Felicity, a comic review
The ShortBox comic fair is currently running. I'm a big fan of ShortBox, and used to buy their boxes when they published physical comics. The switch to digital only in the comics fair has encouraged me to start reading more digital comics, and because I think the comics on offer are very cool I'm going to try writing some reviews this month to encourage other people to read them.
Felicity, a true story from the field of ethology.
The description of this comic caused me to buy it:
From her first living moment, Feli sought and recoiled from the same thing: social connection. Can a soul who has never received love give love? Based on the true story, Felicity follows the life of a greylag goose at the center of a social isolation experiment in the 1960s.
The idea of psychological experiments on animals to try and understand our inner workings intrigued and horrified me in equal measure. Intrigued because psychology is one of the most mysterious things about us, and horrified because these experiments are often horrific. The things that are too awful to do to humans (at least in a scientific environment - I don't want to pretend that these things aren't being inflicted on people by other people every day, all over the world) are done to animals. Most people are probably more familiar with Henry Harlowe's experiments on rhesus monkeys, and here Joyce Y. Ng shines a light on a lesser known social isolation experiment involving animals.
Joyce Y. Ng writes very matter-of-factly about Felicity, but empathy still shines through. She's done her research, basing the facts of Feli's life on notes available from the original experiment, however, she inserts empathy into the questions she frames about how Feli feels and what she could be thinking, while acknowledging we can't know the mind of another living being.
I found the story almost unbearably touching and sad, which is a credit to how Joyce manages to pull this out of the straight-forwardness of her story. Her illustrations compliment this, with clean lines and muted colour palette.
I'd recommend this comic - it really made me think about how we view and treat animals, and introduced me to a part of history I hadn't though of before.
Joyce has published a newsletter on how she started researching this story here, which is worth reading (there are cute hamster photos!) and she's also talked about how she transitioned from a career as a lawyer to writing comics in her newsletter, here - I always find the stories of people who've switched careers later in life interesting.
You can buy Felicity here. All funds from the sale of this comic going to Save the Children for their Gaza work.