The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief

Fighting on after a dozen deaths and other losses, the renowned cartoonist Carol Tyler returns from the depths of grief with a masterpiece that combines decades-spanning memoir with incredible allegorical imagery, spinning a world of anguish and recovery in fine-detailed brush lines.

In the wake of losing her husband of four decades, estrangement from her daughter, and a string of other deaths, Carol Tyler descended into grief. Being an artist by vocation, she transformed her grief in the only way she could — through artistic expression. Exploring realms metaphorical, half-imagined, and all-too real, she processes her loss and distress through dissociations and hard work alike and combines the two into a magnum opus of aching art. Tyler explores not just her grief, but our grief, and the idea of grieving in a work that is both painfully intimate and philosophically rich.

An artistic advancement nearly forty years into Tyler’s comics-making career, The Ephemerata features Tyler’s most breathtaking picture making ever – fine, dense brush lines complemented with occasional color washes or highlights – and formally stunning cartooning. Combining art and text in multiple ways —in the traditional comics panel grid, as words-and-illustration, as organically flowing images surrounded by floating text— she depicts the inner monologue of a fallible human being grappling with questions of profound relevance. Tyler’s memoirist skills also rise to the fore, excavating and colliding scenes from her history, delineating with sensitive intuition ways in which the inevitability of grief is built into our lives and our loves. To struggle in the face of loss is a universal experience. To turn it into this compassionate, deep and beautiful book takes a true artist.