What does it mean to pay close attention to a life - your own - in all its mundane glory, its private embarrassments, its small moments of wonder? In Bulk Nuts, Melbourne cartoonist Mandy Ord offers twenty-seven short autobiographical comic strips that answer that question with uncommon grace and wit. Created on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation, this collection ranges across decades of memory: from childhood viewing of Australia's Most Wanted to navigating smart speaker etiquette, from hiking in unfamiliar bushland to the humming strangeness of a suburban bowling alley packed with disability support workers and seniors.
Ord's visual language is immediately distinctive: bold, brush-and-ink panels that pulse with energy, figures rendered grotesque and tender in equal measure, the mark of a hand that has spent decades developing a personal iconic picture language. Working in a mode critics have called "comic-vérité," she pares her words back to essentials - many strips end with the compressed weight of a haiku - allowing image and text to arrive at meanings neither could reach alone. The result is a book that reads swiftly but stays long, building a cumulative, meditative warmth out of its accumulated small observations.
The range of subject matter is deceptively wide: the moral complexity of yelling at a Google Home device; the odd relief of Melbourne's night bus; a lost boy in the bush; the muffled anguish of a family supermarket run reaching meltdown; a spider whose life briefly intersects with ours; the age-gap friendship that makes life hold together. Stories previously published in Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, and Going Down Swinging find new company here, drawn together into a book that is, finally, about how odd and humble things sustain us.
For readers of Alison Bechdel, Julie Doucet, and fellow Australian cartoonists, Bulk Nuts represents Ord at a new peak of craft and candour.
