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Nonfiction
Turning Grief Into Art With Unusual Wit
In “The Ephemerata,” the veteran graphic novelist Carol Tyler explores the nature of loss.
Credit...Carol Tyler
Sam Thielman
Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in Brooklyn. He writes about comics and graphic novels for The Times and is working on a book about the history of DC Comics.
Nov. 1, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
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THE EPHEMERATA: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, by Carol Tyler
The morning after I started reading Carol Tyler’s gigantic graphic novel — Part 1 of 2 — about the nature of grief, I learned that I would be attending my beloved grandmother’s …
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Nonfiction
Turning Grief Into Art With Unusual Wit
In “The Ephemerata,” the veteran graphic novelist Carol Tyler explores the nature of loss.
Credit...Carol Tyler
Sam Thielman
Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in Brooklyn. He writes about comics and graphic novels for The Times and is working on a book about the history of DC Comics.
Nov. 1, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
THE EPHEMERATA: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, by Carol Tyler
The morning after I started reading Carol Tyler’s gigantic graphic novel — Part 1 of 2 — about the nature of grief, I learned that I would be attending my beloved grandmother’s funeral, and that is the moment when the volume in my hands seemed to change from a memoir to a sort of guidebook.
Mourning, at least in my experience, is like being kidnapped, blindfolded and then pushed out of a car that is passing through Narnia at top speed. The terrain is unfamiliar, there’s a lot of pain in unexpected places and anything recognizable has some quality that makes it as shocking as a talking lion. The first section of “The Ephemerata” takes place in a fantasy world a lot like the heavily symbolic magical lands of C.S. Lewis or Norton Juster, where Tyler, transported by her sorrow, must learn to survive.
I found myself nodding along at its eccentricities. Of course Tyler finds refuge in a giant version of her great-grandmother Theola’s mourning bonnet. Of course all over the landscape there are surrealist not-quite-trees poking up at the sky. Of course these things are explained by the locals of “Griefville” in ways that enthusiastically refuse to make sense. As is often the case at a funeral, the going is rough but the company is good.
The book’s middle sections seem at first like a more straightforward memoir, and the most obvious function they serve is to showcase Tyler’s powers of observation. Her mother is the first to die, then her sister, then a beloved neighbor. More follow; all of their departures are uniquely difficult. But Tyler takes pains to present herself as unsympathetic, even needy. Her piercing gaze is focused inward, itemizing losses and gauging her reactions to them.
Image
Credit...Carol Tyler
She is also extremely funny, especially in the worst of times. In the middle of the book, Tyler has drawn Theola’s mourning bonnet as a huge archway that spans two pages and includes some of the book’s rare splashes of color. Beneath it, she has written blocks of text describing the agony of missing her mother’s final moments, followed by the indignity of discovering that her father has grown impatient with the plan to find a suitable spot for her ashes and has instead dumped his late wife’s remains in her own flower beds.
“Then he felt guilty,” she explains, “because his Catholic newsletter arrived the next day saying a person’s remains should be in hallowed grounds. So he called my sister” — a former nun — “and asked her to bring over holy water. Then she called me.”
It’s not just the dead who get Tyler down; it’s also the perennial problem of the living. Near the end of the book, Tyler confides in the reader that she has been concealing an important thread from us: Her daughter’s boyfriend, Graham, to whom she has referred only elliptically (as “the Jerk”), has been stealing from the family regularly to support his heroin habit.
Eventually, Graham owes such an exorbitant sum to his dealer — a kid Tyler knows from the neighborhood — that the dealer begins threatening to kill not just him but other members of the family as well. Tyler resolves the dispute, but the dealer remains a constant, frightening presence until one day he, too, is suddenly gone.
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Credit...Carol Tyler
Death is such a gigantic, imponderable catastrophe, no less horrifying and enraging for its omnipresence, and Tyler manages to reduce it to a single incident that has been happening on the periphery of the main narrative, totally unbeknown to us until she finds the right moment to reveal it. In light of his death, everything about the pathetic, mean, stupid drug dealer, especially the things that made him contemptible, seems precious.
Tyler is a load-bearing figure in comics history, both a social contemporary of the original wave of underground cartoonists like Robert and Aline Crumb and Tyler’s own husband, Justin Green, and also a practitioner published in the same magazines that established the subsequent generation — Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet.
“The Ephemerata” is rife with the intentional misspellings, occasionally slapdash renderings and awkward turns of phrase that marked the original underground comics as such intensely personal work. But within a few pages of these little messes, Tyler will have written a careful, secretly hilarious prose section and illuminated it like a William Blake plate, or perfectly drawn a vast landscape or engineered some brilliant twist to remind you that she can keep pace with that younger, more professionally minded generation, too.
At the end of this first volume, she asks herself, and the reader, “Where do I go from here?” and of course we know the answer already: the same place everybody goes.
THE EPHEMERATA: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief | By Carol Tyler | Fantagraphics | 232 pp. | $39.99
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