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Sketching an Uncertain Future

A panel from Eleanor Davis’s The Hard Tomorrow, 2019

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today. She has (among many other things) an amazing way of drawing people: they are both emotional expressions, as vivid and immediately legible as Bugs Bunny, and, at the same time, convincing as bodies in the world, weighty and vulnerable, with scuffed knees and unruly hair. Her new book, The Hard Tomorrow, melds two of her previous modes, finding a new midpoint between the energetic roughness of You and a Bike and a Road (or her brilliant story in the first issue of Now, “Hurt or Fuck”) and the cool, tricky formalism of Why Art? It focuses on Hannah, a thirty-something activist in a near-future America—Mark Zuckerberg is president—who is trying to get pregnant, trying to hang on to her day-job in elder care, trying to avoid the police, trying to do some good in a world that seems increasingly hopeless.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost








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Eleanor Davis’s The Hard Tomorrow is published by Drawn & Quarterly.

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