My Rating: 4 stars

Ray Fawkes’ One Line has to be the most unique graphic novel I have ever read. It follows 18 different people and their bloodlines through four centuries. This graphic novel forces us to ask “do we inherit the sins of the father?” And does that include their trauma, their responsibility, and their teachings?

What you need to know before reading:
1) Do not read the e-version. You need the physical copy for an easier reading experience. It is structured as a double-page spread with 18 total panels — 9 per page. The placement of each panel corresponds to one family line. That panel tells the story of only that family. If that character has children his/her panel continues past their death. However, if their ancestral line is broken, the panel is blacked out when the last living member of that family dies.
2) It's broken up into seven parts, each following a different generation (more or less). This means that there is a bit of an adjustment period with each part because you now have to remember a new cast of characters that you have to then associate with the previous cast of characters. I found myself confused during these transitions and had to flip back a few times. I recommend going back if you are confused instead of pushing forward because you will only get more lost and because you will get much more out of the story if you can follow along with each generation. Take your time with it.

What I loved:
1) I loved that reoccurring symbols (like roses, poems, and tall grass) tied each generation together.
2) I loved that some of the interconnections between families allowed us to view the same situation from two very different perspectives.
3) And, I loved the how the theme of inhering your past ties in with the philosophy of past and future. The story did a great job of showing how religion, culture, anger, passion, vocation, character, and temperament are often carried over from your parents who modeled those values and behavior. In particular, how generational trauma is passed down to children and the effects it has on future generations.

What I would have loved to see:
1) A list of characters and a map of where they are located. This would have been a very useful visual reference tool to have at the beginning of the book when I was most confused. Perhaps even drawings of the 18 different family trees.
2) A longer story. Following 18 different family lines is difficult to do in only 183 pages. I found some characters were memorable but others felt less developed and thus harder to remember.
3) The first section was the most difficult to read because we hit the ground running. I would have liked a bit more back story to each character to help me remember them better before jumping straight into their 18 different stories.

In Sum:
1) This graphic novel is an ambitious project that takes a while to get used to but is worth the effort.
2) It is difficult to keep track of all the characters, especially after each generation, so read slowly and give yourself permission to flip back as needed.
3) If you enjoy graphic novels with strong symbolism and philosophical elements then this one may be for you.

Happy reading!

Thank you to Netgalley and Oni Press for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

2.5 stars!

This graphic novel is extremely ambitious as it follows 18 different families from all over the world over the span of multiple generations. As each familial line dies out, the corresponding panel blackens for the rest of the novel. I absolutely love this concept and the execution was really well done. I just didn't connect with the characters as much as I would have wanted to and I felt the novel attempted to cover too much in a very short time (200-ish pages). It also took me half the book just to get used to the pacing and remember who was who. If maybe half as many families were shown, but they were given more depth and detail I would have appreciated each more thoroughly. Overall though, it's an incredibly poetic and unique way of storytelling and I really appreciate it for that.

Thank you to NetGalley and Oni Press for an eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

One Line - 3.5 stars

From an artistic standpoint this book is really great. I love the high contrast panels and rhythm of the blacked out squares as a way to move the story along. It’s a really cool concept and the reading experience it brings is fun in my opinion.

Another thing this book does well is the storytelling with undefined dialogue. I like how the text is placed in boxes instead of speech bubbles; they make you feel like you’re reading the thoughts of everyone and also a removed narrator at the same time.

Personally, I struggle to connect with book that have multiple narratives, but they were woven together well here. That’s just my reading taste, so if you like a lot of characters you would like this!

This wasn't the right book for me. I found it hard to concentrate on the passing of time and following the story with everything going on and changing in every picture. The art was very simple, black and white, I found it even soothing in a way, but it was difficult for me to concentrate on the story and it disn't keep my attention.

“One Line” written and illustrated by Ray Fawkes is a truly unique human experimental comic. This is the type you want to think about and hold in your hand, and try to read differently, going back and forth between the pages, testing out how far the comic medium can be stretched.

Sadly I was only able to read a digital copy. I am afraid this is not the proper way to read this comic, because I wanted to trace the different stories and after reading them together, I wanted to read them separately. So if you are ready to plunge into that unique experience, I do recommend the paper version.

What is it about?
Well that is a little hard to say. It feels a little like a poem about humanity, but that is because we are being weaved around dramatically different experiences across space, perhaps even time. It made me think a little about automatic association, but it’s structured here, we follow a pattern, the same people over and over, exploring a same topic for a couple of pages over many windows. It’s a little like those documentaries asking people in different areas of the world what they think about a specific topic. But this is more abstract and cryptic. And at the same time there is a meaning to all of this. I did say it is hard to explain, this comic is an experience.

This work has a very strong message that I liked a lot: humanity at large is connected in its emotions and experience. It doesn’t matter that we might transcribe and say things differently, that we look unlike the other, or share different stories, that we live in different areas of the world, because human lives are punctuated by the same essential truth: we are all born and grow and love and disasters happen to us and eventually we die.

All in all this is a very unusual and interesting work that will appeal to people who enjoy poetry, who like to think outside the box, who like the humanities and other social sciences, and who enjoy art. The illustrations are not truly beautiful, but they are efficient and representative, they serve a real purpose.

This was so poetic. It was like I was reading poetry. I loved the simplistic art style it really made it look ancient. This was a good graphic novel.

This book had an interesting premise but a really frustrating execution. The idea of following multiple ancestors which would eventually combine into one bloodline Unfortunately the author decided to depict this in the most confusing way. Each page has nine panels. Each panel focuses on a different branch of the family tree that exists at that time period. As different bloodlines die off or marry into each other, the panels become fewer and fewer. This setup is extremely hard to follow because you’re basically listening to nine stories all at the same time. On top of that, it’s hard to empathize with anyone because there are so many characters that are all introduced at once and all treated with the same degree of importance. I spent the first quarter of the book with no idea of what was going on and the rest of the book boredly waiting for the bloodlines to merge enough for me to have someone to focus on.

This is book 3 in the Soul Series. It follows 18 families through 400 years showing how traditions, ethics, and prejudices are handed down through generations.

The art is very simple, but there is a lot of dialogue and anything else would make the book hard to read. I tried reading the book before reading the synopsis, but I was confused. So I did some research and tried reading it again. I was still pretty confused.

There were these cool pages that had blacked out panels, but I could't figure out what they meant. I wonder if I needed to read the other books to completely understand this one.

3 stars

One major caveat, this book needs to be read with the 2 page spread or on a screen large enough to accommodate 2 pdf pages side-by-side. With this sorted out, you will be in for a special experience. Following 18 stories over multiple centuries, Fawkes has told a history of the world (generally in relation to how societies are impacted by Europeans) from a human perspective. I think face value, there could be a lack of perceived emotional depth, but I think that this is largely left in the hand of the reader to interpret. I think the depth is there, but the reader needs to be patient and not rush from panel to panel.

One Line by Ray Fawkes is a visual masterpiece of humanity and picture/text narrative. This is a book that shows what books can be.

This was a great end to the One Soul series.

This has such captivating stories and storylines, interesting characters and plot and narration. I really felt connected to all of the characters in this.

Overall, if you've read any in the One Soul series, this one will not disappoint.

I had a hard time getting into this at first, it is an incredibly unique form of story telling. That feels incredibly disjointed at first but it gets easier as you get further into it.

It is a beautiful story that honestly has so much re-readability, I want to re-read it once I can get it in physical form, and go through and read each specific story.

3 stars

This uniquely structured graphic novel follows 18 families from cultures all over the world from the 18th C to the present, ambitiously tracing love, war, revolution, natural disaster, parenting, & death. As each family line comes to an end their panel is distinguished, the remaining story lines growing tighter as the novel progresses.

[What I liked:]

•I really like multigenerational family sagas, which is what attracted me to this story. It was fun to follow the different stories & see how the children understood their parents’ lives & choices, & how the past shapes the future.

•Even though the story depicts many varied life experiences, the “basic” human experiences really shine through: family, love, sorrow, looking for meaning. It also shows how no two people react the same—some find comfort in religion or money or children; some hold onto hope, others seek honor or revenge.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•This novel covers so much ground in under 200 pages so I shouldn’t expect much nuance, but as a non-expert I did wonder how accurate the depiction of Native American, aboriginal, & other marginalized cultures was in this book.

•It took me awhile to get used to the pacing, & be able to distinguish all the different storylines I was following. I just had to be patient, & once I was accustomed it wasn’t too frustrating anymore.

•For the length, this novel packs in a lot of content & points of view. It gave me lots to consider once I finished reading, yet I still sort of wish there had been a bit more of a cohesive narrative, some sort of overarching meaning or question to grab onto.

CW: murder, suicide, genocide, slavery, racism, misogyny, domestic violence

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

I thank NetGalley for giving me the ARC for this title.

I went in reading this, not having read the One Soul or The People Inside. This book was captivating. I actually reread the book after fully understanding the format chosen. For this title, I know it will be a great reading experience with the physical copy.

This story starts with Eighteen families, which you get to watch over a number of years grow and prosper. Some of these stories interconnect in unexpected ways, but I can assure the author put a lot of though into each character and their story. I will also note that Ray Fawkes is a Canadian Author and I can’t wait to read the other two titles in this series.

I know Ray Fawkes best for the gorgeous watercolours and fragile veil of reality in his Underwinter books, which – ambition aside – have almost nothing in common with this. A sequel of sorts to two books I've not read, One Line is told instead in plain, firm, black and white on nine-panel grids, and follows 18 families down history (and across geography) as they prosper, suffer, intertwine or die out. The closest comparison I can think of is Richard McGuire's Here, but where that held a fixed camera on one spot back and forth in time, the effect here is more an Ozymandias-style bank of TV screens showing eyes on the chosen dynasties. One where I didn't really get the full benefit, because the Netgalley ARC is laid out as single pages, rather than the double-page spreads as which it's designed – though if nothing else, I now know that if I read the previous volumes, I should go for physical copies.

The story is told chronologically, but I think – though I could be wrong, and it's definitely something which would repay a reread – that they're not all running at the same speed, at least not initially. The sheer scale, and the constant flicking between strands within each grid, mean that especially at first, the effect is vertiginous. But as the reader starts to adjust to the method and the players, it becomes easier to settle into – though for me at least, still too much to read in more than short bursts without overloading. Sometimes what's happening in adjacent panels, or even across a whole page, will have close parallels – elsewhere shocking contrasts, especially when we see two strands connect in one encounter. And at other times they seem as unaware of each other as we all are of most of the billions of other people out there. I wonder if Fawkes had recently done one of those ancestry DNA tests before embarking on this? Because to me it felt a lot like the answers people want and so seldom get from those, with their bare numbers and vague gestures at continents. Here, instead, is an overwhelming download of a family history stretching back centuries, snapshots of good times, bad times and above all lost time. It's a lot. As it nears the present, more and more panels are blacked out, the betrayals and atrocities multiply, and one increasingly feels it's for the best that humanity seems bent on ending itself, even if it is a shame about all the collateral damage it's doing on the way out. The final section attempts to counteract that by breaking the rigid grid (spoiler? Maybe, but I'm not sure it's possible to read a comic done on a nine-panel grid anymore without assuming that's going to happen sooner or later) and finding a moment of connection which makes it all worthwhile. Which...I don't think it's badly done, per se, it's just that I'm reading it in the 2020s, so I find hopeful resolutions almost impossible to take as anything other than sappy cop-out.

One Line is a graphic novel that follows multiple protagonists throughout their lives, focusing on them and their families.
-
I thought this was a really cool idea, just not executed well. The premise sounds super interesting and the art is beautiful, but the actual execution is confusing. The multiple protagonists all blend together and it becomes a chore to read.
-
It has such a beautiful cover though! And I really did love the art style!
-
TW- death, grief, forced movement, war, suicide
-
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.