Love in a Cold Climate

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth

By Isabel GreenbergLittle, Brown and Company, 2013Many a myth does double duty as a love story. Take your pick from the times of Mount Olympus: Echo and Narcissus, Psyche and Cupid, Hero and Leander, and Hades and Persephone. The loves in question not only face significant obstacles but more often than not the couples are kept apart, their love unfulfilled. Just to add another twist, a displeased deity is usually involved. No wonder so many of them end as tragedies.In her graphic novel, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Isabel Greenberg shows that she knows a thing or two about love, and myths, not to mention the Bible, creation stories, and the art of storytelling.In Greenberg’s story, a boy from the frozen land of Nord is in a unique predicament. When three sisters find him as a baby, washed up on the shores of Sky Lake one summer day – in much the same way that Miriam found Moses in the bulrushes – they each claim the right to be his mother. As their usual sisterly squabbles become viciously acrimonious, they seek help from the Medicine Man. He accepts their challenge to divide the baby into three boys, one for each sister. Despite his Solomonic guise – depicted as grave of feature, long of beard, and with a scarcity of hair – the Medicine Man fails to execute the request to perfection, and a piece of the boy’s soul is misplaced. The remainder of the book follows the boy – who is reunited as a single person in adolescence – on his quest to find the stray piece of soul. As he explains to the hostile inhabitants of the island of Britanitarka, (which, according to Greenberg’s illustrated map in the Appendices, has a definite resemblance to Great Britain):

Well, once I was three people, because of a Medicine Man. He put me back together but lost a piece of my soul. Which left me with a terrible emptiness and longing for something, I do not know what…. They say on the flip-side of Early Earth everything is reflected. Perhaps there is a Me there who is whole.

It should come as no surprise that a girl in the South Pole has found his piece of soul, floating down as a glowing snowflake. Throughout the novel, Greenberg’s black and white images are often warmed or chilled with washes of blue or yellow – in this case the snowflake of soul is set against a series of pale blue-grey squares of sky, encased in a curling circle of gold:

It floated down…and landed in her outstretched hand…. So she took the strange, glowing snowflake, and put it into a little pouch, which she kept close to her heart. ‘I deduce that this is, in fact, no ordinary snowflake. Because who knows when a mysterious glowing snowflake with come in handy.’

Greenberg’s artwork neither follows a strict grid of panels nor uses borders around them, but flows with the story, giving the images room to breathe. She often brings the reader in closer to the dialogue with a series of smaller panels, then steps back to give emphasis to a moment with a single large visual. Although the characters have a vaguely flat, two-dimensional quality – and are almost always depicted in black and white - their faces are endowed with large eyes and their gestures are expressive (even with mittens). In the chapter “The Storytellers”, she creates the setting of Nord with a simple grey and black wash of color, with solid black conifer trees in the background, as the inhabitants gather on patterned rugs around a yellow-orange fire. When the boy begins a story, at the top of the next page, the legends of Nord float over him in arcs, as bands of ghouls alternate with birds, and figures seem to be in free fall. The text floats between and among the images, as well as in speech bubbles, in a clean, almost script-like font.As the boy undertakes his journey, he relies on his storytelling abilities to steer him through a variety of harrowing situations, including suspicions of espionage in Britanitarka and the hatred of an agoraphobic Bavellian mapmaker, whose maps are proved completely useless by his arrival from beyond the supposed edge of the Earth. The world may have been newer – “A long time after the Big Bang, but long before the Permian or Mesozoic Eras (when giant reptiles first began to swim about in the watery oceans of our planet) there is a little known segment of Earth’s history…. It is not an era that is taught in schools, and is believed by many to be as far-fetched as time travel or Martians…” – but the inhabitants were no less flawed than we are today. After all, it is the three sisters’ inability to share the baby boy that sets Greenberg’s story in motion.Meanwhile, above in the Cloud Castle, reside the jealous and often displeased gods – in this case the misanthropic chief god, BirdMan, the sympathetic girl-raven, Kiddo, and her brother Kid, who is torn between wanting his father’s approval and siding with his sister in sibling solidarity. In portraying Kiddo and Kid as ravens, Greenberg has chosen a symbol with a myriad of cultural references, including, among others, the Native American conception of the raven as a trickster god, the Norse and Greek mythology depicting ravens as messengers to the gods, and the Cornish belief that King Arthur lives on as a raven. In the novel, Kiddo and Kid are often cast as protectors, shielding humans from the full force of BirdMan’s anger. As he watches the humans below, BirdMan frequently exclaims: “This is Hubris! You know how I feel about hubris. It cannot be allowed!” In Greenberg’s telling of the story the Tower of Babel – or as she calls it, using the Biblical Hebrew, Migdal Bavel – BirdMan instructs Kid to kill the humans, who have offended him by trying to reach the Cloud Castle. Kid, however, opts for a less severe punishment and takes away their ability to communicate with a common language instead.Among this trio of gods, Kiddo has a love story of her own. In her case, it is first a love of the people on Early Earth. Showing a black and white illustrated square in which BirdMan and Kid sit opposite one another playing chess, Greenberg writes, with a barbed jab at the male deities:

After the world was made the God BirdMan and his son Kid did not pay very much attention to it. They had more important things to think about. But Kiddo, she loved the world. She had made it, and she felt connected to it. To every atom and every organism.

Yet Kiddo learns the hard way that she cannot sustain romantic love with a human. Again dipping into the Old Testament, Greenberg depicts Kiddo spending her time on Earth, meeting Noah, and falling in love. She shows a series of four small panels at the top of the page, as Kiddo and Noah walk together in the idyllic, unspoiled Earth, sit under trees, lie on a picnic blanket, and finally, Noah tenderly touches Kiddo’s face as their figures are portrayed against an orange oval background. She writes:

They would spend hours and hours talking. Just waxing lyrical about life, the universe. All that jazz…. It was a love so all-consuming and blissful that for a couple of years they basically did nothing but look into each other’s eyes and swoon. It was a little gross, yes.

On the bottom third of the page, she moves back to Kid and BirdMan, still playing chess. When Kid divulges Kiddo’s plan to make Noah into a god (so he won’t age and die) – BirdMan is incensed. We see BirdMan surrounded by an orange and black heat, his beak open and his eyebrows steeply furrowed. “WHAT?!” he shouts. As the chapter continues, BirdMan opts to destroy Earth with the flood, and of course their love in the process. Kiddo – not easily deterred - takes the form of a raven, and flies above the Ark to protect it. Feeling betrayed when she spies Noah embracing his wife, however, she does not deliver the branch that shows the rains are receding and land is near.Kiddo and Noah are kept apart due to the intricacies of relationships between a god and men, yet the boy and the girl also face problems of their own. In this case, BirdMan punishes the boy for his success (and Kiddo’s helpful “meddling”) by interfering with the Earth’s magnetic force. Although, as the Medicine Man says, the North and South Poles should attract, not repel, the lovers find themselves unable to touch. “Well, this is weird,” the girl says as they look at one another across an unbreachable two-foot distance. Although Greenberg often throws in a humorous or flippant aside to keep the story light on its feet, she has a true ability to portray human relationships with all their complications. Unable to seal their union with a kiss, the boy and the girl:

…kissed scraps of paper and blew them to each other. (In fact many historians believe this to be the first recorded instance of anyone blowing a kiss.) Like most newlyweds, they wanted to kiss each other all the time, and in those early years the skies of the South Pole were alive with hundreds and hundreds of paper kisses, mingling with the snow flakes as they were swept away on the icy winds.

In the middle of the page, Greenberg shows the lovers standing apart in a long horizontal panel, their faces upturned to the sky, as the paper kisses float around them. The perspective is from above, almost as if Kiddo is watching them, and the paper is caressing their enraptured features. Yellow light falls on many of the images of the lovers, their ardor sustaining them much as the fire helps ensure their survival on frigid nights.We next see them asleep in bed – again with a yellow haze over the black and white lines of the image - and a faint apparition of them embracing in the middle, as Greenberg writes,

Each morning they would get up and swap sides of the bed. That way they could lay their heads in the impression the other hand made in the pillow. And for a few fleeting moments, until the pillows cooled and the warmth faded, it was almost as though they were holding each other.

It is this sweet, creative tenacity and complete commitment that keeps their love intact over the years. Where many lovers would have retreated to their separate ends of the Earth, these two create a life together ice fishing, telling stories by the fire, sheltering from the snow in first one igloo, then two, as the magnetic force pushes them further apart. Greenberg has refashioned the formula of the myth in allowing her lovers to make a life together – obstacle-ridden though it may be. Perhaps their type of love story could only hail from an earlier era of the Earth, yet Greenberg gives us an impetus to revive something similar in our own.____Sara Henkin is a freelance writer living in London.