Edifice
Cartoonist: Andrzej Klimowski
Publisher: SelfMadeHero
Publication Date: December 17, 2024
“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.” –Franz Kafka
Understanding is not always a two-way street. Rather than presuming answers to every question asked, sometimes the only understanding we have is the slow acceptance of that which we cannot understand. But the journey from experiencing the unknown into the acceptance of it can itself be grueling because it requires one to surrender. Surrender their grounding, their sanity, their self.
Polish cartoonist Andrzej Klimowski returns with a new graphic novel set in Engelstadt during the holiday season. As is characteristic of his wider work, Klimowski does not construct this around a straightforward narrative, but rather dives into a series of Kafka-esque nightmares that compound and raise more questions than answers.
From his history in making movie posters to his work in comics, Klimowski excels at creating unease in the viewer. Often this is through the juxtaposition of two contradictory images imposed on each other. The essence of his style always comes down to visual manifestation of the taboo. Whether that’s done through horror or eroticism, his art is always about being confronted with something we feel in our bones, that unsettles us to our core, and yet we are unable to look away. Or even that we’ve gone numb to the shock and let ourselves succumb to the horror which we lack the will to confront.
Edifice opens simply enough, with a tenant entering his apartment building. But from here, we watch a mantle piece slowly shape into the form of a woman. The transformation into a womanly figure starts slow, but its features are exaggerated panel after panel creating a series of pages that are both enticing and uncomfortable.
Klimowski shifts perspective here as well, moving from the tenant into the eyes of the mysterious woman. Our own position of shock, arousal and horror is surrendered to the perspective of something we do not understand, that both draws us in and repulses us. That movement ultimately becomes Edifice’s mission statement: we should let go of our own grounding and release what little control we seem to have over the world and instead let the nightmarish, the uncontrollable and the strange take shape as they will.
Klimowski plays out the rest of these scenes about the horror at the heart of the story without any sense of judgement. The book is largely laid out in a series of rectangular panels, 2 per page, and then the occasional Full page or 2 page spread. The result is that the entire experience feels like moving through a photo album, a series of images captured from the outside looking in. Every image that we see is captured for all its terror and vulnerability all at once.
From here, we meet a series of characters who live in this building, preparing for one holiday tradition or another. Klimowski carefully weaves the story and introductions of these characters through the architecture of the building, moving in a series of pages through the various floors and apartments as we get a sense of geography while getting used to all these names and faces. But like The Shining or any haunted hotel-style story, it’s not so much about knowing the building itself but rather how the space you inhabit is disrupted, how it subverts your expectations.
Klimowski’s pages are not designed to be understood in strict, literal fashion but as mood pieces that transition us from one feeling to another. We go from exhaustion, to lust, to fear or from love to resentment between the pages as he carefully crafts the inhabitants of this apartment building with rich, expressive and often exhausted looking faces.
Edifice is at its core, as the title implies, about both the dreary interiors of this asylum-like building as well as the practices and rituals of those inside. The more we see each character live their life inside these walls, the more we’re reminded of the uniformity and prisonlike structure of the building itself and even the town. The distractions of the holiday are juxtaposed with the maze-like streets of Engelstadt wherein everyone is essentially trapped. And while some have a clear sense of longing for the outside, or a need to beautify what is within their personal prison cells, Klimowski does not give anyone an out from this. All of these lives, lived differently at first, are all ultimately reduced down to the same desires, to the same confines of this building that stands firm with no sign of changing.
Thus, the introduction of the horror, the creeping forces and the unexplainable, do not function antagonistically, but rather as a way to manifest the spirit and interior lives of those inside. While Klimowski is always playing with contrasting images and scenes to craft the unsettling, he’s never forcing those images to oppositional positions. The weird and the unknown are about as normal as anything else, and often the existence of the unknown is the only way we have freedom from the confines of routine and structure.
Edifice is a striking comic, one that’s style and images linger long after you’ve read it. If you are familiar with Klimowski’s work, you’ll be sure to enjoy this sustained engagement with him but it’s also a great introduction to him and his wider work.
Edifice is available now.
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