The Wrong Place

Greice Schneider
The Wrong Place, by Belgian Brecht Evens, recently got an award in Angoulme for audacity,
and it is easy to see why. The first thing that calls attention, just by glancing at the book,
are Evens loose watercolors, distancing himself from the expected emphasis on the
trace and contour that prevail in comics. The surprise, though, is that The Wrong Place is
more than just a beautiful book made by a skilful visual artist, as it is so common to find.
Evenss style comes hand in hand with a happy awareness of the mechanisms of graphic
storytelling, and explores the possible combinations between word and image and the
reading directions on the page.
The first part of the book takes place in a party, in an apartment. This specific page
reveals those common small rituals and social codes so familiar in these festive
occasions, when the guests are just arriving. The only character that we can actually see
is Gert the host, and protagonist in this part of the story (and even so, the author is
economic to the point of just giving us Gerts head, one hand and some contour of his
back). The rest of the characters in the scene are only barely suggested: yellow and
green circles indicating heads, shoes, hands, eyes, mouth. The same metonymic logic
applies to the space of the apartment: if the door as the place of arrival gains a little
more definition as it concentrates more activities, the rest of the apartment is suggested
not by a delimitated space composed of floor, ceiling and walls, but by objects spread
across the page (a lamp, a hi-fi and a photo frame) functioning as symbolic shortcuts for
the whole.
Besides characters and scenario, the third and most interesting visual element that
composes this page is the text. On the content level, what we have is a sample of the
familiar small talk typical from these situations. The dialogues follow conversational
patterns that make the flow very predictable and repetitive, with lines
involving instructions on how to get to the place (Gert asks three times, with the same
words did you find it alright?), followed by asking what the guests wish to drink, or
remarks on the house decoration (youve got the same IKEAs chairs as us) or guests
figurine (oh, youve got the same tights as me).
The content (or lack of content) of the dialogues, is reflected in the way they are visually
arranged. Here, it is not the silences that are meaningless, but precisely the need of
breaking a potential uncomfortable silence and reduce the tension with any topic, even if
just fillers. This purely phatic communication is translated visually, with words (more than
anything else) filling blank spaces of the page. Everything that is said in this page is
basically chatter to fulfill the function of initial bonding.
And this is also efficiently reproduced visually: instead of adopting a sequential order of
panels, what we see are different moments developing in the same image, in the same
apartment space, reproducing the same temporality and confusion existent in parties. Its
true that the absence of panels compromises a sequential order of events, but this is
compensated by the text, that can still be read from top to bottom, in three diagonal lines

that go from the top left of the page to the bottom right. That organization obeys not only
a temporal logic, but also a spatial one, going from the door where everything begins
to the living room inside the apartment in the adjacent page, creating a sense of
progression and development. In the absence of balloons, corresponding colors help to
identify whos speaking.
These are only a few of visual solutions that make this book succeed in the task of
integrating artistic skills to a larger narrative program. While it keeps the reader busy to
figure out his way along the pages, offering a considerable variety of styles and reading
possibilities, The Wrong Place avoids the temptation of gratuitous visual tricks and
manages to maintain a coherent tension between showing and telling.

http://blog.comicsgrid.com/2011/02/the-wrong-place-brecht-evens/