“I never wanted to be someone just working for attention or praise, I’m just trying to put it all in order. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s serious, but it’s always me.”
In a market saturated with graphic memoirs about early adulthood and finding oneself, it’s unusual to find one that feels genuinely original. Rarer still to find one that distills the inherent uncertainty of the subject matter into a profound and confident artistic statement. M. S. Harkness’s new Time Under Tension is such a book, and it’s one of the most remarkable releases of 2023.
Time Under Tension
M. S. Harkness
Fantagraphics
October 23, 2023
Harkness has been creating work based on her life for some time now. I first encountered her through some of her shorter pieces, like the classic “A Savage Journey to the Heart of an Anime Convention” (about the horrific experience of visiting an anime convention while extremely high) or “Floor Troll” (about her weird cat). These were fun and well-executed but didn’t immediately seem to highlight Harkness as the innovator she’s now proven herself to be.
Time Under Tension is Harkness’s third book-length comic, the previous two being Tinderella and Desperate Pleasures, both published in 2020 by Uncivilized. All three books utilize the same basic palette of themes and motifs: dating, drugs, sex work, athletics, traumatic childhood experiences, and the struggle to get by, but with each book, the reader can see Harkness’s artistic sensibilities coming more into focus. The first two books were good, but Time Under Tension feels like the book she was trying to write the entire time.
Harkness’s drawings are in heavy black and white with few midtones, her linework slick and iconic in a way that few artists are practicing in comics today. While her characters represent real people, the way she depicts them is very much native to the page. Forms are simplified or exaggerated for stylish effects. Harkness renders her hair consistently as a massive, swooping black blob, the kind of thing you might expect to see on an anime character. These are not realistic depictions, per se, but effective original character designs, each instantly recognizable and unique.
In terms of page layouts, Harkness is again something of a traditionalist, favoring the nine-panel grid for most of the book. Her strict, panel-based layouts are a prime example of why this method has endured. While the subject matter is heavy, reading this book is effortless, the efficiency of the grid pulling the reader along at a steady pace.
But Harkness tempers her traditional methods with other less-orthodox ones. She takes endless liberties with the form: multiple art styles, surreal visual metaphors, montage-style page layouts. This can sometimes come across as gratuitous, but Harkness’s decisions here are deliberate, acting in service of the story rather than against it. The resulting book is rich, alive, and completely unpredictable.
Time Under Tension begins to subvert the reader’s expectations from the first page, as Harkness eschews the front matter entirely and goes straight from the inside cover to the first of many striking splash pages. The book does have a title page (itself a dramatic and striking two-page spread lettered in explosive drybrush), but it doesn’t appear until after sixty pages of preliminary material that for any other artist might have been a complete work. In the context of the rest of the book, these pages are scene-setting, but they don’t feel like it. The opening jumps back and forth through time, shows Harkness encountering several other characters, and summarizes aspects of her past in brilliant, hard-hitting, and fluid page layouts. Only when you reach the title page do you realize you haven’t gotten to the meat of the book yet.
The story follows Harkness as she graduates from art school and begins trying to build a stable adult life that will allow her to continue developing as an artist while maintaining financial security. As with all matters of adulthood, this puts her simultaneously on two disparate paths, and the book reflects that, showing her constantly shifting gears as she moves between artistic pursuits, preparations for a career as a personal trainer, and occasional sex work to make extra cash as needed. All this further coincides with awkward relationships (the most prominent of which is with an up-and-coming martial artist who is himself undergoing similar tribulations), the echoes of familial traumas, and Harkness’s struggle with her mental health.
Piling all these things on top of each other could have made the book feel disjointed, but the confidence with which Harkness jumps from one to another makes it clear that the structure of the book is very intentional and considered. If the book is frenetic and convoluted, it’s because it was meant to be, and as a representation of the confusing, conflicted experience of new adulthood it’s extremely effective and familiar. What’s more, Harkness’s liberties with the form are never one-off. Her more unusual artistic choices recur throughout the book, making them not deviations but a new visual language that serves to unify the work.
At its heart, Time Under Tension presents an engaging and deeply personal story. Harkness’s life is very unlike mine, very unlike most people’s. She could have written this book to emphasize those differences and make it about how unusual her life is. Alternatively, she could have downplayed those differences and focused primarily on the more universal parts of her life. Most graphic memoirs attempt to split the difference between these options, but most tend to lean more towards one than the other. Harkness has the rare ability to perfectly balance the two, telling a story that is extremely specific to her experience while remaining relatable and even profound.
