Dear Julia

AUTHOR: Biggs, Brian

ARTIST: Brian Biggs (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Black Eye Productions; Top Shelf Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1996-1997

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000

Publication History

Dear Julia, was originally published in four parts by Black Eye Productions of Montreal, between 1996 and 1997. After Black Eye went out of business, the series was published in a single volume by Top Shelf Comics in 2000. The Top Shelf edition does not reproduce the four full-color cover illustrations that Brian Biggs created for the series, which, according to the author, are the closest thing to “actual traditional painting” that he has done. A French translation of the work, hand-lettered by Biggs, was published by Montreal-based La Pastèque in 2002.

Plot

On a trip to Arizona, Boyd Soloman and his girlfriend, Julia, come across a dead man along the road. Two years later, a man named Leo Legyscapo seeks out Boyd to question him about the dead man. Leo first approaches Boyd on the bus, but then he visits Boyd’s apartment. He shows Boyd a photograph of a man flying with wings strapped to his back; it is the man Boyd and Julia found in the desert. Leo questions Boyd about the dead man and what Julia saw, but Boyd is more interested in the huge pair of wings that Leo presumably used to enter the apartment via the window. When Leo threatens Julia, Boyd grabs for the wings.

In the struggle that follows, Boyd falls to the floor and is knocked out. Leo exits the apartment quickly, leaving the wings behind in his haste. When he comes to, Boyd writes a letter to Julia, telling her what happened and warning her. As Leo enters the apartment building, by the front door this time, and rings the doorbell to Boyd’s apartment, Boyd straps on the wings. He puts the letter in his pocket and jumps out of his eighth-floor window. He had written that he wants to deliver the letter to Julia himself.

Several weeks later, Leo is sitting on a park bench with a woman who lives across the hall from Boyd. Leo looks dejected and asks her if she has seen any wings. When she points out an extraordinarily large and odd-looking bird, Leo breaks into a smile.

Biggs’s Dear Julia, is narrated in fits and starts, jumping between the present and the past as Boyd is writing his letter to Julia. Certain important plot points are established only obliquely, such as whether Leo actually flies into Boyd’s apartment using the wings or what happens to Boyd after he leaps from his window, while others are never addressed at all, such as what exactly happened to the man in the desert. The story is a puzzle of sorts and engages readers by inviting them to connect the fragments and pay attention to all the minute details in the pictures to find out what is happening.

Volumes

•Dear Julia,:Part One (1996). The first installment starts at the end of the story: Leo is walking up to Boyd’s apartment. As Boyd’s letter begins in the captions, “August 17, Dear Julia,” the images show the apartment in disarray but empty, and Boyd is poised to jump off his windowsill. Subsequent scenes show how Boyd and Leo met, then switch to Boyd writing his letter, and finally show a flashback of the trip to Arizona and a policeman talking to Boyd next to the body.

•Dear Julia,:Part Two (1996). The second part fills in Boyd’s background, as his letter to Julia continues. He relates his childhood, how he lost his parents in a car accident, and how he was always fascinated with flying, to the point of obsession. The final page shows Leo gazing up at Boyd’s window, taking notes.

•Dear Julia,:Part Three (1997). This volume is completely devoted to the confrontation between Boyd and Leo in Boyd’s apartment. By the final pages, Boyd is unconscious on the floor of his kitchen, and Leo is in the corridor outside the apartment, locked out and realizing he has left his wings behind.

•Dear Julia,:Part Four (1997). Part Four begins where Part Three ends. Boyd regains consciousness and starts writing the letter the reader has been reading all the while. Leo is keeping an eye on the apartment and trying to get back into the building. Finally, the narrative catches up to where the story started in Part One and then concludes with Leo watching the sky.

Characters

•Boyd Soloman, the protagonist, is a man probably in his late twenties with perpetually raised eyebrows, freckles, and deep grooves in his face. He suffers from mountain fever, the “overwhelming urge to leap from high places,” which he inherited from his father, who drove his car off a cliff seventeen years earlier, killing himself and Boyd’s mother. Boyd has always been fascinated by birds and flying insects, wanting to know how they are able to fly, and he becomes alienated from the people around him as a result. After he attempts to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge with homemade wings, his insect and bird collections are taken away. Over time, he believes he has recovered from his mountain fever and his life takes on normality; he even has a girlfriend, Julia. Boyd Soloman’s name is a pun, with “Boyd” sounding slightly like “bird” and “Soloman” referring to Boyd’s life as a loner.

•Leopold Legyscapo, a.k.a. Leo, is a tiny balding man who likes to wear ties and basketball sneakers. He befriends Boyd at the bus stop, but it turns out he has an ulterior motive, wanting to find out what Boyd knows about a dead body in the Arizona desert. Throughout the story, it is unclear whether or not Leo is an antagonist: He seems to stalk Boyd, appearing in his apartment uninvited and making threatening comments about Julia. On the other hand, he seems to be happy when Boyd takes off with his wings. The ambiguity about Leo’s motives adds to the tension of the narrative.

•Julia was once Boyd’s girlfriend. They went to a wedding in Tucson, Arizona, together two years ago, but they have broken up since then. She is never actually shown in the comic: Her face only appears in a series of photographs that depict the trip to Arizona, and her face has been scratched or crossed out in all of these, presumably by Boyd. However, Boyd still has strong feelings for her, wanting to protect her; the entire narrative is a letter to Julia, telling her about what is happening and warning her.

Artistic Style

The artwork on Dear Julia, is done in black ink, with a wash for grays. Biggs’s drawings include a lot of detail, in lines and patterns such as wood grain, making the overall effect deeply textured. Over the course of the four parts, Biggs’s line becomes bolder and clearer, as he develops a style that relies more on thick outlines, which has become the typical style of his children’s book illustrations. The human figures in Dear Julia, are caricatural, with great attention paid to wrinkles, folds, and spots. However, the backgrounds, in terms of perspective and detail, are quite realistic. The detail in the representational style supports the attention to detail in the settings, and together, they capture Boyd’s obsession with flight and his compulsion to find a way to take to the air: The pages are populated with pigeons with meticulously rendered feathers, and in the background, many of the panels reveal Boyd’s obsession through glimpses of rockets, bird cages, and paper airplanes.

With the exception of Part One, which keeps a relative distance, the panels include a striking amount of close-up points of view, as well as views from odd angles, giving a claustrophobic sense of tightness. This dominant point of view reflects Boyd’s paranoid feelings of being trapped. The tightness is emphasized by the grid layout of the panels: Each page contains four panels that are arranged in a square, without any blank gutters between them. This “squeezed” layout is completely regular and applied throughout, with the exception of the end of Part One, where for several pages the grid layout is replaced by four drawn photographs arranged loosely on each page, sometimes slightly overlapping, with shadows rendered underneath them.

Captions, which start on page 5, play an important role in this work, since they represent the letter to Julia. Biggs created the lettering for the captions as well as the dialogue. While there is not a huge amount of dialogue in this narrative (conversations are usually a halting, fragmented back-and-forth), the spoken words are made to reflect the characters uttering them, as Biggs uses different font styles and word balloons for each individual character. Thus, the policeman at the end of Part One speaks in clear block capitals, and Boyd’s speech is represented by a spidery cursive not unlike his handwriting depicted in the captions.

Themes

The main theme of Dear Julia, is obsession. This theme appears in several forms, the most important and prominent of which is Boyd Soloman’s obsession with flying. This obsession is explained in Part Two as he tells of mountain fever, his collections of birds and insects and experiments with them, his construction of huge wings, and his attempt at flight by jumping off a bridge. The book also shows other obsessions: Leo’s obsession is expressed in his dogged determination to find answers, stalking Boyd and breaking into his home. A final form of obsession is Boyd’s single-minded commitment to warning Julia, to the point that he jumps out of his eighth-floor window to get a letter to her.

Boyd’s fascination with flying also provides the comic’s second theme, namely, flight. This theme is brought to the foreground in countless details throughout the comic’s images, from clouds on wallpaper, birds on stamps, and Boyd’s books to the names of Boyd’s neighbors (Lindbergh and Earhart, among others). The paper planes, windup birds, and pigeons in Boyd’s apartment bind together the themes of obsession and flight.

The connection between flight and obsession is made explicit when pigeons start speaking to Boyd in Part Four. They utter phrases that were previously spoken to Boyd in Part Three by Leo, and the pigeons’ voices cast doubt on Boyd’s sanity. The lines between flights of fancy and reality have become blurred. When Boyd jumps out of his window, the pigeons follow him, and Boyd is last seen in their park, where Leo is feeding pigeons with Boyd’s neighbor; the implication is that Boyd and the pigeons have joined forces.

Impact

Dear Julia, is illustrative of the difficulty of pursuing a career in alternative comics, a scene in which cartoonists try to release their work through small publishers (or by self-publishing), hoping to be picked up by larger publishers. Biggs studied at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and created a number of comics after his education. His first comic, Frederick and Eloise, was published by Fantagraphics in 1993. He then published the four parts of Dear Julia, after which he self-published Nineteen Weird Guys and a Portrait of the Artist and Interim in 1997. Black Eye Productions was in business for only six years, but Dear Julia, was acquired by Top Shelf Comics, a young company at the time. The collected edition did not lead to new comics projects for Biggs. Biggs has stated that making comics is time-consuming work with little monetary reward. After having had some success in comics, including an Eisner Award nomination, Biggs decided to give up cartooning and turn to children’s book illustration.

Films

Dear Julia. Directed by Alistair Banks Griffin. Self-produced, 2002. This film was Griffin’s thesis project for the Rhode Island School of Design. The nineteen-minute film was shot in Providence, Rhode Island, and starred Christian de Rezendes as Boyd and John Los as Leo.

Dear Julia. Directed by Isaac E. Gozin. Self-produced, 2003. Gozin directed Dear Julia as an art-school project in Belgium. This short was twelve minutes long, with Ted Fletcher as Boyd and David B. Lobb as Leopold. The adaptation, written by Bert van Dael, is faithful to Biggs’s comic, using much of the dialogue verbatim and following the panels almost like a storyboard. This version condenses the story of Biggs’s comic and clears up some of its ambiguities. The main difference with the comic is that instead of being a little man, Leo is quite large in the film.

Further Reading

Berry, Hannah. Britten and Brülightly (2009).

Huizinga, Kevin. Curses: Glenn Ganges Stories (2006).

Lutes, Jason. Jar of Fools (1994-1995).

Bibliography

Postema, Barbara. “Mind the Gap: Absence as Signifying Function in Comics” (doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University, 2010).

Salisbury, Martin. “Brian Biggs.” In Play Pen: New Children’s Book Illustration. London: Laurence King, 2007.

Steinberg, Sybil S. Review of Dear Julia,, by Brian Biggs.” Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2000: 84.