Darling
A bittersweet story of a lonely, imaginative girl navigating the quiet cruelties of childhood and the complexities of human connection.
Juliana Hyrri, winner of the State Prize for Comic Art, explores power relations and morality with hopeful and playful tones.
Darling is the story of a lonely daydreamer girl who finds unconventional ways to cope with everyday life and relationships, drawing on Juliana Hyrri’s own experiences. It is a story of a childhood where bullying is often insidious.
”I am interested in how children understand the world. I’m deeply influenced by works such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which explores the relationship between play and hierarchy, and Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart, which weaves together serious themes and magical elements,” says Hyrri, explaining the background to her comic.
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Reviews
"Hyrri's style as both an artist and author has become recognizable over the years: the whole is at once rugged, delicate, and beautiful. Her gouache paintings and pencil drawings demonstrate her talent as both a painter and a sketcher of expressive characters. The handwritten text blends into the images, and the words and images fill the mind simultaneously, creating a shared sensation."
"Hyrri has an exceptional ability to describe childhood from both the inside and the outside, simultaneously through the eyes of a child and from an adult's perspective reflecting on childhood. (...) Hyrri's way of telling and illustrating the story allows room to breathe and accept. (...) Childhood experiences and memories are both dramatic and mundane. This contradiction fascinates Hyrri, and she illustrates it brilliantly."
