by Joe Zabel
A nurse's aide at a senior care center dubbed 'The Manor', Audrey is weeping over the death of a favorite resident, Mr. Cybulski. Counseling her, another nurse explains how she deals with the grief. "Oh, I cried it out at first. But then something happened. I don't know what... I just learned to... turn it off. At least until my shift was over."
But Audrey is not able to "turn it off." A week passes, and she's still thinking about Mr. Cybulski. And in the process, she's becoming more distant with her friends and alienated from her parents.
By chance she meets Greg, a young journalist who hangs out at the same cafe she does. She proposes that he should do a story about her patients, who are abandoned by their children to The Manor. "You can't imagine the loneliness I see, day after day..." she says. "...Somebody needs to give these people a voice. "
Greg agrees to do the story, but he doesn't mention a relevant fact-- that he himself has a grandfather at the Manor, and he finds it unbearable to visit him.
This comic deals with a difficult subject, and artist/writer Benjamin Rivers is admirably equipped to handle it. He's a skillful draftsman working in a manga-influenced style, employing bold thick lines with delicate expressiveness. The scenarios contain many evocative wordless sequences that create a quiet, melancholy tone.
The narrative moves along smoothly, unencumbered by irrelevancies. There is no verbal narration-- the text consists entirely of the characters' thoughts, and dialog written sparingly but effectively. The romantic subtext of Audrey's collaboration with Greg is quite subtle; the borrowing and returning of an umbrella is vested with symbolism, the phallic disguised as the philanthropic. At one point, the umbrella is opened, and bright streaks of color in its canvas punctuate the grey rainy scene.
Rivers' story veers perilously close to adopting a preachy tone. What saves it is the irony that both of the main characters appear to be neglecting their elders. We await upcoming chapters to see if 'Empty Words' is merely a message comic, or one that truly understands the human condition.
