‘Always Never’ graciously illustrates the long mutability of love

Overwhelming in its sweetness, Always Never tells an utterly unique love story that manages to feel eternal all the same.

Colin Moon

August 31, 2022

No other comic this year has made me cry. A sharp sting in the eye striking me on its final page (no, its final two, silent panels), causing my skin to tingle all over with warmth, a grin to spread across my face, an entire wave of lovely life- and love-affirming grace crashing down on me. No other book has left me shaken, sitting in my place after finishing, staring into space and living in the aftermath—not in horror, not in superheroic awe, not in fantastical wonder. Just in simple, heart-aching joy. A human connection. Shaken by delight.

This was the experience I had last Tuesday afternoon, sitting on the beaten old couch my partner and I hope to replace, the sun filtering through the leaves outside so that the light flickered and danced across the hardwood floor of the house we just recently made our own. The house quiet, not quite familiar in the way it will be in the years (perhaps decades) through which we inhabit it; an exciting newness even now, nearly a decade into being together.

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Jordi Lafebre’s Always Never is the book that so shook me, the one that opened me up to the emotional textures of my surroundings, that made me consider the weight of my own love in time, in space, in familiarity and novelty.

It’s my damnable duty, now, to explain to you how it did this to me. That’s my job, even though it makes me feel like a shill, a man laying out the mechanics behind a magic trick.

A love story told in reverse, Always Never begins with Chapter 20, in which our lovers—two striking retirees meeting one rainy evening–go on a simple walk. They are quite obviously in love: our establishing panels, capturing the two of them in the moment of seeing one another from beneath their umbrellas, illustrate this so primally, so fully that we might stop there. Those looks tell us all we need to know about these two and their feelings for one another.

However, over the course of the chapter we come to understand, despite those looks, despite their familiar and loving banter, despite the sweetness with which they share a kiss, that this is a chapter about them being together for the first time.

What follows, in descending order, are 19 chapters about our lovers not being together.

Each chapter finds us at some earlier point in time, as increasingly younger lovers experience a love that is absent and, somehow, ever-present. Ana, the mayor of a riverside city, has long been married to Giuseppe, a handsome, gracious man with whom she has raised a daughter. Zeno, ever the rakish bachelor, is a man dedicated to knowledge—who has, all his life, been chasing a theoretical truth for a dissertation he only just completes in time to be with his lifelong love.

Each scene details a point of time in which these two reach out to the other—whether in actuality or, simply, with a yearning to the silence of absence. In doing so, the book chronicles the astounding mutability of love: the small ways it can last, the way it can lie along other, powerful and practical loves; the way that it can be angry, sweet, or sad.

Lafebre captures Ana and Zeno, as they reduce in age, with an elegance of illustration and with a depth of emotional understanding. Each chapter finds them in radically different stages of life, experiencing different pressures and joys, and the reader can feel the threads of their lives—how one moment leads to a future moment (which they have, of course, already read).

In such a way, we come to love them; we understand how such a longing and care can spread out over decades. We understand that someone can find a place in your heart and become a permanent resident there, no matter how many ways life stands in the way of your connection.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that the book is beautifully and lovingly rendered, that with a cartoonist’s flourish, the scratchy sharpness of Ana and Zeno (and Giuseppe, and Zeno’s sailor friends; indeed, everyone in the book) is beautiful to us. Every carefully rendered wrinkle on their faces, each loose curl of their hair, feels immaculate, earned. These are details that feel familiar to the reader—they stand in for those same details of anyone we have ever loved.

I will not delve too deeply into the final chapter (that is to say, Chapter 1)—even a critic cannot be so callous as to reveal that particular magic—other than to say that it details Ana and Zeno’s first meeting; there is no other place for this story to end, no other place for the story to begin.

The joy, of course, is though we see young Ana and Zeno meet, it truly is the first chapter (Chapter 20) that is the beginning: the beginning of a story we will not be reading, the beginning, finally, of their lives together.

Always Never manages things that only the best love stories can–that only the best stories, period, can. Like the people we have loved, it too takes up residence in our hearts. It makes us consider our own loves, present or absent, and the contradictory long brevity of living. It establishes, for the reader, how even the longing moments of life are essential, how even absence is beautiful.