When I think about autobiographical comics, I always go back to the second issue of Joe Matt’s Peepshow. It’s the one where Joe’s girlfriend has dumped him after reading the first issue of Peepshow. I used to laugh at that comic as indicative of the swollen egos of the big man autobiographers, I can admit that, but as my relationship to comics has grown over the years I look back on the vulnerability of that embarrassing story; there’s a lesson there about life and art, how every articulation of yourself onto the page will live on and become a part of how people know you. Maybe you were Joe Matt, and you loved your disarming honesty, your humor. And then it remained with you when you were hurting.
There’s a moment in M.S. Harkness’ Time Under Tension where the author and her on-again off-again fuckbuddy Murmur are reading over a scene from her first graphic novel; Murmur admits that he has only read the parts in which he appears. Stammering out an apology for times he was selfish that he sees freshly in Harkness’ pages, Murmur then gets into a light argument with Harkness about whether he had actually used a particularly tacky pickup line which she depicted in her comic. The two bicker, with a bit of nostalgia, and Murmur finally relents that he can’t really remember the night clearly. Harkness quips to the handsome MMA fighter, “If your job wasn’t constantly getting hit on the head, maybe you would remember it better.” The words hurt.
Time Under Tension depicts Harkness amid difficult transitions in her life as she graduates art school and struggles to find a clear path forward for survival. She is haunted by memories of the sexual abuse which her father subjected her to, brought painfully back to her mind by his attempts to contact her. She squeaks by on income from sex work and paid dates which have become increasingly mundane, draining and degrading. Her relationship with Murmur, if it ever was one, is disintegrating. She struggles to find a therapist who can even begin to understand her experiences. She’s exhausted. Disappointed. Lonely. She sees herself at the end of generations of abuse, without any reason to move forward. She’s also working out. She’s also making comics.
Time Under Tension is, in part, a metatext to Harkness’ earlier confessional work, Tinderella (lightly fictionalized in-story as "Cellphone Cinderella"), peering into the months between that graphic novel’s completion and its publication - the time spent waiting for something to happen. Harkness’ moments as a cartoonist among other cartoonists are the brightest spots of her story, and some of the funniest; Nate McDonough makes a genuinely inspiring cameo, and Frank Santoro’s appearances as an occasional foil to Harkness recall the hysterical banter of the Toronto three in the aforementioned Peepshow. As brilliant and motivating as Harkness finds the camaraderie of cartoonists to be, it is a meager aspect of her life compared to the weight of trauma and mundane drudgery. “People don’t really read books anymore,” Harkness coldly reminds the reader, time and time again. So much of Harkness’ time is swallowed by the dreadful pressures of remaining alive, pushing past all her grief and the exhaustion that overtakes her when it catches her.
Being among the few people that still read books—the ones with pictures anyway—Harkness’ stories don’t feel small to me. They feel immense. She is larger than life for us, and we believe in her. Her artistry reaches us. Murmur read her book, part of it anyway. In her art, Harkness is strong, brave, a force to be reckoned with for her sheer perseverance. I think she knows this. And I think she intends this. The opening pages of Time Under Tension approach Harkness from a distance. We aren’t in her head yet, we are in awe of her. She seems impossibly cool. Awe-inspiring. That image is stripped away over hundreds of pages which unveil just how much she struggles to be seen, be loved, love herself, persevere. But the awe remains for us as readers because the intensity of her craft, the deftness of her humor, the confidence of her authorial voice is strong enough to grasp at something mighty. By the work’s close, we see Harkness literally struggle to hold on to a heavy weight and keep it above her during a strength training exercise. We see her falter. The exhaustion. The drop. But we also see the weight she was holding, and how great it is. Anyone would be amazed by her for holding on for any time, for lifting it at all. And with great strength, Harkness captures the moment when it was too much for her grip.
Harkness never shows her time under tension reaching an end. Like the sadsack Joe Matt’s stories of misanthropy, Harkness keeps us in that moment of her frustration and misery. The reader is forced to understand that the cartoonist's autobiography isn't told when she is doing better. We contemplate how the struggles must continue after every book is published, even this one. Yet introspection is a discipline, and autobiography is an art. With Time Under Tension, Harkness asserts herself as a champion of graphic memoir.
