Salt Green Death

A 1947 news item about an apparent suicide opens a sobering window onto 20th-century psychiatric overreach in Thorsen’s poetic graphic debut. Haunted by a decades-old Vancouver Sun article kept by her father, Thorsen delves into archival records to reconstruct Joseph O’Dwyer’s 15-year journey through Canada’s mental health system. Patient records chronicle the Irish immigrant’s struggles with schizophrenia (he claimed to hear “voices of angels”), while family letters document precipitating tragedies, like three siblings dying young. Joseph was entrusted to the care of Essondale, British Columbia’s Provincial Mental Hospital and later a “forensic psychiatric facility” in Colquitz, B.C., where his treatment progressed from insulin coma therapy to electroconvulsive treatment to lobotomy. Medical records lament Joseph’s devotion to “delusional ideas”—a bitter irony, given that the interventions performed on him have since been widely discredited. The nonlinear narrative unfolds over brooding grease pencil compositions that incorporate archival materials and modernist allusions to Robert Doisneau, Pablo Picasso, and Francis Bacon. Hand-lettered texts roam crowded pages in spirals and jagged lines. Quotes from Joyce’s Ulysses (also the source of the book’s title) are peppered throughout, in a nod to accusations that Joseph had stolen a doctor’s copy of the novel. The lyrical structure can be challenging to parse at times, but the overall execution thrums with an obsessive passion reminiscent of Emil Ferris’s work. Thorsen’s haunting indictment of an era of psychiatric hubris fuses dogged scholarship and visceral empathy. (May)