Julie Delporte's Everywhere Antennas is a deeply affecting, sparely constructed novel, equal parts Walden and The Bell Jar. Told in the first person, Everywhere Antennas offers diary-like entries from an anonymous narrator who is undergoing a nervous breakdown and struggling to hold together a failing relationship. In soft, flowing coloured pencil, Delporte shows her narrator coming to term with a rare and misunderstood sensitivity to the radiation emitted by the televisions, cell phones, and computers that permeate urban life. The anonymous narrator moves from place to place, looking for solutions to her melancholy in the countryside via isolation and in the city with friends, even turning to medication for answers. Everywhere Antennas is the portrait of a woman caught in the margins, struggling to balance the demands of technology and modern life with the need to find meaningful relationships and work. Roughly hewn figures, sketched in pencil crayon on brightly contrasting backgrounds, populate the pages of this flowing, emotive work.
With Everywhere Antennas, Julie Delporte proves herself to be a master craftswoman of heartbreakingly personal, beautifully literary graphic fiction.