Review: 10-10 to the Wind (2023)
I have no quarrel with comics that are drawn digitally; I don’t demand that every cartoonist use physical paper and ink. I recognize that’s just not a practical reality for many creators, and there are many incredible comics that have been drawn primarily on a Cintiq or an iPad.
And yet I do get tired of clinically pristine lines, flawless square panels, and colors that never stray beyond boundaries.
So what appeals to me most about Cole Degenstein’s graphic novel is how physical the drawings are. Anyone who has ever used colored pencils knows how much effort it takes to fill a page, and you can feel that labor when reading this book. The colors — lots of orange and pink; a palette of rising and setting suns — are beautiful; the pages that are mostly black feel dense and heavy. The book is brief but has weight that transcends its size.
The story itself is also lovely. It follows a lonely trucker looking for intimacy on the open road, connecting with other drivers through the ghostly crackle of his CB radio and, briefly, through skin-to-skin contact. Degenstein lets the images and dialogue do most of the work; the brief wisps of narrative text that usually represent the trucker’s internal thoughts knit the book together but never try to convey too much. The way these words are arranged on the page, often in irregular, descending patterns, makes them feel like a parallel set of lines — poetic, rather than pencil-drawn.
I’m on the record in a past review saying critical things about a comic that dispensed with traditional panels to tell a story about human loneliness. But I actually like the effect in 10-10 to the Wind. The open page design and lack of regular structure helps convey what it must feel like to spend your life driving through endless, sweeping landscapes without human contact. In fact, the one part of the book that didn’t work was a page that adopted a Will Eisner–esque style of using objects — in this case, the protagonist’s truck — as symbolic panels. It felt like an odd stylistic detour. But it certainly wasn’t enough to ruin my enjoyment of this great comic.
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