Hand Me Down by Kristyna Baczynski

ELEGANT and intricate, Kristyna Baczynski's Hand Me Down is a triumph of visual storytelling, bravely eschewing dialogue to tell a silent tale about an object grown in nature and its travel through the millenia.

I don't know Bacynski's work as well as I would like to but I have known of her for some time, and always been impressed by the high level of detail she puts into every beautiful, intricate image she creates.

If you do know her work, you might be forgiven for believing she would struggle to recreate that level of detail in a comic created as part of the 24 Hour Comic Marathon at this year's Lakes International Comic Art Festival.

If you did, like me, you would have underestimated this hugely talented and engaging cartoonist.

The level of detail and skill that has gone into Hand Me Down in just 24 hours (considerably less I'm told anecdotally) is truly impressive - precise lines and marks fill almost every inch of the beautifully rendered panels.

And Baczynski clearly believes in her work too, choosing here to let the images tell the story of an animal's horn and its journey through the millenia, recalling the work of Norwegian 'silent' cartoonist Jason, echoing that artist by crafting a story more vocal in its visual language than many comics manage to be with words. 

There are other influences on display here too, with the settings and some of the character designs recalling Jim Woodring, while the narrative structure and the subtle pathos of the story, making me think of Chris Ware.

Throughout Hand Me Down, Baczynski's composition is assured and her 'direction' masterful, varying between long beautiful establishing shots where we watch civilisations grow and turn to dust, and a camera that zooms in deftly on her cast, allowing their smallest and most delicate actions to add another layer of detail and depth to the story.

Never is this technique more clear than in the close up shots of a jeweller who finds the horn and transforms it into a beaiutiful ornament.

As we watch this master craftsman at his intricate work, delicately adding gems and ornate metalwork to the horn, it is hard not to imagine the artist, bent over her comic, working on the fine detail that makes each page a thing of beauty.

Baczynski's talent for design shows through in a scene set in ancient Egypt, where a pharaoh's court is rendered elegantly but simply - with characters appearing only in profile, in perhaps, a silent nod to the tradition of hieroglyphics and recalling in me a long forgotten Asterix joke.

The artist inhabits the director's chair successfully again for a series of close ups of the horn, where time passes in the background - walls are built, darkness descends and lifts, cobwebs form and walls crumble and fall - the 'camera' never leaving its set point for almost two full pages, telling us we can stand still, but the world will keep turning around us. 

The same device works well in a museum sequence where a series of characters parade past a cabinet holding the horn, some noticing it and stopping to appreciate its beauty, others less enthralled, but sharing a space and a moment in time with it.

Baczynski uses repetition too, with a scene where burglars pick gems from the horn, and a later scene where an old man discovers the horn in a pile of rubbish, both recalling the jeweller and helping to emphasise the passage of time.

A deft touch with pathos plays out in the body language of the cast - a woman clutches a letter to her chest as a tear rolls down her cheek, a young boy glances sidelong at his mother working in the kitchen before mischievously taking the horn, now a household ornament, out to play.

In moments like this Baczynski catches us off guard emotionally and I actually shed a tear when the horn appears to succumb to a watery, ignoble end.

So it was with some triumph that I read the conclusion, which continues the echoes through time, bringing us full circle to the book's beginnings. 

So what do we take away from Hand Me Down? 

Civilisation is cyclical in the story, possesion is shown to be transient, beauty is natural and man-made and very much in the eye of the beholder.

The story says something too, about the impression we leave on the world long after we're gone.

That's a similar message to one I read recently in Tom Hands: A Tale of Stories by Warwick Johnson Cadwell a comic created alongside Hand Me Down during the same 24 hour marathon.

It may be that an osmosis of ideas happened there, but more likely this is may projecting a need of my own to leave a legacy behind one day.

Either way, it's a message of hope, that our love, our life, our existence can be remembered in such an elegant way, treasured equally but in a variety of ways by generation after generation.

And perhaps it isn't too much to hope the same is true of Baczynski's work and this story itself.

That the enjoyment I gained reading it can be handed down, with future generations getting their own opportunity to read it, to find it beautiful, to covet it, and perhaps, to find their own message of hope in it.

Kristyna Baczynski is an illustrator, designer and comic book artist who can be found at www.kristyna.co.uk (where you can buy her beautiful comics) and on Twitter @kbaczynski.