Riding On, Rising

In You & a Bike & a Road, Ignatz Award-winning artist Eleanor Davis takes up the popular form of the women’s travel memoir, reshaping its contours and contents to demonstrate its profound value for readers today. Davis’ stunning book presents comics as a mode perfect for the mindful practice of both reflection on and resistance to the persistently undermining narrative that women’s art is self-absorbed and navel-gazing. Davis offers a graphic memoir that highlights the inner life of a woman on the move in twenty-first century United States, while also revealing that her movement is sustained by engagement with others in the country where she lives and rides. Through careful narrative choices, Davis calmly insists that women—their minds and bodies—are vitally in conversation with the world.

Fans of graphic memoirs by Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and Lucy Knisley will appreciate Davis’ spare yet resonant black-and-white pencil drawings of her 2016 long-distance bicycle journey from her parents’ home in Tucson, Arizona, to her own home in Athens, Georgia. In portraying the subtle and not-so-subtle splendors and agonies of a long-distance bike tour, Davis clearly expresses the many ways in which the physical and mental landscapes in her journey are intertwined.

In carefully chosen language and sketches, Davis suggests that fear could derail her, maybe more than the people who question her reasons for her journey—or the wisdom of her undertaking it alone. Early in her trip, Davis waves to a woman touring by bike in the opposite direction. She later learns this woman is completing the same journey as Davis but in reverse. Davis thinks to herself, “Obviously the woman was some sort of future-self, my mirror-self.” But she quickly contrasts this hopeful portrait by sharing her lingering self-doubts, “Surely she is stronger. Surely she is less afraid.” Paired with drawings of Davis on her loaded-down touring bike, including saddle bags on both wheels, these words of deep uncertainty send a chill down the spine. Will she make it?

Throughout the memoir, Davis draws herself as a woman who sees her physical journey as an opportunity for truly reparative respite but also for actively self-questioning reflection. Soon Davis reveals the most pressing reason for her trip: the need to use the physicality of cycling to move through and to deal with the psychic pain of depression. Throughout the book, Davis balances lines that expose her emotional and intellectual vulnerability with images that display her sheer physical strength and stamina.

The black-and-white images of Davis on her bike show a sweating, hardworking Davis pushing strong legs on the pedals of her bike against harsh headwinds, up steep hills, and through vast desert expanses. Her form, as depicted, is funny yet loving.

One of the most anomalous yet oddly impactful images comes late in the book, presenting a different kind of outside and inside to Davis’s journey. The full-page illustration displays Davis’ body from behind, standing next to her bike and dressed in her cycling gear, but instead of bare legs below her shorts, it provides an almost X-ray view of her legs. This anatomy-book-type illustration of Davis’ leg muscles seems to suggest that if we could see underneath her skin, we would finally understand her body’s pain. From this image of muscle sinews, drawn in careful detail, radiates casually jagged little comic book “lightning” lines sketched outwards to help readers visualize Davis’ deep, unrelenting knee pain. Davis’ head is craned to look at her bike, with a thought bubble revealing an alarming thought: “When did I start feeling scared to get on my bike?”

This image and text portrait of a person struggling with how to move forward demonstrates a particularly pernicious challenge for someone on a long-distance journey. Readers, whether they have already completed or longingly aspire to take a long-distance trek by bike, foot, paddle, or car, will recognize the difficulty inherent in this moment...