This is one of the best graphic novels I’ve read all year

2 hours ago 1

By Declan Fry

September 19, 2025 — 5.30am

GRAPHIC NOVEL
Cannon
Lee Lai
Giramondo, $39.95

Meet Cannon: stoic, dependable, considered. The kind of person others turn to when they need help. Cannon spends nights watching horror films with Trish, a woman she bonded with in high school, one of the “only two gay Chinese Anglophone teens in all of Lennoxville”. In their late 20s, the pair finds that horror’s tales of possession and degradation speak to the terrifying reality of their own lives.

Cannon is surrounded by people she can barely talk to, forced to make decisions and care for her family while working exhausting restaurant shifts. She puts out fires between co-workers and suffers her smarmy boss, Guy, for fear of losing her job. What little free time she has is frequently spent tending to her grandfather.

While Cannon remains receptive and present for others, those around her are distant and emotionally numb: her grandfather, Chan Ying Fung, sits alone at home, abandoned by carers unable to tolerate his anger. Her mother, Jennifer, remains scarred by memories of Chan’s authoritarian parenting.

Cannon runs compulsively, all while being run down by those around her. As she checks in on friends and family, her primary companions are self-help recordings, therapeutic messages encouraging her to “breathe” and “be mindful” and “ignore all that pesky existential doom, baby!”

Her name is a play on her birth name, Lucy: “Luce Cannon”. It’s ironic, but perhaps not entirely: one day, a wound on her foot begins to blister. Cannon, a quiet soul, is seemingly on the verge of being pushed to the edge.

Trish, listless and struggling with her writing, has begun to worry for Cannon. The pair struggle to show up for one another. Cannon regards their friendship with circumspection, revealing, in conversation with a new co-worker and lover, Charlotte, that Trish’s pride and self-regard colour their friendship in ways Trish is only dimly aware of.

Processing the end of her last relationship, Trish begins hooking up with a man, Kam. Kam seeks more than sex. (“It’s like the guy is specifically trying to engineer a scene out of a romance movie,” Trish tells Cannon.) You root for her and Kam partly because Trish always has her armour on. An insecure person who speaks to those close to her, including Cannon, in a jokey, slightly clownish, slightly defensive fashion, Trish is at once charming and vain.

Vanity is among the novel’s dominant concerns. Cannon, too, is liable to be accused of taking refuge in her stoicism, vainly trying to show up for others, vainly seeking human connections. In conversation with Charlotte, Cannon, finally invited to talk, realises her own emotional walls. She is reluctant to accept her own anger; it feels implicitly connected to her grandfather’s rage. Yet we sense, too, the possibility her intergenerational trauma need not be hers alone to define and navigate.

Lee Lai has a distinctive, hand-drawn illustration style, economic and forceful. Her characters are tactile and expressive, fluid and graceful. Cannon’s relationship with her co-worker, Charlotte, is especially well done, their differences energised by emotional juxtaposition (Charlotte, louchely sophisticated and constantly lolling; Cannon, touching or holding various parts of her body, accustomed to keeping her own company, to self-soothing).

Across each panel, Lai makes space for comedy in the framing of her characters, attentive to their expressions and postures and tics. Lai’s faces seem to flicker and ripple, marked by wide-set expressions, distinctively pocked and wrinkled gazes: eyebrows balanced high, curves jauntily bracketing lips and cheekbones.

A pivotal moment in the novel, when Cannon arrives home alone and Trish is with Kam, offers a neat little pile-drive of feeling and released tension. In one lovely sequence, Lai skillfully cuts across time and the interiorities of her characters as Cannon recalls kissing Charlotte to Trish: the panels jump forward, showing the kiss, then Cannon’s blushing reaction, giddy with its memory as she sails through the streets of Montreal on her bike.

Following the success of Lai’s Fantagraphics debut, the Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, Lai returns here with a local publisher. Giramondo’s first foray into graphic novels since releasing Pat Grant’s Blue in 2012, Cannon is comparable to Stone Fruit. Both contain their share of darkness. Crow-like birds periodically greet Cannon – manifestations of latent anger, as well as a form of soothing company.

Yet Cannon’s melancholy, its quiet sense of precise observation, is leavened by a keen sense of humour and intelligence.

This is a thoughtful, deliberative work, and one of the best graphic novels I have read this year.

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