The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down, animator Sarah Airriess's debut graphic novel, is the thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's 1922 memoir of a fraught Antarctic voyage.
Cherry-Garrard was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott's 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. In the first six months, the vessel sailed from Cardiff, Wales, to the Southern Ocean via South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Even before the ship entered the pack ice near Antarctica, the journey was perilous. Airriess includes multiple climactic storm scenes here, including one in which the engine pumps clog. "For twelve hours we bailed, literally for our lives," Cherry-Garrard recalls.
The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. Crew members have distinctive, exaggerated features. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. Dolphins leap; seabirds wheel. There's a menagerie on board, too: sled dogs, ponies, and a ship's cat. The familiar and the exotic rub shoulders, as in a memorable scene in which the naturalists croon a carol to lure in curious penguins and then throttle three of them to provide Christmas dinner.
Airriess hews closely to the historical record and includes more than 60 pages of annotations detailing the evidence and artistic decisions underpinning each panel. Scrupulous research meets filmic technique: the book opens with a framing device, set in 1919, in which Cherry-Garrard awakens in his English country house from a nightmare about the "first-rate tragedy" he endured and begins to type this account. The second volume can't arrive soon enough. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck