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Chrysanthemum Under The Waves
Chrysanthemum Under the Waves is a book of mourning from Sound of Snow Falling author, Maggie Umber.
In the nine comics collected here, Umber grieves for the loss of her former self – a wife, a co-founder of a successful publishing company, and a person with good health living in a pre-pandemic world. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, she says goodbye to all she held most dear. In Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, Umber uses the demon lover theme, first as a way to hold on to her past, and finally, as a way to let it go.
In the nine comics collected here, Umber grieves for the loss of her former self – a wife, a co-founder of a successful publishing company, and a person with good health living in a pre-pandemic world. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, she says goodbye to all she held most dear. In Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, Umber uses the demon lover theme, first as a way to hold on to her past, and finally, as a way to let it go.
272 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2024
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September 17, 2024
Chrysanthemum Under The Waves by Maggie Umber (October 22. 2024) is her first long form work, weighing in at 300 pages, though it is also a collection of nine pieces (some very short, some a little longer) she accomplished for over 6 years, mainly from 2016-2021, during which her marriage ended, the foundation for the anguish and melancholy beauty of this book. She calls it a book of mourning, which also speaks to the loss of her health and the end of her working with her ex at a comics press they helped develop together. And the physical/psychic conditions imposed by the pandemic figure in as well.
But the book began with an appreciation of horror, as she is a Shirley Jackson fan, among other artists, with a focus on the mythological tradition of tales about James Harris, also known as the Daemon lover. Then, as she writes in her afterword, she began to realize it was also about herself, her marriage, her work, her life. For someone as young as she appears to be (I met her as I had before at CAKE, the 2024 Chicago Alt Comix expo), I would hesitate to suggest it might be her “life’s work” but I’ll propose that it is that so far for two reasons; 1) this is a deeply personal project, dealing very much with her “life’s work,” at least the work of her life, until now, and 2) it is her most ambitious work, by far. I’ll call it art comics, too, to distinguish it from alt comix, as the painterly image is central here. And it’s most often wordless, or privileging the image. The fact that it involved linking so many separate pieces and many of them wordless, it could be challenging to many readers, for sure. It was for me, but it pays off for the work I invested. I can’t wait to see it in paper next month. It’s tremendous.
The cover sets the tone and speaks maybe to grief, with smudging here and there of words perhaps connoting grief and the disorientation that sometimes accompanies it with tears. And the wet rotting decay that is associated with gothic horror? Water, under water, under waves
Epigraph: “I sought my image in the scorching glass, for what fire could damage a witch’s face?”--Sylvia PLath
Sections:
*Introduction: in which Umber names and identifies the central figure of the Daemon Lover, a popular ballad dating from the mid-seventeenth century, aka "James Harris," "A Warning for Married Women", “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” and others, where a woman [including Umber herself] succumbs to this tempter (not a femme fatale, but a homme fatale).
*Those Fucking Eyes is wordless, depicting mainly a woman with eyes closed, perhaps seduced by Harris’s eyes. Mysterious, passionate, then a disturbing photo where the image of a figure is obscured, severely smudged, maybe pointing seduction/trauma. Watercolors. Theme of forties gothic romance, forties films begins, wordless.
*Rine features drawing, a big house in the woods, trees, isolated images, the gothic contemplative, chrysanthemum theme, distorted face of Harris, haunting, wordless
*Intoxicated depicts more delirious dangerous passion, featuring usually a ghostly pale face without distinct features, a punchbowl, with alcohol one, presumes, the place (or a bar) where fateful meetings between future lovers takes place, often leading to a kiss, a stage in a relationship… again, vague perhaps daemon-ish features or lack thereof. With an overlay of sort of sepia-toned, old photo wash. . . creating a sense of ambiguity. And maybe these folks are from the Victorian age, as this daemon lover is timeless.
*The Devil is a Hell of a Dancer features a poem about a woman setting foot on a ship with no mariners on it. . . until we meet the devil:
“Oh yon is the mountain of hell/where you and I will go.”
The words as always are smeared (under waves, tears, rotting gothic. . .)
“Old saying: when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you."
To “dance with the devil” is to engage in risky, reckless, or potentially immoral behavior. And she does, with this Harris.
*Chrysanthemum (formerly The Daemon Lover): Again, forties noir film vibe, Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Vertigo’s Kim Novak? … forties and fifties Shirley Jackson and Hitchcock fashionable and well-dressed women, surrounded by Chrysanthemums, Psycho hotel tryst?
[Chrysanthemums are generally associated with happiness, friendship, and well-being. However, yellow chrysanthemums can also be used to express neglected love or sorrow.]
Again, in Chrysanthemums, it’s a feature-less-faced man, with one even creepier frame of a man with two black dots for eyes (yikes). He leaves, she goes out to get groceries and returns to an abandoned apartment, in ruins, he’s gone.
To prepare for my reading of this chapter, I reread Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover,” on which Umber’s story is in part based. A story of a woman abandoned on her wedding day, the Harris guy nowhere to be found, a true real life horror, standing at the altar (and I have been to a couple of these events that were not finally weddings, everyone in shock). Fundamentally about a man’s lack of commitment to her and the devastation that entails.
Daemon mythology: a supernatural being whose nature is intermediate between that of a god and that of a human being.
*There is Water: Short, elliptical, watercolor washes, under water, waves, drowning, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, or maybe its this physical sense of Vertigo as in Hitchcock's film
The text: Blood displaces slumber/if the desert dominates
Somewhere else there is water
*The Witch: A castle in the clouds, where a witch lives, ominous dark scenes--a reversal or inversion, maybe, where a woman is a dark figure, but there’s a mysterious dark man here, too, and dogs… The Innocents based on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, or any gothic mansion in Jackson… a horse drawn carriage… the man meets the woman in the woods . a kiss, passion taking her down, down. . .
and later, rowing in a boat. . .two terrifying frames of an open, toothy mouth
*The Tooth: A wordless comic also collected in Rob Kirby’s The Shirley Jackson Project: Comics Inspired by her Life and Work, a rendering of her story. So yeah, rabbit hole, I actually reread “The Tooth” from Jackson, and Umber’s rendering is maybe her least ethereal drawing, more of a pretty straight interpretation or Jackson’s story, but capturing the unsettling vibe. The woman is controlled by her tooth, and with the pain killers she takes, disoriented, increasingly in body horror.
“Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle”--Jackson
The tooth is about Umber’s own physical/psychic “demise” (that forties word) that she went through, that dissociating, isolating occurrence of ill health.
*The Rock: Layered, shadowy, in a boat again, a woman in a long gown, with a man; , he touches her lower back. The rock is an island of rock where she goes to meet him, and again, to meet her demise.
Afterword: In the afterword Umber says she had beenwriting about James Harris, the daemon lover figure, highlighted in Shirley Jackson and elsewhere historically, then was left by her husband, and then realized, “The more I plunged in the darkness, the more I saw myself.” I am reminded of Yale psych literary critic who said your favorite stories are always to a great extent autobiographical. True here! Hauntingly so!
The best way to read/experience this collection is to just experience it before you read anything in the intro or afterwords, where certain things may become clearer, and then you can do as I did, reread it with her words as a guide. You see mirrors, water, decay, duplications, repetitions.
Umber says at one point as she was working she played the soundtrack from Hitchcock’s Vertigo sound track on repeat. Yeah, Kim Novak haunts this text as much as Shirley Jackson and James Harris:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spx0N...
“As I layered the woodblocks, sorrow mixed with sweetness”--Umber, somewhat restored in the process of her work, healed by it to some extent.
Fabulous project, one of my faves of the year, without question. Get it when it comes out, and see a book rollout event if you can here in Chicago or across the country. Thanks, Maggie, and congrats, and sorry to all readers for this erratic pile of notes toward a review.
But the book began with an appreciation of horror, as she is a Shirley Jackson fan, among other artists, with a focus on the mythological tradition of tales about James Harris, also known as the Daemon lover. Then, as she writes in her afterword, she began to realize it was also about herself, her marriage, her work, her life. For someone as young as she appears to be (I met her as I had before at CAKE, the 2024 Chicago Alt Comix expo), I would hesitate to suggest it might be her “life’s work” but I’ll propose that it is that so far for two reasons; 1) this is a deeply personal project, dealing very much with her “life’s work,” at least the work of her life, until now, and 2) it is her most ambitious work, by far. I’ll call it art comics, too, to distinguish it from alt comix, as the painterly image is central here. And it’s most often wordless, or privileging the image. The fact that it involved linking so many separate pieces and many of them wordless, it could be challenging to many readers, for sure. It was for me, but it pays off for the work I invested. I can’t wait to see it in paper next month. It’s tremendous.
The cover sets the tone and speaks maybe to grief, with smudging here and there of words perhaps connoting grief and the disorientation that sometimes accompanies it with tears. And the wet rotting decay that is associated with gothic horror? Water, under water, under waves
Epigraph: “I sought my image in the scorching glass, for what fire could damage a witch’s face?”--Sylvia PLath
Sections:
*Introduction: in which Umber names and identifies the central figure of the Daemon Lover, a popular ballad dating from the mid-seventeenth century, aka "James Harris," "A Warning for Married Women", “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” and others, where a woman [including Umber herself] succumbs to this tempter (not a femme fatale, but a homme fatale).
*Those Fucking Eyes is wordless, depicting mainly a woman with eyes closed, perhaps seduced by Harris’s eyes. Mysterious, passionate, then a disturbing photo where the image of a figure is obscured, severely smudged, maybe pointing seduction/trauma. Watercolors. Theme of forties gothic romance, forties films begins, wordless.
*Rine features drawing, a big house in the woods, trees, isolated images, the gothic contemplative, chrysanthemum theme, distorted face of Harris, haunting, wordless
*Intoxicated depicts more delirious dangerous passion, featuring usually a ghostly pale face without distinct features, a punchbowl, with alcohol one, presumes, the place (or a bar) where fateful meetings between future lovers takes place, often leading to a kiss, a stage in a relationship… again, vague perhaps daemon-ish features or lack thereof. With an overlay of sort of sepia-toned, old photo wash. . . creating a sense of ambiguity. And maybe these folks are from the Victorian age, as this daemon lover is timeless.
*The Devil is a Hell of a Dancer features a poem about a woman setting foot on a ship with no mariners on it. . . until we meet the devil:
“Oh yon is the mountain of hell/where you and I will go.”
The words as always are smeared (under waves, tears, rotting gothic. . .)
“Old saying: when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you."
To “dance with the devil” is to engage in risky, reckless, or potentially immoral behavior. And she does, with this Harris.
*Chrysanthemum (formerly The Daemon Lover): Again, forties noir film vibe, Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Vertigo’s Kim Novak? … forties and fifties Shirley Jackson and Hitchcock fashionable and well-dressed women, surrounded by Chrysanthemums, Psycho hotel tryst?
[Chrysanthemums are generally associated with happiness, friendship, and well-being. However, yellow chrysanthemums can also be used to express neglected love or sorrow.]
Again, in Chrysanthemums, it’s a feature-less-faced man, with one even creepier frame of a man with two black dots for eyes (yikes). He leaves, she goes out to get groceries and returns to an abandoned apartment, in ruins, he’s gone.
To prepare for my reading of this chapter, I reread Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover,” on which Umber’s story is in part based. A story of a woman abandoned on her wedding day, the Harris guy nowhere to be found, a true real life horror, standing at the altar (and I have been to a couple of these events that were not finally weddings, everyone in shock). Fundamentally about a man’s lack of commitment to her and the devastation that entails.
Daemon mythology: a supernatural being whose nature is intermediate between that of a god and that of a human being.
*There is Water: Short, elliptical, watercolor washes, under water, waves, drowning, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, or maybe its this physical sense of Vertigo as in Hitchcock's film
The text: Blood displaces slumber/if the desert dominates
Somewhere else there is water
*The Witch: A castle in the clouds, where a witch lives, ominous dark scenes--a reversal or inversion, maybe, where a woman is a dark figure, but there’s a mysterious dark man here, too, and dogs… The Innocents based on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, or any gothic mansion in Jackson… a horse drawn carriage… the man meets the woman in the woods . a kiss, passion taking her down, down. . .
and later, rowing in a boat. . .two terrifying frames of an open, toothy mouth
*The Tooth: A wordless comic also collected in Rob Kirby’s The Shirley Jackson Project: Comics Inspired by her Life and Work, a rendering of her story. So yeah, rabbit hole, I actually reread “The Tooth” from Jackson, and Umber’s rendering is maybe her least ethereal drawing, more of a pretty straight interpretation or Jackson’s story, but capturing the unsettling vibe. The woman is controlled by her tooth, and with the pain killers she takes, disoriented, increasingly in body horror.
“Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle”--Jackson
The tooth is about Umber’s own physical/psychic “demise” (that forties word) that she went through, that dissociating, isolating occurrence of ill health.
*The Rock: Layered, shadowy, in a boat again, a woman in a long gown, with a man; , he touches her lower back. The rock is an island of rock where she goes to meet him, and again, to meet her demise.
Afterword: In the afterword Umber says she had beenwriting about James Harris, the daemon lover figure, highlighted in Shirley Jackson and elsewhere historically, then was left by her husband, and then realized, “The more I plunged in the darkness, the more I saw myself.” I am reminded of Yale psych literary critic who said your favorite stories are always to a great extent autobiographical. True here! Hauntingly so!
The best way to read/experience this collection is to just experience it before you read anything in the intro or afterwords, where certain things may become clearer, and then you can do as I did, reread it with her words as a guide. You see mirrors, water, decay, duplications, repetitions.
Umber says at one point as she was working she played the soundtrack from Hitchcock’s Vertigo sound track on repeat. Yeah, Kim Novak haunts this text as much as Shirley Jackson and James Harris:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spx0N...
“As I layered the woodblocks, sorrow mixed with sweetness”--Umber, somewhat restored in the process of her work, healed by it to some extent.
Fabulous project, one of my faves of the year, without question. Get it when it comes out, and see a book rollout event if you can here in Chicago or across the country. Thanks, Maggie, and congrats, and sorry to all readers for this erratic pile of notes toward a review.
November 20, 2024
Artists often express raw emotions like grief and anguish through their work, and though their expression may be unique to their own suffering, there is something ubiquitous in these feelings that we can all connect with on some level. By premise alone, there isn't anything really novel about Maggie Umber's newest collection of comics, but the way in which she presents her own distress most definitely is. Collected in Chrysanthemum Under The Waves are nine mostly wordless comics that distill down the grief of a dissolved marriage, broken career, health problems and the compounding loneliness in the face of a global pandemic. Though the suffering is very much personal to Umber, the stories themselves are more metaphorical than they are autobiographical. Thematically tying into Shirley Jackson's take on "The Daemon Lover" ballad, the stories in Chrysanthemum Under The Waves are composites of various versions of the tale, including Sylvia Plath's "On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover" and Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover". The nine stories here evoke an enigmatic and ethereal atmosphere, presented fully in Umber's impressionist style. There is horror that bleeds through the dreamlike compositions, and though some of the stories aren't the easiest to decipher from a narrative standpoint, Umber expresses raw emotions capably throughout.
Opening strong is "Those Fucking Eyes", based on Sylvia Plath's poem, which succeeds in setting the tone of a sexually charged horror story with mythological undertones. It's a brief piece, but succeeds as a foundational entry for what follows. Entries like "Rine" and "Chrysanthemum" continue the motif of stories featuring "The Daemon Lover" parable, each maintaining gothic or noir overtones. Completely wordless, these stories feel like classic silent films at the onset of surrealist movements in the 1920s. In contrast, stories like "The Devil is a Hell of a Dancer" and "There is Water" utilizes some poetic text clashing against images, a design choice that doesn't feel at odds with any of the other stories in the collection. More traditional storytelling is what ends the collection in the last few stories, particularly with "The Witch" and "The Tooth", both of which capture the Shirley Jackson influences while also compounding the grief quality that was pervasive throughout the previous stories.
Usually collections will have their ups and downs, but I found the transition from one piece to the next here to be both seamless and engaging. Challenging though some of the stories may be, either due to their amorphous storytelling quality or just the base interpretation of the literary references, Chrysanthemum Under The Waves is truly a quality production from start to finish. Maggie Umber challenged herself to deliver literary quality to personal experiences, and this collection shows the fruits of that anguish in a truly special way.
Opening strong is "Those Fucking Eyes", based on Sylvia Plath's poem, which succeeds in setting the tone of a sexually charged horror story with mythological undertones. It's a brief piece, but succeeds as a foundational entry for what follows. Entries like "Rine" and "Chrysanthemum" continue the motif of stories featuring "The Daemon Lover" parable, each maintaining gothic or noir overtones. Completely wordless, these stories feel like classic silent films at the onset of surrealist movements in the 1920s. In contrast, stories like "The Devil is a Hell of a Dancer" and "There is Water" utilizes some poetic text clashing against images, a design choice that doesn't feel at odds with any of the other stories in the collection. More traditional storytelling is what ends the collection in the last few stories, particularly with "The Witch" and "The Tooth", both of which capture the Shirley Jackson influences while also compounding the grief quality that was pervasive throughout the previous stories.
Usually collections will have their ups and downs, but I found the transition from one piece to the next here to be both seamless and engaging. Challenging though some of the stories may be, either due to their amorphous storytelling quality or just the base interpretation of the literary references, Chrysanthemum Under The Waves is truly a quality production from start to finish. Maggie Umber challenged herself to deliver literary quality to personal experiences, and this collection shows the fruits of that anguish in a truly special way.
November 30, 2024
Maggie Umber evokes the fabled Daemon Lover in nine exceptionally eerie, mostly wordless short stories. Her painterly panels are evocative, elliptical, meditative—GORGEOUS. I'd hang any of these pages up on my wall, framed and everything. You can actually read the book rather quickly but if you're like me, you'll find yourself coming back to it again and again, just to stare at individual pages, try to suss out their secrets.
Note to Shirley Jackson fans: Maggie has adapted three of Shirley's stories (one of which I can boast was in my 2016 book, The Shirley Jackson Project). As Victor LaValle once wrote, "I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name." (~ We still bow to thee, Shirley ~)
Without question this gets five very starry stars. Maggie Umber rules.
Note to Shirley Jackson fans: Maggie has adapted three of Shirley's stories (one of which I can boast was in my 2016 book, The Shirley Jackson Project). As Victor LaValle once wrote, "I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name." (~ We still bow to thee, Shirley ~)
Without question this gets five very starry stars. Maggie Umber rules.
September 17, 2025
UPDATE: I read through this about three to five times this week. Bumped my rating up to five stars because it’s a wonderful, deep book. ‘The Witch’ blows my mind especially
At the fine line between art book and comic, although it's definitely a comic because there's a narrative, but I have no idea what happened. I like when my two favorite types of books intersect though, and I'm sure I'll read this many times. A potent, dreamy mixture.
At the fine line between art book and comic, although it's definitely a comic because there's a narrative, but I have no idea what happened. I like when my two favorite types of books intersect though, and I'm sure I'll read this many times. A potent, dreamy mixture.
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