HOME/WORLD

A graphic memoir of a monumental journey around the post-pandemic world.

Hatke, an Eisner Award–winning writer and illustrator, is probably best known for his Zita the Spacegirl trilogy for young readers. He trades in the sharp lines and cartoon facial features of his children’s books for rougher, sketch-like lines and impressionistic, nearly featureless faces, including his own, for the illustrations in this memoir of a trip he took in the summer of 2024. The trek from his home in the Shenandoah Valley, eastward across Europe and Asia, and back across the U.S. replicated the voyages of 19th-century travelers both real (journalist Nellie Bly) and fictional (Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days). It’s remarkable how rich an experience these drawings offer, particularly when coupled with Hatke’s sensitive and unpretentious prose describing his adventures as he travels by ocean liner, ferry, train, taxi, and bus across terrain and through cultures that become stranger and more challenging as he moves deeper into Eurasia. “I’ve coasted a long way on privilege and I know it,” he admits as he heads into parts of the world previously alien to him. “I know that in most of the places I’ve traveled, being a white male, athletic, and born by chance with features people tend to think of as ‘friendly and open’ has given me a lot of benefit of the doubt. I’ve coasted on the basic assumptions of strangers.” Haunting this story, along with ghosts of famous travelers of the past, is the knowledge of what Hatke shares just before the journey begins—that he lost his then-youngest daughter to an accident in 2019. You feel his vulnerability as his privilege begins to fail him just as he reaches the furthest points from home.

A beautifully melancholic, ultimately hopeful romance of a travelogue.