His publisher Fantagraphics had been waiting for years for Jordan Crane's new graphic novel, "Keeping Two", because the American illustrator had already announced that the 320-page volume would be completed in 2017;

instead, it was the remake of Crane's original 2000 heartwarming little comic debut, The Last Lonely Saturday, which portrays, largely without words, an old man visiting his wife's grave on the anniversary of his death.

This couple, Crane tells it there, remained one even after death.

The tiny volume was the nucleus for "Keeping Two", which tells the story of how a young couple, Will and Connie, find their way back together under death threats.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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According to Crane, he has been working on this story since his debut, i.e. for twenty years, and although the Californian cartoonist, who was born in 1973, is not one of the most prominent representatives of his guild, the comic made a big impression even before it was published because of its highly complex and therefore labor-intensive narrative style Call Ahead: Crane's "Keeping Two" has been pre-sold around the world.

In Germany, Suhrkamp-Verlag, which has also made a name for itself as a comics publisher over the past decade, took action: initially with adaptations of its own literary classics by Thomas Bernhard, Marcel Proust or Bertolt Brecht, now with independent publications, which of course have to stand up to the Suhrkamp myth.

How does Crane's "Two Remain" (the German title) succeed?

First of all, one has to say that Crane only emulates literary role models insofar as the comic book authors he admires, such as Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes or Adrian Tomine, have long been recognized as great storytellers beyond a comic audience - because of the psychological complexity of their personnel, which is easier to understand using image sequences clearly (because in the literal sense more graphic) than by a classical literary novelist.

Crane even intensifies the time interlacing brought to the highest level of graphic virtuosity by Ware in his epochal graphic novel “Jimmy Corrigan” by not only confronting different levels of experience in “Zwei Stay”, but also imaginary events with the “real ones” told in the book “.

With a squiggly edge, everything becomes different

The most famous example of this is the snaking of frame boundaries on still images to indicate dream or flashback sequences taking place within them.

Crane also uses this convention in the imaginary passages of his comic.

However, there are also second-degree imaginations in "Zwei Stay", for example when Will remembers how his wife Connie read a novel while driving in the car and told him its plot.

This novel is a major part of Stay Two in scope, and a key to understanding the psychology of Connie and Will.

Because Connie's novel is about a similarly old couple whose child died in childbirth, resulting in a marital crisis that is to be healed by a cruise together.

At the beginning of "Two Staying", Connie and Will try to correct their mood with a cozy evening after the joint car ride, which has led to an argument due to the stressful process, for which Connie goes on a shopping spree, while Will prepares everything at home .

But his thoughts begin to wander: to the story in the novel he was told before, which he then continues by reading the book himself, and to Connie, whom he suddenly believes is in mortal danger out of superstition.

This superstition results from Will's childhood, which he conjures up in further memories, and eventually he goes in search of his wife.

When she returns to the empty house, she has grave fears about the fate of her missing husband.