Review by Frank Plowright
Having a convicted criminal as the central character is unusual for any fiction, never mind a graphic novel, but Burn With Me’s focus is Jessica Bailey. She’s served a twelve year sentence for arson in which someone died, and as the story begins she’s with her father, returning to the same small community where the crime was committed. No-one’s pleased at her return.
Steven Ingram’s speciality is the low intensity character study, featuring small observations, often provided visually rather than highlighted verbally, and that’s brilliantly achieved with Jessica’s father. While attempting to maintain a facade of everything being normal and avoiding anything inflammatory, he twists himself into knots. It’s implied that Jessica’s crime drove his wife away, and he’s now as lonely as Jessica might have been in her jail cell.
Ingram’s equally adept when it comes to revealing Jessica’s back story, how she’s missing something in her life and becomes infatuated with what seems the sophistication of the new girl at school, previously home educated. Helen initiates Jessica into a world of small burned sacrifices as incantations to maintain friendships and promote desires to the wind. It’s all nonsense of course, but Helen is extremely convincing and Jessica is gullible and needy, so Ingram entirely changes the perception of her.
The third character on the cover is Fran, Jessica’s cellmate, and the sounding board to whom her story is told, but otherwise not greatly developed other than dropping a very salient comment toward the end.
Burn With Me is a clever story, presenting readers with something instantly fixing an opinion, then burying deep into the reasoning. It’s easy to create hate figures, as the British press regularly do when murders occur, only rarely ever looking beyond a crime itself to possible causes of it. There are evil people, who should be condemned and then there are poor souls.
A little more time spent rounding out the reasons for Jessica’s isolation might have made this stronger, but Burn With Me is a substantial graphic novel delving into dark areas serving wider attention. It is available via Amazon UK, but why not buy directly from Ingram on his webpage.
