Review by Frank Plowright

At 24 Veronika is stifled by still living in her parents’ home, although her boyfriend going on tour with his band means she can temporarily move into his place, as grubby and messy as it is. There’s also the bonus of a new job, which ought to mean being able save enough to rent a place of her own. The bosses are strange, but the staff seem okay, and the work is easy enough.

Although Jon Allen draws the cast in animal form, The Well is very much about life as it is for many trapped young people never quite earning enough to change their circumstances. There’s a constant underlying discontent to life, not just for Veronika, but also for her co-workers, and it isn’t helped by an early revelation that the company is an ethical quagmire, marketing product as eco-friendly, which is plain dishonest despite glib justifications.

While a conventional graphic novel size would reduce the page count, even half the almost seven hundred pages still marks The Well as a monster of a book, but due to Allen’s storytelling style the pages turn relatively quickly. Many inconsequential moments are included to reinforce the daily grind, and big panels with minimal dialogue are the order of the day.

However, around a third of the way through Allen takes a brief dip into different territory that later comes to predominate. His friendly cartooning style prevents The Well ever becoming full-on horror, but the tropes associated with the genre certainly manifest. It’s a strange choice because Allen’s extremely good at revealing feeling and so much time is spent establishing true to life drama that welding on a completely different plot feels as if Allen had two stories in mind and decided to run them together. Both work on their own merits, but it’s an awkward fusion despite a thematic connection of loneliness eventually manifesting.

Each cast member has a clear and distinct purpose rather than making up numbers, and the deceptive simplicity throughout hides an adroit insight into the frustrations of feeling trapped, making for an immersive experience. By the end Allen’s moved back into domestic drama for a satisfying resolution, but the arrival would have been better achieved by means other than what occurs.