By Sarah Miller

Life is a series of moments in time, strung together by our memories to form a narrative that suits the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. What happens when those moments are captured on the page one by one as they happen, rather than being collected all at once when the perceived narrative arc is already over? In deceptively simple sketches, Eleanor Davis answers this question as she tells the story of her cross-country journey from Tucson, Arizona, to Athens, Georgia. You & A Bike & A Road is a diary comic that lets us into Davis’s mind as she confronts the challenges inherent in such a physically and mentally strenuous undertaking. Her story is told as a series of moments that add up to what seems at first glance like a simple cycling narrative, but which at second glance proves to be a series of existential questions about identity and belonging. “I want to bike fast and draw beautifully,” she says, and so she does, in the process revealing the splendour and inescapability of both our physical and conceptual selves.