Lee Lai’s second graphic novel, Cannon, won this year’s Stella Prize, and so, while I’m not a graphic novel aficionado, I was intrigued to read this one. I’m not embarrassed to admit how surprised I was by how completely I was drawn into Cannon’s world, and how much I felt for her predicament. How did this happen?

So, this is what I want to focus on here, or, to be more clear, I’ll be focusing on the education of Whispering Gums in reading graphic novels, on how I learnt the “language” of graphic novels. But, I should introduce the story first. The titular Cannon, aka Lucy, is a cook in a restaurant in Montreal. When she is not working, she is looking after her aging grandfather, spending time watching and deconstructing horror films with her friend, the writer Trish, or running. Cannon and Trish have been best-friends since school, where they were queer second-generation Chinese nerds, but cracks are showing. Now on the “uncool side of their twenties”, Cannon is burnt out by her pressured job and being her grandfather’s primary carer, while Trish is trying to establish herself as a writer by mining Cannon’s life for her stories.

“You’re solid, Cannon. I dunno how you keep a cool head” (Benji)

Cannon is your quintessential stalwart, but it is coming at a personal cost. She holds it together when those around her lose it, and steps up for her grandfather while her mother makes herself scarce. Her so-called best friend Trish is nowhere to be seen when Cannon needs her the most.

This is a novel about millennials reaching that point in life when things should, perhaps, be coming together, but instead they are facing burnout, professional insecurity, care responsibilities, and more. Cannon copes – or tries to – through her generation’s coping mechanisms, things like meditation and mindfulness apps, running, dating, and deconstructing horror movies with friend Trish. Eventually, though, the cracks split open and Cannon loses it. There is only so much a human being can take. Hold this thought …

Cannon starts on the cover with its evocative jagged font, and sickly green colour for Cannon. It then opens to a double-page spread depicting a variety of kitchen utensils scattered willy-nilly, along with broken plates and splashes of liquid. Functioning like a prologue, the next few pages contain mostly dark-grey-shaded panels depicting up-ended furniture and a woman on her knees, all watched over by birds that look like magpies. Another woman enters, another plate is broken “for the road”, and this second woman, clearly a friend of the first, leads her friend out into the night. Then comes the Title Page, followed by the next page announcing, simply, “Three Months Earlier”. We are off …

The story is then told chronologically – except for three short flashback sequences to Cannon and Trish’s schooldays in Lennoxville in the mid-2000s – up to Cannon’s breaking point, that opening scene when she smashes up the restaurant. From there, it moves to some level of resolution, albeit life is not easily fixed. Relationships can be, however.

So, the story, on its own, is not an uncommon one. What makes it, of course, is its form, and I loved learning how to “read” it. It wasn’t as hard as I thought, due to Lai’s ability to render action and emotion with clarity while retaining nuance.

Most pages contain four equal-sized panels containing (mostly) black-and-white drawings using simple, strong lines, that avoid extraneous detail which might detract from the point. It doesn’t take long to recognise who is who, and where we are at any point. Pacing is managed partly by the occasional introduction of a single page panel, or other physical variations.

Now for some of my graphic-novel-reading learnings, so bear with me. Just as prose fiction uses recurring motifs to convey meaning, so can graphic novels, and Lee Lai does here. These motifs can be visual and/or textual. Take, for example, the recurrent panels depicting Cannon running (or engaging in other activities) while listening to her meditation or mindfulness apps. These apps include common, repeated phrases like In, Out, Exhale, which are used by Lai literally but often accompanied by visual jokes and wordplay. The running occurs when Cannon needs “relief”, not, as her podiatrist assumes, for the endorphins to experience a high!

Also recurring are those aforementioned birds. They appear frequently in panels when Cannon is experiencing stress. Late in the book, she asks Trish whether she sees them too. Cannon finds them unnerving, but Trish suggests they could be looking out for her. My sense is that they fulfil both roles. Sometimes they seem creepy, representing discomfort, stress, fear, harbingers of doom even, but other times they seem more tender, like companions or guardians, even. Either way, they seem to represent Cannon’s mental state.

Another feature that guides our reading is the use of colour. Grey-shaded panels convey what you can imagine, feelings of anxiety, monotony, dullness, or just general blah-ness. Then there are the sudden splashes of red, which need little explanation. Introduced early in panels depicting Cannon and Trish’s interest in horror movies, red then naturally moves on to expressing rage and frustration.

These are just some of the techniques Lai uses to tell this story, but there’s one that felt more particular, Lai’s use of overlapping, incomplete and obscured speech bubbles to convey problems in communication. The first time this appears is on page 24, and Cannon’s bubbles are overlaid by Trish’s, meaning we can only read Trish’s in entirety. The reason is made clear near the end, if we hadn’t worked it out before, when Cannon tells Trish she’s “got to stop interrupting so much”. Others do it to Cannon too, including her boss, her mum. The meaning is clear. Cannon and her needs are not being listened to, and she’s not pushing back. Lai’s use of speech bubbles could be a study on their own, but this will do as an example.

Finally, there’s what I assume is a visual joke. A couple of times Trish refers to Cannon’s smallness, you’re “small, quiet and Chinese” she says, but the drawings of Cannon are of a solid person, making her visual representation metaphorical rather than real.

It will be clear by now, why I was drawn completely and willingly into Cannon’s life. But I do have one more thing to say before I let you go! Early-ish in the novel, Trish is told by her writing mentor that her project funders “want a young queer Asian voice”, when Trish has a different story she wants to tell. This is surely a comment on a common problem diverse writers face. What Lee Lai has written in Cannon is a story about human beings regardless of colour, sexual orientation or any of the other “others” Cannon might represent. We know Cannon is a queer Chinese, but this has nothing to do with what she is going through. And this is how it should be, unless a writer wants specifically to write about identity. I can see now why the Stella judges loved it.

Jonathan also admired this book.

Lee Lai
Cannon
Willoughby: Giramondo, 2025
304pp.
ISBN: 9781923106406