The Weight

By Melissa Mendes. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Softcover, 580 pages, B&W, 2025

A rural family’s cycle of love, loss, and renewal, set against the beauty and adversity of mid-century America

Edie comes into the world calmly as the adults around her rage. Her father is a cruel man who beats her mother regularly and much of Edie’s young life is spent trying to escape this tyrant. “Why doesn’t she ever cry?…Gives me the creeps.” Of course, being a child means she lives a child’s life—she still has laughter-filled sleepovers and outdoor adventures with the local rat pack of kids still too young to work. But Edie’s heart grows callous as her father becomes drunker and angrier.

A work of fiction inspired by her grandfather’s writing and childhood, Melissa Mendes’ pastoral cartooning captures the openness of rural America—soft breezes, tall grass, whirring grasshoppers, rainstorms, skinned knees. But all the while, the cruelty, the disappointment of man lurks behind the barn and in the trailer. Life can be stubbed out as easily as a cigarette tossed in the dirt. One moment all focus, next, gone without a thought. Will Edie find herself repeating a cycle or will she be free like she felt as a child?

“Black eyes and pancake breakfasts. Wide open fields and cramped trailers. In The Weight, Melissa Mendes doesn’t shy from depicting the quotidian brutalities of lives fenced in tightly by systems and cycles. But she’s equally generous in rendering the bright flashes of beauty and joy. We follow the desire paths carved by hungry hearts—mistaking oncoming headlights for lucky stars.”—Laura Park

“The Weight is a gut-wrenching graphic novel with the power of a timeless ballad—plaintive and beautiful, shimmering with tenderness and humor.”—James Sturm