In Paco Roca’s intensely intimate and international award-winning graphic novel, The House, three adult siblings return to their family’s quaint vacation home a year after their father’s death. They each bring their respective wives, husbands, and children there with the intention to clean up the residence and put it on the market, but as garbage is hauled off and dust is wiped away, decades-old resentments quickly fill the vacant home. Through flashbacks into each sibling’s memories — the fig trees they grew up climbing, the pergola they never got around to build, the final visits to the hospital — Roca gives us a glimpse into domestic moments of joy, guilt, and disappointment while asking what happens to brothers and sisters when the only person holding the family together is now gone. Much like the film The Big Chill, The House is both painful and touching, brilliantly rendered on panoramic pages by Roca, who is known for his empathetic books like the 2017 Eisner Award-nominated Wrinkles. At once deeply personal (dedicated to Roca’s own deceased father) and entirely universal, The House details the struggle to overcome the past, but still hold onto the memories.
The House | 
