All My Bicycles

Reviews

Tate McFadden | April 22, 2025

I’m trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant-now that’s also already gone. Everything has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing.” 

- Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva 

A dark and empty jungle. Rain falling on a hanging rug. The black silhouette of a tropical bird. “That’s how all my stories always end. With me leaving, fleeing,” Powerpaola writes in the opening page of her new memoir, All My Bicycles (Fantagraphics 2024). The book, painted in lush black and gray ink wash, is a melancholic, and touching portrait of Powerpaola as she moves to new cities in Colombia, each with a new bicycle. Nonlinear, and magically real, she leaves boyfriends and friends, falls into manholes, and is bloodily torn apart by a crocodile. 

Powerpaola’s ruminations on love and quotidian life are understated. She lulls you with a simple ink wash style, making even her most surreal moments seem par for the course. Comics memoirs have long been uniquely able to combine nonfiction with the absurd and eerie, from Marjane Satrapi’s conversations with God in Persepolis to the feet of hanged bodies appearing in both the past and present in Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Comics are at the frontier of the magical realist memoir and in All My Bicycles, Powerpaola proves herself to be at the forefront of that history. The book offers little to no explanation of its fantastical elements to its reader. It quietly refuses to hold your hand and guide you. It consists of scenes from her life in new cities interspersed with pages of unreal and absurd imagery occasionally paired with ruminations on art and writing or the history of the bicycle.

In the first chapter, titled “The Giant No. II,” after a bike of the same name, the magical and the real combine. She rides The Giant along the streets of Bogotá before coming to a stop in front of an open manhole. Inside is only blackness. She sticks her head in and asks: “Is someone there?” She looks to her bicycle leaning against a signpost on the street and says “I can’t just leave you there,” as her feet dangle into the blackness. A woman tells her “Maybe you’re uncomfortable there” Beneath them, a crocodile is revealed, waiting in the darkness. The manhole becomes the memoir’s most striking motif. In another manhole scene, Powerpaola seems to speak to herself at an indeterminate age. She tells a story of her childhood that her doppelganger is too impatient, high, and anxious to listen to.

In most chapters there’s a lovely lack of dialogue. In “The BMX,” she combines expository captions written in sparse, direct prose, with the adolescent cuteness of young love as Powerpaola falls for a BMX rider at a bike park whom she names “Big Red,” for the strikingly red sweater she draws him with. She writes “I fell in love with the color of his sweater. He was always wearing it. I was the hue of red you only see in European clothing, cardinals’ robes, cave paintings. Marlboro red.” The ever changing way in which Powerpaola draws herself shines most brightly in the pages of “The BMX.” She grows from a gawky childlike figure to a mature, adult profile as she kisses him. Almost none of Powerpaola’s panels have a gutter. Instead, they’re separated by a thin black line, as if each moment happens simultaneously. It can be disorienting and occasionally overwhelming, as if the story were a memory of our own, one we could still feel with the intensity of the present.

In other chapters, most notably “The Mountain Bike,” the penultimate chapter of the memoir, dialogue begins to take over. “The Mountain Bike” is the saddest chapter of All My Bicycles. It’s the first chapter that Powerpaola hasn’t fully wrapped her head around. The chapter follows her and her closest friend from 1992-1995 as her friend falls in love, gets pregnant, then loses her lover’s life to an overdose. Afterward, Powerpaola drifts away from her friend. She wonders: “Why did I abandon you?” Dialogue takes over for the memories she can’t interpret through a retrospective caption. She can only remember her friendship as a series of conversations and experiences.

It’s in “The Mountain Bike” that Powerpaola’s assertion that her stories always end with her leaving becomes the most overt and the most painful. In earlier chapters her leaving is either amicable(In “The Giant No. II,” her and her boyfriend send their relationship off with a nice dinner), or implied, as in “The BMX,” where we’re told she remembers “how the sensation [of the kiss] clung to me for days,” but never actually see her leave. Every previous chapter feels less like Powerpaola is leaving someone, and more like she’s going to a new place: Cali, Medellín, Bogotá. It’s only in “The Mountain Bike,” that we see who it is she’s left behind.

In her opening chapter, Powerpaola quotes Chris Kraus: “We are only circumstances and interpretations.” But the idea that art is the process by which we grow to understand our pasts and ourselves becomes fraught in “The Mountain Bike,” and the final chapter, “Aurorita.” Throughout the memoir, leaving evolves from easy and friendly, to ambivalent, to brutally painful. In All My Bicycles it’s an act centered around Powerpaola, as if it’s disconnected from whoever is left behind. 

In “The Mountain Bike,” however, we are finally privy to the pain of those who are left. In one of the most striking sets of pages in the book, Powerpaula and her friend both cry silently on opposite ends of a phone call. When she hangs up, her friend curls into a ball in her dark, solitary room. The light gray ink wash threatens to overtake the boundaries of her friend’s figure. As if shying away from the thought of all that pain, the next panel is an empty scene of the jungle. It’s the first time we see Powerpaula consider why she’s leaving, and who she’s leaving behind. 

Despite this questioning, “Aurorita,” a short chapter in which Powerpaula’s bike gets stolen fails to provide us the introspection that the previous chapter suggested might be coming. Her final line is a plea to her lover: “I can’t help thinking what it means when something disappears. I’m never gonna see it again. If you ever take off, please say: ‘Goodbye: I’m leaving, I wish you the best.’” It’s not an assurance that she herself will say goodbye, but perhaps it’s as close to admitting the pain her leaving can cause that Powerpaula is able to get.

Many good memoirs don’t have the clarity of a character arc that a novel or play might provide. Human lives don’t lend themselves to such a structured path. The vignette nature of All 

My Bicycles lends the book the feel of a short story collection rather than a single narrative, which makes the lack of linear progression an invitation to become a part of Powerpaula’s development. In drawing her stories she makes it clear she is in the middle of understanding herself. She remains an active participant in her narrative rather than a historian of it. All My Bicycles makes us privy to that process. We are actors in that interpretation as much as she is, as we examine ourselves and her over the course of the text. It’s an intimate invitation, deeply personal in its ugliness and beauty.

Powerpaola is the author of several comics, including the memoirs Virus Tropical #1-3 (Editorial Común, 2011), qp (La Silueta Ediciones, 2014), and the graphic novel Todo Va a Estar Bien (La Silueta Ediciones, 2015).