Tyler smartly plays the early part of the story as a mystery - what happened to Ann, and why won't her mother talk about it? - and once her mother (prompted by witnessing the birth of her granddaughter, Tyler's daughter) finally opens up and tells the story, the emphasis is on the awful circumstances (hateful in-laws, a husband on the other side of the country) that preceded the toddler's death. The death itself (a combination of serious, but not inherently deadly, accident, and subsequent medical neglect), Tyler treats only glancingly, as if the enormity of the event were impossible to record - but her skill and sensitivity have pulled the reader so far into her parents' lives that she needs nothing more than a boldly stylised panel of Hannah and her husband receiving the awful news to drive the emotional point home.
Tyler, whose comics had previously appeared mostly in black and white, was finally given the chance to work in full colour in The Hannah Story, which appeared in the first of Drawn & Quarterly magazine's 'up-scale' second volume. She rose to the occasion with a deliberately limited but flexible sepia-based palette that changed subtly from sequence to sequence - darker, almost black-and-white for her own childhood memories; richer, faded brown's for Hannah's story (augmented with greens for the idyllic sequence at her mother's home); and small patches of full colour for the "contemporary" sequences, with a startling, huge, somehow healing burst of red (an Oriental rug that figures in the story) in the final panel. The delicate lifework is more nuanced and detailed than usual for Tyler, without ever losing clarity and readability.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of comics stories that can make you laugh, but only a handful that can make you cry. The Hannah Story heads that short list.
