The hospital room smelled of rubbing alcohol and dying cells. Outside, the Pacific Ocean kept crashing against the California coast, entirely indifferent to the fact that a twenty-four-year-old girl named Kristen was losing her leg to osteosarcoma. In those quiet hours between chemotherapy drips, her partner, AJ Dungo, did what any artist does when the world splinters. He watched. He held her hand. He memorized the specific slope of her shoulders, a silhouette that would later become the anchor for one of the most heartbreaking graphic novels of the twenty-first century.
Grief is a heavy, waterloggedthing. It doesn't move in a straight line. It pools in the corners of your life, waiting for you to step into it unawares. When Kristen died, Dungo didn't write a standard memoir. He didn't offer a clinical breakdown of cancer stats or a self-help guide on how to survive the loss of your first love. Instead, he drew a book called In Waves.
It is a story told in shades of faded denim and seafoam green. On one page, you are watching a young couple navigate the terrifying terrain of terminal illness. On the next, you are swept back into the early twentieth century, learning about the Hawaiian origins of modern surfing. It sounds like a jarring juxtaposition. It shouldn't work. Yet, the parallel narratives mirror the exact rhythm of a human mind trying to survive unbearable trauma by clinging to something older and vaster than its own pain.
The Long Ride of Duke Kahanamoku
To understand why a grieving young man in Los Angeles turned to the history of surfing to explain his heartbreak, you have to understand the ocean itself. Water is the great equalizer. It accepts everything and remembers nothing.
Dungo introduces us to Duke Kahanamoku, the legendary Hawaiian swimmer who brought surfing to the global stage. Consider the factual reality of Duke’s life: born in Honolulu in 1890, he grew up in a Hawaii that was rapidly being Westernized, its native culture stripped down and repackaged for tourists. Duke didn't just ride waves; he carried the dignity of a displaced people on his back every time he paddled out. When he won Olympic gold in 1912, he didn't celebrate with corporate sponsorships. He went back to the water.
The book transitions between Duke’s historical triumphs and Kristen’s physical decline with a quiet, devastating grace. In one sequence, we see Duke gliding effortlessly across a massive swell in Freshwater Beach, Australia, changing the country's beach culture forever. Turn the page, and we see Kristen, her body weakened by tumors, being lifted into a wheelchair.
The contrast is brutal. It is also entirely deliberate. Dungo uses the immense, untouchable strength of these historical figures as a shield. When the reality of Kristen’s pain becomes too sharp to look at directly, the narrative retreats into the past, wrapping itself in the stoic legacy of the men who tamed the ocean.
The Architect of the Modern Board
Then comes Tom Blake. If Duke was the soul of surfing, Blake was its mind. A restless, solitary man from Wisconsin, Blake met Duke by chance in a Detroit theater lobby in 1920. That brief interaction changed the trajectory of Blake’s life. He moved west, became obsessed with the mechanics of the surfboard, and eventually invented the hollow surf board and the stabilizing fin.
Before Blake, surfboards were massive, hundred-pound slabs of solid redwood. They were literal backbreakers. Blake hollowed them out. He drilled holes, used lightweight cedar, and sealed them up. He made the heavy light.
This is where the metaphor becomes reality. AJ Dungo, sitting by Kristen’s bed, was dealing with a weight that felt entirely solid, completely unliftable. By intertwining Tom Blake’s obsessive need to lighten the surfboard with his own need to process his girlfriend's illness, Dungo reveals the true purpose of his art. He is trying to hollow out his own grief. He is searching for a way to make the crushing weight of loss buoyant enough to float on.
Consider what happens when you look at Dungo's art style. The lines are remarkably clean. There are no cross-hatchings, no chaotic ink splatters, no crowded panels. Whole pages go by without a single word of dialogue. The historical sections are rendered in a warm, sepia-toned brown, while the contemporary story of AJ and Kristen is bathed in a cool, melancholic blue. The silence in these panels is deafening. It forces the reader to slow down, to breathe in the salt air, and to feel the space left behind when someone vanishes from your life.
The Invisible Stakes of the Shoreline
People often look at surfing as a lifestyle choice, a sport for beach bums and adrenaline junkies. In Waves reminds us that for those who truly live it, the ocean is a sanctuary. It is a place where you go to bury things.
Kristen was a surfer before her diagnosis. The water was her home. When the cancer stripped away her ability to walk, let alone paddle out into a break, the loss was twofold. She wasn't just losing her life; she was losing her freedom.
There is a moment in the book where AJ takes Kristen back to the beach after her amputation. She cannot surf, but she can sit on the sand and watch the horizon. The ocean doesn't care that she has one leg. It doesn't pity her. It just keeps moving, an infinite loop of rise and fall.
This is the emotional core that standard book reviews often miss. The book isn't really about surfing, and it isn't really about cancer. It is about the desperate, clumsy ways we try to love each other through the worst moments of our lives. It is about the guilt of the survivor. AJ confesses his own shortcomings through the text—his helplessness, his occasional frustration, his sheer terror at the looming void. He doesn't paint himself as a hero. He paints himself as a flawed, frightened young man watching the person he loves slide into the dark.
The Way the Water Heals
When Kristen finally passes away, the book doesn't offer a neat resolution. There is no triumphant sunset, no swell of inspirational music. There is only the quiet, agonizing return to normalcy.
But then, AJ does something crucial. He goes back to the water. He paddles out on a board, terrified, inexperienced, and entirely consumed by the memory of the girl who used to lead the way.
The first time you catch a wave, everything else disappears. The noise of the world goes silent. The bills, the doctors' appointments, the empty apartment, the phantom scent of hospital linen—it all gets washed away by a wall of rushing water. For a few seconds, you are entirely present. You are alive.
That is the ultimate truth Dungo uncovers through his research into Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake. These men weren't just athletes or inventors; they were seekers. They were running away from the confines of modern life, from their own ghosts, and finding a brief, beautiful peace on the surface of the water.
In Waves is a monument built from ink and paper. It acknowledges that some pains never truly leave us, that the scar tissue of a great loss remains tender forever. But it also proves that if you trust the rhythm of the world, if you allow yourself to be carried by the history and the community of those who suffered before you, you won't drown. You will eventually rise back to the surface, gasping for air, ready to catch the next swell.
