[identity profile] puritybrown.livejournal.com posting in [community profile] 50books_poc
Four graphic novels to kick off my 50. Short assessments outside the cuts, longer discussion/commentary behind them.

Aya won the Best First Book Award at the Angouleme Festival in 2006, and it's easy to see why: it's charming and fun, with an underlying sharpness that sort of creeps up on you. Abouet was born in Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire and lived there until she was 12, and the GN is set in Yopougun, a working-class suburb of Abidjan, in 1978. The story is a kind of suburban teenage sex comedy: although she's the title character, Aya herself stays out of trouble, and mostly observes as her friends Adjoua and Bintou go dancing and chase boys.

The plot isn't particularly original, although it's well-written and well-drawn: the three girls are very distinct both in their appearances and in their speech patterns and characters. In fact, the distinctness of the character designs is one of the charms of this book: once introduced to a character, he or she is instantly recognisable next time you see him or her, even in different clothes or a different hairstyle. This might sound like an obvious thing, but a lot of comics artists have such a limited range of faces and body types that their characters blur into one another and only the dialogue tells you which is which.

What really stands out for me with Aya is how it drew me in to Aya's neighbourhood and Aya's world, a world far removed from my own, to the point that when a boy asks a girl out to a restaurant and she anxiously asks Aya "Can I eat with my hands?", the question (fraught as it is with class and cultural and political issues) seems entirely natural. Abouet has a fine line to walk here, since she's presenting a culture she's very familiar with to a group of people not familiar with it at all (and probably inclined to dismiss it). In that position, I would have been terribly tempted to over-explain, to justify or defend the ways in which Ivorian (and specifically Yopougun, as the GN makes it clear that Ivorians from other parts of the country, and even other parts of Ibidjan, look down on people from Yopougun) culture differs from European culture -- but Abouet doesn't do this; and she also avoids the opposite trap, of presenting the story as a series of familial anecdotes incomprehensible to outsiders. Aya is funny and charming and clever and offers an insight into Ivorian society during its all-too-brief period of peace and prosperity. Highly recommended.

Maggie the Mechanic is the first half of Locas, the monster collection of Maggie & Hopey stories originally serialised in Love & Rockets. I meant to buy Locas a while ago, when there was a copy in my local comics shop, and didn't get round to it, and now it's out of print... but fortunately the two-volume paperback edition is still available (the second volume is called Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., not to be confused with Ghost of H.O.P.P.E.R.S. which is in the same continuity but set some years later).

I had high expectations for this book: it's been generally regarded as one of the essential indie comics titles for decades, it got written up by Douglas Wolk in Reading Comics -- it's an underground pop culture icon. And yet I didn't really warm to it. I think I was expecting something more similar to Palomar, the monster collection by Jaime's brother Gilbert. Maggie the Mechanic is nothing like Palomar (other than both titles revolving around a Hispanic cast). And taken on its own merits, I found the early chapters hard to read. They're choppy; the plot is all over the place; there are a lot more words than seem strictly necessary; a lot of backstory gets dumped into captions or dialogue. Just when I think I've got a handle on what he's doing, he changes directions and does something else -- he did this so many times I felt almost seasick. (I wonder if this is an artefact of my reading it at a faster rate than it was published -- the original Maggie & Hopey stories weren't published in one or even two fat volumes, but ten or twenty pages at a time in Love & Rockets. Mainlining 270 pages of them at once may have diminished my pleasure simply because they were never meant to be read like that -- yet I didn't have this problem with Palomar, or with many other graphic collections, so I can't help but see this as a flaw rather than an excuse.)

There's a long story early on concerning Maggie going abroad to the fictional country of "Zymbodia" with a crew of other mechanics. This story's really weird. There's a dinosaur, and a rocketship, and robots, and hoverbikes, and the country of Zymbodia is threatened by a madman called Pedero San Jo, and and and... none of it really seems real to me. The sf elements undermine the reality of the personal stories and distract from them, not because sf inherently does that, but because Jaime doesn't seem to care very much about making them consistent or even interesting. What the hell is the dinosaur doing there? Damned if I know.

The later stories get more grounded, and towards the end I got a feeling that Hernandez was shifting towards something more relationship-focused -- and I got less of the seasick feeling from the shifts in direction. Overall, I can sort of see why Maggie the Mechanic is so popular -- the central characters are very attractive and fun, and the series has a kind of punk-rock sensibility to it -- and parts of it were great, but I can't say I enjoyed it as a whole.

Good As Lily is the fourth in DC's Minx line of graphic novels aimed at teenage girls. It's a coming-of-age comedy with a supernatural twist. On her 18th birthday, Grace Kwon is visited by three versions of herself at different ages: as a 6-year-old, a 29-year-old (well, she claims to be 29, but I think it's strongly implied that she's actually 30+ and lying about it), and a 70-year-old. I don't want to summarise the plot further than that, because although it's quite intricate and a lot happens, it's pretty fluffy -- but in a good way! Good As Lily is the comic book equivalent of a feelgood teen movie. It certainly made me feel good. (It also made me cry, because the title refers to Grace's older sister Lily, who died when Grace was six, and I, too, had an older sister who died when I was six, so Grace's feelings of mingled grief and resentment and her mother's guilt when she realises that Grace has suffered for being compared to Lily cut very close to the bone. Obviously not everyone's going to have that reaction.)

There were a couple of moments when I felt Kim was trading on stereotypes about Korean families: an early scene where Grace's mother tries to press a cheesecake on her departing friend because she's too skinny kinda made me cringe, as did Grace's father's comment "You can star in as many plays as you want after you've made your first million as a lawyer, right?" I know Derek Kirk Kim actually is Korean and is most likely drawing on his own experience (like an old writing teacher of mine once said, "stereotypes exist because they are true"; and besides, these aren't really bad stereotypes), but I have an uncomfortable feeling that some readers will respond in a spirit Kim didn't intend. Then again, maybe I'm just being paranoid: these moments aside, Grace isn't Korean so that her parents can be pushy convenience store owners: she's Korean because she is. Her ethnicity isn't glossed over, but it's not central either. Good As Lily is a heartwarming teenage comedy; fluffy and touching at the same time.

I've been aware of Adrian Tomine as a highly-praised indie creator for years now, but this is the first work of his that I've read. For some reason every time I picked up Summer Blonde or Optic Nerve in the past my eyes glazed over and I never made any headway. Well, based on Shortcomings, I must just have been in the wrong mood every time I tried, because Shortcomings is terrific. It's a kind of story you see a lot in indie comics -- the main character, Ben Tanaka, is a slightly nerdy, anti-social guy with woman trouble who judges people based on their artistic taste. And I don't know whether it's Tomine's departure from the "thinly-disguised autobiography" genre (he has said in interviews that while Ben shares some characteristics with him, he's not an alter ego), or the fact that he's dealing with the intersections between race and sexuality, which is more interesting to me than the usual "wah I'm surrounded by morons and I can't find a girlfriend who shares my passion for Krazy Kat, FEEL MY PAIN" fodder, or just the pared-down naturalism of Tomine's cartooning, but I never once wanted to smack Ben in the face or felt like Tomine was making excuses for him.

It occurs to me that I've been describing the book by reference to what it isn't rather than what it is, and that's not very helpful. Well, Shortcomings is a relationship drama; and it's an examination of how racial identity works for those Asian-Americans who are generations removed from Asia and don't necessarily consider race to be an important factor in their lives; and it's a very frank look at the ways in which race and sexuality intersect in contemporary America. There are no answers offered, only questions, and the presence of Ben's lesbian friend Alice opens the story out a bit and prevents it from becoming claustrophobic. I really enjoyed Shortcomings and highly recommend it. (Also: I accidentally spilled hot chocolate on one page, and it wiped right off without leaving a stain, which proves that Faber & Faber aren't skimping on the paper quality.)

Date: 2007-09-26 04:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jinian.livejournal.com
Thanks for the great reviews!

Date: 2007-09-26 09:31 am (UTC)
rydra_wong: Chiana from Farscape in a silly hat, captioned "really white girls against racism" (Chi - *really* white girls)
From: [personal profile] rydra_wong
Ooh. I've heard great things about Aya, so it's cool to read another rec. Thank you!

Date: 2007-09-26 11:36 pm (UTC)
ext_48823: 42, the answer to life, the universe and everything (Default)
From: [identity profile] sumofparts.livejournal.com
I've wanted to check out Good as Lily after my sister picked up Same Difference from the local library. Have to give the others a look too. Thanks for the reviews.

Date: 2007-09-29 03:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] decarnin.livejournal.com
Thanks for giving us a peek at what's going on out there in graphic novels. *Aya* sounds especially interesting.

Date: 2007-09-30 08:39 am (UTC)
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (one city)
From: [personal profile] rydra_wong
Belated thought: for anyone who's interested in graphic novels, I'd also rec Marjane Satrapi's marvellous autobiographical account of growing up in Iran, Persepolis.

Re: Maggie the mechanic

Date: 2007-10-01 01:11 pm (UTC)
ext_13221: (Reading)
From: [identity profile] m-nivalis.livejournal.com
I much prefer the later stories, where it gets more realistic. In particular, I find the story The death of Speedy good. I really recommend you get Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. as well. I think you'd like it.

Re: Maggie the mechanic

Date: 2009-09-06 06:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whereweather.livejournal.com
in an infinitely late comment-on-a-comment: agreed about _The Death Of Speedy_. i think that story arc is absolutely incredible -- to the extent of being a good example of how comics _can be_ good. also, the original cover art to that volume ( http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/513VBR0RH6L._SS500_.jpg ) still takes my breath away.

Date: 2007-10-06 12:57 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] philippos42.livejournal.com
I think Xaime went from doing pretty good science fiction that does not reward reading too quickly (early Maggie) to very real-world stuff with a couple of characters from the earlier stuff (later Locas). I think he changed his mind about what he wanted to do after he started, & you have to enjoy it for being thematically different works that only barely intersect.

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