Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

#29.  Same Difference and Other Stories, Derek Kirk Kim
2004, Top Shelf Productions (material originally self-published between 2000-2003)

I really, really like this story.  (Also, the edition I'm reading has an extraordinarily beautiful cover, which I wish would show up more readily on Google searches for the book.  I just love it a lot.)

This is a collection of short stories, but the book is clearly dominated by the title piece, which at 80 pages makes up more than half the book.  (The rest of the pieces are a grab bag of variable interest and quality, ranging from two to eight pages or so.)  "Same Difference," though, is a novella -- or a short graphic novel -- and I really dug it a lot.  The central characters are Simon Moore and his friend Nancy; both are Korean-American, both are recent college graduates, both are living and working in Oakland and working on finding their adult footing and way in the world.  An over-the-top prank played by Nancy, and her insistent desire to follow it up (Nancy has a very forceful personality, to the point of being domineering), leads to a day-trip-cum-road-trip down to Pacifica, the quiet, beautiful beachside suburb where Simon grew up.  The day brings encounters and surprises; it ends, as days do, with sunset, night falling, the stars.

It would make this a longer review than I have time for to go into detail about all the reasons I like this work, but I'll throw out a few.  I like Kim's aesthetic; by that I mean not just the technical execution of his artwork (which I also like very much), but also the way he chooses to depict things: his sense of pacing, of rhythm, of composition; his interest in quiet spaces and quiet passages, in the emotional value of light and natural and constructed-urban patterns in the environment.  (This stuff is not blatantly obvious while you're reading the story, which I think is also deliberate -- it has a cheerful, almost noisy flow -- but it's definitely there.)  Also, I like his character design, and I like his characters.  

I find myself thinking of this in comparison to other comics I've been reading lately.  Adrian Tomine's 2007 book Shortcomings throws up a similar dynamic: the protagonist's best friend Alice Kim is, well, actually almost identical to Simon's best friend Nancy.  (Huh.  The more I think about those details of character design and dynamic, the more I start to wonder about that.  Kim's came first... )  But I like Kim's characters, and story, better: I find the protagonists more realistic (although that's admittedly a complicated term) and more engaging and endearing.  Another comparison that comes to mind is Dan Clowes' Ghost World, for reasons which will probably be evident if you've read both books.  Once again, though, I find myself liking Same Difference better.

I think the reason might be... or boil down to... because I find Kim's view of his characters, and the world, ultimately much more compassionate and humane than is the case with either Tomine or Clowes?  And I like humane.  It is ultimately what makes great literature great to me; which is why I'm not really a fan of either Clowes or Tomine, despite the respect I can accord to some of their work. 

Your mileage, of course, might vary. This is why the world is full of books! :)

[Tags I would add if I could: california, disability, twentysomething, coming of age, culture shock]

PS: Oh yeah -- the rest of the stories are interesting, too, at least some of them.  (A number of the tags I've used apply to them, not to the title story.)  I couldn't really get into most of them, though; a lot of this work seems to be Kim complaining about how girls don't like him.  They are fairly superior examples of the type, but there's not much depth there.  This is, I'm coming to think, just material that many artists have to work through before they can get to plumbing their memories and emotions for richer and more mature work, and Kim has worked his way through it and gotten beyond.  (Unlike some other cartoonists I could mention, like Chester Brown, or Ivan Brunetti, or Adrian Tomine, or Dan Clowes.  (Oh, excuse me!  Did I say that out loud? ;))

[Note: Tags I would like to add, when it eventually becomes possible: a: hernandez lea, i: hernandez lea, steampunk.]

#20.  Cathedral Child, Lea Hernandez
Cyberosia Publishing, 2002 (?)

Cathedral Child is a very curious graphic novel of somewhat confusing provenance.  It is also, I think, unfinished.  I gather that it was meant to be the first volume of a series that Hernandez called "Texas Steampunk Trilogy," but there were a long series of delays in publishing the book and I don't think the second and third volumes were ever produced.

Which is a pity, because Cathedral Child is full of interesting ideas, and has a unique sensibility and a lot of heart.  The ending is very confusing to me, but I don't know how much of that comes from its being supposed to continue on later, or perhaps from the artist having been obliged to cram some extra plot points in where they hadn't been planned.  (Babylon 5 season four, anyone?)

So anyway, I can fault this book on several counts of clarity and pacing. On the other hand, conceptually it is fantastic.  It is set in nineteenth-century West Texas, where a white engineer, Nikola (I see what you did there!), and his investor/partner, Stuart, have set up shop to build an "analytical engine," which in this setting seems to mean an AI. 

They are building their AI inside a mission-style Spanish church, which is referred to as Cathedral, and the "machinists" and "tutors" -- who do the work of teaching and training the young artificial intelligence --  come from among the ranks of the so-called natives, who seem to be Hispanicized Indians.  (This is not entirely clear to me, but on the other hand I am not entirely clear on the distinction between "Hispanicized Indians" and the people we now call Mexicans, so maybe that means I have to do some more research myself.)   In any case, they are brown people, with Spanish names.  And there are really not nearly enough representations of brown people with Spanish names in steampunk at all, much less drawn in a manga-influenced American style, so even if it were just for this I applaud Lea Hernandez a lot.

I won't summarize the whole story here -- I guess I should just recommend reading it yourself, if it seems interesting to you.  I do admit I find the book somewhat confusing.  Some of the story concepts aren't as clearly brought through as they should have been, and I think that unclearness resides both in the storytelling and in the artwork.  On the other hand, I like many of the characters, and some of the ideas are just sublime.  It's really too bad the trilogy seems never to have been finished.

(Also: this book, and its writer, raise a "Who's P.O.C.?" question for me.  Is Lea Hernandez a writer/artist of color?  I am assuming, from her name, her place of origin, and -- here's where it gets really tricky -- from the content of her work, that she is Hispanic, and probably Mexican American.  But does that mean she's necessarily a person of color?  I don't know.  All the (smallish) photos of her I've been able to find online show her with blonde hair.  But I don't know if that means anything; many Mexicans have blonde hair... So here I am, including her, but without really knowing.  For all I know, I could be wrongly assuming.  And we all know what assuming does.  I could be making a ming out of my ass.)

#10.  Kindred, Octavia Butler.
1979

Okay, I am about the fiftieth person to read this book in this community, and the sixth or seventh to post about it TODAY.  Which makes me feel as if an in-depth review would be... unnecessary?  Redundant?  I will, nonetheless, try to write briefly about what I myself took away from it. 

A brief summary: Dana, who is black, is a feminist and a writer.  It is 1976, and she has just moved with her husband of not-very-long, Kevin (who is white), to a their first house together in Los Angeles.  By mechanisms unknown to her, she finds herself unwillingly pulled back into the past, for the presumable purpose --  she quickly figures out -- of saving Rufus, a young white boy who will become the master of his father's Maryland plantation, and keeping him alive long enough to father the child who will become Dana's ancestor.  But that means Dana has to live -- and  try to keep her body, integrity, and sense of self intact, in a society in which blacks are property, women are treated like children, and she has no legal or personal rights at all.

Butler calls this book a "grim fantasy," which seems correct, in that it's certainly not science fiction.  The mechanism of time travel is not really important here; what matters are its consequences.  I find Butler's writing very immediate, and although she is not a particularly lyrical or elegant stylist, her calm, tough, clear prose works very well to keep the story moving, to illuminate character and to draw the reader into the questions she is most interested in addressing: those of assumptions; of ambiguous ethical questions; of painful choices which genuinely -- unlike in most fiction -- have no obvious right answer.

A couple of interesting, and illuminating, quotes from the book's Wikipedia page:

"I was trying to get people to feel slavery," Butler said in a 2004 interview. "I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people." In another interview, she said, "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you."

The book is set on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Butler said she chose the setting "because I wanted my character to have a legitimate hope of escape," and because two famous African-Americans, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, had been enslaved there.