Sakura of DOOM

Kimberly Keiko Cameron, also known as "Skim," is currently trying to negotiate her place at school. She and her best friend are starting to drift apart, she has a crush on her English teacher Ms. Archer, and the suicide of one of the popular girls' boyfriends is affecting everyone.

The story here isn't new, although the specifics of it are—the teacher crush, the student suicide. What makes Skim feel different is the execution of the plot, from the fallout of Skim's crush to how she has to negotiate friendships and alliances in high school. I especially liked the portrayal of Katie, the popular girl whose boyfriend committed suicide right after he dumped her; she was much more real than I had expected, and I appreciated that.

The art is also beautiful. Jillian Tamaki's style is somewhat like other indie comics, except certain panels, which look like Japanese paintings. I can't tell if it's me stereotyping the art based on ethnicity, as it's only occasionally, and usually only when she paints Skim. Here's a sample, although you can't really see the effect I'm talking about until page 19 or so. It's the small fuzzy high eyebrows and the roundness of the lower face, along with the curve of the nose, that work together to remind me of paintings of Heian court ladies.

I liked this much better than Mariko Tamaki's Emiko Superstar and hope she does another project with her cousin.

Links:
- minnow1212's review

This is a collection of shorts that Kim previously published online; although I think some have recurring characters, others feel very random. Also, I read it over a week ago and already returned it to the library, so my memory of this is very sketchy. (Oh hey, it's available online! Check out the right column in Lowbright to find links to the other shorts in the book.)

I felt like this volume has much of the American indie comic sensibility—crowded art, neurotic characters, big focus on failed love lives—which is sad, as there's a reason why I don't read many American indie comics (I know, I stereotype). I didn't feel for either of the characters in the main story, particularly with the way one talks about a blind character ("Her eyes were so giant and sparkling and gorgeous, like she could see things we couldn't!"). I do like that the blind girl shows up later and acts like a normal person, but when the other two characters were talking to each other, all I could think was that I so didn't feel for them feeling awkward about saying things like "As you can see" or whatnot.

I also hated the plotline revolving around Nancy sending a letter back to someone who seemed to be stalking his girlfriend. There's acknowledgement that what Nancy does is mean-spirited, but not enough for me, and the ending portraying the letter-sending guy as sad also annoyed me, given that he was the one sending creepy, stalker-y letters.

I don't know. Much of the humor (much of it scatalogical) didn't amuse me, and the general neuroticness annoyed me. It was good to see bits of Korean-American-ness in there as background, but not the center, but all the same, it wasn't enough to get me over my dislike of the characters. I'd personally skip this and go for Kim's Good as Lily instead.

Ann Marie Fleming found a few reels of old film when she was recovering from a car accident, and portrayed in those reels was Long Tack Sam, magician extraordinaire and her great-grandfather. After researching his life a little, she left with even more questions: who was Long Tack Sam? How did he negotiate being Chinese while touring worldwide during the turn of the century? And why was this world-famous magician almost completely forgotten today?

The graphic novel is actually based on a film Fleming wrote and directed, albeit adapted to take advantage of the different format. It's a combination of memoir, biography, and cultural history, as Fleming ties together the story of her own search and how it affected her with the not-always-factual story of Long Tack Sam and the history of the world at the time. Long Tack Sam lived through the fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of the Republic of China, two world wars, the rise of movies and the downfall of vaudeville and other travelling acts like his. His story is particularly interesting because it is so international; he married an Austrian (I think) woman and raised three biracial children, two of which ended up marrying Chinese (I forget about the third). And he was travelling at a time when it was just as common to see a white man playing a Chinese man than an actual Chinese man.

I'm not sure if you get a cohesive story out of this book, but I also don't think that's the point. Information about Long Tack Sam is piecemeal and untrustworthy; Long would tell different peopel different stories, his advertisements would say something else, and all of it had to be rediscovered. What we see is what Fleming had to puzzle together, and as such, I think the patchwork nature of the story works.

Fleming doesn't go as into issues of race and racism as I wanted. It's perpetually there in the background, but I suspect that one of the ways Long Tack Sam dealt with it was to use it to his advantage and capitalize on his own "exoticness" to the non-Chinese world. He also incorporated his daughters in his act later, changing their names to more "Chinese" stage names. I wish there had been more about Fleming's grandmother and what she thought of all this, but I suspect that would have been difficult, given that her grandmother had passed away before she started the project.

Still, an interesting look at an interesting life lived during an interesting period.

Out of McCloud's three books on comics (the other two being Understanding Comics and Making Comics), this is the weakest. This is largely because this is McCloud's book on the future of comics, and it was published in 2000.

The book consists of two distinct halves, the first concentrating on the future of comics themselves -- the industry, the readers, expansion, etc., and the second concentrating on how the digital revolution will affect comics. I think the first still has a lot of relevant information in it, despite the fact that it's now seven years later. McCloud clearly has a lot of experience in comics and in the industry, and his manifesto of sorts still resonates with me (despite my, uh, knowing not much at all about the comics industry). While some of it is now obsolete or somewhat funny, given the current manga trend, it's nowhere near as obsolete as the second half on computers and comics.

Alas, the second part just had me alternately giggling or scanning over pages. It is not really his fault that he wrote it just before the first big internet boom crash, or that things in that industry change so fast that books from last year are already out of date. But there you go. Also, it reads like every other book about the internet and "ZOMG THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION!" written. I mean, I would be interested to see McCloud's look back on things that have changed -- PayPal and the popularity of many webcomics and blogs and the entire "long tail" theory are versions of what he predicted, but I'd love more concrete details on how they have changed the comic industry. But no more predictions, because they just make me laugh.

The first part, though, would have benefitted from even more detail; I think the book as a whole would have been better if it had all been the first part. McCloud details 12 areas in which comics could improve in, some of them being gender representation, minority representation, more genres, focus on the writing, focus on the art, industry revolution, and etc. Sadly, there are only a few pages dedicated to each of these twelve areas. And while I know he only wanted to give a jumping-off point for people, there could be whole books written about each of them.

Also, (you all knew this was coming up) while I was glad that he did at least notice the disparity in gender and POC representation in the content of comics and the comic industry, the whole thing gets about four pages. Argh. I mean, he thankfully knows enough to acknowledge that it's not as easy as saying, "Well, it's just because we don't see enough comics with women/POC" and he acknowledges sexism and racism as institutions. But I don't think he goes far enough to point out that increasing representation takes a lot of work and focus; it's not something that just happens. Granted, it is the same for broadening genre representation, but since I personally find that combating sexism and racism in comics is about, oh, say, eleventy billion times more important to me than genre representation (I can get that elsewhere), I am just going to harp on that point.

Also also, I laughed and laughed because we did get a lot of the advances he was asking for, only with manga. Alas, the American comics industry has yet to get a clue, from my POV. This is, by the way, not to say that manga solves everything, because manga also needs to improve in the same twelve areas that McCloud pointed out for comics. It's just that I feel like the manga industry keeps growing here, so the potential to hit upon those improvements is larger, as opposed to the comics industry, which has yet to win me back. (Comics, I used to love you a lot, but I feel like you keep slapping me in the face over and over and over. At least manga wants me, even if it is only for my money.)

Anyway, it was an interesting read, though flawed, and I so desperately want McCloud to write something on manga.

(subtitle: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels)

I think this is McCloud's third book on comics/manga/graphic novels, the first two being Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. Like the other two, this one is written in comic format. It sounds gimmicky, but it actually isn't, as McCloud uses the format to illustrate how and why comics are a different medium. Also, it's so much easier understanding what he's talking about when you can actually see the techniques in effect, such as word balloon placement, gutters, panel layout, and etc.

I haven't read Reinventing Comics, but Understanding Comics is still the textbook on the techniques of comics. Making Comics goes even further and has McCloud explaining exactly how certain techniques and tricks work to support or take away from the narrative. He goes into character creation (more the appearance than the character's background), panel layout, narrative flow, and etc. He breaks down the artist/writer's choices into five: choice of moment, choice of frame, choice of image, choice of word, and choice of flow. These cover fonts, word balloons, panel layout, style, establishing shots, and more.

I can't really say how useful this would be, since I don't actually write or illustrate comics, but as a reader of the medium, it's fascinating. There's even a chapter 5 1/2 online so that McCloud can show the readers how the nature of browsers and the internet change things for comic writers and artists.

My only problem with this book is that it isn't long enough; I wanted even more details that McCloud provides, including in-depth analyses of manga pages, comic pages and graphic novel pages. But I suspect that would make the book four hundred pages long or so. When I say that it isn't long enough, I don't mean that McCloud doesn't give enough details. He has created a great overview into the techniques that any comic writer/artist needs. It's just that... he's so good that I want entire textbooks.