Tag Archives: sequential art

They Called Us Enemy – George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and Harmony Becker (2019)

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If you’re on FB at any time, you might look up George Takei (yes, that one) and read his feed because he has some good stuff going on. You also might be interested in looking up this graphic memoir because it’s fascinating and it’s really well done.

Takei is a son of first-generation immigrants from Japan – his father’s parents had immigrated from there and his mother, although born in the U.S., had been sent to Japan to go to school. George (and his young brother and sister) were raised with a foot in both cultures – all U.S. citizens but fully cognizant of their Japanese roots.

(Interestingly, George gets his name from Anglophile father after King George VI and his brother, Henry, is named after King Henry VIII [since he was a chubby healthy infant when he was born]. The sister didn’t get a royal name though, but was named after one of the parents’ friends for whom both the parents had high admiration.)

So, the Takei’s were a typical immigrant family, working hard and minding their own [dry cleaning] business. It was at the start of the American involvement in WWII and although the war seemed distant, all that changed when Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor catapulting the U.S. into this event. It also immediately changed the lives of the Takeis and thousands of other Japanese-American families.

I’d been sort of familiar about the awful history of the U.S. internment (really, imprisonment) of Japanese-Americans at the start of WWII, but reading about Takei’s experience of this was heartbreaking. And the fact that the Powers That Be reacted to an outside force in such a knee-jerk and paranoid way reminds me of another U.S. administration, 70 years later, but who’s naming names? ;-]

George Takei, actor and SJW.

This is a thoughtful read through the memories of Takei from when he was a young boy and from the after-dinner conversations that he has held with (mostly?) his father, it seems. I really appreciated how honest Takei is when he admits that his childhood memories of how fun and novel this whole situation was for him as a kid starkly contrasts with his parents’ more honest appraisal of how this edict uprooted them and forced them to lose almost all their possessions.

Looking back upon this time, it’s quite astonishing that the U.S. government allowed this situation to happen (let alone continue for a few years), but sometimes power corrupts. Hmm.

Good read about a shameful historic time that has led me down a few rabbit holes since finishing it.

Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Controlled Chaos – Lucy Knisley (2019)

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As an ongoing reading fan of Lucy Knisley’s graphic novel/sequential art work, I was happy to discover that she had recently released an update to her autobiographical books with the latest news about her getting pregnant and then successfully having that offspring.

What I really appreciate about Knisley is that she has no pretensions about being anything but normal – her perspective on her own life is refreshingly down-to-earth and, unusually for a graphic novel of this genre, she is not writing to heal a personal or familial trauma (apart from this getting-pregnant thing).

Plus, Knisley seems to be a very curious person (similar to how I am) and so you never quite now what to expect for inclusion in her graphic novels. (Question: is a graphic novel still a graphic “novel” if it’s true and autobiographical? Or does it then become a “graphic autobiography”? …)

At this point in her life, Knisley has now been married for a few years and she and her husband, John, decide that now is the time to start a family. It’s this topic around which the book revolves, from the overall preparation for it (she researches in much the same over-the-top-but-fascinating-to-me levels) and her work is as honest as she can be in how much she tells the reader about herself and about her life. (When I have finished one of her books, I feel as though I’ve just been having an enjoyable conversation with a good friend at a coffee shop or similar. She’s that relatable.)

So, in this particular volume, Knisley not only tracks her various attempts to get pregnant (not as easy as it sounds) while also relating a connected and wide-ranging litany of background info about women’s reproductive health, including its history and some of the science behind it as well as recounting the more personal side of things. It’s an effective mix of personal and impersonal and it’s a recipe that really works.

This blend of personal perspectives and more objective information also enables the reader to feel invested in Knisley’s reproductive life – when they have difficulty getting (and staying) pregnant, my heart went out to them at how heart-broken they were. How could something so “easy” as getting pregnant become so difficult for these two people (and others)? It’s actually a riveting story and one that I read through all in one go. (I had to know how things concluded in the end!)

Knisley presents scientific facts and debunks superstitions in a respectful manner, really saving the emotional approach for her own personal side of life, and so this makes her an effective and credible teacher for this information, some of which was new to me (and may be for you too). In fact, I really think Knisley would be a good writer for a sequential art-take on some harder science topics, if she ever decides to travel in that direction. I’d read that work, for certain. (Are you reading this, Lucy? You know. In all your spare time! Ha.)

So, much like her other reads, Knisley’s latest volume is an excellent addition to her ever-growing oeuvre. I hope the fact that she now has a toddler doesn’t signal the end of her graphic-novel days, but fortunately, there was a hint at the end of this book that there may be more to come: “It all ends right now, with a new beginning…”

Fingers crossed that Knisley continues to refreshingly document those early days of motherhood that lay ahead of her!

Other (highly recommended) Lucy Knisley reads include the following. Your best bet would be to start at the beginning and read them chronologically:

Raymond Briggs – Still Great…

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graphic_novels

Continuing with my graphic novel binge from our Snow Day the other day….

book343I dug in my shelves and found “Ethel and Ernest: A True Story” (1998), a GN by English author Raymond Briggs. (You might know Briggs from his work, “The Snowman”, which sometimes comes on TV at Christmas.) This was a wonderful read, poignant with crayon drawings (as opposed to the harsher pen/ink) and closely follows the biographies of two ordinary people who get married and live their lives through the twentieth century. Based on the story of his parents’ lives, this is structured so that the reader sees UK history through the lens of these two people as it happens: WWII, rationing, austerity, stereo, TV, buying their own car, Labor government. They move on as best they can with the husband having stronger political views and the wife pretending to not know and just agree when she really does understand events. Her gentle teasing of her long-time husband, familiar to anyone in a long-term comfortable relationship of any gender combination, will ring true along with a realistic portrayal of aging which, in this case, eventually shows one of the pair having Alzheimer’s. The couple lived in the same house for 41 years which provides an unchanging backdrop to the ever-changing world about them. A lovely and poignant story written with love.

book344Then, I found another Raymond Briggs’ work, “Fungus the Bogeyman” (1977). I had read this when it first came out and when I was 14 and I enjoyed it then, but this reread was a much deeper appreciation as I saw Briggs’ many literary and word-related sly jokes which had gone right over my head when I was younger. The actual story is presented as a “Day in the Life…” of Fungus the Bogeyman who, with his family, lives in dread of clean and dry places up above his home in the open air. He’s not the only Bogeyman, but lives in a community of others, most of whom go up to do their daily jobs of scaring unassuming quiet vicars on an evening walk and waking up babies from their sleep. However, along with this fairly humdrum life, Fungus is also dealing with an existential crisis of his own, pondering the meaning of his life and asking himself: What was the point of being a Bogeyman? He analyzes his life: a lovely dirty wife, a lovely dirty boy called Mould (respecting the UK spelling there), and pets called Mucus. But what more was there for him in his life? Readers are given a detailed field guide (of sorts) to how the Bogeys live and it really was very sly witted on so many levels. Bogeys love literary quotations, but always misquote them so it was fun (and tricky!) to try and work out which ones he was quoting on his bicycle journey to the outer world. I enjoyed this when I first read it in 1977, but I really appreciated the clever wordplay when I read it on Friday.

Scab and matter custard,/

Snot and bogey pie,/

Dead dog’s giblets,/

Green cat’s eye./

Spread it on bread,/

Spread it on thick./

Wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.*

(Children’s rhyme from England, oral tradition.)

(And related to not much — look what I found in my bookshelves the other day looking for graphic novels…a 1974 Star Trek Annual with scary illustrations of Spock and Kirk and co.)

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* The word “sick” (in my English childhood) referred to the actual product of vomiting (i.e. the vomitus). It wasn’t the verb (meaning “generally feeling unwell”) that it is in the U.S., and so when I first arrived in Texas and people referenced that they were (or had been) “sick”, I just thought that there was a lot of throwing up going on which I found to be confusing as ‘Mericans tend to be quite healthy. (I know this small nugget of memory is fascinating and amazing for you all.)