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Iguana Girl vs. the Chick Lit Stereotypes

A Seattle publisher ventures into manga with tales of sci-fi romance, doomed princesses, and hideous heroines.

Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Sep 10, 2010 at 10:00AM Speech Bubble 0 Comments

Not your father’s comic books: Moto Hagio’s “Iguana Girl.”

This is too much of an event to ignore: Fantagraphics, Seattle’s eclectic and prolific comics publisher, which has revived everything from Popeye to Peanuts in archival editions, has just published its first volume of manga—the comics that may be Japan’s most popular and influential art form. Trouble is, just as Woody Allen can’t understand mime, I usually don’t get manga. The big Keane eyes and blandly androgynous, racially indeterminate features of the youthful characters (and nearly all the characters are youthful) creep me out before I even start reading.

Worse yet, this is shojo manga, comics for tween and teen girls, a demographic I fit like a walrus fits a fashion show. But these aren’t just any girl comics: A Drunken Dream and Other Stories ($24.99 from Fantagraphics Books) is a four-decade anthology of graphic short stories by Moto Hagio, the “founding mother” and premiere creator of shojo manga, who, the promo suggests, has raised an insipid pop genre to a serious art form.

Does Hagio’s work justify the hype? Her visual storytelling and graphic invention, by turns fluid, crisp, and stately, certainly do. The earlier stories in A Drunken Dream, from the 1970s and ‘80s, are the ones most bound in little-princess conventions; their sensitive, spontaneous young heroines are crushed by the cold, callous adult and teenaged worlds. The long title tale is a too-twee sci-fi romance. But the 1991 “Iguana Girl” is a heartbreaking fable of maternal rejection: a love-starved girl looks normal to everyone except herself and her mother, who see a hideous iguana. Another tale finds a trenchant ghoulish metaphor for sibling rivalry and symbiosis: conjoined twins, one an adored, beautiful simpleton literally sucking the life out of her withered, intelligent sister. These two and Moto’s other later stories do indeed raise manga to literature.
And their refreshingly hideous protagonists don’t even have Keane eyes.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories is the first volume in an anticipated manga series from Fantagraphics. After a start like this, I can’t wait to see more.

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Tags: Books & Talks, Fantagraphics Books, Comics, Art Exhibits, Manga

Books and Talks

Collateral Damage: The Comic

Cartoonist Carol Tyler probes her family’s inner war wounds in words and pictures, and shares the results at Fantagraphics.

Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Sep 06, 2010 at 10:00AM Speech Bubble 0 Comments

From A Good and Decent Man, the first volume of Carol Tyler’s You’ll Never Know graphic memoir. A show of art from the new second volume opens with a book signing this Saturday at Fantagraphics Books.

“Greatest Generation” hoopla will never seem the same after You’ll Never Know: Collateral Damage, book two in Carol Tyler’s sprightly but relentlessly honest “graphic memoir” (new from Fantagraphics, with an author reception this Saturday and a show of art from the book through October 6).

This volume both revisits and picks up from the first one, in which Tyler recounted the wartime adventures and ordeals of her father, a G.I. in the long slog to victory over Hitler. Dad’s the classic taciturn, can-do, don’t-want-to-talk-about-it WWII vet, drowning combat horrors and every other emotion in an unending bustle of activity. Decades later he starts looking back, prompted by a forgotten wound he now wants compensation for. This Rosebud leads Tyler to re-examine her own messy life and relationships—youthful neediness, neglected husband, rebellious, self-destructive daughter—and slavish but resentful devotion to her bullying dad. All lead back to a war that ended before she was born; this is the story of not just a family but a generation, or two or three. And all are told with a saving dash of humor.

Tyler’s form, a mix of scrapbook, diary, and cartoon panels, is likewise messy and eccentric, but it pays off in layered textures and viewpoints. Two famous precedents, Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, seem almost one-dimensional by comparison. What’s most unusual is Collateral Damage’s raw, diary-like sense of immediacy: It feels as though Tyler is sharing each discovery and deepening insight as it unfolds. Which just might be the case.

Carol Tyler, You’ll Never Know
Book signing and opening reception Saturday, September 11, 6-9pm
Exhibition continues through October 6.
Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery
1201 S. Vale Street, Georgetown

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Tags: Books & Talks, Fantagraphics Books, Comics, Art Exhibits

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Iguana Girl vs. the Chick Lit Stereotypes

Collateral Damage: The Comic

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