Ngozi Ukazu's Flip, a YA graphic novel set at a tony prep school, offers a body-swapping story and a complex lesson in empathy. Its plot hook is simple and perhaps obvious, but what Ukazu does with it is anything but. The book is smart, complex, surprising, and, finally, moving: a wonderful novel.

Briefly, Flip follows Chi-Chi, a shy, socially withdrawn Nigerian American Blerd from an impoverished family, and her crush Flip, a popular white jock from a super-wealthy family, as they trade places and learn how to navigate the world as each other. After Chi-Chi invites Flip to the senior prom and he publicly turns her down, her shame precipitates a psychic crisis that somehow triggers their body-swapping, which leads to complicated and embarrassing maneuvers as the two try to play each other's social roles. The body-swapping isn't constant, but comes and goes. Ukazu never explains the mechanisms of this; the body-swapping has no pseudoscientific or magical root cause. But there are rules, of a sort, one of which is that each period of body-swapping seems to last twice as long as before. Chi-Chi and Flip are terrified that the swapping may eventually become permanent. The two develop a deeper understanding of each other, not only because of the body-swapping but because they have to work together. Chi-Chi experiences Flip's crumbling family and deep depression; Flip experiences Chi-Chi's self-hatred and unquenchable longing to be someone else. For both, self-love requires looking at the world through the other's eyes.  

This may sound obvious, even platitudinous, but Ukazu avoids crude signposting. She lets every character develop complexly, not according to received generalizations about privilege or race but out of their own circumstances. Necessary points about Blackness and whiteness, about social ostracism, structural disadvantage, and envy, become earned insights as Ukazu pits the two characters against each other. Provocatively, there are many moments in the book at which the actual identity of the characters (who is speaking, from what POV?) becomes indistinct or ambiguous. As Chi-Chi and Flip begin to identify with one another, Ukazu pushes the story further and further, into fascinating tangles. The conclusion, which redefines the two leads, is affecting and tonally complex: affirming, yes, but surprising almost to the very end.  

Ukazu's brilliant writing and delightful, elastic cartooning are, above all, socially astute: alive to the interworking of personalities and groups, to social complications, to hierarchies and compensatory habits. Each named character, not just Chi-Chi and Flip, navigates the world differently, and grows more distinct and interesting as the story progresses. There's a remarkable scene in which Flip's ex, a conventionally beautiful alpha girl, asks him to the prom, only to be rejected by Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, who is spurred on by jealousy. There's a great scene in which Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, braids Chi-Chi's, or for the moment Flip's, hair. This is somehow both tense and encouraging. And then there's the stunning scene in which Flip, in Chi-Chi's body, confronts Chi-Chi about her own self-loathing. Complexities like these, delightful and confounding, mark the novel from start to finish.

In short, this is a great book! Ukazu's character-writing is remarkably sensitive, her pages lively and dynamic, and her use of visual metaphors tricky and smart. Flip is the kind of book that certain readers will embrace devotedly, and it's likely to be remembered as a watershed. It's that good.

Gotta admit, I spent a good part of Ash's Cabin waiting for its protagonist, Ash, to "come to their senses." For a while, I was less a sympathetic reader than a fretful parent, waiting for his wayward child to realize the error of their ways. This kneejerk response of mine had the effect of, not exactly blunting, but complicating my interaction with the book. In fact, Ash is not depicted as senseless, unreasoning, or in error, but their story challenged my preconceptions. It's quietly radical and, true to form for author Jen Wang, beautifully told.

Ash, an alienated fifteen-year-old from a complex Chinese American family, is working through a tense transition. They are implicitly trans or nonbinary (resistant to labeling, certainly), also lonesome and inward-turning, mindful and resourceful, and strong of will. Repulsed by the routinized world around them, Ash plans to withdraw into the wilderness: to hike into California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest and find a secret cabin built by their late grandfather, in hopes of staying there "forever." Ash perhaps has a touch of Greta Thunberg about them, but strikes me as not so much an outward-looking activist as a lost soul seeking a Walden-like retreat from everyday compromise. Lost, but determined.

It seems fair to assume (in a YA book like this) that the protagonist will come to realize that they need community, their quest for beatific isolation will fail, and they will end up back in the bosom of family and schoolmates. And indeed (no spoiler here, I don't think) Ash's Cabin does trace that sort of arc. Yet it's not predictable. To Wang's credit, the desires and values that drive Ash into the wild are never dashed or scolded away. What Ash stands for is never dismissed as naive or impossible. Although Ash's quest resolves in a way that they do not expect, it is transformative. That's why I call it radical.

It may come as no surprise that even during the loneliest parts of Ash's journey, the most telling scenes are those that depict social encounters, interdependence, and the process of getting and giving help. Even in the wild, Ash is never quite alone, and of course they eventually realize this. Though the novel focuses resolutely on Ash (and their loving dog Chase), and Wang devotes many pages to the  fascinating details of wilderness survival (sheltering, foraging, fishing, improvising), what sticks with me are the vivid characters and the connections they make. The same sensitivity and social acuteness that distinguish Wang's Stargazing and The Prince and the Dressmaker (the first book I ever reviewed on this blog) are abundantly here. 

The book's gorgeous, open pages suggest a journal — essentially, this is Ash's survival diary, even before they enter the wild. There is an uncluttered airy quality about the spreads, which are less packed, or more loosely joined, than in Wang's previous books (even Stargazing, with its open spaces). Lovingly drawn with mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, and watercolor, Ash's Cabin often seems like Ash's own fugitive handiwork. Ash moves freely through the layouts, as they move through and explore the world. Wang excels at scenes of research and handiwork, and Ash does plenty of both. They are a character we get to know through their doing: dogged, brave, brilliant, often alone. Much of the book involves getting ready to do things, then learning to do things differently when push comes to shove. In a way, the book is a record of mistakes, missteps, and losses — and yet not. Ash has integrity and never stops living intently. They never stop risking everything, so the story's ending doesn't register as defeat.  

Thematically, I think Ash's Cabin ​could pair interestingly with Kengo Kurimoto's Wildful (reviewed here recently), a fable about biophily as a salve for grief, or with Jonathan Case's Little Monarchs (reviewed here in June 2023), a postapocalyptic environmentalist adventure. I'd even put it alongside Miyazaki's classic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (in its extended manga version), a work that wavers between humanism and misanthropy and whose naturalist-hero faces a similarly impossible set of choices. (Just thinking about these connections makes me want to design another syllabus!)

This is a great book, full stop.

Vera Brosgol is one of my favorite artist-authors in the children's graphic novel field. She's back with a new book, her first graphic novel since 2018, and it's a doozy.

Plain Jane and the Mermaid is a feminist fairy tale about outward appearances versus inward self-worth. It's also an inventive, and occasionally spooky, phantasmagoria that takes place almost entirely underwater. Jane, a "plain" young woman of apparently few prospects, dives into the deepwater world of selkies, sea monsters, and mermaids in order to rescue (?) Peter, a mermaid-stolen man with whom she thinks she has fallen in love. She hardly knows the guy, but he is beautiful, and she has asked him to marry her. Marriage is Jane's one hope, because, as the last survivor of a household without a male heir, she is about to be turned out of her home by a distant and uncaring cousin:

A mysterious crone magically grants Jane the ability to survive underwater, and so Jane takes off in pursuit of her hoped-for husband. In the meantime, Peter is wooed and pampered by a trio of mermaids, little suspecting what they may have in store for him. Things turn dark(er) when Peter learns what it is that mermaids actually do with humans, but meanwhile Jane develops a comical yet genuine friendship with a seal who turns out to be a selkie, and her plainness (if that's what it is) no longer matters. There are twists and surprises en route, and the story ends delightfully, with a sense that various dangling loose ends have been tied up, or tied together, in unexpected but apt ways. It's the kind of well-engineered book where nothing goes to waste, and small details glimpsed along the way turn out to be openings (or deepenings).

Brosgol's story-world is cruel. Parents and peers judge and shame; rivals tease and bully. Plainness of face and stoutness of body are condemned. Appearances count, and mirrors are threats. Beautiful people get unearned perks and learn to rely on them, while ordinary, unlovely people are expected to scrape and crawl. Social outliers are sacrificed for the comfort of the socially advantaged. Women get the short end of most everything, and predation and hunger rule. Some readers may be taken aback by the harshness of this world, but to me it seems honest enough. Some may be alarmed by certain terrible comeuppances that are meted out. The story is tough. Moreover, some undersea scenes are scary, as when, on a sunken ship, corpses come groaning to life and close in on Jane, or when a giant anglerfish almost snaps her up in its jaws, or when a mermaid bares her teeth. Brosgol isn't scary in quite the same way as, say, Emily Carroll (whose take on mermaids is positively terrifying); she pushes only a little at what middle-grade books usually allow. But she does push. Me, I love these moments of risk-taking. Her graphic novels always play for keeps, and that wins me over.

So, Plain Jane is a recognizable Vera Brosgol book. Yet Brosgol deserves credit for making each book look and feel a little different. Plain Jane doesn't look that much like Anya's Ghost or Be Prepared (they don't look that much like each other, either). This one feels a bit rawer in the rendering, I'm guessing deliberately, but at the same time uses a full color palette, courtesy of color artist Alec Longstreth — a great cartoonist in his own right, and a great graphic novel colorist. He does a lot of heavy lifting here. (It's a shame Longstreth's name isn't on the title page where it should be. Though the back matter reveals some of the coloring process, and Brosgol praises "Alec" effusively, you have to read the fine print to find his full name.) 

Despite surface changes in style, Plain Jane boasts Brosgol's usual distinctive character designs, expert timing, and gift for small shocks. This is clear, classic cartooning. The book is not the revelation that Anya's Ghost was, but it's thrilling. Its roughly 350 pages pass too quickly, a fierce, lovely dream. The final affirmation of Jane's self-worth is not surprising — in that sense, the book ends where most of us would want it to end — but the trip is full of little gemlike touches.

Vera Brosgol really is a gift, you know?

Family Style is a fast-moving, elliptical memoir that follows author Thien Pham from about age five to his early forties, starting with his family's emigration from Vietnam circa 1980 as refugees fleeing by sea, and ending with him as a high school teacher in the Bay Area circa 2016, around the end of the Obama presidency — the moment Thien belatedly becomes a US citizen. Through eight chapters, each running roughly twenty to forty pages, Pham follows his and his family's acculturation to the US. Every chapter is titled for a memorable meal, from rice and fish to bánh cuốn and so on, as befits Pham's reputation as a foodie cartoonist/columnist. Each captures a brief snapshot, a moment in time. The early chapters seem to form a smooth continuity, one flowing into the next without pause, but later chapters skip forward abruptly: for example, Chapter 6 depicts him as an elementary student in the mid 1980s, Chapter 7 has him as an adolescent in the late 80s, and Chapter 8 leaps forward roughly twenty-five years. Pham presents the story sans narration, so there is no knowing voice to guide us; we have to pay attention to understand how much time is passing and how Thien is changing. Chapter 5 shows young Thien learning some of his first English words, while Chapter 6 suggests that he has already begun to lose fluency in Vietnamese; Chapter 7 shows him consciously struggling with his in-between status as a somewhat assimilated American teen who is "kinda scared to hang out with other Vietnamese kids" (176). There's an awful lot going on, if you read closely.

Pham's fast-moving story is aided by a measured and understated aesthetic that takes everything in stride. Originally published serially to Instagram, Family Style is a blinking narrative, a series of flashes knit together by a steady layout. The pages consist mostly of regular six-panel (3x2) grids, punctuated by occasional single-panel splash pages that bleed out to the book's edge. Pham renders everything in a roughhewn style, with drastically schematized cartoon faces. His digital drawings (created with Procreate on an iPad) are strikingly organic, flecked and a bit scratchy and colored with a muted palette in which colors and tones have a grain and rawness that seems positively earthy. It looks terrific and reads even better. As in the best cartooning, Pham attains a seeming simplicity through complex means —​ again, if you look closely, there's a lot happening. Some of the most telling details are faraway or half-buried in the mix, waiting to be discovered and puzzled over. 

Though Family Style begins with harrowing suggestions of violence (only half-glimpsed through a child's eyes), it is really an optimistic, affirming book. Pham is remarkably gracious and funny even as he tells of losses and little betrayals. The story implies the pressure to assimilate and captures Thien's adolescent uneasiness as a cultural outsider or recent arrival, and many little incidents in the book seem sad (for instance, Thien throwing away homemade bánh cuốn so that he can eat Dairy Queen burgers with his mostly White buddies). In this sense, the book is terribly open and revealing. Yet Family Style is quite positive about Pham's process of becoming an American, including the hurdles to citizenship (so, the book's subtitle seems deliberate). Also, Pham's "endnotes," in the form of charming strips about sources and creative process, comically depict him interacting with his parents, who come across as amused informants — lending the book's conclusion a cheerful, settled tone. Even Pham's depictions of privation, as in Chapter 2's patient recreation of life in a Thai refugee camp, are shot through with happy recollections of minor details: a children's game, a small, ingenious life hack, or his mother's unflagging resourcefulness. 

I'm considering teaching Family Style this fall alongside Thi Bui's celebrated The Best We Could Do, another graphic memoir of Vietnamese American experience (and one I've taught a lot). My reasoning has less to do with commonalities than with differences. In fact, the two books are strikingly unalike. Whereas Bui builds her story alinearly and recursively, moving fluidly from present to past, Pham works in something closer to a straight line. Whereas Bui narrates reflectively, Pham simply shows. Bui excavates family history and recounts Vietnam's decolonization, while Pham concentrates on what he would have seen firsthand. Pham's book is much shorter, and uses a regular layout and blocky cartoon aesthetic in contrast to Bui's dynamic pages and fluid brush inking. Finally, The Best We Could Do is melancholy, introspective, and ambivalent, but Family Style is comparatively high-spirited, even playful (though it hints powerfully at loss and dislocation along the way). What the two have in common is that they are simply great comics.

Pham has said that he'd like to follow Family Style with a story about traveling back to Vietnam and recovering family history there. I would happily read that.

I lost sleep over In Limbo. Foolishly, I started to read it late one night, when I was in a sticky, sort of unhappy mood that had nothing to do with the book and much to do with work. I needed to read something that was utterly different than the work I was obsessing over; I needed a way out of my spiraling. So, I thought I would start In Limbo before bed. Just start it, you know? Get my feet wet. But no — once I started, I had to finish. Damn. There was something quietly harrowing about the book, something that frustrated and gnawed at me. I think maybe I was angry with the book's protagonist, and her mother? Or maybe bothered by the evocations of racism, bullying, or depression? Struck by the contrast between the book's elegant, quiet style and its dark undertow? Whatever it was that got to me, I felt pretty helpless about it. I mean, I did put the book down for a few minutes, about a third of the way in, but then I grabbed it up again, anxiously, and plowed on. As the story got deeper and darker, I was all in. When I finished, it was well after midnight — and of course I had the story on my mind as I tried to get some shuteye. Again, damn.

In Limbo is a graceful and refined graphic book, a beautiful feat of design, and a moody, enveloping story. It's also observant and brave. Thematically, the book treads some familiar ground: a high school memoir; a Korean immigrant's story; an exploration of familial tensions, crushed friendships, cultural in-betweenness, mental and emotional fragility, suicidal thoughts. The protagonist is a version of author Deb JJ Lee, and the story tracks her four years of high school, leading up to graduation and college after a long spell of desperation and loneliness. Okay, none of that feels unprecedented. But In Limbo is bothersome and riveting, a tough, involving work. I couldn't read it complacently. It pulled me in with its long silences, layered, emotionally telling details, fraught conversations, and occasional shocks. Its cloudy, blue-grey palette, monochrome yet somehow endlessly varied, feels soft, yet Lee uses it to create sharp, crisply defined pages — despite their refusal of black frame lines and their frequent use of bleeds. (Note that in life the author goes by they, but the book genders Deb as she, which, Lee says, more accurately reflects who they thought they were in high school.) Their layouts are often dense and maximally detailed, yet the overall impression is dreamlike, entranced. At first blush, it looks like a book that should be calm. But calm is not what the book is about, and reading it often hurts.

What I'm trying to say is, this is a great and hard book.

Briefly, In Limbo follows Deborah (Jung-Jin), or Deb, ​through her four years of high school as she tries to love and understand herself, embrace art as her vocation, and get out from under her family's expectations, especially the relentless needling of her very driven, at times abusive, mother. Her mom, as a character, hews perilously close to the "tiger mom" stereotype (as the book itself acknowledges). Their relationship is full of jagged edges and cruel scenes — and it's one of the things, I think, that caused me to read on, after midnight, in hopes of relief or understanding. Deb's father and brother don't register as strongly; In Limbo is very much a daughter/mother story. Yet it's also about friendships, sometimes fraught, overburdened ones. Deb's feelings for her friend Quinn, to whom she has a sort of desperate, proprietary attachment, lead to surprising reversals.

In Limbo doesn't resolve every problem it raises. This is probably partly by design; Lee has acknowledged in interviews (again, see this one) that their life, past and present, is more complex than a single book can cover, and the book seems anxious to show Deborah as a work always in progress. There are things in the book I'd have liked to know more about. Some relationships and threads are still nagging me, even now. Some readers may finish the book wanting to know more about Lee's understanding of internalized racism and the pressure to assimilate. Some may wonder about the connection between those things and the book's tormented mother/daughter dyad (cf. Robin Ha's graphic memoir Almost American Girl). Some readers may be anxious to know more about the mother's abuse, what prompts it, and how Deb lives with it (cf. Lee's own short comic from 2019, "Dear CPS," readable on their website). Some may wish that the Künstlerroman aspect of the book came through more strongly, that they were left knowing more about Deb's artistic vocation. Some may wonder about Deb's implicit queerness or perhaps about gender nonconformity. I've been thinking about all those questions; the book feels a bit tentative about what to include, what to leave out, and how to balance things. That said, I don't expect complete "closure" in memoir, and when I do get it, I worry that I'm being sold a bill of goods. In Limbo has honesty and emotional rawness despite its delicately finished surface, and I dig that.  

That "surface" is going to draw in and mesmerize a lot of readers, I expect. The book's rapturous reception has a lot to do with Lee's virtuosity as an illustrator and designer (indeed, the many blurbs on the cover note their lush, meticulous art). In Limbo is visually extraordinary; the book is gorgeous and transporting, a master class in narrative drawing and sustained mood. That mood is melancholy almost the whole way through, but In Limbo is vital and ravishing enough to make one fall in love with melancholy. (My images here don't do the book justice.)

I'm grateful to this book for introducing me to a singular and gutsy artist. Most highly recommended: another high watermark for autobiographical comics about adolescence. <3

Bea Wolf is brought to you by the same team that did the illustrated book Augie and the Green Knight some years back: Zach Weinersmith and Boulet. It's a graphically sumptuous retelling of Beowulf as a battle between rowdy, joyous kids and tedious, joy-sapping adults. Its proper soundtrack would be the number, "I Won't Grow Up," from the 1954 musical Peter Pan. That is, Bea Wolf assumes a world where kiddom is matter of keeping adulthood at bay.

So, Bea Wolf is an elaborate, prolonged joke. Really, it's a bit of a soufflé, the sort of thing that needs to stay light and airy if it's going to work at all. Heaviness, ponderousness, would be deadly. The thing is, spoofing Beowulf usually does involve some heavy lifting. The language is technical and hard to ape; the world evoked is remote and strange. This is esoteric stuff by current children's book standards. Happily, Bea Wolf finds smart 21st-century analogs for the poem's beasts and heroes, and stays light enough to elicit chuckles from start to finish. I even laughed aloud at several points, early and late, which is unusual for me when reading a long comic. 

Part of what makes this work — for me, it may be the biggest part — is that Weinersmith is very good at parodying the "voice" of Beowulf: the rugged prosody, loping parataxis, alliterative phrasing, and vivid kennings of the old Old English. I mean, he does this hilariously well, from the start:

The book has a firm voice, full of flavor, that stays the course despite the odd moment of deflation or comic anachronism (e.g., "Dawn rose, like a jerk"). Sometimes the verse rises to truly affecting poetry, like Bea's great last line on this page:

Another thing that makes all this work — and I confess, this is what drew me to the book in the first place — is the cartooning of Boulet (Gilles Roussel). Boulet draws up a storm, makes the risible setting believable (enough), and transforms cliched, doll-like children into ferocious heroes. His digital renderings (drawn on iPad via Procreate) mimic the look of pencil and charcoal and brush, with, at times, a texturing so dense as to recall scratchboard — yet somehow he manages to maintain the necessary lightness and energy. Every spread is different, and many are quite elaborate. Layouts are dynamic, grids are avoided, and frame lines are using sparingly, so that each page-turn brings up another compositional treat. Man, he's good.

In all, Bea Wolf is a charming book that may appeal most to lit nerd adults and the children who share their pleasures. Reading it feels a bit like playing an adult-centered but kid-styled game (Unstable Unicorns, maybe?). I dug it, and, er, I Iive in that kind of household. So, yay!

I'm honored and delighted to be giving a talk as part of the Los Angeles Public Library's West Valley Big Read focusing on Jen Wang's graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker (the first book I ever reviewed here on KinderComics).

As the above flyer says, the talk is happening at the West Valley Regional Branch Library on Saturday, July 23, at 11:00 a.m. LAPL has more information about the talk here: ​https://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/lets-talk-graphic-novels.

(This review is part of a series: see the first, second, third, and fourth posts.)

I favored Snapdragon to win this year’s Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids (though, um, another book ended up winning). Of all the recent comics about witches that I’ve reviewed here, Snapdragon strikes me as the most sure-handed and persuasive, as well as the richest. It shares with most of the other “witch” books a progressive, inclusive, queer-positive ethos and Bildungsroman structure. Snapdragon, though, brings even more to the table, without ever overcramming or pushing too hard. Unsurprisingly, the book has a utopian, welcoming, vibe, but author Kat Leyh stirs in so much complicated humanness that the results never seem pollyannish or schematic. What we get is a winningly complex cast of characters, queer and trans representation that is central to the story while being gloriously unflustered and direct, spooky supernatural details that resolve into unexpected affirmations, and, above all, vivid and confident cartooning – one terrific, nuanced page after another. I was just a few pages in when I realized that I was in the hands of a master comics artist.

But Snap, a fierce young girl, isn’t having it; the town’s rumors of a witch are “bull,” she thinks. “Witches ain’t real,” her skeptical thoughts go, as she brings her bike skidding to a halt in front of the witch’s (?) home. But soon enough Snap has joined forces with this supposed witch, a quirky old woman named Jacks who cares for animals but also salvages and sells the bones of roadkill to collectors and museums. Is Jacks a witch? Does she wield real magic? The book remains coy about this until halfway through, but Snap quickly bonds with Jacks, who welcomes Snap into her work, mentors her in animal anatomy and care, and becomes a sort of avuncular (materteral?) queer role model.

That bond helps Snap claim her own implied queerness – that, and Snap’s friendship with Lou/Lulu, an implicitly trans schoolmate labeled as a boy but anxious to claim her girlness. All the book’s relationships are worked out with care, including the crucial one between Snap and her overworked but wise single mom, Vi. Leyh’s characterization is slyly intersectional, including sensitivity to class (Lu and Snap are neighbors in a mobile home park, a detail conveyed with knowing matter-of-factness). Almost every character has more to give than at first appears – the sole exception being Vi’s toxic ex-boyfriend, a heavy whose sudden reappearance at the climax is the book’s one surrender to convenience. Everything else feels truly earned.

Snapdragon is the kind of book that, described in the abstract, might seem to be playing with loaded dice. In less sure hands, its story could have come across as pat and programmatic, a matter of good intentions as opposed to gutsy storytelling. But, oh, Leyh is absolutely on point here; her mix of irrepressible cartooning and narrative subtlety, of bounce and insinuation, is a wonder to behold. Snap and Jacks are great characters, and in good company. Their world feels real and vital. Leyh infuses their story with grace, understanding, and nonstop energy. I’ve read this book multiple times and expect to read it again. I’d read sequels, if Leyh wanted to offer any. And I’ll follow her whatever she does.

The Phantom Twin, a subversive romance set in a carnival freak show, risks creepiness, with a droll style that for me recalls the late Richard Sala (and, indirectly, Edward Gorey). The book treats sideshow freaks in a complex, sympathetic way; Brown captures some of the ironies of freakishness as performance, even as a means of limited agency, and depicts the world of the carnival as an everyday, intimate circle. That circle, though closed to rubes/outsiders, offers a chance at found family and romantic love. Despite what appears to be a straight romance plot, The Phantom Twin strikes me as implicitly queer, and treads on delicate ground, with matter-of-fact depictions of prosthesis, bodily spectacle, and gender ambiguity, as well as characters who, in some cases, embrace enfreakment and reject normate society.

Briefly, the plot revolves around a pair of conjoined twins, Isabel and Jane, who perform in a sideshow until a botched separation surgery costs Jane her life, leaving Isabel, for the first time, to fend for herself. Isabel loses an arm and a leg in the process but gains the ghostly presence of her dead, but still very vocal, sister, who manifests as something like a phantom limb. (There’s a semi-Gothic air about all this that would make for a good Laika movie.) The carnival’s tattooed lady takes Isabel in, then introduces her to Tommy, who like Isabel is an artist – in his case, a tattoo artist. An interesting relationship develops, but then Isabel falls into a tryst with a muckraking reporter whose snooping ultimately threatens the whole carnival, which leaves Isabel cast out even by her fellow outcasts. The book’s ending has to resolve, all at once, the problems of thwarted romance and social ostracism – but Brown sticks the landing gracefully, with real boldness, and without too neat a fix.

Brown clearly has a passion for the history and culture of the freak show; The Phantom Twin somehow channels Tod Browning’s Freaks while delivering a YA tale with, for me, a warm, affirming payoff. I dug it. My wife Mich, though, who read the book first, found it simply too creepy. We ended up talking about Brown’s harsh depiction of normate society (cruel, vicious, coldly transactional) and the threatening hints of gendered violence scattered throughout (too frank for that notional Laika movie). There were moments, on my first reading, that unnerved me; the world evoked here is quite dark. Yet love redeems it, somewhat – love, and the possibility of community among those deemed freaks.

In sum, The Phantom Twin is gutsy and smart. It’s also elegantly drawn and colored, and eminently readable, carried along by restrained yet subtly varied three-tier layouts in classic style. In its embrace of bodily difference (and body art), it’s a courageous, insinuating graphic novel I look forward to re-reading. Many readers, I bet, will find it impossible to forget. 

This one came out in 2019, but I missed it. As much as I dig publisher First Second, I’ve skipped over Science Comics, their didactic middle-grade nonfiction series on topics ranging from dinosaurs to robots, rockets to trees. I should have been paying attention, since the series, launched in 2016, has yielded nineteen books (and counting) and looks like a solid hit. Under editors Casey Gonzalez and (now just?) Dave Roman, Science Comics has welcomed diverse artists and writers, yet the books are strongly branded, sharing a common dress and size (128 pages). Collectively, the series is quite an editorial achievement, as opposed to the creator-driven work First Second usually champions. I suppose that’s one reason I’ve stayed away — but also, I admit, I share the general distrust of children’s informational nonfiction, a critically unloved genre despite outstanding work by creators like David Macaulay (and despite how much time my family and I have spent poring over DK Eyewitness Books). Expository nonfiction for young readers is often slighted as functional, utilitarian stuff, and it’s true that nonfiction books of the Baby Professor type — mechanical and unlovely — are everywhere. I tend to look askance at books that ignore or instrumentalize the pleasures of character and plot. So it took a great cartoonist to get me to try, at last, Science Comics: Dan Zettwoch.

​I first read Zettwoch in the avant-comix anthology Kramer’s Ergot, then followed him to his first graphic novel, the neglected Birdseye Bristoe (2012), and to Amazing Facts and Beyond (2013), a bundle of mock-didactic, believe-it-or-not strips in collaboration with Kevin Huizenga. Zettwoch’s work is distinctive and, for me, always a draw. He is the master of the cutaway diagram, the cartoon schematic, the absurd yet precise infographic: a successor to both Rube Goldberg and Robert Ripley. Somehow, he manages to be meticulous and loopy at the same time. What’s more, his work often pays tribute to bygone technologies by showing just how they worked. Zettwoch’s cartooning peers into the mechanics of things, rendering them with clarity and joy — so an informational comic about cars would seem like a natural for him. It is.

While Science Comics: Cars boasts a few recurring characters who age over the course of the book, it’s not a character-driven narrative; unlike, say, a Magic School Bus adventure, or (I gather) some other Science Comics, it’s not framed as an individual or group journey. The recurrent figures are reminders of the book’s historical through-line, but mainly Cars is a workout for Zettwoch the diagrammer. Though automotive history gives the book an arc and shape, Cars comes closer to encyclopedic Eyewitness style than to a graphic novel. It’s a reminder that comics do not always need traditional strong “storytelling” in order to engage us the way stories do. The book may be organized thematically but coheres graphically.

Zettwoch divides the book into four chapters, or “strokes,” named for the modern internal combustion engine’s four-stoke cycle: Intake, Compression, Power, Exhaust. Within these, he repeats certain graphic elements that together lend a sense of order; that is, the book finds its form by braiding and varying key images, layouts, and design conceits. For example, the first two chapters both begin with accounts of historic automobile rides that serve to establish phrases and layouts that recur later. At the same time, Zettwoch throws in, unpredictably, myriad diagrams, charts, and sly jokes, and this graphic playfulness turns Cars into a series of discrete spreads that almost stand by themselves, poster-like. The book demonstrates comics’ diagrammatic nature and the power of design to cluster and clarify big gobs of information — ​but it also gets a bit drunk on the sheer pleasures of the page.

Cars is densely informative, and a feat of design. It excels at the engineering history of autos — but less so, alas, at the social. The book wants stronger thematizing: some social and political threads that would make it, in the end, more than a compendium of wonders. The final chapter, Exhaust, hints at deeper themes, discussing fossil fuels and noxious emissions; belatedly, it suggests the damage automobiles have done to the environment (the globe is shown wreathed by auto exhaust). I figured I was being set up for a reflection on the harm as well as advantages bred by cars — but, no, Zettwoch skitters in other directions, devoting four pages to an insanely detailed chart of trucks, another spread to “Weird Cars,” and then other pages to the histories of car horns, car stereos, etc. A final section covers electric cars and the possibility of driverless cars but gives no sobering sense of the challenges posed by car culture and our reliance on personal vehicles, no sense of ecological or social consequence. Nor does the book deal in detail with automotive safety. It’s as if it can’t face up to harder issues. Instead, it’s a blithe valentine to cars that any gear monkey could love. I get a sense of failed follow-through and of implications left unexplored — that is, I found the book’s finale disappointing.