Comics aren’t known for straight-up realism. Setting aside the so-called “mainstream,” where superheroes dominate the bestseller lists, even the so-called “artcomics” crowd sometimes seems more interested in the over-the-top, the outre, the joyously vulgar, and the anarchic, than in the ordinary. I’m not saying that this is a good or a bad thing. I’m just saying. Maybe it’s because bizarre milieux can be rendered more easily and inexpensively in comics than in other forms of visual narrative, so the field attracts those who fiend for that kind of thing in particular. Maybe it’s because the heyday of the commercial children’s comic (which, venturing an uneducated guess, probably stretches from about the time of Little Nemo through the 1960s go-go Batman) showed us, in ways we hadn’t been shown before, and haven’t been shown since, the strangest reaches of our imaginations — to the point where that’s almost the only thing we remember to turn to the medium for, civilian reader and haughty artiste alike. Maybe it’s because “artcomics” have, until very recently, been sold almost exclusively in comic book stores, venues built for, and by, superhero fans, so that any chance these literary works have had to attract an audience has required reaching out to superhero readers with some sort of fantastical element mixed into the story, like whisky in an otherwise undrinkable punch at the prom. Or maybe a fantastical streak is inherent in the art form, a result of the local genius of this field, for no reason except its own whim (field genii being arbitrary as a matter of course), choosing to shun the pedestrian in favor of the fancy, and that’s that. Or not. I dunno. Hard to say. Granted, there are well-known exceptions: Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Eddie Campbell’s Alec: How to be an Artist, Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference & Other Stories, etc. Their presence on the scene, and the critical acclaim they have received, have not been well-tolerated by all, though. “I get enough of the everyday every goddam day,” a friend of mine (not a superhero fanboy, by a long shot) told me recently, in the course of griping about the “self-masturbatory” (his word, not mine) American Splendor movie and the comics that inspired it. “When it comes to comics, I want bigger-than-life!”

So, yeah, he probably wouldn’t like R. Kikuo Johnson’s debut book, Night Fisher, which is just about exactly life-sized, and not one inch taller or fatter than that. If it had been a prose novel, it would be called “mainstream” — but this is comics, so it’s fairly unusual in its focus on the ordinary, even on the highbrow end of the graphic novel bookshelf. Here’s the setup: Loren Foster, the geeky, overachieving son of a geeky, workaholic father, finds himself, just a few weeks before high school graduation, becoming a casual user of the currently hyped “epidemic drug,” crystal meth. Contrary to what you might expect if you watch Oprah, or even the local news, this does not affect his life in any catastrophic way, though the adults around him do start to notice that he is slipping a bit, and he does eventually get arrested for a petty theft related to his drug use (since this book doesn’t depend on its plot for its effect as much as, say, a spy thriller would, I won’t worry about “spoiling” the story — in literary work, it’s often the execution, the moment-by-moment reading experience, not the plot, that counts — everybody knows, for example, that the entire cast of Hamlet, pretty much, dies in the end, but people still go to the play anyway). Even the arrest turns out to be no big deal, adding another layer of tension to his relationship with his father, but since that relationship, and that tension, are presented in a flat manner, suffocating, but undramatically so (perhaps because both father and son are, themselves, affectless and passive in their dealings with one another — which is as true a portrait as any of father-to-son family dynamics in the suburban era, I suppose), there’s no explosive climax. There is very little resolution at all, if any, in the work as a whole. Though the back cover blurb from the publisher calls this a “coming-of-age” novel, Loren doesn’t do any such thing. Coming-of-age novels, as a genre in and of themselves, rotate around the one epiphanic moment where the protagonist puts away childish things and takes upon himself or herself the power and responsibility that comes with adulthood. Loren, though, simply lives through the last few weeks of high school, does some drugs (he had already been doing some drugs — he does different, famously more dangerous drugs), has some fun, gets into some trouble, gets out of some trouble, then rolls around in the grass on a hillside as the credits (not really) roll, and the music (not really) swells. The end. All of the catch-points of a coming-of-age story are put into place, but the author, and the protagonist, willfully refuse to spring those traps. The guy rolling around in the grass at the end is as much of a cipher, and as much of a child, as the guy driving his truck recklessly home from a night fishing trip, speeding so that he can get his homework done, at the beginning: maybe moreso.

And that’s just fine. Unsettling, yes, but fine. Like I said, the execution, not the plot, carries this kind of book. The execution is, in a word, elegant. Each character– the cocky, self-assured best friend, who is always running ahead of Loren, whether it’s in drug use, academic achievement, or, literally, on the track; the preoccupied but proud dentist father; the genial thirty-something loser who deals the meth (when his woman and infant child aren’t around, anyway) — comes to life immediately, thanks to solid character design, smoothly minimal dialogue, and fine “acting” on the part of the “players,” in terms of their body movements and facial expressions. The artwork generally has an accomplished, easy flow to it, even when Johnson uses difficult and unexpected camera angles (or maybe because of same). The story, or the lack of story, impels itself along, despite its lack of affect, through the power of dangled, then withdrawn, cliche — when Loren’s father complains about his grades, or when Loren starts using “hard” drugs, we imagine that we’re about to see something like, say, The Basketball Diaries play out — but then we find out that the grade his father is complaining about is a “B” against a straight-A backdrop. “You can do better, right?” says his dad. When the arrest happens, we imagine we’re about to see the beginning of a downward druggie spiral — but then we don’t. And so on. We’ve been teased with the beginnings of a story we didn’t really have any deep interest in reading again, but our ears had pricked up anyway at the signs of a predictable potboiler building up steam, because that’s what they’ve been trained to do by the thousand drug-related-downward-spiral stories we’ve read before. This generates something like suspense, a kind of friction between the story-that-is-here, such as it is, and the story-we-thought-would-be-here, which replaces the usual kinds of dramatic tension that drive stories along. It works surprisingly well, as a means of driving a frustrated coming-of-age story in a culture where, for the most part, we avoid adulthood as long as possible (haven’t you heard that 40 is the new 30, which age, ten years ago, of course, was the new 20?), and where all the stories one can imagine — especially about teenagers, and about drugs — have already been told.

Some of Johnson’s tricks don’t work quite so well. Under the large half-page panel that opens the first chapter, the author displays instructional diagrams for tying knots in string. These diagrams occur in a couple of other places in the book — places where an actual knot is being tied, or untied, by one of the characters. Loren exhibits a particular interest, for example, in the knot that his father ties to hold up a tree in the front yard. One would imagine that he was something of a knot-tying hobbyist, or that, at the very least, the tying of knots is meant to serve as a metaphor for what’s going on in the character’s psyche. If it does, it is only the most rudimentary of metaphors, the obvious one (that Loren is maybe being “tied in knots” by the people and events surrounding him), but it isn’t played out well enough or interestingly enough to make the effort worthwhile, or to justify the unusualness of the knot diagrams scattered throughout the book. It’s just left there on the page, without development. Ultimately, you end up suspecting that the knot diagrams were simply cribbed from The Shipping News, a prose novel, of all things, where E. Annie Proulx used the exact same device much more effectively.

Similarly, Johnson attempts to make much of the book’s Hawaiian setting without, finally, convincing us that it matters. Before the proper start of the story, we’re treated to four pages’ worth of geological maps, charting the development and decline of Hawaii’s actual landmass over the past dozen or so million years. Via one of Loren’s teachers, droning in the background of a scene, we get a treatise on the slow accumulation of Hawaii’s local flora and fauna, blown thousands of miles by breezes from Asia, or shit by migrating birds, and the effects on that unique ecosystem of the introduction of humanity and humanity’s workaday livestock to the islands, approximately 1200 years ago. That would stand only as background noise in the story (which is, after all, set partly in a high school, where teachers are always droning on about meaningless things), except that Johnson introduces finely-detailed drawings of some of Hawaii’s flora into the margins of later, seemingly unrelated, scenes. They’re supposed to mean something, one supposes, but one isn’t sure what. An ancient deed to a piece of land, hidden away in the porno stash of the thirty-something meth dealer, is reproduced in full on one page — giving the characters an opportunity, while waiting for their drugs, to muse on the way that the pineapple corporations grabbed a lot of privately-held land, and invalidated legal deeds, after the United States took over. But even this goes nowhere, unless we are supposed to believe that it points out a reason for the allegedly “epidemic” drug use among Hawaii’s native population; if so, that’s never really expanded upon (and rightly so — I hate it when books get all preachy, like Dixie Carter in the last ten minutes of a Designing Women episode — but, still, it’s a loaded gun shown to us that never, ever goes off). I don’t bring these things up because I believe that books set in Hawaii have to make their setting mean something special: I bring them up because it’s clear Johnson wanted the setting to mean something special, that he is attempting to show us something unique about Hawaii which affects Loren’s life and the final point of the story, and he fails in that effort. The story could have been set in an affluent suburb of Minnesota just as easily.

Which is not to say the book is a failure overall. Far from it. It is a first novel by a talented young author, with all the limitations, and all the strengths, that one would expect from such a thing. With his accomplished traditional drawing skills, his easy brushwork, his ability to frame and block a story, his subtle but high-flown ambitions, and his way with character “actors,” Johnson could someday be as well-known among casual readers as, say, Craig Thompson, or as masterful a High Artist as, say, Jaime Hernandez, or even — and this would be fortuitous indeed — both at the same time.Meanwhile, Johnson is clearly an author to watch for. I expect his second book, or maybe his third, to knock my socks off. Potential is a frustrating thing, though, and comics is a frustrating medium. We’ll see how it works out.

Recommended, but not essential.

Title: Night Fisher
Creator: R. Kikuo Johnson
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Cover Price: $12.95

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!