Following up on this week’s feature review of Jessica Abel’s La Perdida:

Andrew Arnold of Time Magazine’s online comics column finds a particular strength where I saw a fatal flaw (and, no, I didn’t happen to read his review before writing my own):

Abel’s focus on relationships and Carla’s changing sense of self makes La Perdida one of the strongest and most challenging works of character study in the medium. Why challenging? Because Abel makes a gutsy move of creating characters that you can’t automatically like, and to whom you never warm up in the course of the story. Even Carla, the most sympathetic of the cast, seems naïve at best and stupidly unaware at worst. She keeps company with a spoiled snob, an arrogant blowhard and a fantasy-filled ne’r-do-well. Among its other themes, La Perdida examines how and why people form relationships with others that they don’t like very much because of how they fulfill other, sometimes self-destructive needs … read more.

The unlikeability of the protagonist comes up again (and is again excused) in the Chicago Sun-Times’ review, by Jessa Crispin (who also reviews Renee French’s The Ticking in the same round-up style article, another book that I’ve reviewed recently, myself):

La Perdida is deceptively complex. At first the book seems to be a simple coming-of-age tale, something along the lines of Abel’s shorter fiction. But as the story unravels, the politics become more nuanced and Carla, who in the beginning seems almost one-note in her naivete, becomes something difficult to pull off in fiction: the unlikable character you hope makes it safely to the end … read more.

I’m starting to wonder if I was maybe too harsh, or if, instead, Abel is being excused this flaw because of the fact that, in terms of ambition and technical achievement, and only those criteria, La Perdida dwarfs most of Abel’s contemporaries on the realistic/literary graphic novel scene. I suspect the latter, but am willing to be convinced of the former. I may have to reread the thing.

Meanwhile, veteran cartoonist Trina Robbins, ever the crusader for acknowledgement and celebration of womens’ roles in the history of comics (and rememberer of past slights), ends her glowing review at BookForum on a sharply ironic note:

The publication of La Perdida comes at an interesting time. Graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are alerting the reading public that women are producing important comics. Yet the current touring exhibit “Masters of American Comics,” organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, argues for the significance of fifteen twentieth-century cartoonists — all of them men. In an Art News article on this dearth of women artists, Abel, who may or may not know her comics history, noted that “there were women comics artists, but they were not as important.” La Perdida may prove her wrong … read more.

A very long and worthwhile “author to author” interview from Beatrice.com, in which Abel interrogates Alison Bechdel (author of the “it” graphic-novel-of-the-moment, Fun Home, which I own, but haven’t yet had time to read and review), and vice versa, yields this tasty excerpt about craft, and how craft relates to theme (normally I wouldn’t pull such a long excerpt, but the interview itself is so much longer that I feel okay doing this):

Jessica Abel: I realized at some point in the 90s that the vast majority of my comics had to do with people trying to communicate with one another, trying to know themselves, but usually failing. I think it may come out of an earlier interest in authenticity: That is, wanting to be a punk rocker, but since I was born late (my prime teen years were 1984-1987, six sad years too late to have BEEN THERE!) I always felt like a poseur. This kind of rule-making seems to me a crucial method people (young people especially) draw lines for themselves—I knew that band when, I grew up in the projects, I was in the movement before there was a movement—it’s so destructive, yet so appealing. This is what Carla’s struggling for, and it’s by definition impossible. Her realization of that is what enrages her about Harry’s lack on interest in the same standards, and what makes her feel superior to him. Acknowledging that these standards of authenticity are valid, and defending them is the next best thing to fitting the standards.

So, going back, in my earlier short stories, I was deeply interested in getting it right: the right slang, the right details in places, and most especially, the right body and facial expressions. I wanted to convey all that unspoken code that revealed both the characters’ true thoughts and how they showed and hid them, and, probably a little sadly, my authentic and deep knowledge of the kind of people and scene I was writing about. The drawing style I used was very tight, very picky. I wanted to draw every detail. When I collected the stories, I came up with the title “Mirror, Window” as a way of referring to just these ideas of seeing—seeing oneself, seeing others; seeing truly, or only a pale or distorted reflection.

Meanwhile, my drawing style was growing increasingly frustrating to me. In my effort to get everything exactly right, I was driving myself bananas. Among other things, I realized that, when you draw in such a tight, controlled style, you open yourself up to criticism (in my case, my own) that things aren’t quite right. When a room is drawn so carefully, when a detail is wrong or missing, your imagination doesn’t add it in. Readers are restricted to seeing the elements that are right there in front of them. Then, of course, there’s the time issue. Those pages took me forever, and gave me major hand/arm pain.

So when I was living in Mexico, and started questioning the subject matter of my previous work, I started reassessing my drawing style as well, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. I had Matt give me assignments, like redrawing an existing page of comics at print size, at 50% of print size, and at 200% of print size, then photocopying all to the same size and comparing them to see how comfortable you feel drawing at different scales. Or redrawing a relatively complex existing panel in progressively simpler styles

The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more “true” to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader’s imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it’s a lot faster and more fun to do. Of course, I preserved my interest in facial and body gesture in this style as well, it’s just a bit more fluid … read more

Note: I’ve only linked to the first page of the above-excerpted interview (the excerpt itself occurs on page 3) — be sure to find and click the “part 2,” “part 3,” etc., links, which are near the top, middle part of the page — it’s kind of confusing. The whole interview is definitely worth reading.

Title: La Perdida Author: Jessica Abel Publisher: Pantheon

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