Comic Book Reviews - Persepolis and American Born Chinese

It was not my intention to have this be the "ethnic coming of age" graphic novel review blog post, but you know, I guess it is. It was over a month ago that I read The Complete Persepolis and not to sound like a broken record or to state the obvious, but it was fantastic. As a general note, you'll find that my reviews are mostly positive. I'll try to go beyond just saying "it's great, I loved it" but will also say why, and maybe anything I wasn't so crazy about - but I'm not going to have very many negative reviews because I'm not that snarky of a reviewer, and I try to only read things I'll like (i.e., I'll try to avoid reviewing crap, by not reading it in the first place). In the event that I review something I didn't like so much (like The Surrogates), I'll let you know why.

Anyway, back to Persepolis. First off, I learned a ton about Iranian history from reading it, a lot of stuff I really didn't know about the revolution and what happened afterwards. Extremely informative. Secondly, this was extremely moving - there were definitely parts I read where I almost started crying, because the author does such a beautiful job conveying the difficulty of adolescence occurring in the midst of a harrowing political situation. I mean, being 13 is hard enough without having a war and political repression. I know - I remember. I felt like it dragged in a few places, and I wasn't quite as into the parts when she was living abroad as I was when she was younger and back at home, but those parts were wonderfully rendered as well. The author is a really astute observer of life, of adolescents and young adults, and at people posing at being something that they are not (whether it is pseudo intellectuals, anarchists, or whatever.). The artistic style is extremely accessible but a little incongruous with the heady subject matter - discussion of torture seems particularly unsettling in this very cute and charming "cartoony" style. Anyway, any quibbles I have are minor - I loved it, and give it my highest recommendation.

I felt pretty similarly after reading American Born Chinese, which was equally fantastic. It didn't make me cry quite in the same way that Persepolis did, but made me laugh out loud at certain points, and always kept me engaged. The author uses three different stories to tell this bigger story, and they all come together in a clever and thoughtful way, which really ties all of the themes of the narrative together. There's the fable of the Monkey King and his quest to be something more than a Monkey, and there's Jin Wang and his struggles to assimilate into a school where he is one of the only Asian students, and then there is Danny, whose cousin "Chin-kee" comes to visit every year and makes things difficult for him in a very embarrassing and humorous way. While some of the ideas in this book relate specifically to the experience of being Chinese in America, the way the book deals with feelings of loneliness, feeling out of place, not knowing how to communicate with the opposite sex, fumbling through adolescence - these are universal themes, beautifully drawn and told throughout the story. Plus, in the story, characters play with old-school Transformers like Optimus and Megatron, which forever endears this book to me. As with Persepolis, I can't recommend this strongly enough, particularly if you are either an adolescent, were at some point an adolescent, or like things that are awesome.