It's taken some adjustment to get used to the pacing of Love as a Foreign Language, which presents a central "will they or won't they" dilemma but doesn't seem in any hurry to really get into it. In the second volume, I found this somewhat off-putting, but now that I've seen three volumes, I think I have a better feel for the general pacing, and the relatively slow relationship dynamics of Joel and Hana make perfect sense in the context of an entire issue that more or less focuses on Joel's difficulties with Korean food. Love as a Foreign Language is not just about the relationship (or lack thereof) between Joel and Hana, it's about the Korean culture as seen through western eyes, about xenophobia and arrogance and learning to compromise and a variety of other themes related to Joel's unusual predicament of culture shock and puppy love.
I developed a fondness for Korean food in New York, so in that respect I'm quite different from Joel, but I'm a picky eater and so I can definitely relate to Joel's difficulty with the different eating customs and food in Korea. Torres and Kim play Joel's inability to handle traditional Korean food for comedy, exaggerating the spiciness to maximum levels and tying Joel's eating habits into his general intolerance towards Korean culture, and the result is comedy combined with some of the "man, that sounds good!" factor of Iron Wok Jan. I love that despite being a teacher, Joel basically learns everything he knows about Korea from children's television and remedial books, showing that he is a student as well, albeit a very unwilling one.
Truthfully, Joel's arrogance is a good story tool, but it's not making him a likable protagonist a lot of the time. His stubbornness and snobbish behavior towards a culture that he has basically chosen to enter often makes me wish for him to get a literal punch in the face. Fortunately, Torres does angle the story so that Joel takes some lumps for his unwillingness to blend in or try to get along, and certainly a big part of his troubles from Hana are self-inflicted, not just from his inherent clumsiness and stammering but because he never really learned how to talk to people in a polite manner, Hana included. What's surprising is that the most unlikable character in the book is also the protagonist and point of view character, and yet the book isn't uncomfortable to read. Part of this may be that there's a limited omniscience going on in the point of view, so that while we aren't inside Hana's head, we do get glimpses of how she feels, and we certainly know plenty about Joel's friends from the way they interact with him. I was particularly pleased with Hana's misinterpretation of Joel and Kelly, a great bit of visual storytelling from Kim.
Which brings me to the work of Eric Kim, and I really can't say enough positive things about his work on Love as a Foreign Language. He really has a handle on the things that make manga storytelling strong, such as very expressive characters and an exaggerated sense of motion, but this simplicity of storytelling is not at the expense of detailed backgrounds or strong character designs. Kim is as adept at the normal, day-to-day stuff like the group dinner or subway ride as he is with more unusual sequences like Joel's octopus dream or the surreal children's show that he watches for lessons on Korean dining. I also have a special fondness for the chapter breaks, which feature character-defining illustrations from Kim and bad (but funny) puns by Torres.
The romantic comedy is a rarity in American comics, but a romantic comedy that is also part travelogue to a foreign country? That's something truly unique, and Torres and Kim have succeeded in making it a must-read for me. It took me a couple volumes to get a sense of how the pacing worked, and I'm still sort of longing for an issue or two from Hana's point of view, but Love as a Foreign Language remains a compelling and unusual read.
