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LA PERDIDA PART ONE
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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Fantagraphics Books
Writer/Artist: Jessica Abel
Translations/Consultant: Ernesto Priego
Editor: Gary Groth
Price: $4.95 US/$7.45 CAN |
I've been hearing about Jessica Abel forever, but have never gotten around to picking up any of her work. Boy, do I regret that now. La Perdida is an incredible story about a girl moving down to Mexico and falling in love with the culture. It's a thoroughly engaging story about new experiences and the changes that can happen during your youth, as well as an examination of relationships and how they are affected by the changes that our protagonist is going through. It feels almost like an autobiography, a travel journal or recollection of a time in the artists' life, because it's so real, but it has a structure that makes it far more engaging than a simple dry recreation of real life. Combined with Abel's entrancing art style, one that I find hard to properly describe, La Perdida grabbed my interest from the opening pages
and made me exceptionally glad that I finally decided to pick up on the
word-of-mouth about Abel's work.
La Perdida is
told from the point of view of Carla, the protagonist, but it has a feel of
being told by Mexico City itself. I was especially interested to note that the
story starts with Carla as a fully adapted citizen of Mexico, watching a tourist
much like she used to be struggle with the problems of being an outsider, right
before the story took a turn back in time to when Carla was the outsider. Abel
really makes us feel the isolation and xenophobia that Carla experiences, as
well as her own well-founded fears about fitting in to the culture rather than
simply being another clueless tourist.
Though I have never actually traveled
outside of the United States, I felt like I had gotten a very real view of
Mexico from the American point of view in this comic. The locales, the crowds,
the beauty of the architecture all come through in Abel's artwork, and Carla
goes through a variety of interesting encounters, from an art gallery show to a
visit with a human rights/journalism organization, that helps to shed light on
various aspects of the country. In addition, the various discussions between
Carla and the people she meets help to give us different viewpoints on the city
and to give us a wider, more multi-faceted cultural view.
While on a large scale the story is about
Carla's adaptation to Mexico, on a smaller scale it's about the personal
relationships that she develops in this new phase of her life. Her bickering
with Harry and Memo over different reasons gives us insight into what makes her
character, and I like that she's not presented as perfect anymore than the other
characters are. Her relationships are real, the arguments totally believable,
and the everyday difficulties that she encounters in life are easy to relate to
even as they have a scope I'm not familiar with, given the added pressures
brought on by culture shock. And the opening hints that Carla's story may become
more dangerous as things go on, leading me to wonder what direction her life
will take as she becomes more a part of Mexico and of Memo and his group of
friends.
Abel's artwork is hard to describe for me,
although it does remind me pleasantly of artists like David Lapham, Steve Lieber
and Andi Watson. She does incredibly beautiful landscapes, such as the view of
the pyramids or the Parque Mexico, and she is also quite skilled with crowd
scenes. Her work on the city streets, the art gallery and the bars all give a
feel of crowds and congestion without ever getting so crowded that you can't
tell what's going on.
I picked this up largely out of curiosity,
but found myself loving it. It seems that I need to add some collected works
from Abel to my graphic novel wish list.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
