The Stumptown Comics Fest came and went in a blur of
MacTarnahan’s and mini-comics, but it’s still officially “Portland
Comics Month.” Powell’s is catching the tail end of the comet with a
reading headlined by indie comics superstar Derek Kirk Kim, whose 2004
book Same Difference and Other Stories snagged both an Eisner
and a Harvey.
Kim illustrated the new collection The Eternal Smile (it’s
written by Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese), and
fans who pick up The Eternal Smile based on Kim’s previous work
may be surprised. Both Same Difference and Good as Lily (the young-adult title Kim penned for the Minx imprint) are
confessional in tone and smart-assed in humor—but the stories in
Eternal Smile look at the ways in which people (and frogs)
mediate their realities, and at the escape valves and petty deceptions
that get people (and frogs) through the day.
In the book’s most successful story, an office worker knowingly
falls for a Nigerian email scam, entranced by the prospect of adding
meaning and excitement to her life, even as she knows that her checks
aren’t really going to deposed Nigerian royalty. Kim’s art here is at
its best—as the office worker scrapes the bottom of her bank
account to transfer money to her desperate “Nigerian prince,” a muted
color palette suffuses the character’s previously black-and-white life,
and where once her loneliness was represented by scant panels arranged
sparsely against a blank page, a lush imagined romance unfolds like a
fairytale in a children’s book. In Gran’pa Greenbax and the Eternal
Smile, a frog plots and connives to increase his fortune, dreaming
of a pool of money so deep he can swim in it. I won’t spoil the story’s
big reveal, but it’s a surprisingly touching reconciliation of real and
constructed realities that borrows equally from Scrooge McDuck and
The Truman Show.
These are self-aware little stories, hip to their own participation
in the very pop-cultural means of entertainment and escape they’re
critiquing—and perhaps that’s why they feel gentle, even as they
consistently reject escapism in favor of engagement. Yang’s writing is
over-partial to the “gotcha” moment, in which a grand gimmick is
revealed with a flourish, but the stories are otherwise clever and
sensitive.
Kim will be joined at Powell’s by local cartoonists Sarah Oleksyk
(saraholeksyk.com) and Jesse
Reklaw, whose Slow Wave runs weekly in the Mercury.