Customer Reviews

Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag (High School Chronicles of Ariel Schrag)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Following her three previous high school chronicles, "Likewise" details Schrag's senior year at a Berkeley High School. Much of the plot focuses on Schrag's negotiation of her queer identity after her first heartbreak, aided by a pair of caring teachers, while she deals with changing friendships, her plans for the future, her relationship to her family, and her dedication to her craft.

Formally, Schrag takes many more risks in "Likewise" than she did in her other works. Other reviewers mention her use of stream of consciousness captions inspired by Joyce, which sometimes is amazingly poignant, and other times simply distracting.

More striking to me is the fact that her account, written years after the events depicted is recreated from the high school Schrag's obsessive documentation of her personal life, and in "Likewise," Schrag carefully reproduces the technologies that enable her memory in the book. Thus she illustrates tape recordings, word processing files, diaries, sketches, handwritten notes, and the more polished comics she was working on at the time. She also carefully mixes illustrative styles to distinguish between some of the most emotionally vivid moments, the other sketches and finished comics within this narrative, her retrospective analysis of events, and the moments when pen and ink fail, like Schrag's emotionally troubled narrator, to manufacture a coherent re-presentation of experience.

While her first three books were to a great extent about her experience of the events themselves, clearly the flak Schrag got for her representation of others and herself also created a much more self-critical approach to both narrative and visual coherence. Schrag is careful to include those moments where she is already in the process of "thinking in double frame," already imagining her experience in comic form at the same time she's living it, and the other characters both participate in it and call her on it.

In fact, the book really is about problems within the creative process itself. Focusing attention on her inability to draw sense into her life, Schrag illustrates herself repeatedly panicking over losing "Trusty", the protractor she needs to create straight lines for her panels. While many authors celebrate the creative process as cathartic, for the senior-year Schrag, her time and labor intensive project of inking "Potential" enmeshes her in her past even while she's trying to move forward into her future. She can't let go of Sally while she's redrawing the demise of their relationship and when she needs Sally to disrobe and pose in the present so she can take picture to illustrate their past.

Because she is trapped in this "double-framing," this book doesn't have the shocking immediacy of her first three comics, whose diary-like form and content provided a gripping and straightfoward sense of urgency, even if it sometimes verges on voyeuristic access. While I appreciated "Likewise" for its skepticism, self-reflexivity, and incoherence, it is still quite plodding and self-important, even though it is aware that it's self-consciously obsessive and self-indulgent. Even visually, the illustrations of illustrations, and illustrations of notebooks get a little tedious. For all the flaws with her own self-editing and naivety that Schrag is careful to point out in "Likewise," I think that "Potential" was a more focused book and a devastating read.

Well, after reading Likewise, it's evident that it is highly likely Ariel is reading this review herself. The book let's the reader in a LOT more than Potential, Definition, or Awkward. It lets us in so much, in fact, that we begin to feel the loss and panic that Schrag may have been experiencing herself. The difference is that the reader may be lost in the text and confused by our changing and growing narrator. At points, it is not even clear what is going on anymore and Schrag's sketches represent these times by becoming thinned out or even appearing to have been drawn with her other hand. This is not to say that the book is incoherent, just that at times it is confusing because it is SO detailed. This book begins a lot like Potential, but soon the reader starts to feel deeper into Schrag's psyche than before. It becomes difficult to navigate between what is real and what is Schrag's obsessive paranoia or twisted humor. It feels a lot like being inside the mind of an extremely intelligent, well read, teenage scientist in the midst of a mental breakdown that alters her world forever. Flashbacks, dreams, fantasies are all drawn in different styles so they seem easier to follow, but again, it becomes tedious to try to remember when you are still in a flashback or present since the entire book focuses on the creation of Potential in the "present" by looking into the "past" as well as recording, writing, thinking, for the "future" creation of Likewise itself.

I enjoyed the depiction of trying desperately to understand homosexuality, while struggling to feel proud. I appreciated her exploration of gender and particularly, the way it is seen in queer women; Being a hip queer Vs. a butch dyke and the inward homophobia that results in knowing that the whole world thinks you're the same thing anyway: a degenerate. I also enjoyed the self-loathing ala "poor bastard" joe matt and the fact that she pairs it with an overcompensating teenage narcissist narrator that is aware of her level of fame in the world. It's like being so sure you are awesome, yet fearing that you are not good enough. This is why AP Literature classes are dangerous! heh.

ALSO: I would read it more than once. Schrag becomes enmeshed in Joyce's Ulysses during the course of this book, so I would advise having read that or reading it and then reading Likewise again. She uses a lot of stylistic elements that she takes from Ulysses as well as allusions (so much so that we now need an annotated Likewise and probably Potential as well).

IN SHORT, Likewise is not like the others. It is graduated and requires more of your attention than you may expect for a high school chronicle. BUT, it is GOOD. I think, having had my own queer identity grow up with Potential to thank, I was hoping for something more like the self-discovery and representation captured in her previous work, but Likewise is like getting to know yourself again after some (seemingly) great tragedy changes you forever. You're different; everyone notices that you may be losing your mind, but you don't really care because there is no going back. It is hard to use the word "existential", but I will say that it is the most existential of her works. Be prepared.

Likewise, the final installment of Ariel Schrag's comic chronicle of her high school career, was years in the making and worth every second.

Schrag's work is proof positive, if any more be needed, that the comic book is just as legitimate an art form as any other medium in the world and can explore the human condition as eloquently as any novel. That, and she's a terrific writer. From the first panel of the first page, the reader is not only engaged, but addicted. As we dig deeper into this book and into her life, we truly care about her characters (who just happen to be real people). We want them to be happy, we want them to find the answers to the questions that torment them. At certain points, we want to shake them.

That we as readers are engaged as deeply as we are is testimony to Ms. Schrag's uncanny ability to use her deceptively simple artwork and eerily precise ear for dialogue to suck the reader into her mind and world immediately.

Part of her ability to do this might be related to the unflinching honesty and openness with which she tells her story. Nothing's sacred, nothing's held back--not her portraits of her family and their failings, not her own explorations of her own sexuality, not her insecurities about her body. It makes for painful reading at times. If Ms. Schrag were a lesser writer, much of Likewise would come across as precious, self-indulgent, or maudlin. But it doesn't.

In between Potential and Likewise, Ms. Schrag has been a television writer as well, but as a devotee of and a believer in comics, I truly hope she doesn't abandon this medium, but continues to show us what it's capable of.

Painful because teenage years have so much in them that's well worth leaving behind, but Schrag brings it all boldly to the fore. She's brutally honest and startlingly open about the roller-coaster friendships, the amount of time spent on solo sex ("the most important year of my life, and this is what I do with my time"), pressures of school and college applicationns, and just trying to look like - well, she doesn't seem all that sure.

This series (including Awkward Awkward/Definition and Potential) is really about Schrag's growth, whether she intended it that way or not. There's the physical, of course, entering high school as little more than a child and leaving as an adult, more or less. Beyond that, there's Schrag developing confidence and maturity of outlook. Most of all, there's her growth as an artist.

"Likewise", even more than the others, shows the central place that comic-writing holds in Schrag's teen life. This could have come across as self-conscious art-about-art. Instead, Schrag seems to document as a genuine part of her life, just as much as zit-popping or strained parental relationships.

The importance of her art in her life and the clear stylistic advancement through this series explain why I didn't give the fifth star. Toward the end of the book, Schrag often falls short of the standard that she sets early on. Page after page seems sketchy and thrown together. The series as a whole is great, and a spectacular achievement for someone of her age when this was done - so I'm even more disappointed when her standards slip so conspicuously. Despite that, it's a remarkable memoir of girl's life and the time in which she lived it.

-- wiredweird

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