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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Haole's Hawaiian Coming of Age, November 18, 2006
This review is from: Night Fisher (Paperback)
Set on Maui, Johnson's debut graphic novel is told entirely from the perspective of Loren, a haole (white) high-school senior whose family relocated from Boston five years ago. Loren is a slightly awkward, mild-mannered, straight-A AP student at a the local elite prep school (which appears to be modeled after Seabury Hall, one of Maui's three prep schools). He's slowly drifted apart from his best (and apparently only) friend Shane, who has abandoned their midnight fishing excursions in favor of hanging out on the "wrong" (ie. Filipino) side of the island to smoking batu (crystal meth) with a 30-year-old dealer.
Displaying true self-destructive teenage behavior, Loren is decides to join Shane on one of these batu runs. And in true drug culture form, it's never just a simple matter of purchasing and consuming. Rather, Loren gets caught up in some slightly more serious stuff which leads to an inevitable crisis. But it's a only hard to buy Loren's fall from grace if you buy into the original grace. Despite his straight As, Loren's home life is pretty lonely as he putters around the motherless, siblingless house all alone while his dentist father works long hours to pay the mortgage and meet the school fees. Loren is slightly disaffected, slightly disillusioned, somewhat ill at ease with his low-key nerd rep, and so it's not too hard to see him taking this walk on the wild side.
Mixed into this is some information about the island's flora and fauna which serves a metaphorical adjunct to Loren's situation. At times the story is interrupted by biology book excerpts discussing how non-native plants and invasive species came to Hawaii over the years. It's hard to miss the meaning, as Loren is both haole invader and haole outsider. Similarly, it's hard to miss the symbolism of the jungle of a front yard that Loren and his father do battle with, as it attempts to take over the property. Other than this slightly-too-obvious nature element, Johnson's depiction of Hawaii is fresh and original. In contrast to the typical image of a sunny paradise, much of the action takes place at night, which lends an entirely different mood. And in a much-needed alternate view of the state, instead of palatial mansions or chic apartments, we see regular houses, ramshacklehouses, low-income neighborhoods, convenience stores, open markets, and industrial works. This is. All of Johnson's characters are real and alive, and while some may find his artwork a little too loose, it captures the restlessness of the protagonist. The stark black and white panels are a great example of how an artist can use negative space to create mood in a story. It's a very solid debut and I'll look forward to his next.
Note: If this alternate view of Hawaii interests you, check out Kaui Hart Hemmings' excellent (and inexplicably overlooked) short story collection "House of Thieves". Almost all the protagonists are haole teenagers, and it is a great pairing with this book.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Read it twice, March 28, 2006
This review is from: Night Fisher (Paperback)
On first read I wanted this book to be better. I felt like there were bits of the art (especially the Dad's lawn and the last few pages) which were excellent and evocative and there were bits of the story that I liked. But I also found it profoundly depressing, probably because it felt cliche. But on second look, I think Johnson does a fine job of playing with two different sets of cliches, the drugs-are-bad-and-will-ruin-your-life cliche and the wayward-kid-with-bad-friends-finally-figures-it-out-before-it-is-too-late cliche and teases us with both. The nice but challenging ending plays even better when you read from the beginning a second time.
But the structural complexity of this text is subtle and moves in the silences between subplots, frames and even characters in the panels. So unlike something like the excellent Blankets, which wears its struggles in the art and plot in the surface disruption of the panels, The Maxx and Swamp Thing: Love and Death style, this book asks things of the graphic novel reader that perhaps we are not used to.
After the more showy, hip work of Ware, Robinson and Clowes, this book is both challenging and refreshing. And style-wise it seems to want to move between the hipness of someone like Abel and the unhipness of someone like Pekar.
Art, style and plot-wise, this book wants to make lots of movements under the guise of simplicity and stillness, which is a great thing in its own right, and it also speaks to (at least my stereotypes of) the book's Hawaiian setting.
There are still elements of the book that are not 5 star caliber, and the tensions I outline above do not work as nicely as I would hope all of the time, but for the price, this is a good book to check out. I just added it to my syllabus for the comic book class I teach.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An amazingly accomplished piece of work, May 16, 2007
This review is from: Night Fisher (Paperback)
Night Fisher is a graphic novel by R. Kikuo Johnson. It's his first work; at least, I haven't seen any mini-comics or short stories in any anthologies by him. Johnson's thick-lined black and white art is gorgeous, reminiscent of Paul Pope's work in its looseness. There are a couple of misspellings, something that's glaring in an art form where wordcount is low, but aside from that Night Fisher is an amazingly accomplished piece of work. My only other complaint: it ends abruptly. I want to know what happens next.
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