Customer Reviews

Night Fisher

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Hawaii has a long reputation as an "island paradise," but it's not like that anymore, if it ever was. It's pretty much like everywhere else in the United States, with widening divisions between socioeconomic classes, a raging drug problem, professional men who have trouble paying the mortgage, and teenagers from good schools who become stupid and get in trouble with the law. The somewhat geeky Loren Foster came to Maui from Boston in 6th Grade; now, five years later, he's saddled with backbreaking work for his AP classes, can't get a relationship started with the basketball-playing girl of his choice, and has no idea what he's going to do after graduation. His best friend, Shane Hokama, has gotten mixed up with crystal meth and a thirty-year-old pusher, together with a Hawaiian kid named Eustace. Loren, wanting to fit in with his supposed peer group, naturally gets roped into the dope world as well. Only the guys are paying for the stuff with stolen merchandise. Johnson has a sure hand with a pen and a clear eye for adolescent characters, and his "comic book novella" is one of the best written, best drawn, and most uncompromisingly (and depressingly) realistic I've seen in some time. And the "ending" doesn't really end anything -- just like real life. An amazingly beautiful and first-rate piece of work.

I bought Night Fisher as a gift on the recommendation of a friend who owns a comic-book store. It didn't seem like the type of thing to interest me, but I was hooked from the very first page. There is a simple beauty to both the art and the writing that can, at times, take your breath away. The author's gift for perspective is particularly impressive, almost as if he's a film director that catches each character and each scene from precisely the right angle. I've read _alot_ of graphic novels, but more so than any others I've seen, this should be treated as literature in the best possible sense of the word.

I absolutely loved this book. The drawings were beautiful and exciting, the story was very entertaining! I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a work of art in a comic or just a great story.

Drawn with sweeping black brush strokes, this "comic book novella" is done completely in absence of color. This, however, helps to magnify the tone of the story and brings a subtle heaviness to the work. The artwork itself is excellent--just check out that beautiful cover. Johnson does a great job conveying characters' moods and emotions through angles, posture, and facial expressions. There is also a fantastic level of detail drawn into the local flora, as plants and agriculture play an important metaphoric role in the story. Another notable aspect is the use of black and white space: characters and settings are enveloped in shadows or become silhouettes since a good chunk of the book takes place at night.

Night Fisher is your typical "coming of age" story, highlighting the rougher, realistic aspects of this place we call paradise; shattering the common stereotypes of relaxed life and island luxury. The main character is a high school senior named Loren Foster, whose workaholic dentist father moved to Hawaii from Boston six years prior. Loren is a teenager who attends a prestigious private academy on Maui and finds himself slowly losing touch with his best friend Shane, who often keeps Loren out of the loop for his more dangerous (read: cool) ventures.

To paraphrase a line from Kaui Hemmings' House of Thieves, "Being uncool in Hawaii is the worst thing you could be." Loren, despite his best attempts, always seems a step behind his counterparts. He is chastised for being a virgin. After a somewhat intimate encounter with a girl he likes, Loren chose to boost his reputation over advancing the relationship by letting sexual rumors spread. Loren buys and uses marijuana to fit in, but his contemporaries have already graduated to methamphetamines. It is this attempt to "catch up" with Shane that drives the majority of the story. Shane guides him deep into the world of crystal meth, or batu, which leads to late night vagrancy, organized burglary and general apathy towards life.

I don't necessarily think the whole "dark side of paradise" angle is that original. Many stories seem to revel in showing the seedy underbelly of our Island home. However, the portrayal in Night Fisher is presented very well, without being judgmental or preachy. The meth use is neither glamorized nor demonized. I'm not privy to those circles, but it seems like a realistic take from a teenager's perspective. You use it, it makes you feel good, it keeps you up all night, but there are still consequences--association with dangerous people, constant theft to pay for drugs, the slow isolation of life and goals which culminates in a surprise ending for Loren in relation to his "race" with Shane.

Some people may not like the ending as it is a bit anticlimactic and doesn't really tie up any loose ends. But that is life. Just like Maui, volatile changes and shifting faces affect Loren, but it's these exchanges that shape and create him. He's constantly trying to keep up with his contemporaries, but finally accepts his fate and lets it take over. Like everything that has created Maui from its inception, he is a transplant. When the story ends, he realizes the island is a part of him just as he became a part of the island.

This comic novella may not be for everyone, but if you enjoy these realistic and unapologetic looks at adolescence I recommend giving Night Fisher a read. Even if the story doesn't resonate with you, the skilled ink drawings will make you appreciate everything that R. Kikuo Johnson has put into this work.

This is a beautiful little book. My only complaint is that it seems to end abruptly, as if the artist and writer simply became exhausted and could not go on. Which would be understandable, given the remarkable effort that must have gone into what work there is. Besides the moving story, I learned a lot about Hawaii that I never knew, which seems to have been part of the point. Mainlanders imagine Hawaii as a kind of fabulous wealthy paradise filled with retired pediatricians. This book gives the lie to that idea. In many ways we empathize with the protagonist's desire to escape the cookie-cutter universe of prep-school-college-house-in-the-burbs, but we shudder to see how destructively he channels that desire. Methamphetamine abuse is a timely issue and it is portrayed frankly here, without knee-jerk media stereotypes but also without glorification.

Loren Foster is a brain who attends a high-powered prep school on Maui. His single Dad is a dentist who works long hours to pay for his prestigious home and send his son to school. The pressures of his office don't leave much time for being with his son, who has free rein. Soon enough, Loren and his best friend Shane, become involved with a group of violent lowlife characters who turn him onto to smoking batu, the island's name for crystal meth. The drug keeps people awake for days at a time, so Loren and Shane need to find ways (aside from their enormous load of school work) to keep busy. Soon they get involved with stealing goods from local merchants.

The story brings in aspects of Hawaiian life that were unknown to me -- the rivalry between locals and ha'oles, or whites, for one example. Then, there was the desperate hope of some young people to get off their island paradise. And the island's colonial history plays its part in the story as well. Locals still hold onto their old, worthless British land deeds, perhaps in the hope that someday their small holdings would be returned to them. Johnson does a terrific job of showing the plainer face of the islands -- the side where poverty, lack of assimilation and lack of opportunity conspire to create an environment where escape through drugs seems like a reasonable solution. The particular events in the books -- an early morning romp through a tourist hotel, forays to steal tires, etc. -- seem almost too real to be made up. At the very least, Johnson has used his knowledge of island culture to tell a fascinating, coherent yet imaginary story; at most, he has accurately penned a tale of some of his own youthful adventures. In either case, "Night Fisher" focuses a fascinating lens on a side of Hawaiian life that most of us cannot imagine, overlain onto a tale of typical teenagers, dealing with the ordinary pressures of growing up and making a life for themselves. Johnson's drawings are exceptional and detailed, and his story-telling skills are sharp. It make take a couple of reads to catch everything that is going on, but it's well worth the effort to try.

"Night Fisher" deals with fairly mature themes -- violence and experimentation with sex and drugs -- so it's not appropriate for young teens. But it's a book with an open eye for teen pressure and attitudes. Great book.

Poor character development, awful pacing, and a trite storyline all contribute to an unbearable reading experience. This story fails on all levels. It doesn't convey an original idea. It doesn't change the characters for the better. It doesn't make a moral statement that you couldn't find in an Just Say No era anti-drug cartoon made for elementary school kids. In other words it's a pointless waist of time and shelf space. Life's to short to spend an hour of it reading something this poorly conceived.