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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential, April 23, 2006
Jessica Abel crams heaping handfuls of story into each chapter of her gripping tale of self-discovery and self-deceit, an excellent, completely engaging and essential graphic novel that belongs on every discerning comics fans' bookshelf.
Carla, Abel's titular "la perdida" -- lost girl -- is a half-Mexican twenty-something who moves to Mexico City on a whim, looking to get in touch with her Mexican roots by fully immersing herself in the culture, quickly rejecting her fellow American expatriates in favor of two natives who (with a peculiar mix of selfish sincerity) embrace her: Memo, a Communist pseudo-intellectual, and Oscar, his good-looking if somewhat simple-minded friend. The first three chapters are Carla's story of trying to fit in and find her place in a culture that is completely foreign to her and not always welcoming, despite and in spite of her half-Mexican blood, and Abel does an excellent job of establishing a rather large cast of supporting characters so that in the fourth chapter, when things take a dramatic shift that in lesser hands would qualify as jumping the shark, she's able (no pun intended) to pull it off without derailing everything that's come before. Because she tells the story from Carla's perspective looking back on what happened, the reader is cued into details that Carla herself is missing at the time, so as events unfolded, I found myself cringing at some of her choices while always remaining engaged with her story. When it ended, somewhat abruptly, I found my head spinning a bit, chock full of images and anecdotes from Carla's experience as if she had shared them with me personally over coffee.
Abel's artwork, dense and subtly detailed, took about 15 pages for me to get used to before I was fully drawn into the story, as the back-and-forth prologue and discordant opening sequence forced my eyes to linger on each panel much longer than I'm used to doing. There's also the Spanish-English translation that crowds many of the panels in the first chapter which adds to its density -- and also helps non-Spanish readers, myself included, to further identify with Carla's situation -- but the extra effort is rewarded throughout the story, and it quickly becomes clear why it took five years to finish the story because there's not a single wasted panel in it. Like Blankets, the first long-form (non-superhero) graphic novel to really blow me away, and Black Hole, the most recent one to do so, La Perdida is everything great sequential art should be.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad, but not brilliant, July 20, 2006
I read and heard a couple rave reviews about La Perdida, but I have to say I was disappointed. I speak Spanish and have spent time in Mexico City, so I agree that Abel gets a lot of the details right, but I found that the characters were types who didn't really develop. That is, I'm sure, part of what Abel wanted to convey...characters trapped in an approach to life without much insight into themselves or others, so it's possible I had the wrong expectations for La Perdida. The book does effectively show a woman struggling to find herself and does make make us wonder about how many women form relationships with men with so little insight into the power they give up and the jerks the guys are. But, overall, I think that creating a lurid comic book surface was a way to avoid developing fully human characters having real interactions. But, it's a pretty good graphic novel. You might enjoy the movie "Y Tu Mama Tambien" by Alfonso Cuaron if you want drugs, sex and swearing, but also insight into human characters and a brilliantly vivid picture of Mexico.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Gorgeous artwork... Irritating story, February 10, 2007
I am a fan of indie comics (that is, not superhero stuff-Persepolis, Blankets, Peepshow, etc), so I was very excited to find La Perdida, especially because it was done by a woman. The artwork is sumptuous: rough brushwork, great expressions, evocative landscapes, especially the view of Mexico City on page129. Hats off to Ms Abel for this.
The story is what's lacking. While artfully executed, the story halts occasionally because there are no indications of scene changes, or even flashbacks for that matter. While most of the time I can intuit this, I really stumbled in through the beginning when more flashbacks were employed. Then, I have to chime in with previous reviewers. It is incredibly frustrating reading about a main character, Carla, who has no self-respect nor awareness, and does nothing but unwittingly sabotage herself (and others). The men she chooses for her friendships and relationships are all fairly abusive (verbally); they clearly don't respect her. She chooses the crowd she does simply to compensate her overwhelming lack of identity. (She loves Frida Kahlo, but when her new Mexican friends mock Frida, Carla rips her poster of Frida down!) While that's fine okay in a coming-of-age story, there is NO redemption. You do not feel as if she's learned from her mistakes. She recognizes she's messed up, but in the end, she's simply wondering where her innocence (read stupidity) went!
This is incredibly frustrating. The events of the story are interesting; the characters, if a bit one-note, provide a fascinating point of view (for a capitalist American like me). And if nothing else, the setting is stunning. Abel's images of the city and foliage are gorgeous.
But this isn't a graphic novel I would recommend to first-time comics readers.
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