In Limbo: Deb JJ Lee Reviewed | Comics Memoir Analysis

[00:00:00][Music] tonight [Applause] everybody thanks for joining me for another one Man review today I'll be taking a look at Deb JJ Lee's new book in limbo this is out from first second brand brand new book just got it in the mail and right there really enjoyed it it's the type of book that I'm always cautious about you know it's a coming of age I have mental health problems Memoir which is always like I'm a little a little scared about this but the art I saw just looked really really amazing and so I had to get it and give it a try and I really wound up liking it it is exactly within that genre which I think is played out and tired a little bit but the writing in this one is really well done and it's combined with really really gorgeous art as you can see right here in this opening sequence an art that oftentimes is um like technically confusing to me in a way that's compelling like I'm not quite sure how it was accomplished or what I'm looking at and that's really exciting and then the the autobiographical writing is handled in a way that shows a lot of the things that I find problematic within this genre that I think that this type of thing is it's cathartic for the artist but if this is all they do it will keep them stuck in unhealthy Cycles but at the same time it's handled in a really thoughtful way that I'm I'm not used to seeing in most of these where I I think the artist is doing a lot of healthy self-reflection about their contributions to the situations and I I haven't seen that a lot in these Memoirs of like the outcast searching for their way in society it just seems to be you know always about the society and I think this book is very balanced between uh the the kind of societal pressures that are on a person coming from all sides but also the pressures that a person puts on themselves and that seems like something not I've never read a book like that before but it seems like a new Wrinkle in the the autobio genre for me that is refreshing and nice I'll talk about that more as we go but here you'll get a look at just some of the stunning artwork in the book and you'll see what I'm talking about about the confusion I I have about how it's made because there's this really clean Line work and then there's stuff like this that very obviously looks like kind of pencil drawn I'm sure it's probably done with digital tools but it's fairly realistic kind of chalky pencily look to it and then you have other stuff like this that almost just looks like manipulated photographs but then those elements oftentimes will have some drawn looking elements abstractions in them so I think there's some interplay between photography and digital drawing and maybe some actual drawing with pen and ink I'm not sure but this is a good example here as well of like the makeup kit where it looks photographic at first glance but then you see a lot of the objects and there's just a little bit of simplification or a little bit of distortion and it makes it for a really interesting combination and a lot of really great atmospheric moments and then having everything printed in the one spot color is really nice as well given that it was printed in this spot color it's a bit of a bummer that it's printed in half tones throughout especially because of the digital production they could have done the line work as just the the straight bitmap output like Sean does and had that be crisp and then had all this be in the halftones or the diffusion dither and the the line work in the lettering could have been cleaner but for the most part you get a softness throughout the book that works really well with the line work I really like the influence I don't know this I'm not familiar enough with this genre of manga but there's a certain type of line work that I see especially in the manga for young girls that shows up in here where it's like a clean line and then this kind of obsessively clean filling back in of the blacks and that shows up here but with all these other stylistic things going on on top of it it feels really really fresh and really new so that's kind of a general overview of like the the content of my response to the book probably something I should have said at the end but uh that that's like going into the book and then I just want to show some instances that kind of elaborate on those things so the book is uh autobiographical of uh dab growing up Deborah growing up as a someone whose family immigrated to the United States from Korea when she was very young and it seems like spent some time in Canada as well so she's feeling displaced you know she feels out of place as an Asian and in a school where there's not many Asians uh but she also feels displaced from her Korean family and her Asian Heritage and is going into that and then it's just also displaced and this is one of the things I like about it is just talking about other kind of displacements that happen too where it's like you're just an awkward geeky kid and it wouldn't matter if you were Korean or not um you know you would still have a lot of these same problems and that's acknowledged as well and so it's kind of just taking a look at all of those things things that could leave someone as an outcast this scene here had me a little bit worried right out the front because it immediately jumps into like the fact that you feel like an outcast because of your ethnicity and I thought this whole book's going to be about that but it's not and it's actually handled in a really interesting way so this is a scene here where she's sitting there and the teacher she's going to high school so this whole book is the four years in high school leading up to getting in into college and finding her identity as an artist and stuff so at first it's showing the teacher having a problem pronouncing her name and then giving the teacher a correction and then just telling the teacher that she can just go ahead and call me Deborah or Dev if you want and the teacher's like oh sorry I just didn't know and she's like it's fine and that scene I'm sure it's like very uncomfortable for her but I like that she kind of gives the teacher a pass too because I've been on the other side of this every semester I've ever taught where there's no reasonable way that you can expect a teacher to know how to pronounce properly people's names in every possible language on Earth but that doesn't take away um you know so she's kind of giving him a pass like and I can tell you from the other side it's awkward you don't want to [ __ ] up a person's name and and I've been in situations where I've mispronounced the name and actually the students in the class I the kid's name was ermogenesis and it spelled like the Greek philosopher homogenees and I thought oh finally I know how to pronounce a name and then I got ruthlessly ridiculed by the students in the class it's ermo like what what ermogenous it's oh okay I'm sorry so I like that on the page turn she kind of set me up for especially as a teacher I was like God damn it you know like have some pity the other way and then she shows that and that's nice but then it also goes on to show like pretty immediately that the kids have picked up on it and that that that that honest mistake from the teacher has led to bullying from the students so like here you have this kids saying does yunjing mean Deborah in Chinese and she's Korean so that's obviously an irritation she tells them I'm Korean but then she's thinking like does Bailey Franklin mean barely finished eighth grade in Caucasian uh so it's it's showing the complexity of those situations which I really like I feel like a lot of graphic Memoirs in this genre tend to be like problematizing everybody else but not having empathy back and so that empathy in showing how it's not really a problem of the teacher but it accidentally leads to other problems I think is really well handled and thoughtful so that makes me really really enjoy the writing in this book I think it's very careful thoughtful writing here's another page just where uh some of the images like I don't know if this is photographic or not it looks you know on at first glance it looks like a photograph the same with the violin and stuff it looks very photographic but then a closer inspection a lot of it looks you know more drawn it looks more abstract like the cars are just simple marks and I I really enjoy that style I really enjoy the mixture with the line work and then here Deb is playing the violin which is you know like it seem as someone grew up like my two best friends were Asian like they both parents made him play a musical instrument my friend Mark played violin so that's that just seems very familiar to me very on stereotype but obviously it was true for her and then I like the little musical nature of the the kind of shrinking Rhythm here she's like not not too interested in playing her violin really um she's also got kind of the stereotypical Asian family Dynamic that the mom is really really overbearing especially about grades and all this stuff and really really up her ass in a mean way like spying on her I watched you playing and you stopped and were drawing every now and then and you know I watched that Dynamic with both both of my friends and then also on the other side of that Dynamic which I watched as well is the kind of more loose caring dad and um that there's a lot of that in this book it seems like the majority of her problems stem from dealing with her mother her mother being really supportive and caring and like I want to be a good mom but then that going like way too far and they even use the term tiger mom at some point in the book you know kind of like dismissively but that that term does refer to this stereotype and it is playing out in her life and it was obviously very damaging to her um I really like this this is her obviously her Sketchbook she's showing this to her music teacher and so I'm hoping that these are actually scans of the type of stuff that she was doing in high school I think that would be really cool to include that and this is where she starts to realize that that she's an artist just some more really awesome like really awesome effect rendering throughout the book uh here getting getting contact lenses and I've never had contact lenses but the distortions and the warps here just seem like that's got to be exactly exactly what it looks like and just the way again that that's handled with all of this soft diffuse rendering versus the line work I think is really beautiful beautiful art all the way throughout um here's just some more instances of uh bullying and here she's also complicating the kind of ethnic thing that it's not just that she's getting bullied when she shows up in a school where she's like you know one of the few Asian kids it's that when she's going to the Korean school as well like the kids are really mean to her so it's showing that it's it's more of just you know some people wind up being outcasts for whatever reason and is is delving in into that um some really good renderings here I think of having like social anxiety panic attack a dissociative disorder where she's just like checking out from the room and uh those those are familiar feelings to me as well so that's very well rendered and and well represented in the comic very smartly and then I also really like the abstraction here of going to see a therapist and the therapist is always I'm sure in real life the therapist wasn't literally hiding behind these leaves but it probably must have felt like that and so I think that looks really good and then just the abstraction of the shapes and the negative spaces and all that stuff is really really well handled um and that that kind of imagery is really interesting to me now really like that and then she also mentions that they lived in Alabama from for three years and now that I do live in Alabama I know I I've seen it like that's a very hard for people in the Asian Community here because there are not many Asians at all growing growing up in California it was you know there was a significant Asian population especially in Sacramento Central Valley area San Francisco where I grew up with the heavy Asian population but here like my colleague when I started here was a Chinese woman and she would almost go out of her way in an awkward way uh when a when an Asian student came up they were immediately like oh there's another Asian here I'm so happy to have an Asian and um you know so I've seen firsthand like kind of that here in Alabama as well so I can only imagine how that moving around especially when you're feeling displaced and then coming to Alabama was difficult and she also talks about when they moved to New Jersey the students in New Jersey were ahead in academics compared to where she was at at the same grade level in Alabama and that's that's very true that that would be very difficult some really nice abstractions just happened to flip to that but some abstractions that show emotion and then I really like this bit she's talking to her therapist and it says um but by running going to the city being with other people you're expanding your world further a running space a new space and she's by by running not by running to the city but she's going running she's going to the city she's being with other people so she's creating new spaces for herself and soon a college space and this is like having more worlds circles like these means that you have pillars of support so you have more if one of them Falls and I really like that that like the the more Diversified the worlds that you move within the less important any one world becomes and I think that's a really smart lesson that she learned and obviously latched on to and is is passing on so there's a lot of wisdom in this book especially for a young artist I think um here there's a note where she's she's talking about well there's other mental issues I've struggled with blah blah that's a story for another day as much as I enjoyed this book I still like my immediate reaction was like please know you're a very very talented artist and a very very talented writer and um that'd be personally I would like you know I feel like people need to get these books out of them sometimes but I I fear for creators who get trapped in and you know this is my own bias but this is my worry about these kind of works as I've read plenty of creators who get trapped in autobiography and you can watch them drive themselves crazy and especially if they're already coping with mental health issues and the the work becomes the way to cope it's like getting rid of the pillars and you just narrow down to only focusing on the mental health and as much empathy as there is in this book and tender writing I think that it would be you know the the work itself would benefit from an outward look and empathy at someone else and I feel like our society kind of pushes people to like you're only allowed to tell your own story and that that could be a problematic this is obviously a over 300 Page book so a Creator who's really capable of intense work and great things and to see someone like that like just always kind of be telling the next story about their mental health is is a bit sad to me throughout throughout the whole book there's this subplot of the societal pressure in Korea for plastic surgery which is something that I got exposed to in grad school we had a number of Korean students and a lot of the female students were talking about the pressures of their their artwork was about the pressures of the um the plastic surgery industry over there and especially the eyelids that the you know getting the surgery to actually have a a double lid and over the eye and so she she winds up uh going and doing that and I like this little diagram here of how it happens and it's like oh it's so gross I mean just kind of accept who you are and she has a friend telling her that throughout the book but she she kind of doesn't take it and then here uh she's been given a camera and going around taking pictures and again this is one of those things where at first glance you think like well this is just pictures of stuff you know that she's just taken the pictures and you know put a grain tone over them and then then put them in the book but some of them like this look more like that and other ones like this and this like upon closer inspection look more drawn to me or there's like abstraction in these things maybe there was filters run on them I don't know but it leads to a really interesting look and the fact that I don't know that it's right on this boundary between things is um really really interesting to me so there's just that kind of visual appeal throughout the book that really grabs me and like I said these kind of abstract moments there's some montages I didn't even put because there's a lot in this book that I haven't covered that I you know I highly recommend going and getting it for yourself and and seeing it but a lot of atmospheric and emotional effects that are rendered throughout the book with this technique that make it very mysterious in an amazing way so I do think it's a a really really potent work uh It Seems like by the end of the work she's the the author has you know come to some kind of terms with herself but then there's an afterward where it's like ah you know I still deal with mental health health issues and like yeah of course they never go away and that's where I just worry a bit about like the career trajectory of people like this who have been kind of raised in the moment of autobiography in comics and especially the idea that you're not really allowed to tell other people's stories that there's something wrong with that that you can only tell your own it just doesn't seem healthy and it seems to and this is one of the problems I have with this genre in general this is really well-rendered stuff too it seems to keep people locked and this is the the main problem I have with the autobiography genre in general and a societal problem in general is it seems to keep people obsessed with identity who are they this whole book like that Outsider feeling comes from not knowing who you are not knowing where you fit in not knowing which of those pillars you belong to which world you belong to and I just see this over and over in my own students I see it over and over in comics and I don't know what's going on in society that has trapped everyone so heavily in this world view and that's why I have a tendency to you know like be skeptical about even reading books like this because it's just putting me back into something that I find uncomfortable about the way our our world is working right now but there's plenty of works like this that are really powerful Well Done Works of people grappling with the problem and I think that's important as well I just hope that through these works like this work to me seems like there's an outward turning to the the problems of others as well it's not all internally focused on the author's own kind of problems even though that's the majority of it and so I I I'm hoping that as people get more sophisticated with these types of works that that problem will kind of start to go away and that we'll get back to um outward turn empathy and you know being able to tell stories about people whose life you haven't lived that it's not all has to be your experience only So within my skepticism for the genre genre and the problems that I have with the genre and the specifically the subset of the genre that's like here's my Coming of Age mental health Outsider for whatever reason I don't fit the norm kind of story this is one of the more exceptionally well done ones and one of the ones that makes me more hopeful so I would highly recommend this book in Limbo by Deb JJ Lee out from first second and I'm definitely curious to see what Deb JJ Lee does next uh also seeing the use of color on the cover makes me think oh I'd really like to see something in color but I can't imagine how long this must have taken it's a tremendous piece of work so really good definitely recommend it if you enjoy what we're doing here on the channel and want to support us there's two ways to do that the first is through patreon we have two different tiers of Internet action there the first one just gets you early access to the videos second tier get you exclusive access to our pranae day ongoing web experiment and also previews of the books that Sean and I are working on and the money we get from that just helps us buy the books that we review so turn that around into other creators Pockets back into the community and we really appreciate that and if you want to support living the line itself the best thing to do is to support what Sean's doing with living the line publishing so we'll go ahead and take a look at one of his projects now the Exile by Eric Creek is a gorgeously Illustrated Viking Saga of Revenge Eric Creek calls it his Viking Western it's about a guy who's been away on the the war path and is returning home um to some family troubles that have to be resolved and this is told in just this amazing like kind of three color art style that looks like old wood block Cuts or something it's absolutely gorgeous book that you've got to pick up thanks for following along take it away Jack smash that subscribe button and the like button and the bell and then you get them