Read This: Johnny Hiro

Fred Chao

I’ve been on a low ebb with my comics reading lately, but when a copy of Tor’s collection of the first three issues of Fred Chao‘s Johnny Hiro turned up recently, I flipped through the opening pages, and I was immediately hooked by Johnny’s fight against the giant lizard monster that came all the way over from Japan to smash the wall of his apartment and kidnap his girlfriend Mayumi. Things get even more delightfully weird from there: The panel I’ve sampled above is from a story where Johnny and Mayumi go to the Metropolitan Opera and run into somebody they knew back in Japan… and his enemies… Then there’s the big finale, an extended parody of the sitcom Night Court with Judge Judy replacing Harry Anderson—which even has a callback to Mayor Bloomberg’s involvement in the giant lizard monster saga.

I love Chao’s simple, straightforward line style, and his visual pacing is superb; so many gags in the script get an extra jolt from his ability to know just how much artwork to give them. His celebrity characters are almost never just walk-ons, but actually serve to drive the story forward; there’s a sequence where Grand Puba, who just happens to be a good friend of Johnny’s, is telling a story about the time he and LL Cool J ran into David Byrne, that winds up punctuating an emotional point absolutely vital to Johnny’s development at that point in the series. Even things that initially bugged me early into Chao’s storyline—specifically, Mayumi’s broken English—become essential components of a deeply thoughtful exploration of a young couple trying to find their bearings. I’m keeping an eye out for the next volume, and Fred Chao is totally high up on the short list of my dream illustrators for future ebook projects and Twitter avatars.

1 August 2012 | read this |