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 |

Life Stories #11: Alyssa Harad

In this installment of Life Stories, a Beatrice podcast series of interviews with memoirists about their lives and the art of memoir writing, Alyssa Harad discusses Coming to My Senses, the story of how she developed a love for perfume in her mid-30s and the personal transformation that came with it. Interestingly, as she reveals in the interview, she didn’t set out to write a memoir at first—the original plan was that she’d be editing an anthology of some of her favorite writing from the various perfume fan blogs that fueled her own passion for scents. For various reasons, that project didn’t pan out, but the responses to her own writing in the proposal was encouraging enough that she began to tell her own story…

One of the many interesting aspects to this memoir is the education Harad goes through on her path to becoming a perfume connoisseur—it reminded me in some ways of a conversation I’d had a few years back with Barry Smith, the editor of a collection of essays about wine and philosophy. We’d talked about sense memories, and the ability to separate out multiple “notes” from a sensory experience, and the capacity of language to represent that experience and its components—all of which is relevant to our ability to describe what we experience when we smell a particular perfume. And then there’s the question of how we cultivate our ability to perceive and describe such experiences; as Harad writes, when she first started proffering scents for her husband to sample, they either smelled like vanilla (which he liked) or powder (which he didn’t). And I’ll confess that I’m not quite so much better…although, with a little help from Mrs. Beatrice, I am learning.

(Mrs. Beatrice, by the way, was very impressed with Harad’s mental catalogue of perfumes; she’d given me a few favorite notes to mention, and Harad very quickly came up with matching scents—at least one of which, when found at a store the next day, was judged as excellent indeed.)

Listen to Life Stories #11: Alyssa Harad (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

30 July 2012 | life stories |