laura_seabrook | Two Graphic Novels

I've been holding onto a couple of graphic novels from the library until I did a post about them here. They're both about identity and heritage and I'm impressed with both. As I'm about to start a graphic novel that touches on that later this year, I think that they're important.

The first is The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. This seems to be an adaptation of a 2003 film by the author (look, the official site!) using stills from the film. And just who is Long Tack Sam? That's the central question of the book, and the key in which the author seeks to answer her own questions about identity and heritage. Ann Marie Fleming was born in Okinawa and is a Canadian citizen; her parents were born in Australian and Hong Kong; and her grandmother was half-Austrian and her father was Long Tack Sam.

It seems that Long Tack Sam was an internationally famous stage magician, though unlike contemporaries like Houdini and Blackstone, is seldom heard about nowadays. I liked this work, because it's not a straight biopic - several versions of Sam's story are given, differing in minor and major details - reflecting different versions of the truth. I hope to see the film some time on SBS.

The second graphic Novel is American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. Yang has a deceptively simple line style which I found compelling. The novel has three threads that finally intersect in the last two chapters. The first concerns a version of the Monkey King story (more familiar to most as the TV show Monkey!). The second is about Jin Wang (pictured on the cover) who though born in San Francisco had Chinese parents and suffers from discrimination at school. The last thread concerns Danny, an average American high school student and the embarrassing visits of his cousin Chin-Kee.

There is a point to all of this, and it's made in such a succinct way that you can really identify with the characters and get it. I shall look for other graphic novels by Yang as well.