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Lucky Vol 2 No 2

By Henry Chamberlain
August 18, 2008 - 09:07

 

The first few pages of  the latest issue of Gabrielle Bell's Lucky finds her away from her familiar New York surroundings and on the road on a book tour.  She picks up  where many of us left off, the release of her 2007 collection of Lucky. I bought her book and reviewed it here at Comic Book Bin after her mesmerizing reading at Fantagraphics Books in Seattle.

Studying her observations of Seattle's Capitol Hill, my bohemian stomping grounds, it provided some insight. Gabrielle is excited, in her recollections, to just eat at the "grab and go" Dick's burger joint but her group wants a place to sit. They decide on a chic bistro, despite Gabrielle's skepticism, and are shown the door when they don't have ID's since it's also a bar. The last panel has the guy in the group, in his trucker cap, who wasn't impressed with Dick's, finally seated at a diner. He stares down at Gabrielle's poker face: "I'm glad I'm traveling with you guys and not some asshole cartoonists." You're left to fill in the blanks. As for me, I would have gone to Dick's.

Gabrielle often leaves it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. What she does suggest is that she's stuck with her peer group and she's doing the best she can. As individuals within her group, they can often surprise her but, in general, not so much. There is this wonderful ambiguity throughout. While an ironic comeback usually does the trick, a desire to connect is also undeniable.

Lucky: On the Subway.

What Bell is doing best is chronicling her generation to a certain extent. The fact is, she is story telling first and foremost. But she's also expressing the bittersweet joy of youth: all that energy to burn (or waste), fresh memories of childhood, struggling to succeed among all the lotus eaters and all in the age of Rupert Murdoch's Myspace where being a narcissistic underachiever is the standard without the irony. Bell tries to join in on the "fun" and gets her own home page out of a need to connect but quickly discovers the experience is more alienating than anything else.

Maybe you're having a different experience. You're free to fill in the blanks as you please. What is appealing about Bell is that she isn't pushing her view onto you. With her gentle delivery, both in her writing and in her understated line work, she can basically be as caustic and anti-social as she wants and our response comes down to a knowing nod. If Bell could get the Apple guy to deactivate the airport card in her Mac book, and cut her off from the internet and the rest of the world, she would do it. The Apple guy can't but he understands. His advice is to deal with it, turn off the computer now and then and take a walk once in awhile.

Either a walk or maybe riding bikes with her friend, Tom, will help. Gabrielle expresses her existential angst fully in a look back to a bike ride to Roosevelt Island where, through Tom and Gabrielle's eyes, monsters lurk after a horrible experiment conducted by Theodore Roosevelt's younger crazy brother. Whoever actually lives on Roosevelt Island, in Gabrielle's world, can all be fancifully dismissed as being a bunch of zombie robots. 

The arty bunch back in Brooklyn aren't much help in producing some life's blood into Gabrielle's veins. To her plea for substance, they offer knitting or maybe making a chair. Finally, they decide they all should go fishing since one of them knows how to cut a fish's spinal cord so it'll stop flopping around once it's caught. The painful truth is that growing up is painful, full of awkward poses and dreadful pretension. No wonder Gabrielle finds it necessary to return to a memory she saved for herself when she was older of a tranquil summer's day when she was eleven. Just her floating in a pond. That alone sounds pretty pretentious but, in Gabrielle's hands, it makes sense.




   

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12