Thanks to barnesandnoble.com for the above cover image.

Early in American Widow, a recently released hardcover original graphic novel from writer Alissa Torres and artist Sungyoon Choi, the reader might come to some incorrect conclusion.  Is this awkward narrative with its stammering pace the result of a writer still finding her voice and entering the field of comic book writing by tackling a graphic novel right out of the batter’s box?  The reader would be wrong.  Everything about American Widow that feels too different and mostly wrong when compared to what many think of as a comic book is a deliberate choice.  This comic book focuses on the intensely private, internal sufferings of individual that fits into the pain most of the world felt seven years ago.

Alissa Rosenberg-Torres is a widow.  On Monday, September 10, 2001, her late husband, Luis Eduardo “Eddie” Torres, a former illegal immigrant from Columbia, began his dream job at Cantor-Fitzgerald, a global financial services firm, located in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  A day later, September 11, 2001, Eddie plunged to his death after a hijacked airplane struck the North Tower.  Suddenly Alissa was “9/11 widow,” seven and half months pregnant with her and Eddie’s unborn son.  American Widow is the story of Eddie and Alissa’s courtship and a remembrance of both the immediate impact and long term complications of his death and the 9/11 attacks, as Alissa finds herself a small ship adrift in a sea of competing bureaucracies, envy, mourning, new motherhood, patriotism, and politics.

American Widow is so deeply personal that reading it for leisure or entertainment will leave the reader feeling uncomfortable.  It’s not that this graphic novel can’t be engaging, even enthralling.  American Widow simply goes places most of us don’t ever want to go, although all of us will endure times of grief.  Ms. Torres brings us to the place where people, as they say, wallow in self-pity, but really losing someone so connected to you (such as a spouse or child) makes you want to just stop living in society at large.  You want to lie down all day and not only let numbness wash over you, but also to allow that numbness to take over everything.  What makes American Widow an exceptional, noteworthy work of comics non-fiction is that she succeeds in conveying to us both her sorrow and also placing us in the context of her loss as part of a larger tragic event.

Torres’ partner in American Widow is new comics artist talent, Sungyoon Choi.  Drawing in a style that recalls Daniel Clowes’ marvelous Ghost World graphic novel, Choi captures the diversity of the human face and figure and the variety of environments from NYC to Mexico to South America to Hawaii with the eye of a National Geographic photographer.  As a storyteller, Choi’s imagination presents a visual catalog of human emotions and storytelling moods that is impressive and translates Torres’ writing into a graphic narrative that is potent and is recognizably human story.

Back in the 1990’s, it was trendy for fans, reviewers, and critics to mock the burgeoning autobiographical comics movement.  The negativity could not overshadow what the best creators of autobiographical comics did and that was present attention-grabbing individual stories that show us what is common in the human condition.  That’s American Widow.

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