Gaijin

Possibly one of most disappointing reads so far this year, flipping through this book I had a lot of high hopes. This is an important part of American History and the artistic style is not something I see in graphic novels every day - it intrigued me! And not to say that the art really isn't skilled, or that the story is complete crap or deals with the material in an offensive or unacceptable way, it's just a mess.

Looking through the author's biography in the back of the book, I'm not really surprised that things went the way they did. Matt Faulkner obvious has a lot of talent, but you can tell that all he's written to this point are Children's Picture books. Not to knock picture books, but they are a completely different medium and this being in the teen section - even the youngest in that demographic are pretty far removed from his previous work.

To be perhaps overly specific, the frames were too large, the text was too big, the end felt extremely rushed and none of the characters felt really fleshed out. The bullies in particular felt like caricatures that were fulfilling a role and not actual people. Faulkner (and or his publishers) also doesn't seem to have a clear idea why this is a teen story. Besides the rather random accusations that his mother is cheating on his father, there is nothing in here that strikes me terribly T rated. Personally, I think the book would have worked much better as an all ages picture book.