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Many publishers get their books printed in China, which means these new tariffs are hitting them hard. And small press publishers are the most vulnerable. Fieldmouse Press has a shipment of printed books on the way to the U.S., but now suddenly has deal with new import tariffs. Please consider helping them out. As government services are taken from us and tariffs are raised, more and more of us…

Exploring The Concept of Intentionality in Art Comics – by Kimball Anderson 

My partner @earnestattempts​ just published a super insightful essay on art comics on comics crit/journalism website SOLRAD - read it at the source link! If you don't know what "art comics" even means, this is a great place to start, and if you love and/or make artsy/poetry/abstract comics, then you’ll probably enjoy digging into Kimball’s analysis of how readers perceive artists’ intentions:

“When a piece of art looks like lines and shapes thrown against a page in a frenetic rush, how do you know it has meaning rather than just being random visual noise? When a comic is built out of abstract shapes and loosely connected words, how do you trust that it has a purpose behind it?

Much of how we appreciate narrative media is based on how much we trust that the person who has made it knows what they are doing. In comics, having a slick and well-designed visual style is a well-worn method to earn this trust. It feels like the artist’s intention is fully realized, and everything they are doing is what they meant to do. But in Art Comics, it’s a common practice to embrace messiness and ambiguity, and do away with the style of clean lines and clear shapes. So how do these artists maintain trust and show that there is intentionality to their work?”

The Burden of Growing Up Too Soon In Kaori Ozaki’s ‘the gods lie’

CW: This review will discuss themes of child neglect and death.

ALSO: SPOILERS!

Published in 2016, the gods lie is a brilliant self-contained single volume of manga with a powerful story about the complexities of childhood and the death of innocence. In it, soccer-loving sixth-grader Natsuru Nanao happens to strike up an unlikely friendship with the reserved and often whispered about Rio Suzumura. Natsuru is happy-go-lucky, living much without a care, until one fateful summer where he skips out on soccer camp and learns more about Rio and a dark secret that threatens everything.

Kaori Ozaki, also the creator of other series that center on young adults, such as the more recent The Golden Sheep and Immortal Rain which introduced Western audiences to her work when Tokyo Pop was flying high in the early 2000s, created something really special here with this manga. Ozaki’s work in this single volume features a narrative that speaks to the parentification, the need for support systems, and the toil of emotional labor that is often placed on girl children in families that is not always found in literature, much less comics.

The major spoiler in the gods lie is that Natsuru stumbles upon Rio Suzumura’s secret: she and her young brother have been abandoned by their no-good father, and their only living relative, their elderly grandfather who lived with them, has passed away unexpectedly at home. With a mother that left years before, the reserved — and often whispered about — Rio Suzumura took it upon herself to bury her grandfather in the garden, all to keep up appearances. She does so with the fear that, if she doesn’t, she and her brother will be taken in by child protective services and separated from one another, which means that the only home she’s known, her grandfather’s house, will be gone. It is a terrible weight for an eleven-year-old to carry, one she hasn’t had the time to fully process, as evidenced through the several events by which she’s moved to tears throughout the book.

Grown-ups Are Flawed  

Rio’s situation is a terrible one, yet it is one that is more common than we may think. When Natsuru first asks about the whereabouts of Rio’s father, she tells him that her father is a fisherman and he’s gone for long stretches of time but sends money home. Later, near the end of the manga, it is revealed that Rio’s father is actually still in the local area. Going fishing in Alaska for crab was just an excuse: especially since he’s just been boozing it up at the nearby bars and intentionally ignoring this family. This is even more evident in the last pages of the manga when he’s arrested by the proper authorities.

Rio’s father was selfishly thinking of just himself. His excuse? He was “sick of living at home”.  Placing himself before his family certainly made things worse and increased the strain on his oldest child.  Consequently, this leads to the parentification of Rio. Parentification is “a form of emotional abuse or neglect where a child becomes the caregiver to their parent or sibling” as defined here by Jennifer A. Engelhardt in an academic paper titled The Developmental Implications of Parentification: Effects on Childhood Attachment. The one who has caused the harm here is Rio’s father, yet so much of the blame lands on Rio, the sixth-grade girl who buried her grandfather by herself and kept her family going.

Thinking back to the title of the work: the gods lie, If we substitute “gods” for “adults”, we can link this to the manga’s narrative of children finding out that adults truly are not without flaws. Adults make mistakes that often cause great strife in their everyday lives, upheaving everything familiar for the children in their care. Children often have to pick up the slack of the failings of their parents. Poor Rio was doing everything she could to keep the world’s prying eyes off her father — as a way to try and protect him. The truth of the matter, though, is it really was she who should have been protected and cared for.

As shown in a flashback in the later half of the manga, Rio’s father abandoned his family under the guise of going away on work trips to earn money for the family. In the scene where he announces his plans of “work” and asks Rio to keep it together– to run the household — she grumbles that she does most of the work anyway. This gives us insight that he, as an adult, hasn’t done a very good job of handling their home and allowing his daughter a safe place to grow up and thrive. When the truth of her abandonment and his daughter’s impromptu burial of her grandfather is revealed, children at school and adults in the neighborhood alike treat Rio poorly. Very little sympathy or compassion is shown for this child who simply tried to make the best of the situation she found herself in.

The Locust Lodge is a new comic running on the SOLRAD website by Derek Van Gieson. It’s described as “a supernatural horror noir centered on special agent Bert Arne,” who is a character from Gieson’s Eel Mansion graphic novel. It just kicked off earlier this month, so it should be easy to catch up on.