Review: The Colors Trilogy by Kim Dong Hwa

Graphic novels occupy a strange cultural space -- on one hand, they've been championed as "real" books, even (gasp) "literature" for more than 20 years in some circles, and on the other, they're still regarded as "just" comics by many folks (and not just older ones). The 6th edition of Robert DiYanni's gigantic (and ubiquitous?) Literature anthology includes several comic strips and graphic-novel excerpts, careful to explain that "graphic novels" are superior to "just" comics, because they eschew superheroes and the like, making them superior, of course.

This is all pretty much hogwash.

Some graphic novels are about superheroes, and some "just" comics are not. Some comic strips are literary and artistic gems worthy of the same literary consideration as, say, a Basho haiku (I'm looking at you, Bill Watterson!), and some are repetitive, simplistic crap. Some graphic novels get Pulitzers, but more deserve consideration for that kind of honor than get it. Several decades into the genre's maturity, I'm astonished that we're still having trouble figuring out what their cultural role is -- or should be. (Then again, shorter-form comic books have been out for many, many decades, and their cultural role is both disputed and, frequently, unfairly pigeonholed.)

Here's what I think about graphic novels (and related genres): Some of them are wonderful, and some of them are not. Some of them are complex works of visual and literary art, and some of them are not. Just like some poems suck, and some are masterpieces. Just like some short stories exalt us, and some flop.

Kim Dong Hwa's Colors trilogy is wonderful, a complex work of visual and literary art, a masterpiece that exalts us. He is a household name in Korea for his long career in manhwa (the Korean word for comics, analogous to the Japanese word "manga"), but this trilogy has only been available in the U.S. for a couple of years. The translation, by Lauren Na, is graceful; she has chosen to preserve certain Korean words and phrases, identifying these (along with certain colloquialisms) in brief footnotes that, surprisingly, are not at all intrusive.

The trilogy is, essentially, a coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl's romantic and sexual awakening, but it is neither prurient nor sensational. (That said, it is not for children. The subject matter is dealt with tastefully but frankly. If topics like a boy's first wet dream or a girl's discovery of masturbation embarrass you, stay away -- but you'd be missing a beautiful and powerful book. Nothing is graphic.)

OK, "parental advisory" over. This is a remarkable work. I'm more or less late to this bandwagon. Kim's work is roundly praised in North America as well as in his native country, and just flipping through these books will show you why. These three books show how a great artist-writer can use words and pictures as a unique poetry. He tells the story of Ehwa, a young girl growing up in early-20th-century Korea, in a combination of small-panel comic style and whole-page painterly illustrations that manga/manhwa readers have come to expect from the greats. Some of the pictures are so evocative on their own that they are powerful, even taken out context.

The trilogy begins with The Color of Earth. Ehwa and her widowed mother run the local village tavern. Their relationship is close, loving and open. The local men gossip about the beautiful widow and flirt with her, to her daughter's dismay, but she handles both with grace but a no-nonsense attitude. Ehwa, age 7 at the book's opening, grows into a young woman and develops her first crushes. Meanwhile, her mother falls in love with a handsome traveling salesman -- called "the picture man" because of his gift with calligraphy.

In the second book, The Color of Water, Ehwa has become a young woman. With the picture man still roaming into and out of her mother's life, she begins to wonder about her own romantic future. Torn between delight in her developing beauty and the shy awkwardness of teenagehood, Ehwa falls in love herself. As anyone knows, "the course of true love never did run true," and an old lecher's jealousy enforces a separation.

In the third book, The Color of Heaven, Ehwa and her mother pine in their own ways for their own wandering loves, dealing with uncertainty and doubting their choices. It's no spoiler to say that the ending is a happy one, at last.

I know, I  know: It sounds banal. Trust me: No mere summary of the plot can truly do justice to the trilogy, because the plot is almost incidental in this lyrical work that is as much a poem as a story. Kim's stated purpose is to honor the strong Korean women of his mother's generation, who faced social limitations with graceful strength. The picture of the society of the time is nostalgic but not utopian; you get a sense of the very real hardships underlying the story's context. None of this intrudes, however.

Ehwa is an appealing touchstone character. As our way into this world and this story, she is refreshingly naive but not stupid. Sometimes immature and selfish, sometimes generous and kind, she is delightful to watch grow up. But my favorite character is her mother. I loved her flashes of temper, her gentle humor, and the great tenderness and honesty in her dealings with her daughter, even on the most sensitive topics. Her love story is the more fascinating to me, and I think I was as happy to see the Picture Man round the gate as she is.

Rating: Enthusiastically recommended

Review: The Search for WondLa (or, You can't judge a cliche by its cover)

Let me get out my soapbox: People are always defending the most awful dreck by arguing, "But it's just for kids!" Thus revoltingly stupid movies and sitcoms survive and thrive, on the assumption that kids don't know any better.

This is balderdash. Kids can only learn to like what they are given, and if that is the laugh-track-ridden mugging of the Nickelodeon afternoon TV schedule, then that is what their intellects and palates adapt to. Do you want your children to learn to love crap? Of course you don't. You don't have to be a yuppie and sign them up for immersive Japanese lessons so they can read The Tale of Genji in the original. Trust someone who's spent many hours studying more or less useless things: That's a decision only an adult can make for herself. But on the other hand, if you steer them toward fresh and delicious things to read and watch, then they--no, all of us--will be the better for it.

That said, The Search for WondlLa would be a charming, if sometimes stilted YA speculative fiction adventure were it not for one teensy, niggling detail: The entire ending is among the most cliched in the history of science fiction.

Now's the time for a spoiler alert -- if the Amazon.com reviewers can be believed (they can't), the ending of this book is considered a "twist," though many of you will have guessed what it is just by my calling it "among the most cliched" endings in all SF. But if you really want to preserve some measure of mystery, stop reading here. No, really, please do, and it's not just about the spoiler. Go read some science fiction, maybe watch a clutch of cult SF movies, too. By the time you're done, you'll probably be able to guess the big "twist" without any spoilers for me.


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I enjoyed the heck out of Tony DiTerlizzi's Spiderwick Chronicles. The series walked a difficult line between spare, exciting prose and the evocative tone of high fantasy--sometimes evoking dread, sometimes wonder. The protagonists were believably real, and the world we saw (literally) through their eyes was funny and scary by turns. It was less weighty than many others in the genre, but it was damn good fun, and my daughter Hannah and I devoured it.

In tackling science fiction, DiTerlizzi hangs onto that other genre, in some ways, chiefly the inspiration it takes from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, to which both the title and the cover art (by DiTerlizzi) allude. Nonetheless, DiTerlizzi seems pretty comfy with the trappings of SF, inventing or adapting a clutch of technologies, species and architectures that immerse us in this brave new world. Among his best creations is the ecology of the planet, Orbona, itself, with its outsized sand bugs, its movable forests and its adorable, overgrown tardigrades.

The premise is simple and instantly engaging: A 12-year-old girl, raised by a robot "mother" in an underground Sanctuary, is thrust into the dangerous surface world when a huntsman destroys her home. Eva Nine's twofold quest is to evade the tenacious hunter and to find other humans; she is inspired by "WondLa," a scrap of cardboard with a drawing of a girl, an adult and the Tin Man, er, a robot. OK, you got me, but there: I already gave you a spoiler warning. The scrap is, of course, a partially destroyed cover from Baum's book, and DiTerlizzi parallels Oz in some meaningful ways. A girl in search of her home is aided by a robot who needs a heart and an earthy friend who lacks a brain. Except he doesn't; I expect that DiTerlizzi posits the two chief companions of Dorothy, er, Eva Nine not as lacking those essential parts, but as the two sides of an archetypal dilemma: Head versus Heart, and more broadly (and less Baumishly), Technology versus Nature.

 And there's where things go wrong. WondLa is just too high-concept. At times, it has the feel of the charming adventure that it is clearly meant to be. But other times? Well, you can almost hear the pitch meeting: "And the robot learns to love, and the alien learns to value science...." The book sometimes feels forced, as if DiTerlizzi is compelled to fit his plot and characters into the path that his initial plan laid out, the path that leads to the Symbolism and Life Lessons that he wants us to take away. At the risk of sounding like that Scarecrow stand-in, Rovender Kitt, the book just isn't organic enough. You may think that "inorganic" is a good thing for a SF novel, but you'd be wrong. The beings and vehicles in a science fiction book can be as artificial as you like, all gleaming futuristic plastic or dystopian black metal, but the work itself has to feel as if it really happened, as if it grew as haphazardly as a living thing. The planning behind a spaceship--or an underground Sanctuary habitat--can be apparent, but the planning behind a book should not.

The tone and language of WondLa sometimes falters for the same reason. DiTerlizzi tells us, over and over, about Kitt's "backward-bending legs" and blue skin, as if he's worried we might forget the guy's an alien. MUTHR robot has a single wheel, we are constantly reminded, and her wire-veined fingers are tipped with silicon. It goes on and on--I suspect that DiTerlizzi isn't that comfortable writing (or reading?) science fiction, and so he feels the need to point at these science-fictiony details.

His intended readers maybe haven't read a lot of SF. They may not chuckle to themselves, long about page 50, and wonder if this alien landscape is really Earth. I mean, c'mon--the indigenous lifeforms could almost be huge variations of familiar Earth microorganisms. But really, it's so obvious that it can't possibly be true. As the book goes on, DiTerlizzi seems to be trying harder and harder to dissuade our guesses: The planet's called Orbona, so it's obviously not Earth! The aliens colonized the planet generations ago, so it's obviously NOT Earth! And, you know, it's just, hey, what's that over there? I tried to tell myself that a writer as accomplished as DiTerlizzi wouldn't be quite so conspicuous, wouldn't rely on quite so hoary a genre cliche. I was oh, so wrong.

When Eva Nine and Rovender Kitt uncover a pair of large stone lion statues, I started laughing. Out loud. And not in a good way. Two big stone lions, buried in the sand, with steps between them: That's the New York City Public Library, right? I could actually hear Charlton Heston's voice in my head: "You maniacs! You blew it up!"

Young readers probably will be surprised to find that this is, indeed, Earth. They probably haven't seen Planet of the Apes. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't excuse an adult, a good writer at that, taking narrative shortcuts to make some kind of point. Having Eva Nine grow up underneath a ravaged Earth is fine, and leaves the reader with many questions to pursue: What happened to the humans? Is she the only one left? If not, how will she find the others? These are more or less some of the same questions DiTerlizzi wants on our minds anyway, so I'm baffled why he is compelled to shroud them in a fakey mystery about the nature of this place. It's part of the overall problem I discussed before: Artificiality. He wants a big twist, a big shockeroo at the end, so he screws around with unconvincing hints and false leads to try to get one. Just because he gets away with it among newcomers to the genre, doesn't mean he should get away with it. Boo.

This crucial failing--the book's tendency toward arbitrariness--is all the more noteworthy because so much about it is so good. Eva herself is a resourceful and engaging protagonist, and the supporting cast have some excellent moments, as well. (DiTerlizzi betrays a tin ear for dialogue at times, however, which is part of the book's main failing--their conversations are too clearly author-driven, not always character-driven.) My favorite of the secondary characters is the water bear/tardigrade Otto, a gentle behemoth who communicates with Eva telepathically. My least favorite--and this is a major problem--is Besteel, the hunter. As an antagonist, he's less complicated than the average Bond foe. Like Oddjob, he exists only to be scary, though DiTerlizzi tries here and there to inject some complexity with hints as to his motivation. (Note my use of the verb "tries.")

If you're a fan of DiTerlizzi, you may like The Search for WondLa, but please do me a favor. Go to the library and read a selection of classic science fiction, too. I have a feeling that this is going to be a lot of folks' introduction to the genre, and that's a darn shame.


Status: Regretfully Not Recommended

Defining Terms: Potter Stewart Was Right!

What, exactly, is "young adult fiction"? How is it distinguished from "children's books" or "middle-grades literature"? Where are the lines between the categories? Who draws those lines? What, pray tell, is "speculative fiction"? What is "fantasy," and what is "science fiction," and how are they different?

Answering these questions: Bad idea. Any definitions are going to make somebody mad, which is fine. Making people angry is not such a bad thing. But more importantly, definitions are going to be reductive. No sooner would we define "young adult fiction," than some book would come along, a cool book, a book that 13-year-olds love, but a book that wouldn't fit the definition. Drawing lines can be very helpful (and, in some cases, necessary --  say, around ZIP codes). But boundaries keep things out, as well as in.

So I'm going to take the coward's way out. I'm going to follow Justice Potter Stewart. You may not know the name, but you've heard his famous response to an obscenity case. In 1964, asked to address the attempted ban of a movie, Stewart refused to define "hard-core pornography," asserting, "I know it when I see it." (He went on to deny the censorship of the movie.)

So, let's assume, like the pragmatic Justice Stewart, that while we may be hard-pressed to define "young adult fiction," still we know it when we see it. Similarly, we know speculative fiction when we see it.

That said, debating whether a particular book is or isn't for young adults (or children, or adolescents, or tweens) is good fun -- the rhetorical door is always open. Like Justice Stewart, such definitions are valid as they apply to individual examples. Apply away....