GRAPHIC FICTION: SkimBy Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki Walker Books, 148pp. £9.99
‘BEING SIXTEEN is officially the worst thing I’ve ever been.” So says Kimberly Keiko Cameron, also known as Skim. She is half-Japanese, overweight, introspective, too cynical to fit in with the “normal” kids at her private Catholic school in Canada but not cynical enough to maintain a veneer of cool aloofness. She is an unwilling outsider, as demonstrated by two poignant flashbacks: at the age of six, “I was in the school play and they ran out of parts for people. And so I was The Night Sky”; at the age of 13, she is invited at the last minute to the birthday party of a popular classmate and spends most of the evening upstairs watching television with the only other Asian girl there – that is, until the two of them are rushed out of the house with cries of “Fire drill!”, and left outside to make their own way home while the others continue the celebration. The casual cruelty of youth is never directed quite so blatantly at Kim again, but it is a threatening presence throughout the graphic novel, something she can never quite forget.
Skimis narrated by Kim's diary entries; clear as it is that she feels more deeply and sees more clearly than the people who surround her, the authors have resisted the temptation to make her preternaturally knowing or precociously self-aware. Rather, she is an utterly believable teenager, with all of the self-absorption, self-deception, and inarticulacy that entails. She fumbles clumsily to express herself in words, and we see her crossed-out false starts and the way she changes her mind about what she will write down, carefully editing even the story she tells herself.
Kim lives through some unusual events: she breaks her right arm, attends a combination Wiccan circle/AA meeting, learns of the suicide of a classmate's boyfriend, falls in love with her English teacher, Ms Archer. And yet what is extraordinary and very refreshing about Skimis how ordinary it all is. Everyday life keeps on going, with all its messy incompleteness: biology class, shabby diners, inconvenient rain.
The grand passions must co-exist with much less grand things, and their grandeur seems almost unreal in the face of all that pettiness. Kim always seems to be looking down or to the side, as if averting her gaze from life, and this tentativeness is reflected even when she is not on the page; the images in the panels are decentred, as if we the readers were looking at them from the corners of our eyes.
No medium can capture the sense of being plunged into another person's mind like comics can, and Skimis the perfect example, its words and pictures and storytelling so unified in conjuring Kim's world that it comes as a surprise to see it has two creators rather than one. Alongside and reinforcing the off-centre placement of the panels is the subtle use of narration: there is a gap between what we see happening and what Kim thinks about what happens, and what she wants to think about what happens. The careful layering of perception, desire and reality is handled so deftly that the effect is almost subliminal. Jillian Tamaki's art is deceptively simple, her fluid lines fading to grey, or black, or white, to foreground what we need to see in detail – again, so subtly and so naturally that what you notice is not the skill with which Tamaki uses the technique, but the shifting of Kim's attention signalled by it.
Stories by or about adolescents have a tendency towards the didactic, and it could be said that there are lessons in Skim, but they are too complex to be easily summarised. The Tamakis have done the hardest and most rewarding thing an artist can do: they have captured the texture of real life and made it into something beautiful.
Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer and co-author, with Ben Murnane, of Dublin on a Shoestring. She blogs about comics at puritybrown.blogspot.com