To bring an end to Part 1 of our feature of Women In Comics, I wanted to bring you a more personal one-shot, in hopes that it will encourage readers of mainstream comics to brave it and branch out. Since leaving manga for graphic novels, I’d have to say that my heart lies more so in the indie scene. Here personal stories come to life in thrilling, emotional, touching ways that have inspired and provided me with a foundation to my creative pursuits. It’s stories like This One Summer by cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki that fuel me as an artist.
*Warning: The following article may contain minor spoilers.
This One Summer is about many things: family relations, love, loss, friendship, and growing up. It’s a telling of an adolescent girl’s yearly trips to a beach town named Awago. Here, friends Rose and Windy, face the challenges of growing up and the realization that life is much more than a set of guidelines and rulesets. In fact, they learn that life can sometimes turn out to be a hot mess.
This graphic novel is a coming of age story. It follows the character Rose who has visited Awago since as long as she can remember. Her best friend Windy is adopted and just over a year younger than Rose. But sometimes, that can make all the difference in the world in your adolescent years. This One Summer sees Rose and Windy discover a world outside the one they’ve known forever: the adult world. And it seems as though, for the first time, both are forced to recognize that life is much more complicated than they thought. The Tamakis bring us along on Rose’s adventure into adulthood as she longs to be someone older, wiser, funnier, and more desirable, while being trapped in the body and mind of a pre-teen, and the notion of taking responsibility for your actions and words.
And in this transition, Rose is also forced to face a reality that has hit every single one of us at some point in our lives: our parents are real human beings too. I think we can almost all relate to that moment when we realized that our teachers had lives outside of school. Or the first time we were disappointed by the flaws in our superiors. Likewise, it comes as quite the adjustment for Rose to see her own parents struggle in their relationship, and for the teenagers she once idolized to have incredible messes of their own.
The book focuses on themes surrounding love, life, loss, and how to cope with all of it. Rose’s rose-tinted world seems to shatter when she realizes her mother and father have been fighting with each other over an attempt to cope after a miscarriage. Rose’s mother suffers throughout the book from a severe depression that projects itself onto her impressionable daughter. Like her mother, Rose must learn to cope with the hard truths before her. This is nicely contrasted with the teenage life Rose idolizes. The more Rose desires to be someone she is not in an attempt to impress one of the teens at the convenience store, she discovers even the teenagers aren’t invulnerable. As she tries to wrap her head around unwanted pregnancies, teenage hormones, and a father that eventually abandon’s the family vacation home, Rose discovers that her world isn’t so black and white, and that a lot of the time there’s no easy solution to a problem.
As Rose struggles to find her own voice in the situation, she watches as her mother nearly drowns in her own sorrow. All Rose has to lean on is Windy, someone who, having grown up in a very dissimilar situation, has a more understanding, open view about all of it. Rose’s journey to understanding both her place in the family and the world is a raw, honest, and touching one, and hopefully brings clarity to the reader that engages with it.
Guys! I’m off on holidays for the next few weeks. Hopefully I can do some write ups for you (I’m still fairly busy, but man, I’ve read oh so much!) and plan for them to post in the new year. Wish me luck!
I hope all of you are well <3 I miss the tumblr-verse but I’ll be back!
Just finished listening to Native Peoples of North America by The Great Courses, narrated by Professor Daniel M. Cobb on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free.
