Challenging Boundaries

Jillian Tamaki, the Caldecott- and Eisner-winning author of This One Summer (2014) and SuperMutant Magic Academy (2015), said in a 2015 interview with Paste that she was never sure where her books could fit in. This healthy dilemma perhaps comes from the diverse themes and styles in her work: "I always try to put diversity in my figures just because it's more interesting. And I think visibility is powerful, as somebody who grew up mixed race in a very, very white part of Canada, Calgary, which is very different now." Tamaki's most recent publication, Boundless, a collection of nine short stories, attests to her strong interest in diversity and visibility, as she weaves together throughout the book varying visual treatments, a wide range of genres, a proliferating set of perspectives, and interesting and often confusing interplays between words and images.

"World-Class City," the first story of the collection, is an especially apt choice for the book's opening in this regard. Drawn with crude strokes against pale yellow-green background, the story's words and images appear sideways. Consequently, readers must change their mode of reading and turn either the book or their head in order to read. This physical discomfort is further compounded by the ambiguity of the story as a whole. While the unnamed, faceless narrator narrates her plan to live in a World-Class City, readers are confronted with seemingly irrelevant images that do not appear to have any clear connection to the texts of the story. When the narrator declares that "the dogs are so cute in the World-Class City" and "the girls are so fine in this World-Class City," for instance, readers witness a figure of a naked woman who has wings growing out of her chest.

Readers, who are quick to interpret visual narrative by attributing meanings to the ways in which images and words come together, will be easily frustrated. Until the very last page of the story, the theme is vague, the relationship between words and images is enigmatic to say the least, and readers are left wondering what and how to make sense of what they have just viewed and heard. Tamaki, through this challenging first story of the book, warns her readers they will have to resist what they have grown used to as readers in order to fully appreciate her work.

The ambiguity of stories and Tamaki's deliberate visual treatments in fact serve an important aesthetic purpose, helping Tamaki convey her messages to readers without being too didactic. "The Clairfree System," for instance, questions the fraught relations among beauty, money, and womanhood by creating a narrator whose telling is motivated by an attempt to sell a skin-care product that will work for "you": "We aim to simplify. While we can't legally guarantee results, I can link you to hundreds of testimonials." Although the use of the first-person and second-person pronouns facilitates an intimate conversational setting between the story and readers, bringing readers closer to the narrator, this bond is simultaneously satirized by a pyramid scheme script layered into the narrative: "Some are shocked I'm so upfront about my commissions. We women are taught it's rude to discuss money. Hello? That's life! We all have bills to pay and families to feed."

Meanwhile, the dark, colorless panels are filled with images that are perplexing and disconnected—a circle of women holding hands, a beautifully drawn mother and child drifting in space, and a baby sleeping in a crib. These somber images make a stark contrast with the enticing tone of the sales person, the narrator, and the wonder the product has done to the beauty of so many women. Even as the frequent shift to the communal "we" in the narrative and the familiarity of the sales presentation continue to hold tightly readers' attention, images add to the story an eerie feeling that is hard to make sense of. This unnerving story about beauty and money, coupled with images that unsettle readers, however...