The Eternal Smile
by Joshua Malbin on Oct.15, 2009, under Comics
Several comic book author-artists have used children’s storybook-style drawing to handle adult themes. James Kochalka springs to mind. The Eternal Smile, written by Gene Luen Yang and drawn by Derek Kirk Kim, does it to tell nested stories about fantasy fulfillment. That is, three separate stories, each about fulfilling wishes by wrapping reality in stories.
The first of these, “Duncan’s Kingdom,” is the only one that really misses. It’s sort of a less interesting version of Vanilla Sky where the main character turns out to be dreaming. But the second and third, “Grandpa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile” and “Urgent Request,” are much better. In “Grandpa Greenbax” a greedy cartoon frog tries to exploit the appearance of a miraculous smile in the sky to make money on a new religion. Then the smile cracks open to reveal he’s part of a children’s show, and what he took for greed is really a misinterpretation of a more primal longing. And in “Urgent Request,” the most successful of the three, an unhappy woman sends thousands of dollars she can ill afford to lose to a Nigerian scam artist, an apparently stupid mistake cleverly inverted by the end into an act of self-empowerment.
The art is quite different from story to story: a kind of Prince Valiant pastiche in the first, maybe Peanuts in the second, and int he third bubbleheaded figures that remind me a little of David Cooper’s Crumple.
I’ve included previews of all three below the fold.
Art © Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim, used with permission of First Second Books.
July 13th, 2011 on 11:51 pm
[...] Review of Gene Luen Yang’s previous book, The Eternal Smile, which on the whole I liked better, here. [...]