45 Days Of CCS, #7: Jarad Greene

If there's a single word to describe Jarad Greene's work, it's focused. From the very first time I met him at SPX years ago, it was clear that he had found his niche doing memoir-inflected young adult and middle- grade comics. While his comics have big supporting casts, the books revolve around his stand-in protagonists. This is especially true for his middle-grade comics A-Okay and his new one, A For Effort. In the former, Greene's Jay Violet character tries to come to terms with his severe acne and his dawning understanding that he's asexual. In the new book, Jay struggles with academic expectations and how a theater class is taking him out of his comfort zone. 

Once again, there's a big cast of characters for him to bounce off of, but no one else has any kind of well-developed character arc. This is meant as more of an observation than a criticism because most YA and MG books tend to focus on friendships and relationships more than anything else. For Jay, those are all secondary concerns. Where Greene excels is in providing both fine details regarding his protagonist's desires and a lot of colorful side details to accentuate the plot. In A For Effort, Greene builds the structure of the book around Jay's class schedule. Geometry and Biology are struggles, but it's being placed in a theater class that really flummoxed him--especially since he was looking for an easy "A."

Jay navigates new friends, like the studious Cepos and arts-oriented Frida and Marin, as well as the overachieving, handsome, and charming Paul. The hypercompetitive nature of the school, even for frosh, becomes more of a subplot than the focus of the narrative. While grades (especially with pressure from his parents) are a source of stress, the real story of the narrative is not just Jay discovering the joy of trying something new but not worrying about being great at it, it's also using this newfound confidence to assert his own agency with his parents and his friends. Visually, Greene's art straddles the line between typical MG art and something that's a bit cartoonier and more expressive. I wish it had been possible to do this in black & white because Greene's line is compelling enough on its own to not need color. Color in this book is fairly perfunctory, serving to add depth and weight to some pages (ala Raina Telgemeier) but not really doing much for the narrative itself or conveying emotion. 

It's interesting that with his books having this individual focus, that some of Greene's recent mini-comics have gone in another direction. Everyday Friend is about the concept of having a "best friend" (which Greene says he's not sure he's ever had) vs. an "everyday friend" (a concept his sister told him about, where it's someone you see all the time). Greene notes he's had many of those, but that they also tend to fall by the wayside thanks to work or simply diverging paths. In Tunnel To Dreamland, Greene uses a fun fantasy backdrop to explore the tunnel vision he used to achieve his lifelong goal: being a cartoonist. That focus I saw when he was still at CCS served him well, making him one of the more significant success stories from the school with three books to his name at a young age. However, he candidly reveals that in so doing, he had to sacrifice human connection and love--"no person to share it all with." He concludes by saying (through a metaphor of coming out a tunnel into the sun) that things are shifting. I'll be curious to see how this changes his work in the future.