31 Days Of CCS, #23: Sam Nakahira

Sam Nakahira's development as an artist has been interesting, because while she's clearly headed to a career doing long-form, personal journalistic comics, she's taken the opportunity while at CCS to branch out a little and try different things. It's made her a better cartoonist, in part because her journalistic comics have sometimes been so deeply researched that it didn't leave a lot of room to have fun drawing things. Her mission was to transmit information clearly and succinctly, and that sometimes meant comics that weren't terribly interesting to look at on a purely surface level. 

That's certainly not the case with her selection of minis here. Cursed Hands is absolutely soaking in atmosphere, with black gutters and dense hatching immediately establishing an oppressive backdrop. The story is about a puppetmaker who creates puppets that are so lifelike that the small town she lives in think she's a witch. Her lover leaves after being unable to endure the abuse of the townsfolk. In response, the puppetmaker crafts a doll in the image of her lover so lifelike that it actually comes alive, drawing the attention of the devil. She tempts her with all sorts of things in order to get her hands, but the final confrontation is defiant. This story depended entirely on Nakahira's ability to get across emotion through body language and her ability to draw dolls and puppets. Her rendering is still on the rough side, but the actual cartooning nails every goal. The use of splash pages and unusual close-ups is highly effective in conveying mood as well. 

Copycat is a story that originally appeared in an anthology, but this solo edition similarly uses black gutters to set the story's tone. This one's about an art student named Mei and another student named Katie who befriends her. It doesn't take long for Mei to realize that Katie was starting to copy her sense of fashion, her musical choices, and even her choice of majors. It became clear that Katie wasn't just copying Mei but also trying to replace her. The final pages are chilling and inevitable. In this comic, keeping her character designs relatively simple allowed Nakahira a lot of room to experiment with different facial expressions and work in a horror vein with many of them. The bland friendliness of Katie in particular was cleverly played up as highly unsettling. 

The Quantum Worlds Of Bernice Bing is very much in Nakahira's bailiwick. This is a typically scrupulously-researched biographical comic about abstract expressionist artist Bing that's filled with Nakahira's own reactions and interests. Bing defied categorization, being less interested in getting on the treadmill of an art "career" and the capitalistic and competitive path this demands and much more interested in community outreach. Nakahira relentlessly pursues the hypocrisy and blatant sexism of the fine arts world and holds Bing up as a model for someone who did things on her own terms. 

Visually, Nakahira makes a lot of smart decisions in this comic. Clearly working from photographs and original paintings, Nakahira keeps character design simple. It's naturalistic, but Nakahira is more interested in capturing the essence of her subject rather than attempt to convey a detailed likeness of her subject. More importantly, Nakahira wanted to create a sense of what Bing's use of color was like, flinging colors across the page as though Bing was a wizard. This effect works, as once again Nakahira's goal wasn't to create precise reproductions of these paintings but instead of what it's like to experience them. That use of color makes this comic exciting to look at as well as read, and it's a testament to Nakahira's hard work on both clarifying her line and making her pages more visually striking.  

31 Days Of CCS #5: Sam Nakahira

Sam Nakahira is a young but prolific cartoonist who has already published a lot of comics heading into her first year at the Center for Cartoon Studies. That includes a 100+ page graphic memoir/journalism and several minicomics as she seeks to find her voice as an artist. This is still very much a work in progress, especially from a visual perspective, but all of the building blocks are there. Much of her work to date centers on different aspects of being a fourth-generation Japanese-American. A Japanese Doll is a sparse and poetic meditation on how Americans went from having a friendship doll exchange in the early 20th century to virulent hatred when Pearl Harbor came around. Patriotism quickly mutated into racist jingoism, with a twisted fury turned on Japanese-Americans; this comic notes how the way in which there was a run on destroying these dolls reflected the ways in which Japanese women were thought of us quiet and subservient.

Nakahira's anger is even sharper and more pronounced in Not Your Oriental Fantasy. Here, she calls out the ways in which the fetishization of Asian women is little more than a control fantasy; again, there's that passive doll imagery. Nakahira talks about the trend in America in the last century of Japanese war brides and the idea that they'd be passive, but Nakahira instead notes their powerful agency. They were willing to walk away from their home country, and they were willing to walk away when things got dark in America. Nakahira's use of shadow and imagery is powerful in this comic, viscerally supporting her ideas with a few key images on each page. That clarity of layout was essential in getting her points across.

Disconnection is about a college friend who was otherwise intelligent but was unable to perceive racism either against her (as someone of East Asian descent) or in general. It's a function of privilege and being unable to see how that privilege warps one's worldview. Nakahira admits at the end that she wasn't really sure where she was going with this comic other than to voice frustration with this person on paper, and it shows in how the visuals didn't really add much to the story.

The Astrologer is a different kind of experiment for Nakahira, as she eschews her simpler storytelling techniques and opts for a more poetic and visually dense style. This is fiction about an astrologer who's fading further and further away from reality and her family. Some of the images, especially on the first few pages, are striking in the way Nakahira blends foreground and background images. The shadowy form of the astrologer blending in with the shadows of the night sky is especially beautiful. The more mundane images at the end feel stiff and bland in comparison, and part of this is because Nakahira doesn't quite have a grip on body language and how bodies relate to each other in space.

Her most ambitious comic is Bill's Quiet Revolution, a work of memoir and journalism that delves into the grocer Bill Fujimoto, who was one of the source suppliers for the California Cuisine farm-to-fork revolution. The story begins with Nakahira eating with her mother and openly wondering about how much culture she's lost and how much has suppressed thanks to Japanese people being sent to concentration camps in the US. That was a zero event that affected the lives of every Japanese-American person in the United States at the time and one that still resonates today. In particular, her mom noted that it wasn't uncommon for Japanese-Americans to deliberately distance themselves from their culture; in their case, it meant identifying with Japanese-Hawaiian culture.

That was the background that led Nakahira to discover Bill Fujimoto, who inherited and expanded his father's business as a produce grocer in Northern California. The fascinating thing about the practice is the intersection between capitalism and art. For Fujimoto, the goal wasn't to simply sell as much stuff as possible. Instead, it was to sell the right things and knowing what that meant. In many respects, he was a produce critic and editor, which meant that he was constantly looking for new and interesting small farms and for the freshest, most interesting produce. It meant understanding weather, soil, and many other trends. What he didn't realize is that he was at the center of not just a local food revolution, but the beginning of a trend that would extend not just to restaurants, but to daily living.

Nakahira breaks the story down into his background, his relationship with small farmers, and the mutually beneficial relationship with restaurateurs. Those chefs were looking for ingredients that set their food apart, and Fujimoto's artisanal understanding of food gave them exactly what they needed. There's a scene where a customer is amazed at how good a simple chicken and vegetable dish was, and the chef correctly gives credit to the source. Fujimoto advised and encouraged small farmers to be bold and try new things, and locally-sourced food has been the backbone of both the farm-to-fork restaurant movement, it's had an influence on larger chain stores. Freshness, flavor, and health became as important than mass production and convenience. Nakahira interestingly ties all of this into his Japanese background, even if he didn't come out and explicitly make this connection himself. The work ethic, the craft, and the tradition went back years in America,as many Japanese immigrants set up farms.

Nakahira's research and attention to detail are excellent. Nakahira's reportage is top-notch, both in terms of doing the legwork on the grocer scene but also doing the work with regard to secondary sources that provided facts, figures, and dates. Adding her own personal story to the mix was an interesting move that paid off, though I wish she had been a little more specific at the end when she was tying together his ancestry with his expertise. Nakahira has a real talent for humanizing a particular topic while providing a deep well of knowledge for the reader to draw from. She made the reader care about Fujimoto both as a person and as a trailblazer, and his humility, in particular, shone through. Visually, Nakahira is absolutely rock-solid in terms of layouts and storytelling. She made the story visually interesting and compelling. Again, her weakness is in character interaction, and her figures, in general, are a bit stiff. She's not quite mastered the nuances of facial expressions either. Her line is functional and did the job, but there were times I wish there had been more visual flourishes that really made the food snap on the page. All of this is just a matter of time, repetition, and drawing from life. All in all, Nakahira has the makings of an excellent memoirist and an even better graphic journalist.