Three New Comics by Iris Yan

I usually do all of my Center for Cartoon Studies reviews all at once, but I'm making some exceptions with the recent batch I've received. It's always a pleasure to get new comics from Iris Yan, whose dry but blunt sense of humor always delivers. Yan is extremely prolific, for good and ill, but when she takes her time, her anthropomorphic figures add a lot to her storytelling.

She also frequently just has a great concept. In Taxi Driver: Wisdom On Wheels, for example, she takes what is low-hanging fruit (stories about cabbies) and focuses on details and her own withering observations to create variations on a set-up that still offers up funny surprises. What's also interesting about this comic is that Yan's whole project has been one long memoir mediated through various gimmicks and devices: her experience having cancer, dating, teaching English, and more. This mini explores Yan's career as a consultant, a lucrative but stressful profession that meant dealing with a lot of weird personalities. Yan wisely approaches this time of her life from different, bite-sized angles with their own narrative hook, like having to take taxis to work. Ultimately, Yan noted that she just wanted to get home safely, which meant humoring some weirdos. 

Yan goes much deeper in her two Studying Traditional Chinese Medicine diaries. Hilariously, she decided to take up TCM after some acupressure helped him with a medical issue, because it seemed like witchcraft and "I've always wanted to be a witch." She was living in Taiwan at the time, and the courses were in China, so off she went. Yan is really adept at breaking down the inherent social absurdities of hierarchical institutions of schools and businesses, bringing the eccentric personalities she encounters to the forefront. Whether it's rigid teachers, flighty students, and concepts in TCM that she can't quite absorb, Yan goes into a great deal of depth with regard to her experience living in a dorm as a woman over forty years old. It's also interesting to see Yan struggle to learn the nuances of the TCM organs, which, while having familiar names like "lung" and "kidney," don't quite match up with their Western equivalents. 

The second volume begins with Yan returning to Taiwan for spring break in 2020, which coincidentally marked the beginning of the global pandemic. Her program was completely unprepared for zoom-style instruction, and so what it took to pass courses became much easier, with lots of open-book exams. As a result, Yan felt she didn't retain much information, except those things that involved children's urine or squirrel feces as part of their makeup. In the end, Yan took a leave while dealing with colon cancer. Each diary issue is close to 100 pages, and the episodic quality of each vignette made this a more uneven reading experience. Yan tried to vary the lessons she learned with bits about her classmates and teachers, but the narrative structure felt a bit overstuffed, as diaries often do. Yan's art and lettering were also uneven, looking rushed at times. The line weight for figures and especially lettering noticeably varied, as it felt like Yan was trying to get this down as quickly as possible. Yan works in a deliberately simple, stripped-down style with anthropomorphic figures because it gives her a lot of freedom to depict sensitive topics. However, I've seen her do this in a much more polished way in earlier comics. Happily, Yan's wit and timing remain as sharp as ever, and that is the main calling card for these comics.