Contemporary Authors

• Gilded lilies Conundrum Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2006
• Sexcoven Youth in Decline (San Francisco, CA), 2015
• They Say Blue Abrams Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 2018

• Gertie's Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley; illus. by Jillian Tamaki - 2016 Farrar, NYC
• Half World by Hiromi Goto; illus. by Jillian Tamaki - 2010 Viking, NYC

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jillian_Tamaki

  Jillian Tamaki
  Born Ottawa, Ontario
  Alma mater Alberta College of Art and Design
  Known for Illustration, Comics
  Notable work Skim (comics), This One Summer
  Website http://jilliantamaki.com/

  Jillian Tamaki (born 1980) is a Canadian American illustrator and comics artist known for her work in The New York Times and The New Yorker and for the graphic novels Skim and This One Summer, written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki.[1][2]

  Contents

  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 Awards
  2.1.1 Wins
  2.1.2 Nominations
  3 Bibliography
  4 References
  5 External links

  Early life

  Tamaki was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and grew up in Calgary, Alberta.[3] She graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2003.[4] After graduating art school, she worked at the video game company BioWare[5] and later taught illustration at the New York City School of Visual Arts.[6][7]
  Career

  Gilded Lilies (2006) is Tamaki's first published book and is a collection of Tamaki's illustrations and comic strips.[8] The first part of the book comprises a carefully selected assemblage of paintings, personal drawings, illustrations and comics. The second part consists of a wordless graphic narrative titled The Tapemines, which tells the story of two children in a surreal landscape featuring "forests of cassette tape".[9][10]

  Skim (2008) is a critically acclaimed graphic novel illustrated by Jillian and written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki.[11] It tells the story of a young high-school girl and touches on themes of friendship, suicide, sexuality, and identity.[12]

  Tamaki became the centre of controversy when Mariko Tamaki alone was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Skim. The comics community and others circulated an open letter to the Awards Committee that argued for Tamaki as a co-nominee, which was signed by notable comics artists such as Lynda Barry, Dan Clowes, and Julie Doucet.[13]

  Indoor Voice (2010) collects Tamaki's drawings, illustrations and comic strips and is part of publisher Drawn and Quarterly's Petit Livre series. The majority of the book is printed in black and white, but it also features some colour illustrations.[14] Indoor Voice was released to mixed reviews.[15][16][17]

  "Now & then & when" (2008), a drawing with ink and graphite, was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2011. Within a two-panel horizontal, she depicted herself as a central, monumental figure, flanked by smaller full length figures of herself from infancy to adulthood on the left, from middle age to elderly on the right. Tamaki's variation on the theme with figures in bathing suits, related vignettes and speech balloons, presents an updated counterpart to the demure figures and texts of artistic precedents.[18]

  This One Summer (2014) by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki is a graphic novel that centres on the experiences of close friends Rose and Windy, who are on the cusp of adolescence, during a summer holiday.[19] This One Summer won a 2014 Ignatz Award,[20] the 2015 Printz Honor and Caldecott Honor awards,[21] and the 2015 Eisner Award.[22]

  SuperMutant Magic Academy (2015), published by Drawn and Quarterly, is a collection of Jillian Tamaki's web comics from 2010 to 2014.[23] Previously, these comics won an Ignatz Award in 2012 for Outstanding Online Comic.[24]
  Awards
  Wins

  2008 Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel for Skim [25]
  2008 New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books List for Skim [26]
  2008 Best of Books of the Year: Publishers Weekly, Quill & Quire for Skim [27]
  2009 Doug Wright Award Winner, Best Book for Skim [28]
  2012 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic, for SuperMutant Magic Academy.[29]
  2014 Governor General's Award for children's illustration, for This One Summer[30]
  2014 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel for This One Summer [31]
  2015 Caldecott Honor Book, for This One Summer[32]
  2015 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, for This One Summer[33]
  2015 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, for This One Summer[34]
  2016 Rudolph-Dirks-Award for Best Youth Drama / Coming of Age for This One Summer[35]
  2016 Eisner award for Best Publication for Teens, for SuperMutant Magic Academy

  Nominations

  2008 Governor General’s Literary Award nominee for Skim [36]
  2009 Eisner Award nominee (Best Publication for Teens, Writer, New Graphic Album, Penciller/Inker) for Skim [37][38]
  2014 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel for This One Summer[39]

  Bibliography

  Gilded Lilies. (Conundrum Press, 2006) ISBN 1-894994-19-1
  Skim. (Groundwood Books, 2008) Co-created with Mariko Tamaki. ISBN 978-0-88899-753-1
  Indoor Voice (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010) ISBN 978-1770460140
  This One Summer (First Second Books; Groundwood Books, 2014) Co-created with Mariko Tamaki. ISBN 978-1-59643-774-6
  Frontier #7: SexCoven (Youth In Decline, 2015)
  SuperMutant Magic Academy (Drawn & Quarterly, 2015) ISBN 1770461981
  Boundless (Drawn & Quarterly, 2017)

• Author's Site - http://jilliantamaki.com/illustration/

  I am a cartoonist and illustrator. I grew up in Calgary, Alberta and currently live in Toronto, Ontario.

  My cousin Mariko Tamaki and I are the co-creators of the graphic novels SKIM and This One Summer, which won a Governor General’s Award and Caldecott Honor. I’m the author of SuperMutant Magic Academy, a book which collects my webcomic of the same name, and Boundless, a collection of short comic stories.

  I’ve been a professional illustrator since 2003, when I graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design. I do lots of different stuff: magazine and newspaper illustration, book covers, posters, even a few storyboards for the TV show Adventure Time.

  I’ve also taught illustration at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons in New York.

  Selected Awards

  Governor General’s Award (2014) / Caldecott Honour (2015) / Printz Award (2015) / Society of Illustrators Gold Medal / Eisner Award / NYTimes Best Illustrated Children’s Books / Society of Publication Designers / Best American Comics / American Illustration / Doug Wright Award / Ignatz Award / Advertising + Design Club of Canada / National Magazine Award

  Partial Client List

  The New York Times / The New Yorker / National Geographic / Penguin Books / Cartoon Network / The Folio Society / Marvel / WIRED / Washington Post / House of Anansi / Chronicle Books/ New York Magazine / Psyop / MTA / Esquire / The Guardian / The Independent UK / CBC / Bloomberg Businessweek / The Atlantic / Tor.com / Maclean’s / VSA Partners / Abrams Books / The Walrus / ESPN Magazine / Nickelodeon

  How did you get started in the illustration field?

  Upon graduation from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2003), I was lucky to be introduced by a teacher to a particular designer who gave me some great local jobs and enabled me to build up my professional portfolio. He was very supportive, and a lot of the work I did with him formed the basis of my portfolio. I worked at a video game company in Edmonton, Alberta, doing texturing and character work, while freelancing during (all of) my free time. Basically, I worked my day job until I had built up enough clients to allow me to freelance fulltime, which I started doing in early 2005 when I moved to New York.
  How did you find your style? Has it changed since you started?

  When I was a student, we were very much encouraged to develop our basics, experiment with media and not lock ourselves into finding a “marketable style”. I didn’t dare think I should try to get jobs when I was in school, and I’m thankful I was just allowed to incubate.

  All of that said, the term “style” has a certain usefulness in the field of Illustration. When you first start out, I would recommend your style (the work you present to the world) be a little more consistent across the board, so people know exactly what they’re going to get if they hire you. But you’re not a machine. It seems inevitable that your “style” will evolve as you change as a person.
  What is your creation process?

  Read this. Then this.
  How do you market/promote your work?

  In the past I have sent out postcard promos and targeted mini-portfolios. I have never done an email promo, but that seems increasingly accepted. In truth, I don’t promote directly anymore–at some point, published work becomes a kind of promotion.

  Social media is the most effective promotional tool. As fraught as those spaces can be, I think it’s great they are cheap and accessible–it used to be hundreds of dollars to print/send mailers. I think it has really opened up the industry to new voices too. I think you have to manage your relationship to those spaces–you can participate and exist online in many different ways. Try to find a way that feels non-gross to you.
  Do you recommend moving to NYC?

  Sure, why not. If you want to do it and can make that happen financially, I think you should. Living there will expose you to a lot of creative energy and pop culture at a high level. The community there is very competitive and will be very stimulating for some people. It’s a difficult place to live, both financially and (in my opinion) mentally. I also believe one can make a go of it in other cities/towns/countries. I don’t know what environment or situation is right for you–that’s for you to figure out.
  Do you recommend art school/masters programs?

  Art programs can be hugely beneficial for some people and a colossal waste of resources for others. Again, this is up for you to decide. In an ideal world, art school would be an enriching experience that allows people to grow as artists and people. I’m all for goofing off, making new friends, moving away from your hometown, being challenged personally and artistically. The equation changes somewhat when you factor in the student debt that accompanies these degrees, particularly in the US. Being an artist is a tough go, even if you are successful.

  But you knew all that. I guess my more direct answer is: go to art school if you truly believe you are ready to learn and grow there and are willing to take on the debt. Don’t go to art school if your heart isn’t in it or believe the debt will be crippling. There’s more than one way to skin a cat (ie. eventually end up in an arts career). I have a lot of artist friends who didn’t go to art school.

  I went to (a cheap) art school and learned a lot.
  Do you have a rep?

  I don’t have an illustration rep.

  I have a literary agent who handles my book and comics projects. Book contracts are much more complicated, so I think a literary agent is very helpful.
  How did you get your comics published?

  I started making mini-comics just after graduation. I sold them online and in shops, and started going to indie comic conventions. Eventually people asked if they could publish them in books. Kind of a boring story! I guess the idea is to just start making a thing and try to put it in front of eyeballs. It’s easier to do that now, with social media and stuff–you don’t even need to learn to collate Xeroxes, if you don’t want to. SuperMutant Magic Academy was a webcomic that was eventually collected.
  What is your process?

  This is too hard to answer, because these days I do many different things. I will tell you that the tools I use most often for “traditional” illustrations are a Cintiq, nibs, microns, a scanner, pencils, a light-table, and brushpens.

  I don’t mean to be intentionally vague on this point, but it’s always changing.
  How do you manage to have so many styles? Is that a hindrance?

  I have a short attention span. I like doing many things. It’s important to me, for my own happiness, to do all these different things, and luckily I’ve managed to convince others to pay me to do so. Certain clients will only want to hire you for certain things, and that’s fine. Other clients I have had for my entire career and are interested in supporting my zigs and zags.
  What are your influences?

  I think I learned to draw from studying Archie comics and copying photographs of horses. I also liked reading the newspaper comics and the few anthologies my parents had: Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, etc.

  As a teen, I was quite interested in Art History and volunteered at a museum at my hometown. Predictably, I was fascinated by the Dadaists and the Surrealists. The idea that symbols, meanings, and words could be manipulated (often to a humorous effect) was very intriguing to me.

  My influences now are a hodgepodge. Whatever kick I’m on at the time. That doesn’t exclusively include comics or even visual art.

  What does it take for a young illustrator to be successful today?

  There are 2 main things, I think.

  The first is my blunt opinion: you have to be good. You have to be ready to commit to your craft.

  That said. You don’t need to be the Second Coming of Art You just have to be able to make something someone can use. Many people are tripped up by never putting their work out into the world because they are crippled by fear. Which doesn’t make sense because if you thought your chances of success were low before, they are most definitely ZERO now. But I suppose that’s the point. You can’t really “fail” if you never try… that’s a very common attitude.
  How do I improve my [drawing/anatomy/computer skills/colour/etc]?

  Again, not trying to be cagey here, but I have no advice for you besides seek out educational opportunities (online and IRL), surround yourself with peers with whom you can confer, and practice. There are no magic tricks or shortcuts. Your suspicions are probably right: your favourite artist got to where s/he is today because of talent, passion, and perseverance. If you hope to create good work yourself, you’ll have to travel a similar road.
  Have you always approached your sketchbook so experimentally?

  Read this.

  How have you managed to get a hang of the business side of illustration?

  We did not have a business course at my school. We just heard the personal stories of our instructors. I didn’t feel unprepared, per se, but also know that you will never feel wholly prepared either, so cut yourself some slack. It’s not rocket science and you will quickly set up and streamline a system that works for you. Confer with friends, trade tips, consult, ask questions. I still ask colleagues for business advice all the time.

  But here are some Hard Tips that I have found useful: only work with professionals if you can, get familiar reading contracts, get an accountant, know your worth/ask for what you deserve, set up a bookkeeping system (I use Google docs), try to get a book agent.
  Any tips for compiling a successful illustration portfolio?

  I think it’s wonderful if you can show a range. As long as it feels cohesive. You only need about 12 pieces to get started. I would actually advise against having too many pieces. When you are starting to put together a portfolio, think about what kind of work you would like to be doing and let that guide your decisions as to what to include/exclude. The design of the website should be plain and straightforward and easy to navigate. Out-of-the-box sites are totally fine.
  Do you have any advice for me, a twentysomething trying to be an illustrator or cartoonist?

  Hm. I teach a lot of very freaked out 21-year-olds. I think a lot of people psych themselves out. “What do people want?” “Will I get a job/jobs when I graduate?” “What is illustration anyway?” Those questions are hard to avoid and I certainly struggled with them myself. However, my piece of advice is to try not to think so “large”. Think small. Think about the marks you want to make on the paper in front of you… the ones that bring you pleasure and satisfaction. You can’t control what other people think or if they’ll give you a job. You can only control your own actions and the work you produce. You have to be a little delusional to pursue a life in the arts, so throw caution to the wind and make pictures that excite you and hopefully the world will agree.

  Also: you have to take care of your mental health in order to be a functional artist, not to mention a functional partner, friend, sister, son, etc.

• Drawn & Quarterly - https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/author/jillian-tamaki

  jilliantamaki.com
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  SuperMutant Magic Academy

  Jillian Tamaki is an illustrator and cartoonist based in Toronto. She is the co-creator along with her cousin Mariko Tamaki of the graphic novel Skim, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book and a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Their second graphic novel This One Summer earned a Governor General’s Award and a Caldecott Honor. Tamaki’s first collection of her own comics was the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Eisner Award-winning SuperMutant Magic Academy.
  Top 10 Finalist
  Rainbow List for SuperMutant Magic Academy (2016)
  Great Graphic Novel for Teens
  ALA / YALSA for SuperMutant Magic Academy (2016)
  Best Publication for Teens
  Eisner Award for SuperMutant Magic Academy (2016)
  Outstanding Anthology or Collection
  Ignatz Award for SuperMutant Magic Academy (2015, nom.)
  Outstanding Artist
  Ignatz Award for SuperMutant Magic Academy (2015, nom.)
  The Pigskin Peters Award
  Doug Wright Award for Indoor Voice (2011, nom.)

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/24/jillian-tamaki-comics-graphic-novel-supermutant-magic-academy

  Jillian Tamaki: 'I need to spend less time in the minds of straight men'

  The Canadian comic artist talks about the new print version of her popular webcomic SuperMutant Magic Academy, gender and life after divorce
  Graphic novelist Jillian Tamaki
  Graphic novelist Jillian Tamaki: ‘I’m totally fascinated by the interior versus the exterior.’ Photograph: Reynard Li/Drawn & Quarterly

  Chris Randle

  Friday 24 April 2015 17.27 EDT
  Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 06.45 EDT

  “It was intentionally kind of a stupid concept,” the artist Jillian Tamaki told me on the phone from California last week. She had just appeared at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to promote SuperMutant Magic Academy, the collection of a popular webcomic she began posting on Tumblr in 2010.

  The setting is a satirical melange of X-Men, Harry Potter and teen dramas like Degrassi, all of which Tamaki cheerfully admits only passing familiarity with. “I had just done Strange Tales,” she recalled, a Marvel Comics anthology of cartoonists who would never otherwise draw any Marvel comic. Finishing a story about the disco-themed superhero Dazzler, Tamaki realized that her “dumb daily life” was the main appeal. “I didn’t really care about what happened after she used her powers,” she laughed. “I was more interested in the fact that she had some weird older boyfriend man.”

  If a character in SuperMutant Magic Academy uses her powers, the reason is invariably petty or needy. Nobody saves the world; they have more direct concerns. The initiate Marsha develops a hapless, all-consuming crush on her friend Wendy, blurting out “you have such nice hair”. When she finally manages to come out to her, Wendy declares “I’m going to be the best ally a girl ever had”, then asks: “Did I do something wrong? The internet said to be ‘supportive but non-invasive’.” The comic’s jokes often hinge on discrepancy, those gaps between our self-image and what the world sees. A character will say something casually manipulative before revealing clueless, tone-deaf, touching earnestness. Tamaki lingers on their anxious and unspoken monologues, like the humanoid lizard-girl Trixie studying her reflection: “Pretty from certain angles. Cute from most angles. There’s still time … to be hot from more angles. I believe in me!”

  “I’m totally fascinated by the interior versus the exterior,” Tamaki said. “That’s why I think it connects with that time in your life where it’s just a monsoon happening inside, and everything is fucking going crazy, but from the outside you’re just a zitty teenager. Other people are left to put the pieces together, what you’re presenting versus what is reality, what you think it means and what it actually looks like.” Or, she added, your base desire crashing against your intellectual structures. “Wanting to be kissed is the most natural thing in the world.”

  Tamaki herself went through a public high school in Calgary as the kind of teenager who makes their own zines to give away.

  “It’s so funny,” she told me, “because there were other weird kids there, but we just never made it to the point where we were, like, in a band or doing anything together. We were all so isolated in little pods of friends.” Tamaki’s family is sprawled over most of the continent. Back when Montreal revelled in being the country’s least boring city, her grandmother Fawzia Amir ran nightclubs there, sometimes performing as a belly dancer. Tamaki worked at the video game company BioWare after graduating from the Alberta College of Art & Design, eventually gravitating towards freelance illustration. But to those who aren’t art directors at the New York Times or Penguin books, she is best known for the young-adult comics she created with her cousin Mariko.

  The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, with its bouncy castle and puppet shows, felt unfamiliar to Tamaki; she joked that she’s been going to a lot of librarian conferences. Last year’s This One Summer, a graphic novel about two friends in the ambiguous space between childhood and something else, won the first Caldecott Honor ever given for cartooning. It also garnered Jillian a Governor-General’s Award, one of Canada’s three major literary prizes, which was a bit ironic due to Tamaki’s history with the prize. When the previous Tamaki/Tamaki collaboration, Skim, came out, only Mariko got nominated, prompting various comics figures to sign an open letter in protest.

  This time the artist and her cousin, who prefer to call themselves co-creators, shared the prize money. She seems merely bemused by the fallacy that whoever scripts a comic must be its lone author: “I do realize just from doing stuff where you’re meeting a more general audience, people who aren’t involved with comics, reading them intensely or making them, it really is quite mysterious, the process.”

  SuperMutant Magic Academy was in part a way to dissect that process. “I was looking for something to replace my sketch blog,” Tamaki explained, “and also trying to make comics that weren’t graphic novels. Or images that weren’t super-pretty, full-color, beautiful things. I just wanted to learn how to write, basically.” Although the collected edition has a more expansive new coda, the typical Magic Academy strip fills a single six-panel grid – arbitrary dimensions determined by the size of Tumblr’s dashboard, but Tamaki thrilled at the rigor of those constraints. You can feel her punchlines sharpening as the book goes on, like Marsha’s response to Wendy marveling at a child’s wonder: “You know little kids literally have the IQ of house cats, right?”

  Tamaki’s expressionistic brushstrokes made the Ontario forest of This One Summer look vast and forbidding, with elements of the landscape rendered so ethereally you could gather the milkweed in your hands. In SuperMutant Magic Academy, her line is rougher, though still lustrously black, and she uses more visual shorthand. The budding performance artist Frances – who dumps BBQ all over her American flag swimsuit at a Fourth of July picnic – always has two little dashes beneath her eyes, perfectly blasé. “They’re not polished drawings,” Tamaki said. “They’re much more akin to my own handwriting, and a lot of them were made in direct result of what was going on in my life. It’s obviously the most personal work I’ve done, even more so, probably, than the autobiographical short things I’ve done here and there.”

  The closest thing to a superhero here is Everlasting Boy, whose power – if that is the word – allows Tamaki to draw multiple sequences where his flesh and bones slough away before surreally regenerating. His form collapses into dust and peels back like a cocoon. In another strip, Trixie offers to do makeup for a comically morbid classmate: “Paint and powder: armor for my desiccating body and sense of self.”

  Tamaki told me how amazing it was (“good amazing and bad amazing”) to be dating again since her divorce last year, able to redefine what she seeks in a relationship. “To take control over your face is really hard, you know what I mean? I’ve started growing out my facial hair, growing out some body hair, over the past year, and that has felt really, really hard at times. But I just couldn’t ever see myself being – am I going to be a 75-year-old woman and I’m plucking my eyebrows? Really?”

  The Magic Academy has a few marginal teachers, but parents seem to fade from view there. Like Skim and This One Summer, it’s mostly a world of young women. “I need to spend less time in the minds of straight men, especially now,” Tamaki laughed. “It’s funny, because people will ask, like, ‘you’re a feminist, you’re making a feminist book’, and I’m like: ‘I guess?’ That’s just my lens. That’s my filter, that’s my medium that I exist in, every day. It’s not at all subconscious. That’s what I’m interested in – female experience.”

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/13/jillian-tamaki-super-topical-boundless-interview

  Graphic novelist Jillian Tamaki: 'Our brains are being rewired to exist online'

  The stories in Boundless, her latest collection, show the Canadian author-illustrator pushing the boundaries of the graphic form to reflect a changing world
  Jillian Tamaki
  ‘I think it’s really interesting to do something super-topical’ … Jillian Tamaki. Photograph: Reynard Li

  Marta Bausells

  Marta Bausells
  @martabausells

  Tuesday 13 June 2017 06.26 EDT
  Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.32 EDT

  In one of Jillian Tamaki’s comic-book stories, entitled 1. Jenny, a “mirror Facebook” appears on the internet. At first, it looks like it is merely a duplicate of the familiar social network – until small changes begin to appear on everyone’s profiles. Like most internet phenomena, it is “all anyone could talk about for two weeks”, considered “playful at best, mischievous at worst”. But as Jenny watches the mysterious mirror-Jenny’s life diverge from her own in tiny ways – growing her hair long, watching Top Gun – she grows increasingly obsessed with the life that could be hers; wishing, all the same, that “she had followed through with her threats to quit Facebook. (Threatening to whom?)”

  As in many of Tamaki’s stories in her delicate new collection Boundless, 1. Jenny is unpredictable and wry, focusing on women struggling with societal expectations, both online and in reality. Technology and social media are front and centre in most of the stories, but the Canadian writer and artist isn’t moralising. “I try to be more observational about it, and think about its sensory aspects or people’s different connections to it,” she says from Toronto.

  Despite some of the stories being written years before Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale landed on TV, they feel very current. “Part of your brain thinks, ‘I should make something that stands the test of time and is very universal’,” Tamaki says with a smile. “I can see how there is a temptation to do that, but I think it’s really interesting to do something super-topical. I am living in 2017 and that’s where my brain is – and a lot is happening and our brains are being rewired to exist online.”
  Panels from Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless
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  A panel from The ClairFree System. Photograph: Drawn and Quarterly

  In SexCoven, a cult develops around an anonymous music file that surfaces on the web. In Darla!, the only story with a male protagonist, a TV producer reminisces about his quickly cancelled 90s “porno sitcom” and resents the millennials who have started to watch it ironically on the internet. That story is “about intention versus interpretation”, says Tamaki. “You find, as a creator, you make [something] with one intention but it ends up being something else! And that’s wonderful.”

  Tamaki is used to unmanageable interpretations. Her previous book, This One Summer, created with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, topped the list of most banned and challenged books in the US in 2016. It is a story of two pre-teenage girls coming of age during a summer vacation, during which they discuss topics like breast size, the word “slut” and their developing sexualities. “It was [obviously] interpreted as being very scandalous,” says Tamaki. “You definitely don’t feel like you’re making a very controversial book. People bring their own thing to it.”

  The stories in Boundless often started as thought experiments, for which Tamaki would conjure up the domino sequence that follows. Half Life exemplifies her simultaneously deadpan and sensitive voice: protagonist Helen slowly shrinks in size, as if possessed by an intractable force. “If [the concept] gets pushed and pushed and pushed, it is relentless. There’s no changing her path,” explains Tamaki. But it is Helen’s reactions that are the focus of the story. “I think the story is quite fantastical, obviously, but it’s also fantastical in that she is completely calm about it. She’s not afraid, she’s not freaking out – people around her are freaking out – but she is completely adapting to the new circumstances.”
  Panels from Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless
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  Panels from the story Half Life. Photograph: Drawn and Quarterly

  Half Life is metaphorical of ageing, she ventures. “Not that I’m old, but you can already see, at 37, that the body starts changing in ways that feel very inevitable, and they link you to broader humanity – you think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why old people are they way they are.’ It feels inevitable, like you’re joining some sort of weird club. But as we face ageing, we don’t want to do it with fear. Ageing is death, right? That’s why we all freak out about it, but we want to deal with it calmly. That’s what we all would like – you lose control over your body, and you’re doing it with a degree of grace.”

  The women in Boundless are smart and self-aware, reflective and angry; diverse in age, race and body shape – but their characters seem almost interchangeable. “I feel like they are possibly conceptual,” Tamaki says. The stories [are about] a fantastical element, always butting up against reality. I wonder if the women are incidental. Maybe it’s the same woman at different times in her life, or something like that.”

  While Tamaki has published an array of bestselling and lauded books, Boundless feels the most personal. The stories often have open endings because Tamaki followed what “instinctively feels right” – which, with her, often means no satisfying arc or conclusion: “I’m bored with traditional narratives, where it’s so prescribed,” she says. Her “mainstream” successes, like webcomic-turned-book SuperMutant Magic Academy, have put her in a position where she feels comfortable to push the form: “I’m not making crazy art comics that are beautiful abstract things, but I do want to bridge [mainstream and experimental] somewhere. It’s a little bit of a challenge to see if they fold together and they still work.”

  Using many styles, from hyperrealist drawings to impressionistic ink work, Tamaki adapts her pen work for each story, giving each its own colour palette, scale and visual ambience. Strangely, the juxtaposition makes them speak to each other. Tamaki is pleased with the result of collaging them together: “Some of it is completely unintentional. It’s like developing a photograph – you’re not exactly sure what the effect will be once it’s bound together.”

• Hairpin - https://www.thehairpin.com/2015/04/to-see-myself-reflected-an-interview-with-jillian-tamaki/

  To See Myself Reflected: An Interview With Jillian Tamaki
  By The Hairpin April 29, 2015

  by Annie Mok
  JillianTamaki_creditReynardLi_252

  Jillian Tamaki is my hero. She moves like a shark; like a very funny comics-drawing shark. Last year, First Second released the Caldecott Award-winning This One Summer, a young adult graphic novel Jillian created with her cousin, Mariko Tamaki. This One Summer was her second collaboration with Mariko — the first, Skim, was a goth Lolita teen drama published in 2008.

  Jillian illustrates for The New York Times, among others, and she created two books of stand-alone drawings and comics: Gilded Lilies (2006) and Indoor Voice (2010).
  mutant academy

  On April 28, Drawn & Quarterly released the long-awaited collection of her webcomic, SuperMutant Magic Academy. SMMA shows what Hogwarts — or maybe Professor X’s School in X-Men — would be like if the adolescent student body talked about the empirical perfection of each others’ butts, did oblique performance art with piles of cotton balls, and creeped each other out with painfully bad flirting.

  This month Jillian will also release the haunting SexCoven, a comic about memes, youth, and relationships, for Youth in Decline’s Frontier #7. Jillian and I spoke over email about the difference between art versus Art, fantastical characters dealing with the utter mundane, and the benefit of rapid-fire, low-stakes, messy, rambling work.

  How did the process of making these loosely-drawn, one-and-done style strips feel in comparison to tightly polished work, like your drawings in This One Summer?

  Well, the process behind a project like this is really different from a graphic novel. The graphic novels I have worked on (Skim, This One Summer) were very concerted, intense efforts. Sketches to pencils to inks to digital, then repeat ad nauseam.
  this one summer

  That creates a very specific effect. It fits those stories, which are relatively conventional. The point of starting a webcomic was to explore different possibilities for comic-making and to work on the “writing” aspect of comics.

  I always learn a lot from the bigger, polished projects (and from working with Mariko), but I wanted something very rapid-fire, low-stakes, messy, rambling. The SMMA strips vary stylistically, depending on my mood when I made them or how much time I had or even the time of day I made them — I did a lot of them very late at night.
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  poodle

  Like a lot of readers, I quickly latched onto the characters Frances and Marsha. Frances is a fiery performance artist who, in one strip, throws blood onto boys, and is only shocked when her teacher says, “Guerrilla performance art? A little… seventies, no?” Marsha is a closeted, bitter, sex-obsessed dork who suffers under the weight of a secret crush on her straight best friend, Wendy, a shape-shifting human/fox. Can you talk about the process of developing these characters and their world? The universe of SMMA seems to have grown organically, strip by strip.

  I feel like characters cropped up whenever I needed them. Marsha, for example, was sort of just an add-on friend to Wendy, who was conceived of first (because every “high school world” needs a cute girl everyone has a crush on, I guess). There was no forethought to any arc, characters, or anything, which is an element of the project that people might find interesting or a weakness. You really see the whole thing spring from an intentionally stupid conceit.

  There is no world that surrounds SuperMutant Magic Academy, really. That’s not intentional or unintentional. I’m not interested in castles or wizarding class or fantastical monsters…only, like, disappointing food, or being ignored by your friend, or trying to make sense of your own body. I liked the absurdity of this fantastical cast dealing with the utter mundane.

  Every book I work on is a portrait of a specific time in my life. Almost like a set of bookends. So some of the characters are directly inspired by people that were in my life at the time. It’s funny how often you forget what exactly inspired the strips in the first place (a lot of the time I would bust out a strip in response to something that I was thinking/had observed/overheard/etc), so you’re just left with an emotional impression.

  SMMA as a school environment seems egalitarian; the nerdier kids can be bullying, the jocks bright and tender. I also love the portrayal of teachers: several strips explore the “awkward adult trying to get kids excited” trope to lovely effect (one teacher says, with a big smile, “What I’m saying is books are amazing, guys”). Many storylines center around artmaking and how art critiques poke the buttons of both artist and viewer. You taught for some years at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan; can you tell me about how your observations as a teacher, and/or as a student when you were younger, may have informed SMMA?

  I think it’s a combination of being both a teacher and student. I was always interested in art history but I only have a very cursory education in it. I was a fine art student for one year before I transferred to design school. I was utterly mystified by what made someone an artist, what art (and Art) were. I guess Frances represents some sort of “uber-artist” that I wish I could be. Someone who is fearless, has laser vision, appears to have no self-doubt.

  My 4th year portfolio students certainly provided inspiration, but probably for more of the “broad” strips than the ones that dealt with art. Even though they are in art school, they are often struggling, at the core, with defining their wants, needs, desires, dreams, expectations, aspirations, etc.

  It’s not a particularly savvy depiction or critique… I’m more interested in the artists’ and society’s relationship to art and each other.
  warmth

  The characters exude youthful sexuality casually, as an organic part of their lives. In one strip, two elf boys sit on the grass and one says, “Wanna make out?” and the other says, “Maybe later… But yeah, probably.” It’s refreshing compared to the sensationalized sexuality in most narratives about teens (or adults, for that matter). The portrayals in these and other instances feel both real, and also respectful to the boundaries of these fictional characters Lots of the kids engage in hilariously inept flirting, kissing, etc. In one strip, a boy says to a girl, “You’re so gorgeous. I wanna just eat you. Ingest you,” as the girl’s face goes from smiling, to twisted up in discomfort. How did you navigate exploring these characters’ romantic and sexual lives in their joy and rawness?

  Well, teen sexuality is a complete mystery to me. What is not a complete mystery to me is teen sexual frustration and repression, so that’s…a theme. Haha. Maybe that’s why the Wendy-Marsha thing seemed to connect with people? The verisimilitude?!

  I don’t think there’s that much sex in SMMA? More like a lot of obsessing and fantasizing about sex. Which I actually don’t mean to trivialize, because it’s obviously a lot of people’s experiences and is the start of your sex life, even if you’re not actually having a sex life.

  The thing you said about “boundaries” is astute. I felt the formal constraints of the webcomic, comic-strip form (a post on Tumblr can only be so wide, so that creates an actual physical boundary) facilitated a sort of distance. So how to hit something very true within such a limited space? It was a good exercise. Maybe how like being on Twitter can improve your writing? I suppose that’s debatable.
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  Beauty standards are a recurring theme in your work, from your Have a Sexy Little Halloween, to many SMMA strips. The interactions often center around girls attacking other girls’ choices. In one strip, Wendy shows Marsha the prom dress she’s trying out at a store, and Marsha says, “It’s okay…I guess like your regular clothes better…It’s like you’re trying to look ‘pretty’ or whatever.” Wendy, horrified, says, “That’s EXACTLY how I’m trying to look!” What is it that draws you to write about fashion culture, and how women can cut down other women?

  Fashion is both wonderful and terrible, I think. I went to public school and I remember thinking about how I would have LOVED to be forced to wear a uniform. I have since learned from friends that actually wore uniforms that teenagers will always find ways to differentiate themselves. Anyway, I saw clothes as just one more way to create hierarchy, power and currency. Sometimes I still think that way.

  That said, obviously fashion is glorious and cool and fun and, often an act of empowerment. I guess I just always identified more with the designer who, after the crazy runway show, pops their head out and they’re wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

  As a storytelling device, I think school uniforms are great because they create a weird level playing-field. Like, it strips off some “clues”.

  As for women cutting down other women: I am a feminist and believe that and my femaleness colors every thought, experience, interaction. I’m interested in exploring all the elements of that, good/bad/ugly.

  I can’t imagine that you think of SMMA as a YA comic, but I’m sure teens are reading it. For young people reading the strip, is there anything in particular that you’d like for them to take away from it?

  I would love for teens to read it! I would have wanted to read something like it when I was a teen. I guess I never try to impart anything specific, though. When I was a kid, especially a mixed-race kid in a very white neighbourhood, all I was ever looking for was to see myself reflected (physically and psychologically). I hope it’s an empathetic book.

• Paste Magazine - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/02/mariko-and-jillian-tamaki-on-creating-the-first-gr.html

  QUOTE:
  Rendered in a lush, monochromatic blue, This One Summer takes place at a summer lake house as two young girls find themselves on opposite sides of the widening gap between adolescence and young adulthood. With a mélange of marital tension, local teen drama and complicated friendship, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki have created a quietly heartbreaking — and hopeful — microcosm of life on the cusp of growing up.
  Mariko and Jillian Tamaki on their Multiple Award-Winning This One Summer
  By Steve Foxe | February 3, 2015 | 1:59pm
  Comics Features
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  Mariko and Jillian Tamaki on their Multiple Award-Winning This One Summer

  It’s not every day that a graphic novel is recognized for a prestigious literary honor, but writer Mariko Tamaki and artist Jillian Tamaki’s evocative masterpiece, This One Summer, just accomplished the unprecedented feat of taking home both a Printz Honor (for outstanding young adult literature) and a Caldecott Honor (for exceptional picture book art), awarded by the American Library Association at the Youth Media Awards in Chicago yesterday.

  This One Summer Cover.jpg

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  Rendered in a lush, monochromatic blue, This One Summer takes place at a summer lake house as two young girls find themselves on opposite sides of the widening gap between adolescence and young adulthood. With a mélange of marital tension, local teen drama and complicated friendship, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki have created a quietly heartbreaking — and hopeful — microcosm of life on the cusp of growing up. Paste spoke with the cousins over the phone to discuss award recognition, collaboration, and writing for audiences of all ages…or not.

  Paste: Congratulations on your Printz and Caldecott recognition, which, up until today, felt mutually exclusive! Were you surprised to find you’d been honored in both categories, including one that’s traditionally for picture books?
  Mariko Tamaki: I knew that they were coming up but I was trying not to think about them too much, so I was super honored and happy, but not necessarily surprised.

  Jillian Tamaki: I was surprised only because I didn’t know when it was happening… I don’t pay that much attention to awards. That sounds, like, really pretentious. [laughs] I guess I was surprised only in that I wasn’t expecting a call like that, and I did presume that a Caldecott would be more for a picture book, but I think we’ve been surprised throughout our collaborations at where our books could fit in.

  Paste: This One Summer is the first graphic novel to receive the Caldecott Honor, and I believe it’s only the second to receive Printz recognition.
  Mariko Tamaki: I think [Gene Luen Yang’s] American Born Chinese was the first one?

  ThisOneSummer-blue_100-112.jpg

  Paste: Right, in 2007. And this past fall you also picked up the first Governor General Award for Children’s Literature Illustration given to a graphic novel. What does it mean to you to be recognized for non-comic-exclusive awards?
  Jillian Tamaki: I think that’s great. I think that by being recognized by, say, library associations — and it’s great to be recognized by comics people as well — I think it just means that a wider variety and range of people are reading comics, which I think is a good thing for creators and the medium itself.

  Mariko Tamaki: I think that comics have been kind of emerging in stages. One way to say it is that it’s a fad and publishers are getting interested in graphic novels, but I think in the larger scheme that more readers are collectively understanding that there’s a variety of ways to absorb a story. And comics being included with other literary awards is sort of a nice recognition that comics are literary, and as much as they’re beautiful, that they also can tell complex stories, which a lot of comics before this have been able to do.

  Paste: Many of these awards sort of recognize one of you over the other, as they’re traditionally given to prose writers or picture book illustrators. Is it strange having a collaborative work parsed apart like that?
  Jillian Tamaki: Absolutely. That’s why I think it’s great that these two awards just recognize the book, as opposed to trying to parse out who tells the story and who creates the images, and the role of those things. It’s just such a different interplay with comics than with a traditional picture book. We’ve always been bumping up against this in our collaborations, so this is great. We don’t have to feel conflicted!

  Mariko Tamaki: Exactly, we can have a prize in both homes. We don’t have to hold one of them hostage. [Laughs] It’s also that we’re proud of this book as a collaboration. It’s not like you think, I really like the words in this book. I think the words in this book are excellent. It’s always been that you’re proud of the final product, so it’s nice to see that that’s something that is translatable to someone other than just us.

  ThisOneSummer-blue_100-203.jpg

  Paste: You work remotely from each other, but the marriage of art and words is so close that it feels like the work of one person. Was there a lot of back and forth during the creative process or was it a pretty clear division between script and art?
  Jillian Tamaki: There was a lot of back and forth at certain stages of the project, like the initial pitch and when the initial script was finished and when the sketches were finished, and that was when we could consult with one another. But for the most part, it’s the individual sitting alone making this thing. [Laughs]

  Mariko Tamaki: Both of us go into this process as a collaboration knowing that our goal is to work together to create the story. And for my process and for Jillian’s process, even if you’re working alone, your mind is sort of on the fact that you’re bringing these two things together. So it’s lonely but you’ll always have your sister in your heart, like an emotional connection — I think. [Laughs]

  Paste: Mariko, you write for prose and performance, too. What about This One Summer made it right for comics?
  Mariko Tamaki: When Jillian first said she was interested in making another book, I just thought it was something that could be really beautiful, with the atmosphere and the trees and water. It just seemed to me like it was this incredible setting for a book. For me it was always a story that would become a comic book.

  Paste: How much do you keep young readers in mind while working on a project? You’ve both spoken about not necessarily writing “for” kids, and clearly adults are connecting with This One Summer too.
  Jillian Tamaki: I don’t ever really consider the kids that would be reading the book. I’m always kind of surprised, in a way, of what is considered appropriate for kids. But, like, pleasantly, in that there is stuff in both of the books that we’ve made that I would think some parents would not feel comfortable with, but librarians and our publisher, thank god, are willing to take a risk with it. I think that, A. kids always like to be titillated, and B. I think that it’s important to me that our work be layered for different audiences.

  Mariko Tamaki: I was actually surprised once when a publisher informed me that basically the [intended audience age] of the book that you write is for the age of the main character, which I did not know. I think that that’s the most I try to pay attention to it, in that I try to make it as true to the experience as I can think it would be. So other than that responsibility, the idea that you’re shaping or molding something for a younger reader implies that you’re teaching them something or setting up a guideline for them of what’s good or what’s bad behavior, which I’m not really into as a writer.

  Paste: A lot of comics popular with young readers do get challenged at school and library levels, often because they visually depict things that other books imply through text. It’s hard to talk too much about the plot without giving things away, but have you encountered any concern over some of the mature topics tackled in the book?
  Mariko Tamaki: Yes, it was removed from a school, I believe in New Jersey? Almost removed, but the librarian, as librarians are prone to do, put up a good fight and made sure it was kept on the shelf. I think the thing with this book, which is kind of great, is that it’s more about what they talk about than what they show, which to me is the life of a twelve-year-old. All you’re doing is vaguely describing what you think anyone is talking about. Especially when it comes to sexual stuff, you’re just guessing. So that’s kind of what happens in the book a lot, is a lot of guessing. On that level, I really don’t think there’s anything in here that’s more graphic than what you would find on CSI. There are no female dead bodies to look at!

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  Paste: It’s definitely less graphic than most of what you find on TV, but it does deal with some mature emotional themes for sure.
  Jillian Tamaki: As we were on tour last year, we would talk to teenagers and then we’d talk to adults, people older than us even that have read the book, and it became really apparent that, depending on your age, experience or point in your life, you are gravitating toward different themes and different characters. Some of the younger kids are not even aware that there are other machinations happening within the story, which I think is really cool.

  Mariko Tamaki: When Jillian and I were in Houston, we met these young boys who were pretty obsessed with the one male teenage boy character, and they were all about the experience of this one boy and his girlfriend, who in their mind was cheating on him, and I was like, wow, you have walked out of this really feminist book with the one male, macho story to talk about. But they were perfectly content with that so I was like, okay, cool, maybe read the book when you’re ten years older and it’ll be a different story.

  Jillian Tamaki: It depends on what age you’re closest to. If you’re an adult, you’re viewing the marriage completely differently, and the girl is a nostalgic view, versus a protagonist if you’re younger.

  Paste: Were comics or manga were influential to either of you growing up?
  Jillian Tamaki: Not when I was a child, beyond Archie comics, which I do feel taught me how to draw in a way, copying some of the forms and just admiring some of the art in those comics. But then at some point, that was not interesting anymore. I don’t even know at that point if there was something like there is now, with comics for every age. I just stopped reading comics until I was in college, and that’s when I started discovering alternative comics. So yes and no.

  Mariko Tamaki: Yeah, I think the same for me. I was never really interested in a lot of the content that was available in comic form. I was never a superhero person, and I did not care if Archie chose Betty or Veronica. It did not seem like a worthwhile pursuit to me. It wasn’t until [Marjane Satrapi’s] Persepolis that I was re-engaged with comics. It was the first time that I really got the whole package with comics in terms of words and pictures.

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  Paste: Is there anything you’re reading now that you’d particularly recommend?
  Mariko Tamaki: For younger readers, I really am liking Lumberjanes. I think it’s going to be available in a collected book relatively soon. And I really like How To Be Happy by Eleanor Davis, which is a beautiful book.

  Jillian Tamaki: I haven’t read a lot of comics lately. [Laughs]

  Mariko Tamaki: Oh no! Then I’m also going to recommend The Wicked + The Divine, which is a really good comic book series as well.

  Paste: Jillian, you’ve cited older manga as a color palette inspiration for This One Summer, and you work in a lot of different styles. What was your artistic process like on this book? How did you settle on this art style?
  Jillian Tamaki: I think that it’s a style that is very practical, in that I can draw it very quickly. I’m really comfortable with that medium of brush pen, so that is the medium that I chose because I needed to do a book in a year. [Laughs] That was kind of a practical choice, and I just think that it sort of fit the content, which was quite specific, quite realist, in the dialogue and the location and the setting. I thought it kind of fit and felt very naturalistic, but impressionistic, the blend of highly realistic environment and nature, and these sort of cartoony people overlaid on top of that.

  Paste: 2014 was a pretty good year for discussions about feminism and body diversity in mainstream comics, both of which feel very natural and intrinsic to This One Summer. Was that an intentional choice?
  Jillian Tamaki: I’ve been an illustrator for over a decade now, and 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. But when I was growing up there, I was the only mixed race kid in my school. I think you’re always looking around to see yourself in your surroundings. It’s not like you’re exactly changing the world by putting a variety of body shapes in a comic book, but who knows. As for feminism, that’s an interest of ours, and it embodies a lot of our personalities and thinking so that’s natural that it’s going to come through in our work, both of our work, either way.

  Paste: Your last collaboration, Skim, also collected a lot of awards both inside and outside comic-exclusive categories. What can we expect to see from you next, either individually or collaboratively?
  Mariko Tamaki: Jillian’s got a book coming out!

  Jillian Tamaki: I have a book coming out in April, called SuperMutant Magic Academy, and that is the collection of my webcomic that has been going for four years, plus new material. It’s different from This One Summer in that it’s a collection of strips with some longer narrative in it. It’s like a different beast, so I’m excited to see what people think. That’s coming out in the spring from Drawn & Quarterly.

  Mariko Tamaki: It’s super awesome.

  Jillian Tamaki: Do you have a new book, Mariko?

  Mariko Tamaki: It’s all to be announced, so I’m working on a bunch of things. I’m working on some things that are going to be just prose and I’m working on some comic projects, but they’re all sort of up in the air still. As soon as they’ve landed, I’ll let you know.

  Paste: One last question: in the book, Rose and Windy really freak themselves out renting horror movies. Do either of you have favorite cabin scare flicks?
  Jillian Tamaki: I’m such a wimp, such a wimp. [Laughs]

  Mariko Tamaki: The funniest thing is I that I hate scary movies, and I knew when I included [those scenes] that I was like, I’m so glad I don’t have to watch these.

• AV Club - https://www.avclub.com/supermutant-magic-academy-s-jillian-tamaki-explores-ado-1798279368

  SuperMutant Magic Academy’s Jillian Tamaki explores adolescence through art
  Oliver Sava
  5/06/15 9:00amFiled to: Books
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  Most cartoonists can only dream of the year Jillian Tamaki is having. Last May, First Second Books released This One Summer, a gorgeous graphic novel illustrated by Tamaki and written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki about a girl’s coming-of-age during summer vacation. Full of lush natural imagery and deeply expressive characters, This One Summer garnered Tamaki major recognition, and in February of this year, she became the first graphic novel artist to be awarded a Caldecott Honor. She received this distinction in the time between the airing of her two episodes of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, but she’s still firmly rooted in the world of comic books, releasing two new pieces this season: SuperMutant Magic Academy, a Drawn & Quarterly collection of Tamaki’s long-running Tumblr comic, and an issue of Youth In Decline’s monograph series Frontier. She recently spoke with The A.V. Club about her evolution as a creator, the value of exploring adolescence in art, and the challenges of jumping from comics to animation.

  The A.V. Club: What was your first introduction to comic books?

  Jillian Tamaki: My younger sister actually was very into Archie comics, and Mad Magazine, and Cracked. [Laughs.] Which I always think is funny, because it’s usually an older brother or sister that gets you into things. She would always buy Archie, and she would color-code them on a bookshelf. I started getting into comics more through her, and then we would just read Archie and stuff like that. We would cut out the little word balloons and paste them on other things and make funny connections that way. And then I sort of aged out of that, and then didn’t read comics again until I was in art college. I was around some people that were fans of alternative comics, and that’s where I clued in to the fact there were things that were about real life. [Laughs.] I really had no idea that stuff even existed. So, I didn’t make that leap. I’m sure there were many ways a young person can graduate from kid comics to something in between, like maybe that’s where our books fit in somewhere, but I don’t know if those existed or I didn’t know about them at the time. So, it’s something I rediscovered again in my early 20s.
  Betty and Veronica by Jillian Tamaki

  AVC: What were some of the alt-comics that stood out to you at that time?

  JT: Adrian Tomine’s comics were amazing, and then when I wanted to start making them, it was the Drawn & Quarterly stable of people. Michel Rabagliati was super cool. I really like how he balances technical aspects with his style of storytelling. And Chester Brown. One thing I really glommed onto early on was Tomer Hanuka and Asaf Hanuka’s Bipolar, which is funny, because they have a new book coming out. It’s not something I hear about that often, but I thought it was cool how Tomer was an illustrator and making comics. I don’t even know if he would consider himself a cartoonist. I know his brother does more of that now. That was really intriguing to me that he was doing both of those things.

  AVC: When did you decide that you wanted to pursue illustration as a professional career?

  JT: I went to the Alberta College Of Art And Design. I went to become a designer, and then realized by accident when I got there it was half illustration, half design. I didn’t even know illustration was a thing. It’s so funny, because I taught at SVA [New York City’s School Of Visual Arts] for a long time, and kids already know they’ve wanted to be an illustrator since 15 or something. I didn’t even know that was a job. I always loved illustrated things. I didn’t know there was—I just thought that was for artists or something. That’s where I was introduced to, “Oh, this is a profession.” This is a job that you can have. [Laughs.] It was just complete serendipity. But it was a real hard decision for me to stop thinking that I was just going to be a designer. Not that I was that good at it. What life is for an illustrator seemed a lot more precarious, and maybe it is, especially for a freelancer most of the time, so it was a really big leap to make that decision when I graduated. I had a half in-between job where I worked at BioWare in Edmonton for two years while I was moonlighting as a freelance illustrator and just working around the clock, as you can when you’re 23. It was sort of like gradual half-steps, how I eventually became an illustrator. I needed small safety nets, I guess.

  AVC: When did you start working creatively with your cousin Mariko?

  JT: So, when I was working at the video game—again, 23, 24—I did my first comic, which was a mini-comic about the new city I was living in, and was futzing around with comics in general. And then my cousin, who is a writer, she had one or two books out at that point, came across an opportunity through a friend to make a small 24-page comic. We did not grow up with one another, but she was like, “Oh, I have this cousin that’s looking to start making comics. And I think that would be fun. Let’s just make this small thing.” So, that was the first time we worked together.

  AVC: What do you appreciate about her as a collaborator?

  JT: Well, she comes from a theater background. She comes from an activist background. There’s a lot of performance in her creative DNA. What comes with that is that she’s really great at collaborating and working with other people and bouncing off other people and accepting other people’s element that they’re going to bring to whatever work. I think that she’s a great collaborator in that she is not precious about what she brings to any sort of collective work and is very giving and very trusting, actually, and is willing to be surprised by an unexpected manipulation of ideas or characters or themes or whatever.

  AVC: Is there a reason that your collaborations have focused primarily on adolescence, or is that a coincidence?

  JT: I guess it’s the whole cliché of writing. We’re both extremely interested in the experience of being a girl and being a woman and feminist themes. That’s who we are as people, and therefore, it’s not like we sit down and are like, “Let’s write a thing about the female experience.” It’s clearly just what I find interesting, and that’s what she finds interesting, and therefore I think that’s where we overlap. There’s a lot in our individual personalities and works that doesn’t overlap, but that is definitely one that does. In terms of adolescence, we did not set out to make YA books or anything like that, it was just that I think we’re both attracted to that time because it is extremely vivid, and you’re making discoveries that seem—they are extremely important and extremely dramatic to you. She’s great at dialogue, and that’s just a wonderful—high school is a great little fishbowl to explore all those things.

  AVC: It’s interesting how in the last decade there have been more graphic novels that specifically cater to female adolescents. And it’s a market that is largely untapped in mainstream comics.

  JT: Yeah, I think that distinction is interesting. Are they catering to that audience, or are they representing that audience? I believe that one of the misconceptions can be that because a book is about a girl or a woman, that it’s for girls or women. You know? I believe that there are—I’ll just say it—there are a lot of men that are just not interested in women’s stories, and that’s a shame. I think now, hopefully, the proof is in the pudding—if you have a story about women or are reflecting a female experience, you can also make money. [Laughs.] You don’t want to be cynical, but that’s when real change comes in terms of a mainstream change. When people realize that something is actually not niche, but can make a lot of money. Maybe that’s a cynical thing to think.

  AVC: How did it feel to be the first graphic novel illustrator to receive the Caldecott Honor?

  JT: I mean, that was really surprising, only because I didn’t really consider—I wasn’t expecting to get a phone call, because I did not expect that I would even be in the running for something like that. I’m from an editorial illustration background, a comics background, more like a publishing background. Children’s books seem like a whole different world, a completely different facet that I know very little about, really. I know of so many people that do that full-time, and it seems like I know very little of that world. I had assumed it was for picture books. It’s a great honor, obviously. I am always really touched to know by work can extend to audiences that I didn’t expect or don’t necessarily even think about when I’m making work.

  AVC: The character expression and environmental detail in This One Summer are really noticeable. How did you hone your skills with those elements?

  JT: Well, I will just go back to ACAD to speak to that for a little bit, because that program at the time—I was there from 2000 to 2003—was very technical-based. It was almost like a trade school sort of thing. The second year—I had gone to another school for my foundation year—the first year I was there, was just anatomy, skeletons, muscle charts, life drawing all year, six-hour classes. It’s a lot of technical drawing, and then a lot of perspective rendering, architectural renderings, texturing where you have to just render a glass bottle with graphite. I think that there was a real emphasis on observation; you can explore your complex feelings and emotions later, you just need to learn how to draw properly first, which could get really tiresome, obviously.

  But I’m so glad I went through that boot camp because, I don’t carry everything forward from that, but it was great to just have somebody sit down with you and tell you, “Here is how you draw something in perspective. This looks wrong, here’s how to fix it.” I feel like I got a really good foundation. And then I think the second part of that question is, especially being an editorial illustrator, you’re just drawing so much, especially those first couple of years when you’re really hustling and you’re doing a lot of jobs all over the place. You just really become comfortable with your own vocabulary and your own skills, and that means your strengths and your weaknesses. Practice makes perfect, the old cliché. I did have years of drawing continuously, which just brings you up to a comfort level, which can help you a lot when you’re dealing with a comic, which is a crazy amount of drawing. Stamina alone is huge.

  AVC: What inspired the creation of SuperMutant Magic Academy?

  JT: I had done a Marvel Strange Tales that was dipping my toe into superhero comics, which to be honest, I did not know anything about and I’m not that interested in. I realized when I did that comic I was more interested in my character’s daily life and her relationships with her boyfriend and stuff like that. [Laughs.] I also was looking for a project that was not polished, just for myself, sort of like a diary. I had gotten bored with putting my sketchbook up online of drawings. I wanted something that would let me practice writing. Again, it’s sort of an intentionally stupid concept that I just want to use to drape things over and move around with them. It’s the time-honored thing of using high school. It’s not a new idea to explore different types of people. Again, like I mentioned earlier, it’s a very vivid time. All emotions are new. For a kid to remark upon them is not so unusual.

  AVC: What was your high school experience like?

  JT: I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I went to a public high school that I hated. Not because I was terribly bullied or anything like that, it was just so—I always felt like I was 30 years old or something. “I’m done being around people you’re forced to be around. Where are the like-minded people?” I always wished I went to a place where there were uniforms because I always thought it would be so great to have one less thing to differentiate people. I’ve since learned that, even within groups of kids with uniforms, there’s ways of differentiating yourself and transmitting “I’m cool” or “I’m not cool” or whatever. This comes through in Marsha especially, where I was just like, “If I just keep my head down…” It was a matter of surviving, you know? To just get through and bleed it out.

  AVC: Which of the teens would you say is closest to who you were when you were in high school? Marsha?

  JT: Yeah, I think some of the characters are directly people I know, but I think that there are parts of me in all of them. But Marsha did end up being a character that, if there is a main character, it’s probably her. But maybe not necessarily because I identify with her more. She just ended up being a more flexible character. Certain characters seem to be able to be easier to manipulate, and she ended up being one that I could put into different situations. I was sort of learning new elements of her all the time, so that was more of an organic process versus any sort of “She’s me!”

  AVC: If you had a superability, what would it be?

  JT: Oh my God… to make more hours in the day. [Laughs.] To slow down time or something.

  AVC: Why did you take SuperMutant Magic Academy to Drawn & Quarterly instead of First Second?

  JT: Well actually, I had one book with Drawn & Quarterly before this, so I already had a relationship with them. It was funny, because I was only five strips in or something, like ridiculously early, and [Drawn & Quarterly creative director] Tom Devlin was like, “Oh, should we be paying attention to this? What’s this about?” It is nice to have relationships with various publishers. This publisher could be great for this type of project, this publisher fits this project a little bit more. In the case of this, it was that he just called dibs on it.

  AVC: The surreal Everlasting Boy interludes are fascinating. What was the purpose for doing those as part of your artistic exercise?

  JT: He’s obviously the most poetic character. He’s kind of a thought experiment, in terms of how your gift or your superability or your thing that might be enviable can actually be a curse. I think what I like doing is following things to the extreme end. That’s a very common thing in our culture, like, “I would love to live forever. I never want to age, I never want to get old, I never want to get ugly, I never want to die.” So here’s a kid that is that, and he’s miserable. What do you do with all that time? I guess I just completely contradicted what I just said about wishing I had more time. So yeah, he’s a thought experiment. I do like following a thread to the very end, and I think that that’s really fun, so that’s where he came from.

  AVC: There’s a shift toward the end of the collection where it switches from the self-contained one-page strips to something more serialized, especially in those last scenes. Was that something that just naturally happened, or did you have a feeling that you needed to tell a bigger story?

  JT: Well, I think when something is already published—well, published online, or a webcomic—and then you’re putting a book out, there’s always going to be a component of people that will buy the thing because they’re happy to support you and stuff like that. But I think it’s nice to give more meat and more content when you’re trying to sell something to somebody. [Laughs.] And give them another reason to buy the book and expand upon it in hopefully a surprising way. I did feel like there should be some sort of sense of resolution or a conclusion. I don’t think every string is tied up at some point of the project or in the thing at the end, but if certain very loose narratives threads just stopped, it would have felt really uncomfortable and unsatisfying. I did want to just tie up some of the more important ones, and give a little bit of a hunk of meat at the end. It’s also somewhat inspired by the original Degrassi High, where they put out a two-hour movie at the end of the series. There was more sex, there was swearing. Everything was way more intense. They were outside of the school. Somehow, that particular little world got expanded slightly, and it was a funny feeling. So that was part of the inspiration for having this big chunk at the end. I wanted to have that feeling a little bit of the world getting expanded.

  AVC: Is there anything you’re especially proud of over the course of the comic?

  JT: No. Every project that you finish is a mix of satisfaction, maybe even a little bit of pride in following something to the finish. Doing these books is a big investment of time and energy. You’re never going to be happy with everything in a book, and it never ends up as perfect as you wanted, but it is really gratifying to see four or five years of work together. I think it’s a different experience reading them one after another versus the way they were originally parceled out, which is online once a week, or something like that. I think it’s a really different—and you’re encountering in a Tumblr feed or whatever, it’s a really different experience to see it put together. I was very surprised that there were that many comics that had accrued. Yeah, it’s pretty cool to see it in one spot.

  AVC: I loved seeing the evolution from the beginning to the end.

  JT: I think that’s a big part of the book that a certain type of person might enjoy seeing that process. It really is starting from something that’s just—you don’t even know what it is. It’s just a nugget of some idea. And then it goes off in various directions. Some dead-end, as well. I think that some people will find that interesting. Some people might find that confusing or unsatisfying. But, you know, it is what it is.

  AVC: You’ve worked on two episodes of Adventure Time that aired this season. How did you get involved with the series?

  JT: Well, I always think of those Cartoon Network shows and comics as being so tied together. There’s a lot of cross-pollination that happens, mostly because they tap the comics community because comics is writing and drawing. That way that they board the show creates something really unique versus just a storyboarder transcribing a writer. You have those two things within the same person, it comes out a little differently, right? So, they knew of me through my comics and just approached me about it. I have quite a few friends who work over there as well.

  AVC: They’ve had some amazing people working on the show this season: Sam Alden, Sloane Leong, Brandon Graham.

  JT: It makes me happy also to know that if cartooning and comics are not that lucrative—in some ways, it’ll always be a subsidized thing—it is really cool to—I mean, who knows how long it’ll last. This is a really special time for television and cartoons and stuff like that, but I’m really glad that my friends get to have jobs, and make some money, and save some money, and get a house and all this stuff, and have their work seen by a lot of people. And they’re shaping the minds of young children with their twisted perspective. I’m so happy for them.

  AVC: What have been some of the challenges in writing and storyboarding? Has there been anything that has come surprisingly easily?

  JT: Well, I think comics prepares you for the amount of drawing needed. It’s so much drawing. It’s crazy. But storyboarding and comics are really, really different. One thing I noticed was that time works very differently in a storyboard or an animated sequence than it can in comics, where you can really play with anything. You can compress it, you can expand upon it, but I was constantly being told, “You have to articulate this motion. You just can’t appear over there.” You need to get there and stuff like that. That was one of the—again, there are all these storyboarding rules you actually shouldn’t do in comics, because a comic isn’t a storyboard. You go the other way, where it’s like, “Oh, you have to do that, or it doesn’t make any sense.”

  AVC: Do you have any episodes coming up in the future?

  JT: Those two are the only ones I’ve worked on. There isn’t one in the pike or anything like that. Who knows? I’m not talking to them about doing anything else, but it’s just super busy right now with book stuff. You never know.

  AVC: You work in a variety of different media. Which is your favorite?

  JT: I love futzing around and just playing around, trying to be loose and free and not worrying about being a technical master. I do like trying new mediums, but I always come back to drawing. Whether that is pencil or ink, might be one of the two, is sort of my first love.

  AVC: What’s the biggest piece of advice you have for an aspiring cartoonist?

  JT: Make comics. [Laughs.] It sounds flippant to say, but it’s never been easier to make comics and publish them and get people looking at them. I’m always a little surprised when somebody says they one day they want to be a cartoonist. You can make them. Like right now. You need some white copier paper and a pencil. Start drawing. You’re going to be bad for a long time. But you’ve got start somewhere.

  AVC: With the rise of digital, there are so many outlets. Anything you do can go out to the entire world.

  JT: It was not hard before, going and photocopying pieces of paper, but it’s even easier now. There’s no reason not to if that’s what you’re interested in doing

• The Comics Journal - http://www.tcj.com/a-conversation-with-jillian-tamaki/

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  A Conversation with Jillian Tamaki
  BY Eleanor Davis Jun 5, 2017

  Jillian Tamaki’s new book, Boundless, has just come out from Drawn & Quarterly. It’s a collection of her short comics done over several years: a calm, whipping, crackling body of work.

  To talk about Jillian Tamaki’s artwork, for me, means talking about myself. For most of my life I felt like being a woman meant I was worth less as a human being. I felt like I could never make art as good as I could have if I were a man.

  I first learned about Jillian Tamaki’s work around 2007. After several years of seeing the images she created, I knew that there was no artist who was better than her. There are artists who may be as good, but there is no one who is better. It was the first time – but not the last – that I was able to recognize this in a woman artist.

  After that, a long and awful lie broke apart inside me and began to melt away.

  – Eleanor Davis, May 17th, 2017.

  ED: What story of yours have you found people respond to the most strongly? And what was your response to their response?

  JT: Well, obviously the strongest reaction I have had to A Book has been This One Summer, which is a collaboration. [This One Summer, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, was the ALA’s most challenged book of 2016 – ED]. It’s interesting, for the interviews for Boundless thus far, people have wanted to discuss “The ClairFree System.” Which is slightly surprising.

  ED: I experience the clearest emotional arc reading it. Not intellectual clarity, but emotional, with the conditional intimacy of the final moment.

  JT: I’m trying to think of their “reaction” though. I feel like they want to hear me talk about it. It feels very mysterious and strange to them, I guess? It’s not a typical image-text pairing. I mean, it’s about The Economy, which I think about constantly.

  ED: I read that comic as both a feminist critique, and defense, of Capitalism. I LOVED it, obviously.

  JT: I had forgotten: that story was sparked by learning that some of my friends in my hometown had gotten into what they called a “Skin cult.” Which is maybe a pyramid scheme? You made commissions off of selling to your friends. But on the other hand, it just seemed like Mary Kay or Avon for the millennial set. And it was bizarre because I was like, oh, I remember Avon and these suburban selling-parties when I was a kid. But now I’m on the flip, the adult, and the moms needed CASH.

  ED: It’s so fucking empathetic to the need for both beauty – a healthy, smooth exterior – and money. It’s so empathetic to what those two things can mean, in this case for women.

  JT: I am constantly bewildered by the juxtapositions of city-life. Like, businesses closing left, right, and center, but then so many empty storefronts. No one can afford to rent, and yet we can bid $500K over asking price on teardowns. So there was an attempt at that in that story. Human needs and desires with cold hard, figures. Friendship and manipulation. Hopes and realities.

  ED: I’ve noticed you think about environment a lot. Your first comic in Boundless, “World Class City,” is one of my favorites. That comic is so loving, and scared, and hopeful, and sheepish? I don’t know if I’m projecting too much.

  JT: Cities. I feel like it’s a real relationship. With longing and dreams and disappointments. Beautiful bits and really ugly bits. That comic is about NY, but can be about any big city. People project so much onto NY, it is still seen as a place to go make your dreams come true, put yourself to the test, be the best version of yourself, possibly even make yourself over. I think this thing can happen where the city gets folded into your identity. It’s a song, by the way! The words in “World Class City” are song lyrics

  ED: Oh! Like, an existing song?

  JT: No! The one and only song I have ever written. I was briefly in a punk band with a few other women in their 30s.

  ED: Oh my God! Your band Shebola? Have you recorded it? Why doesn’t Boundless come with a flexidisk insert?

  JT: It always ended up very shoegaze-y or angry songs about pussies. Literally, we could have put out an album of pussy songs. Anne Ishii and Chelsea Cardinal are the other members.

  ED: FLEXIDISK INSERT!

  JT: Oh God, I would like to be much better! I am very enthusiastic, though. Screaming is great.

  ED: Jillian! That’s so cool! I want to hear this song‼

  JT: This is so embarrassing, but here is “World Class City,” the song, sort of.

  [JT sends ED the song]

  [ED listens to the song]

  ED: Holy shit! I love this so much! What instrument are you playing? This is just hugely satisfying.

  JT: We switched all the time! Guitar, keyboard, drums. Punk as fuck.

  ED: Did you write “World Class City” after you realized you were gonna leave New York?

  JT: Oh yes. Definitely. I had always had a very weird, uncomfortable relationship with New York, but it was my home and leaving was very melancholy despite being 100% the right decision.

  ED: I read it in the voice of someone who is in love with a thing, but is aware of being in denial about its flaws. A keening sort of mournful love.

  JT: Oh, I never fell in love with the place. But, I’m glad. I prefer that, instead of it seeming sarcastic.

  ED: How did you decide the images for it?

  JT: To be honest, I can feel increasingly confined by the image part of comics. Perhaps because often, for more commercial works, the images need be a lot more literal? I feel like images can “lock” an idea. To depict someone specific can be nice sometimes – the books I do with Mariko are always about specificity of time and place and character. But sometimes it’s nice, when reading prose, to have the ideas and concepts more open. They can feel more universal or possibly even symbolic. So I guess this comic was about trying to stretch that word-image relationship. I don’t want to show you what kind of person thinks this way, acts this way, etc.

  ED: “World Class City,” and another story in Boundless, “The ClairFree System,” are doing an odd trick that I’m not super familiar with in comics. With both of them the divide between the words and the images is very stark. The dreaminess of the images makes real life feel muffled. Then, in “ClairFree,” when you come out of the beautiful dreamlike images and into a sequence depicting reality, reality is this scruffy, itchy thing.

  JT: The images in ClairFree system are a combination of found photos I had kicking around and pictures I took of various artworks at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Both were sort of adapted to a sort of universality, which is what that comic ends up being about.

  ED: It feels hypnotic.

  JT: Most of the artworks were statuary. Universality is the wrong word. Perhaps more like, the line between hope and survival, future and present?

  ED: The images have a sense of purity and solidity, and grandeur.

  JT: I dunno, I just feel like, how to recapture some of the feeling of prose? Where ideas are so much more free-floating. It’s cool to create juxtaposition between dialogue and body language, I do that all the time, and we have our tricks as to how to create ambiguity, but what if you are given NO “clues” as to how the words are intended? Sometimes comics can feel like seeding clues.

  ED: Yes! I think you did that!

  JT: Ideas, dialogue, environment.

  ED: One of the things that makes me feel crazy about comics is that they’re so distant, inherently.

  JT: How so?

  ED: Prose feels like it’s happening inside your head, because you’re building the images of the text yourself. Comics does that work for you, about fourteen inches in front of your face, so you’re less engaged. With “ClairFree” and “World-Class,” you’re allowing the world-creating prose-response, but then folding additional images on top of that. I had a sense that both comics existed inside my own mind in a way that other comics do not.

  JT: Perhaps some people will feel the image-word relationship will have been stretched too far.

  ED: Yeah, dude, it’s going to really bug a lot of people!

  JT: Well, whatever [Laughs].

  ED: Just to give you a heads-up. [Laughs] I know this is kind of a shitty attitude, but I feel so comfy in people not getting my stuff. I just roll around in it.

  JT: I wonder if having a kid would change this equation entirely. If you’re suddenly all, ok, cool, time to flesh out the SuperMutant Magic Academy universe and call up Cartoon Network. Instead at this point it’s like, what am I going to do… NOT try to push myself? I’ve been making some choices that are, “ok, well, you’re in a position to do this.”

  ED: I’ve been there lately too. It feels good, and bad, and scary.

  JT: It’s really scary. I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about being scared.

  ED: Yeah.

  JT: Mid-career is a trip, man. I have seen so many ppl around me flip that switch, where it’s like, “time to get real.”

  ED: Time to get real, like, make that money?

  JT: Yeah, or the innovation stops.

  ED: “This look is selling.”

  JT: This sounds weird but it can almost seem childish or selfish to keep on pushing in this way.

  ED: Well, art directors and audiences don’t tend to ask for it. It IS for oneself.

  JT: Yeah. It’s true. Feels increasingly like a choice.

  ED: I am trying to think of anyone I know who has pushed their style so much or as successfully as you have.

  JT: What choice do I have but to try to aim for the highest heights? I simultaneously HATE this way of thinking, because it strikes me as so masculine, and phallic and horrible.

  ED: Don’t you think we’re both masculine ladies though, in that regard? I am OK with that. When I’m not being my best self I’m proud of it. Wanting to succeed, fuck it, that’s my feminist act of resistance.

  JT: I’m really lucky though. It does feel like a very charmed life.

  ED: Oh my God, I say I’m lucky all the time but I HATE hearing you say you’re lucky! Guys don’t say they’re lucky!! They say they WON!!!

  JT: I work hard but…. right time, right place, etc. etc… THAT kind of luck! Like, COSMIC luck!

  ED: Jillian, that’s what I say! But it’s infuriating to hear you say it! It’s LUCKY that God came down and pressed his finger into your nog and gave you fight mixed with skill!

  JT: WELL! I mean! I coulda had shitty parents who forbade me from drawing and forced me to be an accountant like my dad!

  ED: OK, that part is “lucky.” That part was lucky for all of us. [Laughs]

  Final question: what do you think an artist owes their audience?

  JT: I accept various answers. If someone were to respond, “NOTHING!”, I totally accept that! I’m even OK with a level of cynicism from an artist. I guess for me I have found the most powerful and meaningful outcomes have arisen from people connecting with characters or stories, and relating them to their own lives or situations. I feel I owe my audience honesty so we can make that connection.

• Rookie - http://www.rookiemag.com/2017/05/boundless-an-interview-with-jillian-tamaki/

  Boundless: An Interview With Jillian Tamaki

  The illustrator on comics, pop culture, and technology.
  Rachel Davies 05/30/2017
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  05/30/2017 Winter Smiley

  Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

  Over the last decade, Jillian Tamaki has penned seven books, drawn innumerable book covers, and designed an art piece that can be viewed daily on the New York City subway. Her productivity is impressive enough, but compounded with her sweeping drawings, and admirably peculiar storylines, Tamaki is an unbelievable force. Since I’ve been interested in comics, Jillian Tamaki’s work has felt like an essential element of the genre. This could be offhandedly summed up to my interest in queer narratives (namely her book Skim, which was written by her cousin, Mariko Tamaki), or Tamaki’s presence in my hometown library’s slim-pickings comics section (like me, she’s from Canada). In actuality the answer is simple: Tamaki is a master at what she makes, so it would be difficult for the comics scene to not be smitten with her work.

  Tamaki’s most recent book, Boundless, was released by Drawn and Quarterly today. When reading the book, a sinister feeling peeks from the edges of the pages, slowly encroaching like poison ivy. The book’s many stories are intriguing in their own respect, but what’s so captivating about the work is viewing it as a whole. Tamaki flawlessly captures the human impulses that are inseparable from our usage of the internet—such as a story of a girl’s spiraling obsessiveness with a Facebook meme.

  I interviewed Tamaki earlier this month about making work for the internet, meeting her readers, and the darker side of technology.

  RACHEL DAVIES: Does your approach to your work differ when you’re making something for the internet, opposed to making something specifically for a book?

  JILLIAN TAMAKI: Both have their strengths and limitations. The form of a book is quite rigid in some ways. You have to respect the physicality of it. For example, a page turn is quite a dramatic event that can be exploited for effect. Because we know books so well, it can be fun to try to subvert the form a little bit, too. In Boundless, some of the pages are printed sideways, as they were originally an endless scroll when they appeared online.

  When I had a webcomic on Tumblr [called SuperMutant Magic Academy], I loved the simplicity of the very fixed dimension and delivery method. There wasn’t really a lot of room for high detail. What worked best was very direct, simple drawings. The story was most important. Making a webcomic, where the feedback is immediate, can end up influencing the thing itself as it’s being made. Which is a very different creative effect from sitting alone in a room for a year, never showing your work.

  Each of your books seem to approach storytelling in a different way. This One Summer and Skim, made with Mariko Tamaki, have detailed narratives with equally precise illustrations, while SuperMutant Magic Academy is told through humorous vignettes in a more casual style. Are you intentionally mixing these up?

  There is a very strong through-line between the books I’ve made with my cousin, which are very narrative/dialogue driven, sensory, specific. Similarly, there is a connection between SuperMutant Magic Academy and the stories in Boundless. The shapes and styles change, but I sincerely hope there is a unity of voice.

  Many times the “form” of the work is a response to what I have just done. I did a webcomic because I wanted a more direct relationship with my audience, versus putting out a book once every three years. I started writing longer short stories when the webcomic started feeling too limiting.

  Did you grow up reading comics? When did you realize that you wanted to make comics specifically?

  I grew up reading Archie Comics. As an aside, yes, I am totally obsessed with Riverdale. When I outgrew them, I didn’t think of comics in any way. I made some zines in high school but was so stupid that I never thought to make copies…I just gave them to a girl I was trying to make laugh. I only started reading indie comics when I was in college. I made my first proper comic when I was about 23. It seemed like a cheap, accessible, doable way of making a thing. It’s not like I wanted to “break into the industry.” I just wanted to tell a story. But I’m a bit of a competitive person, too. Once I made it, I wanted people to see it! So I sold it online and people liked it, so that was encouragement to make more.

  Do you have any advice for young comics makers?

  Compared to many art forms, comics still remain relatively accessible. It’s not perfect, and the comics community is constantly debating that accessibility, but truly, you need so little equipment to start. If you can get your work onto the internet, poof, you’re a cartoonist. I suppose another thing I hear new artists say is that they wish someone had told them about the financial realities. Comics are extremely laboor-intensive and not terribly lucrative. Even a very decent advance typically is not going to stretch very far if you figure dollars per hour. So I guess I will also throw that in. Be prepared!

  You do a lot of commissioned pieces—book covers, magazine work, et cetera. I’m wondering if you feel that the possibly stricter parameters of these projects affect the way you approach your other work?

  Well, I mentally categorize them differently. I pour a lot of sweat and tears into all my work, but obviously there is an increased sense of ownership over your own stories and characters. But I try to learn something on every job I do. Sometimes, to be honest, it can be a relief to do a straight illustration job, where you are interpreting someone else’s material. You get to give your own personality a breather for a second. Also, it’s not like I have complete freedom with my own work either. Those projects end up as “products,” to be perfectly crass, as well.

  Some of the stories in Boundless are told primarily through interior monologue, and the words leave the reader with a lot to choose from, as far as visual representation goes. Like in the beginning of “1.Jenny,” you begin with writing about the mirror Facebook but the drawings are of the plants in the greenhouse before it’s indicated to the reader that she works in a greenhouse. How do you decide what to represent with your drawings?

  Well, that’s the fun, isn’t it? The space between image and text is the whole thing. One generally wants to avoid being too literal, because then what’s the point of having separate image and text? I think of them as two streams of information–they can support or diverge or conflict. Many of the stories in Boundless aim to stretch and manipulate this space.

  In the case of “1.Jenny,” I wanted to represent Facebook as something much more organic–not the actual interface. For a person who is completely comfortable online, the internet is not a series of windows or whatever, it’s a headspace or textural medium or something. The mirror Facebook might be the result of a bug or spam, but it grows autonomously, hence plants feeling appropriate.

  After the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, you wrote on Instagram about seeing a lot of the same fans each year. Since you come face to face with your readers, I’m wondering if you think about your audience when you’re creating, or if you manage to compartmentalize?

  You have to compartmentalize, at least for large chunks of the process. It’s scary to think about a stranger reading your book. I try to write “to” a few real people I respect and hope for the best. It’s probably best to also assume you will lose certain readers over time or on a book-by-book basis. Not everything is going to appeal to everyone. I’m not interested by doing the same thing over and over again.

  I really love your posts about quilting. Can you talk a bit about the importance of creating things that aren’t necessarily for the public eye as someone whose job it is to create?

  Thanks! Many self-initiated projects—comics, embroidery, even sketchbooking or blogging—have resulted in new career directions. Or, in other words, I have a problem of turning hobbies into work. I’m not sure that those things aren’t ultimately for some sort of “public eye” though. I mean, I did ultimately end up showing them, putting images of them online.

  Regarding quilting, when I moved back to Canada from New York City, one of the things I wanted to prioritize was making non-commercial work. It’s a little cheaper to live [in Toronto], and the cartooning community in Toronto still has a very DIY sensibility that I admire greatly.

  A lot of your stories have this eerie portrayal of technology or contemporary living, whether it be the grave effect “SexCoven” has on its audience, or the personal ways that Body Pods fit into the narrator’s life and relationships. When you started working on stories for the book, did you realize that they would all connect thematically, or were you just following your story telling impulses?

  The latter. I think a lot of pop culture or technology can be easily dismissed possibly because they are so quotidian? There is “real culture,” then there is “garbage culture,” or something like that. But the garbage culture is so powerful. I mean, I think that became very obvious with fake news. People were like, “Wait, those crappy, obviously fake headlines on Facebook had a real effect?!” Or gamergate. The internet is not a subset of IRL. SexCoven chronicles a time when the internet felt more positive and anonymous, a sort of techno-nostalgia. It all feels a little darker now. ♦

• ACAD - https://www.acad.ca/alumni/meet-our-alumni/alumni-profile/jillian-and-lauren-tamaki

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  Jillian and Lauren Tamaki

  Jillian and Lauren Tamaki

  The sisters Tamaki are a double threat. From their respective apartments in Brooklyn, the two graphic artists raised in Calgary have managed to conquer the Big Apple with their distinctive art. Jillian is a freelance illustrator who also creates bestselling graphic novels. And younger sister Lauren is similarly accomplished, combining a busy freelance illustration practice with fulltime design gigs that let her multiple talents shine.

  If the two feel a rivalry, it doesn’t show. “Lauren is really attuned to culture, fashion and trend, both contemporary and historical,” says Jillian, 34. “She understands context very deeply and also has a good sense of humour and light spirit. Lauren, 31, says of her sister: “She’s illustration royalty. She’s set apart by the fact she has technical skill and storytelling ability.” Certainly the last two qualities are what Jillian has become known for.

  After doing a foundation year in fine art at Queens University in Ontario, she returned home to take a Visual Communications Design degree at Alberta College of Art + Design. While her intent was to study design, the curriculum’s second focus, on illustration, seduced her “immediately.” “When I entered ACAD, I don’t think I knew illustration was even a thing,” she recalls. “I was glad the program was so focused on drawing fundamentals and emphasized both design and illustration,” she adds. “It made me a much stronger drawer. I graduated feeling really prepared.”

  Jillian’s solid grounding helped her take off almost immediately. After graduating in 2003, she started freelancing in Calgary and then landed at an Edmonton video-game company, while continuing to freelance. With enough clients she went freelance full time and moved to New York in 2005. Since then, her clients have included the likes of the New York Times, New Yorker, National Geographic, Penguin Books, Oprah Magazine and WIRED.

  At the same time she pursued a love of comics and with cousin, Mariko Tamaki, created the graphic novel Skim, in 2008, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. This year, the pair published This One Summer, a whimsical coming-of-age story. The novel had a two-week run on the NYT bestseller list. Inspired by her sister’s example, Lauren followed a fashion design degree at Ryerson University in Toronto by entering ACAD’s Visual Communications Design program. The twin focus of her courses helped her to realize she could have a dual design and illustration career. “The training just makes me a more valuable employee,” she explains. “The more arrows you have in your quiver, the more marketable you are in a competitive market.”

  While in school, Lauren did freelance design and illustration for clients such as Murale, Good magazine, Swerve magazine and Theatre Junction GRAND. After graduating in 2011, she visited Jillian in New York and landed a job at Bumble and bumble, where she immediately made a splash in the graphic arts community with the wallpaper she designed and illustrated at the uptown salon, as well as holiday cards and the illustrations she created for B&b’s first rewards gaming app. She continued to do freelance illustrations for clients such as GQ, Wall Street Journal and Cole Haan and in 2013, she made the leap to New York’s Arch & Loop design firm, where she reunited with the beauty and fashion clients she loves.

  She is now doing a lot more designing for the Web, forcing her to learn new skills on the fly. She is not fazed because of the “fearless attitude” that she and her sister learned at ACAD. The hard deadlines, high professional standards and, especially, the demanding but supportive instructors, made them realize they could do just about anything they set their minds to. “They helped us to get ready for the real world,” says Lauren. “You can’t put a price tag on that.”
  Featured Work

  This Summer Sampler from This One Summer, 2014

  Jillian Tamaki

  Cole Haan, Holiday 2013

  Lauren Tamaki

• Sequential Tart - http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/oct05/art_1005_3.shtml

  This Is the Story of Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. So Read On.
  Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
  by Suzette Chan

  Canadian cousins Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki are both natural storytellers, Mariko using words, Jillian using pictures.

  Writer Mariko is the author of a novel (Cover Me, published by McGilligan Books), a collection of monologues (True Lies: A Book of Bad Advice, The Women's Press), a collection of short essays (the recently published Fake ID, The Women's Press), and several plays, including the co-authorship of A vs B, which was recently re-mounted at the Ear to the Ground indie arts festival in Toronto.

  Illustrator Jillian's work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC Arts Online, Bust, and Bitch. In August, her work was part of a group show (which included fellow comic book artist Allison Cole) at the Giant Robot store and gallery. She also launched her first mini-comic, City of Champions.

  Mariko and Jillian's first team-up resulted in Skim, a one-off comic about Skim Takota, an overweight, depressed, Japanese Canadian, goth teenager. Skim is desperate to create a physical and narrative space for herself ("This is the diary of Skim Takota. So fuck off.") within a privileged yet oppressive high school, a dysfunctional family, and, fleetingly, an amusingly disappointing local Wicca circle.

  I caught up with the busy Tamaki cousins in the weeks after the launch of Skim. I met with Jillian just after she had received the first printing of her debut mini-comic, and as she was preparing to relocate from Edmonton to New York City. I called Mariko at her home in Toronto, where she attends York University as a student in the Women's Studies Master's Degree program; earlier that day, she'd been working with the director of her first full-length play, based on Skim, which would premiere at Nightwood Theatre's Groundswell Festival in a few days.

  Jillian and Mariko took very different paths in developing their storytelling skills. Their experiences and the lessons they learned along the way became integral to their respective styles.

  Click to enlarge.
  Mariko's Story

  At 29, Mariko Tamaki has led an eventful life that yields rich reference material for her writing. "I was a weird, freaky, gothy kid, and I was really unhappy," Mariko says. "I'm comfortable drawing on that."

  She began to consider herself a writer at the age of 16 — "which was ironic, because that was when I was pretty depressed," — inspired by a supportive therapist and writer who recommended diary writing as a therapeutic activity. Soon enough, Mariko turned what was prescribed as therapy into commitment to the craft of writing.

  "There's a difference between telling a story just to tell a story and telling a story because you enjoy the craft," she says. "Writing is not just telling people what's happened in your life, but showing how you worked through it. At 16 it's too heart-felt, but later you learn to use it as an artform: you view it as your job."

  The difference was vividly demonstrated to her when she made the transition from her first public readings at counter-culture hangouts in Montreal, where she attended McGill University, to the unforgiving literary arenas of Toronto.

  "Writing was a big part of the lesbian community at McGill University," says Mariko, who self-identified as a lesbian in her second year at university (these days, to express a more broader view of sexuality and gender, she considers herself part of a queer community). "My first writing that I shared in public were bad poems — ‘break up' poems, ‘I'm a lesbian' poems, ‘I'm depressed' poems — at open mike nights in Montreal. The events were queer, political podiums and women's groups types of things: the audience was there to affirm you, not to critique your work."

  Mariko was unprepared for the reactions her material elicited when she returned to her hometown. "At literary open mikes in Toronto, the audiences were like, ‘We don't care that you're a lesbian. When are you going to do some fucking writing?'"

  To meet that challenge, Mariko turned to humour writing. "It was a way to develop my craft and get away from writing about my life." Mariko was a big fan of comedians when she was a kid, especially as she grew up watching Kids in the Hall and Bill Cosby; later she would admire Janeane Garofalo. "I like the fact that humour is hard. And it was a break from the seriousness of the poetry."

  Mariko also enroled in a writing class at George Brown College, a fateful decision which led to the publication of her first novel. Infused with Mariko's wickedly wry sense of humour, Cover Me is about a young woman who is out of sorts with herself, her family, and seemingly the rest of the world. The original short story prompted Mariko's writing instructor, Ann Decter, to encourage her to turn it into a novel. As it happened, Decter is a publisher and published the novel under her McGilligan Books banner.

  "It's all been offered in a weird kind of way," Mariko says about her writing career. "I was doing stand-up at the Strange Sisters cabarets at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (a Toronto theatre devoted to gay, lesbian, and queer stories) and someone offered to me a book deal from that (Mariko's comedic monologues are collected in True Lies, published by The Women's Press). I did stand up at Buddies, and that led to writing plays," Mariko recounts.

  "And I always work freelance. I had been working with Nightwood Theatre for a couple of years moving sets around and I wrote a couple of plays," she recalls. "This year, they asked if I'd written anything that could be included the Groundswell Festival (a festival of new plays by women). Because I was in grad school, there was only one thing I had written, which was Skim."

  To take a step back, the opportunity to write Skim also came knocking on her door. "I'd never considered the medium of comics, because I'm not that great of an artist, until I met Emily Pohl-Weary (editor of the zine Kiss Machine, which launched its line of comics this year). She said she was doing a project where she matches a writer with an artist, and I immediately thought, ‘I have this kind of gothic romance and I have a cousin who's an artist!'"

  The cousin was, of course, Jillian (more on her later). The gothic romance Mariko had in mind was born of her desire to see a certain type of character represented in visual fiction.

  "What I wanted to do was to create this character," she emphasizes. "This specific teenaged character is important. You see all these shows with people like Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan playing characters who are having problems being accepted. I think, ‘What the fuck is her problem? She's so white and beautiful!' I wanted to create this weird, chubby Asian character and explore how she's an outsider."

  With a third-generation Japanese father and a Caucasian mother, Mariko knows what it's like to be and to be regarded as being different.

  "I always thought I was an ugly Canadian, you know, I thought I had these ugly eyebrows, until later, when I thought of myself as Japanese." Ultimately, she is uncomfortable with labels, which can be used to distance people categorically. "Other people make me Japanese: some people really badly want you to come from outside" — for example, by guessing where a non-Caucasian is "from" — "like they feel really happy that they've pointed out how different you are."

  In the comic, Skim's parentage is similar to Mariko's, and the character similarly does not stake her identity on her ancestry.

  "Someone said Skim doesn't act very Japanese," Mariko says. "What is Japanese Canadian in a comic? Should Jillian have drawn her with chopsticks in her hair?"

  By giving Skim the attributes and concerns that she does, Mariko signals her awareness that outsiders' stories haven't been told or told enough in the mainstream. When I joke that she and Jillian could have dropped in a discussion about Japanese Canadian Redress to make the characters seem more Japanese Canadian, Mariko has a story about that, too.

  "I heard about that in school," Mariko says of the little-discussed policy. In 1988, the Canadian government came to a $12 million agreement to compensate Japanese Canadians for having unjustifiably interned and dispossessed 20,000 of their number during World War II. This dark episode had been kept from Canadian history books until recently, and, for other reasons, not necessarily talked about within Japanese Canadian families.

  The historical and familial secret upset Mariko. She found that Japanese stoicism may seem stereotypical, but it's a real part of the character of her father's side of the family. "I came home and asked my dad all these questions: ‘Did this happen? Did you get any money?' He said, ‘No, but your grandfather did.' I said, ‘Why don't I know about this?' He said, ‘Oh, we don't talk about that stuff.'"

  While difference is a major theme in Skim, so is the idea of forcible sameness, at a time when teens are trying to set out their own identity. With the hypercritical, snarky dialogue Mariko loved writing for her characters, Skim writes in her diary: "Today Lisa said: ‘Everyone thinks they are unique. That is not unique!'"

  "I'm of the Generations of Kates and Katies," explains Mariko, who has named several female friend characters "Kate", a practice her editors discourage ("If it were up to me, they would all be named "Kate"). "My first name on my birth certificate was Karen. At school, they would line up the Ks: Kathy, Katie, Karen. Mariko is my middle name. I changed it even though it would mean that I would never see my name on a toothbrush."

  Mariko Tamaki's name is, however, being seen across Canada on books, marquees, and comics. It's a guarantee of something unique.

  Click to enlarge.
  Jillian's Story

  Since Jillian Tamaki graduated from design school a few short years ago, she's worked for a major video game company (BioWare), launched a successful freelance illustration career (her work recently caught the attention of Clandestina, a Spanish web-based art magazine), co-created her first comic book (Skim), and wrote, drew, and produced her first mini-comic (City of Champions).

  Jillian, 25, says the speed with which she's met some of her career goals has been surprising. "I'm a competitive person," she says. "But I didn't think I'd get there so quickly."

  Even as a child, Jillian's artistic bent was obvious to family and friends who encouraged her to become an artist. "There was denial for a while," she remembers. Eventually she went to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario for the foundation year in Fine Arts. "But really, I wanted to do something more applicable. I was interested in doing storytelling in the drawings, but the Queen's Fine Art program emphasized abstract expressionism."

  Recognizing that she "found it more challenging and interesting to illustrate stuff like stories and articles," Jillian decided to move back to her hometown of Calgary to attend the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD). "The program was half illustration and half graphic design. I wasn't really going there to be an illustrator, I was there to do design, but I exceled more at illustration."

  Up to that point, Jillian's interest in comics was minimal, occasionally reading her sister's Archie comics. "I got more interested in comics when I was at ACAD, rather than when I was a kid," she says. "Adrian Tomine, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb — all the big names got me into it, and that got me into the European comics."

  In terms of her artistic style, Jillian says, "I'm sort of happy I wasn't so into comics when I was a kid because I had other artistic interests which I bring it." Her inspirations in the field of drawing are German expressionists like Georg Grosz and Otto Dix ("they had that grotesque thing going on"), Inuit art ("especially the printmaking aesthetic"), and Japanese and Asian art.

  From this array of influences, Jillian has forged a distinctive, complex, elegant style. For illustration, Jillian prefers to work digitally because of the tight deadlines which are often imposed. For comics, she chooses to work by hand, with pen and ink and brush. Another difference is that commercial clients usually request artwork in color; independent comics means working in black and white. "It's a challenge to do black and white and to work without the CONTROL-Z (undo) buttons, but it's nice to have a personal project going through."

  Jillian was a recent ACAD graduate working on textures and modeling at BioWare last year when her cousin Mariko from Toronto contacted her about collaborating on a comic. Mariko came up with the story of Skim Takota, an outcast teenager in a school where none of the kids lead perfect lives. Jillian showed the comic to one of her high school friends. The verdict: "She got goosebumps and said, ‘Those were terrible days.'"

  Although sequential art was part of her studies, Skim is Jillian's first comic. She found that while there were some differences in the process, the core of the work was the same as doing illustration.

  "For Skim editing dialogue and the logistics were new to me, but when it came down to the drawing, it was about the same as doing illustration," she says. "With the illustration, I tend to be very narrative-conscious. The details are what make the thing special or powerful. I didn't want to fall into the trap of talking heads, something I don't do in illustration. I do character development, and that's a real strength of Mariko."

  Inspired by her collaboration with Mariko and intrigued by the comic book form, Jillian decided to do her own comic, handling all aspects, from concept to illustration to production to distribution. "I wanted to do another project and I wanted to learn."

  Jillian's "Teach Yourself project" was a kind of love letter to her temporary home, entitled City of Champions, after a civic nickname which became ironic when the multiple Stanley Cup-winning Edmonton Oilers and other professional sports teams fell upon hard times. She chose to do a non-linear series of scenarios that describe her perspective on Edmonton, a city she found to be populated by "cautious optimists" and "resigned cynics", and filled with accidental street theatre, from secret underwater inside-bikini gropes in the wavepool at West Edmonton Mall, to kids who wear shorts outside in the dead of winter, to that woman who walks down Whyte Avenue yelling at everyone.

  "There are a lot of Edmonton-specific references that I didn't want to explain. Why explain Gretzky? It's like an inside joke for Edmontonians," she says. "There are so many funny things. Just walking down the street, I laugh."
  Skim's Story

  When Jillian and Mariko agreed to do Skim, they had Mariko's idea, Jillian's art school notes about the sequential art form, and the knowledge that Kiss Machine would handle the production and print duties. Neither had done a comic before, and, although Jillian did the cover illustration for Mariko's book, Fake ID, they had never collaborated together. Yet their work on Skim is seamless.

  "People say we must be close, but we've lived in nearby cities for one year of our lives," Mariko points out. When it came to working on the comic, "I wasn't really sure what Jillian would do. I wanted to give her as much freedom as possible, so I sent her something between a play and prose, half narrative text and half dialogue. She took this mish-mash of a text and she turned it into a comic. I give her full credit for that."

  One of the best examples of Mariko perfectly setting up a situation and Jillian rendering it into a powerful visual is the scene where we first meet Ms. Archer, the only teacher Skim respects. In Jillian's signature layout, a main image serves as the background for the first two smaller images, and becomes the focal point as the third image. To walk through the page backwards, the main image is of a classroom of bored schoolgirls, with Skim, a pool of black clothing and adoration for Ms. Archer, in the middle. The next panel back is a shot of Ms. Archer, her pretty head set off against a blackboard. But the first panel is borderless and floats down from an unseen off-the-page space. In fact, Jillian situates the image so that Ms. Archer's head is intentionally cut off.

  "I knew I didn't want something that was so confined (i.e., in blocky panels), so here's this mysterious woman, who's going to be this central force in the story: she's a little bit untouchable," Jillian explains. "In Skim's eye, she's like this angel that comes to Earth."

  Jillian says she appreciated Mariko's open approach to the collaboration. "The script was almost all dialogue," she recalls. "Mariko didn't say where they were or what they were doing, so I had a lot of input into it."

  The cousins are talking about creating a follow-up to Skim, perhaps a full-length graphic novel.

  "I was shocked when people came up to me or emailed me asking what happens next," says Mariko, whose theatrical version of the story was well received. The comic book Skim completes a character arc, but leaves open the question of what will happen next in the characters' lives. "I hadn't really thought about that, so I'd like to know, too!"

• Asian American Writers' Workshop - http://aaww.org/jillian-tamaki-eileen-fisher-armor/

  Jillian Tamaki’s Eileen Fisher Armor

  The artist and illustrator of Skim and This One Summer talks about the tension of tween-hood, body types in mainstream comics, and why purple is the warmest color.
  From This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Courtesy First Second Books
  By Anne Ishii
  October 9, 2014 | Cartoonists Talk, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, This One Summer, comic art, graphic novel, the body
  Media Gallery

  AAWW board member and resident comics expert Anne Ishii keeps it coming with her new series of conversations with Asian American (and Asian Canadian) comics artists in The Margins. Check back for more.
  I spoke to Jillian Tamaki in the lobby of the wrong Toronto Marriott. That is to say, the rest of the comics world had converged for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival at the Marriott up the street from where she was staying. It’s an apt metaphor: having this conversation at the lesser known outpost of an industry event because she wanted to be available but wasn’t interested in following rote social patterns.

  Jillian is the illustrator-half of the graphic novelist dyad behind the critically acclaimed Skim and as of this writing, the unparalleled This One Summer, which debuted in May. The duo includes Jillian’s cousin, writer/performer Mariko Tamaki, who was on other interview duties, leaving me to focus on itinerant issues of depicting identity and the art and craft of developing a persona, on paper and in real life.

  After greeting each other in the lobby, Jillian and I moved to a café booth where she noticed I was wearing designer sneakers. I made a point to address that I am not a sneakerhead but happily accept designer gifts as such.
  Anne Ishii: Do you consider yourself into streetwear at all? Or are you just a casual person who dabbles in fashion?

  Jillian Tamaki: I wouldn’t even dare to say that I dabble. I don’t think I’m very stylish. I just feel like I have, through trial and error, found things that work on my body. That’s as far as I would go.

  So what works on your body? What’s your uniform?

  Sacks. Shapeless clothing that kind of drapes. (laughter)

  You know that label, Eileen Fisher? I’m gonna wear Eileen Fisher when I’m old. That’s my trajectory. I’m sort of just lollygagging around, doing variations on that, but I will distill to Eileen Fisher.
  Jillian

  Jillian Tamaki at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May

  I am more into amorphous clothing. Today I took a double XL sweatshirt and turned it into a kid-sister dress.

  But there is something kind of weird about obscuring your form. It feels a little bit subversive, which is funny because I remember when I bought my first pair of really tight jeans, almost 10 years ago. That felt explicitly sexual and super freaky. And now that everyone wears that all the time… maybe I’m just older… it feels really subversive to wear things that purposefully obscure your form.

  Is obscuring your form, you think, more subversive than sexualized clothing?

  I feel like saying “fuck you” to sexualization is pretty subversive.

  I mean the first thing I think of when I hear “subversive obscurity” is the hijab.

  Women’s bodies are like public property. And to actually shield that makes people fucking mad, you know? So I think there is something to it.

  I’ve never liked people looking at me. I didn’t have a wedding—and it was mostly because we weren’t in the situation to have one—but that’s my nightmare: everyone looking at you with expectation.

  Then, how do you deal with visibility in the virtual sense now that you’re so acclaimed as an artist and illustrator?

  I feel like that visibility is an illusion and it’s easier to exert control over it. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t easier. I guess I’ve never been totally trusting. I used to be really reluctant to put any picture of myself online because as a woman you are always going to be judged, but I did this thing where I Googled my favorite comics art authors and there were always pictures of them in the first search result. But if you did that for a man, there would generally be fewer pictures. I don’t want that to be part of that conversation (about body image), but it’s just impossible to avoid.
  ThisOneSummer-blue_100-141

  From This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Courtesy First Second Books

  There’s an interesting spectrum of female body types in This One Summer. Some of it is really subtle but you even get this sort of genealogy of body types, like between mother and daughter and then phenotypes, like the Native American woman.

  Visibility is powerful. And if you make one of your characters adopted, just the visibility of that aspect shows how this is a person that exists in the world and that her whole story isn’t just one thing. You’re not defined by such narrow facts. Also, you can kind of incorporate different body types in narrative tropes—the character Rose and her mom are supposed to look really similar because the mom is the future version of the kid. But the little girl who’s adopted looks totally different from the mom, who looks totally different from the grandma. They all look totally different. I think there is some narrative stuff that comes into it. But again I feel like there is not a diversity of women’s bodies in the comics world.

  Would you say that it is a real problem in comics art?

  I think it’s becoming less so. I teach at SVA and I see the comics made by the girls I teach. I am exposed to really smart girls that feel the need to make really inclusive comics, so I see all the time that people are really interested in this. I see that there are people making it. But I guess even on the grander scheme in mainstream comics, which I have no interest in, things are definitely getting better. Do you think so?

  I do but it’s funny that you preface that with the caveat that you don’t care about mainstream comics, because that is where the most mediatized problem is and presumably still represents the lion’s share of comics fans.

  Right. I think I just have no context for them and so I can’t comment on it. I personally just think that they seem interested in the sort of stories that wouldn’t appeal to me so why should I care about them?

  I don’t think it’s anybody’s responsibility to create universal appeal, but I wonder if part of this divide might even subconsciously have to do with the fact that mainstream comics are an American macho phenomenon and you come from a Canadian context. Is that maybe even a completely different race of comics? I wonder if there’s any nationality to that machismo?

  I think we Canadians always move toward America, although there are still some fundamental differences. But I don’t think it’s so much of a virtue to be super powerful and dominating here. The idea of saving the world is not in the Canadian psyche in the deeper way that it maybe is in America. There is an element of the American dream in the Canadian psyche. It’s like, you can move here and make a future for yourself, but I don’t think Canadians traditionally have been the most macho society (laughter). It is just so funny that the great cartoonists of Canada have built their reputations on being a kind of specific sort of guy. A guy to be sure. That is something that I’m off about. It is interesting and I don’t know why.

  In terms of depicting bodies in This One Summer, even the way you depicted masculinity is interesting. There are prototypes, but they’re complicated. Rose has a crush on this guy, Dunc. And surely puppy love (for older boy of questionable character) is a real experience for most girls. Where did that story line come from? Because she’s so vulnerable and you get so scared for her…

  I think the whole book is about tension. Tension between two friends, tension between different age groups, sexes, husbands, growing up and being a kid; between Summertime and real life. It’s all about this tension point. And I know that Mariko will say that it was somewhat based on personal experience—you know, being obsessed with the teenagers, understanding that it’s what comes next. But from my point of view, I was thinking about how to create this boy that was not just a stand-in for exposition. He’s kind of that teenager that if you look at him at a certain angle, he’s handsome and from another angle he’s totally gross, pimply and disgusting. And I think that to him, the interactions with Rose are nothing. He has no awareness of the turmoil that is happening in this little kid, you know, she’s just a little kid. At that point, he’s already left childhood behind and can’t really empathize with Rose. I think that’s the tension point between childhood and being a teenager.
  Courtesy

  Courtesy First Second Books

  That tiny little jump—between pre-teen and teen—feels so gigantic when you’re that age. I find that people are either sentimental about their childhood or loathsome about it. Do you feel one way or the other?

  I kept diaries as a teenager. And then when I was 24 or 25 and I was moving down to New York and getting rid of a lot of stuff, I just threw them all away. At the time I thought, this is super embarrassing and I would never want to read this, this is humiliating. Now I’m like, that was really dumb. So I think that your viewpoint evolves as you get older. A) I probably could have made a book out of that stupid stuff, and B) it’s such a harsh judgment! It’s you but it’s also a 14 year old. I think that kids now have a heightened sense of nostalgia and that’s what I was trying to do with the book. Rose notices nostalgia in the making—nostalgia is being created through these experiences. Even through the mini flashbacks and echoes, Rose already knows about nostalgia. She’s aware of the melancholy of change. And that’s why I think the use of the purple across the book adds to that in some sort of slight way. I used it because I thought it was cool, from vintage manga, but it does do something—it tinges it less directly than sepia.

  What’s the color psychology there? You just said that the purple harkens back to vintage manga.

  Not in any symbolic way. I mean, Rose reads manga and she is a manga fan because she’s like… 12. But I just thought it made the book feel a little warmer. Plus it looked different and unusual. Just on a formal level, it adds something undefinable—something nostalgic and a little bit warm.

  I’m struck by the idea that purple is a warmer color, because for me purple is a really cold color.

  I think it depends on the purple. It’s not a color you really see in nature, but it’s one that I do associate with fantasy. Whenever I would play videogames and there was some sort of fantastic element that would pop up on the screen, it would be in purple. I don’t think it’s a color that has strong associations like green or sepia or red.

  That would have been an intense book if it were in red.

  Oh my god, that would be a completely different thing, right? And certain comics would be great in red.
  this one summer cov

  Courtesy First Second Books

  Another element that I want to ask about are the emotional landscapes in which you create full sensorial spreads. Was there a cue from Mariko there? Or is that how you interpreted something that she had written?

  I like to think that I’m always guided by what is on the written page, and then I like to add to it if I think that it needs heightening. Mariko does give some slight art direction, but it’s rarely specific. But the emotional landscape is a nice break from events and exposition. Some of it is just like, we need a breather here. Something to kind of rest on when they are underwater.

  Well that’s the irony because it is a breather, but Rose is always her holding her breath under water. It’s really fascinating.

  I did think about that with the spread of just clouds. A lot of the book is an exercise in describing a place through your senses. We went to Muskoka, which is where Rose spent her summers. I’d never been before, and I mean, how much can you learn from just Googling a place, right? Nobody is going to take a picture of the garbage cans, you know what I mean? But I wanted to convey the overflowing garbage cans.

  Speaking of which, another sense that you are trying to communicate is smell. Conveying breath is so unusual and you’ve been able to do it so well.

  It’s funny because I think that comes a lot from Mariko’s work. The first book we did together was all about that. It’s about being totally explosive but contained at the same time. I don’t know, Mariko must have really felt that as a kid and that must have been a really powerful emotion because both characters have that. Rose has so much to say and express, yet no way to do it. I think that both of the books are really about tension. I think that is in her work and I pick up on it because we’re both Japanese-Canadians, we’re totally repressed in ways that we don’t talk about. Like our emotions are: everything’s fine.

  In other words, you wear Eileen Fisher.

  Yes, my Eileen Fisher armor. And I’m not very expressive about what’s bothering me so I think that that does really translate.

  Now I have to ask a super personal question: A) really how repressed is your emotional repression? B) do you think this writing, though its not about yourself or a memoir, is this your psychiatry?

  I think I’m sort of less uptight in a certain way—and I don’t know if that is from doing the books or because I am getting older. I don’t worry the world is going to crumble if they see me as a weak person.

Q&A Jillian Tamaki
142.10 (June 1, 2017): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Cartoonist Jillian Tamaki is known for crafting thoughtful, richly emotional stories with beautifully fluid and dynamic illustrations. Her 2008 book, Skim (cocreated with Mariko Tamaki), was nominated for a Governor General's Award in 2008, and in 2014, the pair released This One Summer (School Library Journal 12/14), which received a Caldecott Honor and an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album. In 2015, she published a collection of webcomics, SuperMutant Magic Academy, and this year presents Boundless (reviewed on p. 86), a compilation of short stories depicting characters struggling against the confines of their lives, limitations, and circumstances.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The stories in Boundless range in design from the standard, classic panels-with-word-balloons neatly arranged across the page to more adventurous, sprawling layouts. Did you script these stories first, before creating the drawings? Does the design element inform the narrative itself?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Usually I script things out with words first, then devise how to depict the story in panels. My last book, This One Summer, was a fairly strict, traditional grid. That is its own challenge, but I also like to explore formal possibilities. Of course, it is hopefully always informed by the story itself.

The story "World-Class City" features narration describing a sort of fantasy city and what life there might be like, juxtaposing this text with imagery that speaks to the emotions being expressed without literally dramatizing the environment that's being described. How did the story come together?

"World-Class City" is actually a song I wrote. The only song I've ever written.

Comics are (typically) about the relationship between words and images. There's a saying, "show, don't tell"--it's generally thought of as bad cartooning for the images to reflect too literally the corresponding words. The "reading" occurs in the space between the two, and between panels. So I think it's fun to explore that space, and push and pull it and see if it still holds up.

The stories "Body Pods" and "Sex Coven" both explore the impact that works of art have on the lives of their fans, and in "Daria," you touch on the tension between a creator and his audience. Do you spend much time thinking about the effect your books might have on your readers, or the relationship they might develop to the work?

Hmm, not really. I think I'm a very active consumer of media and images, so that's more where "Body Pods" and "Sex Coven" are coming from. Our relationship to pieces of art, even commercial art, and how they flower beyond the creators' original intentions.

"Daria," I suppose, is more from a creator's point of view. No, I don't really think about the effect my work will have on people. You really can't control people's reactions. I think I seek out making a connection but that's about all I can ask of myself.

Many of the stories in Boundless seem to be about the conflict between internal desires and external complications. Was thematic unity within the collection something that was important to you as the author? Were you concerned with certain themes, or is the common thread among these stories a by-product of your own interests and experiences?

Well, the stories were done over the span of several years. No, there was really no attempt to congregate around a theme. It shouldn't be too surprising that certain preoccupations just arise. The mark of your thinking is going to be imprinted on a story, just like your "handwriting" can never really be scrubbed clean from your drawing.

YA readers enthusiastically received your earlier books Skim and This One Summer, but Boundless seems more geared toward adults. Is audience something you think about during the creation of a work, and if so, does the distinction between YA and adult change your approach?

I am nominally aware of the "content-appropriateness" when I'm working on books. Boundless is definitely for a mature audience because there are depictions of sex, but also I just think a lot of the stories are probably of more interest to adults as they deal with marriage, nostalgia, aging, etc.

On the other hand, I think you can get a little tripped up by trying to adhere to categories. I actually think that This One Summer is quite a mature book, but it won a Caldecott Honor. We were surprised that Skim was categorized as YA, too. But I leave it to librarians to determine what is appropriate for young people. A lot of it comes down to marketing.

SuperMutant Magic Academy was a diaristic project, published on Tumblr, and very personal to me, a woman in her 30s. But ultimately I think that book is my most popular with actual teenagers. So it just goes to show that you can't really predict your audience sometimes.

Do you feel like your approach to storytelling has changed much since your first book, the award-winning Skim?

Well, Skim was my first long-form book project. I think it has a rough-hewn, direct sort of quality that you'll never really achieve again as you gain experience and skill.

The preoccupations of the current batch of stories is a little different. Skim and This One Summer are very much about sensory envelopment, realism. These current stories [in Boundless] are a bit more fantastical or fable-like, so it demanded a different approach.

How does your career today compare to what you imagined for yourself when you were working on your first book?

I don't do much commissioned illustration these days, certainly not like I did then. But maybe the winds will blow in another direction down the road, who knows. I'm extremely lucky to be able to draw every day for a living.--Tom Batten, Grafton, VA

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Q&A Jillian Tamaki." Library Journal, 1 June 2017, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA494891733&it=r&asid=96beacab614a9f44efac935cc308a9b1. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A494891733

QUOTE:
profoundly honest, bittersweet picture of human nature, made all the more haunting by her enchanting artwork
Boundless
Sarah Hunter
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Boundless. By Jillian Tamaki. Illus. by the author. May 2017. 248p. Drawn & Quarterly, paper, $21.95 (9781770462878). 741.5.

Coming off the whirlwind success of her YA graphic novel This One Summer (2014) and her wryly funny SuperMutant Magic Academy (2016), Tamaki now offers a selection of short comics for adults that are just as captivating. Tamaki gives readers intimate, warts-and-all glimpses into the lives of her characters, some of whom occupy a world almost-but not quite-like our own. In "1.Jenny," a woman becomes preoccupied with a Facebook profile of herself that reveals a slightly different life than the one she's living. "Half Life," meanwhile, follows a woman trying to carry on with her daily existence as she shrinks to a subatomic level. In every story, Tamaki's artwork is a treat. Her confident line work alternates between bold, thick outlines and finer, jittery pen strokes, and she often expands scenes to fill whole pages. In "The Clairfree System," for instance, sales-pitch voiceover appears atop strikingly shadowy, finely cross-hatched artful images of women, and the contrast is stunning. In these marvelously odd, sf-tinged packages, Tamaki captures deep truths about the human experience. Even animal characters, as in the titular story, have the petty, hypocritical, overanalyzing tendencies of her human characters. And yet, nothing ever seems grim: despite the disappointments, there are moments of satisfaction in breaking free of the expectations that weigh down her characters. It's a profoundly honest, bittersweet picture of human nature, made all the more haunting by her enchanting artwork.--Sarah Hunter

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hunter, Sarah. "Boundless." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 37. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496084804&it=r&asid=91e587d27b156d62bbd4faabf967e968. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084804

QUOTE:
Tamaki has delivered an essential collection of truly modern fiction in comics form.
Boundless
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Boundless

Jillian Tamaki. Drawn & Quarterly, $21.95 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1-77046-287-8

Tamaki (This One Summer, Super Mutant Magic Academy) presents the adult, oblique side of her work in this revelatory collection of short stories. These strips are playful yet pensive; in the introductory story, the narrator asks, "Do I want to look at art at 2 AM or eat a donut in the park?" Many, including "Bed Bug" and "Half-Life," track the formation and dissolution of romantic relationships. In "Body Pods," a young woman goes through her history of romantic partners, all fans of the titular invented sci-fi movie. A surreal, dreamlike sense of dread and sadness pervades many of these stories, but wry sympathy for the often lost characters takes Tamaki's already formidable cartooning skills to a new level. Artistically, obsessive-looking rendering juts up against spontaneous, sparse line work, mirroring the disorientation the narrators experience. Tamaki has delivered an essential collection of truly modern fiction in comics form. (June)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Boundless." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971656&it=r&asid=2f48b8759c96f8d2430ff0cb7ed8ea47. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971656

Gertie's Leap to Greatness
Elissa Gershowitz
92.5 (September-October 2016): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Gertie's Leap to Greatness

by Kate Beasley; illus. by Jillian Tamaki

Intermediate Farrar 250 pp.

10/16 978-0-374-30261-0 $16.99 (g)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Gertie Reece Foy lives with her great-aunt Rae in coastal Alabama while her kind and loving father, Frank, works on an oil rig. Her mother, Rachel, who left the family when Gertie was a baby, lives across town, but now there's a for-sale sign on her lawn. Before Rachel moves away, Gertie wants to become the "greatest fifth grader in the whole school, world, and universe" in order to prove something to Rachel and to herself: "She'd show up on her mother's front porch, gleaming with greatness.. .and then Rachel Collins would know that Gertie Foy was one-hundred-percent, not-from-concentrate awesome and that she didn't need a mother anyway. So there." Standing in Gertie's way is the rich, prissy new girl at school, whose own mother is waging an environmentalist campaign against oil rigs, and whose ambition for fifth-grade greatness is just as strong as Gertie's. The busy plot--Gertie resuscitates a frog; she helps Aunt Rae babysit a spirited five-year-old; she thinks her teacher hates her; all her classmates turn against her; she saves the class play; she gets in trouble for walking off with the school secretary's bowl of chocolates--may not be to everyone's taste, but slice-of-life fans should enjoy the homespun humor. Personality-rich illustrations by Tamaki (which skew young) help set the scene; the picture of Gertie, triumphant after dispensing with the whole bowl of chocolates, for example, speaks louder than words.

(g) indicates that the book was read in galley or page proof. The publisher's price is the suggested retail price and does not indicate a possible discount to libraries. Grade levels are only suggestions; the individual child is the real criterion.

Gershowitz, Elissa

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gershowitz, Elissa. "Gertie's Leap to Greatness." The Horn Book Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2016, p. 102. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469641295&it=r&asid=5c7b666e678ba9d18db3d50b4d480cfa. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A469641295

Gertie's Leap to Greatness
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Gertie's Leap to Greatness

Kate Beasley, illus. by Jiliian Tamaki. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0374-30261-0

Like the title character in Kate DiCamillo's Raymie Nightingale, the indefatigable Gertie Foy is determined to prove to an absent parent that leaving was a big mistake. Gertie, whose school bus passes her estranged mother's house every day, sees a For Sale sign and learns her mother intends to remarry and move. She devises a five-phase plan to become the best fifth grader ever and get her mother's attention before she departs, but Gertie's ambitions run smack into full-of-herself new student Mary Sue Spivey. First, Mary Sue steals Gertie's seat next to Jean, her best friend. Then, she steals Jean. Perhaps worst of all, Mary Sue's mother, an environmental activist, begins a campaign against offshore drilling. (Gertie's father works on an oil rig, and she lives with her Aunt Rae, who winningly sends her off each day by saying, "Give 'em hell, baby"). Given Gertie's world of hurt, debut novelist Beasley wisely interjects humor as often as possible, and Tamaki's winning illustrations add verve, perfectly capturing Gertie's indomitable spirit. Ages 8-12. Author's agent: Emily van Beek, Polio Literary Management. Illustrator's agent: Steven Malk, Writers House. (Oct.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gertie's Leap to Greatness." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285756&it=r&asid=012ca73d77a16a9e5af6a2ce32f14d83. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285756

QUOTE:
Jillian Tamaki's rigorously composed, kinetic drawings teem with psychological nuance and action; they epitomize the very condition of lightly held balance and mastery that (with the possible exception of Windy's gnomish grandmother) none of the story's adult characters has achieved.

Some vacation: This One Summer
Leonard S. Marcus
91.4 (July-August 2015): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Writer Mariko Tamaki and illustrator Jillian Tamaki are cousins by birth and sisters under the skin. This One Summer, their second graphic-novel collaboration, follows Skim (2008), an emotionally raw coming-of-age story that drew apt comparisons with Harriet the Spy. The new book--a winner, unprecedentedly, of both a 2015 Caldecott Honor and Printz Honor award--features a pair of preteen girls, one (Rose) just a bit older than the other (Windy), who, on vacation at the woodsy lakeside cottage community where their families have summered for as long as they can remember, find themselves outnumbered and all-but-outgunned by a rogues' gallery of sad and burnt-out would-be role models.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A terrible symmetry informs the narrative as it is revealed that Rose's mother, who longs for a second child, had a miscarriage the previous summer and that Jenny, a local teen, has accidentally become pregnant and is utterly devastated. As these two story lines converge--generating spirals of anger, frustration, fear, and depression--Rose and Windy are treated to a crash course in the varieties of human frailty and imperfection. Like Mark Twain's Huck and Jim, the two girls drift, goggle-eyed, from one unsettling scene to the next: Rose's brooding mom's meltdown when at the beach one day she cannot find it within herself to join in the fun; the heartless public taunting of Jenny. Between times, Rose and Windy skip out to share a quiet swim, watch video-rental horror movies, and talk ... and talk and talk. Their raucous debriefing sessions provide the book's most impassioned--and comical--moments, as when the duo, out for a walk in the woods, anxiously debates whether it's possible to catch herpes from mere physical contact with someone's abandoned flip-flop.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Off-the-wall misinformed or not, the girls are lucky to have each other. Both have the advantage over their elders of rarely doubting their need to keep rethinking their experiences. Rose, who narrates the story, is a likable, bright girl with a healthy spirit of adventure and (unlike most of the other characters) no obvious tics or compulsions. Yet even as she watches her parents' marriage unravel, she develops a secret crush on a sketchy older boy (the teenage general-store clerk who got Jenny pregnant, to be precise). As levelheaded as Rose appears to be, it is hard not to worry a little about the personal choices that lie ahead for her in the next few years.

It is rambunctious Windy, though, who steals the show and wins our affection. One and a half years younger than Rose and poised awkwardly on the cusp of puberty, she is the adopted only child of a New Age-y massage-therapist single mom. Moon-faced, saucer-eyed, and built like a roly-poly baby Buddha, she is a pugnacious sprite with a mother lode of combustible energy. One minute she is chomping noisily on a celery stick, the next minute showing off her krunking prowess. She knows instinctively when feeling scared is the appropriate response, which, for doughty her, is not very often, and she knows when someone or something in her rapidly expanding universe merits out-of-hand dismissal as "crappy" or "bleh." She looks at times to be bursting at the seams, yet Windy is utterly at home in her messy, protean self. She is the very picture of childhood resilience that Maurice Sendak spoke of so often. If Windy had a younger brother, his name would be Mickey or Max.

Jillian Tamaki's rigorously composed, kinetic drawings teem with psychological nuance and action; they epitomize the very condition of lightly held balance and mastery that (with the possible exception of Windy's gnomish grandmother) none of the story's adult characters has achieved. Many panels have the casual look of snapshots from a family album, but others zoom in probingly to document a telltale reaction or gesture--the displaced rage with which Rose's mother (represented by her two rubber-gloved hands) scrubs a plate spit-shine clean; the heavily made-up face of a forlorn Jenny. Tamaki is equally adept at pulling back for a panoramic double-page spread, such as the one depicting Rose and Windy blissing out underwater, or another that registers in naturalistic detail a cluster of flowering milkwood plants, the pods of which Rose believed magical until, she says, she learned they were "really poisonous."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is amusing to imagine what Robert McCloskey might have done with the same material. Tamaki's meticulously observed drawings of tranquil forested areas, cottage kitchens, and rural shop interiors could be his. The great difference, of course, lies in the radical disconnect the Tamakis find between the harmoniousness of the setting and the muddled confusion of the human dramas being enacted in its midst. A nice round of Parcheesi, anyone? When Rose and Windy sit down to while away the time with a rainy-day game, they choose to play M.A.S.H.--Mansion, Apartment, Shed, House--a fortune-telling exercise that allows them not only to daydream but also to prod and tease each other about the futures they imagine for themselves. Rose is far from oblivious to the natural beauty of the place with which she associates all the summer pleasures of her childhood. But in the Tamakis' bracing fable, the role nature plays is more akin to that of an innocent bystander than it is to a driving spiritual force, and the time of wonder would seem to have passed for good.

It's especially notable, of course, that This One Summer has received a Caldecott Honor--an award usually reserved for thirty-two-page books intended for preschoolers and early grade-schoolers. This well-deserved recognition shows not only that Brian Selznick's 2008 Caldecott Medal win for The Invention of Hugo Cabret was not an anomaly but also that "distinguished" illustration is increasingly likely to turn up in books for readers of any age. The underlying message is that, contrary to decades and perhaps even centuries of received wisdom, readers never really outgrow illustration, and that visual narrative can be just as absorbing and subtle a storytelling medium as is the written word. In many graphic novels, or comics, as some artists and fans prefer to call them, the draftsmanship does not stand out as exceptional in any way, and it is not always the case--as is true in the Tamakis' book--that pictures and text both contribute powerfully to the reading experience. Hats off to the librarians who saw this extraordinary accomplishment for what it is.

Readers who wish to continue their exploration of Jillian Tamaki's supple art will want to follow the weekly series of portraits she draws for the New York Times Book Review's author interviews and look up SuperMutant Magic Academy (2015), a compilation of her witty online strip about life at a prep school for mutants and witches. The graphics in this collection are not nearly so exquisitely drawn as those in This One Summer. But Tamaki clearly prides herself on her powers of stylistic self-reinvention, a facet of her work that can best be observed in Indoor Voice (2010), a "Drawn & Quarterly Petit Livre" with the feel of a pocket sketchbook. The solo one-off comics and assorted studies gathered in this slim volume range from spindly expressionist pen-and-ink doodles to finely nuanced, semi-abstract watercolors, and suggest an artist whose idea of realism is all about keeping both herself and the reader a bit unsettled.

Leonard S. Marcus is the curator of exhibitions about Lewis Carroll at Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum & Library and about Alice and Martin Provensen at the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, Abilene, Texas, both of which will open this October.

Marcus, Leonard S.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Marcus, Leonard S. "Some vacation: This One Summer." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2015, p. 61+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA421324125&it=r&asid=9d944e0c30bebb342630c35c8a7ad926. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A421324125

The Canadian Library Association 2015 Young Adult Book Award Winner
20.5 (June 2015): p17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Resource Links
http://www.atcl.ca
This One Summer by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood Books)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Canadian Library Association 2015 Young Adult Book Award Winner." Resource Links, June 2015, p. 17. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA421624369&it=r&asid=268205bdd4152b8765fe2c0166e47feb. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A421624369

QUOTE:
There are flickering moments of transcendent wisdom and kindness, but the overall tone is one of insouciant, salty resignation to the mundane realities of existence. Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious,

Super Mutant Magic Academy
Sarah Hunter
111.16 (Apr. 15, 2015): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
By Jillian Tamaki. Ulus, by the author.

May 2015. 276p. Drawn & Quarterly, paper, $22.95 (9781770461987). 741.5. Gr. 9-12.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Like an angsty mash-up of Harry Potter and X-Men, Tamaki's Ignatz Award-winning SuperMutant Magic Academy, originally a webcomic, explores the thrills and banalities of superhuman teens at boarding school. The story begins with discrete sets of dryly witty six-panel pages focusing on individual characters, such as Eternity Boy, who drifts through all time and space with little concern for worldly worries, and Frances, who creates absurd and antagonistic performance art ("Frances, feminist statement or not, throwing pig's blood, followed by glitter, on male students is not acceptable"). Its true heart, however, is Marsha, a closeted bespectacled grump who pines for her best friend, Wendy. Though Tamaki's black-and-white panels shift from detailed and realistic to dreamy and atmospheric and back again, she consistently and expertly captures subtle emotion and subtext with only a few strokes of the pen. The teens all face the usual hurdles-dating, self-esteem, homework, sports, and so on--but Tarnaki, illustrator of the award-winning This One Summer (2014), never lets growth come easy. There are flickering moments of transcendent wisdom and kindness, but the overall tone is one of insouciant, salty resignation to the mundane realities of existence. Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, this is perfect for fans of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World (1997).

Hunter, Sarah

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hunter, Sarah. "Super Mutant Magic Academy." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2015, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413338275&it=r&asid=e0689523f8847718e94bd0aa226ff911. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A413338275

QUOTE:
Tamaki is playful and loose with her art, unafraid to be experimental as she draws us into a world where true feelings are the greatest danger.
SuperMutant Magic Academy
262.14 (Apr. 6, 2015): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* SuperMutant Magic Academy

Jillian Tamaki. Drawn & Quarterly, $22.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-77046-198-7

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Bestselling Tamaki (Skim, This One Summer) returns with an offbeat coming-of-age graphic novel about mutant teenagers at a school that teaches magic alongside other, more prosaic, school subjects. Showing its origins as an infrequently updated webcomic, the book opens with one-page vignettes, which are choppy and abrupt. But as the comic progresses the characters become clearer, the vignettes get longer and more 'developed, and the book becomes an often painfully blunt look at the insecurities and cruelties universal to teens--even flying teens. The central story focuses around Marsha, a tomboyish, frumpy broom-flyer, and Wendy, her beautiful best friend who can transform into a fox. Marsha's very real love for Wendy drives the text, but other students have their own agonies, which they keep hidden in plain sight. The humor is sometimes slapstick, but more often it offers ultra-dry observations on modern disengagement. Tamaki is playful and loose with her art, unafraid to be experimental as she draws us into a world where true feelings are the greatest danger. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"SuperMutant Magic Academy." Publishers Weekly, 6 Apr. 2015, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA409833277&it=r&asid=5bd5a2b2c4bed720929c2f18f420f77d. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A409833277

QUOTE:
The visuals are incredibly beautiful and evocative.
This One Summer
Ayra Junyk
20.1 (Oct. 2014): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Resource Links
http://www.atcl.ca
TAMAKI, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki This One Summer Groundwood Books, 2014. 319p. Gr. 9-I I. 978-1-55498-152-6. Pbk. S 18.95

Rose's favourite place is Awago Beach where her family spends their summer vacation. Here she can spend time with her younger friend Wendy, and get away from all her problems. However, this summer, her problems seem to come with her to Awago. Her mother and father are constantly arguing for some unknown reason. Rose is sick of being a child, and she longs to grown up. When Rose and Wendy go to rent horror videos at the local store, they discover that the local teens have very complicated romantic relationships. Jenny believes she is pregnant, but Dunc won't admit that he is the father. Has Awago Beach finally lost its magic for Rose?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In This One Summer, Martko and Jillian Tamaki once again stretch the boundaries of the graphic novel format. In their acclaimed graphic novel Skim, the setting was an urban high school. In this novel, they portray the idyllic setting of Awago Beach with its natural beauty and tranquillity. Silence becomes a critical element in this narrative.

The very first page shows the ultimate quiet of the location by repeating the word -crunch" five times - with no illustration. There are also visual digressions to emphasize the beauty and simplicity of this location such as the two page spread about discovering a milkweed for the first time.

However, this is not a simple story about cottage life. The small town is full of complicated issues: teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, and male chauvinism. Rose struggles with her reactions to these issues. All of this is very confusing for her. Relaxing on the beach with Wendy as she has done for many years is just not enough for her this summer. She is under a lot of stress because of the growing conflict between her parents. She takes a very harsh attitude to Jenny's teenage pregnancy and even calls her a "slut."

Wendy thinks that Rose's attitude is sexist. Why is Rose changing? Is Rose growing up? Is she trying to find her place in the world now that she is older?

This graphic novel has a complex storyline with lots of twists and turns. The visuals are incredibly beautiful and evocative. The portrayals of excessive alcohol consumption, teenage sexuality, as well as the graphic language make this novel a choice for older readers.

Thematic Links: Cottage Life; Family Relationships; Friendship; Sexuality; Teenage Pregnancy

Junyk, Ayra

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Junyk, Ayra. "This One Summer." Resource Links, Oct. 2014, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA390327901&it=r&asid=d9536665e3e20718371dbff04957e796. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A390327901

This One Summer
Cynthia K. Ritter
90.4 (July-August 2014): p106.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
* This One Summer

by Mariko Tamaki; illus. by Jillian Tamaki

Middle School First Second/Roaring Brook 320 pp.

5/14 978-1-59643-774-6 $17.99

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Rose Wallace and her parents go to Awago Beach every summer. Rose collects rocks on the beach, swims in the lake, and goes on bike rides with her younger "summer cottage friend," Windy. But this year she is feeling too old for some of the activities she used to love--and even, at times, for the more-childish (yet self-assured) Windy. Rose would rather do adult things: watch horror movies and talk with Windy about boobs, boys, and sex. In their second graphic novel--another impressive collaboration--the Tamaki cousins (Skim, rev. 7/08) examine the mix of uncertainty and hope a girl experiences on the verge of adolescence. The episodic plot and varied page layout set a leisurely pace evocative of summer. Rose's contemplative observations and flashbacks, along with the book's realistic dialogue, offer insight into her evolving personality, while the dramatic changes in perspective and purply-blue ink illustrations capture the narrative's raw emotional core. Secondary storylines also accentuate Rose's transition from childhood to young adulthood: she's caught in the middle of the tension between her parents (due to her mom's recent abrasive moodiness and the painful secret behind it) and fascinated by the local teens' behavior (swearing, drinking, smoking, fighting, and even a pregnancy; the adult situations--and frank language--she encounters may be eye-opening reading for pre-adolescents like Rose). This is a poignant drama worth sharing with middle-schoolers, and one that teen readers will also appreciate for its look back at the beginnings of the end of childhood.

* indicates a book that the editors believe to be an outstanding example of its genre, of books of this particular publishing season, or of the author's body of work.

Ritter, Cynthia K.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ritter, Cynthia K. "This One Summer." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2014, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA375951317&it=r&asid=2c7948103e91c66c8c5cf83cf017eebd. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A375951317

Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer
Barbara Johnston
37.2 (June 2014): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
4Q * 4P * M * J * S * (G)

Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer. Illus. by Jillan Tamaki. First Second/Macmillan, 2014. 320p. $17.99 Trade pb. 978-1-59643-774-6.

Usually, Rose's summer holiday at Awago Beach is full of happy family times, but this summer her mother, Alice, is tense and withdrawn. Rose's father tries to compensate but Rose thinks her mother is upset because she wants another baby. Younger friend Windy is a good diversion and the two girls joke and talk about babies and "boobs" while they swim, play, and watch horror films on the sly. Duncan (Dud) is the summer crush and the girls overhear snippets of conversation that Dud's girlfriend, Jenny, may be pregnant. When Jenny tries to drown herself, Rose's mother races to save her. Rose eavesdrops as Alice finally opens up to Windy's mother about her ongoing struggle over her miscarriage the previous summer. As the family departs, there are signs of healing and Rose's growth toward maturity.

Carefully chosen prose skillfully accentuates the novel's dramatic art and readers will need to synthesize both for complete understanding; for example, Alice's reaction to her husband's kiss. While all the characters are boldly drawn, the young girls are remarkable. Slightly older Rose acts more guarded and reserved while the exuberant fireplug Windy is still child-like and open. The tweens' frank and often humorous conversations and their jubilant fun together provide a counterpoint to the turmoil around them. Tamaki's drawings of Awago Beach--the trees, stars, and the water--are outstanding. Some strong language and heavy topics, such as miscarriage, unwanted pregnancy, and parental turmoil, widen this novel's appeal to readers of diverse maturity.--Barbara Johnston.

Johnston, Barbara

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Johnston, Barbara. "Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer." Voice of Youth Advocates, June 2014, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA375949332&it=r&asid=c68c10b59af7b6929a47991d4e3ac151. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A375949332

QUOTE:
Jillian Tamaki's illustrations feature strong, fluid lines, and the detailed backgrounds and stunning two-page spreads throughout the work establish the mood and a compelling sense of place.Keenly observed and gorgeously illustrated--a triumph.

Tamaki, Mariko: THIS ONE SUMMER
(May 1, 2014):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Tamaki, Mariko THIS ONE SUMMER First Second (Children's Fiction) $17.99 5, 6 ISBN: 978-1-59643-774-6

A summer of family drama, secrets and change in a small beach town.Rose's family has always vacationed in Awago Beach. It's "a place where beer grows on trees and everyone can sleep in until eleven," but this year's getaway is proving less idyllic than those of the past. Rose's parents argue constantly, and she is painfully aware of her mother's unhappiness. Though her friendship with Windy, a younger girl, remains strong, Rose is increasingly curious about the town's older teens, especially Dunc, a clerk at the general store. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki (Skim, 2008) skillfully portray the emotional ups and downs of a girl on the cusp of adolescence in this eloquent graphic novel. Rose waxes nostalgic for past summers even as she rejects some old pursuits as too childlike and mimics the older teens. The realistic dialogue and sensitive first-person narration convey Rose's naivete and confusion, and Windy's comfort in her own skin contrasts with Rose's uncertainty. Both the text and art highlight small but meaningful incidents as readers gradually learn the truth behind the tension in Rose's family. Printed in dark blue ink, Jillian Tamaki's illustrations feature strong, fluid lines, and the detailed backgrounds and stunning two-page spreads throughout the work establish the mood and a compelling sense of place.Keenly observed and gorgeously illustrated--a triumph. (Graphic novel. 13 & up)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tamaki, Mariko: THIS ONE SUMMER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2014. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA366617213&it=r&asid=516d4d27872ba3fc3eb3e17b5a70f345. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A366617213

This One Summer
Sarah Hunter
110.16 (Apr. 15, 2014): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* This One Summer. By Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. Illus. by Jillian Tamaki. May 2014. 320p. First Second, $21.99 (9781626720947); paper, $ 17.99 (9781596437746). 741.5. Gr. 8-11.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mariko and Jillian Tamaki earned critical acclaim for Skim (2008), and they return here with another coming-of-age tale about the awkward transition from carefree childhood to jaded, self-conscious young adulthood. Rose and her parents spend every summer at their lakeside cabin in Awago, right down the path from Rose's best friend, Windy, and her family. They spend lazy days collecting rocks on the beach, riding bikes, swimming, and having barbecues. But this summer, Rose's parents are constantly fighting, and her mother seems resentful and sad. In that unspoken way kids pick up on their parents' hardships, Rose starts lashing out at Windy and grasping at what she thinks of as adulthood--turning up her nose at silliness (at which Windy excels), watching gory horror movies, reading fashion magazines, and joining in the bullying of a local teenage girl who finds herself in a tough spot. Jillian Tamaki s tender illustrations, all rendered in a deep purpley blue, depict roiling water, midnight skies, Windy's frenetic sugar highs, and Rose's mostly aloof but often poignantly distressed facial expressions with equal aplomb. With a light touch, the Tamakis capture the struggle of growing up in a patchwork of summer moments that lead to a conclusion notably absent of lessons. Wistful, touching, and perfectly bittersweet.--Sarah Hunter

Hunter, Sarah

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hunter, Sarah. "This One Summer." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2014, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA366459756&it=r&asid=078418108c2bc8ebe2a30d2ab61e00ad. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A366459756

This One Summer
261.11 (Mar. 17, 2014): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* This One Summer

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, illus. by Jillian Tamaki. First Second, $17.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-59643-774-6

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Rose and Windy, friends for two weeks every summer in nearby Ontario lake-cottages, have hit early adolescence. Rose, a bit older, has knowledge and polish that tubby, still-childish Windy lacks, and Windy sometimes bores her. Yet Windy's instincts are often sound, while Rose is led astray by an infatuation with a local convenience store clerk. As Rose's parents' marriage founders and the taunts of local teens wake her to issues of social class, Rose veers between secret grief and fleeting plea sure in the rituals of summer. Jillian Tamaki's exceptionally graceful line is one of the strengths of this work from the cousin duo behind Skim. Printed entirely in somber blue ink, the illustrations powerfully evoke the densely wooded beach town setting and the emotional freight carried by characters at critical moments, including several confronting their womanhood in different and painful ways. Fine characterization and sensitive prose distinguish the story, too--as when Rose remembers the wisdom a swimming teacher shared about holding his breath for minutes at a time: "He told me the secret was he would tell himself that he was actually breathing." Ages 12--up. Agent: Sam Hiyate, the Rights Factory. (May)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"This One Summer." Publishers Weekly, 17 Mar. 2014, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA362167448&it=r&asid=d63a4a157d81b341fb1e62a889c668d4. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A362167448

This One Summer
261 (Annual 2014): p112.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
This One Summer

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, illus. by Jillian Tamaki. First Second, $17.99 ISBN 978-1-59643-774-6

Rose and Windy, friends for two weeks every summer in nearby Ontario lake cottages, have hit early adolescence. Rose, a bit older, has knowledge and polish that tubby, still-childish Windy lacks, and Windy sometimes bores her. Yet Windy's instincts are often sound, while Rose is led astray by an infatuation with a local convenience store clerk. As Rose's parents' marriage founders and the taunts of local teens wake her to issues of social class, Rose veers between secret grief and fleeting pleasure in the rituals of summer. Jillian Tamaki's exceptionally graceful line is one of the strengths of this work from the cousin duo behind Skim. Printed entirely in somber blue ink, the illustrations powerfully evoke the densely wooded beach town setting and the emotional freight carried by characters at critical moments, including several confronting their womanhood in different and painful ways. Fine characterization and sensitive prose distinguish the story, too--as when Rose remembers the wisdom a swimming teacher shared about holding his breath for minutes at a time: "He told me the secret was he would tell himself that he was actually breathing." Ages 12--up.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"This One Summer." Publishers Weekly, Annual 2014, p. 112. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA394685271&it=r&asid=eef3c83fb60f14e627a1940ae5e58246. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A394685271

Half World
257.10 (Mar. 8, 2010): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Half World

Hiromi Goto, illus. by Jillian Tamaki. Viking, $16.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-670-01220-6

Raised in impoverished circumstances by her single mother, overweight 14-year-old Melanie is the target of ridicule at school and leads a lonely, introverted life. Then an evil being named Mr. Glueskin kidnaps her mother, forcing Melanie to travel to Half World, a colorless land that has been sundered from the realms of flesh and spirit, its deceased inhabitants cursed to relive the most traumatic moments of their lives. In her attempts to save her mother, Melanie learns she is destined to reunite the realms. Goto writes the hellish Half World as miserably surreal yet horrifyingly believable. A woman jumps off a bridge only to reappear again and again, and there are numerous human/animal hybrids, several of whom suffer gruesome (if temporary) deaths at the hands of the grotesque and psychotic Mr. Glueskin. Even after learning the strength of her character (and the truth about her parents), Melanie has believable relapses, but never stops fighting. It's a fast-moving and provocative journey with cosmically high stakes, and one that should readily appeal to fans of dark, nightmarish fantasy. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Half World." Publishers Weekly, 8 Mar. 2010, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA221092543&it=r&asid=ed42e233be7f60e03e60dac566a190b3. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A221092543

Half World
Ian Chipman
106.13 (Mar. 1, 2010): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Half World.

By Hiromi Goto. Illus. by Jillian Tamaki.

Apr. 2010. 240p. Viking, $16.99 (9780670012206). Gr. 7-10.

Goto's contemporary fantasy is set primarily in Half World, where souls go after leaving the Realm of Flesh for a cleansing experience before passage to the Realm of Spirit. Long ago, though, something happened to throw this order out of whack, and Half World has since been twisted into a Hieronymus Bosch--like purgatory, where inhabitants are terrorized by the perverted machinations of the evil Mr. Glueskin. The story sends 14-year-old Melanie into Half World to save her mother. There, she must almost literally wade through a sea of hideous creatures, propelled by prophetic hints about being the child who can realign the realms and bring peace to untold numbers of tortured souls. Although the nightmarish world is certainly memorable, Goto is prone to melodramatic overwriting, and the logic governing the realms is confusing. Most unusual, and interesting, is her heroine, who is often the exact opposite of plucky, burdened by paralyzing bouts of self-doubt, worry, and despair. Sporadic illustrations from Tamaki (Skim, 2008) add delicate nuance to the largely dark but ultimately cathartic journey.--Ian Chipman

Chipman, Ian

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chipman, Ian. "Half World." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2010, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA221202611&it=r&asid=e27e0d811b44cd874c0885e2029efa9f. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A221202611

Goto, Hiromi: HALF WORLD
(Mar. 1, 2010):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Goto, Hiromi HALF WORLD Viking (Children's) $$16.99 Apr. 1, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-670-01220-6

Fat, poor and intellectually slow, Melanie Tamaki's days are divided between torment at school and her alcoholic mother at home. The day a crow gives her a fortune cookie--one that says only "go home"--all that changes. Melanie follows her now-vanished mother into Half World, a magical limbo populated by gruesome semi-humans and characterized by despair. Chased by the oozing monstrosity Mr. Glueskin, aided only by a jade rat and a crumbling Magic 8-Ball full of cryptic advice, Melanie seeks escape from Half World with her mother. Unfortunately for Melanie, Mr. Glueskin thinks Melanie is the chosen one, the destined child who'll bring Half World back into balance with the realms of Spirit and Flesh, and he'll do anything to stop her. As Melanie is neither particularly bright nor brave, her persistence and her empathy will have to be enough. The richly flavored, often gruesome despair of the worldbuilding is enriched beautifully by Tamaki's evocative illustrations, in which the contrasts between light and darkness mirror the tale's thematic concerns. Hopeful and beautifully strange. (Fantasy. 11-13)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Goto, Hiromi: HALF WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2010. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA221151968&it=r&asid=1b60f230be4fa7c9614383e91181bc66. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A221151968

Half World
Shawna Dempsey
23.2 (Fall 2009): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Herizons Magazine, Inc.
HALF WORLD

HIROMI GOTO

Puffin Publishing

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Half World is a true quest narrative--page-turning, fraught with adventure, a trip. Unsentimental and unstinting in its fear factor, this metaphorically rich tale confronts monsters within and without.

Like all great tales, it starts, "Long, long, long ago...." And there begins its irresistible pull. We are dragged as much as we follow its young heroine as she undertakes a harrowing journey into a broken cosmos. The narrative follows Melanie, an ungainly child teetering between childhood and womanhood, who is in search of her lost mother. She is assisted by a form-shifting rat who is at times a green jade talisman and at other times pure rodent. This unlikely duo must pay their way into the half-world hell by first biting off a finger and then traversing a path made of the backs of flying crows. What awaits on yonder shore? Pure evil, Mr. Glueskin, an unforgettable and compelling allegory for pain so great it never ends.

Half Worldis the fifth novel by award-winning Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Its pages are beautifully illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, who is best known for her excellent work on the graphic novel Skim.

It is rare that we adults read stories with pictures, and the combination is nostalgic, reminiscent of "chapter books" from child hood. But beware. Whatever comfort is offered by the form is shattered by a deep darkness of text and illustration alike. This fast-paced tale combines archetype, invention and psychology to profound effect and is not for the weak of heart.

Reading the novel is like entering a dream. The child carries a magic eight ball that asks questions rather than providing answers. Hybrid creatures, part human, part starfish or wallaby, chant for murder. Death is longed for, life is fetishized. Mothers leave their children.

My only regret is the therapeutic language that creeps into Goto's otherwise pitch-perfect prose. Lines like "She was responsible for the things she chose. That's all." took me out of the in-between world and made the message the book delivers a little too easy.

But I quibble. Goto's writing masterfully creates a fantastically detailed and emotionally complex world populated by the weak and the brave--each and every one of us. Her character Melanie drives the story inexorably to its conclusion and, like many great heroines of literature, lives on inside of me.

Dempsey, Shawna

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dempsey, Shawna. "Half World." Herizons, Fall 2009, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA210035322&it=r&asid=c83aa887cb40ceb90b1e2387c7934a77. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A210035322

QUOTE:
the delicately lined art alternately expands and contradicts the prose to achieve layers of meaning, tone, and irony. Dark space and perspective are used to great effect, grafting emotion onto every scene,

Mariko Tamaki: Skim
Claire E. Gross
84.4 (July-August 2008): p459.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
* Mariko Tamaki Skim; illus, by Jillian Tamaki

143 pp. Groundwood 3/08 ISBN 978-0-88899-753-1 $18.95

(High School)

This stunningly emotional graphic novel charts a season of change in the life of Kim (nicknamed Skim "because I'm not"), a thoughtful, brooding misfit facing questions of life, death, friendship, and identity. Kim's sole friendship gradually crumbles; her surreal smoking breaks with Ms. Archer, the young, dramatic English teacher, evolve into unsettling romance; and a suicide rocks the all-girls school she attends. The narrative also touches, though doesn't dwell, on Kim's exploration of Wiccan spirituality and the issues she faces as a biracial teen and a child of divorced parents. These many threads connect and diverge in equal measure, coexisting in an artful jumble that is as true-to-life as it is diffuse. The free-flowing combination of dialogue, internal narration, and diary entries is unfussy and immediate, and the delicately lined art alternately expands and contradicts the prose to achieve layers of meaning, tone, and irony. Dark space and perspective are used to great effect, grafting emotion onto every scene, and the simplest details of body language--Kim's creased brow and hunched shoulders; Ms. Archer's serene, vaguely secretive countenance; a new, wounded friend's pinched mouth and suspicious eyes--project fully developed personalities. With honesty and compassion, this innovative narrative communicates a life just beginning, open and full of possibility.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

* indicates a book that the editors believe to be an outstanding example of its genre, of books of this particular publishing season, or of the author's body of work.

Gross, Claire E.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gross, Claire E. "Mariko Tamaki: Skim." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2008, p. 459+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA181757141&it=r&asid=1c160a958b54cf4ccce225ca4c62ed11. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A181757141

QUOTE:
The b/w art is fluid and curvy and looks like it came straight out of a sketchbook. The little details are wonderful
Tamaki, Mariko. Skim
George Galuschak
42.3 (May 2008): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Kliatt
http://hometown.aol.com/kliatt/
TAMAKI, Mariko. Skim. Art by JullianTamaki. Groundwood. 208p. illus, c2008. 978-0888997531. $18,95. (hardcover.) S*

Kim Cameron (Skim to everyone) wants to be a witch, but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it. She breaks her arm tripping over her altar; the Wicca ceremony in the park turns out to be an AA meeting; and when she and her best friend Lisa try to channel the spirit of Michael Reddear, the boy who killed himself, nothing happens. When Lisa asks what they would do if he appeared, Skim says--"nothing, I guess. Ignore him." Skim goes to a private high school for girls; ever since Michael Reddear died her classmates are obsessed with suicide. Skim's self card is the Lovers, reversed. She is in love with her teacher, Ms. Archer, who should know better. Skim is about being in a certain place in your life--friends come and go, falling in and out of love; being 16, and liking it. The narrative is first person, with diary entries, and manages to avoid the usual cliches; the characters don't line up to tell us their life stories. The b/w art is fluid and curvy and looks like it came straight out of a sketchbook. The little details are wonderful--the sun face on Ms. Archer's door; the Girls Celebrate Life bulletin board; Lisa tugging at Skim's jacket. Skim contains vulgarity (s and f-bombs), witches in training and tobacco use by minors. Highly recommended for high school graphic novel collections, especially those catering to girls. George Galuschak, YA Libn, Montvale PL, Montvale, NJ

S--Recommended for senior high school students.

*--The asterisk highlights exceptional books.

Galuschak, George

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Galuschak, George. "Tamaki, Mariko. Skim." Kliatt, May 2008, p. 31+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA179159884&it=r&asid=68ae03c8735f86f29f86b6cbcb284405. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A179159884

QUOTE:
reflects the spare, gloomy emotional landscape in which Skim exists.

Skim
Jesse Karp
104.14 (Mar. 15, 2008): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Skim.

By Mariko Tamaki. Illus. by Jillian Tamaki.

Mar. 2008. 144p. Groundwood, $16.95 (9780888997531). 741.5. Gr. 11-12.

Canadian essayist and adult-books author Tamaki and her cousin, an artist, dive into the graphic format by using high school as a fertile setting for pungent commentary on racial, cultural, and sexual issues. Pudgy Asian American Skim suffers the contempt of the popular crowd at her all-girl school and ponders the repercussions of the recent suicide of a local boy. The source of her greatest anguish, however, is her intense love for her drama teacher, Ms. Archer, an affection only briefly requited before the teacher leaves without explanation. The narrative, mainly in diary form, feels accurate and realistic, drenched in a sense of confusion and nihilism, and the art, influenced by Craig Thompson's Blankets (2003), reflects the spare, gloomy emotional landscape in which Skim exists. This story will appeal to many female comics fans, though readers may, in the end, be slightly turned off by a resolution that awkwardly introduces some odd sunlight into the otherwise dark world.--Jesse Karp

Karp, Jesse

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Karp, Jesse. "Skim." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2008, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA177634868&it=r&asid=eb052e502c1c95e019a8e72827458e05. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A177634868

QUOTE:
Long, languid lines portray Skim's turmoil and angst with pitch-perfect resonance and show how, for teens, time seems to be so drawn out.

Tamaki, Mariko: SKIM
(Feb. 15, 2008):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Tamaki, Mariko SKIM Groundwood (Children's) $16.95 Mar. 1, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-88899-753-1

A quietly moving graphic novel explores a teen girl's experience with friends, suicide, cliques and love. Both overweight and of mixed ethnicities, Kimberly Keiko Cameron--also known as "Skim" because "she's not"--is slowly moving through high school with her best friend Lisa. Both sharply witty and incisive, the two girls dabble in various forms of self-expression and exploration, like dressing with Gothic flair and trying Wicca. The two girls come to an impasse when Lisa gets an unexpected chance to join the popular clique. Coupled with her tumultuous friendship, Skim also harbors a crush on a female teacher, which leads her to begin to question herself and her desires. Long, languid lines portray Skim's turmoil and angst with pitch-perfect resonance and show how, for teens, time seems to be so drawn out. While Tamaki's faces are sometimes unsettling, the reader has the distinct impression that they should be uncomfortable. Recommend this to fans of Daniel Clowes's Ghost World, who have been waiting for another graphic novel of teen angst and suburban ennui. (Graphic novel. YA)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tamaki, Mariko: SKIM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2008. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174620382&it=r&asid=cb036207104e9c0012fe6127490451c7. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A174620382

Skim
255.5 (Feb. 4, 2008): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Skim MARIKO TAMAKI AND JILLIAN TAMAKI. Groundwood (www.groundwoodbooks. corn), $16.95 (144p) ISBN 978-0-88899-753-1

This auspicious graphic novel debut by cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki tells the story of "Skim," aka Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a goth girl in an all-girls school in Toronto, circa the early '90s. Skim is an articulate, angsty teenager, the classic outsider yearning for some form of acceptance. She begins a fanciful romance with her English teacher, Ms. Archer, while nursing her best friend through a period of mourning. The particulars of the story may not be its strong suit, though. It's Jillian's artwork that sets it apart from the coming-of-age pack. Jillian has a swooping, gorgeous pen line--expressive, vibrant and precise all at once. Her renderings of Skim and her friends, Skim alone or just the teenage environment in which the story is steeped are evocative and wondrous. Like Craig Thompson's Blankets, the inky art lifts the story into a more poetic, elegiac realm. It complements Mariko's fine ear for dialogue and the incidentals and events of adolescent life. Skim is an unusually strong graphic novel--rich in visuals and observations, and rewarding of repeated readings. (Feb.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Skim." Publishers Weekly, 4 Feb. 2008, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174596026&it=r&asid=ffc0c18650ad94ad959d2b4c3aad06b7. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A174596026

QUOTE:
Tamaki has created a stellar graphic novel that combines her slice-of-life expertise and clean, uncluttered art style.

Tamaki, Jillian. SuperMutant Magic Academy
Shelley Diaz
61.5 (May 2015): p128.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
* TAMAKI, Jillian. SuperMutant Magic Academy. 224p. Drawn & Quarterly. May 2015. pap. $22.95. ISBN 9781770461987.

Gr 9 Up--This quirky solo work from Caldecott-and Printz-winning graphic novelist Tamaki collects strips from her long-running webcomic about a school for mutants and witches into one mostly cohesive anthology. Riffing off popular phenomena, such as Harry Potter and the X-Men, this title sets teen angst-y situations in a world populated with cat-eared prom queens, the Everlasting Boy, and superpowered jocks. Most of the strips are a page-long, with the exception of the never-before-seen 40-page story arc that concludes the series. While at times these snippets may confuse readers because of their brevity and often weighty existential themes, these snapshots often center on the same cast of characters, each of whom teens get to know more deeply by the book's end. The mostly black-and-white art is divided in a range of single, full-page to six panels, and rare bursts of color are deftly used to moving effect. Marsha, the misanthropic witch with a crush on her female best friend; Frances, the boundary-pushing artist; and Cheddar, the athlete trying to find the meaning of life, among others, stand out as the more fully developed protagonists, but readers will find bits of themselves in many of the realistic characters. Poking fun at the "Chosen One" mythos, Tamaki has created a stellar graphic novel that combines her slice-of-life expertise and clean, uncluttered art style. VERDICT A must-have volume reminiscent of Alan Moore's Watchmen (DC Comics, 1987) and her and Mariko Tamaki's This One Summer (First Second, 2014) in sensibility and Raina Telgemeier's works in appearance.--Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal

Diaz, Shelley

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Diaz, Shelley. "Tamaki, Jillian. SuperMutant Magic Academy." School Library Journal, May 2015, p. 128+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413169592&it=r&asid=ff1d32ffe3bc570f70f11424c464e727. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A413169592

Indoor Voice
Ellie Anglin
.52 (July 2011): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Broken Pencil
http://www.brokenpencil.com
Indoor Voice

Jillian Tamaki, 96 pgs, Drawn & Quarterly, drawnandquarterly.com, $19.95

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This Drawn & Quarterly Petit Livre consists of "tiny comics" and "little drawings" that are awe-inspiring as well as accessible, hopefully encouraging the reader to pick up that cast-aside sketchbook and create something of her own. Jillian Tamaki's focus is often on the mundane, but that doesn't mean misguided attempts to elevate or mythologize dog shit, vibrators or PBR. Rather, this is a succinct document of Tamaki's world through the filter of her drawings, collages and comics. In the mini-comic, "A Brief History of Feminist Thought," Tamaki shows off her selfdeprecating sense of humour through a series of portraits depicting her past, current and future selves attempting to find meaningful and genuine ways to live in a feminist manner. She makes fun of herself, as well as feminist art and activist culture, but the result is still respectful and loving of that lifestyle. City dwellers can appreciate the "Brooklyn Follies" mini-comics as well as the incredible two-page spread of watercolour and ink portraits of pigeons that capture these birds' unlikely beauty, movement and character.

At all times, Indoor Voice is honest. As Tamaki explains in her very informal end notes, she can't help that: "probably because [she's] not all that creative and, when in doubt, draw what's in front of you." The New York philosopher-poet practice of "seeing beauty in the filth" is cheesy, in Tamaki's opinion, but these depictions ofthe everyday people, things and occurrences are beautiful because they are so real. Indoor Voice is simple, beautiful and resonant, leaving the reader both edified and inspired.

Anglin, Ellie

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anglin, Ellie. "Indoor Voice." Broken Pencil, July 2011, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA264174651&it=r&asid=aebd7ffcc1d6259568b3e6e3b46f6459. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A264174651

SuperMutant Magic Academy
Andrew Wilmot
.68 (July 20, 2015): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Broken Pencil
http://www.brokenpencil.com
SuperMutant Magic Academy

Jillian Tamaki, 280 pgs, Drawn & Quarterly, drawnandquarterly.com, $22.95

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Governor General Literary Award-winner Jillian Tamaki's SuperMutant Magic Academy is absurd, erudite, introspective, and above all things hilarious. It's a little like Hogwarts collided with Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, replete with heavy doses of cynicism, shape-shifting, and a cat that may or may not determine the fate of all humanity.

The book collects work serialized online for four years and takes place in a prep school for mutants, witches, and a lizard-headed girl who aspires to be a model. At the core of the narrative are: Frances, the resident avant-garde guerrilla artist; Gemma, a meddler and wannabe philosopher; Everlasting Boy, whose scenes deal abstractly with impermanence and the cyclical nature of life; Marsha, a brilliant, closeted girl dismantling social norms at every turn, and Wendy, the cat-eared object of Marsha's affections.

The shorts, which work on their own and as part of the larger narrative, achieve a careful balance, mixing the surrealism of the academy with grounded, down-to-earth conversations. The characters themselves are gloriously temperate, no matter the craziness surrounding them, which is why it all works so well. Really though, it's Marsha and Wendy who form the emotional backbone of the book. When late in the collection Marsha finally comes out to her friend, it is genuinely, painfully effective.

Employing the deadpan wit and deft observational skills previously seen in Skim and This One Summer (both co-created with cousin Mariko), Tamaki uses life at the academy to skewer gender norms, performance art, academic cliques, eroticism, teen angst, and empirically perfect asses. The art, while simple, is well characterized and provides Tamaki's writing with a great deal of depth.

But after all that, when all the strangeness and magic is stripped clear, it's the moral of the story that wins the day. There is life after high school, and just because you're not the chosen one doesn't mean you don't have a future. (Andrew Wilmot)

Wilmot, Andrew

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilmot, Andrew. "SuperMutant Magic Academy." Broken Pencil, 20 July 2015, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA424253143&it=r&asid=adedc5ca4bde1fad4b84dfe6ea39bb5e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A424253143

Goto, Hiromi. Half World
Eric Norton
56.4 (Apr. 2010): p156.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
GOTO, Hiromi. Half World. illus. by Jillian Tamaki. 240p. Viking. Apr. 2010. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-0-670-01220-6. LC number unavailable.

Gr 7 Up--A prophecy tells that only a child born of the lifeless Half World can reunite the three worlds of Flesh, Spirit, and the Half World that have been split asunder. Enter Melanie Tamaki, fleeing from some school bullies. She arrives home to find that her mother, bedridden when she left for school, is mysteriously gone. Melanie receives a creepy phone call from someone demanding that she go to the "Half World" or else her mother will be hurt. She turns to elderly Mrs. Wei for help and, from her, hears of the prophecy. Mrs. Wei feeds her and gives her a pendant of a jade rat. So fortified, Melanie sets off on her quest. Her mother has collected the artwork of Escher and Bosch and, upon arrival in Half World, Melanie begins to understand why. In this world literally bereft of color every being is grotesque, most barely recognizable as human at all. Cast among these horrors, Melanie must remain hidden until she can rescue her mother and somehow save the three realms. Goto has created an unusual fantasy horror novel that's something like a Caiman tale with a dash of Asian magic. Readers who want a different kind of fantasy and who like a villain who makes the skin crawl should enjoy this quick read. It's a rare treat and belongs in most YA collections.--Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI

Norton, Eric

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Norton, Eric. "Goto, Hiromi. Half World." School Library Journal, Apr. 2010, p. 156. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA224168054&it=r&asid=b7929a52e4128dc33f405cce660c7579. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A224168054

Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer
Allison Tran
60.5 (May 2014): p144.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
* TAMAKI, Mariko. This One Summer. illus. by Jillian Tamaki. 320p. First Second. May 2014. Tr $21.99. ISBN 9781626720947; pap. $17.99. ISBN 9781596437746.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Gr 8 Up--Every summer, Rose and her parents vacation at a lakeside cottage. The rest of the world fades away as Rose reunites with her friend Windy and delves into leisurely games of MASH, swimming, and the joy of digging giant holes in the sand--but this summer is different. Rose is on the cusp of adolescence; she's not ready to leave childhood behind but is fascinated by the drama of the local teens who are only a few years older, yet a universe apart in terms of experience. They drink, they smoke, they swear. As Rose and Windy dip their toes into the mysterious waters of teen life by experimenting with new vocabulary ("sluts!") and renting horror movies, her parents struggle with their own tensions that seem incomprehensible to Rose. Layers of story unfurl gradually as the narrative falls into the dreamlike rhythm of summer. Slice-of-life scenes are gracefully juxtaposed with a complex exploration of the fragile family dynamic after loss and Rose's ambivalence toward growing up. The mood throughout is thoughtful, quiet, almost meditative. The muted tones of the monochromatic blue-on-white illustrations are perfectly suited to the contemplative timbre, and the writing and images deserve multiple reads to absorb their subtleties. This captivating graphic novel presents a fully realized picture of a particular time in a young girl's life, an in-between summer filled with yearning and a sense of ephemerality. The story resolves with imperfect hope and will linger in readers' mind through changing seasons.--Allison Tran, Mission Viejo Library, CA

Tran, Allison

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tran, Allison. "Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer." School Library Journal, May 2014, p. 144+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA367298994&it=r&asid=30a1cf153dbda2f5cbbff371132b063e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A367298994

Beasley, Kate. Gertie's Leap to Greatness
Carol A. Edwards
62.5 (May 2016): p90.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
BEASLEY, Kate. Gertie's Leap to Greatness. illus. by Jillian Tamaki. 256p. Farrar. Oct. 2016. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780374302610.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Gr 4-6--A step up in reading level and length from Sara Pennypacker's "Clementine" series, this is the story of Gertie, an unselfconscious and truly determined fifth grader. The first sentence captures the spirit of the book and provides a strong hook: "The bullfrog was only half-dead, which was perfect." Gertie's desire to be great means she must surpass all of her uniquely talented classmates, including the newcomer, Mary Sue Spivey. Gertie is motivated by a need to prove to the mother who left her that she's missing out on the best kid in the world. As a plot device, it is somewhat tired, but Beasley sells it convincingly. Gertie's machinations to always stand out from the crowd are often entertaining and are assisted by deft illustration by Tamaki. There is an environmental standoff caused by Gertie's loyalty to her father, an oil rigger, and Mary Sue's mother, who is against the environmental effects of oil drilling. Though the issue remains unresolved, it offers an ideal opportunity for discussion and reflection. Readers may have met the likes of Gertie before, but her Alabama setting and the mix of interesting friends, foes, and family who surround her all provide charm. VERDICT This classic-feeling narrative about an ambitious young girl with a kind heart, while not wholly original, is sure to resonate with fans of spunky female protagonists.--Carol A. Edwards, formerly at Denver Public Library

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Edwards, Carol A. "Beasley, Kate. Gertie's Leap to Greatness." School Library Journal, May 2016, p. 90. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA451409864&it=r&asid=fbb07a1c9d4327ed398c38903fb110c9. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A451409864

Outsiders and onlookers: formulations of girlhood in two novels by Mariko Tamaki
Nyala Ali
7.1 (Summer 2015): p150.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 University of Winnipeg, Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures
http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc
Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer. Illus. Jillian Tamaki. Toronto: Groundwood, 2014. 320 pp. $18.95 pb. ISBN 978-1-55498-152-6. Print.

Tamaki, Mariko. (You) Set Me on Fire. Toronto: Razorbill, 2012. 352 pp. $9.95 pb. ISBN 978-014318-095-1. Print.

In a recent interview discussing their award-winning graphic novel This One Summer, which was given a Caldecott Honor Award for children's picture books in the United States and the Governor General's Award for children's illustration in Canada, cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki both affirm that they are proud feminists who strive to present real stories and real people to their readers (Clark). Their earlier collaborative work Skim, a coming-of-age graphic novel set in a Catholic high school, is a nuanced portrayal of a teenage girl on the periphery of social cliques. Skim was critically acclaimed for its theoretically adept, sophisticated formulation of girlhood, queerness, and adolescent sexuality. These qualities are also evident in their subsequent works: both This One Summer and Mariko Tamaki's young adult novel (You) Set Me on Fire navigate the spectrum of fears and desires bound up with female personhood while showcasing further the Tamakis's talent for writing girlness from the perspective of an outsider.

The narrative of This One Summer is focalized through the perspectives of Rose and Windy, two preteen girls who are privy to adult conversations only through eavesdropped snippets, highlighting the incompleteness of their perspectives as outsiders. As girlhood scholar Catherine Driscoll notes, "the only boundaries which define the teenage years are boundaries of exclusion, which define what young people are not, cannot do, or cannot be" (206). This One Summer is interested in how a positioning within the already tenuous space of preadolescence might shape the young female gaze. As the narrative unfolds through Rose and Windy's surveillance of their surroundings, they are both revealed to be keen, almost anthropological observers, updated versions of Louise Fitzhugh's 1960s Harriet the Spy. As a result, the story is framed much as it would be through Harriet's own spyglass, a microcosmic bubble with well-defined, abrupt edges, but blown up to 300%.

The fictional rural Ontario town of Awago is rendered in vibrant yet imperfect detail. Jillian Tamaki works magic with the graphic medium, using self-contained panels and wide, expressive brush strokes to make a series of snapshot-like images that take on a larger significance when seen through the girls' eyes. Jillian Tamaki's vivid art becomes especially indispensable where the accompanying text is necessarily piecemeal--for example, during conversations heard through a wall, through a gap in a fence, or from behind the convenience store counter--when the human absence that accounts for the partial text is made evident in the images. The skilled interplay between image and text positions Rose and Windy quite firmly on the other side of an adulthood that still governs the world around them.

The narrator of (You) Set Me on Fire, Alison Lee, is also a self-proclaimed outsider with a similarly anthropological gaze. When readers meet her, Alison is fresh out of high school and visibly scarred from two separate fires, and she attempts to navigate college and the "freshman threshold of opportunity" (38), complete with dorm rooms, frat parties, and messy female friendships with the queer potential to become something more. Mariko Tamaki's vivid descriptions are both apt and amusing as Alison identifies her classmates visually through such observations as "nose pierce and slight B.O." (55). Tamaki has a great ear for the teenage voice. Alison's first-person narration is sardonic but hopeful, lively without succumbing to the type of valley-girl teenspeak that veers often into caricature, Alison herself remarking that it is "amazing how a word like 'cool' can land like a lame penny falling from your pocket onto the sidewalk" (74). Tamaki's novel also reads very much as a piece of media meant for current teens: the paragraphs are brief and sometimes written in all caps, often structured like text messages between close friends. Such a narrative form establishes Alison as a plausible ally for teenage readers: frustrated and wounded, she seeks comrades to read about her secrets.

This One Summer also explores the idea of comradeship, as Rose and Windy strive to make meaning of their surroundings. Why does Rose's secret crush, Duncan, refuse to call his crying girlfriend back? Why does Rose's mother, Alice, seem so distracted and sad? Each uncovered answer complicates the girls' comradeship by affecting not only their worldviews but also the ways in which they perceive themselves and one another. We are thus treated to two distinctive, often conflicting viewpoints on the other characters as the events of the summer unfold. Duncan, for instance, is gawky, apathetic, and even casually misogynistic when Windy sees him; through Rose-tinted glasses, however, he seems just a bit more conventionally handsome and a little kinder. The Tamakis portray Rose's confused desire for Duncan as an idealized fantasy that is caught between childhood and adolescence. In this threshold space, Rose is not granted any real agency, sexual or otherwise. She adds Duncan's name to a game of Mansion, Apartment, Shed, House (or MASH, a game played by preteen girls with the intention of predicting their futures, usually with a specific crush in mind). Although Rose is not-so-secretly pleased when she and Duncan end up together on paper, she later insists, "It's not like I want him to be my boyfriend or anything. He's like eighteen. That's like perverted" (251). Rose, of course, enjoys every second of Duncan's good-natured attention (often renting horror DVDs at the convenience store just to see him working at the counter), but Windy is revolted, genuinely baffled as to why her friend would ever give "the dud" the time of day.

Rose's crush, along with Windy's confusion about the object of her friend's desire, is amalgamated in Alison from (You) Set Me on Fire, who takes another step toward her lesbian identity upon meeting classmate-turned-love-interest Shar. What sets this story apart from many other LGBTQ books for teens is that Tamaki begins her story with a heroine who already identifies as queer and has had past lesbian experiences, instead of one who discovers her queer self through the narrative under the eye of readers. Alison's queerness establishes her further as an outsider, a position on which she remarks prior to meeting Shar:

I'm into girls, but I have some pretty strong
reservations about this decision on my heart's part.
For me, "lesbianism," if you want to call it that (I
hate that word), is like a kind of Tourette syndrome.
It's like, why, given my MANY experiences with the
claws and fangs of girls, would I decide to put myself
on the path of pursuing them for the rest of my
life? . . . Although, you know, let's not exclude the
possibility that some boy will come along and sweep
me off my feet. Boys, it seems, are just so cool and
everyone wants one. Why not me? (28)
Although Alison's relationship to the word "lesbian" is shrouded in negativity, she aligns that word productively not simply with a gender label but with ongoing identity negotiations and personal developments that she struggles to work through as a queer young woman. The implication in Alison's musings is that bisexuality is perhaps the safer route, but later she remarks that she's "not really sure what bi is, to be honest.... Does it mean you have to sleep with a boy after you do it with a girl? What if all the boys in your town are stupid?" (126). Tamaki takes great care to illustrate the complications arising from trying to label one's sexuality as she spells out the concrete (and humorous) logistics.

This One Summer also uses humour as a lens through which to address adolescent sexuality, although Rose and Windy's perception of sex veers more toward ignorance and inexperience than hormonally charged adolescence. Mariko Tamaki scripts spot-on girlhood conversations about the logistics of oral sex, and whether or not one can, in fact, get herpes from a flip-flop. Here, both girls exhibit what girlhood studies scholar Michelle Fine calls "the missing discourse of desire" in relation to the effaced nature of adolescent girls as sexual subjects. Although Rose's desire is unfulfilled physically, both she and Windy also lack the language even to discuss sex or their own complicated feelings in relation to sex, since they have access only to second- or third-hand information on the subject. Interestingly, Windy is repelled by heteronormative sex but is intrigued by her own body, especially by both her and Rose's emerging breasts, although largely in the curious, exploratory way reminiscent of a preteen Judy Blume heroine. Windy is also quite tactile and affectionate with Rose, talks enthusiastically about her cool lesbian aunt, and is obviously threatened by Duncan. Given the Tamakis' elegant depiction of queerness in Skim, a queer reading of Windy definitely is possible, her choppy, unruly haircut, thick eyebrows, and round features even suggesting a young, possibly butch lesbian identity. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Windy's potential queerness, though, is Rose's obliviousness to it. She still views Windy with the same childhood innocence that has defined their friendship up until this point and is too self-absorbed to realize that Windy is growing up as well. The social dynamic between Rose and Windy and their conflicting viewpoints concerning and interest in romance point to the different ways in which budding sexuality shapes emerging female identities, queer or otherwise.

In (You) Set Me on Fire, the interplay between emerging sexuality and female identity is intertwined even more as the social dynamic between Shar and Alison is made up of lesbian romance and female friendship gone amiss in equal parts. Although Tamaki displays a clever grasp of the type of behaviour that often sullies female friendships in girls' books, she refutes the idea of toxic friendships as simply a trope of young adult fiction, adding another dimension through romance while pointing out that harmful relationships of this sort exist well past high school. Shar's characterization in particular subverts what is found in a typical teen narrative. At first glance, it would be easy to classify Shar as a Queen Bee, as defined by girlhood scholar Rosalind Wiseman (and on whose book Queen Bees and Wannabes the teen film Mean Girls is based). Usually the undisputed leader of a large clique, the Queen Bee "feels power and control over her environment. She's the center of attention and girls pay homage to her" (89). Although Shar is definitely the centre of Alison's world, she is actually an anti-Queen Bee, often solitary, rejecting the notion of cliques entirely, and remarking that the best part of college is "not even having to pretend to be a part of anyone else's stupid shit" (93). Part of the reason Alison is so drawn to Shar in the first place is that she is also an outsider, albeit by choice. Here, Tamaki shows us how outsiders can function as antagonists precisely by disrupting already established social dynamics: Shar's whirlwind personality inflicts chaos on what Wiseman refers to as "Girl World" (10).

This One Summer also presents a nascent version of Girl World to the reader, although with a much narrower, more detailed focus. The Tamakis propel Rose and Windy toward their adolescent identities by removing them from the privacy of their parents' Awago cottages and from what foundational feminist scholars Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber call "bedroom culture" (182). According to them, girls negotiate different spaces than boys. Although girls are relegated often to the home, boys are allowed instead to "escape the claustrophobia of the family, into the street and 'caff'" (182), and be active in these less controlled and less confined public spaces. Consequently, the agency girls might claim by engaging in activities within bedroom culture in the home is still of a more personal, less publicly visible nature than that granted to boys. Although Rose and Windy occupy both private and public spaces throughout the story and function mainly as onlookers to other characters, they are still most visible as female subjects through their public interactions outside the home.

Mariko Tamaki deploys the concept of bedroom culture in (You) Set Me on Fire as well, when Alison and Shar dress up as Sonny and Cher for the campus Halloween party. Shar's suggestion that the girls choose a couples costume echoes the idea that coming-of-age narratives informed by female-oriented bedroom culture, as scholar Mary Celeste Kearney points out, easily are able to "take this girls-only theme a step further by reconfiguring the bedrooms of female youth as a place of lesbian bonding" (138). Playing dress-up for one another's pleasure suggests the queer possibilities of similar acts taking place between close female friends in real life. That Alison is made to dress in drag, as a man, before fooling around with Shar, is telling, as Shar later treats their relationship as simply a dalliance, something to try on and then discard as easily as a Halloween costume. Tamaki also displays the positive effects of costumes as self-reinvention, however, as the campus party introduces queer possibilities for Alison's classmate Carly as well. Uncharacteristically excited about dressing as Danny Zuko from Grease, Carly later adopts the look permanently, replacing her previous head-to-toe pink attire and long hair with stiff blue jeans, a leather jacket, a short, spiky haircut, and, incidentally, a girlfriend. Cleverly using the Halloween party as a type of coming-out, Carly also emerges as Alison's true friend by the end of the novel. Comfortable in her own skin, Carly shows Alison genuine concern and empathy, in contrast with Shar's selfish manipulations, which are rooted in her own insecurities.

Shar's insecurities are confirmed to readers when they discover that she has lied about a number of issues, including having been a victim of domestic violence. That Shar (a supposed victim of abuse herself) seems to be quite comfortable bullying Alison is especially troubling, given the fact that many real victims of domestic violence do struggle to be believed. With this in mind, such a sensitive issue could have been handled more cautiously, especially in a text with otherwise very honest, considerate storytelling. Despite this oversight (and to Tamaki's credit), the text does not present empathy for Shar as a viable option, in spite of Alison's defense of Shar's behaviour. Instead, Tamaki's narrative amplifies Shar's manipulative antics as a means for readers to empathize with Alison and to cheer when Alison starts challenging Shar after having found some true friends (Carly and her pal Danny who, incidentally, is also queer). Shar eventually feels threatened by Alison's new friends, given that Shar's own lack of community is at the root of her insecurities. Once Shar is gone from the narrative, Alison embraces her lesbian identity fully with support from Carly, who has already come out. Carly's emotional availability also makes Alison genuinely hopeful that she is capable of healthy relationships, both with friends and potential romantic partners, now that she has finally been able to parse many conflicting feelings about her queer self.

The complicated ways in which identity, insecurity, and friendship play off each other also make up the narrative through-line in This One Summer. Once again, the Tamakis depict a true friend as someone who is comfortable in her own skin; although Windy is quite conscious of her own body, she is not at all self-conscious about it, often depicted munching happily on gummy feet and Twizzlers from the convenience store. In one scene, Jillian Tamaki gives us a gorgeous splash page of Windy dancing in frenzied, confident circles around a seated Rose, who laughs at her friend while likely wishing that she possessed the self-confidence to be that uninhibited. In this sequence in particular, Windy, who is adopted, could easily be read as Japanese Canadian, her plump, animated face reminiscent of a Miyazaki heroine. Unfortunately, Windy's ethnicity is not explored further, and intersections of race and girlhood largely are absent from this narrative. Although the Tamakis have looked at these issues before--Skim featured an explicitly Japanese Canadian teenage girl as its protagonist--it would have been wonderful to see race explored in relation to a younger heroine, especially one who is quite obviously a burgeoning feminist.

Windy's feminist views emerge further as she draws attention to the attempts of Rose's jovial, somewhat adolescent father to explain how to gather kindling for the bonfire. She also gleefully calls out the misogynistic T-shirts Duncan's sidekick is fond of wearing. Most notably, Windy is not afraid to challenge Rose for dismissing all the teenage girls in Awago as sluts, an important scene that highlights Rose's own insecurity as the root of her sexist viewpoint, as she is forced to think about why Windy's intervention has upset her, and, more specifically, why her judgmental tendencies toward other women are so prevalent. Rose clearly favours her father over her mother, oblivious to the fact that, while he gets to be the "fun dad" on this trip, Alice is still suffering the emotional effects of a miscarriage that happened the previous summer.

Rose's strained relationship with her mother reflects her own insecurity over the idea of women as sexual subjects as she struggles to resolve her nascent adolescent desire with her previously childish attitude toward sex. She is repulsed by her mother's Sex and the City DVDs because the women in the series are forty and unabashedly sexually active, and she faults Jenny, Duncan's girlfriend, for being pregnant, convinced that the teen must have deserved this outcome through her own carelessness. It is fitting, then, that the eventual reconciliation between Rose and her mother also involves Jenny, whose adolescent desire has marked her as precisely the type of sexual subject of whom Rose previously had been afraid. Throughout This One Summer, Rose and Windy's developing views of themselves and other women serve as a spirited reminder that every girl or woman's relationship to her feminist self is an ongoing negotiation.

Seemingly assuming that outsiders are usually the best observers, the Tamakis write developing identities for their heroines that counter (and call attention to) societally prescribed scripts of female personhood. As such, This One Summer could well serve as a feminist primer for preteen girls at the same time as the scope of its intertwining stories and the variety of body types, facial features, and ages among its female characters might be expected to appeal to a wide range of readers. Though (You) Set Me on Fire falls quite neatly into the young adult genre and thus is less likely to attract a broad audience, its merit lies in Mariko Tamaki's deft ability to write vivid characters who embody many of the nuances and questions of queer adolescence. The Tamakis' rich storytelling reveals their careful attention to real stories and real people. Both This One Summer and (You) Set Me on Fire invite readers to engage with lively, complicated formulations of female personhood, offering readers critical feminist insights, the significance of which extend past the pages of these important books for girls.

Works Cited

Clark, Noelene. "This One Summer: Mariko and Jillian Tamaki Bottle Up Adolescence." Rev. of This One Summer, by Mariko Tamaki. Hero Complex: Pop Culture Unmasked. Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 2013. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.

Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print.

Fine, Michelle. "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire." Harvard Educational Review 58.1 (1988): 29-54. Print.

Kearney, Mary Celeste. "Girlfriends and Girl Power: Female Adolescence in Contemporary U.S. Cinema." Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood. Ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward. Michigan: Wayne State UP, 2002. 125-42. Print.

McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. "Girls and Subcultures." Resistance through Ritual: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. London: Hutchinson, 1976. 177-89. Print.

Tamaki, Mariko. Skim. Illus. Jillian Tamaki. Toronto: Groundwood, 2008. Print.

Wiseman, Rosalind. Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and the New Realities of Girl World. 2003. New York: Three Rivers, 2009. Print.

Nyala Ali holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies: Texts and Cultures from the University of Winnipeg. She has been published in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN and has contributed to the online magazines Tom Tom and Women Write about Comics. Her research interests include comics and graphic novels, girlhood studies, music fandom studies, gender studies, and critical race theory. She writes copy for a social marketing firm and plays the drums in a post-punk trio.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ali, Nyala. "Outsiders and onlookers: formulations of girlhood in two novels by Mariko Tamaki." Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, p. 150+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA445750283&it=r&asid=d9ada345a6640ba2a45732a7bb463c76. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A445750283

This One Summer
Chloe Stelmanis
.65 (Oct. 2014): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Broken Pencil
http://www.brokenpencil.com
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This One Summer

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, 319 pgs, House of Anansi Press,

houseofanansipress.com, $18.95

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, who brought us Skim in 2008, have solidified themselves as the dream team of young adult comics. But their latest feat transcends the young adult genre. Instead, as This One Summer follows summer friends Windy and Rose to the cottage town of Awago Beach, it effortlessly transports readers of all ages into the nostalgic realm of teenage summers. Rose and Windy remain powerful and relatable characters throughout their apprehensive transitions into adulthood. They're two girls who are just trying to focus on the important stuff: boys, boobs, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This One Summer is a vivid and genuine portrayal of girlhood, but the Tamakis resist young adult cliches by juxtaposing this with the harsh realities of adulthood. Jillian Tamaki impresses in her ability to evoke a poignant sense of nostalgia within a single frame, while This One Summer's plot always jolts us back to reality. The palpable tension between Rose's parents, for instance, infiltrates the entire story, and peaks beautifully alongside illustrations of shattered glass from broken dishes.

While This One Summer deserves praise for its authentic depiction of what it means to be on the cusp of childhood, it also succeeds in conveying complex familial relationships and friendships with fluidity and ease. The site of Awago Beach breaks down generational barriers, adult responsibilities and distinctions between public and private realms, allowing for a moving and unforgettable story with a stunning climax that renders This One Summer a worthy book for any season.

Stelmanis, Chloe

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stelmanis, Chloe. "This One Summer." Broken Pencil, Oct. 2014, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA387952211&it=r&asid=cc4dc0687bbeac9d4e168013d2d87010. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A387952211

Tamaki, Mariko. Skim
Dave Inabnitt
54.5 (May 2008): p160.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
TAMAKI, Mariko. Skim. illus. by Jillian Tamaki. 144p. CIP. Groundwood. 2008. Tr $15.95. ISBN 978-0-88899-753-1. LC C2007-905741-1.

Gr 10 Up--Kimberly Keiko Cameron-aka "Skim"--is a mixed-race high school student struggling with identity, friendships, and romantic yearning. After her parents' divorce, she turns to tarot cards and Wicca to make sense of life but finds herself disappointed with the lack of answers they provide. She finds herself increasingly intrigued by Ms. Archer, her free-spirited English teacher. Her interest becomes obsessive and it begins to drive a wedge between her and her best friend, Lisa. Although Skim originally makes light of the half-hearted suicide attempts of popular Katie, whose ex-boyfriend committed suicide, the two of them begin to open up to one another. Skim soon realizes that "perfect" Katie is far funnier, more genuine, and more traumatized than she originally thought-particularly when it comes to light that John shot himself due to his homosexuality. Drawn in an expressive, fluid style and with realistic dialogue, this work accurately depicts the confusion of teenage years, with its rejection of previous identity and past relationships and search for a newer and truer identity; additionally, insider/outsider status is a reoccurring theme. Skim's internal monologue is diarylike, with an interesting use of "scratched-out" words. This is a good but somewhat standard work.--Dave Inabnitt, Brooklyn Public Library, NY

Inabnitt, Dave

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Inabnitt, Dave. "Tamaki, Mariko. Skim." School Library Journal, May 2008, p. 160. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA179207953&it=r&asid=ca93efe0e150de4486497092510d8eee. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A179207953

QUOTE:
beguilingly layered new graphic work

New graphic novel 'Boundless' illustrates the perils of seeking transcendence in a wired world
Michael Cavna
(June 27, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Michael Cavna

For decades,Casey Kasem, the disc jockey and "Scooby-Doo" voice actor who died three years ago this month, would end his "American Top 40" franchise radio shows with a sign-off that seemed to suit both the long reach and relative impermanence of communication that floated along the airwaves. His 12 simple pseudo-inspiring words: "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

Jillian Tamaki, in her beguilingly layered new graphic work "Boundless" (Drawn + Quarterly) - a collection of short comics from recent years - hilariously puts the lie to such a rhetorical dichotomy within the tools of the 21st century.

In Tamaki's collected stories, most any attempt at transcendence - corporal, emotional, spiritual - is bundled with the potential life malware of loss or sacrifice.

The effect upon the reader can be organically disorienting, visually jarring - and, sometimes, sublime.

Tamaki, the Caldecott- and Eisner-winning author of "This One Summer" and "SuperMutant Magic Academy," has a knowing knack for grounding these virtuosically drawn tales in the familiar - right before launching into flights that challenge our sense of mind and matter and what matters.

And it all often glides along prose so clean and in control that you surrender to its sharp, smart wit.

One of the more satisfyingly realized stories here is "Body Pods," in which IRL relationships are mapped along headline-grabbing events tied to a sci-fi/action film. Our fascination with celebrity and fame is skewered, as fans mark the untimely deaths of the movie's actors ("The internet went crazy," we are told wryly. "Talk of a curse and whatnot.") When a moviegoer's investment in manifold aspects of a film - from aesthetic achievement to actor mortality - is so complete, does this experience eclipse even one's own relationships? ("Marcella was disgusted," a caption says. "She fell deeper into with every announcement Disney made regarding their plans.")

The question keeps resurfacing: Can content that lives in the digital somehow imbue meaning into the actual life ephemeral?

The internet also seduces in the story of "Jenny," in which the title woman is entranced by a "mirror Facebook" in which her avatar is leading a different, perhaps better life. In a deliciously satiric twist, Jenny doesn't seek grounding in nature, but instead goes to work in a nursery only because the foliage provides cover - all the better to surreptitiously check her smartphone.

Many of the women in "Boundless" only want to slip the surly bonds of dreary quotidian existence - what if I could fly? Or live an alternate existence? Or at least have better skin? - but the siren's sales pitch also drowns out the caveats. With a pitch-perfect ear, Tamaki mimics the language of these cultural come-ons.

Most manufactured entertainment in these worlds must be viewed with a jaundiced eye, and you are absorbed at your own peril. You might even join the cast of a once-cutting-edge "sitcom-porno" series - in a tale titled "Darla!" - with a healthy degree of irony. But years later, once you're hawking your autographs at fan conventions, sadly capitalizing on the prostitution of nostalgia, you and your head shots become the subjects of the derisive laughter.

Perhaps only the non-human beasts have things all figured out here, so sure of their purpose as they respect their natural bounds. Then again, even a rodent can feel hemmed in by the borders of territorial urine markings, from a rival who rules because of just a coupla extra ounces of heft. In this world, even the soaring bird can be brought down by the near-invisible wisp of a spider's web-strand.

What to do? Keeping your feet planted can beget monotony? Reaching for the stars can invite fatality.

In the better stories within "Boundless," perhaps the wisest path is to laugh at the absurdity of teetering between two such poles.

Tamaki's tightrope-precise lines at least provide a welcome way to enjoy the treacherous view.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cavna, Michael. "New graphic novel 'Boundless' illustrates the perils of seeking transcendence in a wired world." Washington Post, 27 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA497117588&it=r&asid=77dec2f8879201e81ef7534297095ac1. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497117588

Minnesota school's ban on graphic novel draws free-speech protests; Groups including National Coalition Against Censorship say decision to pull This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki threatens principle 'essential to freedom'
(May 25, 2016): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Byline: Alison Flood

The withdrawal of an award-winning graphic novel from a school in Minnesota over its use of "profanities" has drawn a stern rebuke from free-speech groups, who warned that the ban opens the door to removing classic works such as The Catcher in the Rye and Beloved.

This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki tells of a girl who visits a beach house every summer with her parents, but who this time finds herself caught up in the world of older teenagers, while her parents won't stop fighting. Critically acclaimed -- the New York Times called it "a lovely book" -- the coming-of-age story is also a bestseller.

But earlier this month, it was pulled from the shelves of the school library in Henning, Minnesota, following a complaint from a parent. Superintendent Jeremy Olson told the Daily Globe that it was banned after he, along with the school librarian and the principal of the school, found the topics it covered to be "inappropriate for inclusion in the library". "I deemed it as being vulgar. There was a lot of inappropriate language," he told the paper.

Olson added that he was "not an advocate of censoring books", but that "where I draw the line is with something I would determine pervasively vulgar". He said he struggled to understand "if the educational need for that outweighs the vulgarity -- where is that line?"

The Globe explains that Henning is a small town, of approximately 800 residents, with a library that is used by K-12 students (from kindergarten to the completion of secondary school) and is not divided by grades.

However, in a letter to Olson from the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), backed by organisations including PEN America and the National Council of Teachers of English, the group of free-speech organisations say: "There is no basis to conclude that a book is pervasively vulgar simply because it contains a number of instances of profanity."

"The book is part of the collections of school libraries across the United States. It has been challenged occasionally, but as far as we are aware, has been consistently kept in those collections," says the letter, adding that the removal of This One Summer "solely on the basis of occasional profanity opens the door for parents to request the removal of a great deal of literature that is standard fare in school libraries, including classic works such as The Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse-Five, Black Boy and Beloved."

The graphic novel was also challenged in Florida in February, when it was removed from open shelves at three school libraries, according to School Library Journal. At the time, Mariko Tamaki told the magazine that the book was "listed as being for readers ranging 12--18", and "contains depictions of young people talking about, and dealing with, adult things".

Related: The Bible makes most challenged books list in US for first time

"I think there are a lot of books, including a lot of great graphic novels, that should be made available to teen readers," she said.

"While the book may be above the maturity and reading level of elementary school students, its value for young adults at the high-school level has been recognised by leading professionals," says the NCAC letter to Olson. It urges him to restore the book to the Henning school library, and warns that "any other decision threatens the principle that is essential to individual freedom, democracy, and a good education: the right to read, inquire, question and think for ourselves".

CAPTION(S):

'Inappropriate for inclusion in the library'... detail from the cover of This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

Alison Flood

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Minnesota school's ban on graphic novel draws free-speech protests; Groups including National Coalition Against Censorship say decision to pull This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki threatens principle 'essential to freedom'." Guardian [London, England], 25 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453327590&it=r&asid=5eee050f76616ab6719cf2b32e8fb1f6. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A453327590

"Q&A Jillian Tamaki." Library Journal, 1 June 2017, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA494891733&asid=96beacab614a9f44efac935cc308a9b1. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Hunter, Sarah. "Boundless." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 37. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA496084804&asid=91e587d27b156d62bbd4faabf967e968. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Boundless." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485971656&asid=2f48b8759c96f8d2430ff0cb7ed8ea47. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Gershowitz, Elissa. "Gertie's Leap to Greatness." The Horn Book Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2016, p. 102. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA469641295&asid=5c7b666e678ba9d18db3d50b4d480cfa. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Gertie's Leap to Greatness." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460285756&asid=012ca73d77a16a9e5af6a2ce32f14d83. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Marcus, Leonard S. "Some vacation: This One Summer." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2015, p. 61+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA421324125&asid=9d944e0c30bebb342630c35c8a7ad926. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "The Canadian Library Association 2015 Young Adult Book Award Winner." Resource Links, June 2015, p. 17. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA421624369&asid=268205bdd4152b8765fe2c0166e47feb. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Hunter, Sarah. "Super Mutant Magic Academy." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2015, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA413338275&asid=e0689523f8847718e94bd0aa226ff911. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "SuperMutant Magic Academy." Publishers Weekly, 6 Apr. 2015, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA409833277&asid=5bd5a2b2c4bed720929c2f18f420f77d. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Junyk, Ayra. "This One Summer." Resource Links, Oct. 2014, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA390327901&asid=d9536665e3e20718371dbff04957e796. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Ritter, Cynthia K. "This One Summer." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2014, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA375951317&asid=2c7948103e91c66c8c5cf83cf017eebd. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Johnston, Barbara. "Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer." Voice of Youth Advocates, June 2014, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA375949332&asid=c68c10b59af7b6929a47991d4e3ac151. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Tamaki, Mariko: THIS ONE SUMMER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2014. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA366617213&asid=516d4d27872ba3fc3eb3e17b5a70f345. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Hunter, Sarah. "This One Summer." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2014, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA366459756&asid=078418108c2bc8ebe2a30d2ab61e00ad. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "This One Summer." Publishers Weekly, 17 Mar. 2014, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA362167448&asid=d63a4a157d81b341fb1e62a889c668d4. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "This One Summer." Publishers Weekly, Annual 2014, p. 112. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA394685271&asid=eef3c83fb60f14e627a1940ae5e58246. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Half World." Publishers Weekly, 8 Mar. 2010, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA221092543&asid=ed42e233be7f60e03e60dac566a190b3. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Chipman, Ian. "Half World." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2010, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA221202611&asid=e27e0d811b44cd874c0885e2029efa9f. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Goto, Hiromi: HALF WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2010. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA221151968&asid=1b60f230be4fa7c9614383e91181bc66. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Dempsey, Shawna. "Half World." Herizons, Fall 2009, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA210035322&asid=c83aa887cb40ceb90b1e2387c7934a77. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Gross, Claire E. "Mariko Tamaki: Skim." The Horn Book Magazine, July-Aug. 2008, p. 459+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA181757141&asid=1c160a958b54cf4ccce225ca4c62ed11. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Galuschak, George. "Tamaki, Mariko. Skim." Kliatt, May 2008, p. 31+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA179159884&asid=68ae03c8735f86f29f86b6cbcb284405. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Karp, Jesse. "Skim." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2008, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA177634868&asid=eb052e502c1c95e019a8e72827458e05. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Tamaki, Mariko: SKIM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2008. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA174620382&asid=cb036207104e9c0012fe6127490451c7. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Skim." Publishers Weekly, 4 Feb. 2008, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA174596026&asid=ffc0c18650ad94ad959d2b4c3aad06b7. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Diaz, Shelley. "Tamaki, Jillian. SuperMutant Magic Academy." School Library Journal, May 2015, p. 128+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA413169592&asid=ff1d32ffe3bc570f70f11424c464e727. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Anglin, Ellie. "Indoor Voice." Broken Pencil, July 2011, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA264174651&asid=aebd7ffcc1d6259568b3e6e3b46f6459. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Wilmot, Andrew. "SuperMutant Magic Academy." Broken Pencil, 20 July 2015, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA424253143&asid=adedc5ca4bde1fad4b84dfe6ea39bb5e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Norton, Eric. "Goto, Hiromi. Half World." School Library Journal, Apr. 2010, p. 156. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA224168054&asid=b7929a52e4128dc33f405cce660c7579. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Tran, Allison. "Tamaki, Mariko. This One Summer." School Library Journal, May 2014, p. 144+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA367298994&asid=30a1cf153dbda2f5cbbff371132b063e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Edwards, Carol A. "Beasley, Kate. Gertie's Leap to Greatness." School Library Journal, May 2016, p. 90. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA451409864&asid=fbb07a1c9d4327ed398c38903fb110c9. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Ali, Nyala. "Outsiders and onlookers: formulations of girlhood in two novels by Mariko Tamaki." Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, p. 150+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA445750283&asid=d9ada345a6640ba2a45732a7bb463c76. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Stelmanis, Chloe. "This One Summer." Broken Pencil, Oct. 2014, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA387952211&asid=cc4dc0687bbeac9d4e168013d2d87010. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Inabnitt, Dave. "Tamaki, Mariko. Skim." School Library Journal, May 2008, p. 160. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA179207953&asid=ca93efe0e150de4486497092510d8eee. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. Cavna, Michael. "New graphic novel 'Boundless' illustrates the perils of seeking transcendence in a wired world." Washington Post, 27 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA497117588&asid=77dec2f8879201e81ef7534297095ac1. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017. "Minnesota school's ban on graphic novel draws free-speech protests; Groups including National Coalition Against Censorship say decision to pull This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki threatens principle 'essential to freedom'." Guardian [London, England], 25 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA453327590&asid=5eee050f76616ab6719cf2b32e8fb1f6. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

• Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/the-cartoonist-who-makes-you-look-twice/529842/
  Word count: 1505

  QUOTE:
  In Boundless, Tamaki tackles subtle shifts in emotion, identity, and power. Her visual talent has long been obvious. This solo collection now proves her strength as a storyteller in her own right and that, of course, the drawing is central to that process.

  The Cartoonist Who Makes You Look Twice

  With Boundless, Jillian Tamaki makes a profound case for the primacy of images in storytelling.
  Drawn & Quarterly

  Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Jun 18, 2017 Culture

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  “Boundless” could be Jillian Tamaki’s motto. Over her 14-year career, the cartoonist has consistently leaped in new directions. Whether designing book covers using embroidery, illustrating articles for The New York Times, or creating a nihilistic superhero comic, her output has been intellectually curious and artistically roving. And so it’s fitting that Boundless is also the title of her new story collection.

  An ambitious and eclectic set of tales, it focuses on the interior lives of unexpected subjects: the writer of a pornographic sitcom, a shrinking woman, a plant-nursery employee with an internet doppelganger, even a fly. Boundless uses a constantly varying visual treatment that keeps readers on their toes and mixes and matches artistic styles with a proliferating set of genres, from speculative fiction to domestic drama to magical realism. If a reader comes to Boundless with assumptions about visual storytelling, Tamaki will confound them.
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  A Graphic-Novel Memoir That Tangles With the Puzzle of Existence

  With the first story she throws down her gauntlet. “World Class City” is drawn with savage strokes, scribbled in dark blue lines against a sickly yellow green. Text often appears sideways, forcing the reader to turn either their head or the book. The relationship between words and images is vague, almost symbolic. An unnamed narrator describes wanting to live in a world-class city while lizard people dance, a skull-headed human holds a candle, and a snake-like creature curls around a branch. The reader must work to decipher the connections between the narration and the unfolding scenes. By opening Boundless with such a challenging piece, Tamaki declares that this collection will not deal in the expected.

  Each story shifts emotional and visual register. If “World Class City” has frenetic imagery and a demanding narrative style, “bedbug,” a few stories later, reads as literary realism. It follows a woman who’s had an affair but concealed it from her husband. Tamaki’s line work is crisp, but looking more closely, there are places where the art loses its polish. A chair’s color isn’t fully filled in. This seemingly neat but delicately frayed illustration style matches the fraying of the marriage. The story employs a contrasting palette of melancholic grey-blue and irritable pale orange—a faint but omnipresent color clash that mimics the hidden tensions of the couple’s marriage. The art of “bedbug” perfectly matches the material.
  A panel from”bedbug” (Drawn & Quarterly)

  The range of styles in Boundless may stem from the wide variety of Tamaki’s influences, which include X-Men comics, the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, ukiyo-e, and screen-printing. But though she acknowledges her influences, she’s far from defined by them. When she credited vintage manga with inspiring the warm purples of This One Summer (2014), a collaboration with her cousin, Tamaki was careful to say she did not consider the work a manga. Whether she works digitally (Boundless), or in watercolor (her illustration of a review of Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude in the May 2014 issue of The Atlantic) or in thread (the Penguin Classics edition of Black Beauty, where she stitched the equine protagonist bucking and dancing across the cover), the cartoonist seems to take her own advice to students—to not get “too comfortable” with a way of doing things—to heart.

  More than artistic style, then, it’s Tamaki’s philosophies that tie her work together. “I always try to put diversity in my figures just because it’s more interesting,” she explained in a 2015 interview with Paste. “And I think visibility is powerful, as somebody who grew up mixed race in a very, very white part of Canada.” She has been just as open about the fact that her art is deeply shaped by feminism, particularly given the comics industry’s tendency to represent women as hypersexualized objects even when they’re supposed to be saving the world. In Tamaki’s words, “To see [women] as whole human beings is unfortunately less common than it should be.”
  From “The ClaireFree System” (Drawn & Quarterly)

  These priorities animate her earlier work, such as the popular webcomic SuperMutant Magic Academy, which featured plotlines that cleverly subvert school admissions disparities and in which teenager girls are as likely to fret about existentialism as about their crushes. Boundless continues her efforts to explore the full lives of women and, subtly, the societal expectations placed on them. The story “Body Pods” is narrated by a bisexual woman describing her relationships; rather than call attention to the gender of her past loves, she details their taste in movies. In “The ClaireFree System,” meanwhile, Tamaki layers a pyramid scheme script for a cleansing moisturizer over dark and confusing images of womanhood. She doesn’t specifically point to how strange and gothic the language of beauty is, but the juxtaposition makes it clear.

  Throughout the pages of Boundless, the reader is struck again and again by how text and images entwine and come together. In one frame of “Half-Life,” the story of a shrinking woman, the text simply says “I’ve taken up watercolour painting.” Out of context, the statement seems bland. But the frame shows a thumb-sized woman, for whom even the smallest brush presents a hefty weight. Her face is tensed in pain and concentration.
  Drawn & Quarterly

  Given the primacy of Tamaki’s images, it might surprise some readers to learn that she has had to argue the point that her visual work is an integral part of her stories. Her best-known works may be the graphic-novel collaborations with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, Skim and This One Summer, both of which received considerable critical attention and praise. But when Skim was nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s award in children’s literature, only Mariko, who wrote the text, was named. In response, the Canadian cartoonists Seth and Chester Brown published an open letter co-signed by some of the biggest names in independent comics, including Lynda Barry, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware. The letter argued:

  In graphic novels, the words and pictures BOTH tell the story, and there are often sequences (sometimes whole graphic novels) where the images alone convey the narrative. The text of a graphic novel cannot be separated from its illustrations because the words and the pictures together ARE the text.

  A panel from “World-Class City” (Drawn & Quarterly)

  Indeed, a key scene of Skim, in which a teacher kisses her student, is never explicitly referred to in the text itself. Boundless reemphasizes the letter’s argument: that graphic storytelling is literature. This equality is baked into the way the work is described. Drawn & Quarterly bills Boundless as a collection of short stories; there are none of the usual terms—“comic,” “manga,” or even “graphic.” Tamaki’s decision not to categorize her work is significant, especially in an industry for which the terminology is still in flux. Watchmen author Alan Moore, for instance, has argued that the label “graphic novel” has become a pretentious “marketing term” applied to works that aren’t remotely novelistic, and that while “you could probably just about call Watchmen a novel, in terms of density, structure, size, scale, seriousness of theme,” the term “comics” was good enough for him. For Boundless, Tamaki skips over the comic-graphic novel dichotomy altogether. By calling her pieces short stories, she’s helping to redefine what authorship can mean for a cartoonist.

  In “bedbug” there is a moment when the married couple has finally disinfected the house and the husband gathers his wife into a hug. He still doesn’t know about her affair. He bends over her, his body relaxing against hers. The reader sees over his shoulder into the dots of his wife’s eyes. Her eyebrows come together and a single wrinkle cuts across her forehead. Her shoulders hunch and her hair falls forwards across her cheek, as she lets him hold her. It’s a panel that says as much about marriage as any paragraph in Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In Boundless, Tamaki tackles subtle shifts in emotion, identity, and power. Her visual talent has long been obvious. This solo collection now proves her strength as a storyteller in her own right and that, of course, the drawing is central to that process.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2017/05/30/529748942/in-boundless-the-modern-world-is-timeless
  Word count: 760

  In 'Boundless,' The Modern World Is Timeless

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  May 30, 201710:00 AM ET

  Etelka Lehoczky
  Boundless
  Boundless

  by Jillian Tamaki

  Paperback, pages cm.
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  It's risky to incorporate fads into your fiction. It can be a lot like planting a delicate spring garden next to a busy sidewalk. At first the commuters, skateboarders and dog joggers marvel at the blooms, but soon the garden becomes a familiar sight — "NBD." By the time July rolls around, nobody cares that the blistering summer heat has shriveled the fragile flowers. It's all very depressing.

  Unless, that is, you're artist Jillian Tamaki. She's familiar with the complicated business of writing about trendy topics — 2015's hilarious, Eisner Award-winning SuperMutant Magic Academy was one long riff on Harry Potter — but she insouciantly shrugs off trepidation. The comics in Boundless incorporate of-the-moment phenomena — one character joins a pyramid skin-care scheme, while another launches a porn sitcom called Darla! Others, inspired by a mysterious mp3 that's racing around the Internet, move to Joshua Tree and sell friendship bracelets. Even a couple battling bedbugs are clearly channeling the zeitgeist.

  But though such elements drive these stories, they never seem to shackle Boundless to the present. Instead, Tamaki's existential wistfulness lifts text messages and memes into the realm of archetype. In "1.Jenny," a young woman discovers a "mirror Facebook" where duplicates of real users seem to live parallel lives. As Jenny gets hooked on her doppelganger's updates, she starts to question the value of her "real" life. "She felt acutely aware of some sort of lost momentum. Which was startling given that she wasn't even aware she had possessed said momentum in the first place," Tamaki writes. Instead of the familiar "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone," Tamaki suggests you don't know what you lack until you realize you never had it — and maybe, like Facebook's promise of connectedness and validation, it wasn't have-able at all.

  Tamaki's existential wistfulness lifts text messages and memes into the realm of archetype.

  "1.Jenny" and the other stories here gain additional force from Tamaki's inventive, versatile art. Her playful experiments with the space of the page range from spreads that seem to overflow the edges to changes in orientation requiring the reader to turn the book on its side. In "Body Pods" and "Darla!" she gives literal weight to the characters' angsts with muscular lines and chunky shading. A page later she accomplishes a stunning transformation in "The ClairFree System," combining masterful figure studies, chiaroscuro effects and shapely masses of hatching.

  "The ClairFree System" is one of the more unnerving and remarkable stories in the book. Tamaki cuts loose from literality, illustrating the main character's sales pitch for a skin-care line with disconnected images. "In the two years I have been involved with the program, I have attained Level 3 status," the narrator declares. Meanwhile, a beautifully figured mother and child float together in space, two girls sit side by side in a weirdly sterile landscape and hazy figures face off in an arena — or is it a graveyard? The circle of women holding hands — are they engaged in some sort of rite? While the reader wonders, the narrator drones on implacably. "Time and money. It's not hard to think of what we could do with a little more of both ... Ask yourself: What do I want?"
  'SuperMutant Magic Academy' Is Hogwarts With Nuts (And A Cherry)
  Book Reviews
  'SuperMutant Magic Academy' Is Hogwarts With Nuts (And A Cherry)

  In contrast, stories like "Bedbug" and "Darla!" feel utterly familiar. Here, standard arrangements of comic panels carry wry dramas of intimacy and insecurity. Tamaki's graceful way with a line and knack for a striking tableau make even the "porn sitcom" storyline feel emotionally hefty. When Darla has sex with a guy who, for some reason, is wearing clown shoes, Tamaki's vigorous figures fill the page with a happy, hearty vibe. But just as elsewhere in Boundless, a sense of melancholy isn't far off. The creator of Darla! attends a fan convention ("Fans of what, I'm not sure exactly. Maybe the Internet in general") and is depressed to find that young people think of his show as a big joke. "There's nothing wrong with being sincere," he reflects plaintively. Tamaki sympathizes with him — and with all her text-messaging, meme-circulating, alienated subjects — even if she doesn't entirely agree.

• NY TImes
  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Spires-t.html
  Word count: 963

  ‘Always a Little Depressed’

  Children’s Books

  By ELIZABETH SPIRES NOV. 7, 2008
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  Who but a masochist or a cheerleader would want to relive adolescence? For many of us, it’s a terrible time, with heavy-duty social pressure to join a clique, opposed by the equally wild desire to rebel. As if that weren’t enough, there’s sexual identity to deal with, and first love, that gut-wrenching emotion that usually winds up causing so much more pain than pleasure.

  All these concerns are explored in Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novel “Skim,” the story of 16-year-old Kimberly Keiko Cameron, known as “Skim” to her classmates. A Wiccan-practicing goth who goes to a private girls’ school, Skim is the quintessential outsider, a dark-haired, Asian-American in a sea of Caucasian blondes, not skim (slim) like the girls in the popular clique, thus her nickname.

  Two parallel story lines involving star-crossed love unfold as the book opens: the first concerns the uproar at school over the suicide of the boyfriend of one of Skim’s classmates, Katie Matthews. When the distraught Katie subsequently falls off a roof and breaks both arms (it’s unclear at first whether it’s an accident or not), the school administration goes into anxious overdrive, organizing group therapy sessions and an outdoor memorial service where the girls release white balloons with hopeful messages written on them.

  The second plot line involves Skim’s out-of-bounds friendship with Ms. Archer, a neo-hippie English teacher with wild red hair and a penchant for extravagant costumes. The friendship crosses the line when Ms. Archer, who seems to be hiding something behind her overdramatic persona, acts on their shared feelings and unwisely allows their relationship to develop into a romance of sorts.
  Continue reading the main story

  The black and white pictures by Jillian Tamaki, Mariko’s cousin, create a nuanced, three-dimensional portrait of Skim, conveying a great deal of information often without the help of the text. The book’s most striking use of purely visual communication occurs in a lush and lovely double-page tableau of Skim and Ms. Archer exchanging a kiss in the woods that leaves the reader (and maybe even the participants) wondering who kissed whom. In another sequence, Skim and Ms. Archer sip tea without ever making eye contact, the pictures and minimal text communicating the uncomfortable emotional charge in the room and the two characters’ difficulty in knowing what to say to each other.
  Photo
  Credit Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

  Tamaki’s palette often becomes noticeably darker or lighter to signal a change in mood. Various night scenes communicate Skim’s depression, her unhappy moon-face isolated in fields of inky black, streetlights casting long, lonely shadows. In contrast, Tamaki sets the outdoor memorial service for the dead boyfriend on a frozen winter field, the participants drawn in lightly, almost as if they’re ghosts, the snowy backdrop and blank white balloons (shown caught on bare winter trees) conveying absence and emptiness.

  The cover itself, an extreme close-up of Skim’s face (and the only picture in ­color), seems a cross between a Lichtenstein Pop Art portrait and one of those sensual Japanese wood block prints of women from earlier centuries, showing a moody, introspective girl poised on the brink of womanhood.

  Graphic novels, by the nature of their form, often use as little text as possible; the dialogue is sometimes hardly more than a serviceable vehicle to drive the action. In “Skim,” however, the spare dialogue is just right, capturing the cynical and biting way that Skim and her classmates tend to talk to one another.

  In contrast, Skim’s diary entries reveal her vulnerable, innocent side. Here she is describing the almost painful physical sensation that love can provoke: “My stomach feels like it’s popping, like an ice cube in a warm Pepsi.” “It feels like there’s a broken washing machine inside my chest.” Confronted by a worried high school guidance counselor, she confides to her diary, “Truthfully I am always a little depressed but that is because I am 16 and everyone is stupid (ha-ha-ha). I doubt it has anything to do with being a goth.”

  “Skim” — a winner of a 2008 New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award — is a convincing chronicle of a teenage outsider who has enough sense to want to stay outside. In the final section of the story, titled appropriately “Goodbye (Hello),” Skim defies the shallow, popular clique and walks out of a school dance with Katie. She’s cast off her nickname and is “Kim” now, a name more true to the person she is slowly becoming. And Katie is slowly beginning to heal, too.

  All in all, “Skim” offers a startlingly clear and painful view into adolescence for those of us who possess it only as a distant memory. It’s a story that deepens with successive rereadings. But what will teenagers think? Maybe that they’ve found a bracingly honest story by a writer who seems to remember exactly what it was like to be 16 and in love for the first time.

  SKIM

  By Mariko Tamaki. Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki

  144 pp. Groundwood Books/ House of Anansi Press. $18.95. (Ages 14 and up)

  Elizabeth Spires’s poetry books include “The Wave-Maker,” and the forthcoming “I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings,” for children.

  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR37 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: ‘Always a Little Depressed’

• Disability in Kidlit
  http://disabilityinkidlit.com/2016/11/04/review-skim-by-mariko-tamaki-and-jillian-tamaki/
  Word count: 1172

  Review: Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
  Comments: 4
  By Emmalia Harrington on November 4, 2016 Reviews
  Article
  Content

  Skim is a graphic novel written and drawn by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, respectively. It’s a slice-of-life story following Kimberley Keiko Cameron, commonly known as “Skim,” and her experiences with religion, friendship, romance, and school. Shortly after the story begins, the ex-boyfriend of a classmate dies by suicide, sending Skim’s all-girl’s high school into a frenzy. Her classmates and the guidance counselor obsess over suicide and depression, singling out Skim as a suicide risk for not being like the other girls.

  Cover for SkimSkim is not diagnosed as depressed in the book, and going by my high school experience alone, I can’t tell whether she is or isn’t depressed. I was self-aware of my depression and demanded that I get help I thought was appropriate, while Skim’s experience is far subtler. People told me that I wasn’t depressed, or that I was wrong about its root cause. The people at Skim’s school imply that they believe she’s depressed and make gestures at helping her, while Skim resists their armchair diagnoses. Her grades slip during the book, and there are times when her mood is best described as empty or downhearted. If she has depression, it’s expressed very different from mine.

  While my adolescent depression impacted my judgement and made concentrating difficult, I could pinpoint other people’s sincerity. If someone tried to cheer me up, it was clear if their words were to make themselves look good, or if they actually cared.

  Skim’s guidance counselor, specialists brought in to aid students, and a student-led club called Girls Celebrate Life are all reminiscent of “help” I received in high school. Girls Celebrate Life believes in treating depression with cheer, adorning a bulletin board with pictures and exclamation points, hosting movie nights, and organizing a school dance. At one point the club president hugs Skim out of the blue. Instead of focusing on Skim, the artist shows the president’s face, which shows no sign of concern or affection towards Skim. While my own classmates weren’t the hugging type, they believed exhibiting depressive symptoms was disgusting. They preferred it when I watched movies with them, covered my self-harm bruises or otherwise drew attention away from my misery—similarly to Skim’s peers.

  Skim’s school runs gym classes on breathing techniques, and special lessons encouraging self-love. One class consists of students writing down what makes them happy. No purpose is given to this one-shot unit, nor do teachers explain how the class relates to depression or suicide prevention. My high school experience with mental health lessons were just as brief and superficial.

  Rather than a proper unit, we were told to research a mental illness on our own time and present our findings to the class. Our teacher’s contribution was to tell us warning signs of suicide, implying it’s a condition that happens to other people, and never a thing her own students would struggle with.

  I still have mixed feelings about suicide prevention initiatives. In my experience the focus is on discouraging the act rather than addressing why the person wants to die in the first place. The sad person may or may not be treated as a moral failure. The emphasis is on helping other people feel accomplished.

  In “Skim,” Girls Celebrate Life hold a memorial filled with hopeful words aimed at the depressed and suicidal. The ceremony is filmed before news cameras, with club members talking to the microphones. No one in the book comments on this, but Girls Celebrate Life seem more interested in sounding good for the camera than in remembering the boy who killed himself or reaching out to classmates with more than hugs or movies.

  A few pages in Skim are devoted to rumors as to why the boy took his life. Some girls speculate that he took his life over an unrequited same–sex crush. The school could have devoted energy towards promoting acceptance of queer students, explaining why compassion and understanding are important. Likewise, the school could have how important it is to support those with mental illness. What actually happens is the girls make fun of the boy’s possible orientation. For all the talk of preventing death and depression, daily school life and club activities remain their priority. Skim and I didn’t have identical experiences, but I still recognized the superficial, unhelpful approach to suicide in high school.

  Another thing Skim and I have in common are adolescent questions regarding our orientations. Skim’s peers are either single, or dating guys, while Skim is in love with a woman. She never comes out as any particular orientation, nor does she angst about not being heterosexual. What bothers her is romance and whether being in love is a good thing. There is more to explore in queer adolescent characters other than unhappiness with their sexuality, which Skim acknowledges.

  As a protagonist, Skim sidesteps many clichés inflicted on teenage characters. While her love life constitutes a major part of the book, her world doesn’t revolve around romance. She’s not a monster, not a delinquent, not tied to the phone, and doesn’t fall into any stock school clique. Skim comes across as comfortable in her own skin, without a need to stand out from the crowd. Her introverted moments and occasional reticence may make her appear shallow or moody to other characters, but we see the inside of her head and know this isn’t the case.

  Other details of note include Skim’s nickname, which comes from classmates making fun of her weight. She herself doesn’t obsess over her appearance. A few panels show Skim applying makeup or dressing for special occasions, but she’s neither looks-driven nor apathetic. I also like that Skim is biracial, and that her ancestry does not make her miserable. She’s half white, half Japanese, and portrayed as ordinary rather than a model minority.

  Overall, I recommend giving Skim a read. The story is quiet, low-key, and never boring. The book is multifaceted, not just focusing on Skim’s orientation, depression, or friendships. The mixture of elements in Skim’s daily life add depth and interest. She and her classmates are credible as adolescents, rather than idealized or exaggerated.

  In terms of Skim’s portrayal of depression, I think it does a good job of showing misguided attempts to help others with the condition. Undoing depression or averting a suicide through a few thought exercises and a school dance seems like a sunny, feel-good experience, but falls very short of treating mental illness. The book seems to understand this, and lets the reader see the absurdity for themselves.

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