15 Nov / Artist by Yeong-shin Ma, translated by Janet Hong [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Yeong-shin Ma’s dazzling 2020 English debut, Moms, won the 2021 Harvey Award for Best International Book and has recently been picked up for a TV series. Fortuitously paired again with award-winning Korean Canadian translator Janet Hong, Ma’s spectacular latest import arrives in brilliant full color and reveals – and skewers, humiliates, (partially) forgives, (reservedly) applauds – the trials and tribulations of three unfulfilled artists.
Writer Shin Deuk-nyeong, 44, “should be working on his next book, but it looks like he’s turned to webtoons to make a living.” Painter and part-time lecturer Kwak Kyeongsu, 46, insults his students and goes home to a dilapidated studio without hot water. Musician Chun Jongseop, 42, unproductively dismisses “everyone and their dog [who] is a singer-songwriter. Woof!” Once upon a time, the deadbeat trio was part of an artist collective called Arcade, but the other members’ considerable successes have inspired mostly envious complaints and empty declarations: “If one of us hits it big, let’s promise we won’t turn into pompous dicks.”
And then their trajectories begin to change, as writer Deuk-nyeong helps musician Jongseop publish a best-selling memoir, various connections and machinations turn painter Kyeongsu into a powerful bureaucrat, and true love inspires Deuk-nyeong to start a magazine nurturing promising new voices.
Who manages to avoid that pomposity is at the heart of Ma’s stupendous portrait of past-their-prime artists as middle-aged men.
Review: “Graphic Novels,” Booklist, September 15, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2022 (United States)