Jillian Tamaki’s new collection of varied and emotional short comics stories, “Boundless,” uniquely explores modern life while pushing the boundaries of the form.
Written and Illustrated By Jillian TamakiCover by Jillian TamakkiJenny becomes obsessed with a strange “mirror Facebook,” which presents an alternate, possibly better, version of herself. Helen finds her clothes growing baggy, her shoes looser, and as she shrinks away to nothingness, the world around her recedes as well. The animals of the city briefly open their minds to us, and we see the world as they do. A mysterious music file surfaces on the internet and forms the basis of a utopian society–or is it a cult?
Boundless is at once fantastical and realist, playfully hinting at possible transcendence: from one’s culture, one’s relationship, oneself. This collection of short stories is a showcase for the masterful blend of emotion and humour of award-winning cartoonist Jillian Tamaki.
Tamaki combines two of my favourite forms in “Boundless;” the short story and comics, and she wields their unique powers and languages masterfully. At the core of Tamaki’s approach to both these forms is concision — the short nature of the stories means that character and theme have to be established very quickly, everything that’s put into a story has to matter. In “1.Jenny,” a story about a ‘mirror Facebook’ showing an alternative version of reality, we enter the story at a moment where the ‘mirror Facebook’ is already widely known about. We don’t get to see its initial viral spread, we don’t know where it came from. Those things aren’t relevant; the story is about Jenny’s response to being able to obsess over other possibilities of what her life could be. Mirror Jenny buys new clothes; Mirror Jenny starts seeing a new guy, even though real Jenny hasn’t fully moved on after a recent break-up; Mirror Jenny grows her hair out. The obsession that Jenny falls into feels very real, it’s the compulsion to check social media mixed with the desire to fantasize about a better version of your life. The pointed approach to the writing is also there in the art. Tamaki doesn’t feel the need to show everything that’s happening — she’ll often leave the narrative heavy lifting to the captions, while the visuals take on a more emotive, ephemeral role. So in “1. Jenny,” she works at a plant nursery and we get a few beautiful pages that are just sprawling plant limbs; nature juxtaposed with captions about technology.
Each story feels like something special, each one crafted in a way that meets the needs of that piece. For every story in “Boundless,” Tamaki changes her style; the way it’s coloured, the thickness of the line, the structure of the panels (or if it’s in traditional panels at all), all are unique in each story. This presents a certain challenge when reviewing the book as a whole because it is so varied and each piece stands so singular and tall. This is nine stories that are all worthy of being written about on their own. That isn’t to say that they don’t cohere as a collection. There are thematic links, a lot of the pieces are about loneliness and stagnation. There’s a slight level of unreality in most of them; the ‘mirror Facebook’ in “1.Jenny,” Helen shrinking in “Half Life,” the imagery of “The Claire Free System.”
The only piece that somewhat feels like it doesn’t fit is the first one, “World-Class City.” This is more poetic than all the others, I would call it a comics poetry rather than a story, you have turned the book sideways to read it, images are not in panels. You could say similar things about the last piece, the titular “Boundless,” which has a lot of the same unconventional techniques. However, as the first thing you read in the book, “World-Class City” feels like being thrown in the deep end. It is the least conventional piece in a book that has a fair amount of formal experimentation. As a piece on its own, it works, but having this as the first piece in a collection felt unearned, I wasn’t ready for it.
I was ready for most of the pieces. I was ready “Darla!,” a story about the aging producer of a 90’s sitcom-porno hybrid, which has gained a new ironic cult success online. I was ready for “Half Life,” the story of woman who just gradually shrinks until she is too small to even be seen. I was ready for “Sex Coven,” a story about the cult-ish fans of a mysterious six-hour ‘sonic mindfuck’ that went viral online in the early 2000’s. Perhaps I was ready for these because they are more traditionally character and story driven, which I was expecting more than the poetic “World-Class City.” Perhaps “World-Class City” prepared me in some way — by starting with the least conventional, Tamaki puts the reader in a place where we don’t know what to expect, it forces us to be open to the strange and innovative approach that Tamaki takes throughout “Boundless.” That way the experimentation doesn’t distract from the emotional punch of a story.
With “Boundless,” Tamaki gives us a collection of innovative, thoughtful and emotional. Tamaki’s stories are distinctly modern, stories like “Sex Coven” and “1.Jenny” deal with the internet and technology, but Tamaki’s focus is never on the technical, rather it’s on the personal impact of the technology. At an event at Comix Experience in San Francisco, she says she was trying to ‘map the emotional space of the internet.’ Tamaki shows her great versatility as an artist, imbuing each story with its own style and mood, always using the tools of comics in interesting ways to support the emotive backbone of the pieces.
