Before phones pinpointed our steps and paths, perhaps the freedom to wander gave us more tenuous, yet more tender connections to our cities… and one another. Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki partner again for “Roaming,” about three friends visiting New York to get lost and found again.
By Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki.Over the course of a much-anticipated trip to New York, an unexpected fling blossoms between casual acquaintances and throws a long-term friendship off-balance. Emotional tensions vibrate wildly against the resplendently illustrated backdrop of the city, capturing a spontaneous queer romance in all of its fledgling glory. Slick attention to the details of a bustling, intimidating metropolis are softened with a palette of muted pastels, as though seen through the eyes of first-time travelers.
Storytellers gifted at dialogue and character might risk giving short shrift to silences, open spaces, and the pulsing nerve of cities or the personalities of streets, those precious spans of oxygen that let stories breathe. But Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki revolve their “Roaming” around elements that make such neglect impossible, despite the irresistibility of Zoe, Dani, and Fiona’s banter, the poignancy of their bonds, and the speed of the book’s five day visit of New York City. On the contrary, “Roaming” relishes in museum wall mosaics and kitschy tourist trap aisles, in wordless explosions of intimacy and blank panels of regret. In perfect balance. The cousins Tamaki have set a very high bar, both with their individual work and their past, much-lauded collaborations “SKIM” and “This One Summer.” Somehow, “Roaming” doesn’t leap over this bar so much as float weightlessly over it, one wing a reverie and the other a giggle of humanity.
“Roaming” opens with elements as New York as can be: two pigeons mounting among city-people debris (a battery, a ticket stub), and then an airplane through the sky, and then an overheard conversation. Tamaki and Tamaki teach us in these opening pages that our attention will gently pull three ways throughout the whole narrative: a packed city layered around us, a trail of travel both fast and vast, and a universe of human entanglements under subtle everyday exchanges.
We meet childhood friends Zoe and Dani as they meet up at the airport, Spring Break of their first college year, circa 2009. Dani has brought her new dorm-mate friend Fiona, and the three get acquainted as they bustle with tourist curiosity and collegiate sophistication toward Penn Station. Dani exudes bright-eyed sincerity, both for her friends and the city. Zoe, her childhood buddy from Canada, sports a buzz cut to match her all-black style, reading Chaucer and cheerily admitting she’s pursuing engineering. Dani’s art classmate Fiona arrives on her own runway of coolness, or airs, or probably both.
As they arrive at the hostel where they stay and hit Broadway, they negotiate the places they want to see as ways they exist in the world and in relation to each other. One triumph of “This One Summer” was to so perfectly pair the dawning pubescence and naivete of being 13 in a bundle of characters dancing all around those markers of maturity, verbal, cultural, attitudinal, sexual. “Roaming” replicates this feat with the feeling of being 19, so world-wise and yet so barely arrived at the same time. Dani and Zoe’s sweet playfulness and loyalty are redolent of real longtime friendship. Fiona’s charisma is both inviting and unreliable, unstable, but quite sympathetic. And the looks on their faces as they encounter museum masterpieces or tipsy pick-up lines or metro madness depict fully realized and believable humans, each distinct and alive to each other. The chemistry is a miracle of craft.
The full-page splashes and two-page spreads in this book luxuriate in the tonal music of very relatable moments. One of the earliest is Dani stepping off the train at Penn Station, suitcase forward, a pinched smile of barely-contained optimism, hair gusting playfully against the backdrop of the train’s straight, sleek lines and Helvetica-slick signage (where even a small sign that reads “Danger” somehow signals a comforting cosmopolitan conscientiousness). It’s incredible to me that the Tamakis can employ the same biochromatic color scheme of steel blue and coral peach to so vividly and variously depict scaffold-laced Manhattan, urban wilds, romantic built environments, psychedelic surreal raptures, AND the ironic warmth of a train car. Even cannier that most of that train car is convincingly colored in that organic coral rather than in the steely blue, just a tiny example of the tonal mastery long evident in their work, Jillian’s especially.
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What ensues when they step off the train and into New York is both kinds of roaming you’d expect from the situation, a triangular push and pull through city sights and sites along with the three-way relational jumble of fast-shifting dynamics between friends, strangers, and flirtations. Dani introduces the two friends from different worlds. Zoe is Dani’s long past as Canadian friends but Fiona’s the one acquainted with their mutual present as art students. Fiona’s flirtations give Zoe entry. Dani’s high hopes deflate as Fiona’s savoir faire and dalliance with Zoe leaves her out. Within the intensity of those five days, shacking up at a hostel and subway-ing through the city’s unplumbable promise, the triangle pivots and roams.
Yet what makes this dance realistic and fascinating is the fourth partner, the city. The art they contemplate, rehearsing their burgeoning urbanity. The people, genial or menacing (or maybe both?). The artifacts, the alleyways, the alcohol. Tamaki and Tamaki play out each day of this trip with great rush but no hurry. It recalls all the momentousness of 19, when you want to be as wide as the world is showing itself to be, but your confidence can only be mostly posturing through no fault of your own.
The Tamakis take us to school with their craft. They’re accomplished creators and educators, by now in that mentorship echelon. Yet their work stays remarkably fresh, uncluttered and unbothered, surely masking some meticulous labor and making it look easy to magic up such authenticity and empathy. Four colors (the blue, the pink, and black and white) are employed with the same industry as Riad Sattouf and emotional compactness as Tillie Walden, but also with another level of flourish that their space and canvas allow, for blank spaces and black hollows and blue skylines. I could spend another ten thousand words unpacking it all, but suffice it to say, “Roaming” has the power to stay long and cherished in readers’ memories, if not also their bookshelves.
Ultimately, after the memorable journey, all this craft serves the very unpretentious and liberating gift of good stories told well: a mirror and window into our aspirations, vulnerabilities, and intimacies at those thresholds of life when we have to roam to find our ways home. Tamaki and Tamaki do it again.
