The Webcomcis Weekly is back in your life, and this week we go back to the mid-1990s and an even more freighting place: high school.
Re: Trailer Trash
Episodes 1-10
Schedule: Wednesday
By Yishan Li (art), Alyssa Villaire (writing)
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
Oh look it’s another isekai webtoon, this time based on the novel of the same name by FortySixFour, I bet I’ve read this before. Well, it does have art by Yishan Li, so it is worth checking out. Wait, this one is different!
For starters it isn’t traditionally speaking an isekai as our lead character Tabitha isn’t hit by a truck and transported to a vaguely Western European Medieval fantasy setting. Despite the fantastical macguffin that powers the plot, an MRI gone wrong, the story treats it like the magic stones of Outlander; which is to say not really analyzed or quantified. It happened and one panel later the story is moving on to the thing that is actually important. This series is more of a working-class melodrama, but don’t think that it is going to act with Kitchen Sink realism. “Re: Trailer Trash” is more in the vein of Peggy Sue Got Married, or I guess a more contemporary example would be 13 Going on 30, as an elder Tabitha Moore is transported back to her 16 year old self in 1996 and most relive the worst experience of her life: high school. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Moore lives in the titular trailer park with her working poor Father and Mother who appears to suffer from agoraphobia. This is an all around less then stable experience for Tabitha, who is also bullied at school and finds herself ostracized by her peers based on her class status. The bullying in these sequence is so honestly over the top that it feels almost parodic if I didn’t have experience in that sort of judgement taking place in high school. Amazingly the creative team don’t make Tabitha’s weight one of the daggers plunged into her by the student body. She is a bigger bodied person and that isn’t really remarked upon, it’s just part of her character design.
All of this overt drama makes a lot of sense with how writer Alyssa Villaire centralizes the internal point of view of Tabatha within this comic, we are constantly in her head and her anxieties. It also helps that Yishan Li’s character acting and body work enhance Villaire’s internal monologue and scripting. Yes it is all over dramatic, but seeing the tears Li puts in Tabitha’s face sells these moments.
It is this base that “Re: Trailer Trash” builds up to become a self-improvement, re-coming of age, narrative. There is a melodramatic quasi-poverty porn element to the financial anxieties on display. But it also shows Tabitha going to the library and checking out books on home electrical wiring and sewing. She isn’t magically going to better herself through Clinton era neoliberal policies, but through self-knowledge and communal support.
This non fantastical setting plays into the strength of Yishan Li (“Re-Possessed” and “Swing”) strength as an artist. This isn’t to dismiss her fantastical work in workplace comedy “Re-Possessed” or martial arts coming of age “Adept”, but those series are carried by Li’s real strength: expressive body work. Her body language is what helps to sell the relationships in “Swing” and here it sells the tense but dysfunctional loving relationship between the teenaged Tabitha and her parents.
For all of this potentially “anti-Isekai” framing, Villaire (and I assume the source novel as well) plays into certain familiar tropes such as foreshadowing based on Tabitha’s future knowledge. None of these events are good, they’re all pretty much foreshadowing the tragic end of a character that comes into her life. To her credit Villaire uses these moments more as episode ending cliffhangers. Which are rarely made central to the plot of the next episode, but give readers a subtle clue to how Tabitha is trying to improve her future prospects. The creative teams use of these tropes is what helps to push this series into one that is worth checking out. It isn’t so much an individual trope within the genre, but how it is executed that makes it work or not. The character arc and basis for this series has been done before in a variety of mediums, but the technical and specific execution pushes this above the potentially generic label of an Isekai Webtoon.
