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Trung Le Nguyen's The Magic Fish (2020) - Coggle Diagram
Trung Le Nguyen's
The Magic Fish
(2020)
What does "coming out" in comics look like?
Le Nguyen's use of colors to introduce us to time and space:
the power of queer fantasy and story/speculation
"they say we're meant to go from here to there, but so much happens between those two places" -- affective structure of comics medium; references the gutter where the reader is;
the productive, queer power of excess and fantasy
I wish the border wasn't there (the geopolitics of gridding and panels as orientation devices); altera
How does Le Nguyen's comic handle a braided narrative? Queer mythology?
revision of stories for queer closure/queer visibility
metaphors of crafting, weaving, and sewing-- we can't have meaning in isolation--this is about interelated
"Fairy tales...can change almost like costumes" (5); this is about agency and empowering readers? If fantasy is about helping us live in the real world, we can change fantasy to meet those needs;
being made up of stories; sharing stories;
the use of hand drawn to create a sense of agency, remind us of the body and production, the affective power of materiality
the bilingualism to show the influence of language and space; it orients us to home; (Is the English a demand of a white supremacist/anglo market?)
this visualizes the problems of monolingual tyrrany and language barriers; the ways Tien responds is about translation and student position in Anglophone school; translation work
Cry counter: 4.5
moms and sewing and taking care; the affective structure of patchwork
"Am I a bad daughter?"
puts pressure on the concepts of emerging adulthood, especially with Tien's mom: life as growth; emerging in different forms/nations/structures of feeling
the fairy tales speak two ways: to YA feelings of uncertainty and emerging adult feelings about daughters/moms/generational splits
Alera's story
she's caught between two worlds (helps us see political/thematic buy ins)
use of multiple texts/stories to create an assemblage (a queer assemblage?)
"Those are my terms" are about rescripting patriarchal violence/objectification/transaction; an outright challenge