Tsunami

Ned Wenlock’s debut graphic novel is set in New Zealand, where Wenlock moved when he was thirteen. The work follows Peter, a twelve-year-old, who clearly struggles to fit in at school or at home. His neighbor Gus bullies him on a regular basis, and his parents’ marriage is falling apart. A new girl at the school, Charlie, begins to help Peter, though she is unhappy and wants to return to the UK where she and her family lived before relocating.

Tsunami won the New Zealand Book Award for Children and Young Adults for Best First Book. That award surprised me, not because of the quality of the work, but because the book doesn’t feel like the target audience is children or young adults, despite the age of the protagonist. I don’t mean to underestimate children or Wenlock here, as the struggles in the book are ones that children and young adults could certainly identify with, but it feels more like an adult view of childhood, one where the audience is older and reflecting on Peter’s actions. That could simply be because so much of the book resonated with me, as I thought back to my childhood.

The art certainly makes it seem as if the audience is younger, as Wenlock takes a cartoonish style — the characters look more like figures from a child’s toy set, almost like Legos. They don’t have well-defined hands or feet (they don’t have feet at all, actually). The main differences from one character to the next are hairstyles and clothes. Their faces remind me of Scott McCloud’s argument in Understanding Comics that the less detailed a character’s face is, the more universal it is. Peter is like many children his age, in that he’s struggling to understand himself and his world, while Gus is like many bullies, at least on the surface.

One of the strongest parts of Tsunami is that Wenlock presents a superficial conflict that many readers could understand and even identify with, but then complicates that story. Gus also has a difficult life at home, as his absent father shows up and tries to win Gus’ affection with money and hamburgers. Charlie’s father doesn’t know how to comfort her when she talks about how unhappy she is after their move, so he takes her out for breakfast. Peter’s father is clearly having an affair, but he thinks Peter will believe his parents’ marriage is happy if he plans an afternoon out to play miniature golf. None of the kids have stable lives, so it’s difficult to see any of them as the hero or the villain, despite first impressions.

That focus on fathers reinforces the gender expectations that boys struggle with throughout the work. In addition to Gus, who wants to win the affection of his father, so much so that he risks his life to perform a backflip on a trampoline in front of him, the book's other boys try to live up to some sort of male stereotype. One of Gus’ friends, Michael, chases a girl with what appears to be the head of an eel. While the girl reacts as expected, her friend stops and turns to Michael, saying, “Seriously… if you like Anna, why don’t you just talk to her?” Michael has no response, as it’s clear he doesn’t understand how to interact with girls. Given the fathers in the book, it’s a wonder any of the boys know how to function in the world.

Peter at least sees through his father, and he understands the impending dissolution of his parents’ marriage. While he doesn’t tell his mother about the co-worker Peter’s father is supposedly taking home after work one day, he does attack his father quite clearly once the marriage is ending. The father has finally planned the miniature golf outing, but Peter’s mother isn’t enjoying herself. She complains that a hole is difficult because the windmill is moving. While Peter encourages her, Peter’s father says that it will take her at least twenty putts. Peter responds, “Why do you hate mum?” As with Michael, the father has no response, pausing before saying simply, “What?”

The primary conflict, though, is between Peter and Gus, as Peter oscillates between trying to earn Gus’s acceptance and wanting to defeat him. The latter is especially true when it becomes clear that Gus is interested in Charlie, whom Peter clearly has a crush on.

The title hints that a storm is coming, but though there are several full-page spreads of rain that seems to last for several days, there is no literal tsunami. One way to read the title is the range of emotions that Peter, as well as the other characters, endure as they make their way into adolescence. In the same way that the boys move between wanting to impress girls and being unable to speak to them, Peter moves from anger at seemingly everybody in his life to wanting acceptance from those same people. Wenlock uses two cats — one black and the other white — that appear throughout the book to show those two extremes, though it’s unclear which one is a harbinger of good or evil, as different characters seem to see them differently.

The tsunami in the title might be the ending of the novel instead. There is a significant event that happens, but then Wenlock leaves the last several pages rather open-ended. They consist of four roughly half-page images of the beach, one per page, with no characters and no dialogue. The reader can certainly hypothesize what has happened based on clues from earlier in the work, but the ending is far from definite. It certainly doesn’t feel hopeful, though. It feels like a tsunami has come through and wiped everybody from the work away, pulled them out into the ocean, severing all connections.

The post Tsunami appeared first on The Comics Journal.