Week 12: This One Summer/ Comics by Women

As comics are regarded as a literature, many female artists also have shown up to demonstrate their arts to the world as comics. Marie Duval, she was the first female comic artists around the mid 1900s. Isabelle Emile de Tessler designed a character Ally Sloper. In addition to them, there are many female artists such as Fanny Cory, Mary Williams, or Rose O’Neli. Among those great artists, I am going to mainly talk about Mariko Tamaki, an author of “This One Summer”. She is my favorite female artists because her story is focused on a generic girl with puberty in a casual life, which can happen in our everyday life.

Vacation is defined as leaving the daily life and enjoying the freedom, and it makes summer break sounds more fresh. Especially, teenaged girls would dream to leave the boring life from their parents in secret, as if Peter Pan and Wendy travel to Neverland while their parents are asleep. Back to everyday life with their own secret memory, it sounds like the best vacation they will have.

Rose, a teenaged girl with puberty, would go to trip to a cottage in Awago every summer and meets up her friend Windy. Their main interests are sex, big breasts, or R-rated movies. To adults, they are merely naïve children. The girls want to get attention from the adults so they go to stores to get restricted films as if to rebel against their parents. In the store, Rose falls in love with a worker Dunk. She is not familiar with what she is feeling and hopes to no one finds out. Getting worse, Dunk’s girlfriend shows up and it makes Rose struggle with her emotions that she cannot control by herself.

In other side, the story of Rose’s parents, Evan and Alice, also takes place while they are on vacation. Since Alice loses her baby during pregnancy, the conflict of Evan and Alice is getting worse. Rose feels resentment toward her parents because the baby defines her as a threat that the baby can take away the parents’ love and attention from Rose. This causes her to detest her crush, but it ironically targets Dunk’s girlfriend who is frustrated by her pregnancy by him.

The author describes the delicate and complicated minds of teenaged girls only with an everyday life trouble that can easily happen in our life. The conflicts Rose faces are as dark and deep as oceans in Awago. Through these experiences, her minds will still be confused and her memories will not leave for a while, which will make her grow up mentally.