How to Read Comics #1: This One Summer

Analyzing what makes This One Summer so special.

Howdy, friend.

It’s a busy month of traveling for me—I just got back from the AWP Conference in Seattle and will head off to Los Angeles soon for some book research—so this month's newsletter is a bit different. The goal of How to Draw is to have discourse about the art of comics and graphic work, looking at how and why we make them as we learn about their various components in the hopes of breaking down any barriers or perceived limitations folks may have about the medium. So, I think it will be fun to take a detour here and there to analyze a specific work and what makes it special. For this first issue of How to Read Comics, I’ve chosen a beloved book I turn to and recommend often: This One Summer, written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki.

I’ll be back soon with our next full issue of How to Draw. (Previously, we’ve discussed how and why we draw Ourselves, and mechanics of crafting Mood.) In the meantime, if you haven’t read this book, I hope I’ll pique your interest. If you have, I hope I’ll offer you something you may not have noticed before.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying the warming weather, the longer days, and any and all hope on the horizon. ♡

– RJR

Published in 2014 and recipient of the Caldecott Medal in 2015 (among a plethora of other accolades), This One Summer story follows two young girls, Rose and Windy, who have been “summer” friends for years; they reunite every summer in a small lakeside community where their families rent cottages. However, Rose’s parents are going through a difficult time in their marriage and she’s struggling to understand their problems, causing her to question her own views of the world, in that precarious liminal space of no longer being a child but not yet being an adult. Meanwhile, Windy is trying to figure out her own identity and navigate her relationship with Rose, wanting to understand their changing bodies but set on still behaving as they always have—carefree, like children. Rose pushes herself, and them both, out of familiarity as she struggles to understand the local (older) teens, sex and pregnancy, and her own desires.

There’s too much to recount about why I love this book, but it’s the vivid stillness and contemplation on childhood/adulthood/worldview perception that I keep coming back to. In so many ways, this book is about the pains of getting older; the curtain of adulthood finally peeled back; discovering your parents aren’t as happy as you may have naively believed when you were younger; that love can hurt; that people can be mean for no good reason; that life can be complex and painful and hard.

Here, I want to analyze four pages that get to the heart of these girls and their shifting dynamics:

On page 150, Rose takes Windy down a private drive. Already, we have seen Rose entertain small acts of rebellion and assert her independence in some way. This road, this neighborhood, a place neither girl has been before, is a source of mystery and intrigue. They want to know about the people that live in this summer resort town year-round. What they get up to. What their lives are like. They want to push the boundaries of what they know.

As they explore, they come across a deer. In many mythologies and belief systems, deer represent a regeneration or a turning over, apt for the girls’ story. Focusing on the first panel, alone in a new place, the girls are presented as small figures in the left-hand side of the panel—house, fence, road, hardly any sky, hardly any of the natural landscape—adulthood boxing them in and taking over the majority of the space here. We are meant to feel their anxiety, gnomic along with them in this strange place.

In panel 2, we can barely just see the girls’ heads, bombarded with human-made structures: a chainlink fence, a broken window, peeled siding. They are in the very bottom right, nearly breaking out of the panel and, perhaps, back into the nearby woods. We can also read this again as the girls trespassing into the overbearing, overwhelming world of adulthood—pressing down, down on them.

They then chase after the deer—also representing nature, an intimacy and playfulness—into the woods they have spent most summers in.

On page 151, they bound through the woods, scampering through clearings and up hills, until, in the last panel, Rose makes a discovery.

In the preceding pages, the girls—Windy, especially—are nervously shuffling along the private drive, unsure of what or whom they’ll find there. This impending adulthood is scary. Terrifying, even. But here in the woods, they’re child-like again: they run and push through trees and forest scrub. For a moment, everything else has melted away.

As you can see so far in these two pages, we don’t have much text—narrative or dialog. Instead, Mariko and Jillian have presented us with great amounts of stillness; without text or even sound effects, we are left to fill in the sensory information on our own.

CRUNCH
WHUMP
MMMPH
CREAK
FWOOSH

It’s a lovely comic device: providing us with very little allows our brains to fill in the gaps. If we’ve ever been in the woods listening to the wind howl and push against a strand of birch or maple or elm, birdsong coming at you from all angles, humidity dewing your skin, sweat on your brow…then we can feel this page with a level of immersion that brings us closer to the narrative, these girls. Also, it’s a good reminder as we try to avoid having a scarcity mindset: It is often more effective to pull back than to include everything we can cram into a panel. Just because we can, does not mean it’s a service to the narrative.

On page 152, the girls stumble upon an abandoned hangout used by the local teens. This discovery continues to measure the shift in Rose and Windy's relationship.

The girls have been growing apart, with Rose starting to think about—even obsess over—the older teens in the community and Windy feeling left behind. As you’ll see, they have very different reactions to their discoveries: Rose needs to understand what older people do, the behaviors they engage in. She is, throughout the book, quietly observing their interactions, big and small, needing to make sense of this new span of life she’s moving into. Windy, though, while younger than Rose, still clings to her immaturity, as we can see through her various reactions to what they find.

The first panel repeats a recurring imagery found throughout the book: the girls as visitors or watchers, diminutive compared to the world around them. Drawn this way, we again feel their smallness and vulnerability; here a disquietness, too, discovering a scene so foreign to them they can’t possibly fathom its goings-on.

In the bottom left panel, the girls appear as giants, our attention drawn to the garbage populating the ground. They seem suddenly grown as they cross an invisible threshold into the unknown domain before them. Quite literally, once they are privy to adulthood, eschewing their life before, there is no going back—you can’t discard something you have seen or learned. It’s there now, embedded.

On our last page, 153, Rose investigates the hangout spot, all the detritus of the humans who gather there.

Rose here is an anthropologist studying and piecing together the clues, desperate to understand. Among the artifacts we see: an empty milk jug, bendy straws, empty bottles and cans, chapstick, an empty package of chewing gum, a pill container, a single flip-flop. These are all objects the girls are familiar with, painted in a new veneer given their location, their owners. We again see in the last panel the girls diverging: Windy remains steadfastly childlike in her understanding of the world; we can nearly see Rose’s calculus play on the page as she attempts to Sherlock the scene back together. On this page, the girls take up most of the panels themselves—again, grown into this space, the natural world (read: their life before) relegated to the background, pushed nearly out of view.

As we discussed in the February issue of How to Draw, the mechanics of mood in This One Summer are largely conveyed through

1. Color Pallette: The use of muted blues helps invoke nostalgia and atmosphere and emphasizing the bittersweet nature of the characters’ experiences;

2. Composition: The pages and panels and layouts are carefully crafted to heighten the narrative, our characters’ feelings. For instance, in parts of the book characters are placed against stark white backgrounds emphasizing their isolation and loneliness. As we’ve seen above, we can play further with feelings by depicting characters as big or small in a panel. Further, we have some pages with a more scattered and sparse panel layout, adding to characters’ confusion and disorientation; in other scenes, panels are arranged in a more tightly packed and claustrophobic manner, creating a sense of tension and anxiety.

3. Facial expressions and body language: The characters' facial expressions and body language are used to convey their emotions and moods. For example, Rose's slumped shoulders and sad expression when she learns about her parents' struggles convey her feelings of helplessness and sadness. Windy's joyful expression and playful movements, on the other hand, add to the lightness and playfulness of certain scenes.

This One Summer is a quiet book, indeed, but one that packs an emotional wallop. The gorgeously-rendered landscapes, the sparse text, the stillness and the solitude all amplify what Rose is experiencing as the veil of childhood is pulled back. She is questioning everything, even her long-standing friendship with Windy. Everything is the same and yet heinously, curiously different. Compliacated, even when it seems like it shouldn't be.

Ultimately, this is a story that could not be told in any other medium: the immersion through the art is central to us being there with the girls and absorbing the narrative osmotically. It doesn’t matter who we are, how our stories differ from Rose and Windy: throughout this artful, astonishingly beautiful work, we’re right there with them. Quick, listen: the trees shake and groan and crack; a waterbird calls out solemnly; the waves lap, lap, lap along the rocky shore.