#1 (is the Loneliest Number)

Re: apples and oranges:  The narrative arc, in Lucky #1, is closer to a Beckett play than The Imposter's Daughter.


"Nothing" is a motif that is introduced on the first page, during the improv date. The narrator Gabrielle likes to "see people create something out of nothing". We learn later that she chose modeling as a job because she can make money "doing nothing". On the last panel she reveals the wisdom learned, "It turns out that doing nothing is one of the more difficult things to do."


 "What do you think? "
"They're no windows"
       
            ......

(thought bubble) "What am I going to do?"
(thought bubble) "What am I going to do?"

             .......

"MEOW!!"

             ........

"our depression was interrupted by a Yeah Yeah Yeahs music video being filmed on an old abandoned stage."


"It was too disturbing, I couldn't eat and look at it."
"yeah."


Yeah, yeah yeah.


The thing I like about Lucky, and Bell, is the contrast of real pen and ink with day to day absurdities.


The surreality of the art world that Bell illustrates so cleverly ( by shrinking massive, airplane hanger sized installations to the same size and frame as an east village apartment)  is matched and even exceeded by the surreality of relationships via post it notes with roommates, the hilarious mousetrap rigging of makeshift warehouse/loft interiors and her detailed hostile utilities negotiations.


One of the ways Bell makes the reader feel a sense of kinship with the narrator in Lucky #1, (not that I need to! just sayin') is in scenes of herself amongst other New Yorkers. In these frames I can barely tell who is talking. Bell's narrator is hard to pick out even on the cover of the book, as elsewhere, she is looking away, in profile. I feel like she could be any of the people on the subway, or wandering through the Serra exhibit.   It's not so much that her face is simply drawn, but that I am always reminded of that joke (?) "If you think you're one in a million, there are eleven of you in New York!"


On the first page, there is an Alice in Wonderland type panel, where the narrator appears to be entering a tiny door, "An artist once told me that in order to be creative you need to go into a place inside yourself and to do that you need to be alone." But much of the comedy and pathos of the first part of this memoir are found in Bell's illustrations of the artist in relation to others, whether she is modeling or partying,  she is never lonelier than in their company.


An aside about space: On page 41, when Gabrielle helps Tom move into his new place, the "industrial palace",  I wanted to do cartwheels and wave my arms and legs about, too. For once also,  the text floats like a cloud, and no one speaks.  Gabrielle captures the claustrophobic interior of NYC apartments in nearly every frame. If I was the real estate agent of Bell's frames I would have to use the word cozy more than once, and probably add "close to subway",  to remind people they're just a train ride from somewhere they'd rather be ---

....Kristin