Back with a Style of Her Own

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Unlike Laurie Sandell's The Imposter's Daughter, Gabrielle makes Lucky's words and pictures work in tandem. Imposter's Daughter could have been read without the images, and as stated in class was a completed 300+ page manuscript prior to becoming a graphic memoir. Bell makes Lucky's Images integral. I don't think she could do it any other way. While Sandell is a writer using pictures and text to tell a story, Bell is a comic artist. Okay, more comparisions to Sandell later.

Mostly I want to point out the call and response technique Bell employs. She often begins with a heading. This is so prevalent, I'm just going to open up the book and find one. Ok, third panel on page 30: "I applied for a job at a high-end clothing store. I had to start somewhere, although I felt like something the cat dragged in." Then she will follow the heading up with dialogue, an image of the action that illustrates what she was just describing, or an image that decodes or complicates what she said in the heading. On page 30, she picked dialogue: "Now tell me, why are you interested in working for Ann Taylor?" "Well, I particularly like their clothing line. I can't afford to buy it new but I always look for it at thrift stores." The narrator comments on her word bubble by writing "pathetic lie" next to it with an arrow. This technique made me look at the text and images of Lucky equally, like I was stumbling forward. Each item under the heading, be it a picture, some dialogue, pictures with dialogue, serve as punchlines, following through with more than we expected, and after the first few pages, knowing there will be more calls and responses, I'm hooked.


The way Bell draws her faces with just beady eyes and a line for a mouth requires Scott McCloud to be brought in. In his book, Understanding Comics (I recommend reading it, yesterday) he spends a lot of time talking about realistic drawing vs. cartoon drawing and the different affects they have on a viewer. One tidbit: "When two people interact, they usually look directly at one another, seeing their partner's features in vivid detail. Each one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face, but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy arrangement, a sense of shape, a sense of general placement. Something as simple and basic-as a cartoon. Thus when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself"(36). He goes on saying more awesome stuff. But this is what Bell does, I IDENTIFIED with her, and I hardly know anything about her.

It isn't until page 39 of Lucky that we get any information about Bell's upbringing: "I was reminded of the times when we hitchhiked to school because our parents were too hungover to drive us". We don't know if she relayed this memory to her brother or not, but his text responds to the idea of what she told us: "You know, considering our upbringing, we did pretty well for ourselves". This makes a dialogue between her internal monologue and his external one.

Throughout Lucky, Bell shows how important comics are to her, which takes on a meta quality, something she likes to do a lot, something that gives her ultimate control over her world, which from the outside she could be perceived as a victim of. On page 50, in a modern art museum, she divulges that she would have liked "some pictures to look at on the way. Particularly pictures arranged in a sequential order that would tell a story". She eats and breathes comics. She draws herself into her own comic. Maybe she's more of a self as a comic.

In closing, comparing Lucky to The Imposter's Daughter again, I noticed there's no sex in Lucky. (Maybe I wouldn't have noticed if there hadn't been so much sex in ID!) I don't realize this until page 98 when Bell is wrestling with how to greet people in French and she seems so uncomfortable. Will she ever get an opportunity to utilize these skills? Yes, she will. Read The Voyeurs.