Lucky

Gabrielle Bell’s Lucky dives into the mundane reality of being a struggling artist in a large city. Bell’s tone is gradual and solid—although we don’t really get much of a “struggle” besides living, it is understood that the author and narrator grapple with trial and error throughout everyday tasks in her own environment, and that she understands these tasks to be those of a normal importance. In fact, each experience is stated as a fact in itself without much justification, which makes this memoir compelling in its own right.

The panel style of Lucky # 1 is that of a diary—the reader is held in a position to involve itself in the actual day-to-day realities that Bell encounters: that of love (?) and apartment hunting in a city perhaps too expensive for the work that she does as a cartoonist. Bell’s relationship with Tom seems to be the center of this story, particularly because he is in almost every panel, which is admitted in the preface—she draws, and then looks for an apartment with Tom. She’s hulled up in her loft apartment with Tom, working on her story. This is her environment, whether that is considered physical or mental. The space that she occupies is a space that involves this other individual, even though the third panel of this section states that, “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” (7). How, then, has this physical or mental environment stimulated Bell to the point of creating her work (which could be the entirety of Lucky #1)? Perhaps her relationship with Tom is a relationship that involves her “being” so drastically that he becomes a part of her, and therefore is a place insider herself, and therefore she is alone in these moments and can create to the best of her ability.

In contrast, the panel style of Lucky #2 is much larger—the font is bigger, the drawings are more defined, and the reader is able to involve itself more in the story. The environment of this section seems to be more of an emotional reconciliation: we see Bell in the airport, loosing her sketchbook (sad!!); we see Bell taking a short vacation with friends, although she’s super bummed about her lost sketchbook; we see Bell pulling herself into a yoga class, the suggestion of friend Andy, who she asks, “How do you keep from going crazy?”(64). This part of the memoir allows one to understand the trial of loosing something (the sketchbook) that is so close to ones being. When you place this much importance on an object, does it become a solitary part of the self in the way that personal relationships, like the one between Tom and Bell, does? I think yes! 

While the panel style of Lucky #3 is incredibly similar to the one that prefaces it, the environmental content is much different: this is the environment that Bell thinks of as the workspace, whether that is imaginary or realistic (comparison between pages 82 and 87).  It seems that her writing style is much more developed, and that she involves humor into her prose as opposed to blunt sarcasm, perhaps because she found her niche.

As for the craft of this graphic memoir: the black-and-white line drawing really hit it home. I think that this was a favorite for me, as I got much more out of the drawing and cartooning than I did the textual content. In other words, the text supported the drawing, not the other way around, and even though the drawings are definitely over-simplified (no color, hardly any contrast, minimal contour on the figures), they reflected more emotion and depth than the text most of the time.  

Lucille