Review: Same Difference by Derek Kirk Kim

Same Difference – Derek Kirk Kim (w/a)

First Second, $16.99, ISBN: 978-1-59643-657-2

Derek Kirk Kim is perhaps best known for his collaboration with Gene Luen Yang, The Eternal Smile — a collection of short stories that basked in the afterglow of Yang’s runaway success with American Born Chinese.  It was Kim’s illustrations that really carried the book, though — chameleonic displays of versatility that varied from Carl Barks to Shaun Tan stylings — with Yang’s stories often being too reliant on their inevitable twists.  So, it was heartening to see a re-release of Kim’s 2003 debut graphic novel, Same Difference, arriving from First Second (the original edition of which now goes for silly money on the used market.)

It concerns the lives of Simon and Nancy, two twentysomething Asian-Americans, shuffling into adulthood and dealing with the existential crises that it entails — who am I, where am I going, how has my past defined me?  These feelings are anchored by two central transgressions that drive the story and come to define who the characters are.  Nancy is hoarding the mail of her apartment’s previous tenant, and piecing together an unrequited love story, while Simon becomes tortured by his memories of high school and the way in which he jilted a blind girl.  And it’s here that the story hits its first stumbling block — its protagonists are both eminently unlikeable, shallow, selfish people.

Perhaps a similarly angst-ridden twentysomething will be able to identify better with them, and their aimless cod-philosophising and feelings of being an outsider will resonate, but even still, there is not much to redeem them in the eyes of the reader.  This is partly due to the characters’ own failings, but also due to that of the plot.  For all its aspirations of maturity and seriousness, Kim’s writing far too often diverges into the comedic in sequences that do little to further the plot.  So much so that several story threads are set-up and never resolved — this technique may work well for cartoonists like Adrian Tomine and Nate Powell, but even they have a sense of narrative flow and the illusion of closure.

The book just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and the same problems with the writing spill over into Kim’s art.  While mostly serviceable, it does have a few flashes of brilliance, particularly the scenes in the Pho restaurant where the characters are framed by, and often viewed through, a fish tank.  It recalls The Meaning of Life and is richly symbolic, as well as beautifully rendered, but it is left as simply a flourish.  Again, Kim too frequently falls back on comedic stylings with his characters becoming reduced to overly-simplified slapstick avatars.  Tonally, it just feels awkward.

No doubt if given a strong script and a stronger editorial hand, Kim could find his voice.  As it is, he still feels very much like an artist searching for a voice, continuing to experiment until he finds it — even now branching off into a live-action web comedy series, albeit a painfully unfunny one.  Same Difference is not the early masterpiece, or promising juvenilia that it might have been, but rather a sadly failed experiment.

-- Gavin Lees

Posted in: Gavin Lees,Review