Kalesniko, Mark – Mail Order Bride

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Mail Order Bride

I’d heard conflicting stories about this one before I finally broke down and bought it. People either loved it or hated it, that’s for sure. It’s the story of a mail order bride (aren’t you glad I’m here to tell you things like that?) and the 39 year old toy shop owner that she marries. He’s expecting a perfect china doll and she’s just trying to escape her past and, needless to say, things don’t work out the way that either of them expects. The author of the book is a Disney illustrator, something that I hadn’t heard before I went to link to the Amazon page. I probably would have gone into this with some negative feelings if I had known that, just because of my irrational hatred for all things Disney, at least until I see various movies and the such and realize that they’re not so bad after all, more often than not. That could be where his sense of pacing comes from, all the storyboards he has to draw. There are a lot of pages with very little happening except the passing of time, and a lot of artists today probably would have cut those out and made this a much shorter graphic novel. I thought it worked beautifully and perfectly showed the interminable nature of the time they spent together when there were no close feelings shown by either of them. Sure, Monty liked having her around for sex and to show off to his friends, and sure, she liked being married to an extent because she didn’t have to be alone and it gave her at least the semblance of security. The actual love was never there, and the silence showed that better than any number of arguments could have.

So which side am I on? I think this was an amazing achievement. The mark of a good graphic novel to me these days is whether or not I’d show the book to people I know who don’t read comics, and I would have no fear showing this to anybody, except maybe crazy religious types or the kinds of people who are scared of nudity. Look, anybody who has read any of these “reviews” knows that I’m a much bigger fan of showing than telling, and that isn’t going to change here. If you want to read an in-depth review of the book, click on the title and it’ll bring you to the Amazon page. They have very intelligent critics and I think 8 pages of samples, so you can become much more informed about whether or not you want to read this. I’m mostly just here to tell you my visceral reaction to books and whether or not they’re worth your time and effort to read. This is a big book at over 250 pages, but there’s never a dull moment. One of the better things I’ve seen about the nature of relationships and exploring yourself and the world around you. Kyung meets another Asian woman who wants her to be a model and she starts taking some art classes at the local college, much to the chagrin of Monty, who just wants her to sit at home and be obedient. This takes her and both of them to a place that I didn’t see coming, even though it really couldn’t have gone any other way in hindsight. The only minor problem I had with the whole thing was the lack of attention given to the history of Kyung. I guess it’s true that she came over to Canada to get away from her past and Monty certainly didn’t care much about it, so there wasn’t any real reason to go into it in any kind of detail. I’m mostly upset because it’s something that I was really curious about and it was never explored in any kind of detail, that’s all. I probably won’t even notice when I read it again. Anyway, this book is great. I’d recommend it to anybody at all who likes comics, or really anybody who likes books at all. Another guy who I can easily see breaking through to the reading public in a matter of years and having his book up there with all the John Grisham crap. OK, maybe he’ll never get that popular, but I can certainly see him as being a breakthrough artist for comics in the coming years if he keeps this up.