The Re-Gifters

It's been a long time since I've written about comics, but they're such a huge part of my life as a reader that now it's time to dust off that part of my brain.

I picked up The Re-Gifters by Mike Carey, with art by Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel. It is a pocketbook graphic novel about a young South Korean girl, Jan Dik Seong, or "Dixie" to her friends, who lives in L.A. and competes in Hapkido tourneys. As a fat, bald, ugly, middle-aged white guy from the Midwest, I in no way can relate to her or her struggles, and I feel funny just having read the book for review. However, I am a comicophile who will read ANYTHING with panels and word balloons, particularly if I pick it up for free on the giveaway table at the local public library. This is YA lit, specifically aimed at girls, so I'm an old, fat, blubbering, clueless patriarchal white male oppressor bull in a china shop here.

However, I finished this little book because I found the interplay and dynamic between Dixie and her world rather affecting. She lopes along in her rumpled jeans, downcast that the gift she has bought for Adam, a conspicuously blonde boy, is wasted on someone who wants a faux high school Barbie Doll homecoming queen (do they have those in L.A.?) instead of her. Dixie lives in a world where Latino gang members, led by "Dillinger," who turns out to be the "hood with a heart of gold," bully her that she needs to stay on the "South Korean side" of the street. Her head is full of dreams of Adam, who must qualify, on some level, as an embodiment of an American ideal she may not feel her South Korean immigrant family is a part of.

Her father, it turns out, ran a store that was torched in the L.A. Riots. The mother makes jewelry. Her twin brothers are characters that are, weirdly, never fully formed. Dixie is a tiny bundle of Ki, whipping up on those twice her size, always ready to throw down. Her friend Avril, who gets in an accident with a falling museum exhibit on a school picnic, spots Dixie her one-hundred-dollar entry fee for a Hapkido tourney. Dixie spent all her dough on the strange glass statuette of a Korean warrior on a horse that she gifts to Adam, whom she finds betrayed her trust (but who otherwise tries to manipulate her feelings before he fights her in Hapkido) by taking the gift she sank her funds into and giving it as a "re-gift" to the tall, popular blonde beauty queen he has the hots for. Hence, the title.

The comic doesn't end badly, and the artistic style has a kinetic energy: it's part comic strip, with close-up panels that are more traditional in their representation of faces. There's a lot of movement here, and a lot of easygoing fun. There's also the story of a young girl who may feel a terminal sense of outsiderdom because of her South Korean status, or the immigrant status of her family, their traditions exemplified by the warrior statuette, an image and ideal "frozen" in time that bats up against the America where gang members tell her what side of the street she should walk on.

But she soldiers forth, and rises above, God bless her.

Mike Carey has worked on various comics for Vertigo and DC, and Minx, the company that published this, is an imprint of DC. The back of the book has "coming attractions" excerpts of other comics, all YA titles with female main characters (I found the one where the protagonist ends up in an alternate dimension with various selves at different ages particularly intriguing).

The Re-Gifters is not exactly a dark, brooding, adult graphic novel experience. But not everything has to be.

Give the book to a young relative, maybe. But not as a re-gift.

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