By Laura Lee Gulledge (Amulet Books)
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0546-5
We’re well into the 21st century now (with no foreseeable chance of ever getting back to sensible proper times) and yet there still aren’t enough good comics for girls.
Yes, they’ve pretty much sewed up the prose-reading marketplace, but within the realms of pictorial sequential narrative the stories are still all pretty much geared up for adolescent males (for which assume any boy from 11 to 108) with material devised to puff up chests, pump up adrenaline and set testosterone a-bubbling.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying females don’t enjoy Sturm, Drang, angst, mindless fighting and overblown physical carnage, only that they can appreciate other aspects of storytelling too. Oranges are not the only projectile to leave a nasty bruise…
Happily, life is not always about battle, struggle, self-doubt, terror and glorious triumph, so it’s wonderful when creators like Laura Lee Gulledge come along to shine a different light into our shadowy ghetto.
Born in 1979, Gulledge is a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked in Education, Scenic Painting, event production and drama, and seamlessly broke into comics with her beguilingly intimate and aspirational visual testament Page by Paige in 2011.
Will & Whit also highlights her penetrating insight and absorbingly imaginative grasp of purely visual metaphor by relating the Rubicon-crossing moment of a young woman coming to terms with personal tragedy and inescapable adulthood, aided only by her own gifts and the truest of friends…
‘Sparks’ introduces 16-year old Wilhelmina “Will†Huckstep who lives with her free-spirited Aunt Elsie; helping run the small town a second-hand shop called Foxxden Antiques during the most eventful summer of their lives.
Artistic, contemplative and backward-looking, Will is introspective and traumatised by bad memories. She thinks of herself as a “passed-down sort of girlâ€, obsessed with old things and memories, deathly scared of the dark, making lamps as homespun therapy and casting the most interesting and scarily expressive shadows in the world.
Ella Foxx is worries about her ward. It’s just the two of them these days and Will has grown into a tense, insomniac borderline workaholic, even now in the laziest days of summer vacation.
However this year Will is finally going to escape from her Shadow…
It starts in ‘Bright Ideas’ as she visits her best friends Autumn and Noel in nearby Charlottesville. All Will’s pals are creative too. Autumn – daughter of two pushy Indian doctors – is a brilliant puppeteer whilst easy-going Noel is a cordon bleu chef.
It’s his cool little sister Reese‘s thirteenth birthday and they plan to make her a full member of the gang… if she’ll only put down her cellphone for five minutes.
After a lazy day on the river, Will idly wishes for more such days of old-fashioned “unplugged adventureâ€â€¦
The first ominous news reports about Tropical Storm Whitley begin terrifying folks in ‘Shedding Light’ as Will minds the store and three obnoxious kids come in to check out the “junk shopâ€.
Snotty Ava, Blake and Desmond are putting on an Arts Carnival in an abandoned building and they’re looking for props, but the poseur tension dissipates after Desmond recognises “Willy-Nilly†as an old chum from Elementary School.
Soon the kids are leaving with loads of great stuff and Will has volunteered Autumn as a performer. Of course the diffident Asian-American girl is not keen but, after Blake ladles on the charm in ‘Foreshadowing’, Autumn’s head is turned and her lifelong silent crush on Noel utterly forgotten…
Des is keen on Will performing too, but she demurs. After all she just makes lamps…
As the storm finally hits in ‘Out Whitted’, Noel is starting to realise what his complacency and lack of boldness has cost him. Even though Ella is in her element making plans and simply coping, Will is concerned that the hurricane is going to cause a blackout, leaving her stuck in the terrifying, all-consuming dark …
All over the region friends and strangers are battening down the hatches and, determined to deal, she occupies herself making a lamp that will save her, but Will’s mind keeps going back to the crash that made her an orphan…
That rash dream of an unplugged life comes true in ‘Will Powered’ as, in the immediate aftermath of the storm, folks come to terms with the lack of electrical power. The kids organise a giant Blackout Bonfire party and cook-out where Noel shows off his culinary craft and bends Will’s ear about their love-struck BFF before forcing her to confront her fears and take control of her imagination.
However, when Ava organises games in the wood, the junior master chef stumbles over Blake and Autumn taking advantage of the cloak of night and realises how much worse than the unknown reality can be…
‘The Dark Side’ finds the phone-less Reese displaying astounding insight as her brother mopes, and her casual conversation with Will prompts the lamp-maker to make an artistic leap in the dark. Soon however Will is consoling Autumn, whose time with Blake ended almost as soon as it began.
Ava and Desmond need help too. With power gone they need someone innovative with light to help the show go on…
Everything comes together ingeniously and perfectly in ‘Shadowboxing’ and leads to a deliciously authentic but satisfying happy ending with all mysteries and conflicts resolved in ‘Illuminated’ and ‘Epilogue’…
Comics as a English-language medium has had many worthy stabs at producing material for the teen/young adult audience and especially that ever-elusive girl readership, ranging through translated manga material, targeted tales from DC’s Minx imprint and evergreen Archie Comics situation comedies, but the lasting hits have always come when creators ignore editorial and marketing demographics and simply concentrated on telling an honest, absorbing story.
That’s why Maus, Persepolis, Hereville and Castle Waiting worked and how Fables, The Tale of One Bad Rat and The Ballad of Halo Jones found an unexpected, devoted female following, and it’s also why this aspirational, incisive, moving, funny and satisfyingly human yarn should find a permanent place beside those celebrated classics.
Text and illustrations © 2013 Laura Lee Gulledge. All rights reserved.
Reviewed from an uncorrected proof copy. Will & Whit will be published on May 7th 2013.