Deep Space in Comic Book Artist John Pham’s Sublife 1 and 2

How out there can we get? diaCRITIC Jade Hidle introduces us to more Vietnamese American graphic novels, this time, John Pham’s Sublife and its various adventures in outer space, an overcrowded apartment, and with a racist Mr. MacDonald . . . or shall we say non-adventures?  See what this kind of Sublife means, read on!

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With San Diego’s Comic Con, the largest annual event in the comic book world, just around the corner, I would like to dedicate my next couple of posts to spotlighting Vietnamese American comic book artists and writers. For this installment, I focus on John Pham, 2010 Ignatz Awards Outstanding Artist Nominee, and his two-volume work, Sublife. In these books, Pham does not fulfill the standard expectation of Vietnamese American artists to tell autobiographical stories centered on the war, but, rather, presents off-beat depictions of encounters of various natures.

The Cover of Sublife, Volume 1. Image from fantagraphics.com

Released in 2008, the first volume of Sublife is bookended by one-page glimpses into the journey of two astronauts, Captain Joe Ho and Commander Dave Wallach, who have lost their course and, during their efforts to find their way back home to Earth, encounter an alien creature named Deek. With its alien encounters and threats of impending space dementia, “Deep Space” initially seems a nod to traditional comic book narrative. It is, however, marked by Pham’s sense of humor in bluntly depicting the mundane nature of everyday life, even in the expectedly exciting world of outer space. Wallach’s daily activities on the spaceship, for instance, include, at 1600 hours, “Masturbat[ing] to memory of Capt. Ho’s Wife’s Picture.” And the first words he and the Captain teach Deek are “shit” and “fuck.”

A Scene from "Deep Space." Image from comicsreporter.com.

Though occasionally interspersed with imaginative, abstract dream sequences, the meat of Sublife likewise focuses on the mundane. The consistent two-tone blue and peach color scheme across panels that follow the traditional left-to-right, horizontal panel orientation reinforce the simplicity of the stories and Pham’s understated style and tone. From panel to panel, Pham measures the progression of time to create a sense of quiet. The opening twelve panels, for instance, depict the same parked car, only zooming in every few panels to better catch the expression of the cat who drowses beneath the vehicle. It is this slow and steady use of space and time within the comic book form that Pham is able to craft the sense that something is about to happen, but, to the end of capturing the often uneventful character of everyday life, we mostly get to see what occurs before the climax, however insignificant these moments may seem.

This commitment to the d’habitude is certainly nothing new. After all, countless stories, novels, films, and TV shows (cue the quirky beat of the Seinfeld theme song) are about, well, nothing. But, given that the comic book genre has been dominated by narratives chock full of superheroic feats and supernatural (or super-scientific) phenomena, it is notable that Pham contributes to a fairly recent shift (especially in the past 15 years or so) in comics to narrate the real and the ordinary.

In doing so, such texts rely on strong character development to carry the narratives, and I must say that the first volume of Sublife is lacking in this department. The strip entitled “221 Sycamore Street” follows four housemates. Mildred Lee is always late, in debt, and in serious need of concealer. Endowed with a keen olfactory sense, Vrej Sarkissian struggles to take out the trash, and he is revising his online dating profile. Hubie Winters is depicted alone in most of the panels, showing the isolation of his being a worn-out, disrespected teacher. The housemate who tethers all of these quirky yet fairly dull characters together is Terence, a non-speaking figure who looks as though he is draped in a tight-fitting sheet from head to ankle. He looks like a finger (or an unfortunately slim phallus) with sneakers.

Yet, Terence is the most compelling of the characters. He is silent and passive in that he receives action—Mildred steals from him to pay her debts, Vrej solicits his help to revise his dating profile, and Hubie complains about his students at him. Despite his being a voiceless figure through which other characters’ stories are articulated, Terence dreams.

Part of Terence's Dream. Image from comicsreporter.com.

His dreams transcend the mundane. A world of abstract dislocation and displacements, Terence’s dreams demonstrate more of Pham’s creativity. In the dream sequence, his drawings of a walking hand with a face, a legless and levitating Hubie, and dogs and cats that are enormously overgrown balls of fur are odd, yet somehow a bit comforting in their childlike vision. I wanted to see more of this Terence’s mind.

Oddly enough, the most engaging character in the whole book is Mr. MacDonald, an elderly white man who rants about how “savage,” “lunatic” minorities are reducing his “Aryan” brothers to beggars, works on a manuscript of his manifesto discussing the “horrors of miscegenation,” and buys a puppy for his skinhead live-in partner to train to “kill niggers.” Of course, this explicitly racist rhetoric that MacDonald spits is disturbingly real, but Pham’s portrayal of his character within the mundane world he has created makes you want to laugh—not at the racist remarks, but at how Pham undermines that very discourse by showing these white supremacists in the context of the everyday ins and outs of their domestic partnership.

A glimpse of MacDonald's racism. Image from comicsreporter.com.

With the dog in training and MacDonald’s teenaged nephew Phineas coming to live in the house, I was looking forward to the second volume to see what impending disaster would transpire for these racists whose rhetoric is so loathsome it’s humorous.  In other words, while I’m not ordinarily a plot-craving sort of reader, Pham’s work made we want things to happen to his characters to see what they’re made of because, though they seem to have potential, they fall rather flat.

The Cover of Sublife 2. Image from substitutelife.com.

Sublife, Volume 2 didn’t deliver on that count, as the MacDonalds’ portion of the narrative is quite short and uneventful, not offering anything beyond what was covered in the first volume. Nominated last year at the Ignatz Awards for Outstanding Comic, the second installment in Pham’s Sublife series does, however, flesh out the astronaut characters from “Deep Space” and has a cliffhanger ending. The time and space warp they enact in an effort to speed up their journey back home impacts them internally and physically, as Pham writes, “The click, and then the bending and folding of everything […] and then recollections and emotions taking tactile, round forms.” This is where Pham’s artistic abilities are exhibited in a way that wasn’t showcased in Volume 1. Even though he sticks to the two-tone color scheme, he plays with shapes and panel size and orientation that urges the reader to open up his/her understanding and practice of what reading and viewing a comic means, even incorporating an interactive page-folding exercise.

The Captain's Time and Space Warp. Image from robot6comicbookresources.com.

In addition to playing with space and time in the formal qualities of the book, Pham also creates emotional resonance through his inclusion of memories and images that echo yet repeat with a difference—an uncanny effect. Captain Ho fondly remembers a camping trip with his family in the desert, and the barren landscape recurs but in an altogether dissonant context  in the closing Mad Max-esque strip that plays with shading in an eerie way, depicting sexual violence, car crashes, and decapitations that most definitely depart from the mundane and domestic scenes from the first volume.

Pham also includes a short strip called “St. Ambrose,” a two-page  autobiographical narrative, that revisits his Catholic school days in Los Angeles in the mid-eighties. Here, memories are depicted in panels shaped as sharp triangles, fragments, pointing to another kind of violence—that of growing up, of remembering childhood and wanting to go back but not being able to. This more personal interjection may seem out of place, yet I think it fits in nicely with the larger thematic commonality of attempting to bend space and time to find one’s way back home, wherever or whenever that may be.

Whereas I found the first volume of Sublife to be lacking, its follow-up is a more satisfying read in that Pham offers traces of hazy yet meaningful connections between its seemingly unrelated narratives, with more visually striking images to draw readers in. It will be interesting to see if Pham follows up with a third volume or does something different.

And stay tuned for my upcoming review of Level Up, the new graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, the creator of the critically acclaimed, Eisner Award-winning American Born Chinese, featuring artwork by Vietnamese American artist Thien Pham.

-Jade Hidle

Jade Hidle is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. She aims to write her dissertation on Vietnamese-American literature, with a focus on how narrative structures map struggles of the body–miscegenation, disfigurement, skin color–and identity.

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