Graphic Novel Book Club: New Suicide Squad, vol. 1 Pure Insanity, by Sean Ryan et al

Our last graphic novel was intended to tie in with the new Suicide Squad movie, and from what I hear, audiences liked that movie just about as much as our readers liked the New Suicide Squad collection.  By which I mean they're not liking it much at all.  Interesting how that works out.

Anyway.

New Suicide Squad, Vol. 1: Pure Insanity
collecting New Suicide Squad issues 1-8
ISBN: 9781401252380
writing: Sean Ryan
breakdowns: Tom Derenick
artists: Rob Hunter, Jeremy Roberts, Norm Rapmund, Vicente Cifuentes, Scott Hanna, Trevor Scott, Mark Irwin, Batt
colorist: Blond
letterers: Taylor Esposito, Dave Sharpe

Read August 2016

So the OLD Suicide Squad was disbanded apparently, so Amanda Waller is working with a bull-headed, homicidal, over-achieving Vic Sage (what a name) with his hand-picked new Task Force X (why so many names, y'all?) purposefully picked to cause as much strife and mayhem as possible.  Poor Amanda.

So returning from the old team we have Harley, Deadshot, and Black Manta, and Vic drags in Deathstroke and Joker's Daughter (who really isn't, but ok, let's have more crazy women with strange issues about the Joker being the formative male figure in their lives because THAT's totally not sexist and old news already).  At some point the Australian dude and Totally Not Evil Flash get dragged into this ridiculousness, just to have more characters involved I guess?

I'm sure there is a plot, I just couldn't find it.  The team gets sent to Russia to research something, and explodes it instead (quelle surprise), gets sent to tactically explode something in China, and DOESN'T explode it before a bunch of vat-grown mutant (does DC have mutants?) supers lurches zombie/Doom-like out to pummel them (they eventually explode things).  Then there's Chinese Superman, who I think dies because they can't figure out what to do with him... and all the while Vic the dick and Amanda are jousting for position back at HQ.

Anyway - it's a hot mess.  The women are simply crazy - no characters there to speak of.  Harley's a far cry from the self-possessed crazy but somewhat self-aware character she is in her flagship series (review coming soon for that one), and Joker's Daughter is simply a mess and spends most of the time being useless or unconscious.  Characters defect or are invalided out nearly every issue, making it difficult to care about the team.  Honestly, the only one I felt anything for was Black Manta, who really just needs to get out of there and find a team of reasonable people to work with.  (Good luck, man.)  Waller is presented sympathetically, Vic is amazingly cardboard for being the major antagonist, and honestly Waller's assistant has the most "humanizing" moments in the whole thing.

Art was decent, but oddly stretched and warped in places, like the panel layout wasn't finalized before the scenes were drawn, and someone just used the stretch tool in MS Paint to make things fit in their new locations.  Lots of red, lots of explosions as backgrounds (saves drawing buildings) lots of cement-bunker environments or nearly-empty cubical farms.  The women (save a few moments for Waller and her assistant) are constantly sexualized, even when in the middle of mayhem, or when unconscious.  The male characters are differentiated by costumes, and that's about it.  Once in their prison/psych uniforms, I had trouble recognizing characters from earlier panels.

Not hugely recommended, but there's a possibility for interesting development for Manta and Waller, so if you're interested in them, it might be worth it.  Otherwise, the characters are mostly there to provide a superficial reason for all the explosions.      

Graphic Novel Book Club: The Surrogates, Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele

Our penultimate title for the year-long graphic novel book club experiment actually got turned into a movie with Bruce Willis!  (The movie wasn't very good, unfortunately.)

The Surrogates
Robert Venditti
art by Brett Weldele
ISBN: 9781891830877
Read July 10, 2016

Think Blade Runner, but everyone (well, pretty much everyone) WANTS to be artificial.  Shades of Ready Player One in there also.  Robotics and cosmetics industries have advanced to the point that "surrogates:" (remotely-controlled real-life robotic avatars of a particular person) are more commonly seen than actual flesh-and-blood people, who are all at home, connected to their computers to run the surrogate's actions in real-time.  Surrogates are faster, stronger, prettier, and allow people to be free from worries of actual physical damage to their real human bodies (except for getting fat as shit, getting deep-vein thrombosis, or getting bedsores from sitting in one place all day, none of which is referenced at all.)  Things are great until some mysterious freak starts frying surrogates, and suspicion falls on a modern-day prophet figure who is rabidly anti-surrogate, and has amassed a religious army in a recently-allocated reservation under his own local rule, where surrogates are not allowed.

Interesting questions of social consciousness, of abdicating personal responsibility, and of the line between helping people who need assistance (surrogates were initially medical devices intended for medically "locked-in" people) and making shitloads of money on luxuries that quickly become common or standard.

I would have liked to see a lot more depth in the world building - I think there were some ideas and concepts that weren't very well meshed up with human psychology and the reality of life in the world, but it was also an interesting, if slightly dark and depressing, mystery thriller.

Graphic Novel Book Club: Princeless, Volume 1. Jeremy Whitley and M. Goodwin

Princeless, Volume 1 (originally: The Arduous Business of Getting Rescued, later subtitled Save Yourself)
writer: Jeremy Whitley
art and colors: M. Goodwin
letters: Jung Ha Kim
ISBN: 9781939352545
Spunky Princess of Color discovers a sword under her bed in her tower, and rides her dragon guardian (who is of course her friend) off to rescue her other sisters from durance vile in their own towers.

Princess Adrienne is introduced as a child, repulsed and analytically rejecting her mother's recitation of a traditional fairy tale of a "fair princess" getting rescued from a tower by a prince who slays the evil dragon.  Fast forward a few years, and dad (King, and really imposing and grumpy) has drugged her and stuck her in exactly that same situation.  Adrienne's not having it, so she co-opts her dragon and sets merrily off on adventure, stopping first to rescue her  youngest sister from her room in the palace home.  Of course, things never go according to plan, and there are some interesting digressions along the way (including an extended running gag about "women warrior" armor as fashion clothing rather than as practical armor, visually-checking several iconic designs along the way.)

This softcover volume includes issues 1-4 of the comic, along with a few short excerpt comic pages about various secondary (and maybe to-be-important-later?) characters and their own unfortunate experiences.

Suitable for kids, but maybe not for reallly little ones, or for sensitive ones.  Safe bet would be 2nd grade and up.

Book Club, Graphic Novel Collection: Marvel Civil War, Mark Millar & Steve McNiven

Marvel Civil War Event (collecting Marvel Civil War, issues #1-7)
writer, Mark Millar
pencils, Steve McNiven
colors, Morry Hollowell
letters, VC's Chris Eliopoulos
ISBN: 9780785121794
Read May 1, 2016

Graphic Novel Book Club read for May.

I really hope that I like the movie more than I like the comic event.  This collection of seven issues has the core of the Civil War storyline, but as much of the character development and specific moments were parceled out into the individual characters' comic runs, the characters here are flat and dispirited and prone to making decisions that appear to be out of thin air, or changing their minds for what seems to be no reason.  The artwork has lovely framing and is well-laid-out, but the combo of McNiven and Hollowell makes for characters who look like they are plastic dolls or an early cheap attempt at computer-generated artwork.  Not my favorite look.

If you've been under a rock for a while, Marvel decided they needed a giant universe-roiling "event" and wouldn't it be cool if two of the major players in the universe were on opposite sides and got to fight each other!  Yeah!  Or something.  So in the story world, some punk kid supers did something stupid, and then Tony Stark and Steve Rogers both reacted stupidly, and a whole bunch of forced decisions and rampant stupidity later, there was a big smackdown superhero fight  (and some smaller ones) until things were sufficiently shaken up to make the Marvel head honchos happy.

Punisher gets some good moments (I especially liked Spiderman's poignant suggestion that Rogers and Castle are essentially the same soldier, but from very different wars and very different social responses).  Spiderman gets shafted (when is that ever a surprise) and Doctor Strange gets the boot.  Unsurprisingly, he, along with all the mutants, and Wakanda (at least at first), basically says "not my circus" when asked to choose sides.  Steve doesn't really have a character, Tony's a giant bag of snarky comments and bad decisions, and SHIELD and the general public exist as a metaphoric stick to justify and consolidate shaky plotting.

Not the best, but if the cinematic universe continues as well as it's begun, I don't begrudge the source material.

 

Graphic Novel: Collected Run: Hawkeye, Fraction, Aja, et al.

This review covers the entire run of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye: Issues 1-22, plus Young Avengers Presents 6, and Annual 1.

Volume 1 (the hardcover) was also our Graphic Novel Book Club book for March 2016

Hawkeye, Volume 1
Collecting Hawkeye #1-11, and Young Avengers Presents #6
Matt Fraction, writer
David Aja, main artist
Matt Hollingsworth, main colorist
Chris Eliopoulos. letters
Javier Pulido, artist for #4 & 5
Steve Lieber & Jesse Hamm, artists for #7
Francesco Francavilla, art & color for #10
Annie Wu, "romance covers" for #8
ISBN: 9780785184874

(Hawkeye, Volume 1 is a hardcover containing the issues collected in the softback Vol. 1 and 2.)

Hawkeye, Volume 3: L.A. Woman
Collecting Hawkeye #14, #16, #18, #20, and Annual #1
Matt Fraction, writer
Anne Wu, main artist
Matt Hollingsworth, colorist
Javier Pulido, art and cover for Annual
ISBN: 9780785183907

Hawkeye, Volume 4: Rio Bravo
Collecting Hawkeye #12 & 13, #15, #17, #19, and #21 & 22
Matt Fraction, writer
David Aja, main artist
Matt Hollingsworth, colorist
Francesco Francavilla, artist, covers, colors for #12
Chris Eliopoulos, art for # 17
Jordie Bellaire, colors for #17
ISBN: 9780785185314

Short review: It's amazing. It's everything perfect about comic books. Go read it.

Longer review.  What we have here is a perfect look at heroes off-duty - this run gives us Hawkeye when he's not off "Avengering" with the other heroes.  He goes home to his apartment, has cookouts with his neighbors on the roof, deals with tracksuit mafia (Bro) and tries to do the right thing and help out his friends.

This being Hawkeye, he screws things up on the regular.  He also gets the everloving snot stomped out of him on the regular.  He starts the run in traction, and ends it temporarily deafened. I love that we see the consequences of his choices here - he's not Cap, he's not got armor, and it shows. Poor Clint.  

We also get to see the other Hawkeye: Kate Bishop of the Young Avengers.  She pops in and out of Hawkeye's life for the first dozen or so issues, but then there's a bit of a mess that sends her off to Los Angeles to try her hand at solo heroics. Which is really an excuse to get her into the clutches of Madame Masque and her creepy shenanignans over there, and also to get Clint on his own.

What I like about the collected issues is that they've decided to make Volume 3 into the Kate Hawkeye book, and Volume 4 into the Clint Hawkeye book - so Volumes 3 and 4 alternate comic issues and give you a full story of one Hawkeye or the other, whereas if you read them during the actual run, you'd be alternating between the coasts every month or so until the finale.

The run is pretty fantastic. It's internally cohesive, has stakes that range from the mundane to the global conspiracy, has roots in the real world (there's an issue about Hurricane Sandy) and ties back into the Marvel universe (shout-out to Moon Knight!) all while keeping the focus sharply on the Hawkeyes and their attempts to be heroic and good, and to beat the bad guys without lowering themselves to the level of the bad guys. Truly excellent writing.

Now for the art. I can't enjoy a comic unless the art appeals to me, and boy howdy does this appeal.  Aja (pronounced A-ha) is a genius, and Hollingsworth's colors are like an intensive study course on color theory and how to color block without making people's eyes bleed, or boring them to death.  Annie Wu's exuberant work shines through in the retro covers of My Doomed Love and in the wild excess of Hollywood with Kate (although I felt the chibi "internal voice" was a peculiar choice).  The scenes are fresh and powerful and flow beautifully - I rarely felt lost (I always feel lost in the thicket of panels) even when we're being led around by Pizza Dog, or in an issue where everything's narrated in sign language and lip-reading.  Massive appreciation for stellar work by everyone involved.

I have to say, I know all good things come to an end, and runs often don't make it quite to their full potential, but I really do feel like this one rose to the challenge, smote it to death, and strutted on into the sunset.  I'm truly sorry that it's over.

Manga (Book Club Read) Wolf Children, Mamoru Hosoda & Yu

Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki

Mamoru Hosoda, illustrated by Yu (Original character designs by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto)

Translation by Jocelyne Allen, lettering by Tania Biswas & Lys Blakeslee

ISBN: 9780316401654

Hardcover Manga compilation of the original manga series companion to the Wolf Children film.

Read April 3, 2016

Our April read was also our first manga for the book club.  Attendance was slight, and I wonder if people either didn't want to try a different format, or if there is just not much overlap between traditional comics/graphic novels and with manga.  (or more likely, it was still the tail end of Spring Break, so people could have been out enjoying the lovely weather.)  

Regardless, it was a cute story, and another nice light read after February's War Story, and the upcoming Civil War (the comic, not the movie - I'm honestly not looking forward to slogging through the comic series again, but it is what it is.)  March's Hawkeye Vol. 1 was likewise beautiful, and the full review is upcoming, although I did a short teaser review in September.

Back to Wolf Children. The story is simple and bittersweet (as are most shoujo anime/manga) and focuses on the very brief childhood of two siblings raised by a very young, but determined widowed mother.  The children's father is a brief and mythological figure in the very beginning of the story, who dies tragically trying to provide for his infant children.  

After his death the story has roughly two parts - the first section focuses on the mother, Hana, as she tries to keep her children's changeable natures hidden from society while living in the middle of a big city, and navigating health scares and poverty.  

Once she realizes she can no longer keep the children hidden and protected in the city, the story moves to a property in the countryside and the focus shifts to the two children and their developing personalities and natures.  Yuki, the eldest, begins by being fierce and adventuresome, but after an incident at school, she begins to despise and fear her wolf nature.  Her younger brother Ame starts life as a weak and sickly boy, but after an accident in the woods, he associates nature with strength and challenge, and becomes enamored of the wilderness and of his own innate wildness.

The story finishes as the children reach the wolf equivalent of adulthood - still very young by modern American standards.  As to be expected by shoujo manga, there are no real inversions of tropes, and the plot is predictable and minor - the real focus is the beautiful line-work of the art, and of the focus on individual moments in character interactions: the harried and frantic mother with a sick child that she can't take to the hospital, two wolf-toddlers tussling in an apartment, feelings of alienation at school and in the woods, interactions with neighbors and friends.  All these are sweetly and truly drawn, and make the slight story worthwhile and lovely.  

While I haven't seen the movie yet, if it covers the same ground as the manga, it would be a delightful way to introduce very young or very sensitive children to anime - before they're old enough to enjoy Ponyo or Kiki's Delivery Service for example.    

Graphic Novel (Book Club Read): Notes for a War Story, Gipi

Like my recent Storytime, our Graphic Novel book club also branched into Italian territory with this interesting sort-of-biographical graphic story by the Italian artist Gipi.  Sadly, neither the content nor the execution were a hit with our particular group, but the topic did spark interesting discussions about wayward teen boys and gangs.

Notes for a War Story (Originally Appunti per una storia di guerra)
Gipi
ISBN: 9781596433038
Read February 1, 2016  

Follows three village boys of undetermined nationality who are impacted by a raging unspecific war that leaves their towns and villages randomly bombed into oblivion.  The narrator is the "outsider" Giuliano, accompanied by the naive foster boy Christian, and led by Stephano, "little killer," the de-facto ringleader of the group.  The trio (mainly due to Stephano's bravado and bluster) are quickly taken under the wing of a criminal mob and used as low-level thugs, enforcers, and collection agents in the city, basking in their "luck" at finding a job that pays good money and makes them respected.  All this ends when the gang leader decides that becoming "patriots" and "freedom fighters" means essentially living the same violent criminal life, but being celebrated for it.  On the day they are assigned assault rifles and sent off to actually fight in the war, Giuliano flees, and the story ends with a somewhat shaky coda of a documentary filmmaker interviewing the now grown man about his past experiences and his current sadness at not seeing his friends since that day.

2015 Review Round-Up: Graphic Novel: Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, Tony Cliff

Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant
Tony Cliff
ISBN: 9781596438132
Read December 2015 for Graphic Novel Book Club

Previously reviewed here.

All of that remains true, and to add that the sequel is offically named and release-dated:
Delilah Dirk and the King's Shilling
out March 8 2016
(yay we're finally in the same year as the release Oh MY God I've waited FOREVER!!!)

2015 Review Round-Up: Graphic Novel: V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd

V for Vendetta
Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd
ISBN: 9781401208417
The classic english dystopian/anarchist graphic novel.
Read November 2015

When you have a graphic novel book club, and it's November, you sort of have to pick V for Vendetta the first year.  It's only natural.  If you're only familiar with the story from the movie, you really owe it to yourself to check out the much deeper and much more morally complex original.  Moore tapped into serious fears of mid 1980s England, and used them to craft an ambiguous story about a larger-than-life figure that uses government abuses as a moral justification (to himself and to others) for wreaking a very personal vendetta.  It's powerful and unsettling, and very much a product of it's time (and politics).  It's like the English graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451.

2015 Review Round-Up: Graphic Novel: The Graveyard Book (Volumes 1&2) Neil Gaiman et al

The Graveyard Book: Volume 1
Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell
Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, Stephen B. Scott
ISBN: 9780062194817

The Graveyard Book: Volume 2
Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell
David LaFuente, Scott Hampton, P. Craig Russell, Kevin Nowlan, Galen Showman
ISBN: 9780062194831
Both Read October 2015

The graphic novel adaptation of the epic fantastical and ghostly re-telling of the Jungle Book.

Just go read it.  It's Neil Gaiman, and it's beautiful.  I would recommend reading the actual book first - it makes things clearer and deeper to have that background to draw from, and it makes for a nice sense of anticipation about what the various artists are going to choose to do to depict various people and scenes.  This was the October read for our library's Graphic Novel Book Club, and it was a big hit.  Everyone enjoyed the story, even though most people didn't realize it was an homage to the Jungle Book (which you should also read, but remember that Kipling was an AWFUL racist.)

Bod wanders away from a gristly scene, and takes refuge in a cemetery, under the protection of the Grey Lady, the cemetery ghosts, and the mysterious nocturnal caretaker Silas.  These grim beings form a protective family for Bod to grow and develop, but all too soon he is going to learn about the wider world, and once he leaves the cemetery grounds, he's dangerously vulnerable to the strange man Jack who hunts him relentlessly.

Graphic Novel Book Club: Superman Red Son, Mark Millar & Dave Johnson & Kilian Plunkett

Superman Red Son
Mark Millar
Artists:
Dave Johnson & Andrew Robinson (Red Son Rising & Red Son Ascendant)
Kilian Plunkett & Walden Wong (Red Son Ascendant & Red Son Setting)
Colorist: Paul Mounts (seriously good work here)
Letters: Ken Lopez (not so fond of the stylized capitals, but otherwise excellent)
ISBN: 9781401247119 (soft-side trade collecting all three volumes: Red Son Rising, Red Son Ascendant, Red Son Setting, with intro, marginalia, and process art)

Another month, another graphic novel for the club.  This time we went with a well-regarded alt-universe Superman fan-fic: Superman Red Son.  The premise (and a twist at the end) has our Kryptonian ubermensch landing in a Ukrainian communal farm instead of in cornfed central USA.  The idealistic and straightforward hero absorbs and internalizes the ideals of the communist party, and sets the world down a very different path.

This is very much a alternate-universe "what if" scenario, driven almost entirely by plot gears, with only the bare minimum of characterization to flesh out our main cast: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman (holy hand grenades, Batman!) Lex Luthor, Lois Lane Luthor (still a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist), Bizarro, Brainiac, the Green Lantern Corps, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few here and there.  Before reading this comic, everyone should be familiar with those characters and their basic archetypes, because that's pretty much all you're going to get as they karoom around this inverted world and everyone makes pretty much uniformly bad decisions (often from good intentions) that drive the plot deliciously down an interesting path to destruction and difficult choices for all.  A few well-placed heel-turns, a bit of shoe-horning in of characters (I thought especially Batman was shoveled in by main force and then tragically underutilized), and a bit of hazy plotting (was the somewhat extended Green Lantern diversion really actually necessary to the development of the plot?  Discuss.) the story was overall interesting and fast-paced enough to keep me entertained.  Besides, it's essentially an "elseworlds" story, so even if it was horrid, it's easy enough to fling back into the murk and forget about it.

The art was delicious, the forms and poses were classical and clear and well-defined.  People had faces that aged and changed over decades of time, and even through the change of artists, the characters looked like themselves all the way through.  A special shout-out to Paul Mounts for some really stellar coloring work here.  There was a lot of black and a lot of grey and a lot of red, plus loads of stark contrasts that very easily could have slid into melodrama or cartoon, and he held the line excellently.

Overall, a fun excercise in "what if" that stands well clear of politics or economic realities to focus on the fun story potentials in a world only slightly different from our own.

Graphic Novel: Batman HUSH, Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, Alex Sinclair, Richard Starkings

Our second Graphic Novel Book Club was the beginning of this month, and because of the Summer Reading theme of heroes, we decided to go classic with a good Batman story.

Batman: HUSH
Jeph Loeb
illustrated by Jim Lee
inked by Scott Williams
colors by Alex Sinclair
lettering by Richard Starkings
ISBN: 1401229921
Batman's detective skills are tested by a mysterious rash of villainy that all seems to center around creating personal stresses and tragedies for the caped crusader.

I enjoyed reading HUSH, and I enjoyed the group discussion even more.  The consensus seemed to be that the story was as good as the framework of the genre allowed it to be: in other words, there wasn't really a possibility for character growth and change, as everything has to revert to roughly the status quo at the end of the run for the next person to pick up the torch and go.  While to some extent, that's inevitable, for a story like this that tries to have such dramatic stakes, it really saps the urgency and power of the events to know from the start that nothing essential is going to change at all.

I personally thought the artwork was breathtaking, but I was also taken aback by the choice to make the menfolks as physically imposing as semi-truck cabs, while all the women were quite literally half their size, and less than half their mass, and often contorted into unfortunate poses to accentuate their assets.  It was visually effective, but it was also more than a bit irritating.

The story was interesting, and it was nice to see a good villain's gallery (which is part of why it was chosen) for Bats to go up against.  It was also nice to see references to history and other characters in the universe, even though with such a crowded cast list it was impossible for anyone to be treated decently.  There were some really powerful and disturbing moments (Bats vs Joker was physically difficult to look at) and some interesting set-pieces (the Bats vs a certain boy scout) which were fun, even if the set-up was occasionally highly improbable.

It doesn't make me want to run out and grab all the Batman stories, but it does make me want to keep an eye out for Jim Lee and Alex Sinclair's artwork, because that was really the clincher for me.  The dynamic movement of the scenes, and the mesmerizing color choices was truly stunning, and the best part of the experience.

Graphic Novel (re-read): American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang

A new "Comic Book Club" has started at the library, and the first read was Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.  I read this initially in librarian school, and very much enjoyed it (despite the discomfort of the racism it dealt with) and it was nice to revisit with a community book club instead of in a scholarly setting.  The discussion was fun and lively, and touched a lot on the issues of racism and self-acceptance, and on the interesting inclusion of aspects of Christian iconography.

American Born Chinese
Gene Luen Yang
ISBN: 9780312384487
Prinz Award winner.  Graphic Novel.  3 different stories progress in alternating chapters, entwining only at the very end.  

Story 1: A Monkey King arises to lead the monkeys, and he improves himself through discipline and through study and hard work.  He's content until he tries to crash a party held by the King of Heaven, and is denied entrance because - well - he IS a monkey.  Bare feet and monkey stink and everything.  Now he's ashamed of himself, and pissed as hell at the other gods for making him feel bad.

Story 2: In elementary school, Jin Wang tries to survive the casual racism of his school, and reluctantly befriends even newer arrival Wei-Chen Sun.  School remains fairly awful, but their friendship helps them make it through to middle school and the beginnings of dating and social lives.

Story 3: High-schooler Danny is horrified that his cousin Chin-kee (not kidding), a hideous "yellow-peril" racist-illustrated (seriously, his skin is GREEN) walking offensive stereotype (yes, he pees in someone's Coke) has come to visit and attend school with him.  Danny tiptoes, blushes, and cringes through the day as Chin-kee entertains the school with horrible racist antics.

The most interesting part about this story is that it is truly one story.  How the three combine into a cohesive whole is a truly enlightening discovery.  Meanwhile, the themes and pointed observations of each story are echoed in the others in a really satisfying way, making the ultimate enmeshing much more organic and earned.