Jillian Tamaki Schools Up Some Wicked Bittersweet Humor

There’s a new book that contains what might become one of your favorite universes ever.

Before I describe it, though, you have to know this: There was a play I saw a few years ago, a stage play called Dog Sees God, written by Bert V. Royal and performed here in Austin by a troupe under the direction of Ken Webster. It was about the Peanuts gang – you know: Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and so on – except that the kids were teenagers and so the relative innocence of early childhood had been eroded into an adolescent shambles of recreational drugs and sexual shenanigans and romantic trainwrecks and maybe even more existential angst than before. You get the idea?

It was an excellent work of theatre.

And this new book that I just finished reading, this graphic novel I want to tell you about here – Jillian Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy from Drawn & Quarterly – reminded me of that play. Because Tamaki’s collection of slice-of-life strips about oddly-powered mutant teenagers in a vague but sort of Hogwarts setting? It’s reminiscent of what Charles Schulz was doing at his best, characterwise, except that SuperMutant Magic Academy runs even deeper than Schulz’s familiar sandlot and pumpkin-patch shenanigans, with more transgressive, hormonally charged situations – thank you, O cruelty of adolescence – and, glad to tell, the entire book-length series of vignettes is sublimely funny and heartbreaking in its emotional realism.

And of course there’s the whole super-mutant aspect, too, the superhero thing. Which is a trope that’s worked, at times, to hilarity.

Tamaki, who recently received a Caldecott Honor for the This One Summer graphic novel she created with her cousin Mariko, uses a variety of drawing styles that shift from strip to strip: Sometimes with rough and scrawly penwork, sometimes with I’d swear almost a nod to Kate Beaton, sometimes with a smooth deftness of line that even Adrian Tomine or Jaime Hernandez would salute as equals, but always capturing the shifting nuances of her multipartite narrative just right. That Tamaki chooses to end this 276-page tale with several pages comprising the longest arc of the collection is a bonus, because by that point a reader is yearning for a more sustained scene, a greater contiguous investment in the characters involved – and that’s precisely what the author delivers, along with a spot-on, grin-inducing conclusion.

Verdict: SuperMutant Magic Academy is a deeply funny and sympathetic take on what it’s like to be a teenager … whether you’ve got powers or not. Recommended.