The Peanutbutter Sisters and Other American Stories
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An immigrant weaves a new, surreal Americana, complete with bubblegum fights and bomb queens.
Rarely does a new talent arrive in the medium as unmistakably distinct as Rumi Hara. With immersive art and a clear-eyed storytelling rhythm, her uncategorizable debut, Nori, put her playful cartooning on display. Her new collection, The Peanutbutter Sisters and Other American Stories, delights with equal mischievousness.
The Peanutbutter Sisters is a glorious balance of contradictions, at once escapism and realism, science fiction and slice of life. Two students explore the urban landscape while following Newton Creek, the polluted Queens-Brooklyn border. As they do, they plan a traditional Japanese play with contemporary pop culture. Another story features an intergalactic race of all living things set in the year 2099 and is a dazzling treatise on the environment and journalism. Yet sometimes the fantastical collides with the quotidian in the same story. A man struggling with vertigo during quarantine encounters a world of sexual revelry whenever he has a dizzy spell. The Peanut Butter sisters ride a hurricane into New York City and yet aren’t able to hitch a ride back with a whale due to a heavily polluted ocean.
Hara’s magical realist tendencies and diverse cast of characters all contort the tropes of the American comics canon. Yet above all else, her innate control of the comics language—her ability to weave the absurd with the real on such a charming and commanding level—is refreshingly unrivaled.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hari (Nori) captures the zeitgeist in this sprightly genre-bending collection. In the title story, three energetic and entrepreneurial sisters—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—experience the wider world through their yearly excursions off their island via hurricane winds. When the naive but tough trio alight in N.Y.C., they show off their knack for getting in and out of trouble. Other stories focus on human (or otherwise) connection, such as "Walking with Tammy Tabata," wherein two teens wander Brooklyn—its vistas, stark streets, and polluted shoreline lovingly detailed in black-and-white, fine-line art—seeking inspiration to write a contemporary version of a classical Japanese dance-drama; and "Living Things," as sentient beings from around the galaxy converge in 2099 for a race in Death Valley. "Verti-Go-Go" addressees the Covid-19 pandemic, as regular guy Brian has explicit visions of hedonistic orgies. Contrasted with his daily routine of sanitizer, masks, and social distancing, the bacchanalia's full-body contact, unconstrained bodily fluids, and exuberant joy captures a desire for human touch beyond the sexual. And more abstractly, in "Bombadonna," female figures with bombs for heads use destruction to create renewal. Through stories alternating realistic and fantastical, Hara creates worlds where anything seems possible—yet her big feat is capturing everyday experience.