“I loved the city,” Jina tells us, over a panel that portrays a cozy streetscape. Her daughter, Jina, is an artist and a writer who, as the novel begins, has been told she must leave the rental apartment she calls home. The mother, Gwija, has lived through decades of upheaval, beginning in the era of Japanese colonial rule and continuing through the Korean War. The story of a South Korean mother and daughter unfolds in present-day Seoul and in the crucible of memory. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s second book, “ The Waiting,” offers a compelling case in point it’s vividly rendered graphic fiction with roots in autobiography. This is the inherent tension of a style of storytelling that develops via sequential drawings. In each, we are in the realm of the interpretive - neither documentary, exactly, nor fiction. Or the graphic war reportage of Joe Sacco, which juxtaposes portraiture against wide-frame panoramas to evoke the effects of armed conflict through both a personal and collective lens. I think of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” which recounts the Holocaust the Jews are portrayed as mice and the Nazis as cats. That’s not without a certain logic in a form where even a “true story” comes filtered through the eye of its creator, in images as well as words. The term “graphic novel” has long been a catch-all, a way to describe any long-form comic. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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