Independent Propaganda

MAIL ORDER BRIDE by Mark Kalesniko

Price: $19.95

Fantagraphics Books

Originally published in 2001

Reviewed by David Lamontagne

Writer for Independent Propaganda

Order Mail Order Bride from Amazon.

Review:

In a world where comics are black and white in morality just as often as in art, MAIL ORDER BRIDE is a real rara avis—not in the sense that it’s an unusual bird, but that it’s a thing you don’t encounter often.

MAIL ORDER BRIDE is set in the sleepy, little, formerly industrial town Bandini, just southwest of Calgary. Monty Wheeler, self-proclaimed “largest distributor” of comics, games, and toys in the area, is a nebbishy fellow who lives in mortal fear of his testosterone-infused father and brothers and surrounds himself with nonjudgmental old people and snotnosed children. He finds the solution to his social disconnection in an advertisement for “hardworking, loyal, obedient, cute, exotic, domestic, simple” mail order brides from East Asia. Unfortunately for Monty, the bride who arrives, Kyung Seo, is as far from his two-dimensional, 8×10 glossy fantasy as a girl can be.

Told in a series of quick episodes structurally reminiscent of JAKA’S STORY in CEREBUS, the story proceeds in a generally predictable way, as Kyung, who quickly becomes the real focus, defeats Monty’s expectations of women, particularly Korean women, at every turn. Kyung’s attempts to break free from not only Monty’s attempts to mold her but also society’s constraints on women in general depict the rapid and inexorable erosion of Monty and Kyung’s already tenuously based relationship. Kalesniko works with an economy seldom seen in modern, decompressed comics. Often he communicates complex psychological data in a single panel or line of dialogue, never to revisit it explicitly. It’s a good thing Kalesniko largely does keep things brief, because it freed the space necessary for him to indulge his tendency to repeat entire pages of symbolism he saw as central to the themes of the work. He uses the repetition well, typically modifying each iteration slightly to represent the progression of the issues introduced throughout.

Kalesniko’s brevity and repetition give MAIL ORDER BRIDE that cinematic feel that seems to be the goal of so many worse comics these days. Fortunately for you and me, Kalesniko’s comic wants to be a movie by Jim Jarmusch rather than by Michael Bay, so, not to put too fine a point on it, it doesn’t suck.

Unsurprisingly, he has a keen sense for narrative that’s displayed in his page layout and gross story structure, maximizing each panel’s placement on the page and in the book as a whole. His manipulation of the tone of the story is masterful, transforming the social tension of the first pages into an undercurrent of steadily growing unease that ratchets the suspense to such a fine point that reader may find himself unnerved enough to need to set the book down for a break from the unrelenting pressure of the characters’ pathological needs. The final panel of the book sums the entire work in as chilling an image as I’ve ever seen in comic art.

Thematically the work is a densely-layered morality play in which subtle imagery collides contrapuntally on nearly every page. The sheer number of levels on which the story works is overwhelming: it simultaneously addresses racism and race-based expectations, power struggles in relationships, gender roles and their expectations, maturity and its consequences, sexual identity, physical versus mental freedom, and complacent security versus insecure agitation for change. Its level of complexity in addressing each subject and interweaving them is on par with AMERICAN BEAUTY or one of Alan Moore’s better stories, so I’m certain that a fine parsing of the story could only add to the list. Discussion of a single issue would be all I could reasonably expect from a single work, but Kalesniko has included a meaningful exploration of each of the motifs in MAIL ORDER BRIDE. Even better, each theme is discussed in a mature, even-handed manner without adolescent moralizing. Even better than that, each theme is never brought above the meta level, so the reader won’t find the pages thrust full of oh-so-important symbols pregnant with meaning made redundantly clear with long, ridiculous exegeses inserted into the story via narrative captions or, saints preserve us, the dialogue. So that’s good.

The funny thing is, I have this feeling that Kalesniko didn’t intend for his work to be this complex. In my reading of MAIL ORDER BRIDE, it very much seemed that in Kalesniko’s mind everything was a little more cut and dried as he wrote, and that he felt that the story came down more or less on Kyung’s side rather than Monty’s. I won’t deny that she’s a more likeable character, but in a moral sense, the work is ambivalent. Neither right nor wrong is implied; only what occurred is recorded. Regardless of whether Kalesniko intended it, the work is brilliant.

I don’t like to make definite statements about comics unless the comics are definitely bad, and I don’t like most of what I read. That having been said, MAIL ORDER BRIDE is one of the finest single stories I’ve read, and I can recommend it without reservation.

About the reviewer: David Lamontagne is a freelance writer in Orlando. His web site is here.

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