LIMINOWL

Concepts for a new commission—because I wanted to post something less bloody and more cheery right before my sappy graduation post.

Look at me! So fancy. “Commission nbd”

“Betrayal hurts. But not as much as this is going to.”

“No, p-please…no, not my EYE!”

(Source: liminowl)

Black Widow by ~liminowl

Second in a pair of late-night doodles. Too lazy to draw explosions in the background, drew neon craziness instead

I know I don’t look like the girl on the right but whatever, I just really like that one.

brownanon:

Graphic artist Gia-Bao (GB) Tran’s graphic memoir Vietnamerica tells the story of his family’s escape and survival during the Vietnam war, and their struggle as refugees in the United States. A past Colorlines contributing artist, GB recounts his family’s story as he travels back to Vietnam to attend his grandparents’ funerals. It’s a remarkable telling of an immigrant experience through visual storytelling. Below are some excerpts from the 288-page full color book.

Never have I read a work of Vietnamese-American literature that resonated with me so much, and this time it happens to be a graphic novel. GB Tran is in the same generation as I am in terms of immigration-generations—his parents came to America and he was born here, just like me. The main difference between his family and mine is that his parents escaped before the fall of Saigon, in April 1975.

My parents did not.

Tran has encapsulated the pain and suffering of the war’s aftermath in a way I can finally understand. My parents have tried to explain to me how much luckier the people who left before 1975 were, how much things really got worse after that April. I have tried to understand, but I guess hearing it explained by another American-born Vietnamese really did it for me. What’s even more amazing is that Tran learned about these truths from family friends and distant relatives—me, I heard about it from my parents. So the fact that Tran was able to comprehend and then to illustrate all of this in heart-breaking works of art is even more remarkable.

In subtle ways, Tran also addresses how difficult it is to be an American-born Vietnamese, how we have to work hard to fit in an American society as well as try to make sense of our rich cultural history and our parents’ sacrifices. His skillful retelling of his grandparents’ lives has also inspired me to chronicle my parents’ stories and of their own lives and those of their parents (and maybe even ancestors) like no other Asian-American lit piece has. His stories are, like Maus and Blankets, brutally honest. If I have one criticism about this book, it’s that sometimes it’s hard to tell who the narrative is currently focused on—the maternal or paternal grandmother, for instance—but this is a trifle. It’s a good book, and I sincerely wish that it was required reading in American History classes.

The view of the Vietnam War in American History classes is always the same. And it’s always radically different from how my parents experienced it. It’s painted as a power trip, a futile exercise in American assertion of western ideals, a waste of countless American lives and absolutely nothing more. A lot of Vietnamese see it has Americans fighting to help liberate a nation of people being oppressed by corruption, evil, and Communism—and that the American war efforts were a godsend. It’s an opinion, a perspective that…kinda matters, considering it’s called the Vietnam War, but it’s never taught in schools.

But hey, what do we know?

*sarcasm*

This one’s old but whatever- I need to save my blog from falling any further