cover image Invincible Days

Invincible Days

Patrick Atangan. NBM Publishing, $19.99 (128p) ISBN 978-1-56163-901-4

Following several books lavishly illustrating folktales, Atangan returns with an elegiac, episodic tale about childhood memories—mostly his own, but, in some cases, his friends’. Each tale centers around a different stuffed animal, even though several represent the same character—an unsettling technique made even more uncanny by the decision to represent secondary characters with empty walkers, wheelchairs, and hospital beds. The panel layouts are static and the characters hardly move; they’re generally positioned in the center of each panel. The effect is to ritualize the stories, which mostly deal with pets, toys, and perceptions of life seen through a child’s eyes. The nostalgia can go to beautiful places, and some of the stories are funny and weird, such as one girl’s tale about moving to America and thinking that pizza was mouse vomit. The most developed and moving episode in the book is about the deterioration and death of Atangan’s grandmother, though the conclusions he comes to about death are not particularly novel. While many of the stories here are familiar, the unusual presentation forces readers to take a step back from their universality. (Sept.)