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Temper, Temper: A Graphic Novel

by Sonja Ahlers

Sonja Ahlers’ debut is billed as a graphic novel, but this fails to convey the book’s inventiveness and acuity. Temper, Temper is really an old-fashioned illustrated diary, though instead of the pressed flowers and careful penmanship of yearning Edwardian girls, there are the descending scrawls and photocopied collages of a suburban 1990s nightmare babe.

Ahlers paints an entirely convincing portrait of a typical 20-something’s wild years, and does so with pen and ink drawings, Xeroxes, and a whole teen bedroom’s worth of ephemera – old letters and snapshots, fragments of ads, bits of conversation and song lyrics, and dots, scratches, and patterns. Like DJs, and bricoleurs, Ahlers knows that the best revenge of a mixed-up kid is to mix things up even further.

The 144 pages add up to a sort of extended visual riff, like a pop tune for the eyes. There are doe-eyed girls tumbling through the stars, extracts from manuals and commercial packaging, mascara wands, and sad, slumped plush bunnies, with text skittering underneath: “She is mobbed wherever she goes,” or “I don’t want you under my tongue.” Occasionally there’s just text “we’d go up to her bedroom, take Valium, and go to the liquor store in our pajamas,” and sometimes just a lone photograph of a chubby kid from someone’s family album. Ahlers’ obsessions keep the book from spinning off into incomprehensibility: there’s a long-running thread about how awful her hair is, and a strong sense of being caught between saying nothing – “I don’t wanna talk about it” – and saying everything – “I changed my mind.”

Ahlers has a knack for isolating the flying fragments of everyday culture and transforming them into something more weighty: the references to the Hughes-Plath marriage, for example, are effectively chilling, as are the oblique comments on lost and damaged kids: “I cry when I find him and he’s all pale in that ravine.” There are obvious themes to note in Temper, Temper – Ahlers’ anger (feminist and otherwise) at waste and injustice, and her skill at alluding to the mob of anxieties surrounding your average teenage body and mind – but her eloquence is more poetic than sociological, and her inky thoughts stick in the memory.

 

Reviewer: Adair Brouwer

Publisher: Insomniac

DETAILS

Price: $18.99

Page Count: 144 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-895837-23-5

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1998-11

Categories: Fiction: Novels