“This book, for me, is a great example of a book that does a really good thing, has great motives and intent, and brings a different set of characters than the typical to readers. These are all great things. What’s unfortunate is that the book is not all that good.
I’d compare it to food. Food can be delicious garbage, like the entire bag of Hint of Lime tortilla chips I ate the other night. That provided no nutritional value and gave me a stomach ache. But it was worth it. And I’ll do it again. Count on it.
Food can also be raw kale. Nutritious, good for you, but there’s no fun in eating it. Is it just me, or is someone sharpening kale? Why is it so sharp?
The real goal is for food to be in the middle. It’s not always both, but the best meals taste good and make you feel good. They do a good thing, and they do it in a pleasing way.
Bingo Love goes in the kale bucket for me. Does a good thing, has what’s probably a necessary message, but I didn’t take a lot of joy in the consumption.
I’ll talk about why it’s in the kale bucket because I think it’s important to do so. I don’t want to bash on the book, but I feel it’s relevant to talk about why I wouldn’t recommend this book to other people, and it has nothing to do with the race, gender, sexuality, or other parts of this book. It’s storytelling. Please don’t read this as angry ranting. I’m not angry about Bingo Love. I don’t think this book was a colossal waste of time. And I just want to say that if you loved it, more power to you. I don’t think you’re stupid or wrong for liking it. I’m not saying these things because I want to change your mind or prove that I’m more right in my opinion. It’s a subjective opinion on a subjective work.
The narration takes a medium with lots of options for showing and turns it into a telling medium. A good example, the two girls meet at school and go have a hot chocolate together. But I don’t get that dialogue during the hot chocolate, the time when they really got to know each other and fell in love. Instead, we go into narration/voiceover: “And that’s how our friendship was born.” We skipped over the part I wanted to see, which is how the friendship was born, what they talked about, how it all went down. This was a huge opportunity to show readers who these people are and why they love each other, but what I get instead is a character telling me how they felt.
The beauty of comics is that you have visuals and writing, dialog and narration. You have a lot of tools, but they have to be used. The art in this book (though clear and stylistic) doesn’t give me additional information. It gives me a literal interpretation of the narration. The exception being the montage/splash pages, which give me visuals that really enhance the storytelling.
Which kind of leads into the main problem: I really don’t get to know these characters at all. I’m told they love each other. I know they are people of color. I know they are growing up in a conservative era/geography/family situation. But what do they like? What music do they listen to as teenagers? What do they talk about? What do they think is funny? Are they stay in on New Year’s people or go out on New Year’s people?
It’s possible to pull off a story where two people fall in love in high school, reunite something like 50 years later and pick up where they left off, but I think I need a little more. A lot of folks will probably read this and say there’s a problem with lack of character progression. Because who of us is the same 50 years later? But I don’t think the problem is with progression. I think the problem is that we don’t get enough character in the first place, so we can’t really see a change. Seal up a jar of air, bury it for 50 years, dig it back up…it looks and feels like the same jar of air. The jar itself ages, the vessel displays outward change, but the contents, the most interesting part in the case of character, appears unchanged.
I think a lot of folks will also feel that it’s sort of unbelievable that two people who were in love would so quickly fall back in love 50 years later. I disagree with that. The problem is not the unbelievability of the story because, hey, stories can be unbelievable. That can be what makes them remarkable and worth telling. I think the problem is in character. When there’s no real character to hold onto, it’s equally believable and unbelievable that they would be the same in 50 years.
Love stories suffer pretty hard when there’s a lack of character. A reader has to see what someone sees in the other person. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need to love either character. I don’t need to be like, “Yes, I would feel the same way.” I just need to understand what it is that Person A loves about Person B. I have to understand what it is Person A wants and needs. My all-time favorite writer, Tom Spanbauer, has an element of gay romance in all of his work. It’s usually the focus. I’m not necessarily turned on by the characters or the sex in his books, and sometimes the characters make BAD relationship choices, but because his books have characters, I 100% understand what is fulfilling about the relationships for those characters. I understand why a given relationship exists. Even if it’s just a hook-up, I know the characters well enough to understand what they want, what they need, and whether they’re doing something out of love, lust, self-destruction, wild abandon, foolishness, youth, sorrow, lifelong intimacy, following a pattern, ultimate discovery of authentic self, or any number of other things.
The dialog is also…bad. I wanted to use a gentler word, but it’s bad. Characters say exactly what they’re thinking all the time. The dialog ping pongs, call and response, which is not how people talk to each other.
Dialog can be such a powerful tool when it’s used in interesting ways. An example:
I was in a workshop where someone brought in a story about these two 20-something guys. Guy A was totally in love with Guy B. Guy B was not in love with Guy A.
Guy B serves Guy A some pizza. We’re told in the narration that the pizza tastes horrible, like feet, and Guy A puts it down and stops eating.
The workshop suggestion was just a little tweak: Instead of having Guy A put down the pizza, what if he took a GIANT bite and said something completely untrue? Something like, “This is really great pizza.” What if Guy A started hog-facing that pizza in a quest to demonstrate something to Guy B? Readers would know that Guy A is lying because he’s in love with Guy B. He’s willing to completely lie about horrible pizza because he’s so unwilling to criticize Guy B. Something so small can tell us so much about Guy A. Dialog that is something other than characters saying exactly what they’re thinking is huge. Action and dialog that aren’t giving us the same messages can be so, so powerful.
Last, the whole thing just felt kind of disjointed and odd to me. Take these panels:
Why is everyone laughing? Did Mari say something funny? Why is the whole class in stitches? I don’t get it. I read this page over and over because I thought maybe there was stuff I was missing.
This is just one moment, but there are a number of moments that feel like this in the book.
Maybe it’s the pacing. The pacing seems odd. We dwell in odd spots and speed through others. I have to wonder if the length wasn’t really right for telling 70+ years of story.
Oh, one more thing: there are two spots in the book where we’re referred to other stories. One to find out what happened with James, Elle’s husband, in Vietnam. Apparently he’s got some big secret. Based on the single panel of James in Vietnam, a panel in which he shares a sly glance with another soldier, I would bet $10 to the first person who takes me up on this that combat wasn’t the only action James saw in the Nam. There’s a second spot that refers to another Bingo Love book which shows us more of the couple’s eventual honeymoon. The honeymoon one was fine. It was cute, sort of like how comics will be like, “You remember when Thor was a frog, right? Ish #364 -Smilin’ Stan.” I can dig it. But the James stuff, having what seems to be a pretty crucial part of the story in another book, didn’t work for me. That felt like marketing nonsense. I’m having none of that, thank you. “