256 pgs. color | $24.99 hardcover | W: FLuX and David Good; A: FLuX
Even in a population of over 335 million, I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find another American whose life story matches that of David Good. In the 1970s, his anthropologist father Kenneth Good traveled to the Amazon rainforest to study the Yanomami tribe, who were noted for maintaining a traditional way of life and living in harmony with their surroundings. Entranced by their culture, Kenneth Good married a Yanomami woman named Yarima and brought her back to the United States, where they had a son: David.
For the first five years of his life, David and his parents regularly traveled between the United States and the Amazon, where he enjoyed complete acceptance from the Yanomami. Then, after the birth of her second child, his mother remained with her Yanomami family for an extended period, and ultimately decided to stay with them rather than return to America. After hoping for a few years that she would rejoin them, David realized that was not going to happen, and reacted by creating an origin story for himself like those of the comics superheroes he loved. In this fictional version of his life, David was an all-American kid whose mother died in a car accident.
You can only fool yourself for so long and David’s anger finally boiled over in an incident in which he stole his father’s car and drove it to Florida, where he lived at loose ends for six months. That’s quite a journey for a kid in high school, and after returning home he began living a double life—outstanding student and star baseball player by day, washout drunk by night. Eventually he decided to reconnect with his Yanomami half, reading about the tribe and then traveling to the Amazon to visit his mother, a feat he manages with the help of an anthropologist named Hortensia.
There’s more than a little fairy-tale vibe in Good: From the Amazon Jungle to Suburbia and Back, which contrasts David’s unhappy life in America with the idyllic existence of the Yanomami. This approach to storytelling makes the abrupt conclusion more palatable (Happy ending! Everyone’s healed!) and also explains why some of the grimmer aspects of Yarima’s life and less palatable aspects of Yanomami culture are omitted. While the threats posed to the Yanomami by gold mining and logging are mentioned, the role played by anthropologists in colonization is largely left unexamined, as are the inherently unequal power relations between white scientists and the tribes they study.
Authors always make choices about what to include and what to omit, and the story told in Good has more than enough in it to make it worth your while. Intriguing as David’s story is, however, it’s FLuX’s art that really sells this volume. David’s life in America is told through conventionally framed black and white panels drawn in a realistic style with conventional speech balloons and narrative panels, a style also used when conveying general facts about the Yanomami. The sequences set among the Yanomami, by way of contrast, are exuberantly colorful, largely wordless, and make use of what in the film business is called extreme closeup, where the focus of attention, whether it is a face or a bird or a basket of wood, is so large it can’t entirely fit into the frame. The result is a sort of whiplash as you are repeatedly transported from a grim and colorless existence in America to be plunged into the lush tropical jungle, then taken back to America again. The two styles come together as David begins to reconcile the two halves of himself, a nice example of a character’s inner journey being reflected in the artist’s choices. | Sarah Boslaugh
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