Potential Ariel Schrag (Riverhead Books)
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Ariel Schrag’s comics are autobiographical, but they don’t belong in the highbrow tradition of literary memoir. Her three major books—Awkward, Definition, and Potential—each chronicle a year of her high school experience in Berkeley, but they don’t do the look-back-in-sorrowful-wisdom thing; instead, they’re more like on-the-scene reports. Potential, which covers her junior year, was recently republished by Touchstone Books as a trade paperback (the first two came out earlier this year in one edition, and Likewise, about her senior year, comes out this fall).
Written while Schrag was still an adolescent, Potential seems pitched more toward her peer group than the New York Times editorial board. It doesn’t have the purple rhetorical flourishes of Fun Home or the pomo magical realist tics of Maus. Its focus is the nonhighbrow subject of teen-girl angst.
Though there’s clearly a lot to be freaked out about, Schrag manages to present it with remarkable, almost clinical balance. She doesn’t use a nostalgic narrative voice to frame the events (like Bechdel’s in Fun Home), so she avoids the kinds of judgment and self-pity that often define memoir. Sally can definitely be cruel—when she doesn’t want to have sex, for example, she just shouts “Stop!” as if Ariel is some kind of recalcitrant puppy rather than her girlfriend. And it would be easy to see her as the bad guy. But Schrag doesn’t ask us to. Instead, we understand Sally’s ambivalence. When she breaks up with Ariel, she tells her, “I just can’t deal with feeling like I have to be a certain way.”
See OurChart.com for a video comic of chapter four of Potential, debuting June 20.
