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Aya Buy on Amazon.com

A group of teenage girls lie to their parents to go out dancing. They worry over schoolwork and what they’re going to do with their lives. They get into trouble and face consequences of their actions.

This probably sounds like a story you’ve read. And Aya (Drawn and Quarterly, 2007) does tread familiar ground in that respect.

Except for one key thing: It takes place in the Ivory Coast in 1978.

Writer Marguerite Abouet has a clear voice about the time and place she’s writing about. She had a light touch when it comes to the stories of the title character Aya and her friends, Adjoua and Bintou, but she doesn’t shy away from presenting these girls’ reality — one that was full of class divisions and sexism.

Artist Clement Oubrerie is well-matched to Abouet’s style. His art is breezy in its suggestion of movement and his eye for posture and facial features go a long way to suggest the personalities of these characters.

In their hands, these young women are strong, even when they face adversity and the effects of their behavior (I like that while there are repercussions, the girls aren’t punished for being who they are — at least not any more than the men involved). They still have people to answer to, sure, but they are their own people, even given the constraints of the society they lived in.

Still, the story is ultimately simple, and as enjoyable as the work of Abouet and Oubrerie is, this volume doesn’t amount to much. It’s a lovely glimpse into these lives in this time and place, but it didn’t exactly linger too long. Still, I wouldn’t mind reading more about Aya and her life, so they did something right here.

When I repacked my stuff today, I forgot to pack a pen. I have at least seven pens in my possession while I’m here, but did any of them make it into my backpack this morning? Nope. So I wasn’t able to take notes during this, so it’ll be from my memory (and I’ve seem to already forgotten a lot of it. Sigh.)

Comic book people probably are most familiar with Jillian Tamaki because of the graphic novel Skim that she did with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, but she’s an accomplished illustrator and comic creator on her own too. She has a recent collection out from Drawn and Quarterly called Inside Voice.

She started her talk with a slideshow of a lot of her illustrations. She talked about what she likes to do (more interpretive illustrations for science articles) and what she doesn’t (images of celebrities, mostly because she doesn’t think she’s great at likenesses). It was a fun glimpse into her process and I love people who are able to be creative for their job.

She then talked about comics and showed how she put together Skim. Mariko had given her a script but didn’t break it down panel by panel, so she had a lot of freedom to do what she wanted. She sketched it out in thumbnail form first and even put together a little book of her thumbnails to check on transitions and things like that. Since it was a pretty intense process and she didn’t have long to do it, she made jokes about being “unwashed” for a couple of weeks.

After her slideshow, Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot asked questions. She said it wasn’t bad collaborating with her cousin because they didn’t actually know each other very well at the point they started (they do now, however). She said Inside Voice was sort of born out of her sketch blog, which she started as a creative outlet. While she loves illustrating and feels like she can put a lot of herself in it, it’s to some art director’s whims. It allows her to do what she wants.

Both she and Nakamura discussed the process of getting started for young illustrators (basically, work for free. OK, that wasn’t so much the point, but they both agreed that sometimes it’s good to be out there even if you’re not getting paid). Tamaki also said she sees a disconnect between the illustration world and the comics world. When she goes to illustration cons, they know her for that and don’t know she does comics. At events like Comic-Con, it’s the other way around.

She was delightful and said many other things that have fallen out of my brain. So yes, I should go try to find a pen somewhere so this doesn’t happen again.