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The gripping graphic novel shows that people are more complex than others imagine them to be
\n\n\n\nThis gripping graphic novel centres around a character called Lucy, but it’s also about people being more complex than others imagine them to be. Everybody calls Lucy by her childhood nickname, ‘Cannon’. Cannon appears calm, composed and dependable: she cares for her Gung Gung (grandpa), whom her mother can’t bear to look after. She covers for her colleagues. She cooks for her friends. ‘You don’t seem like a loose cannon to me,’ says Charlotte, Lucy’s newest coworker and brief romantic interest, upon learning the nickname’s origin.
\n\n\n\nYet under the surface, she is bottling up a whole bunch of feelings. Some deeply rooted and complex, about her struggles as a young, queer Asian woman living in Montreal and her relationship with her family, tainted by histories of abuse. Others more superficial, about the daily annoyances that pile on and slowly erode her resilience: being talked over, not listened to or cancelled on. Until, at the story’s climax, she finally lets loose, breaks a couple of plates and frees herself from the identity into which she is immured as a result of her relationships with everyone else.
\n\n\n\nIn the main, these relations are the product of supposition and guesswork. Throughout the narrative, all the characters are preoccupied with what they think other people think. Cannon’s friend Trish is obsessed with scrolling through her own social-media feed to imagine how her ex-girlfriend perceives her, meanwhile she is sleeping with a guy because she assumes (because he is a man) he isn’t looking for an emotional connection. While her friends (and her doctor) catch the occasional glimpse that something’s off with Cannon, we can see the building tension throughout undergirded by the calming tempo of Cannon’s meditation app constantly telling her to ‘inhale… exhale’ and illustrations of cooking closeups accompanied by onomatopoeias: ‘sss, ‘shk’, ‘sploosh’. But these recurring moments of serenity are increasingly useless as Cannon’s personal and professional life unravel. Speech bubbles, usually in English but sometimes in French or Cantonese, overlap and disappear beyond the limits of the frame. Isolated red frames cut through Lee Lai’s black-and-white strip, initially denoting gory scenes from the horror movies before gradually coinciding with the sharp outbursts of Cannon’s stress. By the time we witness the ultimate breakdown, we already know it will be the truest form of catharsis.
\n\n\n\nCannon by Lee Lai. Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 (hardcover)
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