Lizard Boy 2 (i)
from Jonathan Hill and Walker Books US, colored by Allie Drake
Lizard Boy 2 is out! That is, in my mail last week.
Walker Books US of the Candlewick Press in Somerville, Massachusetts, bedroom community of Harvard and Lesley universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has birthed a twin to the first novel.
Both measure exactly 6, by 8 and 1 half, by 11 sixteenths inches. The twins are not quite identical.
Similar colors, but 2 different colorists. Similar story, still in middle school, with nearly all the same crypto-zoological young people, but a different drama.
You could call the first Lizard Boy a tragedy even though it ends happily, because the story shows the protagonist achieving insight. He learns to accept himself.
This second Lizard Boy is a comedy, often funny, but always comedic, with a couple dozen dramatis personae struggling to establish a moral order. An abandoned theater full of crypto-zoological families and 1 robot from the future learn to accept each other as their world turns upside down.
Then together they right it. Read together, the series of 2 novels so far is tragicomic art, what do you know, from a comics artist.
3 Viet Nam letters have addressed Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy. That first tale in this series of 2 is fraught, a first novel full of the author’s life to date in its own dream logic. I unpacked what I know of that life and logic in the first and second Viet Nam letters on the book.
Both tales of the Lizard Boy show a moral quality that is more stern than I expect from a fiction promoting pride and tolerance in our brave new world of many origins. I take it that Eagle Valley lies in the hinterlands of Jonathan Hill’s Portland, Oregon.
I recall that Yankees settled Oregon free of black Americans, while driving out the incumbents as they had from New England then barring the rest of the Pacific Rim. That refugees from the Cold War and then the terror wars have now in their turn settled that state once again at long last in an inclusive manner is good news.
From North Carolina, I wonder if that news is aspirational. A story for children in the sense of Walt and Roy Disney, rather than Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
From Viet Nam, I am convinced instead by a sense of bravery and proper relations both in the tragic and the comic Lizard Boy that the author and I each attribute to his uncle Phuc, an author himself as well as a character in the comic books, under the name Dung.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.