Jessica Abel's La Perdida takes the "novel" part of "graphic novel" more seriously than most. It feels hefty, meaningful, novelistic, and not just because of its actual pagecount. As a high-stakes coming-of-age story set among young, politically idealistic but ethically challenged expatriates, it reminds me of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (albeit with more cocaine and less cabaret). Granted, Isherwood's Communist (and fellow-travelling) characters lived closer to the bone: their wished-for, gabbed-about, imaginary revolution felt more real -- because it was actually starting to happen in other nearby countries, maybe, and because Germany, the setting for Isherwood's book, was in the process of turning itself into Hitler's Third Reich at that very historical moment, in part due to middle-class panic induced by the rise of chattering, well-off expatriate intellectuals purporting to be the vangard of a Soviet-style revolution while gobbling canapes and guzzling fancy cocktails. As in Isherwood's turn-of-the-century Germany, the politics in La Perdida's turn-of-the-millennium Mexico come across as dangerous, deceiving poses. For example, Abel's self-professed Communist agitator, a balding lounge lizard named Memo, uses his presumed moral superiority as a weapon against (primarily) women: self-righteous political outrage as pick-up line. When he does act upon his "convictions," it is in a deeply nasty, pathetically opportunistic way. That he is able to justify a simple grab for money with high-sounding rhetoric is entirely believable, and handled very well, and very subtly, by Abel, making him more interesting than he might have been in any other graphic novel, but, all the same, we feel nothing but contempt for him. He is abhorrent. We never understand what the other characters see in him -- and we never understand what he sees in the other characters, either, by the way. There's not a winner in the bunch ... read more