Mail Order Bride (graphic novel)
**Mail Order Bride (Graphic Novel) Overview**
"Mail Order Bride" is a graphic novel by Mark Kalesniko that explores the complexities of relationships formed through cultural and personal expectations. The narrative follows Monty Wheeler, a socially awkward thirty-nine-year-old who yearns for companionship and believes that ordering a mail-order bride from Korea, Kyung Seo, will fulfill his fantasies of love and intimacy. However, upon her arrival, Monty quickly realizes that his idealized vision of Kyung does not align with the reality of her experiences and background. The story delves into themes of exploitation, cultural stereotyping, and the emotional struggles both characters face in navigating their identities and expectations within their marriage.
Artistically, the novel employs a minimalistic style with black sketchy lines and a symbolic cover design, emphasizing the emotional turmoil and fragility of the characters. Kalesniko's work does not offer a traditional resolution, instead leaving readers with a sense of melancholy as both Monty and Kyung grapple with their isolation and the challenges of forging a genuine connection amidst societal pressures. "Mail Order Bride" serves as a commentary on the pitfalls of commodifying relationships and the often unrealistic portrayals of cultural representations, making it a poignant exploration of modern love and identity.
Mail Order Bride (graphic novel)
AUTHOR: Kalesniko, Mark
ARTIST: Mark Kalesniko (illustrator); Paul Baresh (letterer); Dan Dean (letterer); Carrie Whitney (letterer)
PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books; Paquet Editions (French); Ponet Mon (Spanish); Poptoon (Korean)
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2001
Publication History
Before Mail Order Bride Mark Kalesniko had published several comic books and graphic novels, including “Adolf Hears a Who” (1991), published in Pictopia; S.O.S. (1992); six volumes of Alex (1994-1995); and Why Did Pete Duel Kill Himself (1997). Kalesniko began writing adult-themed comics after working for years as a character animator on the Walt Disney films Little Mermaid (1989), The Lion King (1994), Mulan (1998), and Atlantis (2001). Mail Order Bride was published in 2001 by Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books. It and his other books have been published in French. Mail Order Bride has also been published in Spanish.
Plot
A social misfit whose world includes toys, comic books, and fantasies, Monty Wheeler feels he is missing out on life because, at age thirty-nine, he has never experienced any kind of relationship with a woman. To substitute for a real person, he has engaged in sexual fantasies using his porn collection. These fantasies have been prompted by pictures and descriptions of Asian women. He becomes convinced that an Asian woman will fulfill him. In his dreams, she will be petite, beautiful, hardworking, submissive, and traditional.
Asian women, he discovers in his magazines, agree to come to Canada as mail-order brides and marry Canadian men who provide them with Canadian citizenship and a way to escape the limited prospects of their home countries. Thus, Monty orders a bride.
When he meets Kyung Seo at the airport, he is initially disappointed. She is taller than he had imagined; also, she does not embrace him joyously, as he had imagined she would. Kyung Seo is shy and frightened. Her fears are multiplied when she enters Monty’s home, which, like his store, is full of crazy toys and games. Those with outlandishly painted features are particularly designed to startle and intimidate. Every surface harbors a malevolent toy that often spontaneously runs amok and attacks. Monty enjoys the practical jokes of these toys.
Delighted with his new wife, he introduces her to his customers, young kids who quickly take advantage of her lack of selling experience, and his friends, who are all older than he. Monty also introduces Kyung to his family, a meeting that clearly reveals a source of Monty’s lack of confidence and inability to function with his own peer group.
After some frustrating months inhabiting Monty’s world, Kyung ventures out. She meets an Asian-Canadian woman, a photography student, who, with difficulty, persuades her to be her nude model in a series of photos employing the nude figure among huge pieces of industrial equipment. The show is a great success but greatly distresses Monty. Nevertheless, Kyung pursues the new friendships she is developing, especially with R. Frank, an artist and teacher who persuades her to pursue her intellectual interests and affirm her identity.
All these events push the couple apart as they struggle to maintain their own identities and salvage a relationship, for they do need each other. The story ends indecisively. Neither seems willing or able to sacrifice for the marriage, and both have many reasons to feel lost and alone.
Characters
•Monty Wheeler is a self-described geek who is a distributor of comic books, games, and toys and a collector of old toys, games, lunch boxes, and Asian-women themed porn magazines. He orders a Korean bride, whom he expects will fulfill his sexual fantasies and provide friendship and comfort.
•Kyung Seo is a mail-order bride from Korea who, though expected to fulfill her new husband’s dreams and fantasies, has her own ideas about what life in Canada will be like and hopes to affirm her identity.
•Mr. Wheeler is Monty’s father. His dominating and berating attitude and words to Monty, even after the latter has developed his own business, furnished his own home, and acquired a wife, do much to explain Monty’s difficulties with personal relationships.
•Eve Wong is an Asian-Canadian student photographer who befriends Kyung. She encourages her to develop and assert her identity, even though her own goal of marriage is exactly the opposite of what she proposes for Kyung.
•R. Frank is an art-history teacher and painter who befriends Kyung, encourages her to explore her intellectual curiosity, and motivates her to discover her artistic talent.
Artistic Style
Color is used for the cover only. The cover features a symbolic, abstract design, which summarizes the themes of the novel. Big pink shapes, suggestive of the thighs of Henri Matisse’s voluptuous pink bathers, ensnare the small head of an Asian woman, almost smothering it. Her small head—with intense, desperate eyes and pursed lips—and stiff, tense, outstretched hand, colored in pea green, convey the conflict of the story.
The rest of the novel uses black, sketchy, thin lines to depict the fragility of the characters, with frequent panels of black or panels of speckled black-and-white color, looking like the screen of an inoperative television channel. Black conveys strong emotions—anger, frustration, and passion. Simple as the lines describing characters are, they clearly depict the conflict, exasperation, and melancholy the characters experience and express in the text balloons.
The first several pages present a visual summary of the conflict. Next are the explicit pictures of naked Asian women, women of the pornographic magazines, that prompt Monty to order a bride. These pictures depict an Asian bride as erotic and exotic but also traditional and hardworking.
The next panels are black, reflecting Monty’s angry mood from interacting with his bride. The next series present Kyung in nude pictures, but ones very different from those Monty admired. These are of her female form set against large industrial machines. They represent her artistic inclinations and her need for self-realization.
Kalesniko juxtaposes symbolic and realistic shapes and pictures. Some real shapes veer into abstraction, such as the menacing toys and the artistic sets Kyung imagines. This dissonance expresses the novel’s theme.
Themes
Mail Order Bride explores the issues that arise when someone orders a life partner from another culture through the mail. Monty envisions the product he is ordering will be similar to the description and the picture presented, but mostly to his own specific needs. Ordering a bride seems to indicate a lack of self-confidence. Seemingly, Monty has been unsuccessful in interacting with his peer group. The bride is subject to exploitation. She is understood to be someone risking personal safety and self-determination for another chance at life. The story presents two needy people who place their lives in each other’s hands.
The text also explores the theme of the ways people are limited in their abilities to interact normally and positively in society. Monty’s family thwarts his social and emotional development. Kyung’s circumstances, which she refuses to reveal, demonstrate another variation of societal rejection. Her social position in Korea precludes any opportunity to improve her life and limits her choices so completely that offering herself for sexual exploitation seems to her a positive move.
The story also demonstrates cultural stereotyping. Based on his reading of porn magazines, Monty makes assumptions about Asian women. He imagines every Asian woman will have the qualities of the Asian women in his magazines. Similarly, Kyung expects all Canadians to be like the pictures presented in the media. Neither accepts the other’s expectations, yet both must make concessions with each other in the relationship and within themselves in return for an added sense of security that is in essence nothing more than a different form of the loneliness each had experienced before they met.
Kalesniko’s interest lies in presenting the complexity of life, one that does not result in the traditional resolution of plot. His works end in a sense of melancholy that does not suggest character epiphany. Monty orders a bride he expects to please him. Instead, his bride is not a commodity but a real person.
The graphics of this novel do more than simply support the story line. The images add meaning allegorically, symbolically, and self-referentially. For example, Kalesniko juxtaposes different images of the nude form. He contrasts the titillating pictures of Asian women in pornographic magazines that inform Monty’s fantasies with the nude photos for which Kyung poses, in which she is surrounded by industrial equipment. The former represent Monty’s obsessions, fantasies, and his consideration of Kyung as a commodity. The industrial nudes represent, on one level, Kyung’s efforts to attain self-realization through art. Nonetheless, both forms objectify women in a general sense and Kyung in particular. Kyung’s longing to be a free spirit is represented allegorically by her fantasy of the nude woman dancing in front of the oddly dark, conservative cheerleaders. In these images, she simultaneously sees herself as dancer and cheerleader as well as the photographer who captures this mysteriously complex image.
Mail Order Bride also explores the issues of trauma and poor socialization. Situation, word, and evocative picture depict Monty’s and Kyung’s struggles and their inability to cope or adapt. The book’s themes include isolation, disappointment, separation, and the quest for self-discovery.
Impact
Mail Order Bride, a nominee for the 2001 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection, extends a subgenre of graphic novels and comics dating to the Tijuana bibles and, later, to Robert Crumb’s hero of My Troubles with Women (1992). Crumb’s series simultaneously describes and satirizes the lustful, repressed male. Kalesniko’s male is not satirized, but he is suffering in many ways. Male Order Bride is also akin to Posy Simmond’s novel Gemma Bovery (2000), which presents the female sexual fantasy. Even while Kalesniko utilizes the passionate-lover tradition of comics and graphic novels, he continues to express his own intent. In Mail Order Bride, symbolism, allegory, and dramatic situations rendered by graphic art and dramatic structure do not affirm growth and renewal; rather, they serve to define the human condition as one of confusion and frustration.
Further Reading
Katchor, Ben. The Jew of New York (2001).
Simmonds, Posy. Gemma Bovery (2005).
Tomine, Adrian. Summer Blonde (2009).
Bibliography
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling. Paramus, N.J.: Poorhouse Press, 2006.
Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: Collins Design, 2006.
Paparone, Lesley. “Art and Identity in Mark Kalesniko’s Mail Order Bride.” MELUS 32, no. 3 (Fall, 2007): 201-220.
Zaleski, Jeff. “Mail Order Bride.” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 22 (May 28, 2001): 51.