Night Fisher

AUTHOR: Johnson, R. Kikuo

ARTIST: R. Kikuo Johnson (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2005

Publication History

R. Kikuo Johnson created his first graphic novel, Night Fisher, over the course of three years while he was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design where he was a student of cartoonist David Mazzucchelli. Fantagraphics Books bought the completed Night Fisher a year after Johnson finished his program, and the book was received exceptionally well by critics. Johnson was hailed as the “next big thing” in graphic novels. Since then, Johnson has worked as an illustrator, has produced several shorter pieces of comics in various styles, and has published in a variety of venues. Johnson’s second graphic novel, The Shark King, was published in 2012.

Plot

At the heart of Night Fisher is a simple story line with a few short flashbacks that fill in earlier events to help readers understand Loren Foster, the main character. Night Fisher has an open ending: Loren is in the middle of a field with little indication of what he will do next. In the context of the realistic story, this ending makes sense from the viewpoint that as in life there are many moments when one’s next step is unclear.

The narrative follows Loren for a period of several weeks during his senior year at Winthorpe, an expensive private school on Maui. He has heard rumors that his longtime friend Shane is doing drugs. Indeed, when Shane calls him one night, they go to score methamphetamine, or batu, as it is known in Hawaiian slang, and hang out with Jon, a local drug dealer, and a boy called Eustace. Later, the group gets Loren to drive as they steal tires from garages.

Loren had already been losing interest in schoolwork, and it becomes even less of a priority as he spends more time with Shane and buys batu with him several times a week. Jem, another classmate at school and the school’s marijuana dealer, gets expelled for stealing two electronic scales from the chemistry lab. That evening Eustace tells Loren it was actually Shane who stole the scales; he used the money he earned from selling them to buy methamphetamine.

Loren borrows his father’s truck, and Jon and Shane take him to steal supplies and a generator from a building site. On their way back, they get pulled over by the police. The police discover the generator in the back of Loren’s father’s truck, and the group gets taken to the police station.

After Loren has been processed at the station, he is picked up by his father, who is disappointed in his son, and expresses his belief that the years of tuition have been a waste. Loren insists that is not the case. Back at school, Loren reads in a school announcement that Shane has been accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Loren tries to congratulate Shane during a cross-country run, Shane avoids him and says that it is better if they do not talk, at least until their court date is set. Loren trips and falls in the grass. As everyone in the race passes him, he stays behind, staring into the sky as the grass covers him.

Characters

•Loren Foster is a straight-A high school senior at an elite private school on Maui, where he has been living for six years. He is 6 feet tall and 140 pounds. He wears glasses, which Johnson often draws without any eyes behind them, giving Loren an inscrutable look. It seems Loren has grown tired of his squeaky-clean reputation, or perhaps he is having trouble dealing with the pressure of keeping his perfect grade-point average and deciding what he wants to do after graduation; it seems he deliberately looks for trouble when he connects with Shane again.

•Shane Hokama is Loren’s longtime friend, but over the previous year, he and Loren have grown apart. Shane and Loren used to go night fishing regularly, but lately, Shane has spent his nights doing drugs and stealing from building sites and his school. He phones Loren unexpectedly, likely because Loren owns a vehicle. He always wears a ball cap and sets it backward on his.

•Loren’s Father is a dentist with a beard and glasses. He moved to Maui to open a dentistry clinic, “Miles of Smiles.” Since its opening, the clinic has lost business and though Loren’s father works six days week, he struggles to pay his mortgage and other bills. He has not shared his problems with Loren, but money worries may explain why he puts so much pressure on Loren to excel at school.

Artistic Style

Night Fisher is illustrated in fairly rough brush strokes, with large swatches of black, but the lines can be remarkably fine and subtle when necessary. The lettering of the book is done in the same brush stroke, creating a unity to the look of the entire page. Though Johnson uses a realistic style throughout, he often inserts expressionistic elements, such as bees by Loren’s ears to show the effects of the drugs he has just taken or the image of a dead rat to indicate Loren’s mental association when a man at a crack house suddenly falls off his seat. Johnson applies many traditional comics devices, such as overlapping text balloons to indicate interruptions or illegible text balloons to show speech that cannot quite be understood. Many of these tropes tend to be used predominately in “cartoony” comics, so they make for an interesting contrast with Johnson’s realistic imagery.

Night Fisher creates a new visual vocabulary through the juxtaposition of images from different sources and registers. For example, Johnson inserts textbook illustrations, maps, and graphs often in contrast to the narrative panels. Such images work to show Loren’s state of mind: He is a high school student who uses what he has learned at school to understand the real world, but his preoccupation with learning, as a student under pressure, also makes him emotionally distant. This is exemplified by the ironic contrast between smiling faces on a dentist’s office poster and the tense atmosphere between Loren and his father after Loren’s arrest.

Even though Night Fisher is realistic, its cover is slightly surreal, showing, in stark black relief, a man standing on a cliff high above the ocean, holding a line that leads into the water. The scale is off in the image; the man and the line are too large in comparison to the detailed foliage, which in turn contrasts with the cartoon waves of the blue water. The cover seems to emphasize Loren’s dream life, which appears only minimally in the narrative and which Loren seems to want to suppress.

Themes

One of the main themes that Johnson explores is nature versus culture. Before the main character is introduced, the book opens with maps showing the geological formation of the island of Maui. This creates a contrast between the millennia-long history of the island and Loren’s brief time there. Loren sits through classes about the native plant and animal species of the islands, and then he recognizes many of the plants covered in class at a local market. Maui’s vegetation is constantly changing, as endemic species of plants and animals are threatened by species more recently introduced from elsewhere. As a recent arrival to the island himself, Loren takes these lessons personally. He still feels like an outsider, perhaps even an unwelcome one, and his struggle to make a place for himself on the island is represented in the fight he and his father wage against their lawn, which is under threat to be taken over by the “weeds” that grew there originally.

A second theme that runs through Night Fisher is teen angst, as Loren is shown trying to cope in various ways with the pressures of being a high-achieving high school senior and an outsider. In order to gain popularity, he has spread rumors about engaging in sexual activities with Lacey, a friend and romantic interest, which ultimately ruins their friendship. He allows himself be dragged into a nocturnal life of drugs and petty theft to reconnect with his best friend, Shane. The result is additional stress as his grades slide and his father’s obvious disappointment pains him. By the end of the graphic novel, it is unclear whether Loren will pull himself together or whether his fall during the cross-country run foreshadows complete disengagement from school and home life.

Impact

Johnson was born and raised on the island of Maui, and his familiarity with the setting is obvious through his drawings and imagery. The emotional turbulence experienced as one crosses the bridge between high school and adulthood is familiar material to many, and in that sense Loren’s story is not his own. As a result, Night Fisher stands out as a realistic yet fictional graphic novel at a time when autobiographical comics dominate the field of realism in comics.

In Night Fisher, Johnson develops the visual language of comics with devices such as the inclusion of various noncomics sources that are juxtaposed with narrative panels to indicate Loren’s state of mind, associations that he makes, or visual cues that trigger memories. Johnson also makes small tweaks to the use of text balloons such as using arrows on the text balloon to indicate whom the speaker is addressing, rather than the tail pointing to the speaker in the traditional manner. Johnson is also able to intermix the abstract, convention-based visual language of comics, such as panel use, text balloons, and sound effects, with realistic brush-and-ink representational style, which makes Night Fisher an interesting and instructive experiment.

Further Reading

Abel, Jessica. La Perdida (2006).

Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World (2010).

Rabagliati, Michel. Paul Has a Summer Job (2003).

Bibliography

Attenberg, Jami. “Prime Cuts, Rare and Well Done.” Print 61, no. 2 (March/April, 2007): 67.

Johnson, R. Kikuo. “R. Kikuo Johnson Interview.” Interview by Gary Groth. The Comics Journal 277 (July, 2006): 176.