Cannon

Everyone calls her Cannon, but her name is Lucy. Her best friend since their school days, Trish, used to call her Luce, which morphed into just Cannon. "Loose cannon" might be exactly right as Lai (Stone Fruit, 2021) opens her utterly glorious sophomore graphic novel: a darkened restaurant interior in shambles, bewildered Cannon on the verge of a panic attack, and Trish, who appears and insists, "Nope, not here. Up, come on!" to drag Cannon away, although not before smashing a final plate--"one for the road." Back up to "three months earlier" to understand what happened: Cannon "can do things with flavors that none [of her kitchen coworkers] can do," the boss insists. Even when service gets chaotically, rudely overheated, Cannon maintains her "cool-headedness." Outside of work, though, are other challenges, particularly her "difficult," cruel grandfather and her distanced, traumatized mother. Trish has always been there--over weekly meals and scary movies--but lately she's mired in her own crises over writing and hookups. With self-help advice stuck in her ears, Cannon runs (to? from?) endless miles, but the pressure keeps building and release remains elusive. Lai works in predominantly four-panel pages of black-and-white line drawings, reserving shades of red to brilliantly reveal brutal violence and intense emotion--casual in crucial film scenes, overwhelming in pivotal moments of Cannon's real life. Audiences won't ever want to look away.

This subtle yet searing graphic novel from Eisner and Lambda award winner Lai (Stone Fruit) takes its title from the nickname ironically bestowed on the main character, Lucy, by her best friend, Trish. In fact, Lucy is anything but a "loose cannon"; quiet, cagey, and hyper-responsible, she divides her time in Montreal over a summer heat wave between restaurant work and caring for her ailing grandfather. Trish, a sharp-tongued struggling writer, takes for granted their long friendship, which stretches back to when they were coming up in small-town Quebec as "the only two gay Chinese Anglophone teens in all of Lennoxville." Lai cannily employs overlapped or cropped speech bubbles to show how stifled Cannon feels. Charlotte, a new server at her restaurant, becomes someone Cannon can open up to, and a romance blossoms. Cannon and Trish's friendship reaches a breaking point when Cannon discovers that Trish is borrowing Cannon's own family story to jump-start her new manuscript--about a mother who cedes the care of her abusive father to her overworked daughter. After Cannon finally explodes, a healing process begins with Trish ("Nothing you want is obvious, Cannon"), her mother, and herself. Lai expertly develops fulsome characters in fluid, emotive black-and-white art. Cannon envisions hovering blackbirds when she's overwhelmed by emotions, and splashes of red flood the simply drawn backgrounds during heightened scenes. Lai's embrace of their characters' vulnerability makes for a satisfying emotional feast. Agent: Alessandra Sternfeld, Am-Book. (Sept.)