Through Lya’s Eyes, v1: “Seeking the Truth”

She has really big eyes, which helps…

Finding the Plot

It’s easy in this one. This is a book that finds its focus pretty quickly and sticks to it pretty hard.

Lya is confined to a wheelchair after a car accident. It’s the summer now and she’s heading into the city to intern for a prestigious law firm. She’s crashing at the apartment of a good friend of hers.

The real reason she chose that firm to intern at is that it’s the one that handled her case when her car got hit. Her parents didn’t tell her everything, and she wants to know. She’s going to great lengths to find it, and that’s what this book is all about. Can she hide her true identity and mission from her bosses and co-workers, and get all the answers she wants before they “catch” her?

It’s a as much a thriller plot as it is anything else, though without the melodrama of life-and-death chases or violence. The story doesn’t get sidetracked with “single girl in the big city” plot lines or anything crazy or CW-ish like that. She has a friend or two at the firm and her friend she’s living with, but there’s nothing in the way of sexual tension there.

This book sticks to the plot: Lya wants to find the truth, and she’s sneaking around now to get it. She’ll drag everyone into it to get what she wants.

Can she find the truth without blowing her cover?

It’s a pretty quick 67 pages. I think the focus of Carone’s script and the open loop of that mystery keeps driving the story ever forward. There are no lulls.

The Strong Points

Like I’ve said twice already, the book’s fast focus is much appreciated. It doesn’t try to pull a fast one one you with a surprise plot revelation.

Justine Cunha’s art is interesting. I started following her on Instagram awhile back, I think before I knew about this book. She’s in that lineless style that’s all the rage on Instagram these days.

It’s a look I enjoy in single images on Instagram, but would it work on a full scale comic?

For the most part, it does. I think it works best when the panels are closer up. When you can see more textures in the digital brushes, and the action takes place with good facial expressions, the art works the best. Some of the wider shots and full body panels are a little weaker, with some awkward bodies. (The long necks appear to be a stylistic choice that I can live with, but occasionally feel too long. Some proportions in hands and arms are off, and an arm or two bends a bit too much. but I’m really nit-picking here, because the other 98% looks great. I’m a “critic.” I can’t help but see these things sometimes.)

That’s just me, and this book isn’t aimed at me. To the teenage girls who grew up on manga, this book will no doubt be right in their wheelhouse.

And the character designs are great. No two characters look alike. You won’t confuse the generic brunette with the other brunette that works at a similar desk in the same office here. No, everyone is different, both in silhouette and general appearance. It’s a good looking cast embarking on a quest with a strong purpose.

There are word balloons! I almost didn’t realize it at first, but there are word balloons! You just don’t see enough of those these days, and Carbone uses them smartly, often to show us the contrasts in what a character is thinking to what they’re saying or doing. They’re also there to fill in some blanks for the reader without having to create a whole scene to do it.

The Weaker Parts

I think Lya explains her car accident three separate times in this book, and each time it stops all the momentum dead for a page while she explains to someone what happened — even when it’s someone who already knows the story!

As a reader, I appreciate the way Carbone is unpealing the onion, so to speak, and revealing new dynamics to the accident each time. But the rest of me is slightly annoyed that we didn’t just get the entire exposition dump at once so we have her motivation and can move on with the story.

The “big bad” of the book is the mean lawyer, Martin de Villegan. he treats everyone like trash, isn’t afraid to berate them for the most minor infractions, and generally acts like a stuck up jerk. All he needs is a mustache to twirl and he’d be a complete two dimensional villain.

Maybe there’s more to him and we’ll see it in the next volume. I hope so. Otherwise, he’s too convenient a meanie to get too annoyed by.

Part of me wonders if he’s not the red herring. It’s so obvious that he’s responsible for Lya’s case that I expect a surprising twist around book 3 where we find out how he fought for her, made the best of a bad situation, and that one of the friendlier lawyers at the firm is really the hard nosed negotiator who made a bad deal for bad reasons.

(Sorry, I’ll stop guessing at plot points now..)

It felt like there was one more twist coming in this book, but that never happened. That’s likely for the best as it likely would have meant a character betraying Lya and this book turning into a definite cliched thriller thing. I’m glad Lya has friends she can count on, instead of people masquerading as such to get what they want from her.

So far.

One last weird thing: The book starts with Lya heading off to live in the city while she has this internship. She’ll be staying at a guy friend’s apartment. There’s nothing awkward or weird about it. At first, I thought he might be her brother. He’s not. He’s also not a boyfriend, past or current. He’s just her best friend. And now Mom is sending her daughter off to live with this boy in the city for the next couple of months.

I guess I just wanted more up front explanation of how that situation was going to work, why Mom was OK with it, etc. The whole situation feels a little weird to me.

Family friend? I guess we’re meant to find out later, maybe? It just seems so weird not to bring it up earlier.

Again, if I had to guess from reading too many stories in the past, there will eventually be a budding romance there to complicate things in some way…. Right now, there’s no overt signs of such a thing being set up.

Serialization First

This series appeared in the pages of Spirou Magazine originally before being collected in this volume.

It doesn’t feel like there’s a natural resting spot every 4 – 8 pages to indicated chapters in that serialization, so that’s good. It really does feel like one long book.

The other major thing I noticed in this book might come from that serialization first, also:

Characters use each other’s names a lot in this book.

I love it.

There aren’t that many characters in the book, but you do want to keep them all straight, especially once you move to the office, and there’s a half dozen people doing things there. You want to make sure you know who everyone is talking about.

It’s that old Jim Shooter maxim about every comic being someone’s first and making sure you name all the characters each issue. I think Carbone does a great job of that here. I never had a problem with forgetting someone’s name or confusing them with someone else. There was never any pronoun trouble, either. I knew who everyone was talking about the first time. (Credit also to translator M.B. Valente for maintaining that.)

Not that there wasn’t an issue with the lettering, though:

The Lettering Problem

There are some fundamental issues with the lettering in this book. It’s basic Lettering 101 type stuff.

If you can’t tell what order to read the word balloons in, you’re in trouble.

There are a number of occasions where two characters talk back and forth in the same panel and their balloons are off on opposite sides of the panel. There’s no way to tell which balloon should be read after each one. You might not even notice it until after you’ve read all the balloons on the left and then notice there are more on the right.

That’s exactly what happened to me in the panel above. It almost works, until you get to the right stack of balloons and realize the first character was answering these other balloons the whole time. Argh!

Then there’s this panel:

I have no idea what order the balloons should be read in. The conversation is structured in such a way that it almost doesn’t matter, luckily. Any order you read it in can work, but I don’t think that’s what they meant by it. I think this is just a mess of a panel.

There’s a Trailer and Everything

Recommended?

Sure. It’s lighter fare. I think it’s probably aimed at the Young Adult market. I compared it to Nancy Drew before, and that likely fits. I say “likely” because there seem to be multiple versions of that character now and I can’t keep track of how mature or how sci-fi/fantasy she is these days. This book is strictly based in the real world. There aren’t any supernatural elements to it, which is why it’ll never be on the CW….

It’s not aimed at middle-aged men, though I am entertained by it as one. I think for those who grew up on manga or are coming into comics today at a younger age, this might work even more, particularly for the girls. This is all about the relationships on top of the mystery of Lya’s personal tragedy.

For more in the series, check out my review of “Through Lya’s Eyes” v2, available now.

If you like this book, though, I’d also have to recommend another title I reviewed last year, “Emma and Violette.” It’s the story of sisters who are dancers, and has a similar lineless cartooning look to it. The material and the characterizations should appeal to much the same audience.

— 2019.027 —

Buy It Now

This series is being serialized in the Spirou magazine in France right now. This book collects the first batch of stories and just came out in English a few weeks ago. I imagine we’ll see the second volume by the end of the year.

In the meantime, you can find the digital edition of this first book in all the usual places: