by Bob Stevenson
Gene Yang's latest work, Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order, looks like a children's story. The black and white line work is done in a beautiful animation style, and several scenes are peppered with slapstick comedy. But between the pepper, there is much more going on.
Yang's skill as a storyteller keeps growing. The crosshatched backgrounds from Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks are missed, but they have been replaced with impeccable comic timing, more realistic dialogue and even crisper line work.
Just as no line is wasted in its drawing, no word is wasted in the story's telling. The cast is small, with a narrator named Loyola Chin, her friend Maggie, Gordon the overweight, oafish boy who has a crush on Loyola, and the mysterious, demented Saint Danger, founder of the secret San Peligran Order.
Loyola Chin is really two stories woven together: one absolutely predictable, the other outrageously unpredictable, both in subtle service to the other. First, Gordon has a crush on Loyola, who wants nothing to do with him. Maggie tries and fails to teach Gordon how to catch Loyola's eye. Despite his failures -- or more likely because of them -- Loyola decides to take a chance on Gordon and asks him to the prom.
While all of this is unfolding, the second story becomes nearly indescribable. With the help of food, Loyola learns to control her dreams and through them meets Saint Danger. He enlists her as a disciple, teaching her and eventually sharing both his vision of an alien apocalypse and his plan to destroy the weakest 10 percent of humanity in order to make us strong enough to repel the invasion. Loyola achieves an alternate view by squinting at the vision, a technique Saint Danger taught her for seeing truth. She confronts her demented Guru twice: first verbally, then physically, destroying both his temple and, accidentally, Saint Danger himself.
The second story is far more interesting than the first. The dreamlike Saint Danger scenes rely heavily on themes from magical realism and religion. Author Yang is no stranger to either subject. His work on American Born Chinese is, in itself, a religious journey. The combination of the two in Loyola Chin is at first exciting, but eventually a bit confusing. Flying dream bubbles, pyramids in pine groves, and finger-tipped, nose-picking space ships are all a joy to behold. They fit together awkwardly in Saint Danger's plan, but their very strange juxtaposition with the stark, religious world of Jesus, the cross and a rosary compromises their believability. For that reason, Saint Danger's threat is never believable, not even in the comic's world. It should be because, at his most basic, Saint Danger has tons of power, data stored in minds all over the world, the ability to travel by dream and bubble, and a horrifying plan and philosophy straight out of Nazi Germany. The reader, though, has a difficult time getting past the absurdity of his methods and the vision.
Also confusing is that the story seems to be an attack on moral relativism, but its logic breaks down internally. Near the story's climax, Loyola uses Saint Danger's own methodology of squinting at things to see the flaw in the vision that is the basis for his plan to kill 10 percent of humanity. The problem comes when she seems to accept her own version of the vision, a devout Christian viewpoint of the apocalypse. She accepts a central tenant (squint for truth) of a faith she now understands to be flawed in absolutely ever other aspect. A non-Christian reader could easily confuse the whole sequence as an attack on organized religion. The second coming wouldn't mean smiles for non-Christians. Therefore, why should any vision (the Christian Bible is filled with them) be considered valid? The "saving grace" is that Saint Danger's discredited vision was the basis for everything else. He now has nothing on which to base the rest of his experiment in eugenics while Loyola still has the memory of her mother's dying beliefs about God and the weak, aptly aided by Loyola's contemplation of the crucifixion and a verse from Corinthians I.
The quote from Corinthians deserves some examination as well. Included is I Corinthians 1:27, which reads, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong." This fits nicely with Loyola's mother's death, but also with the secondary story of the ostensibly weak Gordon. The whole story is an affirmation of 1:27 and much of its surrounding text. I Corinthians 2:1-2 reads, "When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Saint Danger's words are indeed lofty and cloaked in wisdom. Loyola even seems to take the passage's advice directly, finally rejecting Saint Danger completely only after spending several panels in a row fixated on a statue of a crucified Christ.
Loyola's renewed acceptance of God and Christ is predictable, but her subsequent actions feel like they belong in the Old Testament or even something out of Greek mythology. Is there some play on Artemis, protector of the weak, in her next move? Just before destroying Saint Danger's temple, she strikes a classical pose with a bow. Although the temple seems to have been made of stone in the style of the Maya, the flaming arrow Loyola shoots lands on the roof, burning it to the ground. Interestingly, according to legend, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a stone temple built for Artemis, was supposedly burned thanks to its wooden roof.
On Loyola Chin's other front, there is not much character development. Maggie never grows out of her obsession with the physical and mental "10." She seems disappointed when Loyola decides to ask Gordon to the prom despite her failure at improving him, lamenting, "Are you sure you want to do this?" Gordon now considers himself a lucky dumb oaf. Loyola was so temporarily under the spell of Saint Danger that it was always a matter of time before her moral instincts or religious reawakening kicked in.
There is one heartbreaking moment in Loyola Chin. In the story's last few panels, Loyola considers letting Gordon in on her whole adventure, but decides against it. This seems to betray the story's messages regarding weakness. From the reader's perspective, she does not reveal the story because this dumb oaf of a date would never get it. He's not smart enough. He's part of that bottom 10 percent. The ending suffers in the service of cute closure because in the related tale, Gordon Yamamoto King of the Geeks, Gordon became a carrier for Saint Danger's giant database. Telling him would have proved her embrace of the book's religious and moral messages. Even the author, Gene Yang, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the story's final chapter. He's added several pages to the print edition scheduled for December 2004.
Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order is full of small bits of excellence, artistic and literary, many more than are discussed above. Note the role of numbers in the story as well as the subtextual conflict of nature versus nurture. It might also be interesting to look into the writings of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. Is the name coincidental? Altogether, the story is an ambitious and complicated combination of comics and philosophy, of philosophy and religion, and of comedy and drama that largely succeeds. It deserves to be read more than once and considered more than twice.
