460 PÉREZ, GEORGE
been before and gives her a skeleton doll as a departure present. Th is souvenir from
the famous Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, acts as a precursor of the events to
come.
Without noticing, Carla succeeds in turning invisible: no longer being an expatriate,
she has adapted to Mexican everyday life and blends in perfectly. Yet she begins to
wonder if this is the life she wants to lead. When friends of Memo and Oscar abduct
Harry in order to get a ransom, Carla is stuck with her new identity and is held as a
prisoner in her own house. With the help of some friends she is able to free herself from
imprisonment to tell her tale.
In order to construct these cultural diff erences on the printed pages of La Perdida ,
Abel uses language as a tool to express this otherness. While all the captions are Carla’s or
the narrator’s internal monologue, the dialogues constantly shifts between English and
Spanish. While the fi rst two issues of La Perdida present Spanish and English sentences
next to each other, the English passages tend to fade away in later issues. Sentences such
as “You should make attention” off er further insight into the problems of communica-
tion. From issue three onwards almost everything printed in English should resemble
Spanish dialogue; only some English phrases are displayed in parenthesis. Abel also
introduces the reader into Mexican vernacular by adding special terms of the Mexican
slang, which are translated in footnotes.
While these narrative techniques are rather innovative, Abel’s drawing style is certainly
infl uenced by America’s independent scene. Yet her work with brushes gives her a unique
outlook that she uses for La Perdida. With simple strokes of her fi ner brushes, she con-
veys the characters’ emotions, while thicker lines are used for the backgrounds. Another
trademark of Abel is her lettering, which gives the language its unique appearance.
Th e process of becoming, of change, is also displayed on a visual level. Abel’s evocative
black-and-white drawings tend to alter slightly over the course of the fi ve issues of La
Perdida: for example, facial features change. Th is leaves graphic space for the characters
to evolve, especially as the protagonist Carla blends in with Mexican culture more easily.
Scenes of Mexican everyday life are depicted as darker and more crowded, and clearly
stand in contrast to the blazing white of Harry’s apartment.
La Perdida is an imaginative journey not only in terms of displaying a diff erent culture
but also in thinking of a way to depict these diff erences visually in a comic book. While
introducing her life in Mexico City in a retrospective, Carla’s adventures are always con-
trasted by the captions that already encompass its outcome. Th is mode of displaying a
duality of cultures is mirrored visually by Abel’s unique lettering and her brushwork.
Various levels of communication additionally evoke a process of adapting into an
unfamiliar society, and yet always feature the constant struggle not to lose one’s self.
Daniel Wüllner
PÉREZ, GEORGE (1954–). George Pérez was born in the South Bronx, New York, to
parents who emigrated from Puerto Rico. He was a lifelong fan of superhero comics
and started drawing at an early age. He ended his formal education after high school and
