Yang Kuaikuai and his best friend Li Yu are struggling. They are 14 years old, on the cusp of adulthood. They don’t have any friends besides each other. They live in a backwater town, isolated from everything but the mountains. The town itself is dying. People keep leaving, moving to the city where prospects are better. Kuaikuai’s mother is back in the picture (she left when he was just a baby) and wants to take him away.
Buy Comet ClubThey stumble upon Comet Club – an after-school organization run by upperclassmen interested in alien life. They are intrigued. Not for any real interest in space or aliens, but because these kids seem weird like them, and besides, they have nothing better to do. Kuaikuai is especially interested because the club is run by Qi Ming, who recently bested him in a math competition.
Qi gives Kuaikuai and Yu a map of the mountains and points them to a spot where he thinks he’s previously seen a UFO. The boys head there that evening. They don’t find any aliens, instead they see some strange men carrying a body-sized bag, which they bury. Freaked out, the boys flee and tell the police the next morning. But by the time they make it back to the spot, there is nothing to see. The bag is gone.
What exactly they saw will become the central mystery of the story. But the comic is less interested in aliens and mysteries than it is in personal discovery. As they investigate the mystery, the members of the Comet Club will discover secrets about each other and themselves.
Stories about teenage misfits who find comfort in friendship and investigate mysteries are nothing new. They are tales as old as time. I liked the basics of this story and the individual panels of its art, but I struggled with the details. Comics are a unique medium in that they blend still images with a written narrative. Because the pages are filled with art, the amount of actual written text is limited. Usually, what you get is a few dialogue bubbles and maybe a sentence or two of setup. At the same time, the images are on still pages, not moving pictures, and so there is a limitation to how much story you can get across within a single book.
Because of this, comics generally take shortcuts. They tell their story in broad strokes. They take a couple of pages to give you the general idea of a scene and move on. Readers fill in the details. I felt like Comet Club was skipping ahead a little too much. I needed a little more detail to truly understand what was happening. The narrative seemed to jump forward before I quite grasped what was going on in a scene. Similarly, I often enjoyed the artwork. On an individual panel basis, it is often striking and interesting. But it often changes perspective or zooms in on a detail without giving me the context, so I left it confused as to what I was actually looking at.
Comet Club was written by Chinese-born Yi Yang, and it is a story set in China during the economic boom of the 1990s. I suspect there is quite a bit of context that this Midwestern American is missing. Both in the story and the artwork. This probably kept me from enjoying as much as I would have liked. The story is relatable, and the art is well done, but I definitely never quite understood it.
