Of all the graphic novels I’ve read this year, this is by far my favorite. It surpasses Persepolis. It’s short – I read it through twice today before posting this – but has so much in it. It deals with post traumatic stress disorder, friendships, the blurring of social lines, the modern fear of terrorism, love, family, artistic expression, and identity.

Art or crime?
These girls believe they are beautifying their town with these art projects, but the police call it vandalism and criminal attacks. Both have good points. The art varies from building pyramids in the middle of a construction site, to hanging bottles with messages in them from trees. The teenagers all seem to love it, and even begin to emulate it; the adults are terrified and disturbed. Indeed, the Janes are often trespassing on private property, but they are also not putting up permanent graffiti on walls. So when does artistic expression slip over into criminal activity? When do harmless – sometimes even helpful – acts become a public nuisance?

Terror
Ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center, our country has become increasingly paranoid about safety and terrorists. I’m not saying that paranoia isn’t in some ways justified. We do tend to take it to extremes, though. Periodically I hear the most ridiculous stories about lunches blown up by bomb squads because an office worker accidentally left their lunch bag on a bus, or about six-year-old kids getting interrogated at the airport because their name matches one on the terrorist watch list. We seem to have lost our common sense. It makes sense, it really does – the old saying goes that one bad act ruins things for the rest of us – but that doesn’t make the situation any better. And the more we fear, the more we live with fear, the worse off we’re going to get. At some point, we have to forget fear and just live again. We need to learn to see the beauty in life.

If there’s anything I didn’t like about this book, it’s the end. It ended too abruptly. I wanted to know more. Perhaps there will be some sort of sequel. It wasn’t that anything was left unanswered so much as I wanted to know what would happen next, where these girls would go. I wanted to know what happened with John Doe. I wanted more. [***in looking for images for this post, I found out there is a sequel. I’ll definitely be looking into that!] But beyond that, I really loved this book. The artwork is gorgeous, the story of poignant and heartfelt, and I really like the idea of the nerdy outcasts in the school banding together to make something beautiful.

And in the end, there seems to be one statement that rises above all the others: ART SAVES.