Annah Billips is one strange girl. A self-described tease, she flirts and dates, has boyfriends and girlfriends, and apparently can’t fall in love for one very strange reason: her mad-scientist father removed her Penfield homunculus when she was nine years old, and it became a clone named Ginger who ran away with Annah’s ability to feel strong emotion. Or did it?
Gingerbread Girl, the new graphic novel by husband-and-wife team Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, boasts a bizarre storyline that runs the strong risk of alienating some. Self-consciously odd and full of narrative daring, the comic has its own charms, though, and an adventurous reader can’t help but be drawn into its central mystery. Does Annah really have a twin named Ginger walking around, or is she actually crazy and deeply scarred from her parents’ divorce years before?
Gingerbread Girl doesn’t give any answers, but it does take a fascinating journey through Annah’s psyche, as seen by lovers, bystanders, pigeons, bulldogs, a neuroscientist, and a magician.
Tobin chooses to tell Annah’s story via a fluid stream of narrators, each of whom speaks directly to the reader and then passes the story amongst the other narrators. How each speaker chooses to define Annah, or judge her sanity, gives us a little insight into the narrator. As the reader follows Annah on a date with her girlfriend, Chili, Tobin wisely leaves Chili’s perspective for last.
Her deeply conflicted assessment of Annah, the quite possibly mentally ill and definitely commitment-phobic woman that she loves, is the centerpiece of an already rich comic that frequently makes good on its high-concept premise. The unique narrative structure fits the off-kilter mood; nothing is quite real, but it is meant to feel real, like a story told by a group of friends.
Coover’s art is natural in the best way, like a doodle in a notebook margin that still feels polished and precise. Her renderings of the many characters are expressive yet simple and complement the story well.
Gingerbread Girl presents two possible stories, allowing the comic to work on two levels. The first (and far more boring) option is that Ginger does not exist, and Annah is simply a crazy girl who never got over her parents’ divorce. Realistic and often sad, Tobin floats this option frequently but never seems to commit to it, preferring to construct a world out of the whimsical, fascinating second option.
The possibility that Annah is telling the truth, that she really does have a twin who sprang fully formed from her head and ran away with her ability to feel, is supported by a zany cast of characters who populate an alternate Portland, Oregon with talking pigeons and faux magicians who are temporarily blessed with real mind-reading abilities for narrative purposes. In any case, the comic preserves Annah’s status as an enigma who draws interesting people to herself. She’s someone who plays with the affection of everyone whom she meets, existing in a world where a gingerbread girl can be extracted from one’s head and set free. It’s a melancholy tale for Annah, who can’t seem to recapture that long-lost part of herself, but it’s also a magical world that you’d love to spend more time in. Isn’t that the goal of any graphic novel?