Paul Tobin & Colleen Coover: Gingerbread Girl (Top Shelf Comix, 7/7/11)
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.