Reviewer: Jimmy Lin
Story Title: Losing Everything You Never Had
Absolutely Everything: Gia-Bao Tran
Ever read something so good that you wanted to pound you head into a pulp ’cause you knew the chances of it being seen by anyone else was next to nil? That’s how Content #1 makes me feel. Gia-Bao Tran has got chops, dude – it’s like hearing a young Coltrane or Davis settling into a groove. Losing Everything You Never Had isn’t perfect, but it’s damned good stuff.
The story is sort of take on Lathe of Heaven; Elin Ohmart is a hipster science experiment whose maze-builder is a beautiful young scientist. The subject of the study is dreams – apparently, the wires stuck to Elin’s head will allow Stefania to observe brain activity during REM sleep. What happens in this sarcastic little punk’s head are two things: he sees himself with a family, and he encounters his nine-year-old self. It’s later in the day, en route to a temp interview, that he realizes that the dream encounter has somehow become an actual memory. He bullies his way back into another experiment, intent on teaching his child-self something that will improve his existence. The memory stays; he begins to win over the lovely Stefania; and his personal life improves. His professional existence and personal satisfaction still lag, although he repeats the experiment a few more times, each time trying some other angle to make his child-self more confident, more focused. His love life continues to improve – he sees Stefania in his dream-family now – but in the end, the lack of improvement in the other parts of his drive him to perform the experiment one last time, in an all-or-nothing gamble. I won’t spoil the end for but will simply say that Tran’s treatment of the results is nothing short of beautiful.
Although it’s not the most original setup (the original was an Ursula Le Guin novel), Tran’s take on the subject matter is singular enough. The story poses interesting questions about the inner nature of our characters and what should drive our ambitions in the end. Is there a need for perfection in every aspect in our lives, or is there a point at which we should simply be [insert title here]? The story uses mono-/dialogues to drive the plot, but don’t think that means that it’s all a bunch of talk. Tran’s learned the secret employed by our modern British greats – that conversations and thoughts can convey a great deal of information and story.
Combine this writing with the thinly, almost neurotically-inked artwork. Tran makes liberal use of dramatic and dynamic shadowing, but the illustrations never feel overwrought or melodramatic. The range he exhibits puts me in mind of the great Goseki Kojima – wonderful facial expressions that span the spectrum with beautiful subtlety and grace. This isn’t a perfect work – I found a pacing problem that couldn’t be ignored – but it’s a damned fine effort that deserves to be noticed.
