Monday, November 9, 2020

Review: Boxers and Saints

Having recently read Gene Luen Yang's Dragon Hoops, I felt spurred to check out a pair of books of his which I had missed: Boxers and Saints, which were published in 2013. Although each graphic novel has a different protagonist, they have the same setting (during the Boxer Rebellion) and not only do characters appear in both books, but events are repeated from different perspectives.


Boxers
concerns Little Bao, a young man who gradually becomes the leader of a rebellion which is determined to kill all foreigners in China as well as those Chinese who have converted to Christianity. Little Bao becomes more zealous and fanatical as time carries on.


In Saints we meet Vibiana, a neglected Chinese girl who converts to Christianity after seeing a vision of Joan of Arc, then finds herself in the path of Little Bao's army.

It's only now that I've read my fifth Gene Luen Yang title that I'm beginning to see recurring patterns in Yang's work -- like, he really, really likes dream sequences. They figure into everything I've read so far, including Boxers and Saints.

But I'm kind of mixed as to how I feel about Boxers and Saints. I love the idea of telling the same story from two different perspectives and the Boxer Rebellion is a pretty fertile setting and one which I was interested in learning more about. But I feel like these two books would have been stronger as one single graphic novel.

You see, the division between Little Bao and Vibiana is not equal. Boxers is exactly the length of Saints! And for that, while Vibiana appears only briefly as a character in Boxers, Little Bao gets a lot of new material in Saints. It feels like Yang is more strongly drawn to the mysticism of Little Bao and less comfortable writing Christianity (strange that, as in Dragon Hoops I learned he was working at a Catholic school). Or perhaps he was simply more comfortable writing about a male protagonist than he was a female one.

I do recommend the two books and definitely think if you're going to read one you really should read both.

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