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| Review by Lily Fierro |
When the proverbial East meets West, there’s always some serious culture confusion and conflicts in store. Violations of manners, clumsiness with a new language, and integration into a world with a different lifestyle all factor into the process of attempting to reconcile two vastly different cultures, and in this process, embarrassing moments are abundant.
As a Vietnamese American, I must admit I had plenty of these moments of confusion and awkwardness and still do today when trying to reconcile my own Vietnamese upbringing with the American world where I have spent my entire life.
Rori Lane of Wayward, Vol. 1: String Theory is experiencing a similar cultural disconnect but in the reverse direction.
She has left her life in Ireland with her father to live in Tokyo with her mother. Though half Japanese herself, Rori appears more Irish, and her upbringing certainly matches, making her stand out completely in the bright light excess of Tokyo. And, if fitting in were not difficult enough of a challenge for Rori, Japan has much more waiting for her than just a new school, new home, and new life with her mother.
In her earliest adventure into Tokyo, Rori stumbles straight into trouble when she enters an alleyway filled with human disguised turtle monsters known as Kappas.
Thankfully, Rori has a guardian who seemingly falls from the sky: Ayane and her army of cats, who senses something different about Rori and also has a general penchant for tearing apart turtle monsters. In the fight against the Kappas, Rori begins to notice red strings floating around her, guiding her to a path of attack and escape, and together, Ayane and Rori each use their own powers to defeat the turtles, leaving Rori with many questions and a realization that life in Tokyo will not just involve adapting to the new country, culture, and language; she’ll also need to understand her newly discovered string-based superpowers and how they fit into an entire mystical parallel world hiding beneath the average person’s consciousness.
An ominous energy gathers in the distance as Rori learns of her own power, and the foreboding energy may be heading toward her. However, given her own novice with superpowers and the supernatural, she will definitely need help facing the impending forces of evil when they arrive. Consequently, various threads begin to appear and lead her to others who have their own super-human abilities, and together, they begin to try to plan for whatever malice lies ahead.
Wayward, Vol. 1: String Theory serves as an introduction to Rori and her misfit crew of super humans: Ayane, Shirai, and Nikaido, all of whom Rori encounters either by some hidden string of coincidences or her own floating ones and all with their own distinctive powers. Each has sensed the oncoming danger as malevolent creatures emerge from the shadows, but alone, each would not take on the challenge to seek and face it head on. But, together, Rori and her group find strength in each other; though they are pretty much strangers, they have one major unifying commonality that stretches beyond individual cultures and upbringings: they possess superhuman capabilities.
Though set in Japan, Wayward has little to no Japanese novelties, which is one of the reasons why it succeeds.
Wayward incorporates adaptations of Japanese folklore characters with human characters without any attempt to evoke the Japan of samurais and geishas or babydolls and hyper-sexualized cartoon characters that the West has come to expect in portrayals of the country and culture. As a result, without the trinkets and baubles often included to make a story feel Japanese (and I say feel because those trinkets and baubles are included to evoke an imagined or fetishized Japan), we can focus on Rori’s path to adulthood as she adapts to her new supernatural and non-supernatural worlds, making the story more universal and more character driven, for we are not distracted by her wearing a kimono, eating lunch from a bento box, or flashing far too much skin in an outrageously unrealistic, skimpy Japanese school uniform.
Instead, we see Rori as a teenager, like we all once were (or currently are), dealing with typical teenager issues of societal and familial alienation with the additional burden of attacking monsters and fighting evil.
Without Orientalist sensationalism, as noted by Zac Davisson in the foreword, Wayward emerges as a coming of age tale about finding one’s own identity as an outsider and adapting to a new world through non-cultural similarities with others, creating a relatable narrative for anyone who has ever had to adapt to a new environment with other people who also are new and/or don’t quite fit in.
Consequently, it’s not a surprise that Wayward, Vol. 1: String Theory stirred up my own memories of sitting in a classroom with many other children who did not speak English or each other’s language but somehow had to find ways to communicate. Commonalities reaching beyond individual culture and language allowed us to relate to each other, and this series accurately and acutely captures this phenomenon through the Rori and her friends’ superpower similarities.
Whether or not we are in Japan and whether or not we encounter Kappas in alleys, we can all relate to Rori Lane’s disorienting new life and her path to adapting, making this series appealing to a wide audience. In addition, to complement Rori’s already approachable narrative, the color by Tamra Bonvillain, Ross A. Campbell, Josh Perez, John Rauch, and Jim Zub in combination with Steve Cummings’ drawings exude a palpable vibrancy, exuberance, and energy.
As a result, the narrative and the artwork of Wayward draw you into Rori’s exciting, dizzying, and overwhelming world but with a sense that it may not be too far off from our very own.
