Rainbow Rowell lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her family. she is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Attachments, Eleanor & Park, Landline, and the Simon Snow Trilogy. Her comics credits include Marvel's Runaways and She-Hulk, and the graphic novel Pumpkinheads. You can visit her online at rainbowrowell.com. You can find more of my reviews of her work here. Gabi Nam is a South Korean artist who has lived abroad in Japan and France. She self-publishes her work in South Korea and specializes in the black-and-white manga style. Fangirl: The Manga is her English debut. You can find more of my reviews of her work here.
Everything in Cath's offline life is going wrong. Just when she's started to realize her feelings for Levi, she sees him kissing someone else. Plus, her writing partner, Nick, is acting strange, and her twin sister, Wren, is suddenly making time for their mother—the same woman who walked out of their lives ten years ago! When their dad ends up in the hospital, Cath decides it's time to rethink her plans for the future. But how can se leave the past behind when it keeps showing up at her door?
What immediately stood out to me was how Gabi chose how to illustrate Cath's emotions in the third volume of Fangirl: The Manga. This installment is probably where we most see Cath battling her emotions, and Gabi's illustrations really bring that to life. Literally. The voices in her head take on the monstrous look that Gabi uses to illustrate the literal monsters Simon battles. The paint splattering effect is also used quite a bit in this third volume, to highlight just how complicated and heightened all of Cath's emotions are. It really comes to a head in this volume—her relationships with Wren, Levi, her own creativity are all on the rocks, and I love how we don't just see that in the dialogue, but also in the images and the through the use of blank space. I was delighted by this, and think this is the strongest use of visuals to illustrate Cath's mental space throughout the series.
Speaking of visuals, I picked up on a lot of parallels between Cath's story and Simon's story in this volume. In the original novel, you can kind of tell that each Simon snippet before a chapter has some relevance to the following chapter. I hadn't felt that same paralleling in the manga until this volume, when there are more, smaller Simon excerpts throughout. What particularly stood out are the few times Simon and the Insidious Humdrum are speaking to each other—it becomes a type of metaphor for Cath having to face her own past in order to form true and developed friendships with the rest of the characters in the book. I had never picked up on that before—not even in the novel—so to find that while I was able to literally quote the dialogue in specific scenes in the manga because of the book but that I could still find new things and elements of the story to be impressed by was astounding and makes me want to reread Fangirl all over again. Major kudos to Gabi and Rainbow for this feeling.
I've felt that all three volumes so far are perfectly paced, hitting all the major plot points of the novel while ending on a perfect cliffhanger each time. I also loved some of the never-before-seen content. Usually it's in the form of Simon and Baz scenes, but I really enjoyed how in Vol. 3 at least it seemed that Rainbow and Gabi dove a bit deeper into what Cath's childhood was like. Getting to see that brought to life made Cath's reaction to her mom's reconnection that much more painful to read about. Personally, I would have loved to see a bit more about the drive from Lincoln to Omaha—that hug was everything to me and I wished for a bit more panels of it! But that was probably the only thing I wanted to see more of. Gabi and Rainbow really nailed it with this one, and I can't wait for the collection to be complete soon.
I am so, so excited for how Rainbow and Gabi will bring the conclusion of Fangirl to the manga. I'm putting my guess in now that Wren (or maybe even Cath and Wren) will be on the cover of the final installment, and that it'll be either purple or pink—no matter what it looks like, I know I'm going to fall in love with it! Until then.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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