Angelica and the Bear Prince | Review

Angelica and the Bear Prince
Writer/artist: Trung Le Nguyen
RH Graphic, $17.99
Publisher’s Age Rating: Gr 7 Up

Trung Le Nguyen’s debut graphic novel The Magic Fish revolved around a mother and son reading fairy tales to one another, a practice they began to help the Vietnamese mother learn English, and which allowed Nguyen to repurpose the stories within his story to help focus the drama involving his original characters.

His new follow-up, Angelica and the Bear Prince, is also inspired by a fairy tale, but is otherwise a more straightforward genre book, basically a contemporary YA romance with familiar character types and conflicts and, if I’m being honest, often too-convenient plotting. (In fact, in his author’s note at the end of the book, Nguyen said he set out with the intention of making his next longform comic be “fun and frothy…a little bit vapid, if I can be totally frank.”)

On one level, the book reads kind of, well, shallow, and one can see where Nguyen’s sought-for vapidity is present. Elements of the book reminded me of manga melodrama, others of a Hallmark movie (an association perhaps encouraged by the winter setting, I realize in retrospect).

But, as it turns out, Nguyen is actually a good enough cartoonist, and a good enough storyteller, that he apparently can’t create vapid work even when he tries to do so.

And so, his heroine, 17-year-old Angelica, struggles not with romantic issues, but with the lingering grief of losing her grandmother many years ago…as well as a devastating burnout that derailed her hyper participation in school activities, manifesting as what looks an awful lot like depression.

She also struggles to relate to her mother, who processes feelings in a way quite similar to her, and to her best friend, who wants her to listen to her troubles and sympathize, rather than trying to immediately solve them. (Rather than the typical best friend role, this character also has her own conflicts to deal with.)

And finally, there’s an older character who is struggling to adapt to living a life alone after her beloved husband has died, so that beneath the fairy tale-inspired romance between two teens, Angelica is also a book about grief and mourning.

So, while it may seem and, in some respects, even read somewhat shallow, it’s a lot deeper than it looks.

Angelica and the Bear Prince is somewhat inspired by the classic fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” which was popularized by Andrew Lang in his Blue Fairy Book collection. In it, a white bear asks a poor man if he can marry his daughter in exchange for great riches, and the bear takes the girl to live with him in a castle, only leaving her alone at night, giving her a single important rule that she will, of course, eventually break. Doing so curses the couple, setting up an impossible quest (see the title) that the girl must complete to set things right and live happily ever after.

Nguyen dramatizes parts of the story in Angelica, the panels devoted to it set apart by elaborate, ornate frames. As for the bear, it looks less like a polar bear than a man-sized teddy bear, something akin to a mascot. (You can see a glimpse of it on the cover above.)

That’s because the story has particular resonance in Angelica’s seemingly small town, as it is regularly performed as a stage play by a local theater, and going to see it is apparently a rite of passage for the locals when they are little kids.

One day, Angelica finds a social media account for Per the Bear, the name of the Bear Prince in the local play. Rather randomly, she messages the Bear (or whoever is running the account) anonymously. He messages her back. Soon, she is sharing her innermost thoughts with the Bear, and the two become affectionate pen pals.

And, when the theater starts to gear up for the next performance of the play, Angelica applies for a scholarship to work on it behind-the-scenes, hoping to figure out just who it is wearing the Bear Prince suit and messaging her.

I suppose it’s no spoiler to say that it’s the boy on the cover; just as in the fairy tale, under the bear skin is a prince of sorts (“Dude, you’re like your own Cyano de Bergerac,” another boy excitedly tells the “prince” when he confides to him about his secret text-lationship with Angelica).

Like the story that inspired it, everything ultimately works out for the best for the entire cast, but only after some trials.

Nguyen’s balance between the romantic stuff (some of which, I suppose, can be construed as sketchy, I admit, given the imbalance between “Per” knowing who Angelica is but her not knowing who he is) and the heavier emotional content is fairly perfect, so rather than presenting any tonal clash, the various sorrows serve only to deepen the characters, making them more realistic and relatable, even when they are experiencing sometimes contrived coincidences.

If you’ve read The Magic Fish—and you really should—then you already know what a great visual artist Nguyen is, his distinct style is itself something of a balance between classic illustration and a more modern, Asian-influenced cartoon style that dominates modern kids comics (I love the way he seems to draw every strand of every character’s hair, an insanely laborious-looking habit few cartoonists seem crazy enough to engage in).

Here the art is in full, rich color and presented in roomy, occasionally even airy layouts that let each panel breathe, even during sequences where the events they portray happen in rapid succession.

As Nguyen himself notes, he failed in his attempt to tell the precise type of story he had originally planned on. More creators should fail as successfully as he does here.

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