Camgirl // Review
Her name is Kyoko. It’s Dani. And she’s Korean. (Not Japanese.) She had been coding and making good money doing it. Now she’s doing something else altogether and making very nice money doing that instead. There are dangers in any job, but the work that Dani finds herself doing these days makes matters quite a bit more dangerous...particularly when one gentleman takes a particular interest in her in Camgirl . Writer Sarah H. Cho tells a one-shot thriller with artist C.P. Smith. The psychological thriller moves along with a certain amount of grace, which is surprising given the story’s relatively narrow focus on a single character.
The gentleman in question refers to himself only as “YOUR_KNIGHT_IN_SHINING_ARMOR” He seems to be stalking her. Knows her real name. Even sends her an image of her getting on public transit. So it’s a bit creepy, but she’s got a lot of people who are supporting her and she’s going to be able to stay safe...in theory. There’s a lot going on around the edges of it all. But then...maybe all the people she knows are really kind of a liability. She knows a lot of people as a camgirl, but she doesn’t know any of them really well. The stalker could be...anyone.
Cho really focusses the narrative tightly on the life, mental and emotional state of Dani. There ARE other characters in the book who register as more than minor background figures, but Dani is the center of it all. The entire narrative is told from her perspective. It’s all her. And that’s not an easy thing to have to manage for any author. Thankfully, Cho makes Dani interesting enough to care about while being flawed enough to maintain the reader’s sympathies and emotional engagement. Cho engages in depths of emotional connection that few comic books seem to be able to manage.
Smith has a knack for capturing the inner emotional life of a character insubtle shades of expression and body language. Such a narrow focus on a single character is a challenge for any artist to manage for an extended-length one-shot like Camgirl #1, but there’s also an indulgent aspect of that kind of focus that allows the artist quite a few chances to show subtle changes in motion, emotion and personality that end up being really, really interesting an d captivating when Smith manages to capture it in just the right way.
Cho is exploring a lot of internal ground with the story as well. Her accompanying essay mentions aspects of her own personality that have been fused around the story of Dani. It seems pretty far from being any kind of autobiography, but there’s a great deal going on in the issue that feels quite compellingly rendered in large part due to the fact that there IS a personal basis for the story that serves as a solid foundation for the fiction. It’ll be interesting to see what Cho might be able to do with similar dramas in the future is chance and circumstance allow her to do so.
