Review time! with ‘The Ojja-Wojja’

“Leave your demons here with me, I’ll entertain them in my dreams”

The Ojja-Wojja (with its fun subtitle: A Horror-Mystery, or Whatever) is published ultimately by HarperCollins. Two imprints of the publisher, Balzer + Bray and Harper Alley, take credit for it, though! It’s written by Madgalene Visaggio, drawn by Jenn St-Onge, colored by Avery Bacon (with flatting assists by Arif Kudus), and lettered by Micah Myers. It’s also manufactured in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which I thought was rather interesting!

Visaggio has become a bit of a hot writer over the past few years, and if you’ve happened to pay attention to my posts, you’ll know I haven’t been super-impressed with her work. She’s certainly not bad, but I don’t think she’s as groovy as some people do. She has some good ideas, though, so I’m not ready to ignore her work, which is why this book intrigued me. Plus, St-Onge is a terrific artist, so I wanted to check out her work, as well. The good news (for me, at least) is that this is easily the best thing by Visaggio I’ve read, so there’s hope for her yet!

The story is pretty simple: two teenage girls (yes, it’s a YA book) kind-of sort-of accidentally call up a demon, which wreaks havoc in the their small town, and they have to stop it. It’s a standard plot, sure, but the book is so good because of how Visaggio decides to tell the story, which is very clever. Val and Lanie, the two protagonists, are autistic (in the case of the former) and transgender (in the case of the latter). Visaggio usually populates her stories with LGBTQ characters, but in the books I’ve read by her, she’s usually more obnoxious about making sure we know about it. The word “autistic” is used to describe Val once, and I think the word “spectrum” is used once in a different place, but that’s it. With Lanie, Visaggio brings it up once, almost in passing, so you might even be forgiven for missing it altogether. Val’s behavior and actions show that she has autism, but it’s as part of the story, while there are some almost subtle comments about Lanie occasionally, but again, nothing too overt. One reason I haven’t liked Visaggio’s writing is because her agenda seems to get in the way of her storytelling – she really wants us to know that the characters in her books aren’t “normal” (whatever that means), so she seems to sacrifice story for politics. As you might recall, I think it’s great that more people are telling stories with characters who don’t look like me – a boring, straight, white dude – but I like them in stories like this, where we know who they are but we’re not beaten over the head with it. We appreciate Val more because we see her living with autism and seeing how she deals with the world, rather than the writer jumping up and down shouting, “This character is on the spectrum! Aren’t I awesome for writing such a character?!?!?”

All right, I’ll get off my soapbox, especially because I’m so often up there. Visaggio sets the action in the town of Bolingbroke (at least they’re up on their Shakespeare in town, right?), where Val and Lanie attend a fairly typical junior high – they’re the weirdos, but Val points out that they’re not alone, so they have some friends, but of course there’s a popular girl who makes life miserable for them. They often retreat to fantasy worlds, which is normal – the book actually begins with a fantasy scenario, and Visaggio drops into them occasionally throughout the book. One of Val’s teachers knows that she often struggles in class, so he suggests an independent study on the weird, “paranormal” stuff around town, and Val gets Lanie to help her. Lanie has become more interested in witchcraft recently, and Val thinks that will be a big help on the project. They see a ghost, but of course their recording of it shows nothing, so no one believes them. Then a weird old woman mumbles “Ojja-Wojja” to Val, and a kindly librarian shows her a secret book about the history of the town, in which the founder made a deal with something called the “Ojja-Wojja” – a demon of some kind. Because Val and Lanie are young and dumb, they decide to conjure it. They think it doesn’t work, but of course it does! Soon, almost everyone in town is possessed by the demon and Val, Lanie, and a few of their friends are the only ones who can stop it. You know the drill!

The story works so well because of how good the characters are. Val and Lanie are friends, sure, but they’re not perfect, and as Visaggio explores what could divide friends, she gets at the heart of their friendship and why it works so well. The bully girl, Andrea, isn’t just a cardboard villain – Visaggio gets that regular people are very rarely pure evil, so Andrea becomes the focal point of the demon not because she’s evil but because she’s insecure, and that lets the demon in. Val and Lanie don’t understand this, so they think they have to purge the evil, while Visaggio keeps sending them down different paths that make them change how they think about things. As you recall, I’m not the biggest fan of coming-of-age stories, but “hidden” coming-of-age stories – where they’re disguised as other things, like demon possession stories – can work pretty well, because, again, the writer doesn’t jump up and down calling attention to it. Val and Lanie are interesting – and different – characters who need to work things out, and Visaggio does a nice job with it. Plus, she does some clever things with the “fantasies” Val and Lanie construct. Val is well-versed in pop culture, so at one point she explains what happens in these kinds of situations. It’s lampshade-hanging, sure, but it’s done cleverly, and with a bit of tongue-in-cheek-ness, so it works. Visaggio isn’t as concerned with the plot, either, so the fact that she tells us kind of how it will play out doesn’t mess things up, as we already know what Val’s telling us anyway. There’s a slight misstep in the plotting, where someone does something stupidly so they seem evil and the kids don’t get help with what they want to do, but that’s a minor moment, and the kids need to figure things out on their own anyway. Ultimately, the story isn’t about the demon, but about how people can and should deal with adversity in their lives. That’s right, the demon is a … metaphor! I know, it’s crazy, right?

St-Onge does her usual excellent job with the art, but she uses some rougher lines, especially for the supernatural stuff, that makes the art richer than some of her stuff in the past. She still has that nice, fluid, cartoony style that fits well with YA comics, but she uses some thicker, scratchier lines for the Ojja-Wojja itself, while hatching just a bit more for the supernatural and fantasy parts of the book. She does a very nice job with the fantasy parts, making Val and Lanie recognizable within the scenes but also tweaking them a bit into idealized versions of themselves. Her design of the town is very well done – it feels like an actual place, so that in the end, when reality seems to warping a bit, we get a good sense of twisted movement in the town, which hits a bit harder. Her characters are nice, too – very often, teens in comics look like small adults, but St-Onge manages to make them look like 13- and 14-year-olds, kids who aren’t fully formed yet but are beginning to become adults. Even Andrea, who’s obviously the queen bee and therefore would strive to look more adult, is only partially there, and looks like a kid … one who’s trying to look older but doesn’t, really. It’s nice work. The colors in the book are terrific, too – Bacon and Kudus do particularly good work with some of the more ragged color choices when the demon appears and begins taking over. The book becomes nightmarish, which is the point. They also make good choices with the fantasy sequences, either using wilder and more lurid colors or muting the colors a bit to set them apart from the “real world” of the comic. The book looks great, which is of course helpful in telling the story. So that’s neat.

I’m always interested in a standard-type story – in this case, demon possession – that doesn’t go where you expect it to go. I mean, maybe you will know where it’s going, but we all know you’re smarter than I am, right? Visaggio does a very good job giving us characters with issues but who are working to deal with those issues and learn what it means to be part of a society, for good and for bad. She subverts some of the clichés of this genre nicely, and St-Onge draws the hell out of it. I’m still not completely sold on Visaggio, but this book does make me more confident about her going forward.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆