Word: franks
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...Four Immigrants" follows the lives of four guys, fresh off the boat from Japan, over the course of twenty years. Each takes a Western name, Henry, Fred, Frank and Charlie, and each has different goal. Henry, the author's surrogate, wants to study art, giving the story a personal verisimilitude that makes "Four Immigrants" not only the first graphic novel, but the first autobiographical graphic novel as well. But the two characters who quickly take the book's center are the ne'er-do-well Charlie and Frank, the budding capitalist. Continually rebuffed in their efforts to earn money, Charlie...
...might expect, the very first panel shows the four guys on the deck of a ship looking toward the shore of the new land. "Here we are lads, U.S.A., land of opportunity," says Charlie. Such optimism gets a very quick reality check, and two panels later both Charlie and Frank find themselves quarantined behind a fence...
...Charlie and Frank wander the streets after the earthquake...
...episode focuses on the San Francisco initiative to ban all Asians from public school. Years later, in 1994, California's proposition 187 (later found unconstitutional) banned illegal immigrants from receiving publicly funded services such as schooling. In another semi-comic retelling of an actual incident, Charlie and Frank, working on a farm outside the city, get herded out of town by angry, armed white locals. Another fascinating sequence involves Charlie's decision to arrange for a "picture bride," a woman from Japan who arrives to be married based only on an exchange of photos. "Picture bride" immigration was soon outlawed...
...personal accounts of major events rendered in a highly readable cartoon form. The First World War, the Influenza pandemic of 1918, and especially the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, are all covered through the unique lens of the Japanese immigrant. The earthquake arc has a particular richness. It shakes Frank and Charlie out of their beds and leaves them homeless. They wander the devastated streets, hearing screams from those buried alive. Shuffling through ankle-high ash as a result of the firestorms that destroyed more of the city than the earthquake, the guys sleep on the street, dig latrines...