Kate Gavino’s Sanpaku Will Explore Teen Anxiety And Multi-Cultural Concepts
by Hannah Means Shannon
Boom! Studios’ imprint Archaia will be publishing original graphic novel Sanpaku by cartoonist Kate Gavino (Last Night’s Reading) in August 2018, and bringing readers a tale of teen insecurity and cross-cultural concepts.
In Sanpaku, Marcine is fascinated with the Japanese idea of Sanpaku, the idea that seeing the white around the iris of your eyes is a bad omen. As she dives deeper into this idea, she seems to see it everywhere–in her family members, classmates, even historical figures. Diet and meditation is supposed to get rid of the condition, but Marcine becomes convinced that she cannot save her grandmother’s life or alleviate her school woes.
Sanpaku is going to be published as a deluxe hardcover and brings together Gavino’s own Catholic, Filipino background with Japanese concepts.
Gavino explains:
SANPAKU was inspired by my childhood in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, where I was surrounded by my classmates at a small Catholic school and my religious immigrant family. Marcine is at the point in her adolescence where she is constantly questioning what she is taught, and in effort to find something of her own to believe in, she ends up clinging to the idea of sanpaku and finding its cure. I wanted to write a book about the people I know the best: the quiet girl in class whose imagination is running at hyper-speed, the old Filipino lola who is a master shoplifter, the upright Catholic who is constantly letting herself down, and the bitchy best friend who will never forgive you for seeing her crap in the sandbox in kindergarten. SANPAKU is a look into their world, told through the eyes of Marcine, a perpetually confused twelve year-old who at the end of the day, just misses her grandma.
Print copies of Sanpaku will be available for sale in August 2018 at local comic book shops (use comicshoplocator.com to find the nearest one), book stores or at the Boom! Studios webstore. Digital copies can be purchased from comiXology, iBooks, Google Play, and the Boom! Studios app.
