Shadow Life Review (Hiromi Goto, Ann Xu)

An elderly Japanese-Canadian widow checks herself out of the old folks’ home and goes to live by herself - much to the annoyance of her daughters! Except it’s not just the depressing atmosphere of the home she’s escaping but death itself. And guess who’s tracked her down to her new place…

Shadow Life by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu is quite a boring comic, mostly because of the meandering, garbled story that didn’t seem to have a point and took its sweet time in not finding it.

The story might’ve worked if it had been more staunchly metaphorical. Death is always a presence in our mortal lives but tends to be most keenly felt in old age. Still, I didn’t really understand why Death was persistently trying to claim her. It made no sense to me why it was so insistent that she die now when she didn’t really have anything fatally wrong with her.

She’s also able to trap it in her vacuum cleaner for some reason so the fantastical is actually real but there don’t seem to be any consequences to trapping Death somewhere - presumably people are still dying out there in the world? Unless it’s not Death and it’s some demon - but then why does this demon want her dead? Goto’s script was so poorly written that key aspects of it remained vague and confusing throughout.

There isn’t much to the 350-ish page story. Mami traps the demon, gets into some scrapes, middle middle middle, then fantastical yet real for no reason finale. Parts of the story go nowhere - Mami can see ghosts but doesn’t do anything to help them, except for one at the end and she gives the watery ghost shoes. A ghost gets given physical shoes. Wha…?

Why does Death have tiny cute minions? How did the one minion become a bird after drinking some blood? Is it really so easy to check oneself out of a nursing home by themselves and get an apartment straightaway in Canadia? What does the seeming fact that spirits and the afterlife are real meant to mean? Now she’s defeated Death will Mami live forever? What was the point of the story? No idea.

I liked Mami’s self-sufficient attitude. I don’t think old people’s agency should be taken from them simply because of their age - so long as we have our wits about us, we should be able to live on our own terms. Ann Xu’s black and white art is fine - I had no issues with the presentation of the comic.

I think there’s the bones of a potentially good comic here - something about fighting for her independence, holding onto her identity, and living the life she wants regardless of anyone else without having to make it a literal fight against Death as an entity and ground it instead in side effects of a malingering illness maybe - but Hiromi Goto doesn’t realise it here. Shadow Life was mostly a poorly-plotted, often dull and rambling read that I didn’t find very entertaining or even understood most of what it was shooting for, if anything.

I can’t think of anything immediately comparable to recommend instead of this but First Second has published other supernatural comics by Asian creators that are worth reading like Jason Shiga’s Demon series and Boxers by Gene Luen Yang, all of which are much more fun to read than Shadow Life was.