“Gingerbread Girl” GN by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
I picked up Gingerbread Girl by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover at my local comic shop on a recent Wednesday. I’d enjoyed Coover’s art on Banana Sunday, a book about magical monkeys that my elder, 7yo Drake, also enjoyed. This one is decidedly not for the kiddoes, though.
26yo Annah Billips is a comic-book Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s cute, bisexual (so there’s a brooding girl- AND boyfriend), and she thinks she has a lab-grown clone sister of herself named Ginger running around in the world, which may or may not be a psychological coping mechanism she developed as a girl during her parents divorce. The book is narrated by a stream of characters, including the boyfriend, girlfriend, a pigeon (looking awfully similar to Mo Willems’ famous creation) and a bulldog. The art is clever and charming, but the story felt a bit twee. I didn’t care enough about Annah to be invested in whether her missing sister might be real or not. I felt similarly uncharmed about the film 500 Days of Summer, which also has the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, so perhaps that’s what I don’t engage with.