Ghosts: A Graphic Novel

As the story progresses, Cat slowly begins to find her place in her new town and home. While she once had nothing but pessimistic feelings toward the move, she is finally Accepting and Adjusting to Change. Cat notices that Maya likes the new town and everything it offers, and she also sees that her mother is opening up more and growing closer to her culture. Because Cat sees that her family is growing comfortable in the new place, she feels that she can start to do the same. Carlos continues showing up in her life, both at her door and at school, but Cat resists her developing feelings for him at first. Instead, she turns her attention toward two new friends who help explain the history of the town and inspire Cat to feel connected to it. In one such instance, Cat and her new friends go to the harvest festival, where Cat enjoys several of the town’s traditions. She discovers a town icon named La Catrina, a spirit who serves as a figurehead for the Day of the Dead and finds herself identifying with the new setting in a totally unexpected way. Seo takes the opportunity to teach Cat about the purpose of dressing up for the Day of the Dead, noting it “helps visiting spirits feel less … awkward and out of place” (143). Cat is so inspired by La Catrina that she later decides to dress up as her for Halloween.

As Cat becomes accustomed to life in Bahía de la Luna and grows closer to her Mexican heritage, she also begins encountering ghosts more and more often. When Cat first moved to town, she did not believe in ghosts at all and even went so far as to ask Carlos’s family if they were pretending when they talked about them. After seeing ghosts on Mission Hill, Cat knows they are real but still deeply fears them. Because she believes that they will try to steal her sister’s breath, Cat screams and pleads with a ghost that follows her home from school one day, yelling, “Maya’s not ready!” (124). As the ghosts’ presence in Cat’s life continues to increase, so, too, does her awareness of and appreciation for her Mexican heritage. This development showcases the theme Discovering One’s Own Heritage. At the same time, as more ghosts begin appearing and surrounding Cat’s family, Maya seems to be growing sicker. She can no longer walk around without a breathing tube, and Cat worries that Maya is getting worse much faster than expected. The tension inside Cat between her love for her sister and her desire for her own life surfaces again when she lies to her friends and calls Maya a “friend of [hers] from back home” (141). Maya is deeply hurt by Cat’s denial, but Cat admits that she still feels torn between wanting to protect her sister and wanting to be her own person. Sometimes, this conflict causes her to act out in strange or hurtful ways. Maya seems to gain comfort from the ghosts’ visits, but Cat has yet to connect their presence with the possibility of remaining connected to Maya after she dies. In this way, the ghosts come to represent not only Cat’s heritage but also The Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood, which continues long after death.

To create a diegesis, or plot, Telgemeier alternates between word-dominant frames/pages and image-dominant frames/pages. Each serves a different purpose in illuminating key plot, setting, and character details. Word-dominant montages, such as Cat’s first conversation with Seo, demonstrate Seo’s outgoing and friendly nature as well as the overall upbeat and energetic atmosphere of the scene. Scenes like this are also illustrated with bright colors, further cementing their tone. Juxtaposed with panels like these are panels in which there is little or no dialogue and the focus is, instead, on characters’ facial expressions and body language, as well as on the setting. When Cat is followed home by a ghost, most of the text is onomatopoeia rather than dialogue, and the panels are large and consumed by landscape and background. Cat feels small and powerless in this moment, and she is drawn small against a large, vacant world.