Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the "how I got here" story - whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don't think that's dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is "how I got here," I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai's first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger. It's somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: "semi" is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn't mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we're reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed "Dear Beloved Stranger." I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to - I'm not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction - she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the "Dear Beloved Stranger." (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that "Cathy" was the real person in Pai's actual life, and that bit is less "semi" and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he's creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the "real" scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won't spoil that here. It's personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn't there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he's done since - which I did - we find that he's mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I'm always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make "here's how I broke through and actually started making art" stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there's more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he's been going since then.