Cannon by Lee Lai (she/her) is a thought-provoking and propulsive graphic novel that explores how one can get taken advantage of in all different types of relationships—family, friend, romantic, and professional—and the importance of making yourself and your mental health a priority.
Lucy, also known as Cannon, a nickname lovingly coined by her best friend, Trish, is a line cook at a restaurant in Montreal. Cannon has a lot on her proverbial plate. Working at the restaurant is incredibly demanding, and, to make matters worse, her boss, Guy, showers her with empty praise, disregards her request for a day off to take her Gung Gung (grandfather) to an appointment, and touches her inappropriately. In her family life, Cannon has taken on the thankless and draining job of being one of her Gung Gung’s caretakers. Since the relationship between Cannon’s mother and Gung Gung is fraught, Cannon’s mother does not assist Cannon in this endeavor. She also doesn’t have the capacity to provide Cannon with any emotional support on this front.
Cannon and Trish, who are both queer and Chinese, have been best friends for fourteen years, but lately Trish has been very self-involved, repeatedly interrupting Cannon, obsessing about her writing, and either cutting short or showing up late for plans with Cannon to engage in a meaningless hook-up. Amidst this backdrop, Cannon’s mental health is hanging on by a thread. She is desperately trying to cope by running excessively and listening to meditative podcasts, but it’s just a matter of time before everything comes crashing down.
Cannon spans 300 pages and its palette is largely black, white, and grey, with an occasional red or green pop of color. I loved the way Lai used placement of text to convey the emotion behind what was occurring on the page. For example, when Trish talks over Cannon, her text bubbles obscure Cannon’s text bubbles. Also, when Lai is depicting the chaos of the kitchen at the restaurant where Cannon works, she uses multiple bubbles of text, some of which start or continue out-of-frame. I also really loved Lai’s use of birds as a metaphor for Cannon’s level of anxiety at any given point in time. They were a fascinating visual manifestation of Cannon’s inner world that contributed to the building tension of the novel.
I also appreciated the representation. Cannon and Trish are queer and Chinese, and supporting characters, like many of Cannon’s co-workers and Trish’s hook-up, are men of color. If you’re in the mood for a sapphic graphic novel, you should pick this up. Lai did an excellent job of developing not only a complex protagonist, but other multi-dimensional characters, while simultaneously telling an interesting story with multiple throughlines, each of which resolves in a satisfying way by the end of the novel.
Lai is an Australian cartoonist living in Tio’tia:ke (colonially known as Montreal, Canada). Her debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, won the Lambda Literary Award for Graphic Novel, the Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, and two Ignatz Awards. Her comics have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Granta Magazine, and the Museum of Modern Art Magazine. You can find her on Instagram @_leelai.
Content warnings for depictions of nudity, death, anxiety, panic attacks, bullying, emotional abuse, and sexual assault.
Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey. She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.
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