Noir and the Sunset Haze of Family Memory in Iman Vellani and Marianna Ignazzi's Chachu #1

Let’s be up front about it— Chachu #1 is trying really hard.  Iman Vellani and Marianna Ignazzi put the effort in for this comic to be a Gen Z neo-noir, looking at 1979 through Jordie Bellaire’s golden hour hues. Nineteen-year-old Leila heads out to Los Angeles for college, at least that’s what her Pakistani family back in Canada believes, and there is some truth to that.  She can move into her dorm tomorrow.  But there’s another reason for her to be in L.A.  Even all the way in Canada, they got news that Hollywood star Cleo Handler just recently married one of their own, a local boy who left the Great White North and his family 20 years ago, right about the same time that Leila’s father died.  That starlet’s husband is Leila’s Chachu, her father’s brother, whom she’s never met.  He’s the family’s secret, known to the older generation but just a family ghost to her.  He’s a family story— actually, there are many stories; a mobster, a junkie, and an atheist.  The story you get depends on who you ask.  So Leila wants to find her own story about her Chachu, hopefully the true story.  

Only this is Los Angeles, the city of The Long Goodbye and Chinatown.  Chachu’s (he’s never given a proper name as far as I can find) starlet wife wants to retire, something her father Cyril strongly disagrees with. Busting into Chachu’s house with guns pointed, Cyril thinks that Chachu has something to do with his golden ticket’s decision to get out of the biz.  But Cleo is already off, having sped away earlier that day to have a rendezvous of her own—just another mystery to add to Chachu’s growing amateur casebook.

Ignazzi’s art has the expressiveness of Elsa Charretier, through Eduardo Risso’s use of shadows and negative space.  Leila gets to be an animated character while her Chachu is the observant private eye, trying to put all of the pieces of what’s happening in his life together like it’s another case.  Just the way that she draws Leila and Chachu smoking cigarettes speaks to the character work that Ignazzi is doing.  For Leila, the cigarette feels like a prop, something she should do because she’s playing a role in Los Angeles.  But for Chachu, the cigarette feels like a part of him, a part of who he is.  One is part of this Los Angeles, while the other is still just a tourist, and the way that Ignazzi stages the characters tells you all of this.  Look at Leila’s clothes, the vintage car she drives, just the way her body language changes in each moment.  Ignazzi is telling us as much, if not more, about this young woman as Vellani’s writing does. 

There’s a precociousness to Vellani’s scripting of the book.  It’s very flowery and off-putting at first.  “His mustache sat too politely under his nose—like it was there to chaperone his more boyish features.  Meanwhile his hair staged a coup against its own follicles.  Oh, the fury of tangled casualties…” There’s a lot of work and effort in Leila’s description of Chachu that sounds a bit like a 3rd-period high school creative writing class assignment.  As much as it’s Vellani’s writing, that’s also Leila’s narration and maybe it speaks to the character more than it does the writing.  There’s that air of roleplaying here— the girl from Canada in the big city to find her long-lost uncle— so it makes a bit of sense that her own inner voice would sound like an attempt to mimic the hard-boiled noir detectives that she’s trying to be.  

This is a young woman who, as seen through the art and the writing, exudes a coolness— she’s trying to be the niece that a long-lost uncle in L.A. would want.  She’s trying to be cool and tough but in a later scene when Chachu’s father-in-law breaks in and has his men threaten the reunited pair at gunpoint to find his daughter, Vellani and Ignazzi use this scene to show us who these two are— a girl who’s scared and out of place in this world and an uncle who is a bit too much in this world.  Chachu doesn’t flinch.  It’s more like he’s been in this position before and knows what to do.  It’s a couple of pages but it gives a lot of insight into these two.  This scene reveals more of them to us than they’re willing to reveal to each other. 

There’s a lot not said between these two and those are some of the really intriguing things.  Leila is 19 years old and Chachu tells Cyril that his brother died 20 years ago.  That lines up with when Chachu left his family.  How does that all tie up with what these characters want or what they’re running from?  What exactly is the nature of Chachu and Cleo’s marriage? She says she loves him but she ran from him at the start of the comic.  These are components of the little mysteries that Vellani and Ignazzi are laying out before us in this comic of family, of stardom, and a longing for something that transcends everything else.