By Song Yang
Yen Press, 234 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

What’s especially interesting about Wild Animals is how, despite taking place in China during the Cultural Revolution, there’s not a lot about this coming-of-age tale that couldn’t be set anywhere. Perhaps there is something universal about youthful rebellion that even in a super-strict society like China, there are characters like protagonist Ma Xiaojun running around, cutting class, and getting into trouble.

Based on a novel called Wild Beast, Wild Animals retains the feel of a memoir, thanks to its first person perspective and abundance of detail. Kicking off in present time, a successful adult is attending a reunion of childhood friends when the sight of a certain woman triggers remembrances of his long-lost love. What follows is the main narrative: Ma as a Revolutionary Army uniform-wearing youth, living in an unnamed Chinese city with strict parents who want him to get good grades in school and otherwise stay out of trouble. Unfortunately, Ma falls in with a bad crowd he can never quite leave behind.

This “bad crowd” is composed of youths who loiter in the streets all day, smoking cigarettes, and getting into fights. One might find it ironic that Ma and his friends choose to rebel against the conforming nature of society through a gang, which of course, demands conformity of its own. There is a scene where Ma takes part in the brutal beating of a youth, despite recognizing him as an old friend, because the rest of his gang is doing it. Perhaps fittingly, writer/artist Song Yang never formally introduces the reader to these “friends,” having them seemingly coalesce into a singular, similarly attired collective instead.

One might expect some crazy times, but on the contrary, being in this gang consists of little more than standing around smoking. Personally, I found Wild Animals to be much more satisfying when Ma gets away from them, to explore his own burgeoning curiosities: first in keys, which lead to his sneaking into people’s homes; then in the opposite sex, which he finds equally mysterious. “More often than not, her stare would get even deeper. She’d drift off into her dreams and stay lost in her thoughts for a long time,” Ma says about a character named Mi Lan—one of the first woman friends he ever has, and one of the first real human connections he makes.

Of course, Ma initially has trouble reconciling his feelings for the fairer sex with the macho attitude he has cultivated, leading to conflict: will the same brutality that earned him respect from the gang work on women? We can forgive his transgressions to a point, chalking them up to the normal awkwardness that accompanies adolescence, and because Ma occasionally shows the soul of a poet. “I could almost feel the batting of her lashes against my chin, like the downy caress if a weeping willow,” is one of his many soulful lines.

Yang’s art style, which is purposely sketchy at times, gauzy and realistic in others, balances gritty street life and heartfelt yearning well. Gang fight panels are rendered with minimal strokes, emphasizing speed and agility, while the loves of Ma’s life look like romantic magazine images. Overall, it’s more detailed than most manga, and Yang has a particular gift for facial and body language, so there are times when dialogue and sound effects aren’t even necessary. That along with the careful compositions in each frame gives Wild Animals a cinematic quality (something Wild Beast author Wang Shuo also told Yang, according to the foreword) which alone is worth checking out.