Review: _Prime Baby_

Gene Yang's Prime Baby, recently collected into graphic novel form after being serialized in The New York Times, is a cute, clever, and endearing story about young Thaddeus' childhood megalomania and how it connects him to his family, especially his new baby sister, who just happens to be an interdimensional portal for peacenik aliens intent on bringing smiles and happiness to the Earth.

In Thaddueas one can see a deep-rooted sense of sibling rivalry dueling with the desire to be loved. He's at once a disturbing little boy with an alarming adolescence-level egocentricism and someone with whom anyone with brothers and sisters -- anyone who has ever wanted to be the center of the universe, really -- can relate easily.

This undercurrent of allegorical depth (in Prime Baby, wrapped in the tension of Thaddeus as exceptional while also archetypal "everychild") in otherwise seemingly mundane stories is beginning to be part of Yang's signature. It's certainly apparent in The Eternal Smile. Yang is adept at taking the ordinary and giving it a little symbolic "umph!" While no other work he's produced has been as multifaceted or as meaningful as American Born Chinese, which is beginning to stand as the exception rather than the rule in his repertoire as Yang publishes more work to a wide audience, it is comforting to know that Yang is established enough now that we can see braided threads in his storytelling. I'd rather see more of the complexity inherent in ABC than the essentially playful, "oh, isn't that interesting to note" levels of relevance in the rest of his opus (that I've read to date), but it is important to point out that Prime Baby represents earlier work from the artist rather than an evolution of his craft.

Fun, relatable, worth reading, but not life-changing or particularly exceptional, Prime Baby offers hints of complexity in a storyline otherwise relatively innocuous.