Drop-In

by Dave Lapp

This is a book that has left me with a certain level of ambiguity.

Dave Lapp has worked with kids in Toronto's Regent Park, and other 'at-risk' neighbourhoods. He's come into these areas to run after-school arts programs, and has turned many of his experiences there into short comic strips, which are collected in this book.

At first, the book frustrated me a great deal. Lapp is excellent at encapsulating the mannerisms and psyches of young children in a few panels, but as soon as the tale became interesting, it would end. I kept expecting there to be some meta-narrative, but instead found that, even with recurring characters and themes, the stories did not connect much to one another, until the last third of the book, when he was working in an apartment high-rise and with different students. Partly, this is a function of the book's realism. Many of these students do not have easy stories, that conclude or find closure, but it did make the book feel disjointed.

Lapp portrays himself as rather naive - he's a nice guy who will give money to mentally ill street people, and seems willing to put up with a lot of crap from the kids he's supposed to be working with. I have seen this first-hand: there is a level of acceptance among non-teachers who work with the city's 'at-risk' population, best captured by the scene wherein the one youth worker watches a bunch of teenagers beat up a smaller kid while firemen are trying to get his attention to let them into the building, all while the alarm is ringing. I've seen things like this first-hand as well.

Lapp depicts these children as secretive, attention-starved, and somewhat disturbed. As a portrait of neighbourhoods like Regent Park, he is, I fear, only all too accurate. His lengthier strips involving a family of Vietnamese girls show the randomness and difficulty of life in the area, but also left me the question of why he was spending so much time with this one, particular family. There didn't seem to be a stronger connection to them than the other children he worked with, and so I thought it odd that he spent so much time in their home.

Lapp's art is straight-forward, with thick lines. It is difficult to always tell the ethnicity of the people his is portraying, which was sometimes relevant to the story he was telling.

This is an enjoyable book, but I found that it left me ultimately unsatisfied. I would have rather seen him focus his attention on one or two children, and develop a longer narrative. In all though, this is an excellent first effort, and a promising hint at more quality work to come.