I Am The Subway, written and illustrated by Kim Hyo-eun, was first published in Korean in 2016. This English translation by Deborah Smith was published in 2020.
I Am The Subway is an intelligent and thoughtful reflection on subways, mass transportation, people, and how these interact in society. I was most impressed by Kim Hyo-eun’s use of line and design. For example, inside the front cover there’s a two-page spread, all in gray tones, of a subway train on a bridge, and, tucked off to the side, a paragraph explaining how long the Seoul subway system is and how many millions of people use it each day.
Another line units the next two pages, but this one angled: people going up and down an escalator leading to and from the train. The next pages show a line of turnstiles, and a lines of people passing through them in both directions. The following two pages are horizontal again, this time a line of people standing in wait for the train. All that before the title page.
After the title page, the layout becomes somewhat more standard for children’s books: less reflective, more interactive, with dialogue and individual characters.
Kim Hyo-eun gives glimpses of various people taking the subway, people who come from several generations and represent multiple social classes.
At times this is quite poetic, but at times, the social commentary seems a bit heavy-handed: not wrong, but a touch off-target, and I have to say, I expected a book about subways for kids to address more of the physical, and more directly: there is great heroism and great pain in such massive feats of engineering.
But the lines of the sweeping visuals are quite moving.
