Cannon Is a Comic Book Pressure Cooker

The first thing that strikes me about Cannon, Lee Lai’s follow-up to the award-winning 2022 graphic novel Stone Fruit, is its rhythmic pacing. Aside from a handful of pointed exceptions, every page of Cannon has four panels of equal size, arranged in a 2×2 orientation. A box of boxes in which the title character is trapped. A steady heartbeat that they cannot escape.

The protagonist of Cannon is called Lucy by her family, but to everyone else she's Cannon. The perception among her friends, co-workers, and loved ones is that she’s incredibly put together, stoic, unflappable, and in control. She’s the rock they can all depend on. But what they don't see is that it also makes her the sin-eater, absorbing all their negative energy, their shortcomings, and the small slights they don’t even recognize as such.

She’s the one who stays silent when her best friend talks over them, as if unaware that Cannon has said anything at all. She’s the one expected to play peacekeeper when tensions begin to fray among the overworked kitchen staff at the restaurant where she works. She’s the one who takes on all of the responsibility of caring for her ailing grandfather when her mother proves unable to overcome the trauma he inflicted on her during her youth.

Cannon isn’t Cannon’s real name. It’s an ironic nickname she earned for being the opposite of a “loose cannon,” as revealed when she teases a co-worker by telling him it's an ancient and revered Chinese family name, simultaneously pulling at another thematic thread embedded within the story: that of the model immigrant child.

That Cannon is so dutiful, so responsible, and so uncomplaining makes it tempting to see her as a “model minority," which threatens to flatten her into the kind of stereotype one might see in a shallowly written work of fiction.

This is exactly what her friend, Trish, does. Cannon and Trish grew up together, the only two queer Chinese girls in a small Canadian town. Trish is now a young, up-and-coming writer, but becomes desperate to fulfill the desires of patrons who have boxed her in with their expectations about what a queer young woman from an immigrant community should be writing about. Under that pressure, she begins to write a new story with a thinly veiled Cannon at its center, but without Cannon’s knowledge.