Style and Issues
June Kim, the author and illustrator for 12 Days, primarily drew the artwork in the realism style, although she occasionally rendered characters as super-deformed versions of themselves. While the cover art incorporates red and silver coloring, the artwork primarily appears in black and white, with occasional gray shading. Kim explores the characters' pasts through dreams, and periodic, nonlinear flashbacks. Several character traits, such as Jackie's chocolate allergy, are presented to the reader through inference rather than exposition. Additionally, Kim uses a brief, untranslated Korean song alongside the predominantly English text.
Critics have focused on the issues of love and loss. 12 Days primarily deals with "a love affair and its aftermath," according to Dirk Deppey of The Comics Journal. He considered it "a meditation on loss," which explores "a relationship neither fully ended nor easily forgotten by either party." Theron Martin of Anime News Network considered it a story about "trying to find a way to cope with a devastating loss". According to Katherine Dacey, the former senior manga editor for PopCultureShock, 12 Days contains "lovely, quiet observations about the way we grieve, define family, express desire, and remember moments of hurt and betrayal." Johanna Draper Carlson, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, wrote that Jackie's action of consuming the ashes serves as "a transition period, a way to indulge her grief and then a time to be able to be herself again." AfterEllen.com's editor-in-chief Karman Kregloe stated that the comic "explores the impact of loss, and how relationships are supported and broken in times of grief."
To a lesser extent, critics also discussed the lesbian aspect. Martin felt that the lesbian element of 12 Days had been addressed, without becoming overstated. Casey Brienza, a fellow reviewer for Anime News Network, suggested that the shame Jackie and Noah felt as lesbians "ultimately destroyed their relationship." In her comparison of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and 12 Days, Erica Friedman, the founder of the lesbian-themed anime convention Yuricon, considered neither story to be "lesbian narratives", but rather "narratives of grief, of relationships and of missed opportunities for communication and closeness."
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