That is, rather than using any cheap coloring tricks or differentiated style to separate the worlds, the two locales seem equally real-or equally artificial, depending on how you want to look at them. An assured character designer, she imbues every person she draws with a full range of real-feeling expressions, gestures, and actions, and Wang does a particularly incredible job of intimating a continuity between the real world and the game world of “Coarsegold Online,” the two locales that the book spends equal amounts of time in. The art comes courtesy of Jen Wang, whose previous graphic novel was Koko Be Good, also from First Second.

That doesn’t mean it’s not engaging though. In Real Life, written by novelist, columnist, activist and Boing Boing co-owner Cory Doctorow, is a pretty obvious, if not quite strident, lesson-story for young adults, the highlights of which Doctorow double-underlines in his prose introduction to the comic. Ultimately, Anda is able to do some Internet judo and use the connectivity of the Internet to help solve a problem that grew in the shadows cast by the Internet’s connectivity in the first place. Learning of his plight, Anda tries to help by forwarding on ideas garnered from her father’s experience with labor organizing and unionization in the states, but that doesn’t quite translate in China, and things just get worse for Raymond and his fellow exploited gold farmers. During one such raid, she gets to know a gold farmer named Raymond, a young Chinese man who works in a sort of gold-farming sweatshop. In the game, Anda meets up with fellow gamer girl Lucy, who goes on paid anti-gold farming missions (which basically amounts to having her avatar slaughter the avatars of the gold farmers, whose avatars resemble cute little snowmen gnomes). But it also allows for economic exploitation, as Anda learns when she stumbles upon the real-world phenomenon of “gold farming.” That is, people play the game to make a living, specifically by playing to win gold (or points or experience or items or whatever the reward system of the game may be in this case, it’s gold), which can then be sold to players in the real world for real money.

In real life cory doctorow read online