Smile: A Graphic Novel

“She’s in pain, Amara. If playing Nintendo nonstop makes her forget about her teeth I kinda think we should let her play. She has a lot more pain to look forward to…so try and go easy on her, okay?”

Raina’s mother interprets her early humor as shock and understands the difficult road Raina is about to travel. When Amara complains that Raina refuses to share her videogame, her mother tries to reason with her. Her body language as she kneels with gritted teeth demonstrates how scared the mother is.

“I do look like a baby. But do I really care what anyone else thinks? … Yes.”

Raina is self-conscious about her teeth, but Emily tells her that it is the pigtails that make her look childish. The protagonist spends a restless night in bed feeling like she is giving in to peer pressure. Unfortunately, Raina continues to face criticism from Emily and the others to change her look throughout the story.

“Blah, blah, blah root canals blah…blahse-blah…holes drilled in your teeth, blah-de-blah…dum dum, three hours or longer doo doo dum…doot doot novocaine doobee do…yada yada laughing gas, bloo blah…”

Raina’s endodontist describes the root canal procedure that will help preserve other teeth that are damaged from the fall. As a middle-school student, Raina finds that most of the terminology goes over her head except for upsetting things like novocaine or a long procedure time. This explanation takes place over five panels with the focus on Raina trembling, wincing, and panicking with only the endodontist’s hand visible.

“Smile? Hmm. I guess we’ll have to take a new Polaroid. Your mouth looks pretty different from the last time you were here!”

Dr. Dragoni compares Raina’s current smile to the picture taken before the accident. While the picture’s smile is open and awkward, the one Raina gives is embarrassed and reluctant. As a child dentist, Dr. Dragoni tries to be lighthearted with his patients to ease their worries. Raina, however, feels he is condescending.

“OW!”

After getting braces for her front two teeth, Raina suffers jolts of pain throughout the day that Telgemeier depicts in a series of small panels. She triggers the first by touching her teeth, but it continues whether she walks, sits, eats, or sleeps. This pain leads to a scene in which her dad tells her a tone-deaf joke about hitting her head against the wall to make her feel better.

“Well, maybe someone should start talking about it!! (Maybe it would make us feel less like freaks.)”

Raina complains about her nighttime headgear after her mother suggests that many children secretly wear corrective equipment. This is cold comfort for someone who must live with the device and its stigmas every day. Raina’s response may be one of the reasons why Telgemeier created Smile: In her Author’s Note, she mentions her shock at the feedback she gets from people who have similar stories.

“Oh, man, this guy won’t stop looking at me. He’s pretty cute! Ack, but if I smile back, he’ll see that my teeth are…”

Raina meets Sammy on the first day of band class and has an instant attraction to him. Telgemeier uses body language to draw a connection between the two: Raina is initially nervous to take a seat and buries her head behind a book. Instead of using dialogue to explain further, Telgemeier draws a wordless panel in which Sammy flashes his teeth to an enamored Raina.

“I’m so glad you’re all safe! It’s a nightmare out there. The roads are jammed, everyone’s in a panic, it’s absolute chaos. Did you see the apartment towers over by 19th Avenue? They’re cracked and crumbling! My buddy Frank lives in Watsonville, I heard that’s where the quake’s epicenter was…He hasn’t been able to get in contact with his family yet. The phone lines are so overburdened, it’s almost impossible to get through to anyone! And worst of all… they had to postpone the World Series!!”

Raina’s father arrives home after the 1989 earthquake. With no power or modern internet, the Telgemeiers rely on unclear radio reports and neighborhood hearsay for information, so his arrival is the first time they get any first-hand news about the disaster. Since the earthquake spares the neighborhood of serious damage, his descriptions show just how devastating the event was. The father ending his report with the relatively minor inconvenience of the World Series delay is also a good example of how Smile often ends pages with punchlines.

“I survived a major earthquake. I guess in the grand scheme of things losing a couple of teeth isn’t the end of the world! …Sigh.”

Raina tries to put her personal pain in perspective by comparing it to the greater suffering from the earthquake, but doing so does not make her feel better. The problem with this perspective is that minimizing trauma does not resolve it. Things could always be worse: Raina’s family could have lost their house in the earthquake or lack money to pay for her treatment, but Raina’s issues are bigger than just her teeth, and she needs more than a reframing to improve her self-esteem.

“Whatever. I’m too old for this Disney stuff. I’m totally gonna hate this movie. I just know it. I’m totally gonna…”

Like many preteens, Raina considers herself above kids’ films, but after the first bars of the “Fathoms Below” shanty that opens The Little Mermaid, her posture changes from arms crossed with legs on the balcony rim to crunched up in utter joy. Telgemeier then depicts her with eyes open in thought throughout the rest of the day and a breathless conversation with Emily that leads directly into her first encounter with Sean, her Prince Eric.

“All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!”

This image of pained Raina clutching her teddy bear in bed is juxtaposed with a panel on the previous page in which Dr. Golden’s receptionist wishes her a Merry Christmas after the tooth removal surgery. In between these panels, a drowsy Raina goes to the bathroom, removes the still-bloody gauze from her mouth, and stares at her exposed gums. Even a common courtesy can come off as a cruel joke. 

“Weird…Something happens when you smile at people. They smile back!!”

With her new retainer replacing her stunted front teeth with fake ones, Raina feels a surge of confidence when she returns to school. Her teachers compliment her, and even Sean waves back. This idea about how someone’s internal feelings can influence the way others see that person appears again in the lesson at the end of Smile. Raina does not realize this yet, however, because she is still basing her self-worth on her appearance.

“Oh, so you’re a NOBODY!! What else is new?”

Karin is impulsive and always ready to rip into Raina. Here, she walks in as Raina vents about how she looks nerdy with braces on, and Melissa and Kaylah tell her she is nerdy regardless. Raina tries to change subjects by saying they are talking about nobody, but Karin takes a shot at her anyway. When Raina walks away angry, Karin blames the victim by calling her a baby.

“You take everything way too seriously, Raina. You’ve got to loosen up a little! Learn to laugh! Don’t be so uptight!!”

Out of all of Raina’s friends, Melissa is the nicest to her, but she is not willing to break rank with the other girls. While it is important to laugh at oneself, Melissa says this in the aftermath of the particularly cruel birthday makeover. Melissa also does not understand how much stress Raina is under: The next panel shifts to yet another painful brace tightening with Raina thinking to herself, “Easy for her to say!!” (140).

“What? No way! What would I draw? What would he do with it? What if I…”

While passing notes in class, Melissa suggests that drawing a picture would be a better way of getting Sean’s attention than playing for the basketball team. This makes sense, but having her drawing rejected would be devastating since her art is more personal to her. Before Raina could finish her sentence, her teacher swipes the note and reads it in front of the class. This leads to opposing horrors: the fear of Sean knowing about her crush, and the fear of no one caring about her crush.

“Maybe I liked a few of them, and maybe a few of them liked me…it wasn’t that important. None of them were Sean. But boys were good for video game tips. Boys didn’t give me any flack about my appearance. And, they were willing to talk about important issues.”

As Raina’s friends hang out more with boys, Raina sees them as a chance to practice flirting. The guys open her perspective in other ways, however, as she has more in common with them than with her old friends. During this sequence, for example, Emily recommends that Raina whiten her teeth—an unnecessary practice for a middle-school student and the least of her dental worries.

“The truth is…I want my first kiss to be PERFECT. The perfect guy, the perfect setting, the perfect song playing…But when I imagine all of those things, I imagine myself as being perfect too. And I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon!”

This scene uses multiple comparisons to illustrate Raina’s poor self-image. Raina contrasts the juvenile party at which she declines to play Spin the Bottle with a storybook first kiss. The scene also compares Raina’s idealized self, with arrows pointing to perfect teeth, straight hair, and clear skin, to her flawed body. On the opposite page is a full-page image of the cosmetics that companies sell to beauty-conscious girls like her.

“Well, we did a quick deep cleaning of the gums, and I guess we didn’t wait long enough for the novocaine to work, and we could have given her laughing gas, but we didn’t think she’d need—”

When Raina faints after surgery, the periodontist tries to explain why to her infuriated mother. The specialist is apologetic, but he is only listing excuses for his negligence. Raina’s mom normally trusts the dentists even if the operations are painful, so her anger over inadequate treatment strengthens the bond between parent and child.

“Man, this is great. A whole new school, with new teachers, new friends, new guys…Maybe this is my chance to start fresh! A new, confident me! A new chapter of my life!”

High school is a chance to reinvent oneself, and Raina is ready to put her friendship problems behind her with a brand-new look. This optimism dies as soon as she finishes this thought, as Emily beckons her over to a table of middle-school friends and goes over a series of summer adventures she was absent from. As she struggles with this encounter, her classes, and braces, Raina feels like everything is “exactly the same” (181).

“The next stage of my orthodontic treatment was a fairly entertaining one, designed to correct my CROSS-BITE. (That’s when your top and bottom jaws don’t line up.) To fix this, little hooks are attached to specific brackets on the top and the bottom teeth and a tiny rubber band is stretched between them.”

While the braces succeed in pushing her teeth together, Raina has to go through one more bit of corrective treatment before she is free, and it is the most embarrassing one as the sarcasm in this caption indicates. Banded braces are an unsightly obtrusion for a high school freshman, and talking is difficult, as Raina notes afterward: “I can’ open ma mouf all th’ wey!” (183).

“But you have to admit…it was kinda funny…”

Emily and Kaylah follow Raina to the bathroom to calm her down after the pantsing, but they downplay the incident as an inoffensive prank. Emily’s excuse mirrors the way Kaylah dismisses Raina’s feelings after the makeover. These two might not intentionally hurt her the way Karin and Nicole do, but they are complicit in enjoying her humiliation. Their complicity emboldens Karin and Nicole and keeps Raina as a perpetual punching bag.

“Nicole and Karin have teased me for years…And I always let them get away with it. I guess dumping on me made them feel better about themselves, in some twisted way. But, just by standing up to them it’s like I took away their power!!”

While Smile shows Raina drawing several times, Telgemeier does not show the artwork. After standing up to the other girls, however, Raina does some therapeutic doodling on the edges of her notebook paper, depicting Karin with a snake’s tongue, Nicole as a devil, and herself as a giant laughing over them. While the drawings are crude, they represent a change in her art from a hobby to a means of expressing herself.

“Mmm…Nope. Is this some sort of trick? You look cute!”

Your friends influence your attitude. After seeing the imperfect results of her braces removal, Raina reverts to the self-conscious mindset she had with her old friends. Instead of encouraging her self-loathing or criticizing her, Theresa compliments her and is not even aware that something is wrong. This reaction allows Raina to finally escape her insecurity.