Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:

A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on. But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s growing-up years.

The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside, they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both feel deeply wrong to them.

The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation (like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.

So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you through the lens of one person’s experience.

You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their parents and/or peers, that is.

Definitely worth a read.

Superman: Earth One, Volume One, by Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis: #tbt review

(Finished April 13, 2015)

Loved bringing Superman into the modern age. Plot holes (old and new) neatly filled; Clark has an appealing complexity and isn't always immune to temptation (though this isn't massively, oppressively grimdark like the most recent movies). But his life will show him the way—he seems to have faith in that, and as the reader, I'm happy to concur—and he will learn that there are no simple choices.

Oh, and the artwork. So gorgeous. A thousand times I have picked up a graphic novel based on the gorgeousness of the cover art and been disappointed by clunky, unimaginative, and even amateurish drawing throughout the body of the story. Not so here. Of course the cover is still the most fully-realized image in the book, but thought and care and skill have been applied throughout.

Not a DC person? Maybe this series will change your mind. Don't know what that means? This is a great entry-point into that universe. Four stars, and high hopes that the whole series will amount to five.

Locke & Key Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

A spooky mansion with magical doors and hidden keys—a Bay Area family with a secret history taking refuge there after a horrific tragedy—an echo in a well that is also a deeply malevolent creature—an unapologetically murderous teenager on the road trip from hell—a quiet New England town called Lovecraft—who could ask for more?

Go ahead and ask, because this graphic novel is also replete with glorious artwork and nuggets of sly, laugh-out-loud humor. Not for the weak of stomach or the faint of heart! But super rewarding for the stout-hearted reader.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki: #tbt review

(Finished April 22, 2015)

I don't often sit down and take in a whole book, even a short one, in one sitting anymore, but this was so absorbing I did just that. The characters and situations are very imperfect and very real. There's so much tension between things everlastingly staying always the same whether you want them to or not, and things inexorably changing whether you want them to or not—and the girls are right at that cusp of becoming teenagers, and developing (internally, externally) unevenly, as kids do—and it's just a chapter in their lives, just this one summer—

We see coming-of-age books about boys all the time. And sexy ones about girls. This book is just real. In some ways it's more of a window than a mirror--I didn't have the kind of childhood where staying at a summer cottage was a thing--but I saw myself, too, in the push and pull between wanting to stay a child and being impatient with the whole thing and wanting to just grow up already. 

And there's the whole thing where your parents become suddenly human and the way their human imperfections impact your life becomes—not exactly a thing you question, but at least you begin to see it. It's still the water you swim in every day, but you're getting close to the point in your life where you will be breaching the surface tension. 

And there's the other thing where your childhood friendships, based on nothing more than proximity and age and yet seeming as permanent as the landscape around you, become something that may or may not last through the next argument or your family's next living situation. Just because someone's proximity has made them almost part of who you are doesn't mean that the person they're growing up to be won't be a stranger to you. And that feels so, so strange when you realize it.

I guess what I mean is, read this.

Blankets

by Craig Thompson

A very personal and vividly-told story about first love. I could really feel it… also, the zap that such an intensely religious upbringing put on those kids’ heads. Beautifully drawn. It feels strange to me that I don’t have more to say about this book than I do. It’s very absorbing. But it’s also a quiet book. I felt quiet when reading it, and I feel quiet now, thinking about it. Snow. Blankets. Thoughts.

The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors

by Elizabeth Beier

My partner gave me this graphic novel for Christmas and I started reading it on New Year’s Eve. It’s very specific and awkward and hyperlocal and quite wonderful. It’s an autobiographical account of the author’s adventures as she moves to Berkeley and becomes actively (as opposed to merely hypothetically) bisexual. She also spends quite a bit of the book waxing lyrical about the last days of the Lexington. Vividly drawn and highly relatable, even though I’m not of her generation and reading this book *seriously* made me feel that.