Forest Hills Bootleg Society
by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux
2022
Forest Hills Bootleg Society is a graphic novel set in the early 2000s, in the window of time when media existed on DVDs instead of VHS, but before you could stream or easily download films from the internet. Four high school friends try to buy bootleg copies of a couple kid-friendly Studio Ghibli films ... and end up with some very sexy, very adult hentai instead. (Which raises some confusing and conflicting emotions for them!) They decide to try burning bootleg copies of their own, and selling them to high school boys. What could possibly go wrong?
Brooke, Kelly, and Melissa go to the Forest Hills Christian Academy. Maggie lives in town, but goes to the public high school - she's also the only devout Christian among them. Maggie is also also the other girls' source for a car (her mom's) and a computer to burn the discs (her mom's ex-boyfriend's.) Kelly and Melissa are roommates. Brooke and Kelly are secretly dating. Melissa is extra-secretly crushing on Kelly. Adding money to the mix makes everything more complicated.
Brooke wants to use the status that comes from having money to become friends with the popular girls - which provides the popular girls with another way to take advantage of her. Kelly wants to watch more anime, learn to drawn anime, and figure out her feelings for Brooke and Melissa. Melissa wants to spend more time with Kelly, and also wants cool jackets like the popular girls wear (even as she scorns Brooke for wanting to be popular.) And poor Maggie just wants to be with her friends and go along with whatever they're doing, even though she has serious moral qualms about every aspect of their plan.
In addition to their interpersonal conflict within the friend group, there's dramatic tension and irony arising from the fact that they feel invincible and able to sell as many bootleg DVDs as they can burn, while we in the audience know that they can't possibly avoid getting into some kind of trouble, and that the more they sell, the more likely they are to get caught. Baker and Goux opt for psychological realism over wish fulfillment, so although we might want the girls to be spared from unhappiness ... well, that's not really what high school is like, is it?
The interior art is black and white with two shades of green instead of grayscale - a lighter yellowish-green and a darker blueish-green. In the afterward, Baker and Goux said they wanted to achieve something like a sepia-tone effect to signal that their story is set in the past. It reminded me of the earliest computer monitors. One thing that impressed me was a few instances where Baker and Goux managed to achieve an effect like a montage sequence in a film, by filling a page or two-page spread with dozens of small, irregular panels. One scene shows all the boys who bought DVDs being shocked, then aroused by the hentai. Another shows Brooke and Kelly surreptitiously holding hands at a youth-group meeting, while everyone else is watching the pastor.
There's not a narrator like you would get in a purely textual book, but there is an omniscient voice that appears in text bubbles to give information about the characters. Initially just information about the girls, facts like their handedness, their desires, their insecurities. We get a running count of how many times Brooke and Kelly have kissed. It reminded me of the rapid-fire narration in Amelie. We also get page-length asides telling more about the girls' history and emotions. Each is lonely, and each is only partially able to feel enough connection to the others to assuage that loneliness. Later other students get the same treatment. In some cases these are one-off factoids that simply establish that the girls are not the only ones with secrets, doubts, rich inner lives. A few of the side characters get plots of their own that unfold in the background of the girls' story, including Maggie's mom.
This is a book that's probably appropriate for older teens, in high school. All the swear words are censored by the classic technique replacing the letters of the words with symbols. We see homophobic bullying, racist bullying, fat-shaming masquerading as friendly-concern. Aside from kissing, we only see implications of sexuality, or the moment before something happens, with only a facial expression or the suggestion of movement to indicate what will come next. Considering that the whole plot revolves around teenagers being surprised by and then sharing pornographic images, I would trust teens to know when they're ready to encounter a story where people do that. It's something much easier to do today than it was in the early 2000s, and I suspect that some teens might welcome a book that takes the power of sexual imagery seriously, both as something people might seek out, and as something that might affect them in ways they weren't prepared for.
Brooke, Kelly, and Melissa go to the Forest Hills Christian Academy. Maggie lives in town, but goes to the public high school - she's also the only devout Christian among them. Maggie is also also the other girls' source for a car (her mom's) and a computer to burn the discs (her mom's ex-boyfriend's.) Kelly and Melissa are roommates. Brooke and Kelly are secretly dating. Melissa is extra-secretly crushing on Kelly. Adding money to the mix makes everything more complicated.
Brooke wants to use the status that comes from having money to become friends with the popular girls - which provides the popular girls with another way to take advantage of her. Kelly wants to watch more anime, learn to drawn anime, and figure out her feelings for Brooke and Melissa. Melissa wants to spend more time with Kelly, and also wants cool jackets like the popular girls wear (even as she scorns Brooke for wanting to be popular.) And poor Maggie just wants to be with her friends and go along with whatever they're doing, even though she has serious moral qualms about every aspect of their plan.
In addition to their interpersonal conflict within the friend group, there's dramatic tension and irony arising from the fact that they feel invincible and able to sell as many bootleg DVDs as they can burn, while we in the audience know that they can't possibly avoid getting into some kind of trouble, and that the more they sell, the more likely they are to get caught. Baker and Goux opt for psychological realism over wish fulfillment, so although we might want the girls to be spared from unhappiness ... well, that's not really what high school is like, is it?
The interior art is black and white with two shades of green instead of grayscale - a lighter yellowish-green and a darker blueish-green. In the afterward, Baker and Goux said they wanted to achieve something like a sepia-tone effect to signal that their story is set in the past. It reminded me of the earliest computer monitors. One thing that impressed me was a few instances where Baker and Goux managed to achieve an effect like a montage sequence in a film, by filling a page or two-page spread with dozens of small, irregular panels. One scene shows all the boys who bought DVDs being shocked, then aroused by the hentai. Another shows Brooke and Kelly surreptitiously holding hands at a youth-group meeting, while everyone else is watching the pastor.
There's not a narrator like you would get in a purely textual book, but there is an omniscient voice that appears in text bubbles to give information about the characters. Initially just information about the girls, facts like their handedness, their desires, their insecurities. We get a running count of how many times Brooke and Kelly have kissed. It reminded me of the rapid-fire narration in Amelie. We also get page-length asides telling more about the girls' history and emotions. Each is lonely, and each is only partially able to feel enough connection to the others to assuage that loneliness. Later other students get the same treatment. In some cases these are one-off factoids that simply establish that the girls are not the only ones with secrets, doubts, rich inner lives. A few of the side characters get plots of their own that unfold in the background of the girls' story, including Maggie's mom.
This is a book that's probably appropriate for older teens, in high school. All the swear words are censored by the classic technique replacing the letters of the words with symbols. We see homophobic bullying, racist bullying, fat-shaming masquerading as friendly-concern. Aside from kissing, we only see implications of sexuality, or the moment before something happens, with only a facial expression or the suggestion of movement to indicate what will come next. Considering that the whole plot revolves around teenagers being surprised by and then sharing pornographic images, I would trust teens to know when they're ready to encounter a story where people do that. It's something much easier to do today than it was in the early 2000s, and I suspect that some teens might welcome a book that takes the power of sexual imagery seriously, both as something people might seek out, and as something that might affect them in ways they weren't prepared for.
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