Seek You

 
Seek You

A Journey through American Loneliness

by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon

2021 
 

 

Seek You is graphic nonfiction about loneliness. Kristen Radtke says she was inspired by the widespread social isolation of the coronavirus pandemic. Isolation isn't quite the same as loneliness - it's possible to enjoy a certain amount of time alone, and possible to be in the presence of others and still experience loneliness due to a lack of connection. What Radtke has produced is partly a personal essay where she looks back on the times in her own life when she's felt loneliest, partly an intellectual history of the idea of loneliness, and partly a tour through a few ways people have responded to being alone.
 
Radtke's tour includes the invention of the laugh track, Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the rise of 'cuddle parties', and Casey Kasem's long distance dedications, among other topics. She talks about American gun culture, the way distrust of other people encourages gun ownership ... which then fuels more distrust, and the way mass shooters are invariably described as 'loners'. Cars are also isolating, especially compared to public transit, something Radtke feels viscerally when she moves from New York to Las Vegas.
 
At two different points in the book, Radtke talks about the research of psychologist Harry Harlowe, who is best known for his study showing that orphaned baby monkeys prefer a 'soft mother' made of cloth, who provides only comfort and nothing else, over a 'wire mother' made of metal but equipped with a milk bottle nipple. Many of Harlowe's experiments seem like animal torture, and he seems to me to have continued long past the point of learning anything new. These parts of the book were genuinely upsetting to read. Harlowe himself appears to have been a very lonely person. Radtke says that one benefit of Harlowe's research was to overturn the prevailing parenting advice at the time, which amounted to physical neglect in the name of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
 
Two of the book's strongest sections are when Radtke talks about her father's teenage hobby as an amateur radio operator, and his late-night CQ searches for other operators, and later, when she talks about her own teen years on the early internet, maintaining a personal website and talking to strangers in chatrooms. Despite increasing concern about loneliness, it's not actually clear if more people are lonely now than in the past, or if it is simply more part of the public conversation. The similarity of Radtke's and her father's two activities serves as a kind of embedded metaphor for the universality of the human search for connection with others.
 
If Seek You has a throughline though, it's a growing pessimism about how people are harmed by loneliness and isolation, and how that harm becomes self-reinforcing as those people then find it harder to reconnect with others afterward. One of the findings of Harlowe's monkey research was that monkeys who had endured long isolation found it increasingly difficult to interact with others; they became stressed and overwhelmed by time spent with others, even to the point of self-harm. Beyond a certain length of isolation, they basically cannot rejoin the group; beyond another threshold, the other monkeys simply kill them.
 
Among humans, Radtke notes that lonely people often fear rejection more than they fear remaining isolated. This fear becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating, as it taints every interaction with anxiety, making them awkward and uncomfortable, and can lead to people preemptively avoiding or rejecting others before they can be rejected. Loneliness is contagious with social networks - knowing a lonely person makes you feel lonelier yourself. And because lonely people withdraw from public and create solo spaces for themselves, they reduce the pool of potential people for others to meet or interact with and the shared space where such chance encounters might occur.
 
Seek You predates the much-discussed 'male loneliness crisis', and reading it, I thought about how people sometimes talk about men's very special and important pain as though women never feel lonely. The book also predates the rise of ChatGPT and Claude, although I suspect that Radtke must've felt more resigned than surprised when we started seeing news that lonely people were using chatbots as substitutes for human friends, that some people were even falling in love with chatbots, and that some people were developing 'AI psychosis' as their too-long chats overrode the sense of shared reality that comes from interacting with other people. It's easy to see links between Radtke's observations about the difficulty of connecting with others in "Seek You" with Alison Pugh's findings about the importance of it in The Last Human Job. 

Super Late Bloomer

 
 
Super Late Bloomer
My Early Days in Transition
An Up and Out Collection

by Julia Kaye

Andrews McMeel
2018

 

 

Super Late Bloomer is a collection of autobiographical comics by Julia Kay, drawn in the 4 panel cartoon style of a daily newspaper comic. For Kaye, these comics functioned like a diary, helping her keep track of moods and events during her first summer living openly as a trans woman. Kaye was in her mid-20s at the time, and had moved back in with her parents while she started taking estrogen, getting laser hair removal, wearing women's clothes in public, changing her name and documents, and coming out to a widening circle of acquaintances.
 
Because they're so short, each comic is a little vignette of a single mood or incident. There's a mix of joy and self-acceptance with various forms of awkwardness and unpleasantness. I found a lot of Kaye's experiences really relatable, some from when I was first coming out myself, and some still today. A consistent metaphor is that taking estrogen and transitioning is like going through puberty again, with all the doubt and awkwardness that entails.
 
Kaye has a lot of self doubts - she worries that others will see her as a man playing dress-up, she frets about visible stubble, she's self-conscious about her voice. Sometimes she gets misgendered, even when she looks her most femme; other times she fears she will be, but then it's fine. Sometimes she hates her reflection. There are a few comics about public bathrooms - being afraid to come out of a stall when someone else is there, worrying what a friend will think when you're both in there at the same time. Kaye's parents are supportive, but there's one family member who's distant now, and she misses their friendship.
 
I think that for a lot of trans people, the process of figuring out what it is you're feeling and trying to decide what to do about it, is inherently isolating. You're doing a lot of introspecting, thinking about some of your most uncomfortable memories and emotions, and imagining how you might be able to feel better in the future. And you yourself might be the only trans person you know personally. It's easy to feel alone. 
 
Coming out, starting to socially and medically transition, hopefully does make you feel better. It's also different from anything you've done before, and it's new for your friends and family too. I think one of the most valuable things about a book like Super Late Bloomer is that it reminds you you're not alone, that others have felt what you're feeling, have done what you're now doing. You may be different from most of the people you know, but there are others like you, and things went mostly okay for them, and they can for you too. 

One Week in January

 
  
One Week in January

New Paintings for an Old Diary
by Carson Ellis

Chronicle Books

2024

 

  

I think it's just a thing that happens, in your 40s, to find old diaries and letters and things. I found a bunch the last time I moved. Over the past few years, I've heard from several old friends from college, because they found something like that and thought of me. Artist Carson Ellis made a discovery of her own, a diary she kept for a week in 2001, at the beginning of the new year, starting on the first day she moved into her new apartment in Portland. 
 
One Week in January is that diary, with the addition of illustrations showing the people and sights from that time in Ellis's life. If you don't otherwise know her (she's the author and illustrator of several children's books, for example), Carson Ellis is married to Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. 

 

In January 2001, Ellis and Meloy were best friends and neighbors living in tiny studio apartments on a converted warehouse. The Decemberists had self-released their first EP, were starting to play their first live shows, and Meloy was writing 'Grace Cathedral Hill', a song that would go on their first full album, Castaways & Cutouts. 

 

Ellis had a crush on Meloy, while he was going on casual dates with several other girls in their social circle. She was trying to support herself as an artist, working on a couple big paintings, and getting smaller gigs making posters and flyers and the like. Already, she was making all the promotional art the Decemberists needed.

 

In January 2001, I was halfway through my first, very lonely year of college. I didn't get the courage to tell anyone I was trans until the start of my sophomore year, that fall. Later, in my senior year, I lived in a studio apartment about the same size as the one Ellis describes, although my building had private bathrooms and only the kitchen was shared. I went to a Decemberists' concert while I was in college, so only a couple years after Ellis wrote her diary, when they were still a small enough name to play at a bar instead of a larger concert venue, (though large enough that I'd heard of them).

 

image by Carson Ellis

 

Ellis's diary is surprisingly detailed and specific, and (in her own judgment, stated in the introduction) kind of boring. He diary captures her sharing meals with friends, trying to get work as an artist, checking her email to find nothing new, dealing with the hassle of getting her phone line set up, and on the last few days of the week, going out on the town and trying to have a good time with her friends, despite everyone's lack of spending money.

 

One Week in January is the kind book I think you can probably only make and have an audience for if you're already famous. The paintings Ellis made for the book do a lot to elevate a concept that would otherwise probably only merit a zine. I say this, but I am in fact glad I read it. It reminds me of a similar time in my own life, especially my last year of college and first year couple years of grad school, a time that was emotionally fraught and painful, but also full of nights out and fumbling attempts to create an adult identity. Ellis's paintings show the kind of scenes I used to take photos of, friends I was hanging out with, views of the city I encountered during the day and wanted to hold onto. It's a good book for starting a new year.

The History of the Computer

 
 
The History of the Computer

People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World

by Rachel Ignotofsky
Ten Speed Books

2022

 

 

I really like Rachel Ignotofsky's art, and her illustrated non-fiction, aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers, seems well-balanced to me. She provides a broad introduction with just enough detail to get you started, and hopefully inspire you to seek out more information about the parts that interest you most. Her writing is clear and accessible, without seeming to over-simplify or dumb anything down. The experience of reading her books is a lot like visiting a good museum - it provides a good overview and probably whets your appetite to learn more.
 
In The History of the Computer, Ignotofsky shows us advances in calculating and computing devices, and in the advances in human knowledge and understanding - including math and information theory - that allow us to invent and then build new devices.
 
As in The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth which I read previously, Ignotofsky starts with an overview that defines key hardware and software terms, explains the basics of how binary logic works, and then shows timelines of important on/off switches, storage mediums, video games, and robots. We get a couple chapters about precursors to the modern computer, including numbers and the abacus in the more distant past, and Boolean logic and mechanical calculators during the industrial revolution. The first 'computers' were human workers who could devise and then solve math equations for governments and businesses, so that others could simply look up the answers on a printed table. (The conversion tables in every school notebook, showing how to switch from Standard to Metric would be like the simplest version of this.)
 
We join the 20th century as new electronic computers were invented and immediately put to work in World War II, breaking codes and calculating missile trajectories. After WWII, the American government continued funding computer research as part of the space race. Initially, the only computers were housed in government agencies, prestigious universities, and large corporations, but over time they proliferated.

 
In this and every subsequent period, the sorts of advances we see are switches and memory storage getting smaller and more electronic; truly exceptional thinkers creating new programming languages and user-interfaces (including graphical and tactile interfaces) that make computers easier for everyone else to use; and new applications, previously only theorized, becoming feasible because of the increased speed, enlarged memory, and greater accessibility those innovations provided. For virtually anything you can think to do do with computers, someone was theorizing it and someone else trying to build it much earlier than you probably think.
 
In the 1970s, new inventors working outside of the big businesses that manufactured room-sized mainframes and refrigerator-sized 'mini-computers' began to build much smaller devices for small businesses and households - the 'micro-computer' or personal computer desktop. In the 1980s, artists and other creative people used computers to make their work, leading to a flourishing of computer animation, electronic music, and video games.
 
In the 1990s, existing government, business, and academic computer networks were combined to make the hardware of the internet, and the software protocols of the web made it possible for the public to get online. In the 2000s, computer components were finally small enough to combine multiple devices and still be small enough to fit in someone's hand - the 'all-in-one device' or smatphone.
 
At the end, when she talks about the newest inventions that might drive the next stage of computing, Ignotofsky singles out self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence (by which she means Machine Learning, since ChatGPT and genAI didn't exist yet), smart homes and internet-of-things, and using Big Data in science.
 
Ignotofsky gives attention both to 'firsts' and to iterations on an idea that lead up to its most famous form. She provides us with the names and a bit of biographical detail for lots and lots of thinkers and workers. You can't read this book and come away thinking that a handful of geniuses did everything themselves, and you probably notice that the people who got famous are not necessarily smarter or more creative than the ones who didn't. Fame seems to follow money, which comes from making the first really commercially successful version of something - which is not the same as having the idea, making and of the prototypes or intermediate steps, or even actually being the first one to sell it. Fame and success are both fickle, and it took a lot of other people doing less-noticed work to make each Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg possible.
 
I mentioned I like Ignotofsky's illustration style, and it seems especially suited to kid-friendly technical drawings. She draws outlines that are filled in with block colors, but crucially, the outlines aren't just black, they're in color too, which provides an awful lot of extra information. Her drawings of the old mechanical calculators, the early computers likes ENIAC and UNIVAC, and the prototype quantum computer are especially good looking, possibly because they have a lot of visible parts. Every improvement makes the parts smaller and the connections harder to see, which is aesthetically a bit of a shame, but Ignotofsky also shows us all the many housings and cases computers came in too. 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

 
 

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

Understanding Our World and Its Ecosystems

by Rachel Ignotofsky

Ten Speed Books

2018 

 

 

The Wonderous Workings of Planet Earth is a graphic nonfiction book by artist Rachel Ignotofsky that functions as an introduction to ecology for young readers. Parts of the book are fully accessible to kids, other parts seem designed to supplement what teenagers might be learning in high school biology. Ignotofsky's art is charming, and has a clarity that often resembles an infographic or instructional poster. You could just about use this as a textbook, certainly it could serve as a starting point for other reading to learn more about the topics it introduces.

The heart of Ignotofsky's book, taking up well over half its pages, is a tour through some of the unique, distinctive ecosystems on each continent. In North America, we see the redwood forest, mangrove swamps, and Midwestern prairie. Globally, we take in sights like the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; the Amazon, Sahara, and savanna; and several that might not've made the shortlist in other books, like the Siberian Taiga, Mongolian Steppes, the Horn of Africa, Great Barrier Reef, and Arctic Circle.

Each system gets a two-page spread with a full-page illustration paired with a page of text. Each illustration depicts the biome inside a terrarium, a motif that's both pretty and emphasizes the way each system is somewhat self-contained. We see terrain, common plants and animals, and diagrams showing how energy moves through the system from the primary producers, though all the consumers, and up to the apex predators. Ignotofsky also discusses the threats that human activity pose to each environment.
 
There are a few more ecosystems too, that fall outside the continental framework - a pond and fallen log, a drop of water, the open ocean and sea floor.
 
Before her tour of these ecosystems, Ignotofsky takes us on a brief tour of introductory biology and ecology, with an emphasis on understanding how each system is made up of multiple populations of plants and animals that fit together in particular ways. After the tour, we learn about the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and water cycles. We also learn more about how humans have affected the environment, especially through climate change, and the many consequences of a warming planet. Ignotofsky also talks about steps we can take to help, which includes predictable individual actions, but also advocacy to your legislature, and poverty reduction as climate action.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

 

 

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

by Philipp Deines

translated by Renata Stein and Ruth Bittorf

adapted from the biography by Julia Voss

David Zwirner Books

2022

 

 

I think it's fair to say that Hilma af Klint is having a moment. She was Swedish, a spiritualist, a painter, and possibly a lesbian, whose life and work spanned the late 1800s and early 1900s. She was one of the first abstract painters, predating several much better known names, and she was arguably underappreciated by other artists during her life.
 
af Klint was featured in a few European galleries in the 2010s, notably the 2013 Venice Biennale, and then she was given a solo exhibition in the Guggenheim in 2019, which had record-setting attendance. In addition to an exhibit book Paintings for the Future, there's also a recent biography by Julia Voss, a biopic called Hilma, and a novel, Sofia Lundberg's Friday Night Club.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, which is what I just read, is a graphic nonfiction biography of af Klint by Philipp Deines, who is Julia Voss's husband. If I understand correctly, this is a kind of simplified companion to or adaptation of his wife's book.
 

Deines tells af Klint's life story in five chapters, hence the title, and definitely hits all the high points. Hilma af Klint lost a beloved younger sister just as she herself was becoming an adult, and felt haunted by her sister's ghostly presence for the rest of her life. She was in a spiritualist club that did seances and  automatic writing and drawing, which might be where she first developed certain abstract symbols and motifs. She studied painting and initially produced portraits and landscapes in a more-or-less traditional style. She was the very close friend, and maybe lover, of another woman artist. She got work as a medical illustrator for a veterinary college.
 
Guided by her spiritualist beliefs and visions, af Klint developed an abstract style, trying to depict spiritual concepts in like, instructional diagrams. She exhibited more often to other spiritualists than to other artists, but felt unappreciated by both. A significant portion of her works were never shown during her life, and she included a stipulation in her will that they not be shown for at least 20 years after her death.
 
Deines's art style is kind of cartoony, but I appreciate that his goal seems to have been to show as many of af Klint's potential influences as he could. We see what the af Klint family estate looked like, we see Stockholm, we see af Klint's early realist art and the paintings of her contemporaries, and of course, we see examples of her groundbreaking abstract works. Taken together, all this gives you something valuable that text alone wouldn't be able to.
 
My one complaint about this book is that all the text is typed instead of being hand-lettered. And the font is like, Calibri, and it usually seems too small for the word bubbles its filling. The mechanical and low-effort look of the text was a jarring contrast with Deines's fluid and very human linework.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

 
 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

An Auto-Bio-Graphical Novel

by Zoe Thorogood

Image Comics

2022

 

 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a graphic memoir documenting half a year in 2021. Thorogood is a young cartoonist, and her first book came out near the start of the covid pandemic. It was well-received, but the normal promotional process was disrupted before it could start. Thorogood also has severe, uncontrolled depression, which is the single dominating focus of It's Lonely.

I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.

There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.

Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.

I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.

The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.

Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:

"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."

"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."

I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.

Ducks

 

Ducks
Two Years in the Oil Sands

Drawn & Quarterly

2022

 

 

Ducks is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton, author of the Hark! A Vagrant webcomics. I absolutely love her silly little comics, poking gentle fun at history and literature. I believe she's also written a pair of children's books about kings and ponies. So a 400 page memoir about the time she spent working in the Canadian oil industry to pay off her student loans is something of a departure from the work she's most famous for. It is depressing and bleak, and a work of unreciprocated empathy for the men who work there full-time. And it is a masterpiece, a thoughtful and mature work by an artist at the top of her form.

 

At first glance, Ducks resembles Beaton's other projects. The character drawings have her signature look, and she paces her storytelling so that each page or 2-page spread contains a single complete vignette. But this is a different sort of story. Beaton catalogs her personal experiences, but she also examines the economic and geographic inequalities that send so many people like her, from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the east, over to dangerous and demanding (but well-paid) blue collar jobs in Alberta in the west.

 

Beaton also looks at the gender inequality that structures the experiences of women working in these labor camps, where they are outnumbered 50-to-1, and where whatever fraction of the men engage in sexual harassment (half? less?) are numerous enough that she is stared at, propositioned, and verbally harassed all day every day; numerous enough that men pop into her room whenever her door is unlocked, and her door-handle rattles in the night as they check to see if they can get in under cover of dark; that she is assaulted more than once by men who suffer no consequences for their actions. 

 

Other reviews mention the harassment, but to my mind, it is the thing this book is about, even as she addresses other topics. She remembers incident after incident, recounts anecdote after anecdote. Across the 400-pages, most of them show her being harassed, or show her trying to process and understand it.

 

Katie has just finished college, and wants to try to become a professional artist, but thinks that to do that, she needs to pay off her student loans so she'll have the financial room to take risks. Everyone in Nova Scotia grows up knowing of relatives who went west, where the jobs are, to provide for their families, and so she decides to do the same. 

 

Katie gets advised to try for a job in the tool crib, where she will check out and receive back equipment from the people working in the field, and she manages to get hired for a spot. Initially she also waitresses in town to help cover the costs of her travel and rent. The harassment at work is immediate, overwhelming, bewildering, and when she tries to ask some of the older women about it, they tell her it's a compliment, tell her to toughen up, try to set her up on dates with some of the younger men.

 

There are plenty of men who are polite to her, who show surprising kindness when she needs it most, like working a shift on Christmas. There are men who are her friends. But day in and day out, her most common experience with men is them sexually harassing her.

 

Katie moves to a new company to make more money, faster. She's going to be living onsite at a work camp, where her lodging and meals will be free. The men there are lonelier, more desperate, more willing to violate her boundaries. 

 

Katie starts to help her older sister and one of her college friends get jobs in the admin office. She's insistent that they not work exposed in the tool crib, like she does. Between then and when they arrive, she is sexually assaulted, twice, at weekend parties. She becomes understandably depressed and anxious. She blames herself, and feels responsible for what she's bringing her sister and friend into.

 

After the other two arrive, Katie's not alone, and she feels better for awhile. Her sister confronts her about her depression, and she tells her what happened. She takes a break to work at a museum, but can't afford both rent and her loan payments, and so returns, this time to an office job too. In the office, she is more insulated from the harassment, although it never really stops. She has space to think, and tells her friend what happened too.

 

While Katie is working in the office, another company, the first one she worked for, is responsible for a major spill that kills thousands of ducks. The incident that radicalizes her more is seeing a video of a First Nations woman talking about how the oil industry is operating on, polluting, ruining her people's land, and making her people sick. Katie realizes that she has participated in this harm, a fact that Beaton also grapples with in the author's note at the end.

 

Later Katie and her friend begin trying to tell their stories of being harassed. Many are unsympathetic. Others seem quick to want salacious detail, and to demonize the men. Katie refuses to speak to a reporter like that - she blames the working conditions and the companies who create them, and thinks that middle-class men from the city would act the same if put in the same environment. She doesn't want to hurt men like her dad, cousins, uncles, by helping to stereotype them based on region, ruralness, and social class. Nor does she want to defame the many men who've been kind to her here. As Katie's friend tells her, it's a shame her empathy for the men isn't reciprocated in their behavior toward her.

 

Eventually, Katie pays off her loans and returns home immediately, moving back in with her parents with no more debt, but also nothing in the bank.

 

Throughout the work, we see Katie and others comment on all the dust they're breathing, the chemicals they're exposed to. We see them worry about the long-term effects. In the author's note at the end, we learn that someone who appears prominently in the story got cancer around the time Beaton began writing this book, and died young before it was published.

 

One of Katie's, and I suppose Beaton's, preoccupations throughout the book is the question of why so many of the men act the way they do. Katie does not want to be flirted with by people who she wouldn't like back home, people who wouldn't like her back at their home, if she weren't one of the only women they ever see, people who she thinks really don't like her, but are just bored and desperately lonely, and want to use her as a means to an end. Unlike Katie, most of the workers, men and women alike aren't there for just a few years. The question of who you are at work versus who you are back home becomes more complex when home becomes a place you only get to visit, and work becomes the place you live.

Helcome to St Hell

 
Welcome to St Hell
My Trans Teen Misadventure
by Lewis Hancox

Graphix
2022

 

 

Welcome to St Hell is a graphic memoir by a British trans guy, covering his teen years, as he shifted from thinking of himself as a tomboy, then a lesbian, and finally as a man. Hancox is from a working-class community in northern England (St Helens, aka St Hell,) and both his narration and the dialogue is written in the local vernacular.

 
Present-day Hancox inserts himself in the narrative, to point out times he wishes he'd been kinder to himself, and to interview the present-day versions of his family and friends about what they now think of some of the events depicted. His choice to tell the story in this way feels unique among the memoirs I've seen.

 
Hancox is only a couple years younger than me, and seems to have been grappling with his feelings about his gender around the same time I was, both in terms of stage-of-life and in terms of the calendar year.
Hancox's friends and family were basically supportive from the start (though they felt some initial confusion and reticence too) - most of his struggles are with his own feelings, and with not really knowing that what he feels has a name and is a viable path through life. Living in the same early-internet era, I also had to figure out how my teenage sense that 'I wish I could be a girl' could be translated into a fulfilling life as an adult woman.

 
In telling his own story, I think Hancox gets at some relatively universal feelings of being trapped in a small town where you don't know how to live the sort of life you want, of trying to figure out who you want to be as a person, of worrying about whether the people who knew you when you were young will still accept you as you change into an adult.

Blankets

 
 
Blankets
by Craig Thompson

Drawn & Quarterly
2003
 

 

20 years old this year, Blankets is a graphic memoir that tells the story of the author's strict Evangelical childhood, his first love, and how he eventually outgrew both relationships. It's moderately famous, and something that I think is sometimes credited with helping to popularize independent comics in the 2000s.
 

There's a central narrative that's told in order, but time moves subjectively. We return over and over to Thompson's painful memories of his childhood, when he shared a bed with his younger brother, their parents were harsh disciplinarians, and a babysitter abused them. Thompson remains haunted by guilt for not being a better brother - from growing up and out if their early closeness, and for failing to protect him from the adults who hurt them both.

 
In his rural high school, Thompson is bullied for having long hair and being sensitive and artistic. (He's not gay, just grunge.) He feels even more an outsider at the church camp he attends every winter - he's still bullied, the other kids come from better-off families, and he seems to be the only one there who's really devout. But at camp he meets Raina, a sensitive artistic girl, and the two of them become fast friends.

 
Because Raina's parents are also conservative Christians, Thompson gets permission to visit her at home in Marquette, Michigan for two weeks. She greets him with a handmade quilt. Raina's parents are getting a divorce, and she does a lot of the care work for her two adopted siblings (who both have Downs Syndrome) and her infant niece (because her recently married biological sister wants more time alone with her husband.)
 

Thompson and Raina spend all their time together, he helps her with her caretaking responsibilities, and at night, at her request, he sleeps beside her before sneaking back to the guest room each morning just before her parents wake. Over several days, they work up the courage to kiss, then make out, then, if not actually 'have sex,' then something very similar. They make plans that Thompson will come back after high school graduation, live with Raina, work in her father's construction company. The two weeks span at least half the book, their brief time together seeming to last forever, the way it must have felt at the time.

 
Afterward, we see Thompson and Raina try to maintain a long-distance relationship by phone, begin to grow apart, break up, stop talking entirely. We also see him begin to question his faith, and during seminary, lose it. Throughout the book, child and high-school-age Thompson quotes Bible verses related to his current situation. His sexual love for Raina is maybe the first thing that really makes him question his faith, but other doubts come from the strictness and intolerance of the church. Learning the history of Biblical translation is the nail in the coffin. He moves to a city, gets a job, and resumes his art. He also reconnects with his younger brother, now an adult too.

 
Thompson's lines are fluid and expressive. Almost the entire book takes place in the winter, beneath the snow, another kind of blanket, along with the one from his childhood bed, and the one he shared with Raina. Thompson's love and faith are both incredibly intense. There's something comforting, in the final part of the book, about seeing that intensity reach a fever-point and break, seeing him healing and leading a calmer, healthier life afterward.

A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality

 
A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality

by Molly Muldoon and Will Hernandez
Limerence Press

2022

 

A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality belongs to the same series of short graphic nonfiction as the guide to they/them pronouns I read a couple months ago.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez define asexuality, explain the 'gray ace' spectrum and the 'split attraction model,' discuss growing up asexual and having adult romantic relationships, and delve into cultural representations of asexuality and (mostly online?) anti-ace discourse.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez define asexuality as not feeling sexual attraction or desire. They acknowledge that the amount of attraction people feel varies from individual to individual with some experiencing a lot, some none, and everyone else somewhere in the middle. 'Gray aces' experience some attraction, but still identify as asexual. Given the spectrum, what makes someone ace? M and H don't exactly say, but I would suggest that if someone feels enough less sexual desire than their peers that they feel excluded or isolated by the difference, then an asexual identity might help them understand themselves.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez also include 'demisexuality' as a kind of asexual identity. Demisexuals are people who only feel sexual attraction to someone after they already have emotional attraction or intimacy first. I would guess that this is actually very common, and might be true of a majority of people - but that's just a guess, and I might be wrong.

 
M and H distinguish between sexual attraction and sexual behavior to explain that asexual people sometimes (often?) voluntarily have sex, and that being in a sexual relationship doesn't mean you have to give up your ace identity.

 
One of the key experiences of growing up asexual seems to be feeling different or worrying about being 'broken' because you feel less sexual attraction than your peers. Muldoon and Hernandez say this is very common, and I wonder if it might be the defining experience that makes someone feel like as ace identity 'makes sense' for them. (I think almost everyone who hits puberty later than their peers experiences this feeling for awhile, but for asexuals, it's not temporary.)

 
M and H also seem to suggest that aces are very attuned to depictions of sexuality in the media, because they feel alienated by their own difference from those depictions. Indeed, it seems that some ace people may feel that our media are pushing a pro-sex agenda that is hostile to asexuals. Ironically, I am also aware of a number of voices claiming there is too little sexuality in the media, and that our culture is hostile to realistic depictions of sex and desire.

 
The 'ace stereotypes' M and H discuss include the 'asexual male genius' character in movies and on tv, very vocal hostility to the idea of asexuality in various comment sections online (which often threaten rape as a 'cure'), and ambivalence from some queer people about whether or not aces should be considered part of the queer community. They don't mention it, but I suppose that aces might feel especially bothered by the same 'when are you getting married? when are you having children?' pressure that a lot of people hate being on the receiving end of.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez also spend a lot of the book reassuring other aces that their identity is real and valid. While I do feel like I learned something from reading this, I think other aces are the primary audience for this book.

A Quick and Easy Guide to They / Them Pronouns

 
A Quick and Easy Guide to They / Them Pronouns

by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson
Limerence Press

2018

 

 

Someone I know through work, who has a a nonbinary gender identity, mentioned to me that they had bought multiple copies of A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns so they could hand one out to anyone they knew who was confused. So I thought I might also read the book for myself. It's a work of graphic nonfiction, primarily intended to educate a group we might call 'the straights' about nonbinary identity and gender-neutral pronouns. There's also a section speaking directly to nonbinary readers.
 

Bongiovanni is themself nonbinary, and Jimerson is a cisgender (that is, non-trans) man. In addition to speaking to multiple audiences in terms of targeting both readers who are nonbinary and might be having trouble getting others to respect their pronouns and readers who know someone nonbinary and might want to understand their pronouns better, the coauthors also speak to people with different levels of comfort and familiarity with gender diversity, including readers who might be presumed hostile. 

 
One consequence is that tonally the book is kind of all over the place, switching from explaining to requesting to demanding to attempted coercion (like 'do this or you'll get in trouble with your boss') with not a lot of separation. It's very short, only 60 small pages, so maybe there simply isn't room for some things. I did wish they'd say more about why people use they / they pronouns beyond 'it's none of your business!'

 
I suspect that the book is most useful for a nonbinary person thinking about how to talk about their pronouns to someone else. I don't know how successful just handing this book to someone and asking them to read it would really be, although the authors repeatedly suggest it.

 
One way I tend to think about these things is that there are probably tiers of allyship. Using someone's correct pronouns after they've told them to you seems like the most minimal level of acceptable behavior. Helping out one friend by correcting your other friends if they misgender them is harder, but still an important show of basic human respect. This is probably the difficult conversation that the book does the best job of modeling and preparing the reader for.

 
Doing things like always calling any unknown person 'they,' never calling people 'ma'am' or 'sir' or referring to them as 'that guy' or 'that lady,' or always including your own pronouns when introducing yourself to a new person - those feel like requests of a different order. They're part of an ongoing political and cultural movement. They're aimed at normalizing gender-neutral language and creating a social environment where a nonbinary person is less likely to be accidentally misgendered by a stranger. I support this. But participating in that project feels like a higher level of allyship, not something I think is necessarily wise to ask of everyone (because, priorities), and something where the people who are participating deserve to be told the reasoning behind the request. Let us not pretend that cooperation with activism is the same thing as simply having good manners.

Putin's Russia

 
 
Putin's Russia
The Rise of a Dictator
by Darryl Cunningham

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

Putin's Russia is a work of graphic nonfiction, maybe graphic journalism. 

 
It's also a book overtaken by events, since it was published in February 2022, but completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fairness to Cunningham, something similar could happen to anyone who writes about still-living world leaders, and he does conclude with a warning about Putin's continuing threat to global democracy.

 
Cunningham's art uses thick lines and only a little solid color. His images accompany the text much like the visuals in an episode of Frontline, or the like.

 
The book briefly covers Putin's childhood and his work as a KGB officer in East Germany. The important part of the story probably picks up with Gorbachev's dismantling of the Soviet empire, when Putin starts as a corrupt municipal bureaucrat in 90s St Petersburg and quickly rises in the government, probably aided by his connection to the KGB, until he is Yeltsin's chosen successor, and the second president of 'democratic' Russia.

 
In a typical early incident, a non-corrupt city official realizes that Putin has been authorized to sell state assets to buy food, but instead he'd just been keeping the money. Ordinary people went hungry, Putin got rich with stolen money, the city councilors who voted to punish him were all dismissed by the mayor, and the official who reported him was intimidated into going into exile. The most unusual thing about this case, compared to Putin's future pattern of conduct, is that the official who challenged his theft was not murdered by hired thugs.

 
A lot of the rest is probably well-known by now, although I appreciated Cunningham showing how badly the post-Soviet rebuilding of Russia went wrong, and how likely it was that some oligarch or other would consolidate power over the others by using assassinations and selective prosecution (for the same corruption all of them engage in.) 

 
If Putin is distinguished from the crowd of kleptocrats, it is perhaps by his unusual brutality, such as when he arranged for the KGB's successor agency to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow in order to blame the crime on Chechan separatists and use that to justify an invasion and carpet bombing.

 
Cunningham's focus widens and his narrative becomes more diffuse as we reach the present day, and it becomes harder to decide which incidents are most important. The book ends with a call to action for the US and UK governments to crack down of money laundering and stop treating Putin like a normal world leader, rather than a mobster with a country.

The Third Person

 
The Third Person

by Emma Grove

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

The Third Person is a graphic memoir, which tells the story of a trans woman in her early 30s who goes to a therapist to get prescribed hormones, and instead spends most of a year being treated for Dissociative Identity Disorder and multiple personalities.

To be clear, by Grove's own account, she did have DID, so this was not like, a confused therapist mistaking transition for multiple personalities. But this also wasn't the book I expected to read. It's not a book about Grove being trans, it's a book about her having DID. That she is trans and should live as a woman are essentially taken as given by both Grove and her therapist. Being trans isn't quite incidental to her story - it's why she thought therapy, and homophobic bullying as a child is a key part of why she began dissociating - but it's certainly not central either.

 
Although The Third Person is a little over 900 pages, it reads quickly. Grove's art is cartoony, but very effective at depicting facial expressions and body language, so we see when her therapist is skeptical, confused, exasperated, etc, and you can virtually always tell which personality is dominant in each moment.

 
The first 100 pages show a scene of tween Grove trying to hide her crossdressing from her family, and then a long scene of teen Grove having blackouts and a second personality during a stressful social event. There's also, in montage form, a few pages showing her life working during the day as a guy and going out at night as a woman.

 
The final 200 show Grove after dropping her therapist. She buys a DID workbook and uses it to work through her traumatic memories. She gets a new therapist who helps her finish the process of reintegration. And she finally gets to live full-time as a woman.

 
In between are 600 pages of dialogue between Grove and her therapist. This is not how I wish she'd structured her story. I find this pacing really odd, but I guess this interaction is what she wants her book to be about, with the rest of her life collapsed into prologue and epilogue before and after. The therapist first suspects she has DID, then spends a long long time suspecting that she's faking having multiple personalities to get attention, then trying to treat her, but by that point, the two have accumulated too much history of negative interactions for the therapist's change of heart to matter. So finally she leaves.
 

One thing worth noting if you decide to read it. At times, Grove seems unbelievably obtuse in her inability to understand the therapist's suspicions and accusations. (It certainly doesn't help that always answers her questions with questions, like 'Why do YOU think I'm saying I think you're lying to me?') But a thing Grove the author never explicitly points out, although the therapist says something about it once, ironically to justify his suspicions, is that one effect of her mental illness is that it prevents her from understanding someone pointing out her illness. If she dissociates to protect herself from unpleasant knowledge, then of course she is 'absent' at key moments to protect herself from being made to understand how dissociating is harming her. 

 
Without understanding that though, you'll find yourself asking 'how can she possibly think he's accusing her of pretending to be trans to get attention when he's OBVIOUSLY accusing her of pretending to have multiple personalities to get attention?'

How to be Ace

 
How to be Ace

A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual

by Rebecca Burgess

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

2020

 

 

When I requested my copy of Gender Queer, the public library website recommended that I might also like How to be Ace, so I went ahead and requested that too.

 

How to be Ace is primarily a graphic memoir, although briefly between chapters and in a slightly longer section at the end, Burgess gives a sort of 'Asexuality 101' that defines a few terms, shows some of the variety of ways that asexual people understand themselves, and makes a case for the importance of both an identity label and greater understanding from others.

 
Asexuality refers to a lack of interest in and desire for sex and physical intimacy. It doesn't imply anything about one's gender, and actually, after reading this, I'd be interested to find an account by an asexual guy, because the expectations men and women face regarding sexuality are different enough that it must be different to be a guy who is ace.

 
Burgess is British, and based on when she experienced the Great Recession, maybe about 5-10 years younger than me. In addition to being ace, she also deals with an anxiety disorder that sometimes manifests as OCD.

 
She tells of being bullied as a kid, having trouble making friends in high school, but then transferring to an art college at 16 (instead of staying in high school to do her A levels - British schools are a bit different than in the US) where she finally finds a community of friends. She graduates during the Recession, can't make a living as an illustrator, and eventually gets a job as a housecleaner for the upper class (possibly a good outlet, since her OCD had manifested as obsessive cleaning), which still lets her work on her art in her spare time.

 
For a long time, she struggles with the idea that something is wrong with her. In high school, the other kids all become interested in talking about dating and sex, but she never does. She has no particular interest in depictions of sexuality in media, and is acutely aware of all the messages that people generally want sex, want to form close relationships, want to have sex within those relationships, and often perceive the quality of their sex life as a microcosm of the state of the relationship as a whole (and of course, generally those messages are conveyed more judgmentally than I just said them.) 

 
Burgess fears she isn't 'growing up' the way her peers are, and generally worries that she's 'broken' in some way. Even the therapist she sees for her OCD assumes that her sex drive will emerge after she learns to cope better with her anxiety. She tries dating a guy, but immediately begins avoiding him so they won't have to touch, eventually breaks up with him, and feels guilty about how she treated him. In college she gets close to a couple other people, but pulls away before getting close enough to date. After college, as a housecleaner, she eventually dates and moves in with another asexual woman. They have an emotionally intimate, non-physical relationship.

 

How to be Ace is probably teen-appropriate. It's much less graphic than Gender Queer, and Burgess's illustration style seems aimed at a younger audience than Kobabe's. I particularly liked the images of Burgess noticing characters on tv saying things like 'We've been on several dates but haven't had sex, maybe we aren't really a couple!' and 'We haven't had sex in 6 months, maybe he doesn't love me anymore!' The section at the end also notes that while Burgess herself mostly perceives a generalized cultural pressure to form sexual relationships, other ace people have experienced much more direct, personal pressure, including being sexually harassed or assaulted.

Gender Queer

 
 
Gender Queer
by Maia Kobabe
Oni Press

2019

 

 

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir. I heard about it and picked it up because it has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the most frequently challenged and banned books in the recent conservative campaign to control public education and censor queer people's voices and lives. 

 
Gender Queer is the story of Kobabe's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, with an emphasis on the events that helped em understand eir identity as nonbinary and asexual. About 3⁄4 of the way through the memoir, Kobabe decides on the e / em / eir pronouns. (Personally, I like the singular they / them / their pronouns. I think they're simpler and more effective for communicating to others. But my preference is not the one that matters here.)

 
Kobabe was born to hippie parents in northern California and lives eir entire life in what appears to be the most liberal, understanding, and welcoming community any queer kid could hope for. Kobabe struggles throughout eir life to understand eir gender and sexuality, a task that is difficult because of the general human difficulty in understanding oneself, and because of the lack (until relatively recently) of widely known identity terms to describe a person who is neither a man nor a woman. 

 
It does not appear to be difficult, at least as Kobabe tells eir own story, because of prejudice, discrimination, or anti-trans violence, none of which e experiences. Other people don't always understand Kobabe, but that's sometimes because of their ignorance about the existence of the emerging nonbinary social identity (an ignorance that Kobabe shares for most of eir life), and sometimes because of Kobabe's difficulty in telling anyone else how e feels about emself.

 
Kobabe experiences a desire to be flat-chested, a dislike of being called a girl or woman, a profound discomfort with eir period and trauma from gynecological exams, a difficulty navigating romantic relationship (which e enters mostly out of curiosity and ends due to an almost total lack of desire), multiple comings out as e gained new self-understanding, and eventually a degree of comfort with the adult life e's built for emself. 

 
Kobabe tells eir story with admirable honesty and directness, even details that might feel unflattering or embarrassing. I don't have children or know what's 'appropriate' for them, but I would say that anyone who's old enough to watch an R movie is old enough to read this, and anyone who's struggling to understand their own gender or sexuality might benefit, even if it makes their parents uncomfortable.
 

Had e been born in the 1960s or 70s, I imagine Kobabe might perhaps have identified as stone butch. Today the nonbinary identity is more widely known. In between was a period of where there were perhaps fewer options to understand and describe someone who has this particular constellation of feelings about sexuality and gender. 

 
I also struggled to understand myself in the late 1990s and early 2000s, although part of my difficulty was that I lived in a small town, the internet was new and I wasn't tech savvy, and once I learned that trans people existed outside of science fiction, the only images of trans women I saw (and initially the only other trans women I met in college) were very feminine, attracted to men, and mostly about twice my age. But like Kobabe, I eventually learned to understand myself and make peace with my body and identity.

Radioactive

 
Radioactive
Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
by Lauren Redniss
Dey Street Books

2010, reprinted 2015

 

 

Before reading Radioactive, I would have confidently called it a graphic novel.

 
But for one thing, it's not a novel, it's non fiction. Redniss tells the biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie leading up to their marriage, tells of their work together and marriage, and continues telling Marie's story after Pierre dies. She also tells a lot about radium and polonium, and interlaces the biography with vignettes of information about different "events" in the history of radioactivity, from the Radium Girls to Hiroshima to Chernobyl, at least a dozen in all. Redniss uses a lot of direct quotes, which makes her writing style feel journalistic.

 
Radioactive is illustrated, but it's also not a comic. There are no panels, and the art isn't sequential. Each page is a full-page illustration with text, like an artist's book. Redniss drew each page by hand, then photocopied it onto a transparency, then used that to develop a cyanotype - a kind of photograph where areas exposed to light turn blue, and the covered parts remain white. Some pages are orange, presumably from using a computer to invert the color, and others employ photographs in collage. Redniss also designed her own font and arranged the text on each page.

 
Marie Curie worked hard and made incredible discoveries about radioactivity, a term she coined. She won two Nobel prizes, one with Pierre in physics, and one alone in chemistry. After Pierre died, she had a love affair with a married scientist. Her children carried on her work, and as adults, her lover's son with his wife ended up marrying Marie and Pierre's daughter, and they also won a joint Nobel. Marie Curie's story is interesting in its own right, and Redniss's book is accessible and visually fascinating.

Iranian Love Stories

 
Iranian Love Stories

by Jane Deuxard
art by Deloupy
translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Graphics Mundi

2021

 

I've started wondering if keeping this list is changing the way I read, or if I always had a rhythm of reading a few longer works and then several really short ones in a row. I'm not really doing it just to 'get my numbers up' - but keeping track like this almost makes it seem like I am!

 

Iranian Love Stories is a non-fiction comic that depicts 10 interviews between 'Jane Deuxard' (actually a dating couple who are both journalists) and young Iranians conducted shortly after the election of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. The failure of the pro-democracy Green Revolution movement of 2009 is also very much on most interviewees' minds.

 
The journalists interview some couples, some individual women, and a couple individual men. What they mostly find are people in their 20s and 30s who, even if they are in love and in a committed relationship, are afraid to have sex before marriage because the man's family could insist on a 'virginity inspection' before the wedding, and who rarely even get a chance to kiss or hold hands because there's nowhere they can go where they aren't being watched. Surveillance by their own family members, the uniformed police, and I think at least two different kinds of plain-clothes 'morality police' is omnipresent. Almost everyone is afraid and feels powerless to change anything.

 
One young woman who seems very foolish goes on and on about how wonderful Iran is for women since she is never 'forced' to work for money. One woman says she might be a Muslim if she were born somewhere else, but in Iran she sees the religion as 'all lies' told to benefit the mullahs who form the country's ruling class. Another man alleges that it's easy for the mullahs to forbid sex since they can visit prostitutes while traveling internationally.

 
Half of Deloupy's art depicts the interviews and half illustrates whatever the person is talking about, sometimes literally but usually metaphorically. The image of eyes watching from the shadows represents the ubiquity of surveillance. We also see mullahs like giants eating platefuls of ordinary people, running over them with railroad trains, etc, as representations of their political power.

Factory Summers

 

Factory Summers

by Guy Delisle

translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall

Drawn & Quarterly

2021

 

 

Factory Summers tells the story in three chapters of Delisle's three summers working in a paper factory as a teenager. Delisle learns how the factory works and gets a bit of skill at his job, sees glimpses of the lives of the men who work there full-time, practices his drawing and begins his path to becoming a professional artist, and occasionally interacts with his divorced father, who is an engineer at the factory. It's a short, compact story, only a portion of his coming-of-age, but it's told effectively.

 
Dilisle's art is deceptively simple. The books is black and white with a couple shades of grey and certain details picked out in yellow, often shirts or the factory's smoke. He draws his teenage self as an almost blank cartoon, the other workers more expressively, and shows the machinery of the factory in a way that is at once realistic but somehow not much more detailed than the people.

 
After the three main chapters are two short epilogues. One shows teenage Delisle starting a job at an animation studio rather than returning to the factory, and the other shows an event from 2019 or 2020, presumably the event that inspired him to draw this comic, of Delisle and his brother visiting their father's apartment after his funeral, and Delisle discovering that his dad had copies of all the comics he's published.