Graphic Novels Discussion #4: Diversity
11 June 2024
Read the diverse graphic novel you've chosen and answer the following questions.
• Tell us the story of how you found your title/material (BRIEFLY). What resources helped you pick your material (make sure to cite appropriately!)? What helped you determine it was "______” (in the genre you’re focusing on, in the format you’re exploring, etc.)?
• What is the title/material’s appeal? How does it appeal to the target audience? How can you tell what the target audience is?
• Identify the communities to which the primary character(s) belong(s). Does the author belong to the identity depicted? If not, how accurate is the portrayal to the best of your knowledge? Seek out reviews, blogs, etc. to help with this assessment.
• Do a bit of research: Has this won awards? Been on choice lists? Has it been reviewed by major outlets (Kirkus, School Library Journal (if it's kids/YA), etc.)? How much coverage does the represented community typically get in mainstream lists and awards?
Wilson, J. (2024). Lunar Boy [Photograph]. CC BY-NC-SA.
I spent a lot of time reading Lunar Boy wondering if “diversity” the right lens to view it through.
Let me try to compress years of mixed feelings into something comprehensible. Until about a year or two ago, I maintained the immiscible affair of mingling in online spaces that ostensibly celebrated marginalized identities as an unstated, immutable value, while also absorbing writing that criticized those spaces, whether directly or tangentially. There are dozens of perspectives that make me reluctant to describe Lunar Boy as just “a juvenile neo-Indonesian sci-fi graphic novel about a trans boy from the moon,” or to base my understanding of any work of art simply by the identity of who made it or who’s in it. There’s the ease with which one can make representation into a checklist that “a corporate marketing department can do in a press release” (Bee, 2018); how the products produced by certain corporations are widely regarded as representative of entire cultures even as they obscure the people and histories they’re rooted in (Kittaka, 2021); the impulse to consult with privileged minorities who are already in the high places at a remove from the people who have actually experienced or are actually living out those experiences (Táíwò, 2021); and so much more.
Many of these seem to have been considered by Lunar Boy’s creators in the process of making it. Around a month before its publication, Jes and Cin Wibowo, twin author-illustrators born and based in their homeland capital of Jakarta, posted a short comic on social media about Lunar Boy’s contrastive place in the “queer escapism” lineage (Wibowo & Wibowo, 2024), which is how I stumbled across the comic instead of the many starred reviews it garnered from industry publications. A proper definition of queer escapism has yet to be put forth, but while musing on how the concept possibly manifests in idyllic city-builder video games, Austin (2022) offers the following:
These fantasies and spaces serve their purpose by being fundamentally disconnected from broader reality; there is no implication of queer oppression, [providing] a space where queer people are free from a broader cis-heteronormative society, albeit temporarily (para. 1).While most graphic novels focused on queer protagonists make the difficulties of being queer central to their narratives, comics with love affairs that play out with little more than interpersonal angst or side characters in happily innocuous queer relationships aren’t uncommon. Some examples that I’ve experienced recently are K. O’Neil’s The Moth Keeper, Olivia Stephens’ Artie and the Wolf Moon, Blue Delliquanti’s Meal, and Archival Quality by Ivy Noelle Weir & Steenz.
Where the Wibowo twins, and by extension, Lunar Boy chafe against this trend is how queer identities from non-Western traditions are usually “represented” in mainstream media: stripped of cultural specificity, the intersection of their identities, and the histories of the communities that shaped them. One of the twins writes:
I've always struggled connecting to escapist queer fantasy or sci fi where "real world bigotry doesn't exist" because when one's identity is so inherently political and tied to a generational history of oppression, I end up realizing I share very little in common with queer characters in those stories. Often times QPOC in escapist media feel like re-skinned white characters. It's as if people's only frame of reference for queer joy is that of white people, and that erases the specific cultural joys POC experience. (Wibowo, J. & Wibowo, C., 2024b)To that end, Lunar Boy was created to be a wish—not only for the good future that those unsatisfied with our present yearn for, but specifically one where the marginalized are able to live out their own traditions.
What’s rather ironic about things, though, is that I genuinely do not think you need to know much about queerness or Indonesian culture to get something out of Lunar Boy. There are a couple of emotional beats specific to the transgender experience that might fly over unaware heads, but are given clarity later on. The Indonesian steeping might seem like a taste that needs to be acquired prior—I did not know or at least could not consciously recall a single, specific thing about Indonesia or its history or its people prior—yet while space travel and domestic settings in Lunar Boy are based in motifs that are likely Western-exported visions of the future, life in the Wibowos’ vision is very much an Indonesian one that needs no justification. The New Earth humanity has settled on is a watery planet of island archipelagos like the source country, spoken words that aren’t vital to the narrative are rendered in their native Indonesian, hijabs and peci are just as if not more common than eyeglasses, many of the named characters wear clothes with vibrant batik patterns for casual and ceremonial wear, queer identities are grounded in historical Indonesian titles, a space-opera’ed kemajuan or rite of passage for Indonesian men sets the stage for the narrative climax—and so on, and so forth.
As specific as the setting is, narratively Lunar Boy is ultimately about the selfsame social challenges everyone faces. Indu, the protagonist and eponymous boy born on a moon, is coaxed away from his lunar cradle through a chance encounter with an astronaut-turned adoptive mother, and despite of the warnings of his biological parent. Though the community aboard his mother’s spaceship are compassionate, unquestionably supportive as Indu clarifies his gender identity, a marriage and career change finds Indu settling with his mother on New Earth. And as a planet presumably down the timeline from ours, the same old pressures and prejudices persist: queerphobia, language barriers, anxieties about the boy he likes, and some particularly painful misunderstandings with the men in his adoptive family.
Contending and changing and seeking closure is too much to ask for Indu—but the moon, ever the watchful parent, offers Indu an opportunity to return home on the new year. He accepts—and shortly after, Indu begins to accept his home; by finding community and connection with the people that he can, either through shared queer identities that have persisted through the ages, or by reaching over gaps in language and grief. By the time of his kemajuan and the moon’s ultimatum coming due, Indu hasn’t necessarily “overcome” his issues, but does grasp them better: the imagined and fleeting equilibriums of belonging, whether and when good intentions are always the most helpful intentions, and the petrifying anxieties of change. Lunar Boy’s art style, akin to an animated cartoon put to print, is specifically rendered to emphasize the latter: scenes off-planet and when the moon calls out to Indu are drenched in cool blues and shadowy purples to evoke the chilling stasis of space, while New Earth seldom strays from warm earthen tones for a life that’s sometimes burning, but always capable of remaining balmy.
Nothing that I’ve described here is particularly unique in the long lineage of comics, only the Wibowos’ specific sensibilities that produced Lunar Boy. Which, in a sense, might just be a different kind of flattening. There is no denying the need to expand what queer narratives can look like, much less increasing the still-incremental pace at which other LGBTQ+ identities and people of color are allowed to actually thrive in publishing (Jiménez et al., 2024). And while books should be allowed to firmly set themselves within specific minority experience, I think everyone would benefit if Lunar Boy and books like it weren’t regarded as if they can only belong in a separate category from more conventional graphic novels; that Lunar Boy and other queer books can be spoken of in the same breath as luminaries like Raina Telgemeier and Jerry Craft. In an interview, Mike White, writer of the TV show The White Lotus, captures this ideal the best: “I want to find myself in the other, and the point of it is that there is no other; it is you. That’s the deepest connection you can make in art” (VanArendonk, 2021).
That is my wish: for “diversity” to simply mean “humanity,” no matter the reader or story.
References
Bee, A. (2018, May 8). Against representation. ZEAL. https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/against-representation-97bc44b4d609
Jiménez, L. M., Beckert, B., Polera, R., & Dietlker, J. C. (2024). Where is the diversity in publishing? The 2023 Diversity Baseline Survey results. Lee & Low Books. https://blog.leeandlow.com/2024/02/28/2023diversitybaselinesurvey/
Kittaka, M. (2021, January 3). On having to choose. Marinazone. https://marinakittaka.com/posts/2021-01-03-On-Having-to-Choose
Táíwò, O. (2021, November 20). Being-in-the-Room privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher. https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-and-epistemic-deference
VanArendonk, K. (2021, August 15). Mike White accepts the criticism. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/article/the-white-lotus-finale-mike-white-interview-departures-ending.html
Wibowo, J. & Wibowo, C. (2024a). Lunar boy. HarperAlley.
Wibowo, J. & Wibowo, C. [@jesncin]. (2024b, April 2). Lunar boy and queer escapism. [Images attached]. Cohost. https://cohost.org/jesncin/post/5388230-lunar-boy-and-queer
Wilson, J. (2024). Lunar Boy [Photograph]. CC BY-NC-SA.