Graphic Novel Reading Reflections

Ducks is a title that I’d seen praised with a lot of heartfelt words from people I know and respect, and while it didn’t pull on my heartstrings too hard, I absolutely understand why it resonates so deeply with people. Ducks patches together a massive scrapbook of vignettes from her pursuit to pay off her student loans, as Beaton follows the siren song of a gold rush far from her costal home to the Canadian oil sands. There, she finds herself navigating the bruising dynamics of being a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment on the edge of society, with all the themes you’d expect: sexism and gendered violence, economic precarity imposed from the top-down, the effects of living isolated environments on people. Hark! A Vagrant, Beaton’s name-making webcomic parodying historical people and phenomena of western history, features a flippant, offhand art style resembling a teenagers’ irreverence, one that is preserved in Ducks—and yet it does little to counteract the somehow solemn, pristine presentation undergirding this graphic novel.

N.K. Jemisin is one of the greatest (sci-fi) writers to ever walk the earth, so I had nothing but high expectations for Far Sector. Naturally, even for her first foray into comics, Jemisin’s scriptwriting met those expectations—and together with Jamal Campbell, soared above my expectations to create one of the few traditional, issue-based western comics that I’ve enjoyed reading. That might just be due to familiarity, as Far Sector is playing with ideas established by one of Jemisin’s past works, the short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” Instead of a solarpunk future on Earth, Far Sector takes place on a the far-flung, planet-encompassing City Enduring where the series derives its name, one that has maintained an unprecedented peace for the past five centuries, a stark contrast to its complex and conflict-filled history. Of course, that’s mostly because the city implemented a genetic modification that impedes its citizen’s capabilities to even act on their emotions, much less respond to that history—but when the City sees its first violent crime in generations, plus the release of a drug capable of removing the modification for good measure, a new war threatens to engulf the entire sector. Sojourner Mullein, a rookie Green Lantern and the sole human among 20 billion nonhumans, must navigate the unrest the citizens and maneuvering of their leaders to uncover the original cause and bring justice to the City, all while contending with the notion of a peace kept through a refusal to respond to the past. Jemisin’s wry voice and speculative visions are on plain display through Jo and a cast of humanoid creatures with wildly different designs, but none of it would be nearly as effective were they not framed through Campbell’s stellar pages and style. Gerard Way, a curator at Young Animal, describes Campbell’s artwork as “modern, technicolor, and full of energy,” in the introduction, which is the perfect summary.

Lunar Boy, while a juvenile neo-Indonesian sci-fi graphic novel about a trans boy from the moon with a lighthearted plot typical of escapist queer stories, is something I knew was very intentional about its place in that context. In a comic posted to social media two months before Lunar Boy’s publication, the authors lament the shape people of color usually take in these stories: stripped of cultural specificity, the intersection of their identities, and the histories of the communities that shaped them. 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 (Wibowo, J. & Wibowo, C., 2024). 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, yet as specific as the setting is, 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 unquestionably supportive as Indu clarifies his identity, a marriage and career change find 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. 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. 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.

As I started writing my reflection to Mexikid, I came to the realization that I can’t remember the last time I’ve read a juvenile comic about a boy that is also written by a man? This is an incredibly specific and strange thing to admit, but my taste in media has shifted so far in a direction that isn’t just upward that reading Martín’s thoroughly prepubescent boy memoir of his family’s journey into Mexico and back felt like staring at a shore sitting on a miles-away horizon. Which doesn’t mean my reading of Mexikid was at a disinterested remove, either. Though the webcomic that preceded the physical book is mostly made of black-and-white strips, the full rendition of Martín’s bright, retro-tinged art style goes hand-in-hand with the boisterous escapades and sibling badgering and the references to pop culture and superhero-comic sequences. And amidst all that cheeky humor and frenetic energy, Mexikid still manages to stop for some contemplation, too. A trip to retrieve an aging grandparent from their native country they still have roots is obliged to grapple with the life they’ve lived and the land that made them; or in Mexico’s case, the political circumstances imposed upon them by their northern neighbors. Martín handles these moments well, nodding towards the implications while simplifying their presence in ways that middle school children can still grasp.

Archival Quality is, unfortunately, the only title here I feel is undercut by one of its most fundamental aspects. Which is a real shame, because the story that unfurls in its pages is one that I was practically guaranteed to resonate with me. Celeste Walden*, struggling to hold herself and a relationship to her boyfriend together after a crushing mental breakdown at her library job, finds herself searching for a new one even more orderly than the last. The job she finds, an archivist position at a local history museum, is anything but. There’s an onsite apartment she has to live in, her hours run through the middle of the night—and then there’s the supernatural forces making noises and moving things around and giving Cel vivid dreams about of a person she’s never seen. And though her colleagues find nothing bizarre about it all, the strange phenomena only increase with their severity, pushing Cel to uncover the dark past buried within the museum, and how they echo in her own present life. That dark past, of course, is none other than how people with Cel’s selfsame issues were treated in a bygone era and how those notions persist today—something that is perhaps even more resonant in an era where exponential awareness hasn’t done much to collectively improve things. As resonant as the narrative is, Archival Quality’s visual presentation doesn’t feel equally so—not necessarily hurting the story it’s telling, but not enhancing or adding to it, either. While Steenz has a body of illustration work with an array of mediums and techniques, she renders Archival Quality in her signature, heavily cartoonish art style, with offhand, intentionally uneven lines and bright hues coloring common symbols to represent the finer features of the human body. Definitely suitable for most stories about young people in the present day, which makes up the entirety of Steenz’s comics work—but for a book concerned with connecting historical threads, the artwork would be better served by leaning into techniques that are evocative of those bygone years.

* I refuse to believe it’s a coincidence that both Archival Quality and the hit videogame Celeste were released within three months of each other given that they’re variations on the exact same subject.