Tag Archives: Zoe

Zoe reviews Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

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Don't Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell

Don’t Go Without Me is a triptych of comics written and illustrated by Spanish-American artist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell which deal with ‘love, loss, and connection.’ Valero-O’Connell is best known for her graphic novel collaboration Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me with Mariko Tamaki, a book about a teenage lesbian and her experience in a toxic relationship. Don’t Go Without Me has fantastic premises with achingly familiar emotional experiences at their core. Her art style is iconic, something that is best described as ‘dreamy.’ She also uses panels in increasingly creative ways–they almost become visual line breaks in her comic poetry. Valero-O’Connell thrives in weird worlds, where every inch of space is filled with bits of plants or sky or people, creating a holistic experience for the reader.

The first, titular story follows a lesbian couple who cross to a parallel dimension and lose each other. The main character trades stories and facts about her girlfriend, Almendra, with the magical and strange residents of this other world for clues about her location, unwittingly trading away the memories associated with Almendra. The search shows off Valero-O’Connell’s character and world building skills as the main character plunges through high class parties attended by four-eyed suit-wearing men and skeleton heads and sphinxes and more. Every background character is unique and intriguing. The art is so complex and interesting that I wanted to read the whole thing again focused solely on the illustration

“What is Left” has another strange but compelling premise. In this story, a new fuel has been developed for spaceships– memory. A human donor can power engines through the brain waves generated by memories. The story follows one of the passengers, who, after an explosion, finds herself within the memory core next to the dreamer. She watches the dreamer’s life play out with no ability to communicate, struck by the knowledge that the dreamer is likely already dead. While the pages do contain a lot of sad content, it never comes off as depressing. It always feels more like a celebration of the negative emotions rather than a pity party.

The third and final story in this book, “Con Temor, Con Ternura” involves a town on the ocean, where a giant slumbers away. No one knows exactly how it got there, why it’s there, or when it will wake. The devout followers of the giant have calculated turtle migration patterns and sea levels and have determined that the giant will wake tomorrow, though no one knows whether it will kill them all or save them. Not everyone thinks it will wake, but people prepare for it nonetheless, with a huge day of feasting and partying. This is more of an ensemble piece, but the only characters that recur is an old lesbian couple, who represent love and how we reflect on it. It’s a deeply thrilling, emotional treatise on ‘what would you do if the world was ending,’ and, of course, it made me cry.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell proves once again that she is a master of comic storytelling, visually and textually. Almost all of her stories contain, if not explicit lesbian characters, queer themes, and they all speak to some deep emotion inside of us. This comic was originally Kickstarted and published by the comics subscription service ShortBox, and I was so excited to get my hands on it. Valero-O’Connell’s work always hits and always hits hard, and I recommend this to literally anyone. Everyone deserves to read this wonderful masterpiece.

Zoe reviews Beyond II: The Queer Post-Apocalyptic & Urban Fantasy Comic Anthology edited by Sfé R. Monster and Taneka Stotts

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Beyond II: The Queer Post-Apocalyptic and Urban Fantasy Comic Anthology

Beyond II: The Queer Post-Apocalyptic & Urban Fantasy Comic Anthology edited by Sfe R. Monster and Taneka Stotts is the second of its series, following Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology, both of which were highly successful Kickstarter projects. The preface, which never fails to make me tear up, reads “These stories are for you. You’re not alone. We’re so glad you’re with us. We’re so glad you’re here.” It sets the tone for the rest of the anthology.

The anthology includes 25 stories by 36 contributors, which range from cryptids in the sewers to strangers waiting out the acid rain in a post-apocalyptic world to a fairy on a quest to make her human lover dinner. Each story features a new artist and writer, so the styles vary significantly and there is never any sense of repeat. Each comic has a completely new take on the genre. One interprets urban fantasy as an ancient Greek Olympics with mythological creatures like minotaurs, and another represents the genre with a story about a satyr and a dryad babysitting the seven werewolf kids in the apartment below them.

What I found most valuable within this anthology is how it interrogates the apocalypse from a queer lens. We’re used to the apocalypse in our media as being a place of fear and despair, whether it be caused by zombies, nuclear explosions, or mysterious diseases. The main character’s objective is typically to survive rather than thrive. Beyond II asks, among all this wreckage and loss, where can we find the good? How do we reclaim spaces that have been denied to us? One of my favorites from the anthology, “Pilot Light” by Steve Foxe and Paul Reinwand, has a post-apocalyptic wandering hero sworn to destroy the monsters roaming the land finding her true purpose in found family at a queer-owned outpost.

The sheer diversity and ingenuity in each comic honestly made me interested in urban fantasy and post-apocalyptic stories again, where before I had tended to write them off as overdone or ineffective.

Within Sarah Stern’s story “Cuchulainn,” humans hide behind walls from ‘Bodachs,’ predatory robots. The plot revolves around a boy named Jestin who figures out how to tame one. It’s a story about sacrifice and redemption, and it ends on a bittersweet note. Though Jestin exists in a broken world, he still has room to hope and try to make it better.  Another story, “Time Will Tell” by Samantha Cox and Ria Martinez, follows a male/male couple who explore the overgrown remains of our world, and in the process rescue a baby monster. The world is undeniably wounded, possibly even dying, but the focus is on the love between the two main characters. Beyond II is the kind of book where you didn’t know how much you were missing until you read it. If you can’t tell from this review, I’m kind of obsessed with it.

Something I truly appreciate about the anthology is the casual nature of representation. The stories are undeniably queer, but they aren’t about queer struggle. It doesn’t shy away from conflict, but that conflict is never based in homophobia or transphobia. In fact, the redeeming aspects of terrible situations is queer love. It also isn’t entirely about romantic love either. The book makes a statement about the importance of queer community in both happy and tragic circumstances. It declares that queer love is something that will save us all, even when everything is going wrong, and I, for one, agree. Beyond II is one of those books that makes you feel less alone. It gives you a sense of hope as well as entertainment, especially in these times where it seems as if everything is falling apart. It’s a celebratory anthology that revitalizes two genres that have often shunned queer people.

Zoe reviews Body Music by Julie Maroh

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Body Music by Julie Maroh

Body Music is a graphic novel translated from French, written and drawn by nonbinary lesbian artist Julie Maroh, best known for their book Blue is the Warmest Color.

It’s a series of short 5-10 page vignettes about love and desire between different people in Montreal neighborhoods. The vignettes are connected by theme and location only. The book is packed with representation–there are queer people, straight people, polyamorous people, people of color, people with disabilities, trans people, and people of all ages. The variety of the characters and situations present images of all forms of love, from healthy long-term relationships to unhealthy long-term relationships, fuck buddies to polyamory to missed connections. Sometimes sexy, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, these stories reflect that there is no singular experience of love. One person confesses their romantic feelings to their partners, a mother and a son reminisce about her dead husband, two lesbians run into a straight man with a fetish, a couple relives their first meeting at a gay bar, among others.

For a series of themed vignettes, each is unique. The writing and art style shift each chapter, enough that it doesn’t feel like there were any repeats. I feel like ‘balance’ is the keyword for this book, which uses text and image in such a way that neither feels overbearing. Moments where one fails or suffers are counteracted by an abundance of the other. Simpler stories were augmented by engaging visuals and layouts. In moments where the art didn’t have as strong a grasp on me as a reader, a poetic monologue drew me back in.

Like many collections of short stories, there are some hits and there are some misses. Sometimes the vignettes are too short to do anything other than provide a second long snapshot, which can be unsatisfying. Because there is so little context to each story, it can take a couple of pages for the reader to understand what is going on. However, these are the minority. Most stories are either engaging or poignant, and I appreciated the balance between the two.

Not every chapter has something miraculous or revealing to say, which made the chapters that did hit that much harder. One vignette about a man waiting impatiently for his partner to come back from a dinner with his ex is simply funny and entertaining. Then, two chapters later, Maroh describes the effect a terminal illness has on a relationship. It communicates both the monotony and the sacredness of our everyday lives and loves. I feel like a lot of romances or books on love tend to veer toward one or the other, so having a space where love was portrayed as both casual and revered was refreshing.

In their foreword, Maroh writes “The image of the heterosexual, monogamous, white, handsome couple, with their toothpaste smiles for all eternity, stands in the collective unconscious as the ideal portrait of love. But where are the other realities? And where is mine?” This book is incredibly important to me as a younger queer person. Mainstream media doesn’t have very nuanced depictions of both casual and serious queer love, and I haven’t gotten to a point in my life where I am having a lot of those experiences myself.

This is actually my second or third time reading this book. I first read it when I was about 17, and now, at 19, different chapters resonate with me more. When I was younger, it gave me hope for my future. Now, it’s fulfilling to recognize a few of my own varied experiences within the pages.

I tend to give away books pretty soon after I finish them, but this one has a permanent place on my shelf. It doesn’t even get loaned out. Body Music is a dynamic graphic novel with great representation and high re-read value, and it is an experience I recommend to everyone.