It’s pride month! How exciting. As a result, the latest Humble Bundle is the LGBTQ Book Bundle. If you don’t know about Humble Bundle, let me tell you, they’re wonderful- supporting indie creators, of both games and books, and a good chunk of the profits from their pay-what-you-want sales go to charities.1
A lot of the books are comics, so I’m trying to do a bit of a speed run through some of them so I can have this post up while the Book Bundle is still running. Part of this will result in the fact that I won’t actually be putting all the reviews in this post – three are full-length-novel type books, which will each get their own post. I’m also leaving out the more, ahem, adult-oriented books.2 And, as I usually do, the ones that I don’t finish reading for whatever reason.3
Before I go into the reviews, though, I’ll drop a couple of links. First, the It Gets Better project, which was one of the first Really Good Things to come out of YouTube, if you ask me. Secondly, one that I personally think is even more important, the Trevor Project, a national suicide hotline for queer and questioning youth.4 Being queer isn’t easy, even in 2016, and making sure that resources like these are available to queer and questioning youth is hugely important.
All that said, have some (short) comic reviews!
Kevin Keller: Welcome to Riverdale
Archie Comics! I haven’t read these since I was a kid. My sister and I used to pester our parents to buy the little comic booklets for us from the “impulse buy” section at the grocery store checkout.
I’d kinda forgotten what they’re like – short, sweet little high-school vignettes. The first couple were that sort of sweet innocent thing that I expect, but there was one closer to the end that kinda caught me off-guard. It’s summer vacation, and the Private School Jerks5 are taking over Riverdale’s beach. Yadda yadda, arguing back and forth, with the end result that they’re going to have a surfing competition to see who gets control of the beach.6 Which, fine, total Archie type of thing. Except one of the Private School Jerks, it turns out, is a homophobic asshole, to the point that he’s trying to sabotage Kevin in the competition in a way that can lead to serious injury. Which, yeah, I get that you’re a rich kid and can afford lawyers to make your problems go away, but a hate crime is hard to erase. Attempted murder, even more so.
And yeah, they sorta dealt with it, with the kid’s friends abandoning him7 and Kevin’s dad threatening him. But it felt like it was laughed off a bit too easily – like there’s no acknowledgment of the fact that not everyone is as irascible as Kevin.
So… I dunno how I feel about this one being the first one of these comics that I finished. I’ll take it, I guess, because the first couple of stories were nice, sweet little things. So, yeah, I suppose I’d recommend reading it.
Starve: Volume 1
Okay, this one was interesting. The main character’s a gay man, but one who didn’t come out until his daughter was about ten years old. His wife didn’t take it well, and did a very competent job of turning herself into the villain of the story.
The story starts off with Cruickshank living a very hardcore bohemian life somewhere in Asia. The world’s a bit different, it seems – global warming, much to the shock of the Republican Party, turned out to be real! Parts of New York City are underwater, the bluefin tuna is sitting on the edge of extinction, and the wealthy/poor divide has gotten so large it seems to be on the edge of war.
And then Cruickshank gets picked up by a man in a helicopter, sent by the Network. Despite their apparent implosion in a stock market crash, that Network survived, and they’ve decided to call in what’s left of his contract. Which all sounds very ominous, right up until you find out he was the Gordon Ramsay of his world, the world’s top celebrity chef.
In the time he was gone, though, the show has changed, become a good bit more vicious. One of his former enemies is at the top of the show, his wife8 has had him declared legally dead and taken all his assets, and the show itself has become a spectacle; instead of celebrating cooking, it’s an artifact of the class divide, highlighting the disparity between rich and poor in a way that Cruickshank finds disgusting.
And yes, the storyline of the show is interesting – it’s shown like a real cooking show, with little out-of-character type recipe cards that look exactly like something you’d see on the Food Network or something, phrased in such a way that you can hear the voiceover from the chef in your mind. But what’s of far more interest is the way this shattered family works: Cruickshank himself, vaguely trying to put things back together. His daughter, excited and hopeful about her dad’s return. And his wife, hating everything he did to her, to the point that she wants him destroyed. It’s sad, and sweet in places, and I’m definitely looking forward to Volume 2.
The Infinite Loop
Oh, boy. This one.
First, a warning: there’s a bit of nudity, and a middlingly-graphic sex scene.9
But beyond that, the worst this one is going to do to you is confuse you a bit. Because, y’know, time travel is rough like that.
But of the three reviews I’m going to do in this post,10 I’d say that this graphic novel is the one that you should read foremost out of the others. It’s the sort of Literary Thing that normally I’d hate, but it’s wrapped up in a heck of a lot of the sort of things I love11 so I’m kinda letting it get away with it.
Here’s the premise: Teddy, the main character, is a time traveler. She’s part of a group of them, actually – a government organization, of a sort, that uses their time travel to fix the anomalies created by irresponsible use of time travel. Or, as it turns out, anomalies created by people actively trying to mess with the time stream. And boy oh boy, is she good at it – the best, actually. Right up until one of the anomalies is a young woman – because, up until now, they’ve been either inanimate objects or, at worst, animals.12 Teddy, of course, refuses to “erase” her – a barely-euphemistic term that the cleanup crews use for wiping someone out of existence.
At which point things start to get weirder and weirder. Because, yes, there’s a bit of a reason that the anomalies get pulled out of time – but not nearly as much of one as they’ve made it out to be. More of the damage is caused by the cleanup folk insisting that all anomalies have to be erased than the anomalies themselves would’ve done.
It’s weird and complicated and I suspect the only people who can truly follow the plot are in no small part insane. It’s sad and sweet and happy and angry. It’s science fiction being an allegory in a way that’s a little bit too in-your-face at times, but it’s something that needs to be said.
And yes, the titular infinite loop is something that the characters talk about a lot. It’s also, arguably, the entire plot of the book. And it’s also something bigger: the infinite loop of hatred, played out over human history. Because it used to be that love was banned between Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens.13 It used to be that love was banned between noblewomen and peasant men. It used to be that love was banned between white women and black men. I can’t quite yet say that “it used to be that love was banned between men and men and women and women.” But we’re working on it.
That’s all for the day, folks. And remember: it gets better. And there’s always someone out there to talk to.
