Prior to becoming editor-in-chief of SOLRAD, I ran a comics criticism (among other things) site called Your Chicken Enemy. On that site, I did a capsule review column called Books in Bites which featured books that I was reading. Now this feature has a new home on SOLRAD. Here’s installment 27!
by Madeline Mouse
Published by Silver Sprocket
So much of life rests on being seen as the person we hope to be. Love does that, doesn’t it? Especially those first flushes – that “crush” stage that is much like Gatsby’s smile, a smile that “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” It is all-encompassing. It’s the big, big.
Madeline Mouse’s Belly Full of Heart uses all the gizmos in the comics tool chest to capture the weight and the buoyancy, the distraction and the hyper-focus, the effervescent light of falling in love. In the 40 pages of lushly colored, sprawling, dream-like imagery that comprise Belly Full of Heart, Mouse lays bare an unabashed acknowledgment of much of the myriad small things that fit, puzzle-like, into the immediacy of this tsunami – the torrential and spectacular wave of losing oneself by pairing it with another. This is a celebration of the best part of being alive. “A comic book ode to ooey-gooey homosexual lovers of the past, present, and future.” Immodest. Unblushing. Audacious. Beautiful.
GAYTHEIST: COMING OUT OF MY ORTHODOX CHILDHOOD
by Lonnie Mann and Ryan Gatts
Published by Street Noise Books
The coming-out story is rich with narrative intricacies. So many factors play into its execution. Family and religion are often the foils in these tales, complicating declarations of self with customs and hopes, shame and disappointment. The coming out story is a travel diary, in a way: exploring unknown territories, wading across metaphorical rivers, suffering body blows and slings and arrows. They are hero’s journeys in which the protagonist hears a calling, hopefully meets a guide along the way, descends into the pit, and is transformed.
Lonnie Mann and Ryan Gatts follow these genre tropes in Gaytheist, content with the expectations they provide. And while no new walls are broken through, there is a certain comfort in the simplicity of knowing where you are going and when the next shoe will drop.
In a world wonderfully awash in queer autobiographies, this is a comic that doesn’t necessarily need its medium – perhaps it would have been better served by being an essay or a newsletter – and yet the story is not harmed by being shoehorned into this six-panel per page structure. Mann’s autobio is novel in parts, though, as it pokes at the hypocrisy of certain aspects of orthodox Judaism and generalizes the dictates of the orthodox lifestyle while celebrating the possibility of happiness through understanding and connection.
Gaytheist follows the map made by those who traveled this journey before. It does so in a workman-like way that is ultimately kind and forgiving. And sometimes, there is comfort in that.
by Tony DiPasquale
Self-Published
Reminiscent of the work of Andy Barron, Theo Ellsworth, and Jim Woodring, Tony DiPasquale’s wordless, surreal self-published series, Nugget, is a full-color fever dream meditation on loss, cruelty, horror, and the tiny moments of joy and beauty.
These are stories about longing as much as they are about brutal disappointment. There is a cosmology here, one that belies an underlying structure and, perhaps, a purpose to each vignette – and yet, for the titular character, each moment of ascension or connection or getting one step closer to some goal is thwarted seemingly by the same forces that inspire the desire in the first place.
Still, there is an optimism throughout, even a sense of hope. Is it the hope of Sisyphus that one day the rock won’t roll back down? Is it the hope of Charlie Brown that one day Lucy will let him kick that damn football? Is it unwarranted or unmerited given the seemingly endless backtracking or cruel undermining that happens to poor Nugget throughout every adventure? There is something about the ability to preserve through endless defeat, though, isn’t there? Maybe there is a heroism in the face of the impossible.
Or is it just sad?
Or is it a metaphor for living in late-stage capitalism?
Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries “Hold! Enough!”
by Will Hermes
Published by Farrar. Straus and Giroux
Lou’s week beat your year.
This is a complicated story about a complicated man whose redemption arc is, at best, a mirror to the truth that not all redemption is a neat little package. While not comics, this biography paints a picture of a life lived on its own terms and within the dictates of a social structure that pushes people to an edge. It’s on that edge that some get cut repeatedly, some never push to the other side, and others use the blood it draws to create. Lou’s life, as Hermes tells it, encompassed all three options.
Imminently readable, this book doesn’t shy away from Lou’s flaws. It doesn’t use Lou’s mythos or “genius” to sugarcoat the pain he inflicted on others. It neither fawns nor offers excuses. But it is rightly celebratory of the myriad of things that made Lou Reed an artist. It offers some insight into his pain. But most of all, and most importantly, it casts Lou as a chronicler and humanizer of those so often disappeared by a society that sees these people as valueless.
Lou died on October 27, 2013. His music still fills my house.
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