“Hey Helen, look! It’s Meatball!”

My friend Maebh calls out to me from the other side of the bar. She is holding up the second volume of Cat-Eyed Boy, a Kazuo Umezz manga (published by Viz, translated by JN Productions) which I had been obsessively posting images from on my Instagram story a couple days prior. That’s an odd duck of a comic, not Umezz’s best. It really only finds its footing in the very end when the series briefly ran in Shonen Sunday. Those later stories are short, cruel, and dreamy, on par with some of the Orochi stories but more bluntly violent. Before that terminal point, Cat-Eyed Boy is a baggy, drunken rant of a manga, reading like a strained attempt by the horror manga master to make something a bit like Kitaro but constantly changing its premise with every chapter. But hell if it’s not still vivid, hysterical stuff. Like Meatball! He’s a weird looking meat man who looks a bit like The Thing in issue one of Fantastic Four, all tumorous glop and malice. If you see Meatball, you die. He is a family curse. Page after page of guys screaming “Oh no! It’s Meatball!” That’s great comics. I go over to Maebh and we chat about Meatball. We both love Meatball. I was wearing a Bondage Fairies T-shirt, I’m very cool. Some woman (I do not remember her name) later comes up to me to tell me how amazing my shirt is. She had been staring at it all night. I hadn’t noticed.

Funny how comics can be a bit of a social thing. Whether you are a reader or a creator, it’s a much more private, solitary, hobby than, say, music or film, just by its nature. But there’s something about showing someone else a comic, or someone recognizing a comic, that is special, communal. Anyway, here are some short reviews of comics by people who I am friends with, or know anyway. I would like to be a friend. Comics that I got at a particular place on a particular day in the past month that I can remember vividly. Comics you may want to read yourself. Onward!

Sacred Grove, Celine Loup, self-published

Sacred Grove is an erotic comic by cartoonist and illustrator Celine Loup, an artist who has been perpetually hot on social media yet still appears to me under-discussed given her formidable craft. In recent years, Loup has carved out a niche in sex comics with Hestia, an ongoing series drawing upon motifs and characters from Greek mythology, bringing a distinctly queer, feminist sensibility to Ovidian eros. Sacred Grove is a short, standalone piece of that story, a brief, dreamy inversion of the Pygmalion story, or perhaps the Knidian Aphrodite, where young Hestia finds herself besotted with a marble statue in the likeness of a god. Much of this comic’s pages consist of a vivid, disorienting sexual encounter, while a tender sense of personal tragedy lingers, or perhaps longing, the sex being a dramatic break from the repression of labor and family obligations which have never quite dulled Hestia’s longing. It’s the kind of art I’m always hoping for in smut, profound and beautiful human stories that could not be told without explicit sex. I ran into Celine Loup at The Erotic Arts And Crafts Fair in Toronto last month and also picked up her zine Aphrodite’s Pavilion, a shorter, sluttier yarn that is no less visually sensuous, returning to the theme of humans trespassing on a god’s place of worship, to fuck and perhaps be fucked with. Folds out into a poster! Very cool.

Firebird, Sunmi, Harper Alley

I’ve written about Sunmi’s comics a few times in this column before; their work first caught my eye with the T4T romance comic Cameraperson, and later the trans yuri anthology Datura, which they co-edited. Sunmi is a queer cartoonist of small-scale melodramas working in a decidedly DIY risograph ethos, their shojo manga-inspired art often bearing tender hints of the unfinished in its scratchy compositions. Firebird is their major debut graphic novel, a young adult coming-of-age romance from Harper Alley, an imprint of HarperCollins that seems to be positioned as another First Second. Firebird is the story of Caroline Kim, a talented but disaffected high school sophomore quietly repressing questions about her gender and sexuality while living alone with her strict, controlling mother. Caroline works after school as a tutor and begins to develop feelings for one of her classmates, the tall, elegant, out lesbian Kimberly. The two never quite get together, but through their budding feelings learn about themselves while bearing the weight of their home, the hell of Californian suburbia. These are contemplative, sweet comics in a similar vein to Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s young adult works. Sunmi’s storytelling is attentive to culture, class, gender, and place, observant of her character’s voices and anxieties. Most of the book is in black and white, with a recurring red spot color lends a moderate experimental flourish that calls back to Sunmi’s small press comics. This is an excellent graphic novel, hopefully not Sunmi’s last. I picked up Firebird at a bookstore in Northampton, where it sat proudly in a cozy display of new young adult fiction that I truly wish I had thought to take a picture of.

—
That will be all for this month. I’m feeling much better about keeping pace with a monthly schedule this year; hopefully, I can persist with that. I’m really glad that people are enjoying this column. For all inquiries, complaints, and Meatball sightings, write to comicsgridlock@gmail.com. Until next time, like, don’t forget to excelsior or whatever. I dunno what that means, don’t worry about it.

SOLRAD is made possible by the generous donations of readers like you. Support our Patreon campaign, or make a tax-deductible donation to our publisher, Fieldmouse Press, today.