REVIEW: Gordita: Built Like This Is a Heartfelt Flashback to Teenage Girlhood

Teen girl with her back to font of image with friends, supporter and other girls surrounding her

I remember seeing a few pages on Twitter of Daisy “Draizys” Ruiz’s black and white comic titled Built Like Spongebob. It was a minicomic about a teen girl’s observations and woes about her body which left her uncomfortable and even sometimes feeling a little worthless. The work grabbed my attention and introduced me to Ruiz as a creative. Since then Ruiz has reworked that comic into Gordita: Built Like This– an autobiographical 28-page colored comic fleshing  out the main character and also the world she inhabits (and the lessons she learns).

Gordita: Built Like This

Daisy “Draizys” Ruiz
Black Josei Press
January 2023

 

Teen girl standing in front of brick wall with her back to the audience. She is surrounded by other young women including friends, allies and classmates.

The opening page of Gordita: Built Like This feature the titular character standing in her underwear in front of a mirror. She’s touching and inspecting her body and the very first panel reveals her inner dialogue: “I’m built like this.” Not, “I’m not built for this,” like the jokey internet speak we’ve adopted in some of our online conversations when we bring up silly nonsense like not being able to find our favorite snacks at the store. Or a minor inconvenience like the internet going down for a few minutes when we’re not doing anything more important than doom scrolling.

No, Gordita is staring herself down in the mirror describing her body: small breasts, her belly and her small bottom. Our first introduction to Gordita is almost an apology. She goes on to tell the readers that she’s not the type of Latina you’d see on television, or shaped like the beloved and glamorous icon Selena. In fact, Gordita’s body is the exact opposite, and once she hit puberty it has caused her nothing but grief, harassment, and hurt, including what she’s internalized about her body. She’s at the mercy of the severe judgment by her peers, total strangers, and even her own family.

Gordita, a Mexican-American teenager who lives in the Bronx, spends lots of time at school. It is the place that houses her friends, her fellow outcasts. But it is not a place of refuge in the beginning, as it is where she’s subjected to the most harassment by classmates both male and female. A heated act of group bullying that gets out of hand serves as the catalyst for Gordita and her friends to meet Miss Payne, a school counselor. Through her, the girls gain a supportive ally and receive some resounding and timely advice which takes time to sink in: “I am more than just my body and so are you girls”.

Gordita, teen girl feeling upset about how her body looks. She is looking in the mirror and caption boxes cover her thoughts: "I'm built like this... lil titties, belly. small booty cheeks." She looks at the read in a panel and says, "Yeah I'm Latina, but not the type you see on Univision or Telemundo." The next page reads, "I became hyper fixated on how I looked to the world," and we see her in bed, railing at the world and calling herself ugly.
Pages from Gordita: Built Like This of Gordita speaking about and internalizing how much she doesn’t like her body.

Gordita: Built Like This brings back me to the worst years of my life: middle school. I look back at them as the years of wretched puberty and all the ways I just wanted to be grown up already. I did not want to not have to deal with the way I didn’t like my body. Some of these pages are ruthless reminders of the cruel things boys back then said about me and other girls whose bodies didn’t mean their standards for desirable or pretty. And yet this very same comic brings me back to the best moments of my life: when I discovered shōjo  manga with school friends. It was when I discovered my favorite superhero Sailor Moon: defender of girls and women everywhere.

This comic brought me back to shopping at the mall with my sisters and my best friend and finding cute shirts and jewelry to express our pre-teen selves. This comic also brought me back to first discovering fanfiction online (fanfic.net for my fellow veterans out there) and finding online communities with plenty of other girls and fans. Like them, I inserted myself in fictional worlds and encouraged others to do so as I boldly imagined myself, taking up space.

Ruiz brings me back to the bad and the good experiences of that not always magical time in my life and reminds me of the ways that I got through it, and the folks who took the ride with me.  Gordita: Built Like This illustrates how friendships between girls are ever so important and that girls will literally save the day. Through her friendship and connections to other girls and women, Gordita slowly gains the courage to stand up for herself, start learning to love herself, and being the change that she wants to see.

It is the most fulfilling journey to see our titular character, our heroine Gordita, work through her low self-esteem and body dysmorphia and reach a place of where her self love is able to grow. The girls who accompany her to the counselor’s office are great examples of how diverse Ruiz’s character designs are. No one girl looks the same from body shape to skin color to hairstyle. They all not only find ways to fund the self love they lacked within themselves but also find ways to speak up for other girls. Their guidance counselor Miss Payne is a blessed example of the type of school staff that’s needed and often cut off in budgets in schools nationwide. Ruiz also adds much subtle but needed commentary questioning the need for school police, and critiquing teachers who hastily hand out unnecessary disciplinary punishments for girls of color.

Ruiz’ artwork feels like a loving throwback to everything from the early 2000s with a superb focus on fashion. I fell back in time seeing the clothing of my school years on the page in Gordita’s school, which looked so much like the building I spent so many hours of my life in. In the later pages of the girls hanging out with Miss Payne (some of my favorites in the whole comic) the backgrounds are filled with hearts and other shapes, reminiscent of screen-tones in shōjo manga. With this I am reminded that Ruiz chose to center girls and girls only in this narrative about being supported in gaining positive body image and making the choice to do something about bullying.

While Ruiz has wowed me, she’s also left me with much to think about regarding comics and works about girls of color and the often shewed narratives we read about the bodies they inhabit and navigate the world in. Gordita: Built Like This is a necessary coming of age comic that best illustrates that young women are way more than their bodies and well worth pouring support into to be the best versions of themselves.

From the tender and tearful moments of Gordita confronting her own mother in Spanish to the glorious final confrontation of a classmate in a school hallway, every page, every step of this teen girl’s journey is hard earned, and ultimately it’s a journey I treasure. A fine addition to the world of autobiographical comics, I hope readers of all ages, but especially girls and women, can read Gordita: Built Like This and find comfort for the times that they feel they were not  enough because of how the world saw them and judged their bodies rather than their whole, authentic selves.

Pre-orders of Gordita: Built Like This have been shipped out! The comic will be available to buy on Monday 2/6, sign up on the product page to get notified when it’s for sale at Black Josei Press. You can find also find the comic at indie retailers like Silver Sprocket.

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Carrie McClain

Carrie McClain

Carrie McClain is a Southern Californian native who navigates the world as writer, editor and media scholar who firmly believes that we can and we should critique the media we consume. The X-Men were some of her first best friends. She is forever chasing the nostalgic high of attending school book fairs. As a retired magical girl, you can usually find her buried under a pile of Josei manga.

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