August was a month of ambitious reads, and one of those funny times when we all seem to have melded into a WWAC hive mind. Everyone is reading Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky or has it on hold at the library. Everyone is also reading River’s Edge by Kyoko Okazaki or waiting for it at the library. (I live in the timeline where Boy’s Weekend was acquired fairly quickly but I’m still on that River’s Edge hold list.) We’ve also got moments of beauty in a post-apocalyptic landscape and a society that eschews reading, writing and the study of history — heavy topics and big feelings only for August! Maybe we’ll lighten up a bit in September, but no promises.
Alenka Figa: Sometimes you pick up a comic and think it’s just gonna be a good time because you didn’t pay super close attention to the blurb, AND THEN YOU CRY AT THE END!! That’s Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchanksy, baby!!
Boys Weekend is a snarky sci-fi story about Sammie, a nonbinary femme whose college best friend, Adam, is getting married. He’s asked them to be his “best man” and attend a wild bachelor party weekend at El Campo, a capitalist hellscape tourist island. Sammie can’t really afford the weekend but they still value Adam’s friendship, so they attend regardless of all the invasive questions and uncomfortable glances that await them. Slowly, Sammie becomes aware that something strange is happening on El Campo, and it might be related to a tech startup with a nonsense mission called the Gray Hand. Can… or rather, should Sammie keep their college bestie safe when he won’t even stand up for them to his friends?
I’m not a big sci-fi reader but I enjoy Lubchansky’s comics; they’re a deeply talented satirist whose work for The Nib has been a trademark of the publication. There’s also just not a lot of stories out there about AMAB nonbinary femmes, plus Lubchansky’s colors are really bright and satisfying to look at, so I picked it up knowing it might not be for me. This story, however, perfectly weaves together commentary about the bro-y tech world and heart wrenching, genuine feelings about trying to bond with people who are uninterested in reorienting their understanding of gender, queerness, and an individual’s capacity for change. My gift to anyone who hasn’t read this comic yet is singling out a line from Lubchansky’s afterword: “This is a book about recognizing the community that’s right under your nose.” It is that, and much more. Everyone get your hands on Boys Weekend, please — I checked it out twice from the library to make my wife read it, too.
Emily Lauer: I also read Boys Weekend this month and really enjoyed it! I just read Bezkamp by Samuel Sattin and Rye Hickman, which came out in 2019 from ROAR LION FORGE. It tells the story of a misfit teen, who is supposed to be a warrior like his dad and aunts, but wants instead to be an Excavator, a job title he’s invented for discovering and learning from the relics that surround their insular community.
In Bezkamp this kind of exploration is discouraged, and reading and writing are forbidden. The Sheriff and leadership want Warrior clans to focus on battling giant monsters called Crigs and expanding their borders instead of thinking about their past or studying anything.
While the people in Bezkamp don’t understand written words, it is clear to the comics reader that Bezkamp itself is made of remnants of an earlier, literate civilization, with walls printed with information upside down. The story follows Nem as he ventures outside of Bezkamp’s borders and begins to discover and piece together his own people’s history, and the truth about the Crigs and the land they occupy.
This book is gorgeous, Hickman’s art is lush and immersive and well-suited to the setting and story. The story itself is a fun and engaging one, without a lot of surprises for the savvy reader, but the characters’ own surprise feels genuine and satisfying. The dialogue is rendered phonetically, which I was worried I’d find off-putting (truth is spelled “trooth,” corruption is “crupshun,” and so on), but after a few pages I got used to it, like dialect writing. Recommended, especially for the visuals!
Carrie McClain: I want to read Boys Weekend, now! Let me see if I can get a copy from my local library? So I finally did pick up the long awaited and hot anticipated River’s Edge by Josei manga great Kyoko Okazaki. WHEW. Let me tell you, this is making the best and favorite manga lists at the end of the year, for sure! So I went into reading without much context or knowledge outside of the simple synopsis of six teenagers’ lives being forever changed when a dead body is found by the river near their school (and that this title would most likely be rated mature or for older readers because of the content matter).
So while this is an excellent work with that noted Okazaki feel, it is one full of alllllllllll the trigger warnings (perhaps more than any of her other work published in English so far) as it is a dark tale full of characters attempting to survive the pitfalls of high school while experiencing and forcing trauma on each other. The very first page of the manga characterizes the river that runs through the city near the high school the teens attend as a dirty, filthy thing running alongside underdeveloped land. That land has overgrown Canadian goldenrod masking a number of things, eventually a corpse, and is nearly infamous for all the bad rumors associated with the place.
I think what makes River’s Edge a recommended read is that it evolves into a masterclass of intertwining the lives of all these young adults that Okazaki handles with ease. From saving a fellow classmate from bullying to being coerced into activities they’d rather not participate it, from betraying a friend to sparing another’s feelings – here is a multitude of sins and kind gestures on the page mixing together in this layered narrative about the pains and joys of youth. Darkly imaginative, this manga presents teens at the cusp of adulthood yet also at the proverbial edge of the river where they constantly come in contact with the worst and best of humanity. That river’s edge comes back again and again as a main character yet it is also a place where hopes and relationships come to die. Kyoko Okazaki’s work is always going to be difficult to read, however, I know that whenever I get a hold of her manga, she’s never going to not be the spectacular storyteller that I know her to be and give me a masterpiece to pour over.
Kathryn Hemmann: Canadian artist Chris W. Kim’s graphic novel Adherent, published in May 2023 by Conundrum Press, tells an ambiguous yet hopeful story set in a ruined world almost entirely devoid of people. A nameless woman living in a small community finds a shack in the woods filled with illustrated notebooks that inspire her to leave home and track down the author. Most of the panels in Adherent are wordless depictions of the woman’s travels through dense forests, barren deserts, and abandoned cities, but the narrative pulls the reader through the pages at a steady pace.
Unlike many postapocalyptic stories, Adherent makes no attempt to explain what happened to human civilization. Instead, it asks a larger question about creative documentation. Is there innate meaning in the act of recording one’s experiences, or does meaning only come into being through the interpretation of the reader? Refreshingly, Adherent sets aside abstract philosophical ruminations in favor of the immediacy of its meticulously detailed monochromatic art, which focuses on the beauty of discarded objects amidst crumbling architecture. If nothing else, Adherent encouraged me to rediscover the joy of sitting outside and observing the environment with my own sketchbook in hand.
Masha Zhdanova: I’m back with another webtoon rec! I just found Heartbeat Conquest by Puki yesterday and caught up immediately. I need everyone to read this. Heartbeat Conquest is a comic in which the main character, having realized she was reincarnated as the protagonist of a dating sim, decides she is going to gather a harem for herself. This goes about as well as you can expect. It’s extremely funny and also kind of insane in several ways that make me amazed this comic exists and is being published on the internet for other people to read. I want to study each character under a microscope. They’re all so wild in ways I have never, ever seen before.
What makes Heartbeat Conquest stand out from the hundreds of other “I am the protagonist of a dating sim” comics out there is that absolutely nobody is fitting into their trope boxes or behaving the way I expect them to. I see a guy and think, “ah yes, I know this one” and then he opens his mouth and says some nonsense I never would’ve imagined him saying in my life. The protagonist Diana’s logic is easy to follow, she’s genre-savvy and self-aware, but not Light Yagami-smart or Catarina von Claes-dense, even if her harem dreams are a little wacky. The twist of her being able to see how much affection everyone has for her at any given moment is really clever, because she can’t be oblivious to anyone getting a crush on her— she can see the hearts over their heads! This comic is unpredictable, entertaining, and hilarious, and I want everyone else to read it too.
