jducoeur

During the holiday break, I'm catching up on some of the graphic novels I have in electronic form. In particular, I'm working on some of the stuff I got in the enormous pile of queer comics I got from Humble Bundle a while back. (One of those "donate $30, get 50 graphic novels" deals.)

Not everything in the pile is great (for no obvious reason, it seems to include almost every Archie Comic that includes Kevin Keller, of whom I approve in principle but I just don't like Archie that much), but most is quite good.

An honorable mention goes to The Backstagers, which is fun and silly -- an exploration of the weird magical world behind the high school curtains, full of corridors and strange lands, where the actors never go but the backstage crew must explore and know in order to produce just the right shade of paint on demand.

(Not a full review because the bundle only included v1, and Boom Studios' website is currently down for maintenance, so I have to wait before getting the other three books.)

But two books so far are both complete and worth a clear recommendation, so a couple of short reviews...

First up is Girl Haven, by Lilah Sturges, Meaghan Carter, and Joamette Gil.

Ash is a lonely kid, whose mother disappeared three years ago, still desperately trying to hold on to the hope that she might return someday. Having just made a few new friends, Ash shows them her writing and art studio, largely untouched since that day, and they accidentally discover that the imaginary world that she was always describing in her work is all too real.

Koretris is a land of magic, full of talking animals and a fight between light and darkness. It is also only open to girls -- so how exactly was a boy like Ash allowed in?

This is very much a story about gender identity, as Ash wrestles with the hope that maybe this world is confirming something, but it isn't quite that simple -- instead of saying what to believe, it is more forcing Ash to make a choice.

It's well-written, and I'd say well-suited to younger teens: there is some darkness to the tale, but it's generally a positive story about growth and self-discovery, very strongly advocating the notion that you should decide your identity for yourself. Recommended -- in particular, parents should give it a look.

On the flip side is the rather darker and much funnier Camp Spirit, by Axelle Lenoir.

I first encountered Lenoir with her fabulously weird quasi-autobiography Secret Passages earlier this year. That is the tale of her younger childhood, starting to come to terms with the idea that she might be a little different from other people, her parent were aliens, and that she has an interdimensional doppelganger -- you know, little-kid stuff like that.

Camp Spirit is a somewhat more straightforward novel, but still has much of the same flavor. Elodie is 17, and absolutely despising the fact that her mother has ordered her to earn some money for college by spending six weeks as a camp counselor.

Much of the story is a fairly classic coming-of-age yarn, with scenes that would be all too familiar to many of us who were shy kids at summer camp (from the horror of camp toilets to the unbearable embarrassment of communal showers), livened with humor that grows as the story goes along. Elodie is given the problem cabin: a collection of absolutely uncontrollable red-haired girls -- watching her gradually learn how to harness and weaponize them is nastily fun. And she spends a good deal of time trying to navigate her own feelings about "little miss perfect", her friend Catherine.

But there's also a weirder level: the awkward-to-the-point-of-creepy Camp Chief; the camp songs (which are all Satanic heavy metal tunes); the legend of the local woods (which tells the tale of the good and wicked spirits that inhabit them); and of course that mysterious blue glow in the forest every night.

Suffice it to say, this is not a horror story, but it's often a fairly eerie one with some fantastical elements, as Elodie gets more and more determined to figure out what is up with this place.

Over the span of this six weeks, Elodie grows up a lot, going from sullen teenager at the beginning to significantly more self-possessed young woman by the end. That progression is well-rendered and reasonably believable; moreover, the story is an excellent ride.

Highly recommended -- it's a good book, a bit offbeat, and suitable for older teens as well as adults.