And today we are taking a look at the nonfiction memoir comic Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. Originally published in 2019 by Lion Forge. There is very light nudity, about half real and about half suggested (with people contorted to cover everything controversial). This is a coming of age story so stuff like menstruation and other puberty developments do loom large at times. I would describe the author/artist person, but that seems to be the point of the book itself. The official description is as follows:

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

I guess the only part that I'm not really sure about is that last part, because as an afab person who isn't sure how I identify otherwise, I felt like some questions about what nonbinary is were raised but never actually answered. Not all questions for sure, but I think this is mostly related to my own continuing frustrations and not related to the book itself. Being about the same age as myself, there was a lot of myself and my friends that I saw in this narrative (both gender wise and other wise) which was fun.

The artwork was another real high point of this book as well. The farthest thing from aloof and/or melancholic, Gender Queer is colorful (although strictly realistically), full of all sorts of emotional energy, the page layouts are the skilled balance of varied and easy to follow. Even with a little bit of visual metaphor to express some of Kobabe's harder to explain feelings, I would recommend this as a very easy first comic to many people who are still holding out on books with pictures.

Gender and sexuality obviously take centre stage in this life story, less so class and race although Kobabe came across to me as fairly aware of eir place in the world as afab, white and not poor, which is much preferable to total naivete and ignorance.