more graphic novels
Mar. 23rd, 2026 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraA Song for You & I, K. O'Neill, 2025 graphic. Beautifully drawn and colored coming-of-age fantasy in which a pegasus-riding trainee ranger befriends a violin-playing shepherd and mutual personal growth ensues. Quiet, simple, and lovely, perfect for fans of Kiki's Delivery Service or maybe Blue Delliquanti's Across a Field of Starlight.
Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.
Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.
And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)
ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.
A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/
Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.
Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.
And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)
ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.
A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/
