So I’LL JUST LEAVE THIS HERE: http://therumpus.net/2012/11/horn-reviews-the-dream-of-doctor-bantam
I love everything about this. Mr. Kevin Thomas picked the best possible images anyone could pick pretty much. His version of the Institute logo is so excellent. A SALUTE TO MR. KEVIN THOMAS OF THE RUMPUS.
FURTHER, I’ll leave THIS here: http://www.autostraddle.com/read-a-fcking-book-jeanne-thorntons-the-dream-of-doctor-bantam-149623/
. . . That tenderness of first love, of first girl-on-girl love, of finally knowing how you want to be forever and finding someone you can easily take with you. The love story makes this a book for us. A book in our own strange, emotional, gravelly language. A precious sign of what goes on in our hearts and our heads and how it is to fall in love with someone unusual. Someone nobody would have picked for you. Someone you thought you’d never be able to pick.
Eileen Myles called it “messy.” I was ready for romance, for hot summer nights, for a heart beating merely to continue looking for truth. And if I haven’t given you enough reason to read it by now, just know it was all of that and more.
These are the kind of things that make the huge amounts of time spent doing this stuff worthwhile: having someone you have no direct knowledge of suddenly care about the same things you care about, for a while. SO HAPPY ABOUT THESE.
ON A DARKER NOTE.
I didn’t remember that this was the Transgender Day of Remembrance before planning this comic for the day. I feel completely fortunate that other than a handful of scumbags in my old Brooklyn neighborhood, I’ve never been actually threatened or attacked. But I remember having to make an active decision: “Now there are people who are going to potentially kill you without knowing you, based on how you’re going to present yourself.” And I don’t think anyone should have to make that decision. And I feel grateful to everyone who’s helped in any way to change the balance of the statistics on this site from stuff like “shot by the LAPD, shot by the NYPD.” But trans advocate Brandy Martell was shot in her car just this year by guys who tried to pick her up only a couple of blocks from a restaurant Anna Anthropy and I ate at while talking about the really early stages of her book sometime in like 2011. It’s still really, really bad. We could’ve both been gone just as easily as Brandy Martell was, for just as little reason. And it’s worth taking some time to remember this and the people who weren’t as lucky.
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Okay, so this comic. To anyone who thinks this comic about a mother helping her daughter steal books from the public library is too saccharine: I will see you Thursday for our THANKSGIVING SPECIAL! BRING YOUR APPETITE.
