By Charles Forsman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-193-2 (FB PB) 978-0-57135-012-4 (Faber & Faber PB)
PUBLIC SEVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: It’s ten days until the big romance confluence. Start thinking now, don’t think your significant other or intended likes just what you do – and for every god’s sake don’t “share” drugs with them without informing them first!
Teenage rites of passage are an evergreen source for dramatic material – and comedy too, if you’re fortunate enough to survive the inescapable maturation process relatively unscathed and not too warped… especially when viewed from a bit of distance and with the right perspective. That said, it certainly seems that the problems faced get worse for each successive generation. I can remember my lot facing peer and parental pressure, sexual and/or gender confusion, a war against conformity, political despair and general powerlessness, all while trying to stay sober enough to finish exams and ponder employment futures, but trolls and invisible bullies you can’t escape or confront? No, thanks.
Today’s issues have a unique (devil’s) advocate, however, in a brilliant cartoonist who combines keen insight, devilish imagination and an uncanny ear for dialogue to make stories it’s impossible to not respond to, no matter your specific age or circumstance. Charles Forsman is a multi-award-winning graduate of Vermont’s celebrated Center for Cartoon Studies, whose previous releases include Celebrated Summer, The End of the Fucking World, Hobo Mom and self-published minicomics such as Snake Oil, Revenger and Slasher. He’s been sadly quiet of late but we live in hope…
Subject to many printings and international editions, readily available digitally and the basis for an equally evocative – but by no means identical – TV adaptation, I Am Not Okay with This is rendered in a powerfully deceptive, underplayed cartoon primitivist manner which deviously disguises the fact that this yarn has the shock value and emotional impact of a chunk of concrete chucked through your windscreen from a motorway overpass.
A tale for our times opens with troubled outsider Sydney reluctantly complying with a school counsellor’s urgings to start a journal to catalogue and confront her feelings. Syd is 15 and confused: she’s so far from pretty, a poor student, and recently lost her war-veteran dad in a most unconventional manner.
She’s fighting with her mom – who wastes all her time at her crappy waitressing job – and idiot little brother Liam. Sydney’s only friend Dina is now ghosting her, having just discovered boys in the incomprehensibly form of vile jock Brad. He wants to keep the freak away from his “property” and calls Syd a dyke. Maybe she is? So what?
…And now – as if sexual confusion, family insecurity and disgusting body breakouts aren’t enough – Syd discovers a hidden and uncontrollable ability to cause harm and destruction with her mind. She also thinks someone dark and dangerous is dogging her heels and knows all her secrets…
Similarities to the broader elements of Stephen King’s epistolary landmark Carrie or Kazuya Kud? & Ryoichi Ikegami’s Mai the Psychic Girl soon vanish here, however, as a progression of diary entries intimately expose a succession of poor decisions and relationship mistakes that reshape and transform Syd and everyone she knows. Sadly, the choices made by one lost soul are increasingly irredeemable. They will never get the chance to live down or move away from the events that soon overtake them all, bringing tragedy and disaster in their wake…
Potent and moving, I Am Not Okay with This is a devastatingly affecting variation on a teen theme, and an unforgettable exploration of becoming human everyone with a heart and mind must read.
© 2018 Charles Forsman. This edition © 2018 Fantagraphics Books Inc. All rights reserved.
Today in 1920 historical illustrator and comic book artist Fred (Superman, Tomahawk) Ray was born. In 1951 comics writer/editor/publisher/sound Yorkshire son Dez Skinn arrived too.
In 1957 Mel Lazarus’ Miss Peach first appeared, just like Dik Browne’s Hägar the Horrible did in 1973.