By Jim McDermott
Amongst the many nominees for Eisners this year are quite a few stories starring queer characters. They come in many categories, from memoirs to romance, short stories, and campy sci-fi.
If you’re looking for something new and wonderful to read this Pride, here are some great choices from the Eisner nominees.
If You Like Horror…
This year’s Eisner nominees include many great horror stories with queer characters. James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s The Nice House on the Lake, a spooky psychological thriller about a queer alien and the small group of people he chose to rescue from the destruction of the world, won the Eisner last year for best new series and is up for an Eisner again. I Hate This Place, by Kyle Starks and Artyon Topilin, is nominated for Best Humor Publication for its wildly inventive tale of a lesbian couple who inherit a farm haunted by ghosts, aliens, enormous creepy crawlies and a guy with horns you definitely don’t want to meet.
One of my personal favorites is Rain, David Booher and Zoe Thorogood’s five-issue adaption of a Joe Hill story about Honeysuckle Speck, a young queer woman from Boulder whose girlfriend Yolanda has just arrived from Denver to move in when a horrifying rain of crystal nails kills her and her mom and hundreds of others in and around town.
As Honeysuckle travels to Denver to try and find Yolanda’s father, the crystal rain continues to fall over more and more of the United States. Booher and Thorogood, who are each also received Eisner nominations for other work—Boorer for his wonderfully campy sci-fi-mini Killer Queens and Thorogood for her memoir It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth, do a fantastic job of capturing both the deepening social dread and the heartfelt emotions of a woman trying to cope with the loss of the woman she loves.
If you like Eisner nominated YA horror…
There’s Clementine Book One, Eisner-winner Tillie Walden’s fascinating new entry into the universe of The Walking Dead. Following Clementine, the popular co-lead from the Telltale Games’ Walking Dead game, Walden’s book tells the story of the now-traumatized bisexual teenager who has lost everyone who has ever loved her, slowly learning how to trust and love again.
Walden introduces a number of great new YA characters to The Walking Dead universe, especially Amos, a young Amish boy filled with curiosity and lacking any conception of what life outside of his walled community is like. At this point in her life, he is the perfect partner for Clementine, someone she can’t help but try to protect, and whose kindness and openness slowly wear down her defenses.
Following the pattern of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s original Walking Dead book, Clementine is drawn entirely in black and white. But Walden brings a contemplative, atmospheric feeling to the work that is entirely her own. Sometimes a silent facial expression on a small panel conveys so much emotion, you could spend hours just in that moment. Clementine is the kind of story you want to go back to again and again, just to savor more of what Walden is offering.
If You Need Some Inspiration Right Now…
For me, one of the best things about Pride is discovering new stories of queer people who I can look to for courage and inspiration in my own life. If you’re hoping for that this year, I highly recommend Flung Out of Space, Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer’s bio-comic about author Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith was a lot of things, including incredibly talented, often pissed off, boldly queer at a time when that was not allowed, and a force of nature. But even as she struts across the pages of the book, taking shit from literally no one in these early days of her career, Ellis and Templer also capture her vulnerability and doubt, as she tries to ignore her obvious attraction to women to try and fit in.
Ellis and Templer do an amazing job of capturing the process of a brilliant author imagining a story, as well. When Highsmith is writing or thinking about a novel, lush black and white images literally pour out of her mind, so tangible you feel like you can reach out and touch them.
There’s also the short story “Finding Batman,” written by the long-time cartoon voice of Batman, Kevin Conroy. In it, Conroy and artist J. Bone tell Conroy’s story—what it was like growing up gay in a conservative and unstable Catholic home in the 1950s and 60s; the challenge of being true to himself as a person while facing the horrors of the AIDS crisis and prejudice in the entertainment community; and ultimately, getting invited to audition to voice Batman.
It’s that last piece that packs such a punch, as Conroy realizes that being Batman is allowing him to give voice to the decades of pain and closeting he’s gone through. Like so many of us, he knows all too well what it is to have a public and a private face, and a yearning for a home.
If You Like Eisner nominated Books About Friendship…
I don’t know where to start describing what makes Wash Day Diaries so special. The book consists of five interconnected short stories about four Black friends, one of whom is bisexual. Each story involves women caring for their hair and living their lives, whether that means riding the subway, having drinks together or enjoying a sleepover. Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith luxuriate in these seemingly ordinary life activities and transform them into moments of tremendous humanity and beauty.
The found family that these four women represent to one another also provides much to relish and celebrate. Truly, Wash Day Diaries is a book that you don’t see coming, and then you’re stunned by how much it means to you.
Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure is another wonderful Eisner-nominated book about friendship, but here the central friendship is between author Lewis Hancox’s older self, who has transitioned and is happy, and his teenage self, who is struggling to find their way. Including Hancox’s older self as a sort of older brother in his younger self’s journey proves to be an incredibly meaningful device, one that highlights both that there is light at the end of the tunnel and companionship along the way. (There’s a panel where the two are playing video games together that just about wrecked me.) Even as Hancox’s teenage self has to go through a lot on the path to becoming themselves, somehow St. Hell has a great spirit of hope and joy to it.
And if you like your stories of friendship woven through with stories of first love, joy, and staying true to one another in the hard times, check out volume 4 of Alice Oseman’s beautiful Heartstopper series.
Finally, If You Like Romances While Cooking…
I have been all in for queer romances that also involve cooking since Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau’s Bloom. This year, Jarrett Melendez and Danica Brine created their own special kind of culinary magic with Chef’s Kiss, which tells the story of Ben, a gay recent college grad aspiring to be a writer who ends up making ends meet working for an incredibly hot sous chef and his demanding boss. Liam is as sexy as he is sweet, and their will they/won’t they reads like a soap opera over brunch, but personally I am just as much here for the bearish Chef Daddy Davis and his adorable taste-testing pig Watson. Get me a table for volume 2!
Which one of these Eisner nominees is your favorite? Be sure and let us know, either here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat.
Stay tuned to The Beat for more Pride 2023 coverage!
