Review: You & A Bike & A Road

April 17, 2017

By Sarah Miller

Life is a series of moments in time, strung together by our memories to form a narrative that suits the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. What happens when those moments are captured on the page one by one as they happen, rather than being collected all at once when the perceived narrative arc is already over? In deceptively simple sketches, Eleanor Davis answers this question as she tells the story of her cross-country journey from Tucson, Arizona, to Athens, Georgia. You & A Bike & A Road is a diary comic that lets us into Davis’s mind as she confronts the challenges inherent in such a physically and mentally strenuous undertaking. Her story is told as a series of moments that add up to what seems at first glance like a simple cycling narrative, but which at second glance proves to be a series of existential questions about identity and belonging. “I want to bike fast and draw beautifully,” she says, and so she does, in the process revealing the splendour and inescapability of both our physical and conceptual selves.

Review: Jam in the Band

March 29, 2017

By Sarah Miller

Jam in the Band is the story of Pitch Girl, a band that makes it semi-big before imploding under the weight of different personalities and different desires. The band is headed up by Bianca, an intense young woman who lives for the music and the road and not much else. The other characters seem more well-rounded, with desires that reach beyond the success of the band. Tiara is more interested in love and settling down than touring for months on end, and Corbin admits that she joined the band to meet girls. When that doesn’t seem to pan out as well as she’d hoped—being part of a band is more work than any of them suspected—she too eventually tires of the work involved in touring.

Review: Dates: An Anthology of Queer Historical Fiction Stories

March 23, 2017

By Sarah Miller

In the introduction to this anthology, the editors, Zora Gilbert and Cat Parra, say, “we wanted to fill a book with stories about queer characters simply living life and finding happiness.” In this they have succeeded.

Review: Hero Hotel

January 25, 2017

By Sarah Miller

Even though it’s the cutest thing I’ve read so far this year, Hero Hotel pulls no punches when it comes to showing the rude behaviour of superheroes on vacation. And they all want to relax at Hero Hotel, run by Grandma Zee and her staff, who must deal with the taxing personalities of superheroes who are taking a break from saving the world. While all the staff members interact with the lazy superheroes, Chet, the concierge, and Boomer, his cat and best bud, bear the brunt of their demands, and they even have to save the hotel from supervillains when the superhero guests refuse to lift a finger. (What else would you expect from superheroes on vacation?)

Review: Love Addict: Confessions of a Serial Dater

January 16, 2017

By Sarah Miller

As somewhat of a serial dater myself, I was very excited to read Love Addict: Confessions of a Serial Dater. I was looking for some insights into the various experiences I’ve had, and I was also looking forward to reading about the different affairs that someone else has had. I’m a fan of both slice-of-life and memoir comics, and I was hoping for a little something of both with this work. I certainly found those things, but I also found a comic rife with clichés and stories that I have already heard before, that have been told in so many ways they have entered the public consciousness. I found judgement and a lack of true introspection that might have turned that judgement around and led our narrator to some kind of real awakening instead of the half-hearted “maybe this is bad for me” that we get at the end of the book. There is no concern at all for the women that he has been dating; they all merely serve as some kind of reflection of what the narrator is going through.