Sexile

            When we first see our narrator, on page four, they’re floating, they could be in the womb still, their umbilical chord looping around them.  Their genitals are on display, which I thought, at first, was the point, but as I kept reading I think it’s more about having a different perspective on life.  On page five the narrator is in a similar pose, arching away from the reader as they lean back from an orange tree.  The foreshortening and the fact that we can’t see their face, caught my eye.  Although this is about a happy time in their life, I felt that they had something very different to offer the reader from their unusual angles.

            Bird’s eye view is also used a few times.  When they are asked to quit their teaching job in Cuba we don’t see their face, but from a distance we see them sitting in a chair.  The empty chair and the narrator’s words taking up the emotion of the moment. 

            When they wake up after being beaten up in Cuba before they leave for the U.S., their eye is shown up close and upside-down.  I thought this was a good way to add more disorientation to how horrible they are feeling at this moment.     

            I was surprised by the cells that hold only words, like on page nineteen, and even more so on page twenty-one where there are some illustrations around the page long entry.  Usually in a comic book it’s hard to get away with that much text, it is often an info dump, but I think this flowed naturally because the narrator’s voice is so strong, making anything they say worth reading.  They’re funny, engaging, and they have something really important to talk about.  I get the feeling that even if they were talking about grocery shopping they would still hold me in rapt attention, or breakfast in a can. 

            The illustration on page forty-one, of the narrator and their lover in Fort Chaffee, is beautifully drawn.  There’s so much detail and it’s clear a lot of care and attention was put into this scene.  When contrasted with the more simple drawing underneath of the narrator and Luis sleeping, it made me think how memory works, how one moment can burn brightly and stick in our mind, and then a sleepy, happy moment can remain unformed, suggested in our minds, cartoonish and cute.  Put together like this, I felt the two styles complimented each other and showed the effect each moment had on the narrator, how each had felt to them at the time and was remembered.

            I appreciated that Rolando’s death was done in a simple, but very effective way.  The black background with the words at the bottom spoke to the emptiness of grief.  I think a funeral illustration would have been forgettable and not done justice to the huge lack that Rolando left in the narrator’s life.  I liked that the emphasis was on the Buddha that the narrator still has and remembers him by.  The positive and comforting influence that Rolando still has on their life, years and years later told me more about how deep that relationship ran.

            On page fifty-nine there’s an image of a cocoon.  I wasn’t surprised by the butterfly imagery, it fits in nicely with their transformation, but I was surprised that we never see the butterfly echoed later on, or somehow incorporated in the image on the following page.  I was expecting an onslaught of butterflies.  We see Adela on the next page, which I think is more than enough.  That is the butterfly they wanted to be from the beginning, so I liked how they used the cocoon, but didn’t overdo the metaphor.   

-Iris