QCE Review Series: Part 14 - "Active Voice The Comic Collection" By P. Kristen Enos

Good morning everyone!
So this is my LAST comic review for awhile, I've officially gone through every book I've gotten at Queer Comics Expo. I hope to do more stuff like this at future cons where a lot of indie stuff is available.
for now though, let's focus on the last book in my pile, "The Active Voice" by P. Kristen Enos, a gay Thai immigrant who lived in Orange County during the 80's at the peak of the gay rights movement in the U.S.

This book was endlessly interesting to me. I learned a lot about the 80's and it's gay rights movement and I learned a lot about Orange County as a place (apparently it's one of the most conservative places in California! Who knew?). Not to mention I got a somewhat unique perspective on the intersection of sexuality and race, which is a hard story to come by, even today. A lot of gay stories are mired in whiteness and don't offer a lot in the way of a racial perspective at all. Angels in America came close, but for a 4 hour play, they could have said a lot more. this book is only 120 pages long, and says WAY more than Angels in America even attempted.
The book is organized into a series of short stories about Kristen's life. The stories jump around in the timeline, so sometimes you'll be reading a story about her in high school, then jump to college, then leap backwards to early childhood, and then lurch forward to adulthood. It isn't TOO jarring as long as you go in equipped with the knowledge that these short stories are all a series of anecdotes and not part of a larger storyline. I mean, they ARE... since they're all part of this one woman's life, but it's not like each anecdote relates to the last in a specific way.
Another thing that's kind of jarring is that each anecdote switches artists. There's a pool of about 3 main artists they choose from with a few others here and there. For the most part everyone is good. Casandra Grullon has kind of a Nickelodeon anime style that makes me think of Avatar. Beth Marni and Derek Chua have more serious and rigid art styles. Derek's in particular look like figures you'd see drawn in an instruction manual. Very realistic lines but without a lot of individuality present. i guess it gets the job done, it's nice art for the most part.
The only artist I have a problem with is Lessamarie Croal, her style is VERY awkward and it seems characterized mostly by a severe lack of facial features in every character EXCEPT the main character. She draws Kristen like how Kristen looks. She put effort into that, when i see Kristen on her pages, I can tell who it is. Every other character, on the other hand, looks like a Sesame Street muppet. totally round heads, wide open mouths, usually they don't have noses and have only small black dots for eyes, and every other feature they have seems tacked on like a paper doll.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the way Lessamarie draws clothes is VERY strange. She does not seem to have an understanding of how fabric folds and falls over a human body. Some characters have big, billowing sleeves on T-shirts with lots and LOTS of creases drawn. Makes it look like they're wearing a poncho. when it's not that, clothes look very, very tight instead, showing many many creases around where limbs bend once again exaggerating the fabric's presence to an intense degree. Before this, i couldn't conceive of a garmet that was at once both too loose and too tight but Lessamarie captured it. It's easily the worst part of the book, and it's tragic because in the back of the book is a little tribute to all the artists who took part in the book, and the image that Lessamarie uses as an example actually looks kinda good. She can obviously draw better than this, but for some reason just didn't.
The only thing I can think of was maybe she got this assignment and put it off, so what we're seeing is a rush job, or it's also possible the book was drawn during that awkward transitional time where an artist has their technique down okay but are still struggling to find their style. Lord knows I spent a long time in limbo in that place.
In either case, this book is a fantastic read. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading about early gay rights movements in the U.S., specifically from a non-white, non-male perspective. Lots of good stories in here. i think my favourite one was the one where Kristen decides to take part in one of the city's first actual pride parades and how they were faced with hyper bigoted protesters from the start. There's a part where she notices that these homophobes even brought their kids with them and were making them hold picket signs with hateful messages about AIDs etc. Kristen noticed that the kids seems to not be paying much attention to the protest and were just trying to have fun with the other kids there, and even caught some of the kids dancing cheerfully to the music coming from the parade. she had a private moment of laughter, which later turned to fear as she saw one of the children's parents descend angrily upon them and shout at them about how it is VERY WRONG to be having fun in conjunction with anything related to gayness. A terrifyingly real moment depicted in these pages.
You can check out Kristen's work HERE.