LGBTQ Double Feature: "Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me" and "The Bride Was a Boy"

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (Illustrations)

Here’s the basic summary: Freddy is in a new relationship with the eponymous Laura Dean. Though things were great at first, Laura Dean has shown a new side of herself in the relationship: one that’s thoughtless or even mean. From there, the reader is asked to follow Freddy’s journey of young love. Will she ditch the toxic relationship she craves for the health one she needs? Only time will tell. What did I think of the work? Read on to find out.

Pros:

The art was consistently great throughout. I loved the subtle use of color.
I really enjoyed the representation: people of color, LGBT characters, families of many shapes and sizes, etc.
The characterization was strong throughout. None of the characters were one-dimensional; I felt like each one had their own internal world.

Cons:

You could argue that the use of an advice columnist and a fortune teller as a plot devices is a bit contrived, but the characters and plot more than make up for it.
I could imagine some folks being annoyed by the lack of explicit explanation of certain story beats (i.e. those that are only depicted visually), but I didn’t mind this at all. Comics are a visual medium, so why not take advantage of that to tell the story at hand?

Conclusion:

If it wasn’t obvious from the pros and cons, I enjoyed this work. Even though I haven’t been in high school for some time, the combinations of characters, art, and emotion kept me turning pages. This story has a lot going for it, and if the premise sounds interesting at all, it is worth a read.

Check it out here.

The Bride Was A Boy by Chii

The publisher pitches this work as a “transgender love story, based on true events!” They call it upbeat and adorable, following the life of a transgender woman from childhood through to marriage. This includes explorations of sexuality, gender, and transition. What is my take on the work? Read on to find out.

Pros:

The art is cute and expressive
The work provides insight into the lives of LGBT people (and one transgender woman in particular) outside the USA, and particularly, in Japan. I was especially interested to learn about laws relating to gender and sexual orientation there.
The comic comes with a “works cited,” page. Neat.

Cons:

I was a bit leery about some of the language the author used and the way the author couched her current identity in her sex assigned at birth (“…was a boy”). Though I very much doubt it was the author’s intention, lines of thinking like this are sometimes used to de-legitimize transgender people and identities (e.g. “you’re really a boy,” or, “you’re just a man in a dress”). Beyond that, the author conflates of sex assigned at birth and gender identity, which, “muddies the water,” with regards to terminology in my opinion. Other than that, nothing jumped out at me as being especially troublesome.
It was a minor annoyance, but half of every page in chapter 3 was used for a repeated “title card,” while each of the previous chapters had full pages of illustrations.

Conclusion:

It was a fun, easy read. Though I might use different terms / terminology in spots, 1) I understand that the choices made reflect the author and her experience, and 2) I would rather someone learning about transgender people have this work as a baseline than a lot of other portrayals in mass media / on the internet. If the title grabbed your attention, or if you’d like to learn about the LGBTQ community via a manga, this book is definitely worth checking out.

Check it out here.