Finding the familiar outside straight lines

Gender Queer shines as it confronts this uncomfortable territory. Kobabe’s artwork plays with botanical themes, using a series of non-adjacent sequence panels to connect eir burgeoning understanding of gender identity with the growth of a flowering plant. By the time e reaches eir twenties, e has “begun to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape.”

In another full-page panel, Kobabe plays again with organic forms, depicting eirself curled up inside a nautilus shell, a series of questions about gender and sexual identity unfurling around eir.

Kobabe’s use of organic imagery is especially powerful because it evokes the biological roots of flora and fauna in the natural world, and raises this as a contrast with the author's own expansive understanding of eir gender and sexuality. Eir work, like Sarah Leavitt’s, is equally powerful in eir renderings of emotion as abstract lines that bend and swerve, inconstant in their direction and intensity.

Find it at Drew