More Comics Please! Issue #7

More Comics Please! is a space for comic book reviews: think of it like a friend telling you about their latest read! Today’s comics are The Last Session TP, This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America, and Made in Korea TP.

Content Note: anti-fatness

The Last Session TP is hands down one of my favorite comics ever! I truly did not want this one to end, and I sincerely hope there are plans to continue this as an ongoing series! It’s a delightful romp through a TTRPG campaign that’s finally ending years after it began in high school and the ways the players come to terms with moving on from the characters and in their own lives.

What It’s About

“Jay, Lana, Drew, Walter, and Shen began playing Dice & Deathtraps in high school. Now dealing with college and all the twists and turns of their lives, their weekly game has been a wonderful constant. But, as college graduation looms and it feels like their lives are all moving down very different paths, Lana’s thrilled to finally finally complete the party’s unfinished original campaign. But when Jay’s partner Cassandra joins the game, Lana refuses to let her play.

Writer Jasmine Walls (SEEN: Edmonia Lewis) and artist DOZERDRAWS (Lumberjanes) weave a heartfelt story of friends learning to cope with all the changes that come from growing up. Collects issues #1- 5.”

What Worked for Me

✦ There is so much to love about this comic! I love the art, first of all– such beautiful color choices were made, and it was easy to follow the story visually as well as narratively. Dozerdraws has a wonderful hand at showing expressions and movement in their work that really springs to life.

✦ I loved that there was a supportive parent and family members of a trans character in the story and that they discussed that character being on testosterone. Makes my heart so happy to see that included!

✦ There was such a delightful variety of queer identities and relationships, including ace relationships, in here that were so wonderful to see. I loved that it was there as the backdrop to the main story and not what the entire book was about– I always yearn for things exactly like this, where queerness is prominent and proud and supportive of this fantasy story and the relationships revolving around it.

✦ It was fantastic to see a fully BIPoC cast! I especially loved it in this nerdy fantasy game setting!

✦ I don’t have 100% certainty on this, but I definitely think there was neurodivergence in multiple characters in this story, and it made me so happy to see. It was especially lovely to see it represented in BIPoC characters.

✦ Body size inclusivity was a huge positive in here! I loved that it wasn’t just one fat person in the group– no! It was a full half of the group! Do you know how happy I am right now with all the ways I am seeing myself in this comic?? This whole book was just such a joy!

✦ The lettering in here by Micah Myers was also beautifully done and easy to read with great placement throughout; that’s something I’m always a huge fan of.

✦ The story by Jasmine Walls overall was short and sweet but packed full of character development and backstory and tension that was great at keeping the story moving forward but also wasn’t an overwhelming amount of tension. 

✦ I love the way the characters take care of one another and support one another even from afar or even without speaking directly about an issue. The love they have for one another was felt all throughout the story, and I really appreciate that.

✦ I felt like I had been plopped down into a room of friends. This felt really grounded and realistic to me– a group of queer, nerdy kids hanging out and having a good time together. Everyone had a full backstory that got shared throughout, and I appreciated the way the characters played off one another throughout the book. 

✦ I loved the wholesome message at the end! 🥹 

What Didn’t Work for Me

My only complaint is that I want more! I really do hope they continue with this as a series in the future because it was such a wonderfully light hearted story with low stakes and a sweet message against a fantasy TTRPG background with delightfully drawn characters, and I NEED more of that in my life! 

Overall

I give The Last Session TP Volume One: Roll for Initiative 5 out of 5 speech bubbles: this book is fantastic and lighthearted with a delightful fantasy element to it that I think you will enjoy very much! It’s a great pick me up, and I’m glad I have it in both digital and physical copies to read when the mood strikes! Go grab a copy today, give it a read, then come back to the comments and nerd out with me, yeah? Yeah! 😃 

How to Read It

Interested in checking it out for yourself? Here are a few ways you can get your hands on a copy!

Read This Next

If you liked this, check out My Love Mix-Up!, Snapdragon, and Needle & Thread

Content Note: Racism, slurs, possible lynching mentions, misogyny, anti-queerness attitudes, anti-Islam attitudes, animal death, hunting for sport, guns, violence, fertility struggles

This Country is an achingly beautiful story told in snapshots of memories and musings on cultures, history, the lands on which we grow and how they inform the people we become. The comic isn’t shy about discussing racism and other issues that abound in the United States and particularly in this part of it, nor does it try to paint the author’s time in rural Idaho as entirely negative. It weaves together the horrible and the joyous into a seamless experience that leaves the reader feeling both satisfied and unsettled.

What It’s About

“Before Navied Mahdavian moved with his wife and dog in November of 2016 from San Francisco to an off-the-grid cabin in rural Idaho, he had never fished, gardened, hiked, hunted, or lived in a snowy place. But there, he could own land, realize his dream of being an artist, and start a family—the Millennial dream. Over the next three years, Mahdavian leaned into the wonders of the natural Idaho landscape and found himself adjusting to and enjoying a slower pace of living. But beyond the boundaries of his six acres, he was confronted with the realities of America’s political shifts and forced to confront the question: Do I belong here?

Mahdavian’s beautifully written and unflinchingly honest graphic memoir charts his growth and struggles as an artist, citizen, and new father. It celebrates his love of place and honors the relationships he makes in rural America, touching on dynamics like culture, environment, and identity in America, and even articulating difficult moments of racism and brutality he found there as a Middle Eastern American. With wit, compassion, and a sense of humor, Mahdavian’s insider perspective offers a unique portrait of one of the most remote and wild areas of the American West.”

What Worked for Me

✦ This could have easily been a depressing story about a man and his small family moving to and then away from a new rural home in Idaho, but it wasn’t. Navied Mahdavian’s sense of humor and deep appreciation of the land, the animals, and the people in his life brought a levity to the story that invites the reader to see the beauty in his time in Idaho.

✦ I appreciated the respect for the Indigenous tribes offered by Navied in expanding upon the names of the people and distinguishing the differences in beliefs and cultures throughout the book. I would be interested to hear from reviewers who are members of the tribes mentioned in here and whose ancestors inhabited the land in Idaho to hear their thoughts on this.

✦ The illustration style was really fun! In a way, it felt reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes to me, especially in the sort of episodic way Navied formatted the book. A simple style served the complexity of the emotions and the narrative really well.

✦ I really liked the way Navied juxtapositioned the narratives of the white residents wanting to remain white and conservative with the interspersing of Indigenous culture and beliefs and practices of the people who were there before white settlers arrived. The way Navied handled this hypocritical irony almost entirely visually and within the narrative without ever speaking to it directly was a powerful delivery.

✦ I don’t know if Navied used any traditional mediums in here, but the look of the watercolor or ink used throughout gave a lovely textural effect to the pages.

✦ As a white person who grew up among white people in the Bible Belt South as a neurodivergent, queer, and disabled kid, I really appreciated the way Navied demonstrated the abruptness with which white people will switch their demeanor from friendly charmer to raging bigot. That undercurrent of violence is always present in these communities, and Navied definitely captured it so well in his work with the way he portrayed not just his interactions with different people but also in the stories he chose to highlight from the history of the area. 

✦ Despite the heaviness that the book gets into, Navied manages to showcase so much beauty in this book, too. His fascination with the local wildlife and plant life was a welcome addition and grounded me as a reader into the land. I enjoyed the scenes where he identified and and engaged with the wildlife, especially the deer. His vegetarian approach to life was a gentleness against the callousness of the smiling photos he referenced throughout the book.

✦ I really loved the way Navied drew expressions and movement in this story. I laughed out loud as he illustrated himself and others in silly and relatable moments.

✦ Navied brought a great variety of panel structures to the book, too. I liked the ease with which my eyes flowed from panel to panel and the way he played with open spaces throughout as if to emphasize the space of the land.

✦ I also liked the way Navied explored multiple themes throughout the story: his and his wife’s struggle with fertility, reflecting on different cultures and histories and tying them to the moments in the book, his relationships with neighbors and the reliance upon other humans to survive the seasons, his gardening and vegetarianism, hunting, guns, and so much more were expertly woven in.

What Didn’t Work for Me

✦  I mentioned I appreciated the way Navied brought more respect to Indigenous people in the book; however, find it unsettling to find them mentioned so much as if they are past tense when that is very much not the case. I appreciate that this is reflective of the attitudes of the white settlers in the area Navied was in, but I do wish Navied himself had found a way to remind readers that the people who were here first are not gone.

✦ The lettering was a little off for me at times. I appreciated that the aesthetic of the words in balloons surrounded by so much space complemented the landscape, but I found it a bit unbalanced at times. I read this as a NetGalley digital preview, so I imagine the lettering may look different in print, and this may not be as big an issue. 

Overall

I give This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America 5 out of 5 speech bubbles: I would absolutely recommend that you read this beautiful comic!

How to Read It

Interested in checking it out for yourself? Here are a few ways you can get your hands on a copy!

Read This Next

If you liked this, check out I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir,  In Limbo, Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American, and The Magic Fish

Content Note: School shooting, adoption, child abduction, nudity, gore, violence, killing, sex work with AI 

Made in Korea TP is a captivating story that blends true AI, adoption, and trans identity in a futuristic world where humanity can no longer reproduce, exploring the morals and limits, as well as the possibilities, of artificial intelligence.

What It’s About

“A Korean nine-year-old named Jesse is adopted and sent to live with a lovely couple in America. Socially awkward, yet equipped with a seemingly encyclopedic brain, the young girl’s journey through the complexities of race, gender, and identity hits a fork in the road when she discovers she’s not entirely human…yet.

Adolescence just got a lot more emotional for the world’s first true A.I. system.

Collects MADE IN KOREA #1-6″

What Worked for Me

✦ I really enjoyed the story! I liked that this was an AI story that was neither doomsday in nature nor overly positive; it felt like a nice balance of the potential possibilities, consequences, and limitations of AI.

✦ The way Jesse was depicted in school felt very familiar to me as a neurodivergent person. Jesse’s earnestness and taking everything at face value, as well as a tendency to speak plainly and expect others to do the same, is something I relate to deeply, and my heart broke when Jesse had to learn the hard way that humans don’t typically communicate in ways that are just.

✦ I really loved the lettering in this comic! The way Adam Wollet designed the bubbles and handled the letters themselves made it very easy to follow the story without much interruption. I also appreciated the color changes depending on the language being spoken, that was a lovely touch.

✦ I also really liked the art for this, especially the lineless panel style and the texture that Gegê Schall accomplished. The line art was inked so beautifully, and the characters stood out from their backgrounds which made it very easy to understand the visuals. 

✦ Jeremy Holt did a wonderful job with the story overall; it felt familiar yet innovative and effortlessly incorporated a lot of great elements from multiple societal issues. The story felt very real and possible to me.

✦ The characters were well done, and I particularly enjoyed the lovingly antagonistic yet supportive relationship between Chul and his cousin. 

✦ I loved the body type varieties shown in a particular scene of Kim Dong Soo’s work (you’ll know what I mean when you read it, and I can’t say more without spoiling some stuff lol). It’s refreshing to see that kind of variety in comics, however briefly.

✦ I connected with the trans narrative in the story a lot. This is another one I don’t want to spoil, so I won’t say much other than that I liked the way it was handled!

What Didn’t Work for Me

✦ The colors were a bit odd for me at times, mostly during the times when Jesse was with the parents. I felt that the scenes in Korea were more cohesive and translated the mood better on the page.

✦ The ending felt a bit rushed and a little muddled to me. I was a little confused by Jesse’s choice of home at the end of the day and would have liked a little more clarification on why that home was chosen.

✦ I wasn’t a big fan of Kim Dong Soo’s work and the way it was portrayed to be honest. There was a particular scene in there where he was pretending to strike a creation of his to adjust the parameters of the programming, that was unsettling. This is another spot where I don’t want to spoil anything, so I want to be vague, but there were elements of that scene and with his work overall that, when paired with the topic of true AI, made me uncomfortable.

✦ The mini comics at the end of the TP collection were nice, but I would have preferred a little more on the story about Jesse’s final choice instead.

Overall

I give Made in Korea TP 4 out of 5 speech bubbles: This was a great book, and I would definitely recommend checking it out! Even if you’re the biggest AI, android, or robot fan (I’m not either!), and this was still very engaging and interesting.

How to Read It

Interested in checking it out for yourself? Here are a few ways you can get your hands on a copy!

Read This Next

If you liked this, check out Eve TP, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr TP, and Submerged TP

That concludes this month’s issue of More Comics Please! What did you think of today’s comics? Have you read any yourself? Are you itching to go check these out now? Let me know in the comments!

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