Today, Panel Patter is extremely pleased to be double-spotlighting autobiographical cartoonist/zinester, Liz Prince, starting with an extensive interview and also including this review of her new graphic memoir from Zest Books, Tomboy.
Created by Liz Prince
Published by Zest Books
Liz Prince has made a name for herself as a committed and
talented autobiographical cartoonist over the past decade. She is an unabashed
memoirist who possesses the crucial ingredients for thriving in this genre: a willingness
to look honestly and openly at one’s self even if it’s uncomfortable and an
ability to make an impression that resonates with other people even if
storytelling specifics are personal. Keeping with this, her first graphic
memoir, Tomboy, is a success, not
only for Prince as a cartoonist, but for the rich material it provides for
young adult audiences and nostalgic 20/30 somethings alike.
Prince says that this book is a “memoir about friendship,
gender, bullies, growth, punk rock, and the power of the perfect outfit” and
she would be right content wise. The book deals with hills and valleys of
growing up. Prince’s dialogue and character design are excellent in revealing
the nuances of child/teen friendship cycles, the changing nature of male-female
relationships in middle and high school, early crushes and dating, popularity
hierarchies, bullying, and the feeling of finding your place in the world
through community. Although this may be lost to younger generations, Prince
also does a humorous job of incorporating pop-cultural and stylistic references
from the 90s, be they Green Day shirts, Ghostbusters proton-pack toys, or sly
Wayne’s World quotes. As someone also in her early 30s, I can say that this was
absolutely spot on.
Artistically, Prince uses her deceivingly simple style,
which is perfectly suited to this type of material. She employs universal male-female
iconography throughout the book to emphasize her feelings of exclusion from
gender norms (and aversion to wearing dresses). This could have been a trite
technique, but Prince’s placements of the symbols are perfect in illustrating
her feelings.
When you are a girl who does not neatly fall into societally
imposed gender conventions, life can be a continual exercise in proving your
right to being accepted on your own terms. Prince, who prefers to wear boys’
clothes from an early age and play with toys targeted towards boys, realizes at
an early age that she is not a “girlie girl”. In fact, she comes to despise
this brand of femininity and expresses her desire to be a boy. Prince is not
transgendered and she’s not a lesbian, as she is often asked. She’s just a life
long, self-described “tomboy”.
Much of the book details how her peers and teachers treated
her due to this, her distain of
“traditional femininity”, and her resistance to and fear of puberty and
womanhood. If this were the whole point of the book, it would get tiring and
further perpetuate falsehoods regarding gender norms. The key is that Prince
realizes at a certain point that her dislike of what it “means” to be a girl is
an internalization of these gender norms. On some level she learns this through
her friendships with other girls who don’t conform to these rigid feminine
stereotypes, her mother’s unwavering acceptance of her, as well as her artistic
mentorship by her mother’s friend Harley. But the turning point occurs when she
volunteers at a zine library in a teen center and discovers the work of Ariel
Schrag, who imparts her with the wisdom “ I want to be a girl on my own terms”.
I look forward to seeing more work like this from Prince. Tomboy is a delightful, funny, and
inspiring coming-of-age memoir about a girl who dares to be herself and
eventually realizes despite her trials, that this is the key to her
authenticity.
