Lai’s ability to articulate these nuances - in conversation, in character, and in the emotional intensity of the art - is mesmerizing. Stone Fruit Lee Lai This is an excerpt from Stone Fruit by Lee Lai, out with Fantagraphics. Characters allow themselves to be seen one moment, but throw up humor as armor the next. Conversations are as awkward and painful as they are in real life. Lai depicts all of these relationships with so much tenderness. Lai literally draws transformation, and the feelings it evokes, onto the page. But it’s not merely a story told in smart dialogue and character growth. Transformation - the painful, non-linear, ongoing process of moving between worlds - is at the heart of the story. Found family and family of origin are not always easily distinguishable. Sisterhood eases wounds romance can’t touch. In this world, aunthood and motherhood hold different but equally profound meanings. Instead of a staid world of expected boundaries, she draws the messy, confounding world that queer people actually live in.

In this quiet work of startling complexity, she examines how these myths play out in the lives of three women - and joyfully refutes them. Read Full Review >Ī remarkable contribution to this chorus of queer storytelling. But she tells her story with control and authority and it’s impossible not to admire the way she has made a dextrous narrative out of so much taciturnity and mossy sadness. Lai’s monochrome illustrations are, like her dialogue, spare and unyielding she wants for a lightness – the occasional joke would help – that would imbue this story with a warmth it sometimes needs. it impresses from the moment we first meet Bron and Ray, a couple who relish their role as wild, alternative aunties to Ray’s six-year-old niece, Nessie. There is something intensely bleak at its centre: a sense, perhaps, that while blood is not always thicker than water, even happily chosen families may not be able to withstand certain kinds of emotional inheritance.

But you finish it with no hope at all that its characters will ever be able to resolve their difficulties. if its minimalist, indie-film tone is ever downbeat, it’s also, at moments, highly affecting. A downbeat but moving exploration of the aftermath of a relationship.

Stone fruit graphic novel