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Young, Gay & Battling in Liz Baillie's My Brain Hurts Volume 1

By Leroy Douresseaux
July 23, 2008 - 10:35

Thanks to barnesandnoble.com for the image.

Kate Callahan is a high school rebel, but she’s not the typical teen rebel.  Her rebellion isn’t only defined by fashion, music, and posturing because she’s on the wrong side of everything that is expected even of high school rebels.

Kate is a budding queer – still deciding if she should come out of the closet.  Her friend Joey Kaiser, not yet even in high school, has totally come out and is always on the prowl for sex – even with adult men.  One thing is clear to Kate – she’s not ready for a committed relationship, but finds herself fooling around with the promiscuous Verona and politically active loudmouth, Desdemona “Desi” Machado.  When Joey lands in the hospital after a vicious hate crime attack, Kate feels the world closing in on her.

My Brain Hurts, Vol. 1 collects the first five issues of Liz Baillie’s comic book series, My Brain Hurts (to date, 9 issues have been published).  I absolutely love this book.  In some ways it reminds me of Jaime Hernandez’s early “Locas” stories featuring his signature duo, Maggie and Hopey, but My Brain Hurts isn’t some copycat.

Baillie has an unbelievable talent for matching pitch perfect dialogue with the right characters.  What makes it unbelievable to me is that this is done with such subtlety.  There’s nothing flashy about the characters, characterization, dialogue, and plot; it all comes together so quietly that when I realized how full-realized these stories were I’d lost myself in the reading of them.  What makes My Brain Hurts feel so real – so visceral – is how Baillie captures the things that put individual people, who generally don’t fit in with “normal society,” so much at odds with everyone else.

With her comic art, Baillie captures the awkwardness and difficulties of Kate’s young life with poignancy and potency.  There’s a sequence of panels in Chapter 4 (page 9 of that chapter) in which Baillie draws Kate’s eyes in a way that depicts the fundamental sense of Kate feeling that she is being besieged by a world that hates her and how she presents herself to the world.  It’s powerful stuff, and for a moment presents without fireworks the war many LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer/questioning) youth find themselves fighting.  My Brain Hurts, Vol. 1 is comics as the really good, good stuff.

A+

www.lizbaillie.com

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12