What's Normal Anyway?
Morgan Boecher
2015

Morgan Boecher's collection of comic strips chronicles the journey of a character who awakes to find himself in a dark wood, having wandered off from the straight path. He is guided by the Roman poet Vergil through a series of . . .

No, wait, sorry. I was thinking of Dante's Inferno. My mistake

 

What's Normal Anyway? chronicles the journey of Mel, who is trans-masculine and finds himself lost in the sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating dark woods of transition. Mel leads the reader through a gamut of binders, T injections, top surgery, dating, parents, guy friends and gal friends. 

Mel is something of a naif, which allows the reader to encounter all these situations with open-eyed wonder. Mel's a soul in progress. In the strip where he attends a pride parade, taking in all its attendant queerness, Mel remarks, "I don't really know how I fit in with all of this, but it's comforting to know that I do."

Another strip effectively, and wordlessly, illustrates the frustration, first, of navigating the gender binary, then, of being overwhelmed by a multiplicity of labels and identities. Sometimes thinking outside the box only leads to realizing you're in a slightly larger box.

Boecher's strips are not the traditional 3 panel setup-beat-punchline. Each is a 2x3 grid. The result is a more relaxed pace. The strips are about irony, charm, and insight rather than the sort of LOL of, say, Pearls Before Swine. Which is not to say there aren't laughs here. Mel's relationship to his "packer" is hysterical. His relationship with Dr. Skateboard, his cat, captures the intent: loveable and heartwarming.