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Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir opens with the cries of a 2-year-old. They belong to a young Liz Prince, who fears nothing more in her little life than the frilly, pink cloth that hangs from her mother's hand. That's because while other girls her age struggled to balance in their mothers' heels, Prince preferred her Indiana Jones-style hat. She also favored Battle Beasts over dollhouses, bow ties over tights, Luke Skywalker over Princess Leia.
Prince wanted to be a boy. Or, at least, what she thought that meant: bravery, strength, adventure. Girls were the princesses in silver towers—the damsels in distress. Prince wanted to be the hero.
Prince, an Ignatz Award-winning comic artist, illustrates these early years in her latest graphic release, Tomboy (Zest Books, 256 pages, $18.99), an intriguing portrait of growing up as a gender-nonconforming girl in a world fixated on the gender binary.
Filled with sketch-book-style drawings both charming and quirky, the book takes us from the time Prince wore a bow tie and blazer in her kindergarten picture, to the cruelties of middle-school hierarchies, to navigating first romances. Many of Prince's experiences are common enough to be relatable but too unique to risk triviality, as when she's mistaken for a boy by her teacher or bullied and buried in snow for wearing a baggy shirt and men's pants.
But there are only so many times one can illustrate a young girl's aversion to anything pink and frilly before it gets redundant. Especially as we move through the first half of Prince's childhood, which is dedicated to her "boyish" pastimes—her affinity for playful wrestling and Ghostbusters—we can't help but sense the author's urgency to demonstrate how much of a "tomboy" she is. Yes, as she says, such labeling requires us to make assumptions about "what makes a girl and what makes a boy." But, in our post-Brony world, isn't she embracing that system by labeling tomboyism a lifestyle?
Label aside, Prince's story is a testament to the joys of finding one's place in a world so adamant about finding that place for you. And it's a story that, filled with self-deprecating humor and a flowing narrative, is easy to finish in one sitting. But perhaps Tomboy's success lies most in its ability to get you to contemplate your own experiences growing up—swimming with your shirt on, searching for that special valentine, navigating social anxiety—and the ways in which we have all transgressed, and perpetuated, our society's rigid definitions of what it means to be a girl or a boy.
GO: Liz Prince reads at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., on Thursday, Sept. 11. 7:30 pm. Free.
WWeek 2015