I Am Not Okay with This

Forsman (The End of the Fucking World) draws heavily on the aesthetics of classic Popeye comics in this dark tale of adolescence. Sydney is an apathetic and depressed 15-year-old girl, tasked by her school guidance counselor with keeping a journal to help sort out her feelings. This allows for pitch-perfect unreliable narration to run over visual depictions of events. Sydney’s troubles are easily relatable: fights with her mother, grief and guilt over her father’s death, a crush on her best friend, questions about her sexuality, and experiments with drugs. But Sydney is also burdened with a terrible power. Her rage manifests as a shooting pain which she can direct at others, causing nosebleeds, migraine headaches, and worse. She has to live through the pain right along with her victims, but sometimes that seems worth it. The pages are drawn with a scratchy quill pen line, with occasional subtle grays interrupting the harsh black and white. As with Forsman’s best work, it’s another troubling yet poetic exploration of young adults working through their mental pain via its physical projection. (Dec.)