Can I just say that if I was giving out awards for best title, that one would win running away? This is somehow Claire’s first graphic novel, despite it feeling like it comes from somebody who’s been doing this for years and is completely assured in their own skills. The story itself bounces back and forth from the life of Constance (a young illustrator who’s beyond fed up at the countless attacks, big and small, suffered by women every day) and the hero of the comic she just started, Camel Toe. This hero has the power to make every man who harasses a woman picture that woman as their mother, which is a spectacularly appropriate punishment. Constance, meanwhile, feels better about herself and the world the further she gets into the stories of Camel Toe, but those stories are starting to freak out some of the companies that had been hiring her for illustration jobs. Her long term boyfriend, despite being generally supportive, also has trouble having her back on the subject, which really leaves Constance feeling alone in this struggle. If your “preachy” sense is going off right now, and you’re afraid that you’d be in for a humorless diatribe if you read this, I’m hoping the sample page alone will be enough to convince you otherwise. That story goes on for several more pages, and would solve a whole lot of harassment issues if it was implemented as a law. The Camel Toe stories are consistently funny (this is one of those books where I could have used several pages as sample pages, if that wasn’t, you know, unethical), and everybody at least knows somebody like Constance, assuming you’re not a lot like her yourself. I also think this deserves mentioning: the slogan for Camel Toe is “defender of gals and fucker of the patriarchy.” Why is she watering her plants with period blood on the cover? Sorry friends, you’ll have to read the book to solve that mystery. I’m scratching the surface on the details here, granted, but this is something that everybody should read and discover for themselves. Here’s hoping we see a lot more out of Claire, because this is one hell of a debut. $25 ($10 for the pdf)
