The year is 2004 and seventeen-year-old Amanda Orham loves bad television, minor league baseball, and hanging out with her best friend, who also happens to be her father. However, a series of small events leads to Amanda overhearing her dad’s side of a suspicious sounding phone call, and Amanda’s life slowly begins to unravel as she digs deeper into the secrets surrounding herself and her family.
Written by Colleen AF VenableCover by Ellen T. Crenshaw
Illustrated, colored, and lettered by Ellen T. CrenshawIn “Kiss Number 8,” Venable and Crenshaw have teamed up to create a stunning and expressive story about the complexities of gender, sexuality, and being true to yourself in a society that values uniformity and prescribed roles. In the character Amanda, and in her late grandfather Sam, readers are shown what it means to be courageous in the face of not only uncertainty but also physical, psychological, and emotional danger. But the most notable thing about this title is how Venable and Crenshaw flawlessly wove together strong characters, dynamic artwork, impeccable pacing, and a touching story to craft an experience that oozes with emotion and transcends expectations.
Looking to one of its greatest strengths, Venable has written a collection of characters who each bring an intricate and multilayered history to the pages while managing to keep them both relatable and realistic. Amanda’s journey to first recognize, then to accept and further explore her sexuality, is not an experience all people go through specifically, but the roots of the journey are universal to the teen (and human) experience of discovering who you are as an individual and in relation to others. Each relationship we are shown – with her father, her mother, her best friend Cat, her family friends Laura and Adam, and others she meets along the way – reveals Amanda’s journey through various stages of anger, confusion, desperation, hurt, empathy, and elation. Often, Amanda experiences many of these emotions with any one given character as the story unfolds. This is particularly true with regards to Amanda’s relationship with her father, Jim. Although the story depicts the many relationships, romantic or otherwise, Amanda maintains, it is through her relationship with her father that the story seems to be centered around.
When we first start out, Jim and Amanda are presented as having a carefree and loving relationship. As soon as Amanda thinks her father is keeping a secret from her, their relationship begins to suffer. To help explain this, the reader is given flashbacks, through an otherwise largely linear story, that help to provide context for the relationship her father and grandfather Sam had. The flashbacks also explain why Jim hid Sam from Amanda, and how Jim’s feelings toward Sam became twisted by Jim’s father, Robert. Readers see Jim’s memories of his childhood, as they were re-shaped over time by Robert’s transphobia, juxtaposed over images of what really took place.
Readers also hear from Gina, Sam’s wife, about the abuse Sam suffered at Robert’s hands, and how that was the catalyst for the dissolution of Jim’s childhood family. Later, readers get to see Jim’s struggle to come to terms with Amanda’s coming out as queer and how his lingering feelings toward Sam are transferred, for a time, to Amanda. Readers are shown some of the struggle that occurs for Jim but most of his internal battle takes place off-page.
With regards to Amanda and her sexuality, Venable and Crenshaw never label her as a lesbian. Instead, the photo galleries (found in both the front and back matter) that contain the portraits of those Amanda has kissed seem to indicate that she is able to engage in relationships with others across the gender spectrum. This decision to present Amanda as fluid in her preferences will speak well to the current and ongoing socio-political discussions surrounding the rights and acceptance of a broader range of gender and sexual identities. Overall, Venable and Crenshaw do a wonderful job of using the characters to present teaching moments to readers without it feeling unnatural or patronizingly didactic.
The controlled chaos and emotional turmoil that exists throughout the story is nicely rendered by artist Crenshaw and her use of varied achromatic panel layouts. Most panels are orderly in their positioning but brim with dialogue, sometimes in the form of message windows from the popular early 2000s communication platform AOL Instant Messenger. At other times, panels are borderless, particularly when reflecting the sharing of a memory between two characters, rather than the depiction of an individual’s self-recollection of a memory.
Continued belowBackground scenery can be detailed (the baseball stadium on page 14, the forest getaway on page 51) but it can also be sparse to keep the focus on the characters (page 110). Additionally, Crenshaw makes spectacular use of shading. On pages 152 and 153, the shading tends to occur strictly in the background. However, as relationships begin to turn toxic (Robert violently hovering over Sam) or dissolve altogether, the shadow moves to the foreground. This occurs on page 153 as a shadow moves from behind Jim and Sam sitting together in one panel and then hovers over a now-alone Jim as he relates the loss of his then-mother to Amanda.
Crenshaw similarly uses body language to great effect, not just limiting herself to facial expressions to convey emotion. The angst characters feel can be clearly read in the way they are drawn, particularly when it comes to Jim and Amanda. As an example, the tension between the two after Amanda comes out, as seen on page 257, is so clearly conveyed via their body language that it is one of the few pages that is light on dialogue or other text.
It should be noted that although homophobia and transphobia are present in the story via the beliefs of some of the characters, the story itself is neither. Because this is a realistic depiction of teens, cursing, slurs, teen smoking, underage drinking, and sex are all outright depicted or strongly suggested. Most characters present as white, though a slew of secondary characters (Jess, Darren, Ken’ichi) with varying levels of presence do appear to be persons of color. A fun Q&A between Venable and Crenshaw is included in the back matter.
