He looks tired. He looks anxious. His eyes are two wavering black holes cut into a pouch, ever so slightly indented by the face beneath or perhaps from the tear in the fabric which formed them. These eyes, or perhaps the windows from which they gaze, stream spectrally, offering the cartoon impression of a ghost, or else shame like the shame Charlie Brown felt when he covered his head with a paper bag. This man's covering is overlaid in spikes, threatening or perhaps distracting from his bodily form. Wearing nothing other than a loose pair of shorts, his body is plainly seen. The heave of his drooping breasts, the paunch of his hips against his narrowed waist, the skin which seems to hang from his slender arms. His body is not feminine. Slouching, he stands as a shy and gentle man. But is this body his?
The man's name is Lucille. He is a transsexual, and the hero of two new comic books by Leo Fox from Silver Sprocket, a publisher who appears to be currently hellbent on publishing every notable trans cartoonist at least once. Boy Island is a modern epic, with Lucille cast as the unlikely young hero on a quest to liberate transsexualism itself. My Body Unspooling is a romantic drama charting the stormy relationship of two lovers scorned -- Lucille and his own body. Each present complex allegorical dilemmas of the trans/human condition -- How do we become who we are when the world hates us? How do we become who we are when we hate ourselves?
Boy Island is a lot of things. A Homeric quest, narrated in the improvisational second person of a tabletop roleplaying game, presenting an allegory of transition on the road to collective trans liberation. Jounce, a Digimon-like bulbous cartoon creature sporting bat wings and a bright exclamation mark on his stomach, is the spirit of perversion and the godfather of transsexuality. He has been imprisoned by Fairy, the blandly evil yet magnetically sexy ruler of law-abiding, binary gender. He has cleft the land into two loathsome mounds, Girl Island for girls and Boy Island for boys. Those who do not belong have cast themselves into the sea. “Needless to say,” the prisoner Jounce purrs, “I think Fairy is a fucking cunt. And incidentally, so do you. Your name is Lucille.”
In case Jounce’s introduction were not clear enough, the first image of Lucille is helpfully captioned “LUCILLE: YOU.” Whether or not we readers identify with Lucille, Jounce’s narration identifies us as Lucille, a young resident of Girl Island haunted by a secret, the knowledge that he is a boy. Torn between excitement and shame, Lucille’s private anxieties transform into determination to transition after Jounce confronts him in a dream. This lapse from narration to direct address is key to Boy Island’s structure. Second person captions are poetic, dare I say erotic language, pushing a reader into identification with an other. It is also the storytelling language of choose-your-own-adventure books and tabletop roleplaying games. We become Lucille, we become a closeted trans man, but we do not decide who he will be, we do not control his emotions, we do not control his actions. Jounce confronts him and spurs him into action – we do not. As passengers gazing out the eye-holes of Lucille’s mask, our thoughts and choices are relayed to us by Jounce’s words. For many readers, our relationship to embodying Lucille will be impacted by our relationship to transness and (trans)masculinity.[1]
After stammering a goodbye to his bewildered mother, Lucille journeys to Boy Island to realize himself as a transsexual man, save Jounce and ultimately overthrow the restrictive binary rule of the prudish Fairy and liberate the transsexual perverts suffering under his yoke. It is a loosely Campbellian hero’s journey, though hardly so tightlaced, Lucille journeying like a shy, perverse Odysseus across the ocean with a small itinerary and a little company to come home to his gender and restore a lack of order to the land. Starman, the paradoxically toxic bro with deep cosmic awareness, returns from Fox’s debut graphic novel Prokaryote Season as Lucille’s ferryman across the islands and Fairy’s son – it should be noted that Fox’s comics appear to utilize a star system like Tezuka’s, where characters appear again to evoke and comment on their prior lives in other stories. Starman is a masculinity totally alien to Lucille’s – upon arrival to Boy Island, Starman declares with chipper enthusiasm, “I better go find a hole to fuck.” This uncannily male ferryman offers Lucille a price for the journey into manhood: a precious memory, never named, never spoken of again, gone from Lucille the moment Starman consumes it, apparently not worth keeping anyway.
Lucille is joined by another passenger, Starman’s sister Battleigh, a trans woman who is journeying to Boy Island to rescue her husband Jounce from her wicked father Fairy, who is still misgendering her constantly after years of change and adjustment. Like Starman, Battleigh is an other to Lucille, another version of transition, one of both transfeminity and life out of the closet. Battleigh is not an elder, but she has years of living as a transsexual pervert, fighting for her right to do so every step of the way. She does not carry Lucille’s timid trepidation but bears herself with grim, proud determination, her blank expression turning into a vicious smile with only the slightest shift in line, the intensity of her piecing yellow eyes distinctly unchanging, set on pale grey skin at once evoking sickly frailty and the hardness of concrete. She has endured losses that Lucille fears and grieves but doesn’t yet know. She is a far more likely heroine than Lucille is a hero. But we remain in Lucille’s eyes, because we are him.
There are a few episodes in Boy Island that are particularly revealing of Lucille’s character as well as, I suspect, the intentions and anxieties which drive Leo Fox’s current work. During the journey at sea, Lucille encounters a transsexual shipwreck and is pulled into the depths of the ocean, confronted by skeletal, beastly spirits. These ethereal grotesques introduce themselves as “the ghosts of transsexuals past – fear and hunger have transformed us beyond recognition.” When Fairy divided the lands, these lost transsexual souls chose the sea, preferring starvation and decay over loss of independence, a small, doomed collective ripped from society. “I’m like you!” Lucille stammers, “except alive, and, uh young!” Lucille pleads with the transsexual ghosts for his freedom, promising that he will make a world for transsexuals free of Fairy’s violent law like they had tried and failed to build before. “What if we don’t want you to?” a transsexual ghost objects, “What if we don’t want to do it wrong?” Dejected and overwhelmed by the negativity of ghosts, Lucille remembers his mother’s disapproval of transsexuality. The weight of the ghost’s disapproval is overridden be Lucille’s certainty that his mother must be wrong. With this epiphany, Lucille decides to give the ghosts a spoon his mother left him with, now a magical object that can truly nourish the starving spirits, who, gladdened by the offering, send him safely on his way. Later, Lucille meets a lone survivor of the shipwreck, who asks him if he knows what became of her crew. Flop sweating, the bag on his head twisted with distress, Lucille says he hasn’t seen them. “Eventually you sleep,” Jounce narrates, “You dream of piles of dead girls.”
This encounter with transsexual ghosts is the central drama at the heart of Boy Island, perhaps more significant than the conflict between Jounce and Fairy because, ultimately, it does not resolve. I called Boy Island a hero’s journey, and indeed - spoilers - the proverbial dragon of Fairy’s enforced cisgender binary is slain, in a sense. But the ghosts of transsexuals past cannot be saved. The ghosts could be us in a future where the anti-trans panic of today achieves a total victory, but they are clearly meant to stand for trans elders, the generations of gender outlaws who broke out of gender conformity before we even had rights to fear losing, and the many trans siblings who have been lost to death over decades of adversity. There is both fear and anger in the words Fox gives our elders to speak: “What if we don’t want to do it wrong?” Lucille’s encounter with the ghosts is a memory of the frightening violence which trans people have always faced and the alien stakes of queer communities past, a mean and strange living absence that nearly crushes him if not for the reality that he is much more kin to these hostile, haunted ghosts than his oppressively cisgender mother. As he gave a piece of his memory to Starman before, Lucille gives away the last material connection to his mother and becomes a descendent of trans history. Lucille’s anxieties change over the course of his journey from anxieties about transition to anxieties about measuring up to trans people who came before, the dead trans people, the trans people who never got to make the journey from their assigned island.[2] Lucille is haunted by the ghosts of transsexuals past, he wants to honor them, he fears their fate and struggles to make sense of it. I imagine that Leo Fox shares these anxieties with his protagonist. I certainly do.
Transsexual liberation and the weight of trans history are not the only core anxieties in Boy Island. In an earlier dream on the boat, Lucille indulges in sexual fantasies about his destination, the boys of boy island. Dark, hot colors evoke feverish humidity, Lucille’s dream man is a creature of hair and sweat, massive hands, grasping limbs, rigid collarbones and a drooping gut. Lucille bottoms for his “dream of a perfect boy [...] being boys on boy island, together, forever.” The scene shifts to a domestic setting. Lucille is cooking dinner, and looks down at himself to see that he is wearing an apron. Lucille wakes up, dizzy and clearly disturbed. What could the dream signify? Perhaps Lucille’s dream boy is the boy that he wants to be. Erotic desire serves then as a displacement for Lucille’s dreams for himself. An abstract lover may indulge in the version of life which he has been denied so deeply for so long it has infested his self-image.[3] On the other hand, perhaps the contradictions of the apron-wearing dream Lucille are not upsetting because they aren’t true, but because they seem like they should not be true. No one person’s masculinity or femininity aligns to a singular role. Homosexual men and women alike, be they cisgender or otherwise, have always diverged from the prescribed behaviors assigned to sexes. At this moment in time as Boy Island still lies in the distance, Lucille’s sexual and personal ideals for masculinity are intertwined beyond parsing. He knows what he wants, but hasn’t learned who he is becoming. Lucille’s subconscious, be it the unspoken urgings of his body or his mind, rebel against his sense of self, his personal logic of being. This is perversion. This brings us to My Body Unspooling.
My Body Unspooling is a minicomic published by Silver Sprocket in 2023, during the online serialization of Boy Island. It is another story about Lucille, only in this version he is both two characters and one - his mind and his body. Lucille’s mind and Lucille’s body have grown to hate each other – the mind hates how the body always acts against his wishes, making horrible noises which he wishes to be alone, while the body hates how the mind restricts him, punishing him for seeking pleasure and contorting him into awkward shapes. The body is too hot, the mind is too cold. After petitioning God, depicted as a rat in a large bed, to grant them a divorce, the mind and body split. Liberated, the two experience contrasting liberations – Lucille’s mind untethered from bodily pain, his body free to indulge in both needs and desires. However, Lucille’s body finds that without a mind, he cannot dream. Lucille’s mind finds that without a body, he cannot protect himself from fear. Weeping, the two Lucilles run to each other and are reunited.
A description does not do justice to the poetry of My Body Unspooling’s cartooning. Fox’s writing in this minicomic is some of his best, evocative and at times deeply humorous. God asks Lucille “What will you do once you’re separated?” The Mind stammers “Oh… uh… um… I… uh… Ponder the uh, secrets of life?” and the Body answers, “Uh, I dunno. Eat berries and shit.” Crucially, Fox’s pages are loaded with symbolically charged chicken fat – cutaways to organs and visions of the mind’s titular wish for the body mingle with leaves, trees sprout at every corner with an almost fleshlike roundness. Foliage, limbs, shadows, cartoon hearts, cartoon tears, stars, nails mysterious phantoms fill up every page with mystery and intensity. Pain, desire, fears and unknown possibility radiate off of every panel that lend the short allegory an internal rhythm hinting at meanings beyond the neat resolution of mind and body restored. This is a story dramatizing the rage and confusion of being one human person that for Lucille is all-encompassing.
There is a crucial visual metaphor central to Lucille’s presentation in My Body Unspooling. Lucille’s body is, well, his body, but his mind is anthropomorphized as his mask, the spiked bag he wears on his head. When the body speaks, we see Lucille’s “actual” face: a long nose, red eyes, white as a sheet, slick straight hair parted in the middle. The body’s face is angular in a way I had not imagined, somehow unremarkable for its difference. He looks a little bit like Laurelie, the imperiled lover in Fox’s debut graphic novel Prokaryote Season. Variations on Lucille’s mask also appear in Prokaryote Season, both as the eponymous single-celled organism which Laurelie wants to become and as the hoods of their suitor Sydney’s imaginary jury.[4] I could write an entirely different essay on the thematic relationship between Prokaryote Season and My Body Unspooling, but in brief, Prokaryote Season presents the story of a love triangle that is ultimately an interrogation of the escape from identity sought in codependency, losing yourself in the need for another, themes which My Body Unspooling returns to but instead turns inward, depicting self-love as the stormiest relationship drama. The similarity of Lucille’s mind to the jury is ironic given that divorce proceedings are central to the work, but the evocation of the single-celled organism is even more exciting. The divorce of the mind and body, like Laurelie’s wish to be a prokaryote in the primordial soup, is a wish from freedom by abandoning complexity. Both the mind and the body look lighter without each other, the mind literally flying as he boasts “I float above the trees, I can see everything! Branches pass right through me!” while the body seems to almost beam in his repose, a part of nature. And yet that lightness is also frailty – together, Lucille is a solid creature, present, his weight defining him.
Given the intense focus of Fox’s comics on transsexuality and Boy Island’s particular preoccupation on gender dysphoria as a core allegorical piece of greater liberatory struggle, it is both tempting and rewarding to read My Body Unspooling as an allegory of body dysmorphia. Lucille’s body is, in purely cissexist terms, female – perhaps androgynous, perhaps ambiguous, but marked by a softness as simple as the slight swell of breasts. In a telling moment, Lucille’s body complains that his mind “contorts me into uncomfortable shapes to get off,” hand bent into a motion of phallic masturbation yet gesturing toward what must be his chest, evoking binding. The first complaints of Lucille’s mind are dissociative – “Me and my body are at odds with each other. I open my eyes but I cannot see. I open my mouth but I cannot speak. My mind races, yet I cannot think.” The divorce might thus not be the liberation we see but a contract of repression – like many closeted people, Lucille’s mind embraces his unreality while viewing his body as something that can only act of its own accord. Might their reunion thus be a discovery of the self, mind and body given presence to embrace their nuanced connection of sensation, love and safety?
I do not believe that allegories of gender journey are simplistic, but Fox does not allow this coherence or certainty. No trans person is simply trans, and the mind/body split in My Body Unspooling is not an account of binary division of gender and sex. Beneath the mind, beneath the body, lie organs, unknown functions, an unconscious self. The titular unspooling is a vision of weightlessness, a nightmare that both liberates and reveals the mind’s fear that he is “a collection of organ’s hallucinating.” Lucille’s body is not a female body troubling a masculine mind – contrary to my prior suggestion, Lucille’s body is not female, he is a body, an unmistakable biological reality perhaps, but not one that can be constrained by language. Flesh lacks gender and sex, flesh is indefinable and existant. Thus, the body is not concerned by the thought of organs beneath his skin, an insult to the mind’s fears. The presence of trees and foliage is significant to this contrast and also complicates it. The mind is either framed anxiously between trees or flowing above their branches, the body lies peacefully between them. These natural growths are in some way fleshy as well, not entirely other. This is not a story of self realization but of an embrace of a rhizomatic personhood, the self as a discontinuous yet coherent thing, beneath the branches, above the roots.
Beneath the earth, skeletons are often seen. Are they a reminder of mortality? The immutable self that TERFs often mock us for with their vision of archaeologists finding and sexing? Ultimately, a skeleton in the ground may stand for death, but perhaps it is underlying structure, holding together the organs that Lucille’s mind imagines unraveling beneath his body, tethering body and mind. The inside cover illustration of My Body Unspooling depicts a red tree at a shoreline, sprouting like veins from an artery, holding severed limbs and Lucille’s mask on its branches, all hanging equally like loose parts of a costume. The skeleton lies at its feet, submerged by waves. Perhaps this grotesque image is Lucille’s underlying nature, mind and body alike unmasked. But this form can only be with skeletal structure discarded. There is an underlying self for Lucille to find in My Body Unspooling, one which he attains through a journey of self abjection and acceptance familiar as transsexual. But the nature of that self, that journey, remains as complex and mystifying as the life of an old growth.
My Body Unspooling ends with an image of Lucille from the waist up, standing and staring straight at the viewer. He looks anxious, he always does, but he undeniably looks like himself. A similar image appears in the closing pages of Boy Island, in a sequence showing life after Fairy’s reign. On Lucille’s future, Jounce provides two words in caption – “You age.” The reader sees Lucille, or rather, you see yourself. Lucille’s chest – your chest – has sagged, his shoulders – your shoulders – are broadened but slumping just a little. Body hair has spread across his body – your body – arms, chest, stomach. Lucille has gotten a bit fatter, comfortably so, its android distribution casually affirming the success of his transition. His mask, both the representation of his mind and a barrier to reader’s knowing his self, remains over his head, but doesn’t it seem to rest slightly different now? Doesn’t he seem weary in a weathered way now, not so much exasperated? In this moment, Lucille is still “you,” but the reader ceases to be Lucille. He is no longer a hero but a man who has spent his years cultivating his own life. Transition is that great hero’s journey, that overwhelming allegory, weaving together our most anxious uncertainties about consciousness and our staunchest political convictions, but eventually it is a personal experience, deep meaning for one and not for others to partake. “You” becomes “Lucille.” We relinquish Lucille’s body and mind to his own thoughts and feelings. Leo Fox’s Lucille stories are about transition, and they are about that transition, from archetype, hero, persona, into person, from story into life lived. Lucille looks out at us in My Body Unspooling flanked by mysterious foliage. Boy Island leaves Lucille on its titular shores, spending its final moments after the world has been rebuilt whole on remembering what has been lost, turning away from people to the land itself. Once Lucille knows who he is, he becomes a mystery to readers. His mystery is that of a life after transphobia, life after liberation, reunion after the split that cleaved mind from body, boy from girl, and poisoned the earth. Someday that will be a story we can write about.
—
[1] Comics have long used narration and costume to place readers in dialogue with marginalization. Al Feldstein and Joe Orlando’s classic EC comic “Judgement Day” famously pulls the reader into the role of an astronaut confronting racism in an alien society (albeit in the third person), revealing the protagonist to be a Black man in the very last panel as his face is revealed from under his helmet, which obscured it.
[2] While reading Boy Island, I also could not help but be reminded slightly of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s playable game WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT (https://blacktransarchive.com/) a virtual exhibit that takes a viewer on a tour of an imagined Black trans archive that can literally resurrect Black trans elders, with diverging paths based in part on whether the viewer is Black and whether the viewer is trans.
[3] A personal note on this reading. Prior to my own transition, I fantasized about marriage and weddings for much of my adolescence and my early twenties. My desire for such things vanished completely when I came into myself, aside from jokes with my friends and lovers. In hindsight, I was mostly interested in brides and the dresses they wore. I never put much thought into the rest.
[4] Unlike the Jury or even the Prokaryote, when Lucille’s mind is independent of his body, he sometimes grows legs and walks around, which intentionally or otherwise kept reminding me of Vaughn Bodẽ’s Cheech Wizard.
The post Mind Body Split: Leo Fox’s Lucille stories appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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