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Writer & Artist: Keezy Young/ Letterer: AW’s Tom Napolitano/ Roar (Lion Forge)

Editor’s Note: This is an Advance Review, if it piques your interest be sure to pre-order the comic, due for release this September.

If you’re a fan of webcomics, then Keezy Young’s name and art might be famillar to you. I’m familiar with her Yellow Hearts webcomic running on Sparker Monthly. Once upon a time Taproot was a webcomic, and it has evolved to its final form, Young’s first graphic novel — an LGBT character driven drama that you should pick up. Having read the earlier version of this work and reading this newer, updated version I can assure you this version is even better than the original: remastered and ready for new fans to read and love.

While describing Taproot, I’d hate to pidegonhole it…this comic is many things: it’s a queer love story, it’s a story of growth, of the transitions in life (AND after) and maturity. Before I forget — it’s also a ghost story! Blue is in love with his best friend Hamal, who is good with his hands and works with all manner of plants and things that grow out of the earth. It is Hamal’s calling. His gift. Blue is very much dead and Hamal can see ghosts. Yup, that’s Hamal’s other gift.

There’s a strange and very dark phenomenon happening that’s unsettling the inbetween-ers like Blue and starting to seep into the physical realm where Humans reside, and it is something connected to Hamal. Good natured, sweet Hamal who is as generous with his time with folks who are flesh and blood as he is with the many ghosts that haunt the area. Blue isn’t one hundred percent sure of who or what it is, this void, this dark place that is overgrowing but when he learns Hamal may be affected by it he steps out to attempt to do something about it.

After rereading the comic, I’m still on the fence on what makes this book stand out more to me: the artwork or the story? Young’s art is fluid. Blue, Hamal, and the world they inhabit is gorgeously illustrated but not overpowering or seeking to overwhelm you. You can easily pick up visual clues to who is who and who belongs to what club: supernatural or human. Panels that are less detailed that may include a comedic moment or where someone is being cheeky don’t ease into the background. The use of color can’t be underestimated here: the majority of this book is more or less brightly colored and when it’s not it’s a visual clue that something isn’t right, something is out of sync and it leads the reader to new dilemmas and fears.

I think back on the story: I think about how loving someone can make you fearless, make you selfless. What is it about love that makes you want to protect the one you adore even at the expense of yourself? Even when you have no clear guarantee of what will happen to you afterwards? These are just a few important questions woven into the comic that should resonate with readers.

Perhaps you could draw parallels with Blue being stuck in one place for so long with being complacent, being comfortable but choosing to give all that up for someone. Someone he loves. Being courageous in the face of the unknown. Perhaps Hamal’s life is one you could see more of yourself in: choosing to make lemonade with the lot he’s been given in life and finding out he’s been granted something, no someone far more precious than he’d ever thought he’d be allowed.

The emotional weight is surely heavy here: how will love change you? How will love center you to accept the things you have no control over? How will loving someone mature you to take the steps to stand and become the person you need to be for the one who love most?

Originally, Taproot wasn’t long–the first version clocked in under 100 pages. I never minded because Young wrapped it up so well with an ending that I didn’t see coming. Here with pages redrawn and with an super fun epilogue that wasn’t in the original–it shines with a remastered look and feel. I can’t stress enough how much I loved this book.

I’m a sucker for romance, characters that have dealings with the supernatural and circumstances that aren’t black and white — when things are clearly so far out of our hands. Taproot is a beautiful tale of how love can power us in all the best ways, make us selfless, even seek to right the wrongs and heal what’s been wrecked.

10 Texted Messaged Grimores out of 10

Keezy Young is definitely an artist to watch. See more of her here on Twitter, take a look at her Patreon and see more of her work at her website.

You can pre-order Taproot from Amazon but also know that you can pre-order through your local comic book shop as well! Wouldn’t you love to see this in comic book stores everywhere? Let’s make that happen! See more of the offerings from Roar, an imprint of Lion Forge!

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Recorded live during the Asian American ComiCon Summit on Art, Action, and the Future.

We’ve seen so many different kinds of futures unfurl in pop culture, and many of them have people of color and LGBTQ individuals as backdrop and “local color.” What would a truly diverse, inclusive and intersectional future really look like?

Moderated by Keith Chow, panelists include: Steven Barnes (Sci-Fi writer, The Legacy of Heorot and the Dream Park series, with Larry Niven); CB Lee (author, Not Your Sidekick); Arune Singh (VP of Marketing, BOOM! Studios); LaToya Morgan (writer for AMC’s Into The Badlands); Marc Bernardin (Fatman on Baman podcast; writer, Castle Rock).

All this and more on Hard NOC Life! Watch it on your screen, hit “play,” and check this.

As always, our official theme music is brought to you by the super team of Adam WarRock and Chops

When you’re told a new television series is set to explore “the untold stories behind” the histories of various pop culture genres, it feels natural to ask the question: will the stories so often erased in these scenarios—that of women and people of color and other minorities—be showcased? It was a question we posited to three of the men behind AMC’s new year-round documentary series, AMC Visionaries (coming sometime in 2018), at the Television Critics Association’s 2017 Summer Press Tour. And Robert Kirkman, James Cameron, and Eli Roth came prepared to address such a quandary.

Regarding comics—something The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman is set to address in his “Secret History of Comics” episodes—Kirkman pointed out two episodes in particular.

“We’re actually doing two episodes about this specifically,” he told us. “We’re doing one about the creation of Wonder Woman, which is credited as being created by William Moulton Marston, but a lot of people don’t know he had a polygamous relationship with two women, and those two women were actually very instrumental in the creation of Wonder Woman. So we do a deep dive into who they were as people and everything that inspired their lives and led to the creation of this character that’s now the lead of a blockbuster movie of this summer.”

Regarding race, Kirkman went on to add that, “we’re also doing an episode called ‘The Color of Comics’ that kind of explores the history of black characters and the lack of black characters in the comic book industry, which touches on the creation of Black Panther, the Marvel character, and has a focus from the 90s called Milestone Comics which was founded by a bunch of African American comic book creators to create characters that appealed to them and represented them because there was a very huge lack of representation for them in comics, even in the 90s.”

Eli Roth, a horror savant and frequent collaborator with indie horror creators, was quick to hat-tip the woman who started it all for his genre of choice—Mary Shelley.

“You wouldn’t have horror without Mary Shelley and Frankenstein,” Roth explained. “And going back through history, what we want to do—like Robert has done and James has done—is have a show for the casual horror fan but also go really, really deep. And as we all know we’re losing these masters; they’re disappearing every week.”

He later went on to add that, “Our show’s going to be [broken up] by sub-genre … but I want to get Catherine Hardwicke, I want to get every single Caché—any kind of and all of the women—any women that’s directed a movie, because there’s a lot of fantastic entries, certainly Slumber Party Massacre, there are a lot of films people don’t know were directed by women that were slasher films that were their sort of comment, they were actually feminist movies.”

Roth also highlighted another creator, the late George Romero. “Look at what he did,” Roth effused. “I mean, at the height of the Civil Rights’ movement, he puts an African American as the lead of Night of the Living Dead. And at the end of the movie he’s shot by a bunch of rednecks, not because of the color of his skin, but because they think he’s a zombie but obviously, you know, you can read into the implications with that. What he was doing with racism and race and using genre to explore racism in America was just so ahead of its time and just as potent today as it was fifty years ago, so absolutely it’s something we’re going to discuss in different episodes.”

Though he was only appearing via satellite, director James Cameron also acknowledged the myriad ways in which science fiction has been a positive space for women—even though he did not explicitly state whether or not his own episodes would highlight the contributions of women and people of color.

“I think the role of women in science fiction has been varied, and we want to look at it, [but] we’re not going to do any specific episodes. We’re doing 6 episodes and they’re themed around space travel and dark futures, dystopia, time travel—things like that.”

Still, he caveated that the ties to those oft-otherized people’s stories will be undeniable in the connective tissue of the series itself. “Throughout it, we want to have this thread of analyzing the interaction between science fiction and society. Not only how science fiction changed and evolved and manifested the anxieties of society—such as the monster movies that emerged out of the fear, and the dystopian stories that emerged out of the fear during the Cold War period, things like that—but also how science fiction expressed changes in society and even anticipated them. So it’s a bit of a checkered story.”

“Science fiction, traditionally, back in the ’30s and ’40s, was a vision primarily by and for men, and the female writers often had to have noms de plume that sounded like male names.,” Cameron added. “But then as you got into the ’60s and the ’70s, science fiction became a kind of forerunner in breaking down social barriers, whether it was around race or gender, the role of women in these future societies, and I think some of the strongest women in film, period, are in science fiction movies. And, you know, we still don’t have enough female directors in general, let alone female filmmakers working in science fiction movies, but we certainly have a plethora, now, of women writing great science fiction movies, starting with Ursula K. Le Guin, and so on, back in the ’60s. And I know I’ve already mentioned D.C. Fontana, who also wrote for Star Trek in the ’60s, and interestingly she used her initials because she didn’t want the Hollywood powers-that-be know that she was a female science fiction writer, which was still seen as a very male genre even then.”

Time, and content, will ultimately tell us if the docu-series will achieve this aspirational look at the worlds of comic books, science fiction, and horror, but it’s heartening to see that they were ready for the question.

What do you think of the comments from these creators? Would you like to see more stories about the contributions of women and minorities in these worlds? Let us know in the comments below!

Images: AMC; Warner Bros.

Alicia Lutes is the managing editor at Nerdist, host of Fangirling!, and frequent over-sharer on Twitter!

#MJB25 #WhatsThe411 #StrengthOfAWoman A post shared by Mary J Blige (@therealmaryjblige) on Jul 28, 2017 at 10:57am PDT It’s hard to think that 25 years ago Mary J. Blige, the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, released her debut What’s the 411? The album would go on and solidify the chanteuse as a defining voice of a generation […]

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