Comics by Women

I read This One Summer by the Tamaki cousins as my choice for a comic created by women. This is a comic that I found to be very real. What I mean by real is that this story and its characters are grounded in reality and provides a reading experience that I found easily relatable and that anyone reading it can connect to on some sort of level. In short its a coming of age story that I found to be genuine, which is the best way I can describe it. To me it felt like the creators were borrowing heavily from their own experiences, which for me is what allowed me to connect with it because it feels like something people experience in the real world, and we do. Its sad and bittersweet but it is a reflection of our real world. The scary, dark, and confusing things that we all experience as we grow up from small, naive children to young, mature adults. The creators do a terrific job of catching that sense of lost innocence.
On a purely visual level I really enjoyed the way the environments and backgrounds of this comic are designed and rendered. Once again a comic reveals the influence of manga's highly realistic backgrounds with simplified cartoonish characters. I think it works well in this case for the story. The characters are very expressive in the way they are drawn which allows for the minimal use of dialogue to describe characters thoughts and feelings. I personally found this comic to be not something only women can relate and invest themselves in, I was able to connect with it on a certain level which is why I don't necessarily believe that just because a women created a comic its going to resonate on a deeper level with women and not really connect with men.