Rick Spears

This comic was great. It is about a teenage girl finding her way to herself, through music and friendship and hard times. It's an ode to riot grrl and the punk rock scene. I could smell the shitty clubs and sweaty pits just by looking at the pages. I was instantly transported back to my days at house shows and all ages venues and 924 Gilman and dive bars. Now my punk rock ethos is expressed via my work and my parenting and activism but I'm imagining the day I watch my kid, currently four, show more explore all this stuff herself. I'm terrified and I can't wait. And if a book brought all that up for me in one reading? It's a good book.

(I'd love follow-up books from Kat and Rudie's POVs, please!)

I received a free electronic ARC of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. But I probably would have bought it anyway. show less

My local dealer (comics dealer, you know), who has a good sense of my tastes, recommended this book to me when it was in its third or fourth individual issue -- just late enough that it was easy to decide to wait for the collected volume that should surely ensue if it lived up to his praise. Well, here it is.

The book chronicles the misadventures of a manic movie producer who is balanced on the precipice of career decline. Well, I've read a lot of lurid, exploitative, and trashy comics in my show more day, and this title can certainly be classed with the worst (i.e. most effective) of them. Sex, drugs, gore, and basic inhumanity are all very well, but I'm pretty sure I've never before read a comic that seemed to harbor such affection for vomit.

That's Hollywood for you, I guess.

In addition to the first six issues of the comic, the volume contains reprints of all the individual issue covers (standard and variant) and some movie posters for imaginary films alluded to in the story: the space opera flop Cosmos, Zombie High (starring Sandra Masters and Penelope Envelope), Death Fist ("It is coming. You will die."), The Ten Commandments 2, and the film produced in the course of the present narrative Presidents Day.

The comedic pacing of the book is excellent, the allusions witty, and the overall effect profoundly gross, with a dollop of sentimentality. show less

An angsty, rage-fueled feminist romp through the Riot Grrrl '90s.

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Content warning for racist violence, eating disorders, sexual harassment, and slut shaming.)

For as long as she can remember, ballet has been Valerie Simmons's escape; when she's dancing, everything else falls away and she's allowed to just be. But lately, it's starting to feel like more of a nightmare: the stringent weight requirements have caused eating show more disorders in many of her classmates, and her instructor even suggested Val take up smoking to drop the "extra" five pounds that will otherwise prohibit her from performing in the troupe's production of Swan Lake. Not to mention, all that prim and proper gender performance is starting to feel suffocating.

Several chance meetings with a quirky, punk rock cigarette thief and TP artiste named Kat threaten to upend everything Val thought she knew about herself - and her place onstage. Before you can say "Bikini Kill," Val and Kat have formed a two-girl band, ironically dubbed "The Proper Ladies." With a little help from Val's crush Jake (and a general thirst for the nascent Riot Grrrl genre), The Proper Ladies are soon killing it at clubs and house parties up and down the East Coast. Eventually they're joined by bassist Rudie, a black Skinhead (SHARP - Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) who's way out of their musical league.

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The culmination of the group's success is an invitation to a music festival in Olympia, Washington, necessitating a cross-country tour during which they crash on the couches of fans, meet other up-and-coming women artists, learn new crafts, and feast on girl power like whoah. But their journey isn't without its hitches: their moderate success leads to fighting, both within and without; the girls are sexually harassed by misogynist "fans" (in what is weirdly one of my favorite scenes); and a scuzzy record exec tries to package them into a more palatable commodity.

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Raw, funny, and compelling, My Riot is a nostalgia-fueled romp through the Riot Grrrl era of the '90s - and female adolescence. Punk music provides Val an outlet for expressing all her frustrations - with slut shaming, sexual double standards, rigid beauty ideals, and violence against women - and the lyrics will have you itching to crank up Live Through This or Sleater-Kinney. Kat and Rudie are kickass supporting characters, though I'm not gonna lie - I think Rudie's backstory might have proven more interesting than Val's, if altogether a different beast. The whole subplot with Jake feels predictable, though you do love to see a mediocre dude go down.

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My only complaint is the sort-of parallel Spears attempts to draw between a protest ("riot") against police brutality and the chaos raging, first in Val's psyche, then in her life. With everything going on out there, using an uprising for racial justice to further the story of a white woman just feels weird and icky. The story would have worked just as well - if not better - without it. Though I have to admit, the scene where Val's dad stays up all night watching the news and brandishing a golf club felt all too real and close to home.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2020/09/22/my-riot-by-rick-spears-and-emmett-helen/ show less

I feel like all my reviews lately starts off with "This is a little rough, but...." and this one is no exception. It's also got a little of the tired cliche where all youngsters are with it and all adults are idiots, which needs to stop. That being said, the characters are realized well and the messages of the book are good ones that are still relevant today.