BOOM! Studios releases a comic about a Latina from The Bronx who is in the magical journey of her queerness in Juliet Takes A Breath.
The story is much more similar to another comic which is Eat, and Love Yourself comic on Boom!, but this comic focuses on LGBT related themed comic. So nowadays, we get those comics focuses on this content, I’ve seen it a lot which is appropriate to LGBT supporters or those who are of the same gender as a partner or something, but this is more than taking you a female version of Romeo and Juliet. The story is written by Gabby Rivera and illustrated by Celia Moscote. Gabby is just like Juliet here, who is also born and raised in The Bronx, a queer Puerto Rican author who is a writer for Marvel Comics and known as the first Latina writer to write something from Marvel. Knowing that this woman is actually a queer writer, she has a lot of experience to take on for writing this story.
The front cover shows a specific background of Miami while everything is an all warm color. However this is more than any kind of comic that I’m witnessing, this is like how a movie poster is created back then. And then there’s Julia with her stylish look and a sign that she’s gay or Bi or I don’t know, while the title is shown on her jacket. There’s a quote by Kirkus who wrote “A whirlwind coming-of-age story that leaves one breathless.” Well, you can say that, depending on how the image that the main character looks like, she may be leaving a short breath, because of COVID or asthma. On the following few pages, Juliet wrote a letter to an author named Harlowe Brisbane who wrote “Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind”, saying an appreciation for the book that she created. And lastly, she says that she would invite her over to Portland, Oregon to meet her in person.
So the story starts with the main character which is Juliet Milagros Palante who lives in the Bronx. I mean seriously, are there any Milagros family names that I don’t know about, aside from that lady on the block not too far. However hearing that name makes me puke, so I’ll call her Juliet instead. So she’s minding her own business reading that book from the holy grail to her while riding on the subway train. Apparently, that day is the last day before she departed to Portland to meet her. There’s so much weirdness going on but this comic focuses on sexual desires and stuff. Anyway, her family are nice and kind, all of them are Boricuan family ancestry and most likely they made one of the meals that I’m most familiar with from growing up, all the foods that they almost sounded like what my mom would make. However when Juliet actually announces to everyone that she’s going out with a girl, she would definitely define herself as a lesbian, but her mom was against it. She’s just another arrogant sangrona meaning cold-hearted in Spanish, a sad human being who doesn’t understand her own daughter’s feelings. After that, she just left NY to catch the plane to Portland and met the author and her friends. There are some cases that one of these days that one of them will stab her in the back, but her experience staying at the author’s place in Portland has a few ups and downs.
First of all her arrogant mother calls her out of the blue calling that author “vagina lady” as an insult and sadly she never accept the fact that her daughter is gay, and she kept going on about a “phase”, I mean what the actual duck is a phase? You mean to tell me that she’ll be going through some difficult times as her mom mentioned. Well, that is yet to be told because everything that she says made no sense. Juliet met a lot of queer people and realized how nice they were, she even met a Library intern who made her fell in love with. After a few days, she gets a call from her old girlfriend that she met another girl who’s fallen for her and left Juliet behind in the dust, now this is going to be a plot twist here because the thing about relationship problems and her being a lesbian, Juliet needed to go on a soul searching while she’s taking another breath. Mostly this is more of mental health issues but she needs to know where that road takes her to.
However that day, when Harlowe performed a show at some event, and then she called her out of the blue to step up on the stage, but the harsh truth is that she calls her the proof as if she used her for her work, and she ran away to see her cousins in Miami. Just not too long ago, she met up with her cousins in Florida, and her family almost seemed to be like queers or something, but they welcomed Juliet with open arms, that was not too long ago, because her cousin begged her to come over, and then when she’s back at Portland, she and her friends traveled around the forest, and after that when she got back home to the Bronx, her mom bought a new notebook for her.
The story may be interesting, but it seems that everything that the author wrote is actually about herself in a form of a Bronx Latina girl who went to see an author in Portland, Oregon. I imagine that this is more of a non-fictional story because all of this is what everyone sees today, aside from COVID. The talk about her queerness is a long journey for her and somehow, the main character had to do some soul searching to know where she comes from. However, making a graphic novel that is based on the novel, is more than just any book that female readers would go for, but this graphic novel makes it no exception that the story goes so far about a journey to learn about herself, it’s quite a breathtaking. The art is more similar to the Eat, and Love Yourself comic, but what the artist illustrates the characters seemed to be more focused on human anatomy and convert it into the characters that we see in real life, just like how I design my characters, I studied and observed the anatomy of humans in real life, and converted into my style for my work. Take Juliet’s character design, for example, the way she designed her, I can almost see where the development came from, and it mostly is seen by many Latina women who have that roundish pear shape form, and I do like the character designs of the children because they seemed too adorable to draw. Well for women, there are so many things to learn in this world, however, it’s a long road to take to learn about yourself. I know these kinds of people, and I know they go this far to learn about themselves and what makes them happy, reading a pussy book doesn’t change anything. It’s what makes you feel that you’re accepting that you’re transgender or something. So Juliet Takes a Breath, it’s an amazing book to read, and to learn everything that she gone through that’s coming from the author who had a lot of experience.
Newsdesk