PRIDE MONTH 2025! Last year for Pride Month at Broken Frontier I covered Leo Fox’s My Body Unspooling, a remarkable study of dysphoria and trans identity. Here we are, almost one year on to the day, looking at Boy Island, his thematic follow-up to that shorter-form comic. Boy Island is described as “a modern transgender fable in graphic novel form” on publisher Silver Sprocket’s site and it’s very much in the same vein of its predecessor in many respects; Fox’s intimately organic and surreal visual style being used to weave and symbolise an allegorical narrative of self-discovery and identity. Only this time in a much expanded page count.
In the world of Boy Island the conflict between Jounce, the chaotic and anarchic “spirit of perversion”, and antithesis/nemesis Fairy leads to society being split between the locales of Boy Island and Girl Island, where gender is strictly defined. On the latter we are reintroduced to Fox’s character Lucille whose knowledge that he is actually a boy leaves him feeling displaced and misunderstood. With Jounce as mental companion Lucille begins the difficult journey from Girl Island to Boy Island…
Fox provides a story that is mythic and epic and yet it’s wholly contemporary and recognisable at the same time. As the quest continues the characters we meet upon the way are representative of the trans experience or of issues surrounding it. The Ghosts of Transsexuals Past, for example, who were lost when the schism between Boy Island and Girl Island was formed, or Starman and Batleigh, the conflicted children of Fairy.
What Fox communicates so well here are the sometimes toxic ways that familial manipulation manifests and even projects itself as love and compassion. From the passive aggressive to the outright belligerent there are characters herein who continually trivialise and misrepresent lived experiences in an effort to control and mould their offspring. Dialogue captures the contrasting honesty and intolerance of different characters while the narration, which switches between alternative perspectives, has an often poetic quality.
Fox’s art again emphasises the real, the raw and the vulnerable by dressing them up in the trappings of the brutally weird and a kind of oozing unreality. What he has achieved here, for all its hauntingly beautiful visual excess, is a story of transition and embracing one’s true self that connects with the reader on an altogether different, almost visceral, level than traditional graphic autobiography would. A simply magnificent achievement.
Leo Fox (W/A) • Silver Sprocket, $29.99
Review by Andy Oliver
