Natalie Norris’s Dear Mini is described by publisher Fantagraphics as “a vivid depiction of adolescent agency in the face of sexual trauma” so this would be an appropriate moment to give a content warning for the discussion to come in this review. A multiple nominated book in the 2023 Broken Frontier Awards (winning in the category for Best Letterer which we will come to in due course) this instalment of Dear Mini is Book One of two, and marks Norris’s debut as graphic memoirist.
Written in the form of a letter to the titular Mini, Dear Mini Book One is Norris’s retrospective account of events that begin around the time of a summer visit to France in the artist’s sophomore year at high school. Here she meets Austrian student Mini and the two become firm friends. Nearly a year later Natalie goes to stay with Mini in Austria but their wayward camaraderie is about to veer off onto the darkest of paths, forever changing the two young women’s relationship.
We will need to await the second volume to fully ascertain whether there is any element of catharsis for Norris in bringing her story to the comics page. This first volume, though, follows her from uncontrolled youth to a retrospective point years later where she reflects on the time in her life recounted here, the trauma of the rape she experienced, and the reasons why she reacted to it as she did.
Norris uses a busy, often freeform, illustrative approach that encompasses both the ephemeral and the evocative nature of the way memory works. Pages often feel like they are going to burst out of their constraints, with Norris’s lettering playing a vital role in conveying the urgency of events. As a main narrative tool her cursive recollections capture the personal tone of this meditative missive to Mini but the reader needs also to look at the way individual words can be emphasised to give additional emotional weight to them; to make us stop, absorb and mark the importance of them as visual signifiers of characterisation.
When the key scene comes it is as harrowing for Norris’s impotence in the face of its impending inevitability as it is for its brutality. As an exploration of agency, trauma, vulnerability and identity Dear Mini centres the reader so firmly in Norris’s experiences for its eloquent command of the language of the form and Norris’s ability to see the fullest potential of the canvas of the comics page.
We talk a lot in reviewing terms about graphic memoir being a powerful communicative tool; of books staying with a reader long after we have put them down. Those kind of observations are no doubt genuine in the moment they are made but arguably they have also become overused as comics commentary fallback terms. In the case of Dear Mini, though, their application is entirely appropriate. This is autobio practice with a lasting impact on the reader. Remarkable testimony from a remarkable new voice in comics.
Natalie Norris (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $29.99
Review by Andy Oliver
