PRIDE MONTH 2025! We’ve reviewed a number of projects featuring Rowan Frewin’s work over the last year and a half here at Broken Frontier, encompassing a number of different formats. There was the autobiographical minicomic Gyula Diary; the illustrated guidebook Where We Are, Where We SHOULD Be: Shaping a Future for Young Trans People; and their zine A Potted Trans History. Most recently Frewin’s Treading Water was published by Comics Youth’s Marginal Publishing imprint. This time, Frewin’s examination of trans experiences takes on the form of graphic fiction.
The story revolves around Morgan Beddoes, a student whose involvement with competitive swimming is starting to be to the detriment of their college workload. At the same time Morgan is beginning to have questions about identity, with the cumulative stress of their life leading them to crisis point. When Morgan makes a new friend they discover the world of sea-swimming and gradually begin to make some decisions about the future…
What Frewin creates here is a story of trans acceptance and belonging that sends a message of true positivity to the presumably younger audience it is aimed at. It’s reassuring and gentle in delivery, underlining that both self-acceptance and family acceptance can go hand-in-hand, and emphasising the fluidity of the concept of gender. While stories about the more oppressive challenges that marginalised groups face are, of course, vital ones to tell Treading Water serves an important purpose in reminding us of more hopeful and supportive outcomes.
Frewin uses a stripped back visual style that means we connect all the more closely with Morgan and their story. More traditionally panelled pages give us a sense of the routine of Morgan’s world with occasional breakouts into one-page illustrations, or open pages, creating scenes of reflection, serenity or meditation as Morgan escapes the pressures of their life; aquatic sequences acting as visual metaphor for Morgan’s journey. Tender and carefully crafted, this is a touching and uplifting story.
Rowan Frewin • Marginal Publishing, £8.00
Review by Andy Oliver
