Single Issue Showcase: Limp Wrist

The cover of Limp Wrist

For this summer’s Single Issue Showcase, I decided to cover a mini comic I picked up at last year’s CAKE. Perhaps I’ll get around to my haul from this year sometime in 2018. That’s the closest I can get to opening with a joke, because Limp Wrist by Scout Wolfcave and Penina Gal is not for the faint of heart. The title page contains a trigger warning for “bullying, abuse, and transmisogyny.” It’s a harrowing autobiographical comic that does not flinch from portraying the reality far too many trans people face. In its sixteen pages, Limp Wrist contains more truth than whole feature-length films. It was published in 2014 by Paper Rocket Minicomics.

The boldness with which Scout recounts systematic abuse at the hands of family members and teachers—the very people meant to protect a vulnerable child—is shocking; the first page recounts the circumstances of the author being thrown out of the house at thirteen years old. A transition in the final pages to the author as an older woman shows the lasting effects this abuse has had, but also reveals the author’s strength and determination to keep living her life. There is no simple revelation or tidy conclusion, just a path in the woods for the author to take. The final line is touching, funny, and heartbreaking all at the same time.

The artwork perfectly captures the external and internal turmoil of these surroundings as well. Penina depicts the author as a type of wolf-person, accentuating her otherness among cisgendered people. Anthropomorphic animals are nothing new to depicting marginalized communities in comics, but the context here is quite subversive. While the language and expectations of others are depicted as weighing down the author, Penina makes her appearance as an animal something that’s part of objective reality. She is herself as this wolf-person, and the angry, hurtful people are shown to be the true monsters.

Limp Wrist was a winner of the 2014 SPACE prize for best minicomic and was on Rob Kirby's top 10 list of minicomics 2014. It is available for purchase at the publisher’s website.