Sex Comics! Incredible First Issue!
The Faster Times has turned me onto the story of Liza Bley, who as part of her final project at the New School, took the opportunity to create a genuinely cool and informative piece of writing. Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf is the end result: a progressive sex-ed comic book. Her project encompasses research from sources as varied as trained university professionals, adult toy shops, and most importantly, contributions from young men and women, who used their own personal experiences to inform readers.
The comic has been distributed to health centers and zine libraries; it’s educational and uniquely artistic. Liza (and collaborator Saiya Miller) maintain a blog where you can download a pdf copy and help distribute to whomever you please. They’ve also recently collected open submissions for a second issue.
Their end goal is to eventually get this piece of useful storytelling into the hands of actual high-schoolers. I hope they do it; this is is the exact type of thing I could have used when I was a teenager (read: “huge geek who was terrified of real human behavior”). I gave up on comic books because I thought it would help me do better with girls. It didn’t. And in the end, I just missed reading comics.
But a comic book about sex? That’s not embarrassing and sophomoric? I’ll take five copies!
