Hot Comb
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AN AUSPICIOUS DEBUT EXAMINING THE CULTURE OF HAIR FROM THE RONA JAFFE FOUNDATION AWARD-WINNING CARTOONIST
Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into Black women’s lives and coming of age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular story “Hot Comb” is about a young girl’s first perm—a doomed ploy to look cool and to stop seeming “too white” in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved to. In “Virgin Hair” taunts of “tender-headed” sting as much as the perm itself. It’s a scenario that repeats fifteen years later as an adult when, tired of the maintenance, Flowers shaves her head only to be hurled new put-downs. The story “My Lil Sister Lena” traces the stress resulting from being the only black player on a white softball team. Her hair is the team curio, an object to touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Among the series of cultural touchpoints that make you both laugh and cry, Flowers recreates classic magazine ads idealizing women’s needs for hair relaxers and product. “Change your hair form to fit your life form” and “Kinks and Koils Forever” call customers from the page.
Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through Flowers’ stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking. Flowers began drawing comics while earning her PhD, and her early mastery of sequential storytelling is nothing short of sublime. Hot Comb is a propitious display of talent from a new cartoonist who has already made her mark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flowers's exploration of black women's relationships to their hair is rich with both sorrow and celebration as it champions black womanhood and family ties. In a series of comics vignettes, Flowers journeys through a first salon trip, a long-running case of trauma-generated trichotillomania (obsessive hair-pulling), and the collision of pain and piety that is a beloved matriarch's funeral. How black hair is treated (literally and symbolically) becomes the lens to explore both oppression and community. In the title story, her mother frets over the loss of Flowers's carefree innocence as she receives her first perm, while another installment shares her younger sister's excruciating visibility as the only black girl on her softball team. Her portrayal of motherhood is particularly affecting: only in the company of other women, engaging in the intimate rituals of hair care, do mothers voice their joy, worry, and anger. The artwork is joyfully tangled, its densely looped lines creating panels that reflect the characters' crowded environs (with witty reproductions of classic hair care ads interspersed); Lynda Barry is credited as Flowers's mentor, and her style influence is apparent in this exuberance. Flowers's vibrant and immersive coming-of-age tales are set in a world that may often be cruel, but is never without communion (and some funny moments) even if she's got to endure a few chemical burns along the way.
