I wrote about It's Only Teenage Wasteland and I didn't even reference T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
Somebody be proud of me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about High School Kate the last few months. For a lot of reasons, really, but the first of them being the whole living-at-home-at-27 thing. Sure, I’ve redecorated, but the room I’m writing this from is still the room I slept in pretty much every night for the first 18 years of my life. Spaces have memories, and this one is no exception.
I’m also thinking about High School Kate because, goddamn, she loved comic books. I, the Kate of 2023, also love comic books, of course, but I’m a different person with a completely different self-perception shaped by years of education and college administration work and fellowship applications and journal rejections and academic conferences and dive bar poetry readings and creative writing workshops and student conferences and grading and editorial positions and tweeting and group chats and and and and
I’m thinking about High School Kate because I’m thinking about how people perceive me, then and now. Which might seem a tad self-centered, maybe, but we live in the social media age, don’t we? And my personal social media has seen several ages, let me tell you. Rewind 18 months and my Twitter timeline was made up almost entirely of poets and other “creative writers,” whatever that means (that’s another essay). That wasn’t how I defined myself privately—I’m a whole-ass person, obviously more than the single word I use to describe myself in a social bio. But, to the outer world to which I was trying to prove myself, I was a poet first and foremost.
I’m still a poet. I’ve been writing poetry seriously since I was, like, 15. But you know what else I discovered when I was 15?
I feel like the people who knew me in late college through grad school might see my sudden shift to writing and posting so much about comics as just that—a sudden shift, a radical change in my focus, a short-term obsession or a phase. This is a huge assumption, by the way, and says way more about me than those imagined people: as if I should feel like I’m suddenly becoming a different person with different interests. But the more I read and write about comic books—from superheroes to indies to the industry itself—the more it feels like I’m coming back to a more true version of myself.
I wrote so many essays about comics in high school. I pitched and wrote my very first article for a feminist superhero Tumblr blog in high school (do not go looking for this, Blake). If anything, the recent shift in my focus is a return to form. I’m back, baby, and I’m smarter than ever.
I’m posturing a bit, now, because I think I’m a little self-conscious about how many of these newsletter entries have focused on comics. I promise I still like other things! But I’m also thinking about High School Kate this week because, well, I just finished a really good comic book miniseries, and it was about high schoolers—and also the apocalypse.
It’s Only Teenage Wasteland by Curt Pires, Jacoby Salcedo, Mark Dale, and Micah Myers follows a group of teenage friends, led by a boy named Javi, with more complicated in-group dynamics than their teenage emotional skillsets can actively manage. The series begins deceptively: at first it seems like a slice-of-life comedy about a high school friend group throwing a rager and dealing with the consequences, emotional and otherwise. They still have to deal with the consequences, yeah, but they’re a bit bigger than Javi and his friends can handle: the apocalypse and time displacement and a strange cult with a mysterious leader.
I don’t want to say too much beyond that, plot-wise, because it’s my hope that at least one of you will pick up the trade paperback when it drops this August. But I will say that the ending of #4 made me cackle in delight (and so did the Stranger Things spoof, intentional or not), and I hope it’s a sign that more of this series is on its way.
What do I like so much about this comic? It’s not necessarily the apocalyptic concept that kept this book on the top of my pulls every time a new issue came out. What kept me reading were the individual and group dynamics of these characters; as is always the case with sci-fi, I was invested in the story because of the interpersonal drama, not just the extra-dimensional plot. And it’s not heavy interpersonal drama, either! It’s Only Teenage Wasteland is a comedy first and foremost, and it plays with a lot of the high school comedy tropes we’re familiar with, from cliques to bullies to (queer!) romances. If anything, it reminds me more of Check, Please! and the best of YA webcomics than it does, say, The Walking Dead and other apocalypse comics.
A lot of this teen comedy goodness comes from Jacoby Salcedo’s art and Mark Dale’s colors. Beyond being distinct in design, these characters are expressive, and no two express the same way. A lot of the comedy comes from that visual character work and all the design gags, from those that play up the romance tropes to the nihilistic late-capitalism aesthetic that marks this book’s particular version of the apocalypse.
In that way, this is a comic book of its moment, and it knows it. The first issue opens with a bold statement: “Once upon a Time in the Twenty Fucking Twenties.” There’s no escaping the wry frustration and even hostility for the ever-collapsing moment we’re literally living through. But It’s Only Teenage Wasteland cuts through that anger with its comedy, its clear love of teen movie tropes, and its heart—its care for the characters and their relationships.
High School Kate, who lived through both the 2012 apocalypse craze and the resurgence of John Hughes nostalgia, would have fucking loved this book. Good thing she’s still part of me, because I love it, too.