How Mattie Lubchansky's Boys Weekend fuses queer experience with sci-fi satire
Comics have increasingly become a popular format for telling queer stories. Before Heartstopper was one of the most popular shows on Netflix, it was a series of graphic novels by Alice Oseman. Some of the other most acclaimed comic books of the past several years — such as Trung Le Nguyen's The Magic Fish and Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, among others — have told beautiful stories about characters coming to terms with their queer identity and figuring out how to convey it to other people in their life.
The achievement of Boys Weekend, a new graphic novel out this month from author Mattie Lubchansky, is how it tells a queer story rooted in real-life experience that also involves sea monsters and apocalyptic science fiction.
Boys Weekend is basically a fusion of two compelling story ideas. On the one hand, protagonist Sammie has been invited to the bachelor weekend of their college roommate, and agonizes over how to communicate their trans identity to the tech bros who populate the rest of the party (inspired by a real-life experience Lubchansky had some years ago). But unlike real life, the titular events of Boys Weekend take place on a high-tech island where rich libertarians spout babble about pyramid schemes — the latest version of which might just be the front for a Lovecraftian cult.
Boys Weekend doesn't spend a lot of time talking about how one should come out to old friends — in fact, the comic emphasizes over and over again how easy it should be to accept your friends' queer identities. It's no mistake that the characters who don't get that also fall prey to a monster-worshipping apocalypse cult. This vivid combination of heightened satire and genuine experience was a natural combination for Lubchansky, who has drawn regular political cartoons for years at The Nib and their own website.
"This is the world we live in. If the book is talking about trans identity issues and masculinity, that's all wrapped up with all the other stuff about our society — capitalism, mainly," Lubchansky tells EW. "It's all one big monster to me. If I'm making jokes about one thing, I'm making jokes about all the other stuff too. I've always admired the way that people can talk about contemporary issues in speculative fiction."
Lubchansky can point to Elon Musk, our culture's foremost example of a tech billionaire at the moment, as an example. Since Musk took over Twitter, the website has rolled back protections against anti-trans hate speech, and to the author, it really is all part of the same story.
But though Boys Weekend channels the "satire brain" that Lubchansky developed after years of short cartoons, they relished the chance to stretch their artistic legs with a full-length graphic novel.
"It was nice to get more space, visually, to do stuff — even just breaking out of the idea of every page looking the same," Lubchansky says. "It's also true that it is more fun to draw a skeleton or a laser gun or a tentacle than it is to have to draw Trump's hair again."
But the sci-fi elements are not opposed to the real-life roots of Boys Weekend. In fact, they help get at the truth in a different way. A particularly memorable scene comes when the bachelor's party embarks on a safari-like event where they have to hunt and kill their own clone. For Sammie, their clone takes the form of their pre-transition self.
"That's the gift that science fiction in particular can give us: A way to talk about things in a really contrived way that gets at something really human," Lubchansky says. "There is a trope at this point in trans fiction where you are talking to your past self. That's a real drive, with queer people generally but trans people specifically, that you wish you could have gotten to it earlier. With that scene, I was trying to convey that what happened happened. I consider being mad at my past self who didn't figure out what was going on earlier, but who does that help?"
Lubchansky continues, "a better way to think about it is that person got me out alive, to the point where I could come out and change my life into something that was closer to how I want to live. I don't have the prose chops to talk about that stuff in a way that is beautiful or compelling, but I really can draw someone hunting their own clone in an enclosed arena on a sea setting libertarian healthcare island. Those are the tools that I have at my disposal, so that's where I went with it."
This is still only a taste of the visuals and ideas on display in Boys Weekend, which is on sale now and makes a perfect read for this Pride Month — or any other month.
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