This book was clearly written for a very specific audience at a very specific point in time and now that it's almost 10 years since the first parts of this comic were written, the social commentary is a little grating and some of the humor feels a little dated. It's all stuff that I personally, and probably the artist as well now that we're farther into the future, find kind of cringe worthy. If I had read this back when it was being written, I probably would have loved it. Now that I'm older and the community and political views  I take part in and that are portrayed in this book have dramatically changed, it just feels outdated and unenjoyable.

Also, I'm not saying no one else can make a comic about a group of queer people who are all just buddies but also go to a lot of protests, but I read this while I was also in the middle of reading Dykes To Watch Out For and I really cannot help but notice that this feels like a worse version of that. If I hadn't read them so close together, I probably wouldn't even notice, but they just feel so similar.

EDIT
I made my boyfriend read this because I wanted someone to complain about it with and they pointed out that two of the weird takes on gender in this is actually a TERF talking point! A non-binary person being comfortable when they're perceived as male as opposed to uncomfortable when perceived as female is because they just hate women and are trying to escape their hatred of women/being a woman by transitioning. This is seen as an acceptable thing to say to another person and is not fought back against at all. Really just a "Wow, really makes you think" moment. Which is strange considering the word "valid" shows up on almost every page of this. I don't know what the intention behind this statement could be other than specifically to invalidate the other person's experience with gender.

There's a second part around Halloween where they go to some sort of gathering and see one butch dressed up as femme and immediately start talking shit about them, calling them sexist and insisting that butches dressing as femmes is inherently making fun of women. This is different from drag queens somehow, which they don't think is making fun of women. It's only making fun of women when masculine women do it. None of the butches ever say anything derogatory about femininity/womanhood, but that's because they are not given a chance to speak. Again, someone perceives gender non-conformity in AFAB people as inherently sexist and there is no room for argument.

Despite this comic having not one, but TWO TERF talking points, I don't really blame the author for writing it, (especially since it was written 10 years ago and I really want to think by now they don't agree with these anymore) Half of the takes in this book just kind of seem thoughtlessly parroted from whoever the author was hanging out with at the time with no real reflection on what any of it means or how it could affect the person you're saying it to, the person reading etc. 

Also, apparently in the foreword of the book, the person who commissioned the comic in the first place claimed that they wanted to make "a spiritual successor to Dykes to Watch Out For" and I must have been so distracted by how awful the actual content of the comic was that I forgot that was even in the foreword. Maybe I'm just too big of an Alison Bechdel fan, or maybe I just REALLY have a grudge against this comic. But saying you are going to make a spiritual successor to one of the most famous queer comics of all time written by one of the most famous cartoonists of all time is an incredibly bold, and in my opinion, self-aggrandizing thing to say. 

But whatever. Its just a stupid comic.