Death Bring Me Freedom From My Heart For I Am Enslaved
Jenn Suxx
Guest Page by Shannon Knox
fucktheface@riseup.net
http://wemakezines.ning.com/profile/JennSuxx
I feel like it’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed any sort of comic zine. What a zine to get back into the swing of comic things with!
Death Bring Me Freedom From My Heart For I Am Enslaved is a perzine-ish tale of love and emotional abuse told in comic format.
Jenn’s art style is engaging (to my tastes). Everything is clearly detailed, but not crowded. This zine is the first time in a long time (first time ever in zine comic form) that I’ve seen sex in a comic, and it was well done. Everything suited what she was saying, and what she was saying read as completely open and not at all shy about what she’d gone through.
At first, I found it an intriguing juxtaposition to get such ‘young’ vulnerability from Jenn while at the same time reading a comic clearly set with adult situations. However, when she followed things with a bit of her childhood background, all of that made a lot of sense. Even in comic form, even in an image that clearly demonstrated the situation but left the serious blows to implications, it was hard to see how another child had been left to neglect. And the impacts of that.
The story does jump here just a smidge, leaving questions that you’re really not sure if you want to ask. In the end, though, none of them really distract from the bigger story, and all I wanted to do is casually ask if she wanted to go out for a coffee sometime.
This is definitely not a ‘light’ zine by any means. I know that the abuse I lived through certainly influenced my reading of this, but I think your empathy would have to be pretty low to not pick up on the emotions in this comic.
Jenn ends the zine on a positive but realistic note, which is all any of us can really do when processing any sort of abuse. That she has the strength and frame of mind to remind people who have dealt with similar situations that they are not alone is a lovely thing to see.