Review: Flip Turn
30 Comics in 30 Days. - I’m reviewing a comic every day in November!
Day 2: Flip Turn by @bread_comix
Flip Turn is a vulnerable comic. It's autobiographical and deals with intensely personal subjects, so perhaps that’s no surprise. But the comic is also about vulnerability. The cartoonist, Bread, explores their experience as a young competitive swimmer and the emotional pain of being fat in the swimming world, which is dominated by thin, muscular athletes. It’s a story about them “choosing to take the risk of showing [their] body, being publicly fat” in a sport where one’s body is on constant, permanent display.
The comic, which Bread self-published and which won the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo’s 2022 Cupcake Award, is done in a minimalistic style, often dispensing with realistic backgrounds in favor of essential details, suggestive shapes, or entirely blank spaces. It’s an approach that lets Bread center their own body as an object of scrutiny, both for the reader and for themself.
Much of the story is deeply painful. Throughout, Bread wrestles with intense anger, shame, and self-loathing. But Flip Turn is also a story of self-acceptance, playing on the significance of the title. In swimming, a flip turn represents a reversal: You reach a wall and use it to propel yourself back in the opposite direction. Bread writes that the flip turn, for them, is an automatic action but also “a moment of reassociation.” It puts them “back in [their] body, moving intentionally, present in the pool.”
In a way, this encapsulates the narrative arc of the comic, which charts Bread’s reconnection and reconciliation with a body that, as a child, caused them almost nothing but pain. It’s not that this pain is gone or erased by the end of the comic. But they do find a way to rediscover the joy of letting their body be present in the water, a joy that competitive swimming helped destroy.
(I picked up Flip Turn at SPX. Bread does have an online store, though it seems to be offline at the time of this writing? I hope you can find a way to get yourself a copy of this comic because it is definitely worth having.)
Follow my bookstagram: @panthercitybooks
