While “shonen” has become shorthand for “action/adventure” outside of Japan, it literally just stands for its target audience: young boys. Would they be able to identify with Kim who fits the expected personality type perfectly?

These people look like me, these don’t; these people think like me while these others don’t; and these people fall in love the same way I do, but those people don’t. Using factors like these to create categories can be argued to be inevitable, but what can be disputed is how they’re based on binaries.

These days, texting (the telegraph’s contemporary descendent) might not play such a pivotal role in fiction, but it does provide a rich, layered narrative and visual medium, especially when employed in comics.

An outcast is a person who suffers rejection due to factors outside of their control such as cultural background, race, skin color, and sexuality. Because of the way sexual minorities have been treated historically, the outcast character trope is almost eponymous with queer media.

It’s safe to claim that magical stories provide great settings for queerness to be expressed and celebrated. Why is this, though? What is it about magic and magical communities that not only appeal to queer people, but also seem to exude some kind of inherent queerness themselves?

Needless to say, dialogue plays an integral role in comics. While sequential art can certainly exist without any kind of text, the medium of comics at its core is characterized by the intrinsic relationship of text and illustrations.

In an attempt to understand it and make our peace with it, countless stories about the death and afterlife have been told and retold, with each of them employing different perspectives and techniques to give shape to the shapeless. This is where symbolism comes into play.

The main theme of Autophobia is made loud and clear from its title: the fear of being alone. For Louis, this comes down to the way his anxiety rules his thoughts whenever he is alone, which then results in bouts of self-loathing.