PRIDE MONTH 2024! Adversary is not a single-read offering. Nor is it a story that you will digest quickly. It’s one of those comics you need to read, reflect on, read again and allow the quiet intensity of its storytelling to stay with you. Blue Delliquanti’s graphic novella (published by Silver Sprocket) touches on multiple themes but does so with a delicate precision that ensures this less than 80-page story never feels overpacked despite the complexities of its interweaving subject matter. It’s a powerful piece of storytelling too so a note to take heed of the content warnings going into this uncompromising work.
Set in 2021, in the midst of some of the worst days of the pandemic, Adversary focusses on the meeting of two characters whose lives previously briefly intersected in the time before Covid. Curtis is a powerfully built older man just coming to terms with coming out as queer after some decades. Anton is transmasc and met Curtis some time before when the latter was filling in and running a woman’s defence class. Anton’s life has been shattered by a recent, and at the time all too topical, loss and the two begin a relationship. But it’s one that is interspersed with physical conflict, as the playing out of their violent self-defence routines becomes intertwined with a more erotic physicality.
Adversary brings together two individuals who are already damaged by circumstances and environment. Delliquanti touches on themes of identity; of loss and grief and how we process it; of disparities in relationships; boundaries of consent; and of how we react and respond to existential threats to our comprehension of the world. In that latter regard this is as much a story about the pandemic as it is an overtly queer one, with the claustrophobia, despair and the ghosts of the pre-2020 world constantly reminding us of the enormity of our abruptly changed circumstances.
For those who reside in Minneapolis I am sure there will also be a relevance to Adversary that a reviewer in the UK can only appreciate from a distance. The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent 2020 protests and uprisings are a lingering presence throughout Adversary, without the need for explicit commentary.
Delliquanti’s art has a fluid sense of motion that is especially effective in the scenes of physical conflict and they use a muted colour scheme that works well in centring the cast in this carefully paced character study. Adversary ends on the most haunting of denouements. It’s a challenging and provocative piece of comics from Blue Delliquanti and, as such, it’s unsurprising that this original webcomic has been picked up for print by Silver Sprocket, surely one of the most important, boundary-pushing publishers around.
Blue Delliquanti (W/A) • Silver Sprocket, $15.99
Review by Andy Oliver
