PRIDE MONTH 2024! A graphic memoir sequel to Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure, Lewis Hancox’s Escape from St Hell: My Trans Life Levels Up continues in the same irreverent style as its much lauded predecessor. That first instalment explored Lewis’s early transition from Lois while at the titular St. Hell school (a contraction of St. Helen’s). In this follow-up he’s about to start university with all the major changes that entails. He’s also still being visited by his future self as older Lewis returns intermittently to give teen Lewis advice about his new life as a trans man.
Escape from St Hell plays with video game metaphors to represent some of the challenges Lewis faces. An early sequence, for example, portrays him as facing a series of end-of-level big bosses in his attempts to find a sympathetic medical professional (the book begins in 2008 when trans experiences were not so widely accepted).The first chapter (Level 1) focusses on Lewis’s attempts to create a new look for himself in the days before moving to Manchester University. It’s a reminder of how well Hancox blends humour (visual gags with his earlier incarnation’s hapless attempts to give himself a signature style) and powerful pathos (his father’s continual misgendering, or bumping into his former school bullies).
As the story progresses we follow Lewis’s time at university where he makes new friends, including flatmate Melka, but where dealing with his transitioning often comes into conflict with his academic pursuits. Here he starts to discover the person he wants to be as he begins recording his trans journey for an eventual uni project, even while his studies start to suffer. Where Hancox’s comics particularly shine is that their appeal to a YA audience is assured by the embedding of a sense of wit and hope into such an important and sometimes raw subject matter.
This especially comes to the fore in the chapters/levels on relationships (his three months dating the accepting Rae) and self-acceptance. Once again the older Lewis drops in every so often to put things into context for the younger one, reframing things like the realities of his parents’ support for him while at the same time reminding us of just how much harder trans lived experiences were in the late 2000s.
Hancox’s lively visuals bring his story to live with passion and create a firm connection with his audience through a heartfelt use of visual characterisation. It’s a testament to his skills as a cartoonist that the reader goes through a gamut of emotional responses as the story continues. While the video game analogies are not an original recurring motif in slice-of-life comics they work well here in paralleling his coming to terms with his changing world as a trans man. Escape from St Hell builds up to a celebratory finale, though one that does not lose sight of how tortuous the road travelled beforehand has been. A vitally important book from one of the most vitally important new voices in UK comics.
Lewis Hancox (W/A) • Scholastic, £12.99
Buy online from Gosh! Comics here
Review by Andy Oliver
