The stand-alone follow up to Michael Sweater’s cult hit Please Destroy My Enemies that BoingBoing called “darlingly ironic and awful” is now available! Featuring such new characters as Karate Dad, man who hates computers, and the feral girl. This book is sure to please anyone who hates Twitter, the government, or just themselves.
Soft Cover, 64 full-color pages, 6″ x 6″
SILVER #083; ISBN:978-1-945509-18-6
Purchase: Silver Sprocket Store
Previews: NOV171890
Ben Passmore’s slim, 11-page mini-comic is an open letter, written in the second person, consisting of a litany of gentle admonitions for well-meaning but racially tone-deaf white people: “Your black friend hates that you slide into ‘black’ presentations thoughtlessly. He feels like you’re mocking him, but knows that you are totally unaware of this … Your black friend wishes you would play more than Beyonce. There are more black performers than Beyonce and he’s worried you don’t know that.” That last sentiment is matched to a panel in which a clueless white guy sings along to “Formation,” while his black friend shoots a hilariously weary side-eye at the reader. Your Black Friend is by far the shortest comic to make this list, but there is nothing slight about it. Beneath its sardonic tone lies a truth that is urgent, sincere and deeply affecting.
It’s entertaining and comical and heartbreaking, everything an eye-opening experience should be.
Required reading for white people, especially if we hope to be useful allies and decent friends.
In his comic Your Black Friend, for instance, Ben Passmore tells a story about the sorts of casual, everyday racism and microaggressions that virtually every black person has experienced at one point in their lives and distills it into a simple scenario that even the most un-woke white person can understand.
Powerful and possibly one of the best I’ll read this year.
Simply put: this work is genius…smart and funny and blisteringly honest and sad. It’s all of that and more, a feat with the most excellent of intentions.