When I was a teenager, I was pretty into John Hughes movies. The first one I really remember seeing was Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and I seem to remember thinking Ferris was cool and not an entitled little twerp who needs to get his shit together. I still love the movie and Ferris and Sloane and Cameron, but there's some part of my mouth that twists a little whenever Ferris says or does something particularly “charming.” I've come to realize that's because I'm old and that's fine. The next Hughes movie I discovered was The Breakfast Club and I, no shit, would sit around with my friends when we were high and talk about which character we would be. I was always Molly Ringwald's Princess, but that was only because my friend was Ally Sheedy's Basket Case because she always was cooler than me. Whatevs.

 

I remembered those conversations, somehow, when I was reading the first volume of Gibson Twist's Pictures of You today. Twist ends the first book with snapshots, so to speak, of his characters with short tags but, you know, sometimes those tags work. There's an informal shorthand that exists where sometimes a someone, usually a good friend, will need to describe someone to me in two or three words because they're walking over to say hi and I need to know how to play it or I've forgotten someone I shouldn't have. But, just as an experiment, I sat here for a good ten minutes and tried to come up with taglines for me and my friends and I couldn't do it.

 

But it's true that everyone fills a role in a group of friends (Me? Lovable drunk.) and we are seeing this story unfold through Peter Morris, who I would go ahead and label The Ingénue, who is fresh out of the wilds of Canada and starting college and probably relies on said shorthand to keep his brain from exploding, bless his small town heart. Morris is just a kid looking for something bigger, something better, and he finds it but it's a little bit of a culture shock. His roomie, Christo, is from much, much further afield and immediately takes Peter under his wing to show him some collegiate ropes and introduce him to his clever, arty, slightly naughty set that has since then, for reasons to be revealed, fallen apart in a spectacular fashion.

 

I say “slightly naughty” not because anyone is doing anything that I find to be wrong, but because Twist doesn't pull any punches and it's interesting to see that level of honesty, a lack of perfection. Peter may or may not have a bit of an anger management issue, doesn't understand gay people (or really, anyone who isn't like him) even a little bit but wants to know the world at large a little better and is pearl-clutchingly shocked and baffled when he walks in on Christo having sex with a girl whose pigtails he'd been pulling. Christo is kind of difficult to get a grasp on, being both incredibly kind and occasionally slightly icky (which I guess probably just makes him human since I am especially guilty of the same contradiction lately) in turns. And, oddly enough, there's an entire chess-and-boy-talk section of the book that I'd like to show to my sweet fauxbling, who tried to explain to me not three hours ago that dating girls is, in fact, like chess. He was close but not quite there yet, but Twist could probably straighten it out better than I could.

 

Pictures of You is great in that it's about relationships but casually, making them slide into the story just like they slide into our lives. Who we love, who we're sleeping with, who we're not sleeping with – all that is part of who we are but not all of it and Twist, thankfully, understands this and weaves his tale skillfully enough to capture the seemingly casual feel of those heady late teenage years where all of that stuff is getting figured out with the help of some sex, your drug of choice, and a lot of rock n’ roll.

 

All of this happens in glorious full-color both online at picturesofyou.smackjeeves.com and off in a Kickstarter funded graphic novel. Twist's cast of characters is startlingly original, a diverse collection of sweet girls and cads and dreamers who will probably all turn out to be anything but, as folks often do. | Erin Jameson