{"id":9199,"date":"2025-10-30T15:57:43","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T15:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/?post_type=article&p=9199"},"modified":"2025-10-30T17:54:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T17:54:54","slug":"review-by-aubrey-hirsch","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/review-by-aubrey-hirsch\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Graphic Rage<\/em> by Aubrey Hirsch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/em>Graphic Rage, by Aubrey Hirsch<\/em>
\nSplit\/Lip Press; $24.00; softcover<\/em>
\nOctober 7, 2025<\/em>
\nReview by:<\/em>\u00a0Nathan Holic<\/em><\/p>\n

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In 2017, we had the great privilege here at The Florida Review<\/em> to publish \u201cThe Language of Trauma,\u201d a graphic essay from an author named Aubrey Hirsch. Hirsch had already published widely by 2017, but she was (from what I understood) only beginning to dabble in the comics form. As the Graphic Narrative\/ Comics Editor since the George W. Bush administration (my crow\u2019s feet just deepened, typing that), I\u2019ve always loved when poets and prose writers who\u2019ve previously worked only in alphabetic text try their hand at sequential art. When such writers create something new and bold, it brings me a profound joy to publish this work side-by-side with established comics artists.<\/p>\n

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Hirsch is a fantastic traditional-text essayist, and she immediately made the leap to becoming a fantastic comics<\/em> essayist. The transition was so adept as to feel preordained\u2014from the first panel, you could see she was meant for this. Rereading the piece today\u2014and I hope you will, here<\/a>\u2014remains an arresting experience, and I\u2019ve found ways to assign the essay in several of the courses I teach at the University of Central Florida, from first-year writing courses, to courses focused on personal essays, to courses in comics and the emerging field of graphic medicine.<\/p>\n

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So, it\u2019s tough to feign anything like objectivity as I begin this review of Aubrey Hirsch\u2019s first collection of comics essays, Graphic Rage: Comics on Gender, Justice, and Life as a Woman in America<\/em>. I\u2019ve been reading her text-image work since 2017, and you could say I\u2019m a fan. Can a fan even write a review? The invitation to read and review an advanced copy of the text felt less like a chore than a reward, a chance to follow in one manuscript the progress and career of an essayist and comics artist who is emerging as one of the finest practitioners of the graphic essay form, consistently producing timely text-image pieces that respond to the political traumas of the 2020s with humanity, reason, and (yes) understandable anger. Most impressive: collected here, these essays do not feel as if their thematic and emotional weight will diminish as newsworthy events fade from the spotlight. It\u2019s a timely collection, given our current moment, but I\u2019ve got to imagine that the book will be readable and impactful for years to come.<\/p>\n

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Releasing in October 2025, and published by Split\/Lip Press, Graphic Rage<\/em> is a collection of what various readers, critics, and creators might alternately term \u201cgraphic essays\u201d and \u201ccomics essays,\u201d short commentaries and op-ed style arguments on timely issues, communicated in some combination of text and sequential image, generally employing the grammar of the comics page\u2014panels, word balloons, emanata, sound effects.<\/p>\n

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Visually, Hirsch generally lays out her pages in four (mostly) equal panels, a reminder that many of these comics were originally published in online spaces that favor this sort of uniformity; you can picture yourself swiping through these comics on Instagram, perhaps, one panel at a time, easily able to read the entirety of the text without pinching and zooming:<\/p>\n

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While this is the general structure of most pieces, some of the essays forgo traditional panel borders and four-panel layouts to assume either a looser, \u201cjourney of thought\u201d quality where the text flows down the page into an image without panel borders\u2014<\/p>\n

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\u2014while other pieces adopt different forms and genres entirely, as in this flowchart-based piece:<\/p>\n

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But for the most part, the visual layout is important to Hirsch\u2019s purpose. Unlike graphic novels created for print distribution, these are urgent pieces that she has created for immediate<\/em> online dissemination, and the function dictates the form. Only now are we finally seeing them in print.<\/p>\n

This uniformity of layout is not a criticism. Yes, the artwork is often iconic rather than photo-realistic (or\u2014on the other end of the spectrum\u2014abstract or stylized), the most distilled version of the image imaginable. No, there are no painstakingly detailed splash pages of the sort that we find in mainstream Marvel or Image comics. But I couldn\u2019t have imagined these essays drawn in any other style. The visuals are restrained, patient, and always crafted in service of the message. When I\u2019m looking for excellent comics, I ask myself one question: Has the artist chosen the right visual style for the message? Take, for instance, the black and white panels of \u201cWhat I Was Wearing,\u201d a sequence in which Hirsch illustrates her everyday outfits, coupled with the catcalls and sexual harassing threats that accompanied said outfits. There is a plainness to the artwork, but that horrifying plainness serves the essays.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve read too many comics that beg obnoxiously to be taken seriously, artwork over-stylized to the point where it looks like a CGI sequence in a Hollywood blockbuster, panels crowded with text as if the only way to be literary or important is to stuff the page with words. It\u2019s all very \u201clook at me!\u201d And it doesn\u2019t demonstrate a synergy between text and image: the right choice image, the right style of artwork, the right amount of text to pair with the image so that they can both do their own separate (but cooperative) work.<\/p>\n

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In Graphic Rage<\/em>, Hirsch has created short pieces that are individually consumed in five to ten minutes, and easily shared, yet they resonate long after the read. Too much text, and we might tune out, or we might wonder: Why isn\u2019t this just a traditional essay? But throughout this book, I marveled at how much these comics could communicate in a single page, or even a panel. Take a look at the following panel from \u201cGoing Gray,\u201d and imagine how many words this might take to convey in a traditional essay:<\/p>\n

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Hirsch takes us through a full internal monologue in that first panel, as she weighs the reasons for allowing her hair to go gray. Another essayist might have spent several pages on this internal debate! She deftly braids personal narrative, charts, diagrams, and outside research, sometimes in a single page, and even visualizes the researchers she cites, allowing us to connect with researchers as humans rather than faceless names:<\/p>\n

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But it\u2019s not just the efficiency of the text and image. Hirsch consistently creates striking visual metaphors that reinforce her ideas, or that offer new ways of seeing those ideas. The balance beam (above) is an easy example, but we see these visual metaphors on nearly every page of the book. Here\u2019s another (and this might someday become the most reproduced image in the book):<\/p>\n

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These visual metaphors build upon the literal text, extending meaning, and (this is crucial for a comics nerd and comics teacher) illustrating the possibilities of the comics essay form. Why choose to write a comics essay when we could write traditional-text essays? See above!<\/p>\n

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In this book, individual panels tell a full story. Individual pages beg to be shared, or (call me old school) clipped and tacked to your bulletin board like we used to do with Far Side<\/em> cartoons. As readers, we might initially perceive some of the artwork as \u201csimple\u201d because it is not highly detailed, but we are frequently fooled into processing and remembering far more than we thought:<\/p>\n

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What an amazing image. What an amazing visualization.<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s left to say about Graphic Rage<\/em>? Have I geeked out enough about the visuals? Let\u2019s talk content, then.<\/p>\n

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The subject matter of these essays can be gleaned from the book\u2019s subheading, \u201cComics on Gender, Justice, and Life as a Woman in America,\u201d and most of the essay titles preview an essay\u2019s subject and Hirsch\u2019s attendant gallows humor. See \u201cWomen Are People, Believe it or Not\u201d and \u201cHow to be a Woman on the Internet,\u201d for instance. Even \u201cHow to Correctly Report Your Rape\u201d adopts a question (\u201cDid you report your rape correctly?\u201d) and a flowchart that leads the reader to the same inevitable, doomed answers. The collection is not ha-ha funny; when we laugh, it is from the same release as when we flip the bird or block someone from our social media account.<\/p>\n

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Hirsch\u2019s voice has certainly been sharpened from years of steady publication in online journals and sites (Salon<\/em>, Vox<\/em>, etc), and the accompanying online toxicity that has been heaped upon her for her perspectives. (Several of the essays directly address these online threats.) Her work will no doubt appeal to readers of Roxane Gay, who is listed in the acknowledgements and blurbed the book. I feel compelled to make this comparison for a very specific reason: If you do not consider yourself to be a reader of comics, don\u2019t be put off by the idea of a collection of comics essays<\/em>. This book will make you a believer.<\/p>\n

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In fact, reading Graphic Rage<\/em>, I felt much the same as when I finished Roxane Gay\u2019s Bad Feminist <\/em>(2014). Here was an author whose work I\u2019d been reading and enjoying online for years, and who\u2014finally, you could sense it\u2014was about to break through with her first major essay collection, about to dramatically expand her audience. She had been unleashed, the wider world was about to get a good kick in the teeth, and a whole lot of people would have a trusted voice that they could count upon. What a feeling that was. Aubrey Hirsch\u2019s Graphic Rage<\/em> gives me the same feeling. It\u2019s a kick in the teeth, and I\u2019ve got to imagine that her audience will only grow from here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graphic Rage, by Aubrey Hirsch Split\/Lip Press; $24.00; softcover October 7, 2025 Review by:\u00a0Nathan Holic                 In 2017, we had the great privilege here at The Florida Review to publish \u201cThe Language of Trauma,\u201d a graphic essay from an author named Aubrey Hirsch. Hirsch had already published widely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":9200,"template":"","categories":[9,139,49,1569],"tags":[889,50,347,369,2023],"class_list":["post-9199","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","category-literary-features","category-reviews","tag-aquifer","tag-aubrey-hirsch","tag-book-review","tag-graphic-narrative","tag-nathan-holic"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReview: Graphic Rage by Aubrey Hirsch - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/review-by-aubrey-hirsch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Review: Graphic Rage by Aubrey Hirsch - The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Graphic Rage, by Aubrey Hirsch Split\/Lip Press; $24.00; softcover October 7, 2025 Review by:\u00a0Nathan Holic                 In 2017, we had the great privilege here at The Florida Review to publish \u201cThe Language of Trauma,\u201d a graphic essay from an author named Aubrey Hirsch. 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