Tegan and Sara: Crush | Review

Tegan and Sara: Crush
Writers: Tegan Quin and Sara Quin
Artist: Tillie Walden
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $14.99

When we last left Tegan and Sara, the comics avatars of indie-pop duo-turned-comics writers Tegan and Sara Quin in the pages of last year’s graphic novel Tegan and Sara: Junior High, the twins were celebrating their thirteenth birthday, having successfully survived the seventh grade at a new school and embarking on a fledgling music career.

The sequel, Tegan and Sara: Crush, finds the twins during the particularly boring summer before eighth grade, when all of the friends they met and made in the previous volume seem to be busy with their own lives, leaving them to their own devices, which includes writing several new songs.

The music component of their lives is about to become a pretty big deal.

They enter a contest to be the opening band for their favorite singer, Nite Fever, despite the fact that it’s only for those 19 and up, a small detail Tegan elided when applying, and they end up earning a chance to play against two other bands in a local bar for the slot. Though they don’t end up winning, they get what might be an even better consolation prize: Nite Fever’s manager Ramona Keys wants to manage the girls!

By the time school starts, not only have they played their first show at a club and secured professional management, they’ve also been interviewed for a feature in a music magazine and starred in a photo shoot.

In this volume of what turns out to be a duology, the focus is less on the normal kid problems the title characters encountered in Junior High—which included various puberty-related milestones, discovery of their sexual orientations, and navigating friendships and frenemies—and more on their dawning careers.

In Junior High, music was what brought the girls together when their school lives started to push them apart, and in Crush, music and, more specifically, the pressures of being a professional musician, dominates the plot.

Seemingly something of an overnight success—by the time this book ends, Tegan and Sara will have starred in their first music video, met and collaborated with their hero Nite Fever, and even opened for her—the girls must now deal with new-found fame and a manager with a lot of ideas about how to cultivate that fame, ideas that they aren’t always comfortable with.

All that is on top of just being teenagers, which comes with its own set of difficulties. The sub-title of this volume seems to come from Tegan’s crush on an older girl who wants to collaborate with her…but nothing more. Meanwhile Sara’s relationship with Roshini enters an awkward stage where she’s not sure if they’re just friends, or if they’re becoming actual girlfriends.

Despite the parallels to the real-life Tegan and Sara’s journey from regular kids to eventual rock stars, Crush, like Junior High, is a fictionalized version of their real-life story, with the setting the most notable difference: It’s not set in the early ’90s, when the Quins were in junior high, but today, which is actually an extremely different environment in which to listen to, create and perform music in.

The Quins, who have in the last few years proven themselves adept in several media other than music, are impressive comics writers, their work reading like that of old pros. Their Junior High collaborator Tillie Walden, a prolific artist with an already substantial resume of particularly strong books of her own, of course returns for Crush, which shares the same basic format as the previous book.

The delicately-drawn artwork is all colored purple, excepting the passages set in Tegan and Sara’s “twin space,” where the two characters and their dialogue appear as blue and red respectively, and they are free to talk directly to one another about the narrative they are starring in, and to the reader (In this volume, twin space is temporarily invaded twice, once by their mom, and another time by Junior High‘s mean girl character).

As with the first volume, Crush is a compelling story of sisters meeting the challenges of growing up and finding their way to being themselves in worlds that don’t necessarily encourage doing so, be it junior high or the music business.

While the books should prove particularly compelling to fans of Tegan and Sara the music act, they’re also far more broadly appealing, and they are likely to make many readers into fans of Tegan and Sara the comics writers. Here’s hoping this isn’t the end of their work in the medium.

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