Weirdo | Review

Weirdo
Writer: Tony Weaver Jr.
Artists: Jes and Cin Wibowo
First Second; $22.99
Publisher’s age rating: 10-14 years

Tony Weaver Jr. seems to be a very busy man, being a popular TikTok influencer and a public speaker as well as running a social impact organization, Weird Enough Productions. Last fall, he also took on a new role, that of published author, with the release of Weirdo, his lightly fictionalized childhood memoir about dealing with bullying, mental health challenges and ultimately coming out okay on the other side.

One wouldn’t know that this was Weaver’s first comic based on its strength. Expertly drawn by twin artists Jes and Cin Wibowo (the artists also responsible for last year’s award-winning Lunar Boy), Weirdo is a powerful, affecting graphic novel that tackles incredibly tough topics that people generally don’t like to talk to children about.

How tough? Well, the book opens with a “content note”: “This story includes mentions of attempted suicide.”

Weaver’s comics avatar, also named Tony, seems like a pretty normal 11-year-old when we meet him in the opening pages. He has loving and supportive parents and a best friend, and he loves video games, comics, and anime. But he’s got some challenges. His beloved grandmother has recently died, and, more directly, he’s about to start a new school.

He’s started plenty of new schools before, but this one is different. An advanced school for gifted students, it’s a much more high-pressure environment than he’s used to.

His attempts to make friends are rebuffed, the teachers aren’t exactly understanding (one teacher accuses him of plagiarism because his writing seems too good), and his fellow students bully him relentlessly.

This bullying takes many forms, from making fun of him for bringing a toy to school and writing anime fanfiction, to constant online cyber-bullying, to at least a couple instances of physical violence, as in one scene where a big kid seems to punch him, breaking his glasses (staged so as to imply the action rather than dramatize it directly), and another in which an older kid strangles him after a somewhat elaborate set-up.

There doesn’t seem to be a racial component to Tony’s targeting, despite the fact that all of his teachers and the majority of the students at the new school are white. His older cousin, who is popular at the school, is also Black. There is one scene where he’s confronted by a group of Black boys in the library, who say he likes cartoons more than “our people”, and ask “You think he asked to get put in the Oreo section?”

Things get so bad at school, that the coloring, which started out with a superhero vibrancy, gradually fades darker and darker, until an entire passage is presented in black and white and, at Tony’s darkest moment, the page is all black, with a small white, scribbly silhouette of Tony in the center of the page, with the narration becoming a few terse lines in a white font.

It’s here that Tony attempts to take his own life, apparently at school. Weaver keeps it intentionally vague, both in detailing the act and talking about it afterwards, seemingly not wanting to give kids any ideas.

“I won’t tell you how I did it,” Weaver writes, “and I’m begging you, don’t try to guess.”

“It didn’t work,” though, and he wakes up, staring at his own hands through blurry eyes.

Tony’s parents, who didn’t seem to appreciate how terrible his school life had gotten, leap into action. They pull him out of the school and send him to a psychologist, soon enrolling him in a new school.

This new school, which seems to be all Black, both in the student body as well as the faculty, proves much more welcoming, especially once Tony meets the members of the literature club, four outlandish characters who each seem to have their own subject they obsess over and make their entire identity, in a way that evokes characters of school-based manga: Journalism, history, fanfiction, and drama.

Much of the rest of the book involves Tony gradually learning to accept these new weirdos and get used to the idea that other people might actually accept him. This also involves learning to become his true self, after having had to bury his identity for self-defense, standing up for himself and his friends, and learning that maybe everyone is really more than they present at school…even jocks.

While Weaver occasionally lapses into unnecessary narration that states the same thing the artwork does clearly enough, and there are lines here and there that might seem overly pedantic for a visual medium like comics, his characters are all complex and fully realized, and the story moves with a palpable sense of drama and propulsion.

Keeping with Tony’s heroic media view of the world, new characters are all introduced in brightly colored images, revealing their identity and a “superpower” in a strip of comic book-y looking text.

These characters are all drawn in a gently cartoony style, although the Wibowos do a fairly incredible job in character design, so that the vast majority of the characters filing the pages are quite visibly distinct. I was also impressed with the likeness of the real Weaver they managed in their Tony; Googling him after reading the book, I was surprised to see how much he looked like a taller, grown-up version of the character I had followed through the graphic novel.

Their art is a lot of fun, particularly seeing how they handle various videogame, comics, and anime touchstones throughout Tony’s story, drawing things like Link and Mario in Super Smash Bros, a TV screen full of Inu-Yasha, or the cast of Haikyuu! in their own style, seemingly finding a sweet spot between making them recognizable without being too faithful.

A potent, important story well told, Weirdo is a great comic that Weaver should be proud to add to his already pretty full resume.

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