Mattie Lubchansky’s books are never fully what they seem at first glance. Her debut graphic novel, Boys Weekend, was billed as a trans-final-girl horror story set at a bachelor party besieged by sea monsters. And yes, Boys Weekend is very much a smart examination of the complicated friendship dynamics between trans femmes and their former male friends set alongside attacks by tentacled beasts from the deep, but it’s also a hilarious climate fiction satire about the excesses of late-stage capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. Also, for a horror comic with its fair share of dismemberment and blood splatter, Lubchansky’s art style is surprisingly playful and colorful. Her environments are detailed for narrative and thematic cohesion, and her characters, while cartoonish and stylized, are rendered naturalistically and with a casual respect for the full spectrum of human bodies. And it all works. I devoured Boys Weekend in a single sitting when it debuted in 2023 and immediately knew that I’d just read a new classic of the genre. Even still, I am confident in saying that Simplicity, Lubchansky’s latest graphic novel which released in August, is even better.
The year is 2081, and 40 years have passed since the dissolution of the United States into numerous smaller nations separated by the lawless Exurb Zones. Lucius Pasternak lives a relatively innocuous life in the New York City Administrative and Security Territory, which has transformed the former metropolis into a hyper capitalist police state shielded from the encroaching ocean by multiple massive sea walls. After the city’s billionaire mayor Dennis Van Wervel takes notice of a forgotten anthropology paper Lucius wrote years ago, he is offered the opportunity to study and interview a utopian commune, the Spiritual Association of Peers, for an upcoming museum of New York history. Even as his social circle urges him to be wary of his new benefactors’ motives, Lucius eagerly accepts and journeys into the former Catskills to embed himself in the community.
At first, Lucius finds the Spiritual Association of Peers’ beliefs and practices, which include a nightly release that is a mix of impromptu battle royale and orgy, absurd and off-putting, and its members are similarly distrustful of the outsider that has arrived at their community. It’s not until he bonds with Amity Grown-Shy, a commune acolyte and fellow trans person, that the first steps towards understanding begin. However, as the days pass, Lucius is plagued by nightly visions of gigantic glowing creatures, whose visits are both terrifying and surprisingly erotic, and more and more community members fall victims to sudden brutal attacks from an unknown source.
Mattie Lubchansky has described Simplicity as a folk-horror graphic novel and, on its face, the comparison feels apt. Like the most famous examples of the genre, The Wicker Man and Midsommar, Lubchansky begins her story with an outsider entering into an isolated community whose practices at first appear archaic and strange. The Spiritual Association of Peers’ founder was a bearded white man, who spoke in stoner-flower-child lingo and whose novel serves as the basis for the community’s spiritual beliefs. The community members wear a uniform of white robes and close their days with violent sex rituals. Simplicity primes those who have even a passing understanding of the genre to expect the plot will follow Lucius uncovering the nefarious true nature of the Spiritual Association of Peers, who will likely be revealed to be some form of malevolent cult that participates in blood sacrifice and murder.
Without spoiling the mystery that unfolds across the novel’s pages, I can at least promise that Simplicity has much more interesting things in mind than mere genre homage. As I said before, nothing is what it seems at first glance. Lubchansky is too good of a writer to lay all her cards on the table too early, and her deceptively comedic cartooning hides just as much terror and brutality as it does laughter. The narrative that unfolds is one of anti-fascist, anti-capitalist resistance that sports some gorgeously weird and unsettling monsters. Reading Simplicity is too incredible an experience to be spoiled by some online gay book critic.
While Simplicity has a lot more on its mind than gender, Lubchansky depicts transness and trans bodies with more complexity and casual honesty than almost any other writer working in her genre. What originally interests Lucius in the Spiritual Association of Peers is their foundational lack of judgement regarding gender and sex. While New York City Administrative and Security Territory claims to respect Lucius as a trans man, his gender and body are still subjected to probing by an AI-run bureaucracy that regards him as foreign, unclassifiable. In contrast, Lucius’s transness is a non-factor at the Spiritual Association of Peers. Trans bodies of all kinds abound among their members, and their nakedness and sensuality is not treated as anything more noteworthy than their cisgender peers. Lubchansky echoes this by depicting trans bodies without any sense of voyeurism or othering. Trans bodies are just bodies in a crowd of bodies. Lucius is also allowed to be a sexual character whose moments of intimacy unapologetically engage with his body as a trans man. Lubchansky illustrates trans sexuality as sensual and transcendental but also with all the messy awkwardness and vulnerability that comes with human intimacy. I have rarely seen anything like it in a visual medium, and it’s just one of the many reasons that Simplicity feels like such a major achievement.
