Review: Shirtlifter #2

The second issue of Steve MacIsaac’s Shirtlifter is a 56-page collection of ten short stories, from 2 to 12 pages. Those stories are unconnected, but seem thematically linked, if only because reading them one after another creates an effect that was obviously non-existent when I read them in the various anthologies most were first published (the author has reworked most of them for the present collection).
A lot of those stories deal with closet/visibility issues, from self-awareness to public behavior, including openess toward one’s family. For example, in the first story titled “Waiting for the Bus”, the character faces a choice between following a stranger for sex at a bus stop and getting on with his life, and thus, between acknowledging his attraction to men and living a life of lies, toward himself and toward others. With a double vertical narration showing moments between the two possible lives and a voice-over commenting mercilessly on the character’s behavior, MacIsaac gives us an uncompromising look at what drives men to stay in the closet even in a somewhat open society, and the consequences of that damaging choice.
The narration and storytelling of those stories is often an important part of their effect on the reader, as for example in the short piece “You can tell us anything”, which juxtaposes the written reactions of parents to having a gay son (“How come you never bring your friends around?”, “Don’t you want to have a family?”) with scenes of an untroubled gay life of sex and coupledom. It’s clever, but more importantly, it’s poignant.

Cruising the net

There are also a few stories dealing with anonymous sex, and the related issue of protection, psychologically and physically speaking. The slight feeling of detachment which is pervasive in most of MacIsaac’s stories help them avoid the pitfalls of melodrama and brings a certain intellectualism that I find very appealing.
The last three stories are the ones where the layers of fiction are peeled away, to reveal some aspects of the real man behind the masks (the covers gives a hint of this: the main cover shows various characters, while the back cover shows faces of MacIsaac in the same positions). MacIsaac (or a fictional version of him) takes center stage, and shows us that he can put a lot of humor in his work, which is not something that was especially obvious until then. “In Plain Sight” is a variation of the now-common observation that gay men and superheroes have a lot in common, with their double lives and their “hiding” their true self. “Border Crossings” is an ambitious piece of storytelling, with a multiple narration where color is used to differentiate between the four strands of a story not told in chronological order: MacIsaac, who’s Canadian and lived then in Japan, is trying to obtain a visa for the USA, which is no small feat. That, and he has to deal with his seeming reluctance to commit too much to a relationship with a man in Los Angeles. The title obviously has multiple meanings…

From the last story

The last story, “You Do The Math”, looks like it is the most personal story, with MacIsaac talking about his unwillingness to be too upfront about being gay, in public and in his job as a teacher in college. He even portrays himself as feeling proud of “acting straight”, only to mock himself for that. It’s not easy to put one’s shortcomings in the full view of an audience, and it seems to me that MacIsaac does that without using the easy way of either excusing or demeaning himself, contrary to what a lot of autofiction writers have done.
With his solid drawing style gaining a measure of roundness in some stories (which might make it lose part of that detachment I was writing about, but probably enhances the implication of the reader) and his willingness to use thoughtful storytelling, Steve MacIsaac proves with this second issue of Shirtlifter that he’s an author to watch.
This comic can be bought on the artist’s site or at Amazon.