Heavy­weight is a mov­ing and provoca­tive graph­ic mem­oir from non­bi­na­ry car­toon­ist Solomon Brager, explor­ing inher­it­ed trau­ma, fam­i­ly his­to­ry, and the ever-shift­ing under­stand­ing of our own cul­tur­al and gen­der iden­ti­ties, for read­ers of Gen­der Queer, Maus, and Ali­son Bechdel. 

Solomon grew up with accounts of their great-grand­par­ents’ escape from Nazi Ger­many, told over and over until their under­stand­ing of self was bound up with the hero­ic details of their ances­tors’ exploits. Their great-grand­moth­er relat­ed how her hus­band, a box­ing cham­pi­on, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists, how she broke him out of an intern­ment camp and car­ried their chil­dren over the Pyre­nees moun­tains. But that sto­ry was nev­er the whole pic­ture; zoom­ing out, every­thing becomes more com­pli­cat­ed.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant in our cur­rent cul­tur­al moment, Heavy­weight is sure to gen­er­ate pro­found con­ver­sa­tions about colo­nial­ism and how the pat­terns of his­to­ry emerge and rever­ber­ate, not as a sim­ple chain of events but in haunt­ing layers.