Becoming Unbecoming

Starred review from December 14, 2015
This challenging debut graphic novel is dense with facts, figures, and exposition, but the issues it explores—sexual violence and the public response to it—are what make it truly difficult to read. U.K. artist Una juxtaposes her own formative years with the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered over a dozen women in England in the late 1970s. And though the artist thankfully didn’t meet such a grisly fate, her own early encounters with male sexuality left an enduring mark, which she explores through a rich collage of drawing styles. The book is largely expositional, as Una digs deep into her memories, the words and images seemingly pouring out of her pen as she unflinchingly explores a nation’s scramble to stop a serial killer and her emotional struggles with her own sexual abuse. It’s as well crafted as it is difficult—and an important document of the lingering effects of male violence against women.

A graphic manifesto for female empowerment and a punch to the gut of predatory males.The young, British female artist who has taken the name Una ("meaning One, one life, one of many") recounts her years of coming-of-age when the Yorkshire Ripper rampaged as a serial killer of prostitutes (and other women he considered of dubious moral value) and seemed almost to serve as some sort of moral barometer in a country that had its own problems concerning female sexuality. During a time of slut shaming and victim blaming, which have hardly disappeared, a young woman coming-of-age with punk-rock rebellion and her own emerging sexual desires could feel conflicted and alone, as those victimized (as she was, more than once) could often feel before the internet would take that victimization viral. The author was told that "there was a problem and it was located in me," that the source of her anxiety and depression might be better treated through psychological therapy than through legal redress for crimes that she, as the victim, felt afraid to confess. "So I became an unreliable witness and a perfect victim," she writes. With a sensory overload of text and visual variety, readers share the unsettling feelings as the narrative expands to cast Una as an Everygirl who was not the shamed exception but actually more the norm. Two pages on how "We Can't COUNT on the justice system," followed by a visual representation of "The Ocean of Sexual Crime That Goes Unreported," show just how pervasive the threat toward women has been. And when the Yorkshire Ripper was finally apprehended, everyone was surprised by what "an ordinary married man" he turned out to be and what "a lovely man" he'd seemed to his neighbors. The book concludes with a wordless coda, projections of the lives that might have been had the murderer not killed these women and disrupted these families. A powerfully disturbing graphic narrative from an author with a lot to say and plenty of creative chops to say it provocatively. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.