GRAPHIC NOVELS: Families, friends and complications
"The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere," written and illustrated by James Spooner; Harper (368 pages, $26.99)
To some degree or another, every teenager feels marooned. This was particularly the case for James Spooner. Though he would later become known as a filmmaker and co-founder of the Afropunk Festival, back in 1990 Spooner was an awkward biracial adolescent stuck in the high desert town of Apple Valley, California. His freshly told and achingly vulnerable graphic memoir illustrates his adolescence as being an outcast many times over.
