Seth Tobacman Changed My Life

My best friend in middle school had radical lesbian moms. They took huge multi-vitamins that smelled like sulfur, and they held hands and thanked the Universe before dinner. Her biological mom had been an actress, and she had huge, expressive eyes and did makeovers with all of us at slumber parties. Her other mom was a photographer. She gave me her old darkroom equipment, and she took my best friend and I to San Francisco when we were 13. She brought us to an anarchist book store, and, without really understanding why, I bought a copy of Seth Tobacman’s You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive.

The book made me crazy. It was my first “graphic novel,” and, more importantly, it was the first really dissident text I’d ever read. I’d learned from feminist-lite magazines like New Moon that Barbie was evil, and I’d been taught at my alternative charter school not to judge someone by the color of their skin, but Seth Tobacman made me political. His beef was with a system that went way, way beyond the cold-hearted advertising execs at Matel or the cops using fire hoses to knock down protesters in the South. The oppression, the way he Tobacman drew it, was pervasive. All-encompassing. Faceless.

Obviously, I related to this in a big way because I was on the verge of becoming an extremely angsty teenager, and it seemed to mirror the “oppression” I was beginning to experience from the adult world in general. Rules, which had gone largely unnoticed by me in the past and which I had followed intuitively, had begun to become tools of mindless cruelty. Social norms, also a former non-issue, were suddenly being called into major question. This is not at all to say that that Tobacman’s concerns were juvenile, but there is something that appeals to the adolescent mind in his desperate, heart-breaking drawings and, for want of a better description, poetry. 

From “I SAW A MAN BLEED TO DEATH”:

I once saw a man bleed to death. That night people walked to the movies over his blood. I thought that because I did not throw up I was not upset. But later I found that the dead man was living inside my body.In face I was full of the things I saw on the street and could not control myself.I was not the only one. I saw that all my friends were eating each other. I had to do something.