One of my favorites of the year. The inner frustration of dealing with long-time friends who aren’t accepting while at the same time fighting monsters and MLM bros.

Riveting final girl horror meets hilariously biting social satire. Expertly evokes the incremental horror of microaggressions and aggression-aggressions experienced by the only trans person at a bachelor weekend, peppered with an astonishingly on-the-mark sendup of our hyper-capitalist society and its impact on identity and relationships.

This was…A RIDE. An ADVENTURE. It’s the epitome of when tech bros go WRONG. Just an absolute capitalist nightmare island.

But we love the sense of community and finding your people!

Miigweetch to Pantheon and Netgalley for the DRC. All opinions are my own.

I'm a fan of this author and their work at the Nib, which is why I requested the title. I was not disappointed.

Visually I really enjoyed it, and overall had fun reading it. Would recommend!

Lubchansky crafted a graphic novel that threads the needle on dealing with serious issues and being a fun romp. Friendship angst! Eldritch horror!

Sammie is asked by their best friend to serve as his Best Man. This includes going on a boys' weekend to El Campo, a playground town where there are almost no rules and money reigns. Things quickly go downhill, with everyone misgendering Sammie and arranging activities (like hunt-your-clone) that are not of interest to Sammie. Their frustration builds as does the sense that weird things are all around them.

If you can get past the irritatingly necessary annoyances at the start (setting the tone with misgendering and dismissive attitudes), you'll be treated to a weird, wild ride

I really enjoyed this; I loved how this graphic novel married relatable everyday experiences with the fantastical. I'll be recommending this one a lot!

Sammie, a transfemme person, has to put up with a friend group of a long, but recently distant friend at their bachelor party in a dystopian party zone called El Campo. This graphic novel by Mattie Lubchansky blends satire, horror, and dystopian elements through the lens of a character navigating what it means to be queer in spaces that are overrun with toxic masculinity, tech bro vibes, and extreme capitalism. Be sure to read the book and not the arc as the color illustrations are intentional and add to the novel.

The world desperately, and I mean desperately, needs more transfem stories. This story, about a transfem/nonbinary person going to their best guy friend's bachelor weekend on an island in a bizarre tech dystopia, was wild from start to finish. I didn't know what to expect almost from panel to panel, and I loved it. In addition, it was not only cosmically horrifying, but also hilarious, and with a really lovely message.

An adventure of ridiculous and satirical horror! We follow Sammie to a "boys weekend" trip as they are forced to be best "man" for their old friend. The premise takes place on the "anything goes" island "El Campo" and touches on popular issues we see cropping up in a post capitalist society; pyramid schemes, unethical cloning, and hunting human for sports. Sammie's friends are all awful techy bros and really have no redeeming qualities which makes it fun to hate them and root for Sammie and their fight to be themself!

I wish there was a little more color in the art but, on it's own, it's still got a charming nickelodeon style that really casts a fun juxtaposition to the storyline. The lens it casts on fake-wokeness and how trans people put up with too much is really raw and inspiring.

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.
Sammie goes to a bachelor party weekend on an anything-goes island. The longer they stay there, the more strange things happen. During all of this, Sammie is trying to deal with being newly out as trans to people who knew her before and don't acknowledge her changes.

We follow Sammie, who is newly-out as trans, while they go to an old friend's bachelor party weekend. Sammie's 'friends' don't quite understand them, and while some are not trying hard enough to accept their friend, others are straight-out hostile.

While this is happening, Sammie also notices that strange things are happening on the island - a weird cult seems to be indoctrinating all of their college buddies! Monsters are eating people!!

This was a really fun satirical horror exploring many themes - transitioning, capitalism, hustle culture, and friendships/community. I loved the art style, I laughed out loud, I cried, I cringed. Highly recommend!!

This one was pretty good. I enjoyed most of it. I almost DNF this one. I could not connect with the characters But over all pretty good.

Listen, I'm a Toastie, so there's no way I wasn't going to love Mattie's debut graphic novel! BOYS WEEKEND is weird and wild and fun in all the best ways. Lubchansky absolutely nails the many types of guy (the one who can only speak in quotes from raunchy comedies he watched in college made me legit shudder) and teases out beautiful nuance in Sammie's tricky relationship with Adam, the groom who kind of wants to be supportive and gender affirming but only if it's easy and he doesn't get in trouble for doing it wrong. Loved the decision to place this story in a capitalist hellscape only barely different from the current day -- the pyramid scheme / MLM / cult is icing on the cake. I've long been a fan of Mattie's work, so I should've been expecting the tender moments toward the end of the book, but instead I was totally suckerpunched into tears, aka one of the best experiences one can have while reading!

I was super pumped about the premise of this book but something fell flat in the delivery. I'm not sure how many of my issues were because this is an eARC (blurry words, limited color, etc.) and how much of it was just cause the book... was just not that great. I loved the clone hunting and how that played in the end of the book! That almost felt like it could have been fleshed out into its own short story, leaving the rest of the book behind.

Super bananas but overt in its anti-transphobia message. The boys made me so frustrated throughout the book, I’m glad Sammie had her friends and her wife to carry her through all that. Honestly El Campo sounded like a horror world even before the cult and monster stuff.

Whenever I see MLM, my first thought is “men loving men” nice. But it’s gross instead and pyramid schemes run by “bros” are ruining society. I hope the full book is in color cause I liked the coloring of the first few pages but then it went b&w.

Super fun fantasy world about a trans woman just trying to be accepted by her old cis friends. The importance of community and acceptance is so important.

TW: deadnaming, misusing pronouns, transphobia, etc. BUT this book is clearly anti-all that bullshit. Karma is a weird pyramid scheme monster, I guess.

Damn, that was fantastic.
This year’s Thirsty Mermaids, if we have such a thing.
A funny, heartfelt, zany, and very relatable satire on gender norms and crypto-bro culture that is both outlandish and completely spot on in its send-ups. The further the narrative gets from anything that can believably happen (you know: cult initiations, clone strippers, kraken attacks, the usual), the more it somehow accurately illustrates the absurdity of strict heteronormative culture and (almost moreso) the implicit need to fit into it.

I think the core of this book, a recently transitioned transfemme nonbinary person going a friend's bachelor party weekend as his Best Man, is very compelling, and the parts of the story that I found most stem from this aspect. However, the story is set in an island version of Las Vegas where the nightmares of late capitalism are taken to extremes. Also there is a doomsday cult veiled in venture capitalist tech industry jargon run by people who talk about maximizing the blockchain to enhance ROI.
These last two elements don't quite mesh well with the story at its center. The satire of the cult doesn't really extend much further than "tech bros sound kind of like cultists, don't they?" and that aspect of the plot doesn't have much to do with Sammie's tension between the life they live now and the life they left behind (and thus must confront this weekend), aside from a brief reference to having previously worked in tech before transitioning.
I really liked the parts of the story that I do like (a hunting trip where they hunt clones of themselves is a particular highlight for me), but I didn't quite connect to everything surrounding those parts.

This book is a lot. It has so much social commentary on so many different subjects that it made my head spin. A transwoman is acting as the best man for her college best friend. The bachelor weekend is happening at some trash island where nothing is illegal. Things go terribly wrong, everyone one is a jerk refusing to acknowledge Sammie's identity correctly, and there's some sort of business cult filling the air with buzz words and nonsense. The author is clearly trying to say a lot, but I think there was so much being critiqued that the messages started stomping all over each other instead.