The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors

In this eclectic collection of short comics, Beier records her dating experiences after breaking up with the college boyfriend with whom she had her first serious relationship. Confidently bisexual but inexperienced, she dates both men and women around the Bay Area, hitting up OK Cupid, Tinder, clubs, and bars. She endures nightmare dates, finds new friendships, and confesses that she messages men when she’s looking for a quick hookup “because they’re easier”; true love connections are thin on the ground. The thickly inked black-and-white art starts out sloppy but matures as Beier learns to draw detailed settings and characters. Recalling MariNaomi’s graphic memoir Kiss and Tell, the artist draws herself as a cute cartoon in cat-eye glasses, and draws her dates with simple clarity. The quality is uneven—running the gamut of sophistication from a hastily sketched 24-hour comic to a penetrating visual chronicle of the final days of the Lex, San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, which closed in 2015—but a more polished tell-all might not be so funny, lively, or roughly honest. This raw chronicle is a dispatch from the front lines of modern app-assisted dating. [em](Nov.) [/em]