Bill Coffin's Reviews > Lumberjanes, Vol. 19: A Summer to Remember

This is a collective review for the entire Lumberjanes series.

I’ve been wanting to do a complete Lumberjanes read-through ever since I bought the first TPB at the New York ComiCon, back when the series first started. My son and I had just finished reading Nimona together, and I was a big Noelle Stevenson fan on the back of that, so Lumberjanes was an obvious choice for what to read next. I read the first few volumes, and then let it sit for a few years as the series ran its course. Now, I have the chance to go back and take it all in as a single, extended reading. So what’s the verdict?

Lumberjanes is a magnificent comic property. Even if it doesn’t speak to you directly (and it doesn’t always speak that strongly to me), the truth is that a book with this much heart, accessibility, respect for each others’ differences, love for a good yarn, and investment in its own characters is a book worth everyone’s notice.

The story involves a very long and unusual summer for a gang of young women at a summer camp where mythical beasts roam and time works at its own pace. It is full of both epic danger and mundane camp stuff, where we might see our heroines fighting a creature from Greek myth one volume, and play a board game of their own making in another. For them, this time-warping summer camp experience is an extended exercise in facing the many challenges of burgeoning adulthood, where growing together matters more than growing up.

Throughout the Lumberjanes is a strong commitment to representation, and this book really delivers there. Just about every reader can easily see themselves in Lumberjanes, which is a feature, not a bug. Even though the stories themselves can hit a kind of rut without any real stakes or advancement of characters or meta-plot (this was especially the case once Stevenson moved off the book), the fact remains that this is a story that provides a much-needed presence in the world of graphic storytelling. You’re not going to find many books this overwhelmingly positive, especially to any dimension of diversity within the audience, and in a comics scene that so often meets diversity kicking and screaming, Lumberjanes' steadfast embrace of our differences really matters. There are more than a few books that feel cut from the Lumberjanes cloth nowadays, but one imagines they wouldn’t be around if not for Lumberjanes themselves. And you know what? We’re all better for it. Whether you like this book or not, you must respect it, and that is no small thing.