Renderwrx Productions

 Rainy Day Recess:

The Complete Steven’s Comics

By David Kelly

From 1995 to 1998, David Kelly’s “Steven’s Comics” ran in LGBT and alternative newspapers around the country. This comic strip explored the world of a sensitive boy coming of age in the seventies, with all its joys, quirks, and heartbreaks. Rainy Day Recess: The Complete Steven’s Comics collects the entire Xeric-Award-winning series in one volume suitable for young adult and adult readers, with additional material created specially for this collection.

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Review by PD Houston:

Although the material in this book is over 10 years old, having been published serially over the years 1994-1998 in various places, it's comics and message don't feel aged at all. Being a big fan of auto-bio comics I was looking forward to reading this having never come across David Kelly's work before.

David tells stories of his childhood and growing up gay from the point of view of a somewhat fictional character named Steven. Steven like David grew up in a middle class family with a brother and sister and often times dealt with the typical family problems most of us have to deal with. But what makes David's story unique is that he had to deal with all this while at the same time pretending he wasn't gay. Sure this isn't exactly a unique situation anymore, a lot of gay people did the same thing if they were born in the 60's & 70's and before that, but not everyone gets a chance to tell their story in a graphic fiction manner.

Iimagine living a lie every day of your life, it can't be good for a person's, let alone a child's, mental state of being. Reading these stories I felt sympathy for the main character right away. God damn growing up like this had to suck. Obviously after reading these stories, Steven's life isn't all hardship, he's not growing up in a family that's super poor or he doesn't have to tell with any serious tragedy on a day to day basis, but still the fact that you can't be who you really are with the people you are closest to has to be about the hardest thing a person could do. Fortunately for us rather than dwelling sourly on the whole thing, David puts a lot of humor into his life story. It's not the laugh out loud kind of humor, but the kind that keeps a smile on your face the entire time you read the book.

Overall I was pretty surprised by the quality of the early stories, kinda expecting that the first few stories would be rough but would improve as the book went along. But that wasn't the case necessarily. David's story debuted with surprising ability and quality storytelling. The first story about our main character dealing with the anxiety of trying to buy a Wonder Woman doll without being chastised by his brother was great!

From an outsiders perspective I've always loved tragic or troubled comics. Whether it's struggling through sickness, disease, heartbreak, death or growing up gay, there's something to that challenge that if told well make some of my favorite comics. Now after reading Rainy Day Recess in its entirety, I'm not going to say this book is one of my absolute favorite's, but I will say it will be widely recommended by me as it's the kind of book that would appeal to a wider audience. Your normal superhero buying comic fan most likely won't read this book, but if I recommend it to my sister or cousin or another open minded human being that likes to read I bet I could get a more receptive audience.

So while overall I enjoyed this book, the only thing that really stood out for me in a negative manner was that as the book progressed and as Kelly's art got better and better (comparing that first strip to the last is remarkable in how much better Kelly's art improved over the 4 years of publication of this strip) the stories seemed to outgrow the single page format that the comic is done in. I as a reader felt that the stories presented needed to outgrow the single page format and into a longer format of multiple pages. Now Kelly did have many of the stories connected in a continuing format, but considering the way they were originally published they seemed very cut off from each other and distinct in a way not conducive to a serialized reading format.

In the future I hope to see a longer story from Kelly, because while before this book I was unfamiliar with his work, after reading it I would love to see lots more. It's a good book, go read it!