Reading List: As the Crow Flies

December 6, 2019

As the Crow Flies
by Melanie Gilman

Melanie Gillman’s webcomic about a queer, black teenager who finds herself stranded in a dangerous and unfamiliar place: an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp.

As the crow flies is a way of speech, similar in meaning to the expression beeline and equally inaccurate: it’s a way of indicating the most direct path between two points.

The work originates as a webcomic, but it’s available also in paper form for purchase on Amazon. It was launched on kick-starter and generally praised for the way it approaches the main topic of gender and race integration.

As the journey wears on and the rhetoric wears thin, she can’t help but poke holes in the pious obliviousness of this storied sanctuary with little regard for people like herself . . . or her fellow camper, Sydney.

There’s a beautiful review by Caitlin Rosberg on AVclub, titled As The Crow Flies examines marginalization and how much summer camp can suck in equal measure, which strikes to the point of this book that’s about marginalization from all points of view and discrimination in all ways possible.

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