The best kinds of satire usually skirt the lines between funny and horrible, and Boys Weekend certainly falls into this category. It's about Sammie, a newly out trans person who has been asked by her old friend Adam to be his "best man."
As you might glean from this excerpt, Adam does not know about this change. Moreover, he certainly does not know how to deal with Sammie's new reality, nor do the even more clueless members of his groom's party. Still, all of them embark on a weekend trip to El Campo, an island resort where you can get away with way more than you can in Las Vegas, especially in the even more libertarian near-future when this book is set. For instance, they have an attraction where you can clone yourself and then go all "Most Dangerous Game," hunt it down and kill it.
Complicating matters even further from the incredibly cringe-worthy bachelor party is the rash of bloody murders happening in El Campo, and everything devolves into a disastrous survival situation more reminiscent of a horror movie than a weekend getaway. What makes this book work is that the horror stakes are real, the humor is sharp and topical, and the contemporary concerns about gender politics and discrimination are prominent. Boys Weekend is brutal, biting, and hilarious, a satiric parable for our times.
Mattie Lubchansky is a self-called "Award-Winning Transsexual Comics Idiot." She has a long history with making funny, political comics, from being an editor of the Eisner Award winning website The Nib to creating scores of comics for that venue to her own graphic novels, such as The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook. She speaks about her work on Boys Weekend in this interview.
The reviews I have read about this book have been mainly positive. Michael Kurt wrote, "It’s funny, deeply insightful, and even more wild than you’d expect for a story about a hedonistic future-tech-Vegas." Sylvie Rosokoff opined, "Lubchansky’s razor-sharp satire, eerie sci-fi sensibility, and distinctive illustration style make Boys Weekend the perfect mix of darkness and light." Kirkus Reviews found it a bit clunky in parts and summed up, "An uneven but undeniably original adventure."
Boys Weekend was published by Pantheon Graphic Library, and they offer a preview and more here. Because of adult humor and gore, I recommend this book for more mature readers.