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Date Me is a collection of comics that tells stories of dating in a wheelchair, social situations sculpted by people's response to a wheelchair, and the struggle of trying to fit in from a different perspective.
About the author
Kristin Beale is a Richmond, Virginia native and the author of Greater Things, her story of surviving and overcoming an accident at the age of 14. Her drawings can be found on scrap paper, old receipts, and hanging on the garage wall of her house.
Summary
Date Me is a collection of comics that tells stories of dating in a wheelchair, social situations sculpted by people’s response to a wheelchair, and the struggle of trying to fit in from a different perspective.
Additional text
This vulnerable collection of single page gag comics centers on the author’s experience online dating as a disabled single woman. Beale writes that there are three things she’ll never turn down: “A date with a boy, a kiss on my face and a sugar cookie.” Yet on two different occasions she deletes the dating app from her phone, and on another celebrates when her date cancels. The endless string of mediocre dinners and coffees with men she never sees again will be familiar to many, and the casual cruelty she encounters—being rejected after disclosing her wheelchair, one man laughing in her face when she shares plans to stay celibate until marriage, snarky comments about her legs—are recorded deadpan. Pages often end with Beale gazing into the camera, a tear drawn on one cheek, silently asking the reader to bear witness to her trials. The stick-figure drawing style becomes visually repetitive, with characters facing off casually in six-panel grids without backgrounds, serving to emphasize the bland interchangeability of the men from these dozens of dates. Beale effectively relates the superficiality of casual dating, but the brevity of the stories leaves the reader similarly stuck in the mundanity of anonymous meet-ups that she’s trying to escape. Agent: David Hancock. (Sept.)
