I Thought You Hated Me

I Thought You Hated Me is a 35-year story of a friendship between the author and a slightly older girl who bullies her at first.  It starts in 1981, when the author's only friend (Harmony) introduces her to Mirabai, who makes fun of her bell bottoms and lack of athleticism.  As they grow older, Mirabai buys the author her first cigarettes, and the author is jealous as boys fall in love with Mirabai instead of her.  Then comes a revelation from Harmony and Mirabai that they didn't like the author when they were all girls but that they liked her in middle school and later.  The comic then follows their sporadic friendship into adulthood.

There's a lot to read into this book, which touches on themes of body image, childhood trauma, and the complicated nature of pre-adult and even adult friendships.  We don't always really like our friends, to put it bluntly.  J.D. Salinger illustrates this perfectly in The Catcher in the Rye.  Holder Caulfield's two best friends at school are his roommates, Ward Stradlater and Robert Ackley, and although he does his best to socialize with them, he envisions a bleak future where his only friendships are of a shallow nature, like those with Stradlater and Ackley.

Again, I've loved every Retrofit comic I've read, and I always look forward to getting new comics in the mail, although I Thought You Hated Me and the other comics are available on smile.amazon.com and the like.  I Thought You Hated Me doesn't quite have the sharp edge of some of the other titles on Retrofit, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  My first two comics on Retrofit were Drawn Onward and Ikebana, and the last title I read on that publisher is We All Wish for Deadly Force, so I gained a false predilection toward titles like that, related to the publisher.  This is a fun story with some darkness but without any mental illness or the like.