By Mary Ann Zehr, contributor
A monthly column in 2025 by a local teacher and reader about connecting with books and taking in Harrisonburg’s literary scene.
~Brosi, Eagle Valiant. Black Cohosh. Drawn & Quarterly, 2025.~
School kids relentlessly bully Eagle, the protagonist in a debut graphic memoir, Black Cohosh, created by a local comic artist, Eagle Valiant Brosi.
Eagle has a speech impediment, so he can’t fight back in spoken words against the bullies. The speech balloons pointing to Eagle contain only illegible pictorial characters. Presumably, Eagle is making sounds, but the people on the page constantly respond that they can’t understand what he’s saying. It has got to be frustrating.
The young Eagle has a talent for making comics and he draws a comic at school intended to put one of the bullies in his place. This comic is off-color and while it might be fitting for a late-night comedy show (or graphic memoir about coming of age), it isn’t appropriate for school.
I have some experience with these kinds of drawings or doodlings by unhappy students from my eight-year stint as a high school teacher. The teachers in the story are clueless about Eagle’s lived experiences at school and why he might have lashed out.
As revealed by his drawings, Eagle is a keen observer of the context around him, including the intentional community where he lives with his parents. Oh, the hypocrisy of idealistic adults! Eagle tells the story of how a couple of community members go on a witch hunt to figure out who discarded a fast food wrapper in the trash. “Bringing fast food here–to this place where we are trying to live intentionally is an act of violence!” one of the accusers says. A community member calls Olive, the person accused of having eaten fast food, the “b” word. Eagle’s mom, Connie, who we come to learn is a compassionate person, says the name-calling is unacceptable. Still, Olive is put out of the community. Too bad that she was the person who worked the hardest of anyone to assist Connie in growing food for the community.
Eagle’s father is also a bully and is seemingly incapable of empathy. Increasingly, Eagle bonds with his mother and separates himself emotionally from his father. A beautiful part of the story–both the words and the pictures–is when Connie takes Eagle on walks and shares with him her knowledge of plants. She introduces him to her favorite plant, black cohosh, which has some properties that women find to be useful for their health. Connie suggests that Eagle could create a comic for a black cohosh superwoman who has a positive impact on the world.
As Eagle comes of age in this story, he increasingly identifies with his mother’s ways of knowing, such as connecting with the earth. Shall we name these ways universally as feminine interpretations of the world? While we can’t decipher what Eagle is saying in the speech balloons, we connect with the feelings of the character of Eagle conveyed in the pictures drawn by Eagle Valiant Brosi.
Like comic artists before him, Brosi has transformed aspects of serious topics–in this case, bullying, negative family dynamics, illness–into humor. Brosi conveys how people can be ridiculous when they aren’t coping well with what life brings their way.
I discovered long-form graphic stories more than a decade ago as a genre for engaging high schoolers in the history or English classroom and also for increasing my understanding of the perspectives of people during their formative years. Graphic memoirs or novels often feature the voices of marginalized people. Human emotions are heightened by the visual elements.
I’ve collected for my personal library the classics of Maus, Persepolis, the March trilogy, The Best We Could Do, American Born Chinese, and Gender Queer. Most of these stories have parts in them that have offended the sensibilities of some readers. They are, after all, graphic. In my view, the insights I gained about different perspectives outweigh a few pages that may have taken me out of my comfort zone.
Gender Queer in particular has been challenged in recent years by people who create lists of books that they would like to see banned from school or public libraries. I purchased the book in 2021 intentionally because it generated some controversy in Harrisonburg. Gender Queer was an important read for me and several other adults to whom I lent the book because it helped us to better understand young people we knew in real life who were questioning their gender.
In all of the comic stories that I’ve named, including Black Cohosh, the main character is trying to make sense of the unwritten rules or cruelty of the world. This act of making sense includes conversations with parents. The books have both autobiographical and fantastical elements. The visuals and fantastical elements seem to play a crucial role for the comic artists to work things out. As we readers follow their journeys, we have the opportunity to stretch our empathy muscles.
Black Cohosh holds its own among some of the classic graphic stories that speak to pain and also resilience. I’m rooting for Eagle, and increasingly as the story unfolds, I feel confident that he is going to be okay.
At 1 pm on Saturday, June 21, Hello Comics Uptown in Charlottesville will host Eagle Valiant Brosi for a signing and launch of Black Cohosh.
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