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Hot Comb

Drawn and Quarterly

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ISBN10: 1770463488
ISBN13: 9781770463486

Paperback

184 Pages

$21.95

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Eisner Award Winner for Best Short Story

Hot Comb
offers a poignant glimpse into black women’s lives and coming-of-age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular “Hot Comb” is about a young girl’s first perm—a doomed ploy to look cool and stop seeming “too white” in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved into. In “Virgin Hair,” taunts of “tender-headed” sting as much as the perm itself. “My Lil Sister Lena” shows the stress of being the only black player on a white softball team. Lena’s hair is the team curio, an object to be touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Throughout Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers re-creates classic magazine ads idealizing women’s need for hair relaxers and products. “Change your hair form to fit your life form” and “Kinks and Koils Forever” call customers from the page.

Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through these stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking. Flowers began drawing comics while earning her Ph.D., and her early mastery of sequential storytelling is nothing short of sublime. Hot Comb is a propitious display of talent from a new cartoonist who has already made her mark.

Reviews

Praise for Hot Comb

“Vivid and resonant . . . In the eight stories of Hot Comb, a mix of autobiography and fiction, the thread throughout is black women’s hair—as a source of intimacy, community and tension.”—The New York Times Book Review

Hot Comb makes itself clear that it’s not about male desire, or male pleasure. It’s about what Black women think: of themselves, of each other, of their communities. They talk to each other while they’re at salons, they braid each others’ hair, they make little refuges from the judgment of the rest of the world . . . Flowers is a remarkable cartooning talent“—Seattle Review of Books

Hot Comb explores the complex relationship between appearance, empowerment, subjugation, and society.”—Bustle

"These complex stories about the ‘ordinary’ lives of black girls, mothers, sisters, aunties, grandmas, nieces, and friends are extraordinary. What Ebony Flowers brings to comics is fresh and absolutely groundbreaking. I’ve been waiting for a book like this forever."—Lynda Barry, author of One Hundred Demons

"[Hot Comb is] rich with both sorrow and celebration as it champions black womanhood and family ties . . . How black hair is treated (literally and symbolically) becomes the lens to explore both oppression and community."Publishers Weekly (starred review)