From a Miami comic-book convention to a Christian men’s retreat in Georgia, from an elite New Age wellness center to a BDSM dungeon in Manhattan, Origin Story follows one gay man’s quest to determine the nature of healing and the price we pay for it. Peter Edelman, a progressive Jewish activist, and his partner, fashion photographer Julian Selkirk, must navigate Peter’s first long-term relationship against the backdrop of late-1990s New York City sexual politics. While working in a transitional home for at-risk youth, Peter collaborates with a teenage bi-gendered artist on a gay superhero comic with themes echoing his own long-repressed traumatic memories.
Jendi Reiter's Origin Story is a carefully created and curated mix of genres and perspectives: diaries, poetry, comics, interviews, emails. All that fragmentation conceals, and reveals, the multiple selves, and one self, of trauma. The everyday superhero who emerges from behind those broken Clark Kent glasses is one who sometimes rescues others, but who is bravest when he is able to look back at the past, and to love anyway. -Noah Berlatsky, author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peters Comics (Rutgers UP)
ISBN 9798987954157
2024
$25 Kindle $7.99
Origin Story