A Review of Vivek Shraya’s Death Threat (Arsenal Pulp, 2019)

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A Review of Vivek Shraya’s Death Threat (Arsenal Pulp, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



So, I’ve been a fan of Vivek Shraya’s work for awhile, having reviewed a couple of previous publications. I was totally enthused to see that he’d come out with a collaborative graphic narrative. I use the phrase collaborative because Shraya’s written this work, but it is illustrated by Ness Lee and it’s colored by two other artists. Let’s let the official page over at Arsenal Pulp provide us with a pithy description:

“In the fall of 2017, the acclaimed writer and musician Vivek Shraya began receiving vivid and disturbing transphobic hate mail from a stranger. Celebrated artist Ness Lee brings these letters and Shraya's responses to them to startling life in Death Threat, a comic book that, by its existence, becomes a compelling act of resistance. Using satire and surrealism, Death Threat is an unflinching portrayal of violent harassment from the perspective of both the perpetrator and the target, illustrating the dangers of online accessibility, and the ease with which vitriolic hatred can be spread digitally.”

I thought long about Shraya’s choice of title because the death threat is something that creates a terrain of ominous uncertainty. Indeed, the transphobic hate mail that Shraya received was a form of a death: that is, the message that Shraya continually received was that she was not female and that she should engage in a kind of curative ritual to return her to her supposed true state of being male. In this sense, the author of that message was advocating for a form of death: Shraya would not be able to claim her gender identity and lose a part of herself in the process. Naturally, Shraya is disturbed by this message to the point where she decides she has to write about it; she approaches Ness Lee, the artist of the collection, to produce the graphic narrative. In this way, Death Threat has a meta-narrative component, as readers get a chance to see the difficulties of putting the work together. One of Shraya’s major points in this process is to see how the artistic production does something else, transforms something like hate into a productive aesthetic object. The compelling ending sequence repeats an earlier set of panels, while providing readers with an open-ended conclusion, suggesting that the metamorphosis was not about returning to a “true” or biological notion of sex but rather to engage the process of this transphobia and turn it on its head, to remake it anew, and in the process, assert the right to define one’s own gender identity. In this sense, Shraya’s work speaks powerfully in this moment of continued violence toward what is considered the non-normative, strange, and ultimately queer. We have a long way to go but we can appreciate works such as Death Threat as a vigilant response and an inspiring engagement with the brutalities of hatred. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also discuss Ness Lee’s stunning panels, many of which have a speculative component to them, certainly inspired by a kind of spiritual ambience. Lee’s character avatars are malleable, giving someone like Shraya a flexibility that enhances themes such as gender fluidity, trans discourses, and boundary breaking, that are all part and parcel of this work. The colors are also vibrant and spark off the page. Death Threat is certainly a wonderful graphic narrative, especially one that will pair well with something like Elisha Lim’s 100 Crushes, which unfortunately already looks like is out of print, and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim!

Buy the Book Here:

https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/D/Death-Threat

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez
If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

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