Cartoonist: Kazimir Lee
Publisher: Top Shelf
Publication Date: April 2025
In Kazimir Lee’s debut graphic novel, a high school freshman named Azar Osman has recently moved to the small Vermont town of Ashford. She and her mom share a duplex with a secretly famous neighbor, the bestselling author of an epic space adventure novel called The Exiles of Overworld. Azar finds a copy of the book while moving into her new home and quickly becomes engrossed. Meanwhile, she’s not getting along with the kids at the local high school, and her relationship with her mother is on shaky ground. As Azar navigates the heroic fantasy of The Exiles of Overworld, she must also find the courage to stand up for herself in reality.
Azar is gay but can’t come out to her family, especially since her mother is having difficulty with her father, a kind and affable man who seems strangely hesitant to leave their old apartment in Brooklyn. Thankfully, Azar finds an ally in her nonbinary teenage neighbor Tristan, as well as their father Shannon, who is avoiding his agent and could use a push in the right direction. While fifteen-year-old Azar attempts to negotiate her life and identity, she learns that the adults in her life are still trying to figure out their own.
The first half of Low Orbit takes place in Vermont. The town of Ashford is markedly pedestrian, from the grungy hallways of its high school to its uninspiring twentieth-century houses. Against the backdrop of utilitarian public buildings and a vast night sky unmitigated by artificial light, it’s easy for the reader to share Azar’s sense of being out of place.
Most of the second half of the story is set in New York City, where Azar and Tristan attend a large fan convention as Shannon’s guest. It’s here that Azar begins to connect with other queer science fiction fans. She takes tentative steps toward friendships whose development is unfortunately cut short by family drama. The Exiles of Overworld is announced for a movie deal, and Azar has to deal with the maladaptive coping mechanisms of both Tristan and their father, whose hidden queer history has given him a complicated relationship with his fiction.
Both of these sections are bookended by dramatic exploration scenes in which Azar moves through spaces that represent her alienation and anxiety. In Ashford, Azar follows her crush from high school into a dead mall on the border of town. While the local teens are happy to kick over furniture while drinking from open bottles, Azar struggles with the unfamiliar environment as she attempts to remain out of sight. Just like the small town’s social scene, the ruins of its former prosperity are treacherous, and Azar’s sense of danger turns out to be justified.
Azar’s unplanned dead mall exploration is echoed by a later scene in which she flees from the fan convention and runs through New York during a rainstorm. The city she was initially happy to see from the train window transforms into an obstacle course of uncaring crowds, flying garbage, and creepy utility access tunnels. Whereas Azar’s fantasies of The Exiles of Overworld are rendered in soft pastels, her real-life adventure in New York is depicted with low-contrast shades of brown and gray. Like Azar, it’s difficult for the reader to see more than a few steps ahead, heightening the sense of panic and helplessness.
While these two spectacular scenes of spatial movement highlight the dynamic range of Kazimir Lee’s art, the true charm of Low Orbit rests in the exquisitely observed details of Azar’s relationship to her family and the places they live. I was struck by the vividness of many of the smaller character moments, from the unselfconscious bluntness of Shannon’s remarks regarding Azar’s Malaysian heritage to the internet-speak of Tristan’s fandom friends to the stark contrast between the work and home life of Azar’s mother Dina.
At the end of Low Orbit, what lingers is the sensitivity with which Lee captures the slow and often painful process of becoming a person. Azar doesn’t find neat resolutions to her problems, and the adults around her remain as flawed as she is. Still, there’s a quiet clarity in how Azar begins to see them as fellow travelers on an uncertain path. Low Orbit is a stunning debut that’s just as fascinating as adolescence itself, and just as full of hard truths and unexpected kinships.
Low Orbit is available now
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