It’s warm, inviting, and ultimately an incentive to get through the awkward phases so you can enjoy the good stuff. Bloomis like a freshly baked, golden loaf of sourdough bread. It’s hard work, it’s messy and sticky, and most of the time you’re not really sure how it’s going to turn out. There is a lot of yucky stuff that goes into making a loaf of bread. Ari and Hector’s love story provides the kind of heart-throbbing melodrama the romance-curious reader demands, while sparing them the after-school-specialness that is sometimes imposed on youth who are just beginning to explore their sexuality.

Everyone who has ever had a crush knows that love can make you feel weird and act like a doofus, and young people need models that are both realistic and aspirational. 8 and Mariko Tamaki’s Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me as an Eisner Nominee in the category of “Best Publication for Teens.” Writer Kevin Panetta and artist Savanna Ganucheau have clearly not lost touch with their inner blossoming tween-ager who is excited but maybe a little nervous to begin dating. I think Bloom would be in perfect company alongside Colleen AF Venable’s Kiss No. It takes a summer meet-cute with culinary student Hector for Ari to let go of the future that kid-Ari would think is “cool” and begin to envision a life that would make him genuinely happy. He wants to try and hack it with his garage band in the big city, but his dad has visions of Ari taking over the family bakery in their small, seaside town. He’s inflated with childish ideas of how his adulthood should take shape and feels confined by the expectations of his immigrant parents.

He’s moody and angsty in a way that is generally formless and cannot be contained. It’s a process called ‘proving’ the dough, and that’s where we meet Ari at the beginning of Bloom. Anyone who knows baking knows that part of making a delicious, mature, yeasty loaf of bread is that once the dough has doubled in size, it needs to be knocked back before it can be shaped and baked.

Bloom graphic novel online