Jen Lee's comic encapsulates the nuance of change

SIHANYA ROCHA

Mercury Staff

As cliché as it sounds, a breakup is just one of those falling outs that hit differently, and no other work captures the awkward transition of moving on from that person and that life you had together like Jen Lee’s “At The Edge Of The Stream At Dust.”

To summarize, “At the Edge of the Stream at Dusk” is a bittersweet memoir about how Lee started her career in animation after the unexpected breakup of an almost decadelong relationship. She ends up moving across the country, from her rural life in Idaho to Los Angeles, and starts a career in the animation industry. Throughout this move, she navigates the highs and lows of transitioning from one phase of life to another.

While at first the premise of this comic might not seem exciting, the visuals and color palette the author chooses to go with it are more than interesting enough to compel a reader to continue. To start, Lee has an interesting way of using black and white as negative space to separate memories from the past and from reflections on things in the present. This also allows her some freedom with where she chooses to have panels, speech bubbles or unbordered sentences on the page. The color palette of “At the Edge of silent and secluded. Eventually, those were locked as well. After the rooms were locked, I emailed student services, asking about unlocking the rooms. I figured I was paying tuition to use campus facilities, so they shouldn't be locked. Student Services cited COVID as their reasoning for locking the doors, which I think was silly as I very rarely brought a guest (my roommate) with me.”

Ben Wise, a senior vVisual and pPerforming aArts studentsenior, is part of multiple musical ensembles here at UTD. However, he has had major issues finding practice spaces for Novis, his a cappella group, which is not course-affiliated. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice rooms in AH2 were open to all UTD students. Now, only music majors or those in a musical ensemble can access them, and even this requires students to sign up for a COVID-19 safety training.

As previously mentioned, last semester, the justification for closing the practice rooms last semester was the COVID-19 risk-, but at this point, that seems like a non-issue. It is true that a lot of practice rooms are not well ventilated. However, campus is now completely re-opened, and UTD is clearly confident enough in its contact tracing given activities have started back up. And, as Ben Wise pointed out when we spoke, at the same time that practice rooms were closed, “people were allowed to go to the gym unmasked.”

Practice rooms may be poorly ventilated, but they get exponentially less foot traffic. So why continue to gatekeep access?