Synopsis
YU+ME is a story about a girl named Fiona falling in love with a literal dream girl. It’s part high school romance drama, part surrealist thought experiment.
From: YU+ME: Dream
Notes on This Title
This first volume of this series (Vol. 1 of the Omnibus Edition) features problematic portrayals of race, sexuality, and gender. The second volume (Vol. 2 of the Omnibus Edition), however, turns a critical eye to the series’ initial shortcomings and offers a more nuanced discussion of these topics.
Awards
2006 Prism Comics Press Grant
Reviews
“It’s hands-down my favorite queer storyline-based comic. Told in a dream world, the comic’s style constantly changes and alters to fit the panel and chapter. All 847 pages are beautiful and worth the time you’ll spend obsessively reading the entire thing in one sitting.” (Source: Autostraddle)
“Occasionally webcomic stories reach their end, turning into a complete narrative as the creator intended. While these stories don’t have the usual qualities of a regularly updated comic, from time to time you stumble across a comic that’s still hosted in its entirety online, free to view for everyone. Such is the case with the comic YU + ME: dream. Started in 2004 by Artist Megan Rose Gedris just out of high school, it ran until October of 2010, spanning six years and a variety of mediums from start to its eventual finish.
YU+ME: Dream stars Fiona, a struggling outcast at her Catholic School. The story starts as a coming-of-age style narrative: Fiona has to deal with her feelings for the new girl at school, Lia, while handling her indifferent step mother and barely-there father. She meets different friends and people along the way that help her feel like a normal person. The story quickly evolves to something so much bigger, tracking across the entirety of the dreamscape world called Nod.
YU+ME: Dream is a great example of a story flourishing and expanding with time, the art changing and evolving as the creator’s skill grows. It starts off as a simple black-and-white story, turning into full color and then to various mixed mediums, even clay! The variation in the mediums becomes symbolic after a fashion – representing the different planes that Fiona and her companions travel through while she completes her quest. While some would call this execution gimmicky or complain of it being hard to keep track of the different characters, Gedris’s solid character designs allow for seamless transitions between formats near the end of the comics.” (Source: Journal Star)
Interviews
The Most Cake: “Megan Rose Gedris on freelance drawing, naughty comics and Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space“