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Pedro and Me
Graphic Novel Review
Book Released: 06 September 2000
Posted 02 September 2006
Writer: Judd Winick
Artist: Judd Winick
Publisher: Henry Holt
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Calen Cross
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Way back in 1994, I was watching MTV nonstop. My favorite can’t-miss show was The Real World: San Francisco.
I was drawn to one of the housemates, an unknown cartoonist named Judd Winick. You could tell he had talent, just by seeing
the art that was shown on the show. But according to him, and chronicled in Pedro and Me, he was not the most
influential member of the house — it was Pedro Zamora, an HIV positive AIDS educator.
The story recounts Winick’s brief friendship with Zamora. If you watched
Winick uses negative space to focus our attention on important moments.
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the show, you already know
the ending, which makes the graphic novel especially moving and personal; if you have not seen the show, it is still very
moving. It is obvious that this story is very important to Winick, and that comes through in the artwork. You can really tell
which pages he spent the most amount of effort on, as they are the most poignant and heartfelt.
Winick is an excellent artist and storyteller. His style is cartoonish, but can show amazing detail and emotion. Awkward
comedy plays a big part in the story, and Barry Ween even makes a cameo. The
conversations are lighthearted and real, despite the heavy tone of the story, which Winick has really brought to life. When
people cry in this book, you can almost feel the tears splashing off the page. What impressed me most, though, is the way, in
especially important moments, he uses negative space to focus our attention on those moments and etch them into our brains as
pictures of how HIV and AIDS affect individuals. That is the true power of this book — those moments.
Pedro and Me is well worth reading; it is a sad, yet life-affirming book. It opens up an intimate world that the
public did not see on the show, and shows just how much of an impact one person can have on so many lives. The purpose of
The Real World was to show how people from diverse backgrounds acted and felt when they were placed in close quarters
with one another. This theme is reflected in Pedro and Me, and we see that the end results can be positive.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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