The Pervert is an unflinching graphic novel written by Michelle Perez and illustrated by Remy Boydell. Published by Image Comics, it follows Felina, a young transgender woman navigating sex work, economic insecurity, relationships and gender transition. It draws on Perez’s own experiences, and is a frank account of sex work that neither glamorises nor demonises either the work or its participants.
The book grew out of a series of short comics originally published in Island, a comics anthology edited by Brandon Graham and Emma Ríos. Rather than presenting a single continuous narrative, Perez and Boydell constructed The Pervert from interconnected episodes, each standing on its own while gradually building a larger portrait of Felina’s life. The stories are also deliberately presented out of chronological order, resisting the conventional ‘reveal’ structure often associated with trans narratives.
Boydell drew the characters as stylised anthropomorphic animals, with Felina’s shaggy canine appearance recalling the visual language of classic newspaper cartoons. The apparent simplicity of the figures contrasts strikingly with the subjects being addressed – sex, violence, loneliness, depression, financial desperation, transition, and the constant negotiation between intimacy and personal safety. The animal renditions create a degree of emotional distance, allowing the reader to encounter difficult material without reducing the protagonist simply to her trauma.
The artwork is painted in watercolour, with soft, often muted washes and carefully composed backgrounds that give the book a distinctive dreamlike quality. The regular six-panel grid provides a calm, restrained framework for Perez’s stark dialogue and Boydell’s expressive imagery. Moments of bleakness and vulnerability are balanced by dry, sometimes very dark humour.
The book’s unusual structure was influenced in part by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s Fell, whose self-contained episodes provided a model for telling an overarching story through shorter pieces.
When The Pervert stories appeared in Island, around a third of the eventual book had appeared before Island ended. Image Comics subsequently collected the complete work as a full-colour original graphic novel, published in April 2018. It was Boydell’s debut graphic novel and Perez’s first book-length comics work. The book received several nominations including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Lambda Award.
The Pervert is a tight collaboration between Remy Boydell and writer Michelle Perez, and draws on both of their personal experiences, Boydell as an AFAB (assigned female at birth) trans man and Perez as an AMAB (assigned male at birth) trans woman. Perez grew up in the American Midwest, spending her childhood in Michigan, and later moved to Seattle, Washington. Her time spent living and navigating a trans life there provides the direct, raw inspiration for the novel’s setting.
When asked how they started working together, Boydell explains that he liked how angry Michelle was all the time. He approached Perez after they had done a little script work together, wanting her help to do a really strong pitch for a strip for Vice magazine. That didn’t pan out, so they went their own route and ran it at Zeal, and the response was great. The pair later went on to date, a development that neatly mirrors some of Felina’s more positive experiences.
We have included here the first sixty pages of The Pervert – for the rest go and buy this remarkable book.
When The Pervert was published, Alex Dueben from Smash Pages interviewed Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez. You can read the whole piece here; we have extracted some of the most interesting responses.
Michelle Perez The book is deeply personal, adapting stuff that happened to me in my life, and still sorta happening?
Remy Boydell It’s very much a ‘first book’, but I’d say it holds up. It’s very personal for Michelle, but I think I managed to balance out the harsher bits with the art direction. The writing is good, so it doesn’t matter that I was still finding my feet art-wise.
Remy Boydell I think a lot of the book has a cinematic feeling, and we wanted to get weird with it. If anyone’s struggling with the characters, take the script, act it out in front of your webcam, and take shots while you act it out gesturally. My flatmate knows a bunch about acting, so I dressed her up in a business shirt and made her act out the whole ‘big red dog boss’ scene. Helped like crazy.
Michelle Perez The structure was us sharing ideas about shows we had watched, and experiences we had, and what we both liked in comics. I ended up learning a lot about Remy simply by talking about comic books we enjoyed, and artists we love. We kept in constant contact through email and DM.
Remy Boydell Michelle would write a first draft, then I’d go through and read it a few times. Once I’d read it enough, I’d go through the text file and write [PAGE ONE], [PAGE TWO] etc, to divide it up across the pages I’d draw. We usually hit about fifteen pages per chapter, but I just had to feel out whatever felt appropriate in pacing. I’d ask for her to sign off on revisions, since I remember there were way too many scenes with the character smoking thoughtfully. That was the main thing I ended up cutting. I’d then take the group of pages for the chapter through the rough pencil, tight pencil, ink and painting stages. My rough pencils are impossible to ‘read’, so I usually just photographed them once they got to tight pencil stage. I had a lot of freedom with the visuals, so I didn’t get them sent back for changes on this project. All in all, with that method I ended up doing fifteen pages per ten-day period, start to finish.
Michelle Perez For the writing portion, Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s Fell was what I wanted to steal a bit from. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a sort of procedural inspired comic, where each issue can be read on its own and you get the story. We structured The Pervert the same way, given it was going in an anthology. If you stick with the long haul it’s an overarching story, but each segment was written to work on its own.
Michelle Perez That said, they’re told out of order. The idea there was to have a really vague idea about our lead, their headspace, and what we learn about our lead. The thing about a trans narrative is this sort of reveal that is so often inherent. We took the piss out of that really quick.
Remy Boydell The first three pages were made purely in anger. Michelle because I’d sent her first script back to her with some dismissive commentary, me because I felt like I’d been snubbed randomly by a friend at a music event that day. I did the whole thing in one sitting. We kept the other stuff in line with the first chapter since it felt ‘pure’ when it came out. I didn’t care about the other 157 pages as much as those first three.
