The sharpest political mind in southeastern Michigan belongs to a 15-year-old girl named Sadia. She’s not old enough to vote, nor is she a citizen—and neither are her parents. Plus she’s superbusy. She’s got school, and then because, birth order-wise, she sits somewhere in the middle of a gaggle of kids, some of whom have kids of their own, she spends a great deal of time caring for infant nieces and nephews, as she would if she hadn’t left Bangladesh for the Banglatown neighborhood of Detroit at the age of eight.
Then she jumped to neighborhood news. “Did you know that just the next block over a man was shot in the face?” she asked. “And then a couple of days later a girl down [on her street] was attacked and nearly raped. A Bengali girl!”
“That’s why people here don’t vote,” she said finally. “It doesn’t do any good. Nothing ever changes. No one listens to us.”
Our cover image this week is by the Montreal-based illustrator and (former) comics creator Julie Doucet. We’ve excerpted an interview from my new book on her oeuvre—Sweet Little Cunt (Uncivilized Books)—for the issue, which coincides with the release of Drawn & Quarterly’s compendium of her work, Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet. I hope to see you tonight out at Quimby’s, where cartoonist John Porcellino and I will discuss her groundbreaking work.
