Let’s welcome autumn
Cartoonist: Tess Fowler-Gutierrez
Publisher: Self-published
Publication date: January 2026
The title of Tess Fowler-Guterres’ new book, “Take the Fall,” has a double meaning. It is about accepting falls due to negligence and harm, and seeing falls openly and clearly with others as a risk of living with hurt. That’s also a way to summarize the narrative arc of this memoir.
To talk about Tess Fowler-Gutierrez is to talk about the industry around her. Or, in fact, a harassment campaign that has mutated and morphed into something grotesque over the past decade. Much has been written about Gamergate and Comicsgate and how these grown ass men (and their tokens) made it their lifelong mission to keep geek culture catering to the needs of white cishet men. I’m not going to summarize it here.
In fact, I hate the fact that the things men my father’s age say about her continue to overshadow her life’s work. It ends up ceding power and agency to a group of people who are, simply put, creatively bankrupt and extremely unwell weirdos who expect the world to continue to lie to them about both. They have already taken so much from the culture and I refuse to let them control it any more.
Take the Fall is a memoir about a woman battling cancer and what it means in her life. If you’re expecting a sordid tell-all about how she dealt with the harassment and violence she received from a small group of bastards and their followers, this isn’t that book.
Take the Fall is first and foremost human. I emphasize this because Tess Fowler-Gutierrez has been out of the public eye for years. She became a symbol of harassment campaigns and an object of sympathy for the larger comics community. None of these labels focus on her humanity.
She writes about cancer, but it’s not just cancer. Because nothing in our life happens without happening. There is a part of us that has been yelled at, traumatized, and disappointed, and we carry that with us. There is a part of us that is ashamed of how hard we work to be loved and supported. These truths are illustrated in dreamy watercolors and pens that perfectly fit the book’s stream-of-consciousness structure.
The way we interact with ourselves is non-linear, moving back and forth in chronological order, and Take The Fall perfectly illustrates that. Conversations about medical procedures are never just about medical procedures, and conversations about comic conventions are never just about comic conventions. Little memories and traumas creep in and pop up. As Fowler-Gutierrez described her adolescent self, a part of us tends to lash out and hate ourselves for allowing ourselves to be hurt, rather than the people who hurt us.
Not to get too personal, but even love itself is made up of ghosts of people we loved in the past, whether we like to admit it or not. Many people don’t. The skeleton in the closet was once flesh and blood, but time has eaten away at the flesh and it has become rotten. The pain of knowing someone gave you good advice, sometimes with good reason at first, while doing you deep damage, is a cognitive dissonance that you get better at dealing with as you get older, but is practically nuclear when you’re young.
Each topic in Take The Fall is treated with the kind of careful language you would expect from a conversation with yourself. They are scattered without modification, but somehow they all make sense.
Take The Fall is sharp in the ways that good memoirs tend to be. It can only come from raw, real emotion. There were a few quotes that stuck with me, but the passages about Fowler’s feelings and memories of being wanted by a man and the effect it had on her psyche were the ones that made me close the book and reflect. I had to catch my breath when I started recalling memories of myself as an unfortunately attractive young girl interacting with adult men in a den of wolves. My relationships with people touching my body, loud noises, late lesbian awakening, and being alone in close proximity to men changed radically during my teenage years.
This is a memoir that is attracting attention this year. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest content that warns about depictions of sexual violence, medical gore, and domestic violence.
Take the Fall by Tess Fowler Gutierrez is now available directly from the author
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