'Manya' and AIDS: a departure for comics.

• Author: Geigel, Jennifer
• Position: Comic book character in third book written by Jen Benka and Kris Dresen

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

When I first met Manya, she had just discovered the pleasures of pants. Six years and 6,000 cups of coffee later, the comic character's third book has hit newsstands across the country. A young woman in her twenties, Manya works at a bookstore, goes on blind dates, shovels snow, refuses to pluck her eyebrows, and is now dealing with losing a friend to AIDS.

The brainchild of Milwaukee writer Jen Benka and Chicago illustrator Kris Dresen, Manya is making waves in the independent comic publishing scene. A shortage of realistic female comic characters in the comic industry led Benka and Dresen to create Manya.

The duo's latest offering, Falling, addresses the issue of AIDS from the perspective of a female character who is grieving the loss of her friend.

Manya experiences a series of complex emotions after her friend Paul dies: "I'm dizzy, spinning round and round . . . I am staring at a solar eclipse. I am scared to death. How can I redirect my fear as quickly as a right-hand turn, to angle away from the edges of sharp and haunting memories?"

Benka decided to write the book after her friend Christopher Fons died. She had become close to Fons through their abortion-rights activism during the summer of 1992, when Missionaries to the Preborn and other anti-abortion forces targeted Milwaukee. When Fons died of AIDS complications brought on by cryptosporidium in Milwaukee's water...