Written and Illustrated by Mattie Lubchansky
Published by Pantheon Graphic Library
Mattie Lubchansky’s Simplicity is ambitious. It is variously a dystopian speculative fiction, a meditation on community and autonomy, a queer utopian fantasy, and a critique of capitalism all rolled into one. The visual style is clean and emotionally expressive; Lubchansky knows how to draw bodies, relationships, and silence just as well as conflict and horror.
Many reviewers have praised the “bright, neat illustration and nimble storytelling” that bring levity and emotional resonance even amidst darker turns.
The premise is compelling. In a near-future United States fragmented by ecological crisis and political collapse, New York City has become a walled “Administrative & Security Territory,” while the exurbs beyond it host experimental communities.
Lucius Pasternak, a trans man and academic, is hired to travel to a commune called Simplicity in the Catskill exurbs to collect oral histories. What begins as a detached anthropological mission becomes a deeper journey — into intimacy, power, betrayal, and the limits of escape.
In many ways, Simplicity delivers. The emotional beats land: Lucius’s tentativeness, his longing, his betrayal, his attempts at repair. The commune’s rhythms — communal labor, group decisions, rituals, even bodily openness and trans embodiment — are rendered with care and thought. The horror elements — creeping violence, forest terror, a monstrous presence — help remind the reader that utopia is always fragile if it’s to survive among hostile forces.
But—and this is where your critique comes in—Simplicity also leans heavily into its ideological framework, to a fault.
I approached the novel believing that a work of speculative fiction should first and foremost tell a story that moves the reader, surprises them, and then allow its themes and politics to emerge organically. In Simplicity, I often felt the balance tipped the other way: the themes of identity politics, queerness, communal critique, and “resistance to capitalist surveillance” sometimes seemed to absorb the story rather than enrich it.
There are moments where characters speak in schematic, metaphorical terms, or where the strict logic of the utopian vision seems to override plausibility. The pacing falters when Lubchansky pauses the plot to insert extended reflections (or visual allegories) about queer safety, trans embodiment, or anti-capitalist futures. There’s little room, at times, for ambiguity or contradictory impulses. The commune’s internal dynamics — disagreements, power plays, moral compromises — are touched on, but often feel subordinate to a higher ideal.
Because of that, the ending (a somewhat ambiguous, semi-apocalyptic confrontation, with the commune recast in the eyes of the outside world as “terrorists” or “queers in robes”) feels less like the culmination of a fully lived narrative arc than a symbolic climax.
Some readers might see this as powerful; to me, it felt like the work of the plot was subjugated to the work of the theme.
I must admit: one of my litmus tests for storytelling is whether I’m left wanting to visit an “ending explained” site.
If I feel compelled to do so, in my mind the work has failed to deliver a fully satisfying narrative on its own. Simplicity came close to that for me. I found myself pausing to ask: What precisely were the stakes here, beyond symbolic ones? Which characters grew? Which ones merely served as mouthpieces for ideological positions? The questions outnumbered the answers.
In contrast, I believe a narrative grounded in characters and emotional arcs can still carry a strong political message without devolving into didacticism.
Some modern writers (and Lubchansky is not alone) lean too heavily on their worldview, assuming that seriousness of purpose justifies stretching the narrative to fit their political lens. But a story should stand on its own, with characters that surprise us and a plot that resolves (or resolves bitingly) in a way that feels earned.
That said, Simplicity is not without value.
Its ambitions are admirable. It pushes the boundaries of queer speculative fiction in a way few works attempt. For readers attuned to queer futures, utopian experiments, or speculative critiques of capitalism, there is much to linger over. Lubchansky’s visual voice is bold and consistent, and there are moments of genuine awe, beauty, and heartbreak.
So my final take: I respect Simplicity and find it thought-provoking, but I don’t find it fully satisfying as a piece of fiction. It sometimes feels more like an ideological sketch than a fleshed-out world.
If you lean toward political or speculative works and enjoy thinking on big themes more than tight plot, you might resonate more than I did.
But for me, a story should stand or fall on characters and narrative as much as on ideas — and this one, in my view, doesn’t quite carry all the weight it sets for itself.
