Flip

Happy Dawning of 2026! May this year improve on the last. May we improve it. May we stick to our guns and make better things happen. May we work toward a more just and equitable society and a more sustainable, survivable world. 

2025 was politically and socially harrowing. And yet, looking back, it was a good year for book-length comics. I recently contributed a list to The Comics Journal's Best-of-2025 roundup, but, honestly, I'm still catching up on last year's most acclaimed titles. I may never "catch up" fully. Following is a review of a book that should have been on my best-of list but wasn't (I just read it yesterday).

Flipped. By Ngozi Ukazu. First Second, ISBN 978-1250179524 (softcover), 2025. US$18.99. 320 pages.

Ngozi Ukazu's Flip, a YA graphic novel set at a tony prep school, offers a body-swapping story and a complex lesson in empathy. Its plot hook is simple and perhaps obvious, but what Ukazu does with it is anything but. The book is smart, complex, surprising, and, finally, moving: a wonderful novel.

Briefly, Flip follows Chi-Chi, a shy, socially withdrawn Nigerian American Blerd from an impoverished family, and her crush Flip, a popular white jock from a super-wealthy family, as they trade places and learn how to navigate the world as each other. After Chi-Chi invites Flip to the senior prom and he publicly turns her down, her shame precipitates a psychic crisis that somehow triggers their body-swapping, which leads to complicated and embarrassing maneuvers as the two try to play each other's social roles. The body-swapping isn't constant, but comes and goes. Ukazu never explains the mechanisms of this; the body-swapping has no pseudoscientific or magical root cause. But there are rules, of a sort, one of which is that each period of body-swapping seems to last twice as long as before. Chi-Chi and Flip are terrified that the swapping may eventually become permanent. The two develop a deeper understanding of each other, not only because of the body-swapping but because they have to work together. Chi-Chi experiences Flip's crumbling family and deep depression; Flip experiences Chi-Chi's self-hatred and unquenchable longing to be someone else. For both, self-love requires looking at the world through the other's eyes.  

This may sound obvious, even platitudinous, but Ukazu avoids crude signposting. She lets every character develop complexly, not according to received generalizations about privilege or race but out of their own circumstances. Necessary points about Blackness and whiteness, about social ostracism, structural disadvantage, and envy, become earned insights as Ukazu pits the two characters against each other. Provocatively, there are many moments in the book at which the actual identity of the characters (who is speaking, from what POV?) becomes indistinct or ambiguous. As Chi-Chi and Flip begin to identify with one another, Ukazu pushes the story further and further, into fascinating tangles. The conclusion, which redefines the two leads, is affecting and tonally complex: affirming, yes, but surprising almost to the very end.  

Ukazu's brilliant writing and delightful, elastic cartooning are, above all, socially astute: alive to the interworking of personalities and groups, to social complications, to hierarchies and compensatory habits. Each named character, not just Chi-Chi and Flip, navigates the world differently, and grows more distinct and interesting as the story progresses. There's a remarkable scene in which Flip's ex, a conventionally beautiful alpha girl, asks him to the prom, only to be rejected by Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, who is spurred on by jealousy. There's a great scene in which Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, braids Chi-Chi's, or for the moment Flip's, hair. This is somehow both tense and encouraging. And then there's the stunning scene in which Flip, in Chi-Chi's body, confronts Chi-Chi about her own self-loathing. Complexities like these, delightful and confounding, mark the novel from start to finish.

In short, this is a great book! Ukazu's character-writing is remarkably sensitive, her pages lively and dynamic, and her use of visual metaphors tricky and smart. Flip is the kind of book that certain readers will embrace devotedly, and it's likely to be remembered as a watershed. It's that good.

Panel from a minicomic promoting FLIP, posted to Instagram in Nov. 2025.

PS. I'll be using this comic in my upcoming Introduction to Popular Culture Studies course, not only because of the social complications it lays bare but also because of its loving, expert treatment of Kpop fandom. Chi-Chi and her BFFs Yesenia and Esther are passionate fans of a Kpop boy band called BGBB, and that's crucial to the plot (for one thing, the climax involves going to a BGBB concert). Flip has a lot to say about pop fandom as an outlet and expressive practice, the value of a shared nerddom for young women of color, and the ways that fandoms can either reinforce or break down social divisions. I'll teach it alongside Kpop Demon Hunters​... (stay tuned).