10 Comic Book Issues Guaranteed To Make You Cry

A powerful arc on identity, personal strength and the obstacles against us.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is an often powerful, emotional tale, weaving a story about stories as we follow the main protagonist Dream of the Endless.

However, A Game of You eschews our usual protagonists to instead focus on others, including Barbie, a character who'd appeared briefly in an earlier arc of the series.

A Game of You follows Barbie in her new life, living an entirely new identity and lifestyle in New York, and the various new characters she meets in the block of apartments she lives in now. A pretty diverse cast of characters for a book in the eighties, the most notable inclusion is trans character Wanda.

One of comics few trans characters, we learn a fair amount about Wanda and her history, coming from a home that would not understand her. The story arc in fact discusses identity quite a bit, and its nature and importance to us.

Through the various events that take place over the course of the story, Wanda and Barbie find their home destroyed, but worse than that, Wanda loses her life in the disaster.

Travelling to Wanda's hometown for the funeral, Barbie discovers that her family had gone against her wishes and buried her as a man with her dead name on her grave stone. In a final act of defiance and solidarity for her friend, Barbie writes over the gravestone with Wanda's true name in lipstick.

It's a message of the small acts of defiance and determination that sometimes make up our identities, and how that construct is fragile and can be taken from us - that even the very nature of who we are and our histories can be taken from us - but those families we make in our lives can be our strength.

A Game of You brings the tears for several reasons, which brings a powerful emotional sting to the tale.