Pedro & Me (Winick)

Pedro & Me: Friendship, Loss & What I Learned, by Judd Winick (2000)

This edition contains a foreword written in 2008, and was published in 2009.

For all my recent complaints about graphic novels, I finally found out that was actually what it was supposed to be, and it's been in a "to be read" pile for years now. Pedro & Me came to me from the Port Chester-Rye Brook Public Library, most likely through a nearby science fiction convention. (That would've been the recently departed Lunacon. Sigh.)

Pedro is Pedro Zemora, who along with Judd Winick (the "Me" of the title) and others, was a part of The Real World: San Francisco in 1994. I didn't watch it, and I had no interest in the series or the ones before it. Frankly, I couldn't tell you the difference between the Real World and, say, Big Brother. But Pedro's story is worth reading.

Judd is a cartoonist from Long Island. He applied for the Real World, and when MTV called, one of the questions they asked was if he'd have a problem with a housemate who was HIV positive. That shook his world a little bit. What shook it more was when he was accepted onto the program and that housemate was his roommate.

What follows are some of the struggles Pedro faced as his illness progressed, and the friendship that was forged. It's wonderfully written and illustrated and makes great use of the medium.

How good is it? It's not a book that I thought I'd be interested in. Not something I thought I would pick up. But I sat in an inner tube in the backyard pool reading it morning after morning. (Okay, full disclosure -- I usually only bring things into the pool that I wouldn't mind losing should it get blown or dropped into the drink.) It was worth reading.

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