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That Sexy Bear
Not yet published
Expected 7 Jul 26- GenresGraphic Novels
300 pages, Paperback
Expected publication July 7, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Welcome to the National Park. Please Keep Your Hands, Snacks, and Branding Strategies Inside the Vehicle
“That Sexy Bear” turns junk food, livestream logic, and sexy-bear spectacle into a sly formal satire about what happens when even the wilderness has a media team.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 13th, 2026
The sharpest joke in “That Sexy Bear” is the commercial break.
Lin Visel and Joseph Bergin III have made a comic about sponsor reflex, litter, public appetite, influencer sludge, and the old human habit of turning anything alive and visible into a mascot. A dozen topical satires could have filed the same complaint and gone off shift. This one trims scenes to ad length and lets the trim do comic work. Fake ads, promo tags, faux returns from break, park copy, product sludge: the interruptions pile up until they stop reading as garnish and start reading as method. Cascadia Falls has not merely been damaged. It has been packaged for sale.
Pull out that ad-break machinery and you would still have a glib, clever lampoon with a baited title. The bargain-rack version of this comic would give you sexy bears, greedy corporations, slob tourists, a few brisk jokes about content, and a tidy moral aftertaste. Visel and Bergin want something uglier than that. Their park has been turned into a sales surface. It is brochured, streamed, cautioned, discounted, and sold back to visitors as an encounter with nature. Even the warnings have copy attached. Before the mountain can simply be there, it has already been framed.
Inside all that branded static are two bears, Ginger and Yaya, both so acclimatized to tourist life that they have become half animal, half public utility – creatures now expected to perform for the crowd. They are attractions, beer mascots, social-media bait, scavengers in a place where the trash does much of the feeding. Yaya is flourishing, or thinks she is. She likes the sweets, the dumpsters, the easy pickings, the cheap glitter of being ogled. Ginger is out of tune. She is hungry all the time, and the book will not let that hunger stay cute. She keeps eating and stays empty. Her instincts have been retrained by sugar and convenience. Berries take work. Pastries appear.
Eggs, one of the park rangers, is the first person to give that misery a usable shape. He is trying, with the patience of a man employed by a warning sign, to persuade tourists that a national park is not an amusement park with better foliage. He is also the first human in the story to offer Ginger something other than prefabricated fondness – the kind of care that seems always to arrive with an audience nearby. He feeds her salmon and berries. He teaches her to fish. More important, he gives her time with no audience built in. That, not the later market smash-up, is where the book puts its ballast: not in villainy, and not in any grand ecological sermon, but in the humble, faintly awkward tenderness of feeding a creature what her body had forgotten to ask for.
That is the moment when “That Sexy Bear” stops being merely sharp and becomes genuinely good. Ginger tasting fresh food again – and crying because it tastes like childhood – reveals what the book has been storing beneath all its promo chatter. Visel and Bergin understand that a body can lose the shape of its own desire long before it can explain the loss. The comic has first flooded appetite with wrappers, syrup, and instant reward. That is why the salmon scene lands so hard. The stranger thing is not junk food. It is that salmon now feels exotic.
The writing sounds like a world with a logo still stuck to it. Ranger calm bumps against tourist babble. Influencer gush runs into product copy, legal mush, local-news melodrama, and bear slang. Everyone sounds as though they have been speaking too long under fluorescent light. The dialogue is built for interruption because the world it inhabits is built that way too. A sentence barely settles before some slogan, warning, or pitch barges in. That could have made the whole enterprise glib. Instead it gives the pages a distinctive residue – the sound of a park sign arguing with a livestream.
The surprise is that the language occasionally slips the sponsor’s grip and sounds briefly unbought. Eggs speaks in simpler, less logo-smeared lines than the rest of the cast, and Ginger’s speech changes as her appetite changes. Early on she sounds like a mascot with a sweet tooth and no brake pedal. Later she sounds confused, then embarrassed, then cautiously direct. In a book papered with slogans, that shift matters. Ginger starts to sound less like a public image and more like an animal returning to herself. That is the book’s quietest achievement: not simply giving Ginger a better life, but giving her back a grammar that is not entirely sponsored.
The page, though, does the hardest work. “That Sexy Bear” bills itself as a dream of a classic television program airing now, and the retro-TV frame turns out not to be a cute costume but the comic’s governing device. Title cards. Cast cards. Sponsor tags. Faux station breaks. Fake commercials. Livestream overlays. The layout keeps chopping mood into ad-sized bits. Scenes are cut short before feeling can settle. A joke flares, then a sponsor barges in. A quiet beat arrives, and by then the reader has learned to brace for interruption because interruption has become the rule. By the time Ginger starts fishing, even the quiet feels rented.
That is where the comic stops pointing at the culture and starts reproducing its damage. Plenty of satires can gesture toward a world in which everything becomes content. Fewer can make the format itself carry the injury. In that respect, “That Sexy Bear” has a useful kinship with Ling Ma’s “Severance,” another work interested in how a prepackaged culture survives by preserving its routines, though Visel and Bergin are rowdier, rubberier, and much less deadpan. There is also a distant formal relation to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s “Watchmen,” simply in the fact that the embedded media matter. The fake ads here are not garnish. They describe the world that produced them.
They also make the satire meaner. Once the plot turns toward Shuga Bae, livestreams, image rights, metrics, and engineered conflict, the sponsor machine stops being wallpaper and starts moving the plot. A crowd will watch a sexy bear sell a product. A larger crowd will watch a sexy bear fight. Outrage, the book suggests, is not collateral damage. It is premium inventory. The joke is broad. The logic is exact. What the book understands, and many lighter satires do not, is that commodification is not only a matter of ownership. It is a matter of tempo. It decides what gets repeated, what gets cut, what can be felt, and for how long.
Yaya saves the comic from a simpler righteousness. She is not merely the fallen bear to Ginger’s recovering one. She is making a convenience creed sound almost persuasive. Why work for fish when pastries appear fully formed? Why recover some strenuous ancestral bearhood when glampers drop calories at your feet? Yaya is vain, hilarious, foulmouthed, opportunistic, and more defensible than the book always lets her be. She knows, at least instinctively, that degraded systems remain seductive because they are easy. She also exposes a weakness in any too-clean back-to-nature story: once your appetite has been retrained by abundance, recovery may feel less like moral uplift than like hassle. In that sense she is not just Ginger’s foil. She is the book’s bluntest argument for adaptation.
That said, this is where the stitching shows. Too often, the satirical target gives itself up before the scene fully arrives. We know early what the corporations are, what the influencers are, what the fake-natural products are, what the tourists are. The formal frame stays lively, and the gag writing keeps finding local pleasures, but the reader can sometimes see the satirical destination before the page turn. Yaya, too, though fully inhabited and indispensable, gets a little less emotional latitude than Ginger. The book knows what she represents faster than it knows what else she might become. You feel the slackening, but the hull holds.
The ending has the tact not to tidy its own mess. The confrontation at Tartan Market could easily have become a cheap fantasy of purgation: smash the bad institution, cheer, go wild. Visel and Bergin are wiser than that. The market falls. The machinery is exposed. The event is immediately absorbed into the smooth language of news coverage and institutional adjustment. The beer ad disappears; the stewardship pamphlet takes its place. The mascot stays; only the brochure gets rewritten. The same apparatus comes back dressed in softer wording and cleaner copy. The old extraction model survives under gentler nouns. The machine survives by learning manners.
That is one of the book’s best final turns. It does not pretend there is some pristine outside waiting just beyond the parking lot. It knows that once a landscape has been turned into a platform, restoration arrives compromised. Wilderness has been framed as programming before it can become place again. What remains is smaller and harder won: not freedom, exactly, but the right kind of hunger. Ginger does not save the park. She learns, imperfectly, how not to be wholly made by what is easiest, sweetest, and most publicly rewarded.
Again and again, the book circles back to Ginger and Eggs, and rightly so. Their bond is tender, endearingly awkward, and blessedly unheroic. Eggs is not a glowing emblem of human goodness; he is a ranger with a truck, some salmon, a little carved keepsake, and more faith than evidence that someone still has to stand there long enough to notice what the bear actually needs. Ginger is not restored into symbolic tidiness. She is warmer, fuller, less lost, and still living inside a place that keeps trying to sell itself. The sweetness of those scenes comes from their modesty. In a comic arranged around interruption, they offer something nearly indecent by contemporary standards: time that is not already auditioning for attention.
That is why the book lingers. Not because its targets are timely, though they are. Not because it knows about green branding, platform outrage, influencer vanity, or the way tourism can turn a landscape into a backdrop with merch. Many books know those things. What lingers is the way Visel and Bergin keep testing every big claim against teeth, stomach, sleep, and fur. Sugar in the mouth. Fish in the jaws. Warmth in sleep. Even the argument about perception is driven back into the body by the end.
I land at 88/100, which for Goodreads purposes is 4 stars: inventive, formally ambitious, and considerably smarter than its title first lets on. Its central achievement is not that it satirizes content culture, but that it makes content culture the rhythm through which the reader has to move. Its central limitation is that the target occasionally gives itself away a beat too early. But when the book is at full strength – in the fishing scenes, in its ad-poisoned language, in its understanding that convenience can deform desire just as thoroughly as coercion – it is sharper, stranger, and more moving than its premise initially promises.
Under all the nonsense, “That Sexy Bear” has a surprisingly hard little spine. It starts by turning wilderness into a scheduled segment. It ends by imagining a freedom so small it almost sounds ridiculous: a bear warm, fed, and not yet turned into a circulating image, while the mountain waits in the dark beyond the signage.
“That Sexy Bear” turns junk food, livestream logic, and sexy-bear spectacle into a sly formal satire about what happens when even the wilderness has a media team.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 13th, 2026
The sharpest joke in “That Sexy Bear” is the commercial break.
Lin Visel and Joseph Bergin III have made a comic about sponsor reflex, litter, public appetite, influencer sludge, and the old human habit of turning anything alive and visible into a mascot. A dozen topical satires could have filed the same complaint and gone off shift. This one trims scenes to ad length and lets the trim do comic work. Fake ads, promo tags, faux returns from break, park copy, product sludge: the interruptions pile up until they stop reading as garnish and start reading as method. Cascadia Falls has not merely been damaged. It has been packaged for sale.
Pull out that ad-break machinery and you would still have a glib, clever lampoon with a baited title. The bargain-rack version of this comic would give you sexy bears, greedy corporations, slob tourists, a few brisk jokes about content, and a tidy moral aftertaste. Visel and Bergin want something uglier than that. Their park has been turned into a sales surface. It is brochured, streamed, cautioned, discounted, and sold back to visitors as an encounter with nature. Even the warnings have copy attached. Before the mountain can simply be there, it has already been framed.
Inside all that branded static are two bears, Ginger and Yaya, both so acclimatized to tourist life that they have become half animal, half public utility – creatures now expected to perform for the crowd. They are attractions, beer mascots, social-media bait, scavengers in a place where the trash does much of the feeding. Yaya is flourishing, or thinks she is. She likes the sweets, the dumpsters, the easy pickings, the cheap glitter of being ogled. Ginger is out of tune. She is hungry all the time, and the book will not let that hunger stay cute. She keeps eating and stays empty. Her instincts have been retrained by sugar and convenience. Berries take work. Pastries appear.
Eggs, one of the park rangers, is the first person to give that misery a usable shape. He is trying, with the patience of a man employed by a warning sign, to persuade tourists that a national park is not an amusement park with better foliage. He is also the first human in the story to offer Ginger something other than prefabricated fondness – the kind of care that seems always to arrive with an audience nearby. He feeds her salmon and berries. He teaches her to fish. More important, he gives her time with no audience built in. That, not the later market smash-up, is where the book puts its ballast: not in villainy, and not in any grand ecological sermon, but in the humble, faintly awkward tenderness of feeding a creature what her body had forgotten to ask for.
That is the moment when “That Sexy Bear” stops being merely sharp and becomes genuinely good. Ginger tasting fresh food again – and crying because it tastes like childhood – reveals what the book has been storing beneath all its promo chatter. Visel and Bergin understand that a body can lose the shape of its own desire long before it can explain the loss. The comic has first flooded appetite with wrappers, syrup, and instant reward. That is why the salmon scene lands so hard. The stranger thing is not junk food. It is that salmon now feels exotic.
The writing sounds like a world with a logo still stuck to it. Ranger calm bumps against tourist babble. Influencer gush runs into product copy, legal mush, local-news melodrama, and bear slang. Everyone sounds as though they have been speaking too long under fluorescent light. The dialogue is built for interruption because the world it inhabits is built that way too. A sentence barely settles before some slogan, warning, or pitch barges in. That could have made the whole enterprise glib. Instead it gives the pages a distinctive residue – the sound of a park sign arguing with a livestream.
The surprise is that the language occasionally slips the sponsor’s grip and sounds briefly unbought. Eggs speaks in simpler, less logo-smeared lines than the rest of the cast, and Ginger’s speech changes as her appetite changes. Early on she sounds like a mascot with a sweet tooth and no brake pedal. Later she sounds confused, then embarrassed, then cautiously direct. In a book papered with slogans, that shift matters. Ginger starts to sound less like a public image and more like an animal returning to herself. That is the book’s quietest achievement: not simply giving Ginger a better life, but giving her back a grammar that is not entirely sponsored.
The page, though, does the hardest work. “That Sexy Bear” bills itself as a dream of a classic television program airing now, and the retro-TV frame turns out not to be a cute costume but the comic’s governing device. Title cards. Cast cards. Sponsor tags. Faux station breaks. Fake commercials. Livestream overlays. The layout keeps chopping mood into ad-sized bits. Scenes are cut short before feeling can settle. A joke flares, then a sponsor barges in. A quiet beat arrives, and by then the reader has learned to brace for interruption because interruption has become the rule. By the time Ginger starts fishing, even the quiet feels rented.
That is where the comic stops pointing at the culture and starts reproducing its damage. Plenty of satires can gesture toward a world in which everything becomes content. Fewer can make the format itself carry the injury. In that respect, “That Sexy Bear” has a useful kinship with Ling Ma’s “Severance,” another work interested in how a prepackaged culture survives by preserving its routines, though Visel and Bergin are rowdier, rubberier, and much less deadpan. There is also a distant formal relation to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s “Watchmen,” simply in the fact that the embedded media matter. The fake ads here are not garnish. They describe the world that produced them.
They also make the satire meaner. Once the plot turns toward Shuga Bae, livestreams, image rights, metrics, and engineered conflict, the sponsor machine stops being wallpaper and starts moving the plot. A crowd will watch a sexy bear sell a product. A larger crowd will watch a sexy bear fight. Outrage, the book suggests, is not collateral damage. It is premium inventory. The joke is broad. The logic is exact. What the book understands, and many lighter satires do not, is that commodification is not only a matter of ownership. It is a matter of tempo. It decides what gets repeated, what gets cut, what can be felt, and for how long.
Yaya saves the comic from a simpler righteousness. She is not merely the fallen bear to Ginger’s recovering one. She is making a convenience creed sound almost persuasive. Why work for fish when pastries appear fully formed? Why recover some strenuous ancestral bearhood when glampers drop calories at your feet? Yaya is vain, hilarious, foulmouthed, opportunistic, and more defensible than the book always lets her be. She knows, at least instinctively, that degraded systems remain seductive because they are easy. She also exposes a weakness in any too-clean back-to-nature story: once your appetite has been retrained by abundance, recovery may feel less like moral uplift than like hassle. In that sense she is not just Ginger’s foil. She is the book’s bluntest argument for adaptation.
That said, this is where the stitching shows. Too often, the satirical target gives itself up before the scene fully arrives. We know early what the corporations are, what the influencers are, what the fake-natural products are, what the tourists are. The formal frame stays lively, and the gag writing keeps finding local pleasures, but the reader can sometimes see the satirical destination before the page turn. Yaya, too, though fully inhabited and indispensable, gets a little less emotional latitude than Ginger. The book knows what she represents faster than it knows what else she might become. You feel the slackening, but the hull holds.
The ending has the tact not to tidy its own mess. The confrontation at Tartan Market could easily have become a cheap fantasy of purgation: smash the bad institution, cheer, go wild. Visel and Bergin are wiser than that. The market falls. The machinery is exposed. The event is immediately absorbed into the smooth language of news coverage and institutional adjustment. The beer ad disappears; the stewardship pamphlet takes its place. The mascot stays; only the brochure gets rewritten. The same apparatus comes back dressed in softer wording and cleaner copy. The old extraction model survives under gentler nouns. The machine survives by learning manners.
That is one of the book’s best final turns. It does not pretend there is some pristine outside waiting just beyond the parking lot. It knows that once a landscape has been turned into a platform, restoration arrives compromised. Wilderness has been framed as programming before it can become place again. What remains is smaller and harder won: not freedom, exactly, but the right kind of hunger. Ginger does not save the park. She learns, imperfectly, how not to be wholly made by what is easiest, sweetest, and most publicly rewarded.
Again and again, the book circles back to Ginger and Eggs, and rightly so. Their bond is tender, endearingly awkward, and blessedly unheroic. Eggs is not a glowing emblem of human goodness; he is a ranger with a truck, some salmon, a little carved keepsake, and more faith than evidence that someone still has to stand there long enough to notice what the bear actually needs. Ginger is not restored into symbolic tidiness. She is warmer, fuller, less lost, and still living inside a place that keeps trying to sell itself. The sweetness of those scenes comes from their modesty. In a comic arranged around interruption, they offer something nearly indecent by contemporary standards: time that is not already auditioning for attention.
That is why the book lingers. Not because its targets are timely, though they are. Not because it knows about green branding, platform outrage, influencer vanity, or the way tourism can turn a landscape into a backdrop with merch. Many books know those things. What lingers is the way Visel and Bergin keep testing every big claim against teeth, stomach, sleep, and fur. Sugar in the mouth. Fish in the jaws. Warmth in sleep. Even the argument about perception is driven back into the body by the end.
I land at 88/100, which for Goodreads purposes is 4 stars: inventive, formally ambitious, and considerably smarter than its title first lets on. Its central achievement is not that it satirizes content culture, but that it makes content culture the rhythm through which the reader has to move. Its central limitation is that the target occasionally gives itself away a beat too early. But when the book is at full strength – in the fishing scenes, in its ad-poisoned language, in its understanding that convenience can deform desire just as thoroughly as coercion – it is sharper, stranger, and more moving than its premise initially promises.
Under all the nonsense, “That Sexy Bear” has a surprisingly hard little spine. It starts by turning wilderness into a scheduled segment. It ends by imagining a freedom so small it almost sounds ridiculous: a bear warm, fed, and not yet turned into a circulating image, while the mountain waits in the dark beyond the signage.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A short and silly romp with a retro vibe! Owlin's art is great as always, with the added fun of commercial breaks interspersed throughout the story. Some of these breaks included a combination of illustration and photos and added to the atmosphere of the story. The book format is more picture book style, with wide pages and full illustrations of scenery. Despite what the title implies, there is some wholesomeness here too and more of an environmental message than I would have anticipated. Things are kept light and a little surreal while still being on the nose about many of todays issues, like social media, pollution, and corporate greed.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Iron Circus Comics for the digital ARC!
Many thanks to NetGalley and Iron Circus Comics for the digital ARC!
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I LOVED the art style of this! The story was cute as well but the art style is what drew me in and really kept me reading. I also really liked the little commercial breaks in between each chapter. I thought those were hilarious. I would love to read more in this universe, I hope that there are more volumes!
November 26, 2025
NetGalley ARC
What an interesting way to bring attention and provide commentary on ecological and capitalist issues. This book was funny. The choice to present the book as an old-time sitcom, complete with a ton of hokey commercials, was great.
What an interesting way to bring attention and provide commentary on ecological and capitalist issues. This book was funny. The choice to present the book as an old-time sitcom, complete with a ton of hokey commercials, was great.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Totally and completely screwed up.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews