Let's Peel
Spinning
Created by
PERFECT if
Perfect if you want to feel adolescence unfold in slow pirouettes, tracing queerness, discipline, and loneliness without ever raising its voice.
Style / Atmosphere
Soft pencil edges, pale lavender wash. Walden’s world glides — half-dream, half-ice-rink — where motion becomes memory and silence speaks louder than speech.
Synopsis
“Every day was the same. The ice was always cold. The music was always loud. But I was changing.”
Spinning moves like a memory-film with no soundtrack. Walden revisits her years as a competitive figure skater, the long early mornings, the exhaustion, the quiet recognition of first love. Her pages capture what happens between practices — where childhood perfectionism melts into self-knowledge. The panels are wide, breathing; the pace, forgiving. It’s a coming-of-age story that trusts stillness more than confession.
Line Work
Fine ink outlines, cross-hatched restraint, and a cool blue wash give each frame the stillness of archival memory. The geometry comforts and confines — a hand trying to stay steady while remembering trembles.
The pacing
Carefully measured. Each panel holds its breath. Page turns feel like walking through long hallways: you sense the echo before the sound. Time folds in on itself — moments revisited from multiple angles until they align.
The Voice
Bechdel’s narration overlays the images like transparent vellum — analytical, ironic, tender. Text and image never mirror; they negotiate. Where her voice retreats, her drawings lean closer.
From Page
to Screen
Fun Home: A New Broadway Musical (2013, dir. Sam Gold) — a stage adaptation that turns Bechdel’s visual silence into song.
The comic’s symmetrical structure and literary layering influenced how Call Me by Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino) and The Father (2020, dir. Florian Zeller) visualise memory as architecture — intimate rooms echoing with withheld truths.
Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
Spinning
Created by
Style / Atmosphere
Soft pencil edges, pale lavender wash. Walden’s world glides — half-dream, half-ice-rink — where motion becomes memory and silence speaks louder than speech.
Perfect if
Perfect if you want to feel adolescence unfold in slow pirouettes, tracing queerness, discipline, and loneliness without ever raising its voice.
Synopsis
“Every day was the same. The ice was always cold. The music was always loud. But I was changing.”
Spinning moves like a memory-film with no soundtrack. Walden revisits her years as a competitive figure skater, the long early mornings, the exhaustion, the quiet recognition of first love. Her pages capture what happens between practices — where childhood perfectionism melts into self-knowledge. The panels are wide, breathing; the pace, forgiving. It’s a coming-of-age story that trusts stillness more than confession.
Line Work
Loose, airy, deliberately unfinished. Greys and violets blend like early-morning light on ice. The texture wobbles between sketch and control — vulnerability visible in every line.
The pacing
Gentle repetition echoes skating drills: loops, turns, returns. The rhythm is meditative, pages expanding and contracting like breath. Long wordless panels invite you to rest — to hear the scrape of blades and the hum of fluorescent lights.
The Voice
Sparse text, heavy silence. Walden lets gesture and composition carry emotion. When words appear, they land softly, like conversation after hours of thinking. It’s autobiography translated into motion.
From Page
to Screen
Spinning was optioned by A24 in 2018 for a feature adaptation (in development).
Its introspective tempo and quiet queer tenderness echo through films like Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, dir. Céline Sciamma) and Aftersun (2022, dir. Charlotte Wells) — cinema that listens to silence as story.