Sora is a gay high school student, afraid to come out for reasons he doesn't fully understand. He's perfected his façade of heteronormativity, which he pictures as an iron mask that slams into place every time conversations move over to his assumed straightness. But then one day he meets Mr. Amamiya, an openly gay man who runs a small café, and his world changes; Amamiya is the first gay person he's ever met besides himself, and through the older man's friendship and understanding, Sora is able to come to terms with the fact that gay is just as normal as straight and to come out to his childhood best friend Nao, and, most importantly, to fully accept himself.

So many queer stories are framed as being strictly about coming out that it's always a joy to find one where that's a plot point but not the point of the plot. Unsurprisingly (this is the creator of the excellent My Brother’s Husband, among other exceptional works, after all), Gengoroh Tagame is able to cut right to the heart of the matter without getting preachy, making the story about more than just Sora telling people that he's gay. Sora doesn't want people to "understand" him or be sympathetic or anything like that; he just wants them to accept who he is and move on. The point, therefore, isn't that he's telling people, but rather that he's asking for the same basic acceptance accorded to straight people. At one point towards the end of the omnibus volume he thinks, "I don't need understanding. Just acceptance. That's all I want." It's an important distinction – he just wants to be treated as normal, not as someone needing specialized understanding.

That rings very, very true if you fall anywhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum – just wanting people to accept what you tell them and keep on keeping on, rather than launching into a speech about trying to understand or otherwise making it about themselves rather than you and what you've shared. But, as Tagame brilliantly illustrates with an image of Sora standing in front of a series of doors, you never come out just once, and Sora's barely on the first step of living true to himself. That's why it's important that Tagame includes Nao in the story. Being Sora's female childhood friend, people are consistently misinterpreting their closeness to mean that they're dating, up to, and including, Sora's own mother. Nao's part of the story is simply being Sora's ally; she's actively working to learn how to respect him and knows that it's not her story to tell others. Nao contrasts nicely with Sora's mother on this front, because while being Sora's friend comes easily and naturally to Nao (even if it causes some friction with her pal Mizuki, who has a crush on him), Sora's mom struggles to be an open, “cool” mother he can talk to about anything while still burdening him with the weight of her heteronormative expectations. Nao understands, as much as she's able, Sora's sense of social isolation; his mother thinks teasing him about subjects he's not comfortable with or is trying to be serious about is a sign that she's being open with him. She's not unsupportive, but she's also clearly out of her depth, and we can see where Sora gets his need to wear a mask from as she attempts to relate to him.

Mr. Amamiya, the gay man Sora meets by chance, is both a foil to Sora and the other adults in his life and a parallel to him. Openly gay, Amamiya is the first gay man Sora has ever met, and he becomes a father figure to him and a guidepost as Sora figures out how he wants to live his life. Amamiya unreservedly believes in Sora's painting and in his ability to be happy, in part because he sees what might have been in the younger man; Amamiya wasn't able to unapologetically be himself until very late in life. Interestingly enough, he sees his café (which gets very few customers) as being akin to the setting of Peter S. Beagle's 1960 fantasy novel A Fine and Private Place – the novel, Beagle's first (you may know him as the author of The Last Unicorn), takes place in a graveyard, where a man has been quietly living in a mausoleum for two decades, communicating with ghosts and a raven. The protagonist of the novel specifically helps two spirits connect with each other, gaining a chance they lacked in life, with the raven supplying food and information from the world outside the cemetery. The implication is that Amamiya sees himself as Jonathan Rebeck, with Sora and Nao as the two main ghosts in the novel, and helping them to find their way is his personal journey, or at least a step on it. As Jonathan moves on in the book, so does Amamiya in the manga, making him no less ethereal than the spirits themselves even as he gains a new insight into his own life. It's a beautiful use of Beagle's work, and one that hopefully he is aware of.

Our Colors is, all told, a quietly tender, warm, and reassuring book. It doesn't have a conclusive ending, because it's just one step in the characters' lives, and they have a lot more living to do. But having met each other and come to understand themselves and each other better, those steps may now take a slightly different direction, one they can all be happier and more comfortable with. Tagame's art, always reassuringly solid, includes some gorgeous splash pages and powerful images, and that makes up for the occasional stiffness in character movement. We all deserve fine and private places to help us find our way and to help us move into the true colors of our beings. In Our Colors, Tagame shows us why.