Turtle Bread: A Graphic Novel About Baking, Fitting In, and the Power of Friendship

by Fernando Gabriel Sosa

Turtle Bread: A Graphic Novel About Baking, Fitting In, and the Power of Friendship (2023), written by former mental health nurse and Great British Bake Off finalist Kim-Joy, and illustrated by Alti Firmansyah with colors by Joana Lafuente, offers a poignant, highly empathetic, and visually inventive exploration of social anxiety, self-doubt, and the restorative potential of community.

The narrative centers on Yan, a young woman overwhelmed by severe social anxiety, impostor syndrome, and a paralyzing fear of failure. After a job interview goes disastrously wrong due to a panic attack, a chance encounter leads her to join a local baking club at a community center. There, Yan discovers a diverse group of individuals, each navigating their own hidden mental health struggles. What begins as a hesitant attempt to learn a culinary skill soon evolves into a safe haven where baking serves as a backdrop for emotional vulnerability, shared healing, and mutual support. Through structured baking sessions and step-by-step recipes integrated directly into the story, Kim-Joy weaves a delicate balance between practical self-care and graphic medicine, illustrating how creative, hands-on activities can help individuals process trauma, ground themselves during anxiety spikes, and gradually rebuild self-worth.

From a visual humanities perspective, Alti Firmansyah’s dynamic black-and-white inkwork and Joana Lafuente’s warm color palette effectively capture the internal, sensory landscape of panic and recovery. High-anxiety moments are depicted through expressive visual metaphors—such as suffocating shadows, distorted proportions, and physical barriers that isolate Yan from her surroundings. Conversely, the comic cleverly utilizes quiet sequential beats and tactile, step-by-step baking guides to illustrate how the structured, rhythmic nature of kneading dough and measuring ingredients acts as a grounding technique. In Kim-Joy’s storytelling, baking transcends mere culinary instruction; it functions as an accessible, non-verbal therapeutic medium that fosters emotional regulation and interpersonal trust.

Ultimately, Turtle Bread stands out as an empathetic and pedagogically rich contribution to health humanities. By portraying mental health struggles not as individual defects to be instantly cured, but as shared human experiences requiring patience, structure, and compassionate social networks, Kim-Joy and Firmansyah provide clinicians, educators, and readers with a powerful tool for reflection. The graphic novel eloquently argues that recovery is rarely a linear process, but rather a collective practice sustained by patience, trial and error, and the transformative power of human connection.

About the Reviewer

Fernando Gabriel Sosa is an Argentine comics artist, writer, illustrator, graphic designer, animator, filmmaker, researcher, lead artist in videogame production, and cultural manager based in Córdoba, Argentina. Active in comics since 1992, he is the founder of Barricada Cómics and a civil advocate for national comic promotion legislation in Argentina. He serves as an External Consultant for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University, is a member of the National Cartoonists Society (since 2014), and is a member of RING Latam.

His work explores visual storytelling across comics, animation, cinema, music, and interactive media. He is also the creator of Soma Creativo, a personal creative methodology that explores artistic practice as a tool for expression, reflection, learning, and personal development. His long-standing interest in the relationship between visual narratives, psychology, education, and human well-being led to his involvement with Graphic Medicine.