Judd Winick, a former cast member of MTV's "The Real World," recalls his friendship with Pedro Zamora, his HIV-positive housemate on the San Francisco show. Winick records their bantering conversations, observes Pedro's frank school lectures on safer sex, and grieves when his friend's health worsens and Pedro dies. The vigorous comic-strip art and pithy text are a good match for the highly visual, documentary style of the television program.

Gr 9 Up-In graphic-novel format, Winick addresses the moral depth of friendship, the molding processes of family, the attention required to discern and pursue a vocation, HIV education, acceptance of gay-identifying youth by themselves and by their families, and the role of death in the human life cycle. The author does a stellar job of marrying image to word to form a flowing narrative. He introduces readers to his own formation as a cartoonist wanna-be, and how he landed a role in MTV's The Real World series in order to live rent-free in San Francisco for six months. Among his television producer-selected roommates was Pedro Zamora, a Cuban immigrant who developed HIV as a teenager. Pedro's response to his diagnosis was to become an HIV educator, traveling around the nation to give informed and inspirational speeches in venues that included schools. Zamora and Winick became close friends after the author's initial trepidation about sharing living space with a gay man infected with the AIDS virus. The role of another of their roommates, a female Asian-American medical student, both in Winick's education and his personal life, is nicely folded into his account. The story continues through Zamora's decline and death to the periods of grieving and grief recovery that followed for Winick, Zamora's family, and his many friends. This is an important book for teens and the adults who care about them. Winick handles his topics with both sensitivity and a thoroughness that rarely coexist so seamlessly.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Winick, part of the 1993 television cast of MTV's Real World, San Francisco, uses his cartoonist skills to take readers back to the house where the show was set and tell the story of fellow cast mate Pedro Zamora, an AIDS educator who died in 1994 from complications related to HIV. Part lesson about AIDS, part biographical sketch, this book differs from the many graphic novels that rely on action drawings or high-octane plotting. It's facial expressions that count most here, and they are Winick's forte as he briefly recalls how he came to the show, his evolving friendship with Zamora, whose background he describes, and his growing understanding of AIDS, which broadened the boundaries of his world. More about the show would have been useful: Winick assumes familiarity with the setup and cast, which some teens may not have. And the resemblance between Winick and Zamora in the artwork (a photo on the jacket does show some likeness in real life) is occasionally disconcerting. Most memorable is Winick's heartfelt description of Zamora's final days (he died at the age of 22), which are described with great tenderness and a keen sense of the loss of a friend.

Cartoonist Winick paints an emotional, graceful portrait of the life of Pedro Zamora, his roommate on the forerunner to today's reality-TV craze, MTV's The Real World . When the seven castmembers first met in San Francisco in early 1994, they knew one of them was HIV-positive, but not which one. Winick soon discovered that it was his chosen roommate, openly gay, Cuban-born Pedro. Wasting little time here on his own initial concerns, Winick delves into some subtle, very effective myth-bashing regarding AIDS and HIV, mostly through the straightforward, ebullient words of Pedro, who was diagnosed when he was 17 and started working as an AIDS educator soon after. Winick leavens the chronicle of Pedro's illness with his romance with—and subsequent on-air marriage to—Sean, Winick's own blossoming love for a fellow castmember, funny injections of camp (" How was I going to say it without saying it?' . . . I could really go for some fruit. Speaking of fruit . . .' "), and a taste of the behind-the-scenes angst of living life in front of a TV audience for six months. The depiction of Pedro's spiral toward death, at the age of 22, is difficult, but ultimately uplifting, to read. The format—a memoir in the form of a graphic novel—is enticing, with images that are effusive and alive on the page and dialogue bubbles full of language spoken in unsparing terms and teaching some urgent lessons. Engrossing, wise, and impossibly brave. (Nonfiction. 12+)