There's no big coming-out scene, no "convert the lone homophobe" drama, no storyline cooked up just to educate the reader about the gay experience. (Not that he'd have much luck if he did Ukazu has made him about 5'4", with a turned-up nose and eyes like dinner plates.) Bitty bakes pies, sings Beyoncé in the shower and says things like, "Goodness gracious!" And his teammates are fine with that. Even though the onetime figure-skating champion has found himself on a hockey team, he doesn't feel the need to put up a macho front to blend in. Protagonist and narrator Eric "Bitty" Bittle, a gay college freshman, is comfortable in his skin in a way that was impossible to imagine just a few years ago. Check, Please! is very much a thing of our time in its approach to gay identity and romance. The moment it preserves is partly cultural. But its quality of suspended animation - of a moment preserved in quivering perfection - gives this comic a tension, and thus an interest, more compelling than its happy-go-lucky façade suggests.
Its story of a college hockey team isn't particularly gripping or dramatic, though there are many flashes of joy. Ngozi Ukazu's comic levitates and drifts insouciantly, belying the massive forces of temperature and pressure that must be held in balance for it to exist.
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