For this third installment, I’ve put together a list of comics that address problems of evidence, authenticity, and doubt: who you can trust, when your cute alien design has been replaced by the real thing, and which of your comrades are as treacherous as “activist” celebrities. What threads through these stories is the proliferation of half-truths, knock-offs, and doubles — and an accompanying sinking/creeping feeling. Each piece approaches it differently, but I can wholeheartedly recommend all of them for your 2020 reading.
- Ivy Atoms’s Emotional Support Animal (Diskette Press, 2019)
[Warning for body horror.]
Emotional Support Animal has the look of something you’d find in a preteen’s spiral-bound notebook, before embarrassment has stiffened and limited their visual repertoire into an acceptable vocabulary of references and marks. The characters in ESA have big, wet gooey eyes and non-specific furry faces (rounded snouts, discrete button noses), a lot like some early-internet fanart of Neopets or Sonic. Atoms’s drawings use both soft and hard pencil edges, with the hardest and darkest looking nearly like inks, while the softer edges mess around with background lines and expressive shading. None of it is precious or overwrought, even though the comic emotes constantly and intensely.
In the world of ESA, a tech corporation called Atomcorp sells an assistive technology AI called neuropets that connects by a “vine” to its user’s brain. Our main character, e-girl Bell, feels passionately protective (if also possessive) of her neuropet Bug. This first installment introduces us to them via Bug’s caretaking of Bell: Bug drives Bell to a (turns out, retraumatizing) therapy appointment, runs them a bath after an exhausting social outing, and generally manages their combined life. The plot kicks off when Bell starts flirting online with another neuropet-user, Nor, who’s escaping hospitalization.
The joke of Emotional Support Animal — and also its most interesting thematic problem — is its play on parasitic relationships. When some rando on the street calls Bell a techie parasite, Bug digs up the definition of the concept: “PARASITE. Noun. An organism that lives in or on another species that benefits by deriving nutrients at the other’s expense.” Bell’s reply: “Well, if you’re a parasite, I’m a parasite.” This unresolved double-parasitism remains when the comic leaves the sunny coffee shop and enters the psych ward, the corporate meeting room, the backseat of a neuropet-driven car. In ESA’s world, people and neuropets use each other in ways that can’t necessarily involve consent, and all of that technology is built upon a structure of gentrification, unnoticed labor, and improperly treated trauma.
Atoms’ cartooning is an intricate, stunning thing to look at, for all that it strives to look unaffected. She doesn’t lean on just one page layout, but plays around with grids and zigzags and splash pages — her cartooning is always incredibly adept at simultaneous humor and horror, jokes and genuine pain. What Atoms does so well in this comic is to give us characters the reader can love, whether or not we like them.
2. Adam Szym’s Little Visitor (self-pub 2019)
[Warning for intense body horror violence]
Mockumentary horror is old hat when it comes to movies, maybe even exhausted of some of the things that make it fun. Usually, the device is there to play with distance — the viewer made a part of the scare’s universe, the camera acknowledged as part of the film’s proximity to reality. But the demands of the climactic scares often railroad the story into a set progression. You start with the far-remove of danger (probably some talking head interviews), get closer by steps to the danger, and finally, by the end, have one of the camera-carrying filmmakers get violently attacked.
Little Visitor uses the mockumentary as a narrative device, but blessedly doesn’t track along this path. What it does instead is use the stillness of that far-removed, “tripod” style of looking as a through line and a limit: there are things we see, things we can’t see. And with one violent exception, the comic contains very little on-panel movement. The horror of it is in what we are and aren’t able to turn and see, where we can’t, as readers, follow the relevant parties and find out what happens.
Little Visitor is a fictional documentary interviewing the film crew of a never-completed movie project: a Soviet version of ET. This movie, one character notes, started as a knock-off, but became something of its own. Trouble starts on set when the production designer Anatoly comes up with a design for the friendly alien that everyone adores except for the child actors — one of whom recoils in fear, screaming.
This fear on the part of the children is the key thing that allows Little Visitor to do what so many movies can’t — making the monster scary when you actually see it, in the comic’s final page. The creature’s look is on one hand innocuous, silly-looking, though certainly not endearing as most of the film crew thought. On the other hand, when cuteness is what you are supposed to see, and the thing is not quite right, the dissonance becomes terrifying on its own. The alien, like the movie project itself, is an imitation that comes far too close to being real, so much so that it may actually have been replaced by something else. It’s a reversal of the familiar trope of the double, where what you thought was real is actually synthetic. Here, what’s scary is the idea that the imitation you thought you were looking at is actually the original.
Szym switches out the terror of the knock-off for the terror of the far-too authentic, and his drawings reflect this, with a constrained, high-contrast aesthetic of filled-in blacks, white space, and sparingly-used midtones. His characters are drawn with the slightly plain “realism” that characterizes so much graphic memoir/non-fiction. I like that Little Visitor plays on these ideas of imitation, replacement, and knock-offs, and that it plays them seriously and earnestly. The end suspends you in a horrible moment so effectively that I feel like I’m still in it, days later.
3. Toyoya’s Peach Boy (Paradise Systems, 2019)
Brooklyn-based publishers Paradise Systems has me all-in on their concept of contemporary lianhuanhua — new books using the print format and visual tradition of twentieth-century Chinese comics. Peach Boy by Toyoya is the first entry into that series, and it’s got immediate appeal as a printed object. In my hands, the smallness of it feels satisfying; it’s about the dimensions of my phone, yet substantial enough to feel like a book.
Like Little Visitor, Toyoya’s comic is about uncanny alien substitutions. Scientists take a spaceship out to an unsettling peach-shaped planet, only for one of them to cower and run away. While that scientist is eating their feelings — an opportunity for my favorite thing, cartoon feasts — another touches down on the Peach Planet. Attempting to penetrate the planet’s peach-shell to get to its powerful seed, however, only ends up pulling that scientist into its expansive interior. In a psychedelic sequence involving mind-bending fractals, the planet’s consciousness switches out the scientist’s head with a peach head.
This comic is a fun play on the original Peach Boy story. In the folktale, the boy who pops out of a floating peach grows up to fight demons, raised by human parents; in Toyoya’s version, the Peach consciousness inside the planet invades a (probably) human body, sneakily returning to the space ship and likely to Earth. No one notices anything amiss. (再见!) The cute, natural shape of the peach becomes an uncanny incursion into the setting of outer space. Charming folk hero becomes interplanetary changeling.
The horizontally-oriented pages typically contain single panels, as old lianhuanhua did; here, those single-panel pages are often digital screens loading information or panoramas of outer space. But Peach Boy also cleaves some of its pages into equal parts — thirds, halves, or quarters. That formal decision makes the pages feel less like paneled layouts than cellular division, or even crystalline multiplication. This earlier division-slash-multiplication on the level of the panel helps set up the comic’s later, wilder fractal sequences.
I’m coming to expect these super-tight, super-schematized visuals from Paradise Systems books (Xiang Yata’s Captivity takes a similarly fixed, meticulous conceit in graphite), and I’m coming to love the quiet, searching feeling that each book leaves you with. Somehow, that tightness opens up a thematic obliqueness, allowing a kind of writing that’s a lot less directly available for immediate sense. These books leave you shivering.
4. Ariel Ries’s Cry Wolf Girl (Shortbox, 2019)
I want to read more pink books. Let me start there — I want to read more pink books! And though it’s not pink throughout, this 2019 book from Zainab Akhtar’s indie-press Shortbox is gorgeously shot through with warm colors that all demand jeweled comparisons. In general, I’m growing fond of these middle-length comic stories, around 40–50 pages — shorter and more compressed than a graphic novel, but much more expansive than a minicomic. And, of course, tiny and super-compressed compared to most webcomics, which can run far beyond the thousandth page.
In Cry Wolf Girl, adolescent village girl Dawa tries to tell her elders about the signs she’s seen that wolves are about, though she has little evidence on her side: just a tuft of something that might be white fur. She’s hyper-vigilant for sounds and traces that would substantiate her claims, not just because no one will take her seriously, but because her body feels terror in their maybe-presence on an instinctual, somatic level. Yet, as the elders and the comic’s own narration reminds her, when she talks about these wolves, she’s only “crying wolf,” as a famous young boy did before her. Her fear is taken as a fantasy, an attention-seeking that isn’t deserved — and that can’t be taken seriously because it can’t be proven.
I’m curious and a bit confused by the marketing copy for this comic. The synopsis on Shortbox’s website talks about Dawa’s “trickery” in the face of her alienation, but Dawa of the comic itself is earnest and honest — to a fault — when she tries to talk about fear. Her alienation from others seems to stem from that continuous feeling that a threat is nearby — the mismatch of reactions and sensory experiences — rather than being the cause of her “acting out.” If the comic intended to present Dawa as a trickster, I’m not sure it succeeded, if only because the narration so constantly instructs Dawa to repress that fact of her life. The comic does come around to an understanding of Dawa’s crying-wolf as an emotional truth, whether or not it is literally accurate, but doesn’t, to my reading at least, actually imply that her fears were trickery.
I appreciate this comic most for its intuitive, delicate visual storytelling: Ries is skilled at page design and at drawing body language, and they especially excel when it comes to atmospheric coloring. Here, they’ve transformed the allegorical effect of the original boy-who-cried-wolf story into one about anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and subjective fears, which is all the more effective because of Ries’s precision as an illustrator and colorist.
5. Ben Passmore‘s Sports Is Hell (Koyama Press, 2020)
Sports-writer and historian CLR James began his 1963 book on cricket with a neat twist on Rudyard Kipling’s imperial question (“And what should they know of England who only England know?”) James’s preface repurposes it as, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” The provocation is tongue-in-cheek, as well it should be; James’s essays concern cricket fandom (even fanaticism) and its political valences, noting that the sport seems to feed on class/color-conflict and exploitation. The game has no automatic politics, and it’s hard to address the accompanying quandaries without the wink.
Much like James’s famous memoir, Ben Passmore’s 2020 release through Koyama Press addresses the chaotic place where sports, capitalism, and anti-blackness meet. And like James’s Beyond a Boundary, Sports is Hell has a similarly ironical attitude about sports and politics — what do they know of football who only football know? What kind of political situation comes out of an all-consuming fandom, bloody rivalries, and athlete-activists?
The answer, as James has said, “involves ideas as well as facts.” In Passmore’s Sports Is Hell, those ideas are a mishmash of political types, from the fuckboy anarchist to the sugary white liberal to Nazi militants. The main plot, as summarized by one of its TV commentators: “sports celebration turned riot, turned to the formation of hundreds of armed factions across the city.” Add in one fictionalized Colin Kaepernick, renamed “Marshall Quandary Collins,” whose shaking terror at the roar of the stadium becomes an emotional anchor in an unsettlingly comedic book.
Collins’ flight from the stadium suspiciously coincides with the city-wide blackout and riots: is he a conspirator, figurehead, or simply victim? He’s called upon by one fan to lead a revolution against the present state, but the comic is mainly interested in his fugitivity (running off the field) and his many doubles (dozens costumed in his jersey and helmet). He’s never seen without his helmet — his face is always obstructed by metal and shadow, and when we see him, we’re never sure we’re really looking at the real Collins.
Sports Is Hell’s protagonist, the punk, good-hearted anarchist Tea, is the only one left semi-untouched by Passmore’s satirical typing. Sports is Hell is half horror comedy, half medieval morality play, with so many characters named for abstract qualities (Marshall Quandary Collins, who rallies the city and yet is a political question in himself; Tea, who talks rightful shit about everyone; Big Whites, the team for ostensibly mainstream white people). A couple of the lazier jokes you’d expect do crop up, including the expected one about gluten-free diets, but for the most part the surrealism of the premise prevents this satire from having the righteous surety that’s pervaded so much Trump-era political cartooning. Tea’s struggle is the real one: who and how to trust anyone in a splintering, often-cruel scene of leftist political divides. This book is a terrifying transport into the midst of that impasse, and many more ongoing emergencies.
Guttermouth: Comics Roundup #3 was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.