45 Days Of CCS, #2: Bread Tarleton

It's been exciting to track Bread Tarleton's development as a cartoonist. (Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing their book, Soften The Blow, early in 2025.) The writing and concepts have always been there, but Tarleton has notably sharpened not just their drawing, but their entire vocabulary surrounding cartooning. You can see how confident they are now on the page as they start to enter their mature period as a cartoonist. Tarleton's comics are about suffering, growth, and love, and the ways all three are connected. 

That's certainly the case in their one-person anthology showcase Ponyshow. The opening story is a conversation in a diner from the point of view of an otherwise unseen person. Tarleton uses an unusual angle in order to emphasize the story of the person who arrives and does most of the talking. It's a quiet story about empathy and human connection, and it features Tarleton using cartoony, distorted anatomy to further emphasize point of view. The second story, "Perfect Life," sees Tarelton going in a more surreal direction. An anthropomorphic marble is "born" and goes down a chute to live his life. He's privileged from the start, with a Rube Goldberg mechanism ensuring that he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He offers commentary the whole time, as he goes through the "Adult Happiness Machine" after having a baby and then through the "Making Peace Machine" when he felt empty ("Got it! That was easy!") 

The best story was the hilarious, strange, and touching "24 Hours," which is about a man capturing and releasing a fly. Of course, it's not that simple, as he reveals to the fly that he was once a fly but for some reason turned into a human. A reverse-Kafka, if you will. The fly-human gets clothes, a job, food, an apartment, and even a woman (from FetLife, of course) who would let him "fertilize her ovipositor." Things take a dark turn when someone sees through his horrific disguise, and even the released fly comes to a tragic (but hilarious) end. There's a sad, droopy quality that Tarleton gives to the protagonist, and this is a story where you can see the ways in which Tarleton's cartooning has leveled up. The other stories are brief anecdotes about an older man at a beach with his family recalling ritually humiliating someone in the army, a cigarette that lasts all summer, a "lone wolf" desperate for attention, and a series of floral gifts from an abandoned bouquet. Tarleton exquisitely captures moments in time: absurd, cruel, painful, loving, and tender. 

Horse 2 goes in a different direction, as Tarleton takes on the challenge of one of the more infamously difficult things to draw and turns it once again into a choose-your-own-adventure story. It reminds me a bit of the extreme absurdity of a Jason Shiga story in the same vein, where things can get out of hand very quickly in extreme ways. This isn't just a story about a horse; it's about a horse who finds a time machine. In addition to being funny, the whole thing is clever, as traveling forward or back in time has different implications. On top of that, going back and doing different stories gets you the code for a secret page which is wonderfully meta that ends the issue. Even in the silliest of stories, Tarleton still has a way of making an emotional connection with their readers. Sometimes this is dramatic, and sometimes it is mundane, but the feelings of Tarleton's characters are always every bit as important as the narrative itself.