Hannah Kaplan is someone I hadn't seen in seven years, which was the last time I reviewed her work. I was happy to run into her at the Philadelphia Comics Expo and got a lot of work that was new to me. Kaplan's work is funny, frank, and restlessly smart. The work covered here is from 2017 to late 2022.
We're All Gonna Die One Day is in the classic Kaplan style: philosophical diary strips done in colored pencil with an emphasis on sex, friendships, and creativity. Her strip from 5/22/17 talks briefly about the agitation of feeling horny, leading to her discussing why the show Twin Peaks was meaningful to her. its focus on the tangibility of evil, death, and aging allowed her a kind of comfort, in part because all of them are expressed as illusory to some degree. There's an extended sequence of going to the comics show CAKE in Chicago, including a particularly funny one where a tipsy Kaplan approaches cartoonists Kevin Huizenga and Gabrielle Bell to see if they remember her. Kaplan's use of color does a lot of heavy lifting for the emotional narrative of her comics, along with making them interesting to look at.
Lately jumps ahead to 2018, done in the same style, with a lot of visual flourishes. This digs further into the essence of Kaplan's comics, which can be roughly summed up as "What is my purpose?" Finding a way to connect her desires with a need for meaningful interactions and a larger sense of what she can do in the world drives these comics. This is true whether she's hanging out with her close friends, feeling frustration over an interesting temp job ending after a week, going to therapy, and dating a new & odd guy. Kaplan's work reminds me a bit of Gabrielle Bell's, only she's much more open in revealing details to the reader. The main similarity is her sense of humor, both in terms of witty dialogue and funny drawings.
Fantasy Land is an interesting comic that seeks to distance an author who usually (but not exclusively) works in memoir from the experience of a character (who bears a great resemblance to the author) who has decided to try "sugar dating" as a way to make money. Of course, this has been well-documented in M.K. Harkness' comics, though her circumstances were far different than the ones of the unnamed character here. It's an important distinction to make because Kaplan is revealing certain things here that are otherwise not discussed in her comics. This comic depicts the fledgling era of the character's career as a sex worker, and the ambiguity allows for Kaplan to show the awkward humor, the feeling of self-empowerment, and both the mundane qualities of sex work as a job like any other but also the ways in which it is dangerous. Using this bit of distance in the way that Phoebe Gloeckner does in her work allows the focus to be on the narrative itself instead of the voyeuristic qualities of the experience.
Diary 2011/2021 is an interesting variation on the daily diary comic. Starting with January 1st, Kaplan does a page from 2011 that is immediately followed by a single panel on the same date, but ten years later. The entries are generally more mundane than her usual comics, but the point of this is to take a gestalt view of her life as a 25-year-old with a particular group of friends and as a 35-year-old dealing with the global pandemic in Philadelphia. Kaplan cleverly makes the images similar in each pairing, even if the life events they portrayed were dramatically different.
August Diary was done a few years after her last comics as a way of working with her friend Anna McGlynn. The threads are interesting to pick up on here, as Kaplan is moving in with her boyfriend Kyler, someone first seen in comics from five years earlier during a time when her dating life was much more fluid and tenuous. Kaplan notes feeling a greater overall sense of solidity even as she remains unsure of precisely what qualities define her, and this feeling runs through this entire collection. While much of the comic is devoted to moving and creating a new normal in living with a partner, this is all contrasted by Kaplan contracting COVID and time taking on a weird, fluid quality. As always, her comics are less about specific events and more about someone living in her head who struggles to be in the moment.
Finally, Alone Together/Together Alone #2 is a collaboration with McGlynn from 2018. Kaplan uses a six-panel grid in the style of Gabrielle Bell with a purple wash here, and the tone of the comics is similar to Bell's traditional July diary comics. There are more shenanigans than usual for Kaplan and her line is a lot more refined and careful than in some of her other work. Her droll sense of humor and ear for interesting dialogue are both working well here, but the slightly ramshackle and colorful quality of her other comics is what I tend to like most about them. That style is certainly a better fit for working with McGlynn, whose comics have a more structured sense of narrative than Kaplan's and are generally more polished. Her self-caricature is delightfully sloppy, giving it a cartoony contrast to everything else she draws. It's interesting to see where the two friends intersect as well as when they're completely apart, like when McGlynn goes to Amsterdam. Overall, Kaplan's comics are thought-provoking, experimental, and funny, which isn't what I tend to think of with regard to diary comics. Hopefully, she will continue to make more.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment