Ellie Liota has shown a knack, in her young career for drawing anthropomorphic animals, or animals who are intelligent. Trash Town is a fun little comic that plays up both the comedic elements of a group of animals who are dumpster diving with the grim, visceral realities of what this really means. It's a nice art object as well, with a cover flap of a dumpster revealing the raccoon, opossum, and skunk staring up at the reader. Trash Town is a good example of an effective use of two-track storytelling; the dialogue is free-flowing and light-hearted as the animals dine on their dumpster buffet, but the visuals tell a nastier story. For example, one of the young possums brings their mother a severed human finger. A swarm of maggots is referred to as "disco rice" by Maude the possum rice because of the way they squirm, and their mother Annie the fly yells at the animals for eating her kids. Another great two-track moment is when the raccoon digs through the maggots to find something shocking. The reader thinks it's shock at finding a human corpse, but instead, it's shock at finding wet cat food. Liota manipulates the expectations of anthropomorphism and cleverly creates interesting story beats when the talking animals don't react the way a human would. Her cute character design only helps emphasize this further.
Al Varela's Young, Dumb & Queer slice-of-life queer romance series is perfectly attuned, josei manga-inspired cartooning. It's colorful and populated by characters with big feelings who aren't afraid to talk about their feelings. The mini Hate My Ex is a good, short example of this, as the characters Tyler and Leslie chat about break-ups from their past. In what is essentially a talking heads comic, Varela keeps the reader's eye occupied with Tyler shooting hoops and then later eating lunch. Leslie is a great character because she recognizes her own self-sabotaging tendencies thanks to her bipolar disorder. Seeing both of their exes dating each other is a hilarious twist that provides a satisfying conclusion for what is just a 12-page comic. Varela's work is much more refined than when I first encountered it a couple of years ago.
It's been a while since I had seen a comic from Iona Fox, but she's certainly had good reason. She had to deal with advanced-stage rectal cancer and the subsequent quality-of-life issues her survival (happily) entailed. In her funny and frank comic Tough Shit, Fox immediately dives into how the language around cancer is odd and "babyish," perhaps in an effort to talk around a disease that is not only deadly but whose treatments are grueling. Contracting cancer at the same time COVID was at its height, all while negotiating a new relationship, was a tough triple threat for Fox. However, the focus of this short comic is how she dealt with having a colostomy bag after her treatment. It's reflective of cancer treatment in general; there's plenty of attention to the actual treatment, but there's much less concern given to quality of life issues for survivors. A lot of detail (and information) is devoted not only to having a colostomy bag, but also information provided on the kind of underwear that should be worn with, sex, and finally how to discuss it publicly. This is one of the better cancer-related comics I've read, in part because Fox deliberately avoids valorization narratives and treatment-related infodumps in favor of her actual lived experience.
Fox's line is much more loose and scribbly than I remembered, but it's highly effective and expressive. Abandoning naturalism in favor of crazier scribbles served her narrative well, just as it seems to serve New Thing, a comic she's doing with Cooper Whittlesey. It's about a twitchy man who's going to pick up. a dog at a special dog pound, one with strange rules. This was just four pages from a longer work, but I'm pretty sure Fox is doing all of the drawing here. The slightly grotesque character design fits with the absurdity of the narrative, and I'm excited to see Fox continue this kind of cartooning.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment