Casey Nowak's Duh! Ha-Ha!

So I recently found my copy of this perfect little minicomic, Duh! Ha-Ha!, that Casey Nowak did some years ago. This was back when Carta Monir was still running Diskette Press. It's a brief reminder that Nowak is one of the best working cartoonists in the world, even if their output has greatly slowed in recent years. (On my docket is their compilation of short work, Boy Chest; they're also working on a much longer project titled Bodyseed.) Duh! Ha-Ha! uses a clever idea: the narrative is from the point of view of an entirely reactive, clueless character. She busses tables at a restaurant, has the hots for the elderly owner of the place, and winds up as the girlfriend of his son. She looks like she's still a teenager, barely out of high school. 

As is often the case with one of Nowak's comments, the important parts are often what is implied, but not directly stated. This first-person narrative never even bothers to reveal the character's first name. The cover is exquisitely grotesque, as she's in a restaurant uniform, popping a pimple, and sports an impossibly round face. In a later scene, she's at a group dinner, presumably with other members of the restaurant (as the owner, Rick, is paying for it), and she starts talking to someone she doesn't know--a guy roughly her age. She starts chatting him up because Rick is perturbed seeing her talk to him, and she's playing out a fantasy in her mind where she likes the idea of making him jealos.

When it finally dawns on her that he looks like Rick, ("How come you have the same face?") he laughingly tells her that he's his dad ("Like--sorry, but duh! Ha-ha!"). Nowak is a master at contrasts--after this horny meet-cute, her own narrative clashes with the actual events. It's implied that she's in a fairly low state a lot of the time, but that his presence helps in ways she doesn't quite understand. She doesn't quite understand a lot about what's going on around her, but in her narrative, she tries to simplify things as much as possible in order to not dwell on the depths of her own depression. In the way she tells this story, it's a quick blur of events and people, and how exactly some of them are connected is unclear. Nowak crafts an emotional (not narrative) chronology for this character, and it's powerfully resonant, sad, and funny.