Whit Taylor's Fizzle #4 & #5

There's only one more issue of Whit Taylor's series Fizzle to go after the fourth and fifth issues, and the fourth issue turns inward while the fifth issue has competing flashbacks and forward movement. The story revolves around Claire, an adrift twentysomething living in Los Angeles who's in an orbit of mutual aimlessness with her rich stoner boyfriend Andy. She works in a yuppie, high-end tea shop whose owner, Poppy, is obsessed with image and hyper-focused on her extremely niche interest. Claire develops an interest in creating gourmet popsicles with unusual fruit flavors, and the only person who really takes it seriously is Andy's grandfather Dick. Dick gives her a citrus taxonomy book to encourage her. 

What the reader doesn't know at this point is exactly how Claire wound up in this position. She had alluded to a shitty family and being estranged from her family, but that doesn't quite explain how she wound up in LA after being raised in New Jersey. It was also unclear what drew her to Andy in the first place. Taylor spends a lot of time answering both of these questions in these issues and fleshes out an unusual character narrative in Claire. What do you do with a character who has no motivations other than trying to figure out exactly what it is she wants? Taylor essentially presents Claire as a character whose motivations are defined by negative space. That is, Claire may not know what she wants, but she quickly realizes what situations she doesn't want.

The fourth issue goes into an extended flashback where her father forgets to pick her up from school, and young Claire has to walk to her mother's place. She takes comfort in television, and the sort of shows with romantic angles in particular. In the present day, she's increasingly frustrated with her slacker "musician" boyfriend, who sneers when Claire tells him that her mother is getting remarried. Claire is so angry that she takes up her work crush Jaime on his offer to hang out.

The fifth issue flashes between her first extended date with Andy and her platonic day out with Jaime. Here, Taylor reveals why she was drawn to Andy: he represented a total sense of freedom from responsibility that she had clearly craved. Living in a family marked by conflict and with a father who barely acknowledged her existence, pushed her to want to be with someone who wanted her exactly as she was. What the series suggests is that she had been drifting in a fantasy world, trapped in a warm cocoon where she wanted for nothing because of her rich boyfriend but was also not encouraged or acknowledged as having any meaningful sense of agency. Meeting Jaime, a witty and ambitious man who clearly valued her passions and found ways to encourage them, was clearly an unprecedented event that led her to start doubting everything about her life. Doubting, but not quite yet acting on these doubts. I'll be curious to see what happens in the final issue. 

Taylor sells everything with outstanding character work. Claire's facial expressions tell the story in ways her dialogue doesn't; the barely suppressed rage expressed as harsh facial angles, the brief moments of eyes-closed bliss, copious amounts of side-eye, and furrowed-brow anxiety. Andy's slovenly character design resembles someone whose own sense of inertia is highly cultivated; he's never known actual poverty or discomfort, and it shows. Poppy's hair and glasses instantly give the reader an instant sense of how self-serious she is, yet also totally contemptuous of anyone outside of her "influencer" sphere. The extra fun stuff is the fantasy segments where Claire imagines someone being on a dating show where the central woman is dating anthropomorphic versions of the planets. Taylor just cuts loose visually during those segments, as she plays to her strengths with regard to keeping things focused on characters but also displays a confident visual ambition that's a new element of her work.