Comics from SAW Week: Meg Lentz

Meg Lentz is a SAW graduate whose work focuses on queerness, mental health, and social justice. Working through their alter ego, Lenny Ditz, Lentz's comics are usually very funny. Working through their assignments in SAW's year-long program, Lentz stretched into poetic comics as well. The second issue of their Lenny Ditz comic continues on the memoir track, with Lenny graduating from comics and getting a retail job at a certain popular grocery store chain here nicknamed as "Raider Rob's." 

What they thought would be a fun and queer-friendly experience turned out to be a nightmare as they endured typical corporate bullshit, mandatory "fun" like synchronized dance routines for customers, and a concussion when some stock fell on their head. Lentz exaggerates this in a pirate motif, as each employee gets a parrot and a "box-cutlass" and their boss talks like a pirate. Lentz makes a lot of clever & funny cartooning decisions, with a potentially tricky open-page layout paying off as it allowed them to pack a lot of gags and information on each page. The final gag, where a "flash jig" results in Lenny getting hit in the head with a plank and being trod on by their co-workers, works well because it pushes the concept to its limit. 

Lenny Ditz #3: Lenny Ditz Meets Sappho is even funnier, as it tells a tale of high-school Lenny, who had yet to come out but considered themselves to be a "good ally." Tongue is firmly in cheek here as young Lenny struggled to write a research paper about the famous poet whose work is mostly fragmentary. Falling asleep in front of an altar to Sappho, Lenny "gay magically" appears in ancient Greece and happens upon Sappho and her admirers. The genius of this comic is that because so little of Sappho's work has been translated, nearly every bit of dialogue in this part of the comic consists of lyrics from Abba. (Mamma Mia, indeed!) Lentz has a knack for wringing out every bit of humor from the premise of "Oh, I'm not gay, I'm just an ally" and pairing it with the absurdity of the Abba references. The front and back covers feature familiar uses of the famous vases that had images of Sappho--a clever decorative feature. Lentz's cartooning is just plain solid throughout, especially the way they depict bodies interacting in space using an open page layout. Lentz's figure drawing is a bit on the plain side, though the humor in their pieces comes from their concepts and storytelling, and less from the drawings themselves. 

A Girl Without Skin is a total departure as a two-track narrative showing a worm but featuring narration by a girl born without skin who is tortured by her constant pain and inability to feel the touch of another. The visual track looks like it was done as a print, with stark black & white illustrating a worm being picked up, crushed, and flicked away. It's a double-barrelled misery explosion presented in a concentrated and beautiful format. It's entirely hand made, with the lettering being taped on. The darkness inherent in Lentz's more humorous work is on full display here. 

Finally, there's I Like To Draw...With My Eyes Shut!, a fun like sketch zine that's exactly what it sounds like. It's a great exercise, because it forces the artist to trust their hand instead of their eyes. Unsurprisingly, when Lentz was drawing action sequences (like figure skaters), the shapes were fluid, dynamic, and immediately recognizable. Their self-portraits, on the other hand, were far less coherent and recognizable. I'd recommend this to any cartoonist who wants to draw more expressively.