Rachael Smith's Quarantine Comix

Diary and memoir comics have become an extremely popular genre for cartoonists, especially in the form of webcomics or as Instagram posts. What's odd to me about this is that their ideal form is as a temporary way of helping cartoonists get through writer's block and helping them get over being too precious with their line. The classic four-panel, daily set-up forces cartoonists to crystalize the quotidian moments of their day into a narrative of some kind, complete with panel-to-panel transitions in order to create a kind of rhythm. While James Kochalka popularized the daily diary strip, Lynda Barry has spoken about how and why they're useful. Specifically, she talked about them having a limited shelf life; ideally, they should last no more than a year. 

Anything more than that, and you start to find it to be an overwhelming grind. Your line starts to break down. In essence, you are hacking them out. There are other ways in which such strips can wear out their welcome, especially if they drop any sense of narrative, or even worse, settle into a kind of smugness. That can be smug self-deprecation (this is intolerable, especially when this devolves into humblebrags) or a total lack of awareness regarding privilege. No matter how good you are, no one wants to read about your dreams, your cool kids, or the love of your life for years. Make no mistake: though diary comics are drawn from one's real life experiences, they are not the same thing as real life. They are a crafted narrative, and making those strips without regard for an audience is a guaranteed way to deliver something that becomes rote and twee. (Note: Kochalka.)

So when I started Rachael Smith's Quarantine Comix, it was with a bit of trepidation that it might be more of the same. Fortunately, Smith has a lot of tricks in her bag. First and foremost, she had COVID and the pandemic to work off of, and reactions to the first few months of quarantine are interesting. Second, she had a built-in narrative of being separated from her boyfriend because of the pandemic and how she coped with that. When they reunited, she didn't go much further; in part, I'm guessing, because there was no real story there. Third, Quarantine Comix is part of a continuum of autobiographical comics about her mental illness, along with Wired Up Wrong and Stand In Your Power. It's funny to read Smith talk about her own self-doubts and occasional self-loathing, considering how bad-ass she writes some of her fictional characters (though they have flaws as well). That includes the trope of a black dog representing her negative self-talk and self-loathing, and a white dog representing a more rational way of looking at yourself. In the context of DBT, this is a Wise Mind approach, where you acknowledge the negative feelings but try to connect them to something more rational. It's an approach woven into the strips here. 

There's more to recommend about this book, even if in terms of its observations and events, it is extremely mundane. That's because of circumstance, of course, but the observations mostly stay simple and on a surface level. Smith is funny and tries to add a punchline to as many of her observations as she can. She also eschews the four-panel grid on every page, often adding or subtracting panels, based on what the story needs. There are also full-color pages that are just illustrations of overall themes. There's one other key to the book's success: Smith doesn't date her strips, nor does she feel the need to include a strip from every day. That's often the curse of a diary strip that's gone on too long. Also, this technique spoke to the amorphous nature of time when typical structures like work and weekends started to become meaningless. 

Smith's drawing is charming and exaggerated, frequently adding to the humor of each piece. Like any good diary comic, there are subtle background elements that are more pronounced if one thinks about them. There's an underlying sense of worry about Smith's mental health from her family and friends, and it's clear that some of her friends make it their mission to check in on her. Some of the humor (like talking to her cat and it talking back) is a little on the contrived side, forcing gags on situations where there aren't really any. Worse, some of the anecdotes seemed to be used because a punchline seemed to be there, but the joke wasn't really strong enough to justify it. 

However, it's Smith's perseverance in the face of despair, ennui, and fear that's the real star of the show. In many ways, it's a class in how to seek out help with a mental illness, as Smith reaches out to friends and family, is gentle with herself as much as possible regarding productivity, and is even relatively sanguine about weight gain. The eventual reward, when she's reunited with her boyfriend, feels entirely earned, especially as she's respected the laws regarding the lockdown. While a large part of the book's appeal is its status as a historical curiosity (something that will become of greater interest as time marches on, I suspect), Smith's understanding of her own mental health issues and willingness to talk about them in public makes this a powerful work of graphic medicine in the guise of a very funny set of anecdotes. 

Avery Hill Week: Artificial Flowers

Rachael Smith's Artificial Flowers represents another leap forward for the cartoonist. Her specialty is zeroing in on and mocking the angst of twentysomething artist types, like in her previous book, House Party. While her characters are certainly quirky and overwrought in fun ways, Smith's starting to write them as more than just a collection of quirks. The book is about an artist named Siobhan, who's trying to establish herself in the London art world while sponging off of her parents for an allowance. Smith quickly establishes her world as she spends much of her allowance at the nearby bar and is struggling to get her paintings any attention. Her parents then drop off her teenage brother because they want to go on a cruise and can't deal with his pyromania and general antisocial tendencies. The narrative gets its big push when Chris gets angry at Siobhan and burns part of her paintings. She's initially furious, until Madison, the head of a gallery, (that Siobhan happens to have a crush on) deems the charred paintings brilliant and gives Siobhan her own show.

The structure of the book is roughly two acts and an epilogue. The first act is all character-building, as we are meant to find Siobhan to be a sympathetic character--up to a point. Sure, she has to deal with art-world nonsense (and to be sure, making fun of the art world is like shooting fish in a barrel), but she's lazy and selfish. One never gets the sense of just how unstable Chris really is, or if his bad behavior has more to do with his parents. The first act ends when Chris burns the paintings, and the second act details Siobhan's dizzying rise in the art world, as Chris becomes her secret collaborator. Siobhan starts spending all of her earnings on her new girlfriend Madison and putting on airs, until it all collapses when her parents find out about Siobhan encouraging Chris to play with fire and put an end to everything. Smith's pacing and gags ramp up in this section, and the art keeps up accordingly, with splash pages and bugged-out eyes. Bryan Lee O'Malley remains an obvious influence on her work, but Smith's line has started to take a more rubbery quality befitting the frantic nature of her sense of humor. The happy endings that are doled out are all satisfying and well-earned, as her characters grow in interesting and sometimes unexpected ways. While Smith's line has become more lively to be sure, her calling card continues to be her use of color. She's toned it down a bit in saturating every page in dense colors, but her characters pop on the page thanks to their color scheme. Smith has simply muted her overall palette, especially in terms of backgrounds. That allows the linework to be more effective on the page, but Smith can always turn up the bright reds whenever she wants to back up extremes of emotion or action in the story. Smith's greatest skill as a writer is making a mess of her characters' lives and then figuring out the pieces of the puzzle that will put them back together.

Avery Hill Week: The Rabbit

In The Rabbit, Rachael Smith makes a departure from telling farcical stories of young people dealing with fitting into the modern world and instead dips into psychological horror. Leaning heavily on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland as a starting point, it follows the adventures of sisters Eleanor and Kathy as they've run away from home and are living in the wilderness. Smith thrusts the reader into their adventure in media res, providing bits of context and clues as to how and why they got there along the way. In every one of Smith's books, the main characters have a transformative arc, wherein lessons are learned and follies are corrected. What transforms the characters is certainly the circumstances related to the plot, but that's just the mechanism of change. What really transforms them is that they learn to accept the truth about themselves, something about which they've been in denial.

In The Rabbit, Eleanor views herself as Kathy's protector but also sees Kathy as her subordinate, an accessory piece in her own (literally) heroic narrative where she's slaying a dragon or has become a dragon and is ready to burn a nearby village down. Nowhere is that more evident than in "the monster game", in which Eleanor is a monster who relentlessly scares her sister. The book sees them wandering around, dealing with some neighborhood boys who discover them in the forest and then discover a tiny rabbit that they've accidentally harmed. Just like things went upside-down for Alice when she discovered a rabbit, so too do Eleanor and Kathy's lives get much weirder when the rabbit (whom Kathy names Craig) arrives. Soon, they discover the rabbit can talk, and it has a voracious appetite. With the rabbit promising them a safe cave to stay in, they accompany (and start wheeling around) the ever-more demanding creature.

The scene where the now-gigantic and toothy rabbit demands that they come into the rabbit's warren (not exactly a cave!) and we see a bacchanal of rabbits and other rodents in progress is hilariously creepy. One running plot device in the book is that the girls' father is continuously trying to call Eleanor, and she keeps declining the call. When the rabbit discovers she has a phone, he takes it from her and demands they steal food and liquor from the local convenience store. Their story has now become an anti-heroic quest, and when they devour food at the store and fall asleep, they've clearly crossed a line. Despite everything, they (and Eleanor in particular) doesn't make the transition in character until she finds the boys again after the rabbit has terrorized them and they run away, chastising them for running away. That dawning bit of awareness leads to the highly effective climax of the book, when Craig and an entire host of frightening critters are chasing them through the forest, as Eleanor finally taking the call from her father literally saves the day. Along the way, the dynamic between the sisters changes for the better.

Exactly what caused them to leave him is only hinted at, but it had to to do with the death of their mother and the reaction of their father. But that was neither here nor there, as the book was really about the denial of reality and the retreat into fantasy and denial that is part of that, as well as shifting negative emotions onto a trusting victim. Using a lushly-colored forest as an almost storybook backdrop was highly effective in getting at this, especially with lots of silent beats thrown into the story that made the reader stop and slow down. Smith has become adept at using the restraint of these silent beats to make the frantic climaxes that are her trademark all the more effective.

Time Crawls On: House Party

In Rachael Smith's big-publisher debut, House Party, she channels early twenty-something angst into a breezy and lively story about three friends from college who miss their glory days. In college, Neil was a successful comedian, his girlfriend Michelle an award-winning writer and their roommate Siobhan an artist. The punchline for anyone not in their early twenties is that all three of them are working menial jobs that have nothing to do with their art and feel like they've either sold out or are over the hill--but they're only two years out of college! While that seems like a ridiculous notion on the face of it, that a 24 year old should feel washed up, Smith gets at the heart at why this sort of thing happens. Without the natural support of college and its insulation against the real world, it can feel difficult to achieve the same kind of productivity and success that one experienced with the structure of classes, teachers, institutions and friends. Just as important is that the community one built in college is effectively ripped away once friends start to leave town, get married, and start careers. The urge to keep that circle of friends just as it was in college, to repeat the same kind of epic parties and to hope that doing so will maintain one's creativity is at the heart of this book.

After a particularly dispiriting day for all three, Neil decides that the antidote to their ennui is staging a house party like they had had a couple of years prior. That event was a high point for all three, especially since it kicked up the romance between Michelle and Neil to another level. The flagging romantic relationship just two years later began the book as a subplot, but it takes on greater prominence toward the end. Naturally, trying to recreate the past has dire consequences, especially when they invite over a band (the perfectly-named The Helveticas) that initially idolized Michelle and then later shunned her out of jealousy. That was especially true of striking redhead Georgia, the lead singer of the band. While the trio manages to convince the band to come over to their place for the party (saving it from the doldrums), it comes at a heavy, heavy price. The young guests act like animals and Georgia has eyes for a drunken Neil. In the end, all three learn that while it's impossible to reconjure the circumstances that led to such remarkable camaraderie and creativity, it is possible and in fact necessary to create new paths and new methods in order to move forward. Sometimes those paths come with hurt feelings and broken relationships, but Smith seems to argue that inertia is a far worse fate.

This book is heavily influenced by Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series. That's especially true with regard to the character designs and overall figurework, though Smith tamps down some of the more manga-inflected aspects of his work. Georgia looks and acts a lot like Envy Adams. Smith and O'Malley cover a lot of the same early 20s aimlessness, selfishness and angst. Rock music plays a big part for both as a general part of youth culture. However, Smith avoids the magical realist aspects of O'Malley's work and instead focuses on a powerful form of alienation that results when one graduates from college. Visually, her use of color is what really distinguishes her work from O'Malley's; it's bold, bright and expressive without overwhelming her solid linework. And while Smith's story is similarly about twentysomething alienation and disaffection, much like O'Malley, her version of this is far more compact. To be sure, this book represents a big step forward for Smith, who managed to retain the quirkiness of earlier works while shedding some of their more self-indulgent aspects.

Minicomics Round-Up: Roberts, Sharpe, R.Smith, Fleener, McMahan

There's no through-line in the minis reviewed in this column this time around, other than I found them all to be quite good.

Powdered Milk #11, by Keiler Roberts. This mini is an especially sharp and subtle bit of storytelling. Roberts has been doing comics about being an artist and a mother for a few years now and hasn't flinched in detailing her struggles with post-partum depression along with the ups and downs of being a parent. This issue is a tightly-drawn series of rapid-fire comments from her toddler daughter, and while many of the comments are hilarious and played for laughs, it's clear that Roberts is drawing these comics as a way of letting off steam as well. Having your child yell at you, hit you, bite you and just do inexplicably destructive things is maddening  Children are also quite intuitive and can pick up on emotional signals both subtle and not so subtle, and they are quite willing to confront you on them, like when Roberts' daughter asked why her eyes are crying. Roberts also hints at the difficulties of being a primary caregiver, especially when one is trying to be an artist. There's a page where Roberts tells her daughter "You're supposed to be napping" when she's drawing a strip, only to meet with curiosity from her daughter. When she sees the strip is about her, she says "Thank you for drawing that, Mommy". It's the situation in a nutshell: guilt, joy, frustration, astonishment. In strip after strip, Roberts gets across what it's really like to be a parent.

Viewotron #2, by Sam Sharpe. Employing frequently deadpan anthropomorphic animals as a storytelling device not unlike the artist Jason, this is a devastating story about the disintegration of the relationship between a son and his schizophrenic mother that seems to be at least partly autobiographical. Sharpe opens the comic depicting himself as a child, talking about his mother being missing with a friend, as well as the odd fact that his father let him read the strange, convoluted and paranoid letters she sent to her boy. From there, we see the hopeful reconnection between mother and son as we're privy to Sharpe's nervousness and uncertainty about what, exactly, he wanted from the relationship. Sharpe slowly, painfully details the way his mother's mind starts its descent back into paranoid delusions, as she thinks that her son is part of the "Sharpe crime family" and wants him to disassociate from his father and family completely. He humors her and tries to change the subject as much as possible, helping her when a friend of hers from therapy suddenly commits suicide. The end of the comic is chilling, as Sharpe is forced to confront his mother's mental illness with her when she demands to know if he's seen the horrible things she hallucinated at his house. Even then, the connection he wants to have with her (as opposed to the actual connection) is so strong that he patiently tells her that they just see things differently and that she has a mental illness. At that point, she starts laughing hysterically, writing him off as a duplicate and telling him that her son is dead. Even drawing his characters as anthropomorphic dogs does little to blunt the emotional impact of the scene, and one senses that drawing his characters in this way was as much for Sharpe's benefit as it was for the readers. Sharpe uses a 2x3 panel grid to maintain the same sense of rhythm and pace no matter what the situation, so even the rougher scenes aren't lingered on for very long by either artist or reader. This is a powerful comic that's told with confidence, skill and even flair.

I Am Fire, by Rachael Smith. This is a full-color mini about a couple of wildly dysfunctional teens who develop a crush on each other. British artist Smith has a nicely-honed sense of comic timing and manages to create a pair of protagonists who are near-sociopaths yet strangely likable at the same time. The story follows a girl named Jenny, who creates havoc doing an internship of sorts in a department store, and Chris, a pyromaniac who somehow winds up as an intern for a fire-prevention outfit. While the cover certainly has an apocalyptic feel to it, the actual circumstances of how Chris winds up wearing that sign are quite amusing. Smith is unrelenting in these forty pages when it comes to the obnoxiousness of her characters and the shtick that surrounds them, as the cast includes an obsessed fire safety officer, an alpha male fireman, a dotty saleslady and various other somewhat one-dimensional character types. Smith manages to insert a bit of humanity into the proceedings in a way that doesn't seem ham-fisted, unearned or sentimental, and that rescues the comic from falling into cliche'. Indeed, it provides some rather amusing surprises for a number of characters. Smith's bug-eyed characters remind me a bit of a slicker Kate Beaton or perhaps Raina Telgemeier. That smooth, slick line actually goes nicely with her acerbic sense of humor. Given the way she writes her characters, I thought her use of color was a bit over-the-top, however. Nearly every page had dense, rich colors that at times overpowered the eye, especially on pages where nothing much was actually happening. A more muted palette would have been appropriate for much of the book and might have allowed the reader a better chance to take in the loveliness of her drawing style. There's no question that Smith is funny and talented but a smidgen of restraint could have made this comic even funnier.

You Were Swell, by Sophie McMahan. Getting this comic in the mail is one of those rare occasions when you get a comic that's completely bonkers and fantastic from an artist you've never heard of. This is an amazing series of strips mashing together 50s advertising art and romance comics tropes with modern body horror/body dysmorphia that together give a scathing, hilarious critique of gender norms and roles. "Other Self" illustrates a seemingly happy, white 1950s family with heads that split off, as the narrative caption posits the question "Do you ever feel split between two selves?" It's an arrow aimed right at societal and consensus constructions of "normal" and acts both as a declaration by the artist and a hand extended to the reader. In "What If?", McMahan takes an idyllic scene of three women enjoying ice cream, inserts a traditionally handsome male making a crude remark, and then has the women disintegrate him with a laser eye blast. I found this comic to be hilarious, partly because the wish fulfillment is so obvious but mostly because of the way she juxtaposes bland figures with crazy action. "Winner", which details a beauty queen winning first prize, goes in a similar direction, as she loses all of her teeth upon getting the crown, though no one seems to notice. It's a funny image to begin with, but it also pokes fun at the ways in which beauty is so obviously a socially constructed concept, something the pageant setting makes quite clear.

"Bad Thoughts" is the central piece of the comic, where McMahan explores and admits that the hateful thoughts she has about others are literally ugly and a reflection of her own self-hatred. This comic is a way of acknowledging this tendency and destroying the notion that we are abnormal if we have negative feelings. McMahan subverts and undermines this notion at every turn, like in one strip where a handsome guy tells a beautiful girl with lovely lashes that mascara is made out of bat feces, or another "perfect date" where the couple's faces melt at the end. This remarkable comic covers a lot of ground and hammers home a lot of provocative ideas thanks to McMahan's command over her line and willingness to explore the grotesque. That facade of beauty that she punctures again and again is set up perfectly, as McMahan has an unerring grip both on what makes such art and imagery appealing as well as how it is also innately revolting. That sense of revulsion is almost palpable throughout the comic, whose commentary is less overtly political (though there is a political and satirical element to it) and much more deeply personal. McMahan has an interesting career ahead of her.

The Less You Know, The Better You Feel #2, by Mary Fleener. This early alt-comics era standout continues to draw political comics for The Coast News, focusing in on local government greed and calling them out for getting in bed with big developers trying to extract every dollar possible from her idyllic and arts-oriented beach town in California. Fleener's at her best when she gets into particulars, like in the above strip about the right of every citizen to speak for three minutes at every city council meeting. Another strip gives advice on how to be effective when given that platform. Fleener also veers away from politics to offer amusingly-illustrated recipes, complain about aggressive bikers (those strips are especially hilarious), talk about the local flora and fauna or whatever strikes her fancy. Still learning on the job as a political cartoonist, she's making much better use of simple and striking images and cutting back on fussy over-labeling and complicated drawings. Strips where she compares a local politician named Stocks to MacBeth (complete with the three witches and their cauldron) are a good example of this powerful image-making. Fleener is a naturally funny cartoonist, and it's been interesting to see how she's allowed her whimsical nature to merge with her sharp, focused political instincts to provide cartoons that are memorable and brutal. She's not afraid to repeatedly get out the long knives to carve up hypocrites and greedy politicians who would prefer that the public simply ignore what they're doing.