Thirty Days of CCS #21: Romey Petite, Laurel Holden

Spiderella is an unusual CCS-related project, as it’s an illustrated children’s book, not an actual comic. Of course, while CCS is known to focus on storytelling in comics form above all else, there have been a number of cartoonists who have focused on illustration or illustrated text. (Katherine Roy comes to mind.) While at CCS, the two kicked around this story, which combined aspects of Cinderella and the myth of Arachne but turned out to be something closer to modern YA adventure comics in many respects. It was decided that Petite would write the actual text and Holden would do the illustrations and their accompanying watercolors. The 200 page book is at once a rapid read but also surprisingly dense. It winds up being the first part of an indeterminately long saga, yet it’s also a satisfying read on its own. Petite and Holden create a beautiful storytelling rhythm, where the slightly poetic and slightly silly language that Petite chooses is a perfect match for Holden’s bright colors, exaggerated facial expressions and pointed use of gestural drawing.

The latter is especially important in an illustrated book that’s not a comic. The understanding of the way bodies interact in space that Holden possesses gives each of her pages life, rather than feeling static, and it’s because of the way she poses her characters and has them express body language in the form of pointing, hunching their shoulders, or slyly staring off in a direction counter to all the other action on the page. Holden also totally leans into the fashion aspect of the story, with her creations more than rising to the occasion of silliness (yet still fashionable) that Petite writes. For his part, Petite’s omniscient narrator is funny without being too wacky, informative without spelling everything out, and on top of the narrative while still allowing a digression or two.

The story is about a young girl named Eleanor who has the fantastic ability to sew very quickly and imaginatively for her boss, Minerva. So much so that Minerva keeps her locked in an attic, where Eleanor is happy because she can at least talk to her friends, the spiders. That mix of sweet and creepy (it’s rare that spiders living in someone’s hair is considered to be a nice thing in literature) also serves to make this book distinctive. While much in the narrative is made to be deliberately familiar, Petite clearly is interested in subverting typical fairy tale narratives in other ways. When the King and Queen of the kingdom decree that their son, the Prince, must get married, they declare a Royal Ball so that a proper bride can be chosen. That all sounds pretty boilerplate, but Petite greatly deflects expectations at the ball and especially with regard to the Prince. The ending of the story in particular is a happy one, but in a manner that’s not common for typical fairy tales, although Petite had been hinting at it throughout the book. What Spiderella wanted more than anything was a chance at adventure (and being reunited with her father, also an adventurer), and she earned that chance. And when the Prince runs after her in this book, it’s not to guarantee her a life of luxury like in Cinderella, but rather to beg to get away. I read the first twenty pages of the book to my daughter, a sometimes squirmy listener, and she demanded more. I read the first seventy pages out loud and she was rapt with every page and made all sorts of predictions as the story proceeded.

(This drawing is by K.M. Claude.)

Also reviewed is a sketchbook rough in Petite’s My Biblical Daydreams series, entitled “Clear As Day”. The story is about a writer who’s apparently had a drunken encounter with a woman named Theda who expects him to show up somewhere. The fact that he can’t quite recall everything the way it was precisely recorded bothers him as a writer. He wanted perfect, clear memories. So Theda talked to him about this and gave him water from the River Lethe, the Greek underworld river of forgetfulness. (Its name means “oblivion”.) It was good ol’ Death playing a little prank, as the water put his memories where they could never be touched again, and she promised to come back later for the rest. (Petite didn’t specify that this was death, but the anagram and other clues made it obvious.) This was a clever short story with great character design, and the modern touches were effective in deflecting the story’s true aim until just the right moment.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #20: Romey Petite

Romey Petite (formerly Romey Bensen) put out an epic release with My Biblical Daydreams #2. Basically, he threw everything he's been working on for the past couple of years into one package, divided into three folios. They are divided into non-fiction, essays and fiction. Petite is a fastidious chronicler of his own work, as he has introductions for each of the sections that give details as to their origins, where they first appeared, his intent, etc. This is a dense, intense look not just at the work of a cartoonist but also the cartoonist's process. It's clear that Petite thinks best when combining word and image, as he's able to cleverly play off the strengths of both to get across his ideas; it's true even when he was doing an introduction to this issue. The best way to describe his style is cartoony naturalism. There are a number of naturalistic details (especially with regard to things like clothes and close-up drawings), but there are subtle bigfoot details like exaggerated noses, eyes that form strange shapes, etc. There's a nervous energy in his line that adds to the jittery feeling of all of his comics, including his autobio work. Even though his figures tend to appear posed on the page, that nervous energy gives each page a kinetic quality.

Petite's autobio work is unsurprisingly thoughtful, restrained and questioning. "Flight" is a moment of sad clarity after his girlfriend left on a plane, where he understands just how much of his best self is wrapped up in her, and her absence leaves him unraveled. That stiff, nervous energy serves the strip well, as Petite uses imbalanced negative space in the bottom two panels to help get across that sense of feeling lost. Another fascinating strip was "The Phallus", which was about a memory Petite had as a child when he saw a snake in the garage as he was reaching for a toy train. His memory warped the shape of the snake, and the strip then turns to modern times as Petite, his mother and his younger brother all try to unwrap the memory. "Doppelganger" is similar in the way that Petite plays with memory on a trip to a Goodwill store where his mom was thinking of buying a vanity but he finds a ventriloquist's dummy sitting on a couch. The strangeness of finding that object in that location bent Petite's memory on other things that happened during that trip, as the dummy took on all sorts of ridiculous associations and significance, to the point where he felt a weird parental pride and worry toward the dummy. It's a hilarious but slightly unsettling story, which is pretty much Petite's sweet spot as a cartoonist. That plays out in "Welcome To My Dream", in which Petite draws and then redraws his girlfriend Laurel's horrific dream about being served a feast with food riddled with maggots, worms, scorpions and beetles. In the redraw of certain details, you can see Petite at his most naturalistic, lovingly detailing the beetles and maggots.

In the essay section, his "Ginnywoman" is as much autobio is it is an essay about feminism. It's about his relationship with his frequently angry father and a family that listened to hyperaggressive right-wing talk radio. He admits to having grown up hearing the word "feminazi" before the word "feminist". His depiction of his father as ranging from a beloved cartoon character to a hulking, terrifying presence indicates the complexity of considering one's parents, but it's clear that he was subjected to a childhood filled with examples of toxic masculinity. What's interesting is that Bensen addresses the issue of being a feminist as something that's not up to him to judge; he can only go about life regarding himself as being pro-feminist. It's a smart take on the topic because it's a way of deflating the self-congratulatory nature of men declaring themselves feminists. The other essay, "Baubles and Bibles", is Petite unfortunately trying to figure out what to call comics as a class assignment. This debate was aimed at a non-comics reading audience, and while I appreciate his enthusiasm in trying to generate a term better than "graphic novel" for what he and alternative cartoonists do, this line of inquiry tends to be a useless exercise. The one term he did invent that might one day have legs is the idea of the "auteur cartoonist" to distinguish them from other types of cartoonists. Of course, that term is as pretentious as "graphic novel", which he points out is a marketing term above all else. In the end, I remain unconvinced that greater specificity in defining alternative comics is of any real value so long as the work keeps coming.

In the fiction section, one could see why Petite listed this as his preferred form of self-expression, as the quality of his line meshes perfectly with the enigmatic stories he likes to tell. "Fugitive From The Monkey House" is jam-packed with clever conceits, like the hypothetical experiment of a thousand monkeys with typewriters banging out Shakespeare if given enough time. In this story, the experiment was real, the monkey was treated with a drug that made them intelligent and the monkey wound up writing a novella. Of course, the real reason the monkey was on the show was because he was captured drunk on video doing a dance, and he became a celebrity for that reason. The framing device of a talk-show host who wanted to focus on that instead of on the astounding phenomenon of a talking monkey who actually created his own literature makes the story all the more pointed. There are riffs on xenobiology and The New Yorker, a horrific transformation caught on celluloid, a clown who bombs on stage because he loses his voice (and then his mind), and the further adventures of Conner Wormwood, who had horrible dreams about his real father and faces an intrusive cat living in his house. Petite has something here with this character, whose strange adventures remind me a bit of early Chester Brown. Petite is the rare cartoonist whose work is highly stylized while retaining a great deal of clarity, both in terms of character design and storytelling decisions. This is a cartoonist who is clearly just starting to get warmed up and who has a long career ahead of him.