Short Box: Jeremy Sorese's The Tar Pit

First, a note about Zainab Akhtar's Short Box comics service. It's a periodic box of comics that she publishes, often up and coming talent that she is helping to bring before a larger audience. After that initial release, the artists are free to sell the comic on their own. That was the case for The Tar Pit, by Jeremy Sorese. I'm not exactly sure what Sorese uses, but the effect in this comic is a dense charcoal. It's evocative of a time long gone; it's thick and atmospheric, as though one was watching an old black & white film. That gritty charcoal effect is also in effect in the book's many night scenes, as the darkness threatens to swallow the light on each page. The grit and space-filling quality of that effect is in sharp contrast to Sorese's character designs, which are highly stylized and include a great deal of negative space in the faces, which are simplified to the point where they almost look like they belong to puppets. While this is a character piece and there's not a lot of focus on backgrounds, Sorese clearly did his research with regard to fashions, hairstyle and other time-specific elements of the time, which is the early 1950s.

The setting is a house where famous Hollywood actors Burt and Fred lived with Vivienne, in an arrangement that was supposed to reflect her dating both men and in reality was a beard arrangement for the lovers. In return, she received decent and well-paying movie roles, albeit ones that had no speaking lines. One of her "boyfriends" inevitably had the hero role in those films, of course. The book opens with a "Barbershop" party; that is, one where the boys and others with similar arrangements could be themselves for a little while. The plot is very simple but its ramifications are intensely complicated. Vivienne grows increasingly disenchanted and lonely living with a couple, especially given their frequent fights and indiscretion when having loud sex. On one frustrating night, a writer who had been haunting the outside of the house cajoled her into admitting on the record that Burt and Fred were gay, right before admitting he was gay as well. In one of the few exaggerated scenes, Sorese depicts Vivienne feeling like everyone in the diner she was talking to the writer in was gay and laughing at her.

The story gets published but quickly squashed. Vivienne slowly loses her roles. She starts to get work in advertising on TV, as color becomes popular. At the same time, the comic switches over to full color illustrations, done in what looks like colored pencil. When Burt dies of a drug overdose, Fred makes a fictionalized film that features a Vivian character who dominates everyone else and threatens violence, and whose outing of them leads to them losing their careers. The book works its way to Vivienne working with the actress who played her in the movie, thirty years later. when the topic of Fred (who had just died of AIDS) comes up, Vivienne utters an unforgivable homophobic slur. The final scene is one of tragedy and hope, combining her inability to come to terms with her life and her deep-seated homophobia.

To be sure, this is not just a story about her homophobia. It's a story about how self-hating gay men used to make money outing other gay men. More than that, it's a story about deep-seated misogyny. Vivienne got more love from Fred's dopey chihuahua than from either men, and it's clear that it wasn't sex that she was missing, but intimacy. She was treated as a convenience, an object, someone they only paid attention to when there was a camera pointed in their direction. She was stuck, as the title implies, in a comfortable but miserable arrangement. She wanted to sell out her roommates and was just looking for a buyer; in reality, she got nothing, other than her own freedom in a way. The irony of the film that Fred did is that it pointed her as the villain all along, while she of course was a non-talking player in real life as well as in film. Yet it showed her as a powerful, dominant woman who had all the best lines, which is why Vivienne liked it so much; it's whom she always wanted to be.

Burt and Fred never copped to their roles in making Vivienne unhappy. At the same time, neither did Vivienne come to terms with what she did. Instead of feeling regret for betraying people she spent so much time with, she simply doubled down on her homophobia. Or rather, homophobia became the reason she gave herself for hating the two men, when the reality was that she was lonely. That she was lonely was not their fault, but it was also true that they didn't seem to give the slightest thought to how she felt about things. In the end, her unwillingness to see past her feelings, insecurities and prejudices choked off her ability to show empathy, as the final, heartbreaking scene indicates. She poured her emotions into her dog and couldn't forgive or admit her own complicity in a relationship from decades before that still clearly defined her in many ways. Without that ability to forgive and accept responsibility for her own actions at key moments in her life, she remained hardened. It's the kind of story that was more common in the 80s and 90s, but I think Sorese was wise to reinforce the basics, given that homophobia never truly goes away.