Minis: Liz Bolduc's Perishable Goods

Liz Bolduc (aka "Liz Sux") is an autobiographical cartoonist I've been monitoring for a while. Perishable Goods is the first mini I've reviewed from her, and it's an impressively-designed and executed comic about the difficulties of managing toxic families and navigating one's own feelings of worthlessness. Each of these short vignettes is loosely-connected in a roughly chronological fashion. The title plays on this metaphor of short-term worth and inevitable decay with numerous references to food, photos of supermarkets, and old supermarket ads. The stories are about rot, both in terms of thinking about death but also feeling rotten and diseased from a mental standpoint. Bolduc reveals just enough details about her personal life and family life to get the point across. In many ways, the details are less important than the feelings surrounding them.

Some of those details include dealing with a mom whom her therapist noted most likely had borderline personality disorder. That's a disorder wherein boundaries tend to be disintegrated, creating a suffocating amount of dependency. "Anger, fear (and) guilt" are common emotions displayed by someone with BPD toward those whom they've grown dependent upon, and Bolduc has trouble reconciling that reality with her own overwhelming sense of guilt. On the one hand, she recognizes the poisonous nature of this relationship, but she feels driven to maintain it. It's no wonder that everything feels decayed and false to her.

Much of the comic revolves around food. There's a lovely sequence about eating crepes at her grandparents' place after church as a child. When her grandmother died, the new tradition was eating at a diner. Ritual surrounding comfort food is at Bolduc's core--it's a touch of nostalgia that ameliorates the alienation she feels from both mother and father. Eating take-out is another pleasure, one that is comforting in the face of grief and uncertainty. Bolduc's line is mostly light, though she does use heavier line weights in some spots. There's an inkyness in her comics that's eye-catching, with a mix of densely spotted blacks and extensive negative space. There's a touch of the cartoony in her otherwise naturalistic line.

This is also a comic about loneliness, even when surrounded by family. Bolduc depicts herself as being fairly isolated and away from friends (and possibly a partner) throughout much of the comic. This is, I think, partly related to the essential nature of the narrative, which is an existential fear of death. She is terrified of her parents aging because it means their deaths, which she fears will leave her rudderless in the world. It also means that her death is near and inevitable. At the end of the comic, there is an understanding that even if are rotten, we will still be rotting one day. We may be isolated, but we will all return to nature, the perishable goods that we are.