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. 

Abby Jame's Emotional Data Test Tube Sugar Baby

The most interesting aspect of Abby Jame's hilariously titled Emotional Data Test Tube Sugar Baby is its reliance on social media culture to simultaneously critique and revel in its banality. That's the meat of the comic, but the scaffolding is a rock-solid cyberpunk plot with interesting twists and turns. The reader is thrown right into the middle of the narrative, as bored young woman Tink and her sentient computer teddy bear are bored and hungry. When she texts her sugar daddy Greg for money, it sets off a bizarre series of events that include the apocalypse (for starters), being grown in a test tube, sugar daddy incest, being used as a tool by both the government and the resistance, and a great deal of hot girl ennui. 

Jame is a member of the Michael DeForge school of thin-line characters and maximum environmental detritus. The character designs are distinct and cartoony, with her entire world stylized to the nth degree. The colors are pastel to the point of nearly being cotton candy, changing on nearly a panel-by-panel basis. The matter-of-factness with which Tink regards her fantastic environment is integral to the humor of the book, which is the essence of the work. Tink is a character with very few fucks to give and is unimpressed with the potential end of the world, the government conspiracy, or much else beyond her own personal gratification. Yet, this is the way she was raised and designed. When her apparent contact in the underground, a woman named Mits, shows her their secret weapon, a fantastic artificial being named Amanda, Tink's reaction had me howling: "She looks fun and slutty." An indignant Mits replied, "She's not that," but Tink said, "I know a fun slut when I see one." While this was a ridiculous sequence, it actually rolled directly into the plot in an unexpected way.

The only thing Tink did care about was a boy named Brad, and specifically, their social media relationship. When Brad texted her, she was outraged that all he said was "how r u?," declaring that to be hostile. She fretted over Brad unfollowing and refollowing another girl when the world was at stake and she was confronting her test-tube dad/sugar daddy. When told her destiny was to be uploaded with a program that would destroy the government, but it would kill her, she only agreed after Brad hooked up with Gretchen. There's a surprising psychedelic sequence that ties into the story and the REAL story (her social media life), culminating in an interplanetary journey. In the end, she looks for more boys. This is a story that is so totally of this moment in the zeitgeist and yet completely cognizant of this, all while transcending it in a remarkable series of gags. 

Andrew Neal's Where The Rent Went

Andrew Neal's evolution as a cartoonist in his Meeting Comics strip has been fascinating to watch. He transformed it from an inchoate series of gag panels to an absurd but fully fleshed-out narrative chock full of complex, layered characters. Of these, Val Cannon became his breakout star, thanks to her give-no-fucks attitude and full possession of her sexuality. One of the fun things in Meeting Comics is when Neal randomly reveals a new fact about one of his characters. With Val, it's that she was the lead singer of a punk band called Titty Blud. 

Neal went down a rabbit hole with Meeting Comics #21: it's a one-and-done story titled "Where The Rent Went," featuring Val in 1996. Couch-surfing in precisely the kind of post-college house familiar to the sort of person still figuring things out after graduation, the story was set in a house party where Val performed. When one of the housemates reported that the envelope containing the rent was missing, the story suddenly turned into a combination of a detective story and a romance/sex saga. 

It's compelling as both. Interviewing the housemates led to a wide array of people with varying motives, which she eliminated one-by-one. Neal is thorough in not cheating with regard to providing clues but doesn't telegraph it, either. It also serves as a kind of origin story for Val as a sexual being, where she becomes aware of how much everyone in her house is into her. Cleverly, Neal solves the story's mystery but leaves the issue on a cliffhanger. 

One of the reasons why Val is so compelling is her character design. Her glasses obscure her eyes, making her seem more opaque and mysterious. Even with a mohawk and a tight leopard-print dress, she retained that air of mystery that was a big part of her attractiveness. Every character in this issue feels very much like an archetype, like long-haired Ricky with six-pack abs or a concert nuisance dubbed Dick-Out Daryl. Neal uses a pretty thick line and a lot of greyscale shading that gives his comics a sludgy feel that fits the overall mood of his work. His character design is highly stylized and wouldn't really work with a lot of cross-hatching. 

VALue Added is a bonus mini that discusses Neal's process. He goes into detail regarding Val's background and how he slowly added to it, changes he made to the script as he expanded the story, and photos back from his days living in a Chapel Hill house not unlike this. Neal also captures a certain feeling of being that age, when rather than feeling the possibilities of youth, one instead feels like life is already passing you by. That it's nearly too late to do something interesting with one's life. It's a suffocating feeling, but Val is the one character who always smoothly navigates it, no matter what. 

Ellen Lindner's Lost Diamonds Part One

Anyone who's read this blog over the years knows how much I've enjoyed Ellen Lindner's evolution as a cartoonist. One of the things I find most interesting about her work is her devotion to baseball, and in particular, her research into the role of women (or female-presenting people, as she notes) in the history of the game. Lost Diamonds is subtitled "A History Of Gender Rebellion In American Baseball," and she examines this through a particular critical lens. Rather than accept the premise that there are no female baseball players, she instead asks the question: "Why aren't there any female baseball players? What structures have prevented this from happening?"

Baseball is one of the few sports, even today, where women don't play it at any organized level other than Little League, and even that took a number of lawsuits. The only other sport where that's the case is American football, and even that has been slowly changing on a high school level, albeit in fits and starts. Sure, there's softball, but it's not the same sport. Lindner makes the case that the same individuals and forces who conspired against being inclusive of women with regard to baseball were the same ones who banned black players from major league baseball for close to sixty years. They wanted to keep it white and male, and they even created narratives around this idea and propagated it through the press and the very companies that created baseball-related products. 

Indeed, Lindner notes that the origins of baseball date back to the 1700s and were both imported from Europe and combined with extant indigenous ball-and-stick games. It's just that the ball-and-stick games played in Europe were often played by women and sometimes by all genders together. Baseball became a national obsession in the US and drew interest from everyone. Just as there were well-known male barnstorming teams that went from town-to-town, so too there were women's teams, including one out of Philadelphia that was all black women. Racist press coverage diminished their nationwide appeal. At the same time, baseball teams started popping up on all-women's colleges in the northeast US. The forces that propagated the idea that baseball was "invented" by Abner Doubleday instead of being a comglomeration of many different but similar games became reified as a way of making baseball the exclusive province of white men. 

Lindner also notes that the fashion of wearing corsets, giving women extremely restricted movement, didn't help during the late 19th century. Narratives about the "fragility" of women propagated through the press also didn't help. Through it all, Lindner inserts herself as an amiable narrator, gently guiding the reader through a great deal of historical injustice with a smile. However, she's unsparing with regard to the facts, and she wields that historical record (and the attempts to alter this narrative) like a slugger. Lindner's strength as an artist has always been her skill in drawing clothing and fashion, especially from different historical eras. That's on full display here, and the blue wash adds to that sense of this being a historical document. 

This is a fascinating piece of comics journalism, and it's striking that there aren't more of these kinds of comics when it comes to sports. Sports has its share of built-in narratives with regard to the games themselves, but the behind-the-scenes events and the weird characters in the game make it an incredibly easy transfer for comics. I hope Lindner is able to eventually get a book out of this.