Nadine Redlich's Doing The Work

Published by German company Rotopol, Nadine Redlich's Doing The Work is on the surface a breezy collection of silly and scribbly single-panel cartoons. Underneath her brightly colored (yellow body and big red nose), bulbous, and frequently absurd stand-in lies a story with a certain sense of lurking desperation and sadness. It's a feeling that leaks out from time to time (like in one strip where the figure is working at a computer, looks at her watch, and utters "Time to cry"), but that feeling is then shunted to the side with strips like a poodle pondering existential questions, a giant walking banana slipping on a stray person, or someone swallowing an umbrella. 

Near the beginning of the book, a pink blob with a big red nose introduces herself as "Nadine's last brain cell," pauses, and then asks the readers if they like her. Later, a creature in a shell declares that it doesn't want to be perceived. (In a later cartoon, it jumps up and says "Just kidding!") This largely sums up the nature of the gags in the book; there's a deliberate and uncomfortable awkwardness present in many of them, as they linger perhaps a beat too long, or a strange, discordant, and sad note to what is otherwise a fairly conventional gag. 

There are several recurring characters: a grumpy boulder who stubbornly resists change; a hairy yellow figure; the aforementioned lecturing poodle; and several variations on the original "brain cell character." For every gag where they are doing something silly, there's another one where the banana has its head in its hands. There's an air of inevitable doom that pervades the book, but there's also a sense that the show must go on. The brightness of the colors feels almost deliberately obnoxious, and there's little about many of the actual drawings that's interesting, even at a minimalist level. Similar projects by Lewis Trondheim like Mister I or Mister O took much better advantage of the actual drawings to make interesting stories, but that doesn't seem to be what Redlich is going for here. This is a protracted howl disguised as a series of candy-colored vignettes, as Redlich constantly lets slip that mask of cheer to reveal the ways in which the narrator is barely holding on sometimes.