Elise Dietrich's Kill Your Idols, Part 1

Many of Elise Dietrich's autobiographical comics have been in the form of travelogues, but Kill Your Idols follows a different journey: one into the musical idols of her past. This is mostly about Dietrich as a teenager, "a mostly unformed mass of anxiety and passion." Music and art can often provide both an outlet and a template for teens, as well as a parasocial relationship that can inform their path and decisions. 

Unsurprisingly, Dietrich details that she first started becoming a fan of alternative rock in the late 80s and 90s, as an older boyfriend shared a lot of different bands with her. While the boyfriend didn't last (although the regrets did), the musical obsession did. For Dietrich, it centered around Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. With the ostentatious Farrell, it was the kind of devoted desire given to a magnetic cult leader. With the cool and reserved Gordon, it was the urgent desire of having a role model. Dietrich points out that their identities became fantasies that she wove in her own head, especially when any significant investigation into Farrell's life and aesthetic revealed a great deal of pretentiousness--and not even original pretentiousness. Gordon at least gave Dietrich a creative direction as a musician and an artist. 

Dietrich explores whole-cloth adaptation of another artist's aesthetic and perspective as a way of cycling through influences in order to find one's own voice. The next part of the story will include Dietrich's present-day evaluation of her idols. In this issue Dietrich uses a mostly open-page layout to her advantage, which allowed her to adapt the imagery and album art of her favorites. It's a quick and easy way to show how they influenced her own aesthetics. Dietrich does her best to express not just what each artist meant to her, but why their songs and visual presentation were so important. There were two essential problems here, however. The first is that the comic doesn't convey much in terms of why the sonic qualities of the music was compelling. It's a difficult ask for any comic, but one that is predicated on music falls flat without it. The second problem is that Dietrich's teenage self is barely a character. This is partly by design, as she presents her teenage self as inchoate, but the result feels more like an extended book report more than a narrative. Hopefully, the second part will help connect the dots with a more pointed critique and deeper self-reflection.

Ladybroad Ledger #4

It seems as though Vermont may well have the densest concentration of cartoonists per capita, and that's not just because of the Center for Cartoon Studies. To be sure, CCS's presence and workshops have influenced and inspired many to start cartooning, but there are many others as well. The Ladybroad Ledger is a broadsheet anthology (with a very clever title), done in black and white with a color cover strip. The fourth issue of this all-women free anthology is typically solid and varied in its stories. At sixteen pages, it's also just the right length for this kind of format.

Rachel Lindsay leads off with a funny strip, done with a green and yellow wash. It's about her outrage over technology, especially with regard to music, as she decries her formerly record-player loving friends' use of Alexa. The ending is a straight-up EC Comics spoof, with an ironic twist that's meant to be easily guessed. Lindsay's exaggerated line and exasperated expressions reminded me a bit of Roberta Gregory in some places. There's also a nice interview with her on the back page of the issue.

Another highlight of the issue are two pages from the Fawkes women: Glynnis and her young daughter Helen. Any long-time reader of Fawkes' work knows that her daughter has always been obsessed with bunnies and creating bunny characters, and this has crossed over into her own comics work. Glynnis drew a strip that Helen wrote about a nervous bunny who impresses a royal bunny by simply being themselves and running through the forest to get twigs and burs on them. There's also a page of Helen's written-and-drawn bunny stories that are very amusing. Helen clearly gives a lot of thought to things like panel composition and perspective, because most of her panels are very well-framed. She also gives a lot of thought to character design and how to differentiate characters who all look roughly alike.

Elise Dietrich and Bridget Comeau both contributed recipes/crafts. For Dietrich, her chicken lentil soup reminded her of a visit to Morocco. For Comeau, it's a way of reducing plastic use by making reusable food wraps. Susan Norton and Kara Torres both use thick lines and dense panel design for different purposes. For Norton, it's a story about feeling constantly uprooted, as defined by having to constantly pack and unpack her record collection. For Torres, it's for a humor strip about "art. anon.", a twelve-step support group of people addicted to the artist lifestyle. Torres nails the language of recovery and addiction for humorous effect.

Other stories include a funny, scribbly, open-page layout strip by Mary Lundquist about tiny elves drinking her coffee; a dense, silent story about a woman braving strange conditions to reactivate a power switch on an island by Abby Pearl; a scribbly and gray-washed series of drawings by Natania Nunubiznez discussing her simple desires; an unfortunately pixelated page from Michelle Sayles about trailblazing hiker Emma Gatewood; a Feifferesque strip by Janet Biehl in terms of figure drawing and shading about inspiring some kids in Izmir; and shorts by editor Stephanie Zuppo and Frances Cannon. They all contribute to the relaxed quality of the broadsheet, as most of the pieces take their time in telling their stories instead of adhering to strict plot and pacing.

More Minis From Elise Dietrich

I don't know what it is about the northeast that's producing so many sensitive and thoughtful autobiographical comics, but Elise Dietrich has certainly proven herself to be part of this trend. The Sandwich Shuffle is her shot at an Hourly Comics Day mini, and her winning wit makes this a fun comic to read. Dietrich strikes just the right now in how much she reveals to the audience in a comic that's very much in media res by its very nature. It's a snapshot into a single day of a cartoonist, and if you knew nothing about them going into reading the comic, it's up to them to provide enough information to make sense. In short order, the reader learns that Dietrich has a young daughter, that her husband is away from town, that she has issues with her weight and food, and that she blanches a bit when her mom seems more delighted to visit her brother's new baby than to stay there.

That said, there's a resoluteness to her narrative that's invigorating. Dietrich is always full speed ahead, no matter what. Despite struggling with a cold, she finds ways to do comics, work with clients over the internet, take care of her kid, go to the library and drop off her mom at a bus stop. The art is understandably rough and sloppy, but it clearly reveals her stylistic impulses and how she organizes a page and a panel. There's an orderliness to Dietrich's work that manages to focus both on foreground and background. The reader is always made aware of time and place, even as the people dominate the action.

Making Time is a collection of diary comics, from the first snow of November through February. In Vermont, winter is a powerful entity, and many of these comics revolve around struggles with the weather. Most of them are Kochalka-style: four panels, with a punchline of sorts in the final panel. Dietrich's line is more careful and assured in these comics, but it's clear that spontaneity and expressiveness are her goals. That said, Dietrich jams every panel with detail, hatching, and other decorative details. The result is cluttered but in a good way. One gets the sense of just how her life is cluttered and bursting with happenings. The comics are quiet and meditative, almost as a way of recovering from the frenzy of childcare, workouts, 5K runs, and knitting baby blankets. These comics are frequently funny, like when Dietrich grouses about muzak being played during a yoga session. These comics are engaging because Dietrich has a distinctive authorial voice, and it's clear that she took quickly to comics because she was eager to find a new way of expressing herself.

The Minicomics Of Elise Dietrich

Elise Dietrich is in that cohort of autobiographical cartoonists that includes Glynnis Fawkes and Jennifer Hayden--women who started to do comics as a kind of second act in life. Dietrich has actually done work at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and these minis show how quickly the confidence in her line has progressed thanks to a great deal of work. Looking at the work in Pine Pitch Perfume, for example, one can see that her character design is a little shaky. Balancing space in her panels is also an issue at times, leading to some clutter. That said, she has a keen observational eye and a low-key wit. Her storytelling is also excellent throughout, especially when paired with an interesting conceptual gimmick. For example, "Partial Anatomy Of A Fabric Stash" uses a nine-panel grid with a different pattern of fabric in each panel. Each pattern told a different story, with a different piece of her past by way of clothes she made or wanted to make.

She also told stories about her daughter, her dog, her childhood and traveling to Brazil. Dietrich wields narrative captions pretty hard in these comics, but even her earliest stories have a witty visual vocabulary as well. In panels where her daughter is trying to fool her into staying awake or where she's trying to listen to headphones on a plane and draw but keeps getting loudly interrupted, Dietrich's use of gesture and exaggeration makes those panels effective. Birth Story unlocks and unleashes Dietrich's easy charm as a storyteller in a story that's paced a little like a Summer Pierre comic, only with much more rubbery visuals. Like any kind storyteller, the charm of this piece lies in its details. For example, Dietrich refused to wear any clothing while waiting to give birth. The lactation staff was away when she gave birth because they went to a Jimmy Buffet concert. Those details allowed her to connect the reader to the wave of emotions she felt at different points. Dietrich mostly stuck to a grid in this comic but wasn't afraid to modify it, collapsing rows into a single image or making single panels into a mini-four panel grid.

Key West Diary is Dietrich's longest and best comic to date. Travel is usually good fodder for diary comics, given the narrative aspect of having a finite period of time one's writing about. Dietrich went the extra mile but traveling alone with her toddler daughter down to her old stamping grounds in Key West with old friends. That gave the comic an interesting emotional resonance, as Dietrich revisited not just an old place, but an old way of life. There's also the New Hampshire in winter vs. sunny paradise juxtaposition, which led Dietrich to increase her degree of difficulty by going out as much as possible with her daughter. There's some disconnect on her part with her friends, who rarely think about their scandalous adventures with Dietrich, especially since she was trying to prove to herself that motherhood hadn't changed her that much. This is a rich and detailed comic that sees Dietrich examine her past, present, and future as an individual apart from her marriage. Her line is expressive and loose as spontaneity was a key aspect of the diary, yet there's greater overall control. The ambitiousness of her trip was matched by the ambitiousness of this comic.