Minis: November Garcia

There are a lot of ways to think about the most recent comics from November Garcia, which include Malarkey #5 and (Even) More Diary Comics From A Relative Nobody. The first thing I want to discuss, however, is Garcia's level of craft. Even though many of these comics were done during what was clearly a tumultuous time on top of dealing with the global pandemic, Garcia's drawings qua drawings show her at her peak. In Diary Comics, which is all black and white, there's a level of mastery and control on every page that reflects her comfort in working on fine details when appropriate but never quite leaving behind the rubbery qualities of her line that helps make her comics so funny. Her use of body language, facial expressions, and even the way she letters her comics is simply pleasurable to look at. Malarkey makes extensive use of spot color, usually for reasons of mood or contrast, and it's every bit as effective. Even the non-narrative sequence where she illustrates the lyrics of a song show Garcia returning to her psychedelic roots, only this time there's a much greater use of restraint. 

Diary Comics, like much of Garcia's work, tends toward closed autobiography. There isn't much in the way of context, emotionally or otherwise, but it doesn't matter much because she never cloaks her diary in any kind of coherent gimmick. That total lack of pretension is what makes Garcia's work so refreshing, along with the fact that she's a humorist even in the grimmest of situations. That almost ruthless funniness, usually at her own expense, reminds me a little of what Keiler Roberts does, only with a completely different personal context. What I mean by a lack of a gimmick, Garcia makes it clear that she's dealing with mental illness, addiction, social anxiety, and grief, among other issues, but all of those problems are muted in favor of trying to work them into gags. There's a strip where her therapist decides that Garcia has bipolar disorder, so she gives her Valpros. Garcia shrugs, saying, "Bend my brain, Valpros!" and matter-of-factly reports the drug helping her concentrate but also making her feel indifferent. Garcia is a clever, succinct writer, but it's her drawings that sell the hell out of every panel. Seeing the way she draws her hair alone is a big part of the appeal of her work.

Garcia's comics have also been about her slow entry and acceptance into the world of alternative comics. There's a strip about being named as an Ignatz award juror and having a funny conversation with Gabby Schulz about it. There's a self-deprecating strip about her "process" that touches on her cycle of addiction and fitness. There's a particularly grim strip that shows her completely over herself and her "made-up problems," wondering why people are even buying her comics. There are also more traditional comics about sharing old photos with an ex and making mutually lascivious comments and a hilarious set of exchanges with her dad about modern technology. 

Malarkey #5 I believe is slated to be the final issue, and it's the most substantial one to date. The issue touches on mortality and the time we spend together. As always, any material about Garcia's mother is gold and Garcia could write an entire book about her childhood alone that would be hilarious and weird. In this issue, she discusses how she first encountered death: first through pets, then her grandfather (as she tried to summon up feelings) when she was still quite young, and then her more recent friends and relatives. That makes her think about how she's living her own life, and it's sometimes a grim prospect.

That leads into a long, psychedelic adaptation of the song "Gasoline" by Shovels and Rope. It's a harsh, cynical take on life matched by Garcia's absurd, visceral, and weird drawings. She goes all-out here, playing up lurid, sick colors with the images of rot, decay, and putrescence. The back half of the issue features two examples of Garcia's specialty: the travelogue. Garcia particularly enjoys portraying the more depraved and hilarious aspects of her trip, like sending cocaine to former cartoonist Tom Van Deusen and giving him a bare-ass spanking along with cartoonist Max Clotfelter. It's such a ridiculous sequence of events, with the best part being a panel where he's getting spanked and his face is a mask of pleasure with little hearts surrounding it. The final sequence of a hung-over Garcia looking at a photo of herself elbow-dropping a bible capped off the silliness while giving it all a touch of regret.

More meditative is her account of her trip to Hawai'i with her husband and partner-in-crime Roy as they meet cartoonist Gabby Schulz. Garcia used an open-page layout here, which seemed fitting in this dreamy, meditative story that focused on a hike they all took together. Even the lighter use of color (colored pencils, perhaps?), as opposed to the denser, more saturated hues elsewhere in the book, reflect the gentler, more thoughtful tone at work here. There's still plenty of funny content, once again mostly at Garcia's expense (like having to slog through a deep puddle while the boys manage to mostly skip over it), but it's all a bit of an oasis, both personally and artistically.

The issue concludes with her mom's outrageous statements, told with a metal-blue wash. Garcia assembled something special here, even if it seemed to take an enormous toll in so doing. The raw nature of her observations, the lack of pretense, and her willingness to ramble all give her comics a sense of vulnerability and verisimilitude in a way a smoother narrative doesn't. Indeed, life itself is not a smooth narrative where everything makes, and Garcia's comics reflect that herky-jerky quality in a way that doesn't spare exploration of her most nihilistic thoughts but also allows her to share the absurd delight with which she views the world and the genuine curiosity and affection she feels for others.

November Garcia's Malarkey #4

At this stage of her career, November Garcia's one-woman anthology Malarkey is mostly comprised of reprints from other venues. Popula, Pen America, and The New Yorker featured some of the stories here, and it speaks to her versatility as a cartoonist in how she tailored each of them for publication while still retaining her essential irreverence. Of course, there are plenty of her own strips in Malakey #4, and they are very much in keeping with past work. For example, there's her obsession with the band FIDLAR, a loud and trashy rock band whose fans tended to be teens. Her obsession and crush on the lead singer are funny, but Garcia also notes that as a middle-aged woman, she's right on track for regressive behavior.

No one does self-deprecation funnier than Garcia. Take her story about being a young cartoonist and submitting a book to Fantagraphics, for example. Convinced of her own genius, she had the chutzpah to send it to her idol Peter Bagge (along with the rejection letter) and asked if the problem was the story or the art. His reply, "It is both," led to her thinking "With that, I officially entered adulthood." Garcia's willingness to deeply mine her memories of embarrassing events is what makes her so funny. A key element of that humor is her subtle mastery of pacing, Even in stories that are mostly dialogue and text captions, Garcia has a way of making them easy to absorb thanks to her understanding of how to use negative space.

"Travel Tips From A Tokyo Trip" was originally published in The New Yorker, and Garcia is much more reserved than usual. It's still a funny strip with a good punchline, but the tightness of the strip and punchline is different from her typical pleasant meanderings. Compare that to the next, wordless story. Garcia drops a nameless drug at the beach, listens to music, and rocks out. "Blind Faith," from Pen America, is about her religious upbringing and Catholic school days. Garcia smartly notes how omnipresent religious practices are when virtually everyone in the same country is brought up Catholic. A Filipina, Garcia shed her beliefs when she moved to America, but what was interesting was how lazy her own parents' practice was. Sure, they had to pray the rosary growing up, but it was ok to wait til after Melrose Place. No issue of Malarkey is complete without a funny story about Garcia's mom, and this issue featured a story about her mom's obsession with beauty regimens, culminating in something horrific called a "blood facial."

"Hole Number One" is a companion piece to "Blind Faith," as Garcia talks about trying to get laid as a teen and finding it hard to get privacy. Garcia talks about using confession as a way of getting rid of her sex-related guilt so this story takes the reader from under her bed to abandoned houses, a park, and finally a golf course. A neatly-trimmed green works every time. The final strip involves Garcia giving advice to her younger self about hard living, being cool, and how she will never lead a conventional life. Garcia's use of color throughout the comic adds a lot to each story; her use of blank space invites conventional, psychedelic, and decorative uses of color. Garcia's increasing confidence and command over her page makes all of this work some of the most entertaining autobio currently being published.

Minis: November Garcia

November Garcia made one of her periodic journeys to the US from the Philippines, which meant that another issue of her grab-bag minicomics series Malarkey (#3) made its way to my mailbox. Garcia's confidence grows from issue to issue, and her use of spot color here enhanced the storytelling significantly. Garcia's use of color was not so much decorative as it was for storytelling clarity, as the colors helped lead the eye across the page. Garcia's comics are autobiographical, but there's no telling if she's going to go with a current observation, a dip into childhood, a tale about "My Weepy Ex", or hijinx from her family (and especially her mom).

Garcia is a humorist, first and foremost. When she does a four-panel, single-page story, it's almost always a sign that the fourth panel is going to have a punchline. That said, Garcia isn't afraid to "spill some ink" as a memoirist; that is, she makes herself vulnerable to the audience and provides intimate, personal details about her life. Her comics are funny because life is funny and frequently nonsensical, and she has a knack for distilling these moments. The greater precision of her draftsmanship shows in emphasizing certain images for comedic effect. For example, in a two-page story detailing her difficulties with smoking pot, there's a close-up panel of her bloodshot eyes as she realizes everyone she loves will someday die. There's a rubbery quality to her character work that's reminiscent of Peter Bagge at times, down to the heavy hatching.

That said, her character design (with emphasis on the eyes above all else) and lettering bears her own unique stamp. They're meant to be a little loose and cartoonish, but the reality is that she's careful on each page to have rock-solid storytelling and clearly-defined background jokes. Garcia is especially adept at drawing herself as a child, which can be a difficult task for some. She gets the body language and gestures that children make and just how weird they can be, which she emphasizes in a strip about her own strange behavior as a kid. Garcia is also as much a fan of comics as she is a professional, and there's a funny two page strip about a friend who tells her his animation friends think her work is too whiny. The result is two tight nine-panel grids worth of one-upmanship, as Garcia defends her indie comic turf and rejects the critique because the people making it don't know what they're talking about. The strip is especially funny because Garcia points out her own foibles and hypocrisies along the way. Her ability to do short strips and longer narratives with sensitivity, humor and even the occasional bit of scatology is indicative of her versatility and points to a wide and varied career path.

Two From November Garcia

November Garcia keeps plugging away with funny autobio comics that show off her ability to distill sweeping events into just a funny anecdote or two, as well as her ability to turn tiny details into a story. Take her Rookie Moves, for example. It details her trip back to the USA (she currently lives in the Philippines) to attend the shows CAKE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo) and SPX (Small Press Expo). The former she attended without tabling and the latter was the first show in the US at which she tabled. (Full disclosure: I spent time with her at both shows and briefly appear in the comic.) Her story is that of the overnight success that takes twenty years to get there and managing the cognitive dissonance between being a fan and a peer of this cohort of cartoonists is something that she played up for laughs. 

Indeed, opening the comic with funny highlights distilled from the local Filipino comic con set her up as someone totally comfortable her own surroundings, even if some young women mistook her husband Roy for Adrian Tomine. The next strip finds her at Chicago's famous Quimby's comic store at a reading, nervous and excited. Garcia's facility for comedy was quickly was demonstrated in two panels: one where she recognizes me (because of the hat, I say) and one where Iona Fox recognizes her (because of her nose, November says). The way she switches character positions, frames each panel with a proscenium of black, and relies on gesture to express the warmth underneath the humor shows just how carefully she considers her formal decisions. Garcia's figure drawings are simple but expressive, as she's especially proficient at depicting body language and the way bodies interact in space. Not unlike Julia Wertz, her backgrounds are tight and detailed.

Throughout the comic, Garcia balances genuine expressions of emotion with the urge to write toward comedic ends. She wrote about penning a letter to John Porcellino about how his comics had changed her life that she later found embarrassing. Garcia in this segment truly poured out her feelings in a earnest way, and the eventual punchline she used for the strip didn't diminish that. The rest of the comic finds her awkwardly making friends with Gabrielle Bell, getting up to shenanigans at signings, going to dive bars, and winding up in the wrong lines at SPX. Garcia walks a fine line in setting herself up as the butt of many a joke, but her affability and wit don't allow her to sink into self-deprecation for its own sake.

More Diary Comics (From A Relative Nobody) shifts the focus back to her everyday life in Manilla. If Garcia depicts herself as a fish out of water in her comics in America, she's very much in control in Manilla as she deals with work as a graphic designer, her wacky mom and life with Roy. Her line is much looser here, eschewing blacks and hatching altogether in favor of just using a bold approach. Throughout the comic, she obsesses about being obsessed with her career, with the paranoid sense that all of the offers she's receiving might dry up at any time and chastising herself for working too hard. Garcia also talks a lot about her health, with one strip starting with the line, "I woke up with whiskey regrets" as she combats the hangover with yoga and negates that with eating a bowl of potatoes. Garcia goes to extremes in her comics: she drinks hard, she eats rich food, and she stays up late, but she shows the ways in which her body pays for this excess with headaches and GI distress. Those extremes seem to be triggered as a way to cope with her two biggest enemies: boredom and anxiety.

Garcia in her comics seems happiest when she's moving: dancing in her house, exercising or running around. That and drawing help set up the central conflict in her life (and in many an introvert artist's): a desperate need for solitude interspersed with an even greater need for connection with like-minded people. Having that solitude disrupted triggers anxiety, but being isolated triggers boredom. Garcia also gets a lot of mileage of the old trope of a diary cartoonist not having anything to say and demanding that Roy do something. At the same time, the travel comics that completed this mini reverted to the kind of small, funny events in the context of a longer journey that marked the previous mini. Garcia's comics are less confessional than they are affirmations of the absurdity of her life, because that absurdity often leads to wonderful things.

More Minis From CAKE: N.Garcia, L.Knetzger, S.McMahan

Here are a few more minis from CAKE:

Bug Boys #14, by Laura Knetzger. Knetzger was on my "Place As Character" panel, and I chose her specifically because of the way the forest has taken on an ever-expanding role in this gentle YA series about two bug friends who are slowly finding their way in the world. This issue is a perfect example of the way that Knetzger invites her audience to explore a new space, feeling the rush of excitement and mystery that this new environment has to offer. While the Bug Boys adventures are always fun, the series really is a kind of philosophical diary for Knetzger about identity and growth. This issue starts with the newly-crowned Queen Bee visiting the Bug Boys' village; she was the new queen in part because of the bravery of friends Stag-B and Rhino-B. The issue begins with a simple question of what's in a name, as she's called either the Queen by outsiders or Mother by those in her hive, but had no name for friends.

Apropos of the theme of exploring a new environment, the bee and the bugs take a spill from the top of a raspberry bush and wind up in its root system. Exploring the tunnels together, they happen upon a central chamber that has a giant gem with roots coming out of it. The Queen suggests that maybe it's the soul of the bush, which leads to a discussion about whether plants have souls, and how the queen thinks of herself as the soul of her hive. That's not just in the case of her own individual agency having precedence over everything, but rather imagining her agency as part of the entire hive's needs, wants and dreams. When they emerge from the tunnels (unscathed; there is rarely real danger in this series, and when it happens, it's dramatic because of its typically gentle tone), one of the boys says, "Goodbye, Soul!", and there's a beautiful sequence where the Queen is taken aback in one panel, then realizes the profundity of this statement and is filled with love. This sequence worked in part because Knetzger is not only increasingly confident in her line, but she's also increasingly elegant as well. The Queen is just a lovely figure to look at: graceful, poised and confident. Knetzger's cartoony but naturalistic line, paired with zip-a-tone to give the world depth and texture, allows the reader to easily interact with the characters but also enjoy the majesty of the environment.

Malarkey #2, by November Garcia. Garcia is my favorite new autobio cartoonist, especially given the way she's able to navigate humor and poignant moments with equal aplomb. Malarkey is her catch-all comic where she collects her four-panel gag strips that center around her family, her husband, comics, and life in general in the Philippines. Her mother is perhaps my favorite character, especially in the way Garcia draws her. The glasses she wears obscure her eyes, which I imagine is a deliberate distancing technique for a character that Garcia depicts as odd, abrasive, in-your-face and frequently larger than life. That distance also sets up her storytelling ability, like in a series of strips where her mom describes her childhood. She told the story of "Uncle Doctor", whom her mom hated, because he was a helicopter parent who micromanaged everything they did. Even as an older person, Garcia ably depicts her as a total free spirit, unconcerned with mores and custom in many ways. That wasn't always a good thing, as in the course of their conversation her mom told Garcia about the racial slur she and her family used to refer to her cousin by, as well as her husband on occasion!

Observing these strips carefully, Garcia does something interesting visually to add a bit of context and activity to what is essentially a two-talking heads strip. First, she changes the pose of both of her characters in each panel, carefully adjusting poses them so as to better relate body language. Garcia also adds food and drink in each panel, giving the characters something to react against and giving the reader's eye something else to look at, but it also works on a sequential basis, like when Garcia does a spit-take at the end of one panel. Garcia also loves exaggerating facial expressions in particular, with wide grins, wrinkled-up expressions of fear, and almost sad-clown type frowns. She also captures the fact that her mom is the kind of person who speaks with her hands, so her arms are flying in every other panel.

There are also various strips about drunk adventures (a wine-and-cheese festival was especially amusing) and comics. Being in the Philippines, Garcia naturally feels quite distant from the North American comics scene, so seeing her do strips about listening to podcasts where her comic is mentioned or fantasizing (positively and negatively) about what going to CAKE would be like have that element present in all of Garcia's comics: an element of pure joy & excitement about life balanced with anxiety and in particular regret for things she hasn't actually done yet. That element adds a certain tension to these strips but doesn't dominate it, as her enthusiasm for life is still the dominant element in her work, and it's the engine for her sense of humor.

Dreaming Of Johnny, by Sophie McMahan. This is a collection of reprints from McMahan's outstanding You Were Swell series as well as a few other stories I hadn't seen before, all printed beautifully on a Risograph. The colors make the original strips pop even more, like "Winner"'s beauty-pageant nightmare. McMahan explores 1950s romance comics and advertising art in her work, and the candy-colored quality of the riso's coloring adds to that sense of the grotesque as she subverts that imagery. In "Please Go", she uses ornate, immersive lettering to say "Wondering when this empty feeling will leave/I hope it's not here to stay" in a posed family photo of three girls. Their eyes are blank in both shots, with what looks like tears or vitreous humor being forced from their eyes.

McMahan explores body dysmorphia through body horror, like multiple eyes on a beauty-queen type, teeth falling out and faces & bodies warping through distorted self-perception. It's also a brutal satire on societal norms and expectations creating an unobtainable image and idea of what one's self-worth should be like. "Lothario From The Black Lagoon" is perhaps my all-time favorite comic of hers, as the titular monster is depicted as a sleazy guy using tired pick-up lines like "Come here often?" and concludes by saying "Another day, another girl. You now how it goes." There's almost a sense of resignation in his own sense of emptiness and alienation, even as he takes advantage of women by saying all the right things. McMahan has a powerfully realized aesthetic that she's refined even further in this comic, one that addresses her own internalized feelings of worthlessness as well as the societal forces that shape them. Her comics are an innovative way of externalizing those feelings by subverting the very kinds of images that helped to create them.

Minis: S.Spina, N.Garcia, B.Berry, M.Turbitt

Supercar 1, by Brandon Berry. This short comic, designed to briefly introduce a setting and its main character, reminds me a lot of the sort of thing that Brandon Graham and Malachi Ward are doing: thoughtful, off-beat and highly stylized science fiction. In this comic, we're introduced to a driver who's getting their car upgraded by an anthropomorphic rabbit creature. After dropping in a component that seems to work on magic as much as it does science, the driver gives the rabbit an old Mac laptop, establishing the timeline as some post-apocalyptic future. The last scene finds a cop on a motorcycle (with perhaps dubious authority) chasing after the driver. Along the way, Berry's wobbly and wonky line adds a tremendous amount of atmosphere and texture to the story. Some panels are missteps (one panel with just the driver has too much negative space), but overall, Berry's chunky line width and the fluidity of his figures makes this a striking little comic to look at.

Malarkey, by November Garcia. Matt Moses of Hic & Hoc handed me this mini at SPX, and he said he plans to publish a longer collection of her work. He noted the obvious comparison between Garcia and the work of Julia Wertz, and it's certainly there on the surface. Their figure composition, line, sense of humor and even personal struggles are much alike. That said, Garcia has her own unique voice, and that's not just because she lives in the Philippines. Her sense of comic timing, her willingness to use aspects of her life (as well as the lives of others) as a rich vein for her comic material, and her skill with regard to body language, expressiveness and page layouts made every story a delight to read. Garcia also exploits the differences between she and her mother, who on the one hand is scandalized by her daughters openly displaying the tampons they bought but on the other grew up playing with spiders and tadpoles. Lighthearted stuff like teasing her mom about her phone screensaver is interspersed with much darker material, like a funny strip about a dilation & curettage procedure she had to get after a miscarriage.

Garcia isn't afraid to shove the reader head-on into some pretty intimate material while at the same time distancing herself from it just enough to extract a punchline. The same is true about her struggles with drinking, the behavior of certain ex-boyfriends, pondering the reasons why she's put off having a baby and juxtaposing the text of a funny story from a beloved aunt with the reality of her life in hospice. What also struck me about this comic is just how important comics are to her. In "The Story Of You", a take-off on the sort of story one tells your young child about how they were born, she goes into detail about how much time, energy and thought she put into each strip. The final panel, where both Garcia and her anthropomorphic comic are homeless, is both tender and hilariously self-deprecating at the same time. There's another strip where she's over the moon about John Porcellino following her on Tumblr and she punches a scoffing friend ("Who the hell is John Porceloono?") in the breast while never taking her eyes off the phone. That sums up Garcia's work in a nutshell: committed to her craft, highly expressive, generally inappropriate in all the best ways. and possessing great comic timing.

Being Myself Is A Treasure and Having A Time, by Sam Spina. These are the collections of years six and seven of Spina drawing diary comics. He abandoned printing or even attempting a daily strip a little while back, preferring to focus in on days where he had a gag, a life event to report or simply something interesting to say. That was a wise move, because while doing a daily diary strip can help a cartoonist improve drastically, they aren't necessarily great reads, nor are they always well-drawn. In recent years, however, Spina's skill as both a cartoonist and a storyteller has been steadily honed through sheer, hard work. At the same time, these strips still retain that same boundless, goofy energy that permeated his early work. He also retains a willingness to put himself out there in terms of things he thinks and says, but is also willing to give his wife, Samantha, her own say in how events played out. Their sweet and occasionally pugnacious relationship is a highlight of the strip, as both are strongly attached to their very different points of view and are willing to defend them, but their ultimately loving foundation grounds the strip.

Being Myself Is A Treasure (volume 6 of the Spinadoodles diary series) is a major turning point, as Spina is suddenly offered a job doing storyboards for the Cartoon Network series The Regular Show. It's reminiscent of Mike Doonesbury being taken out of a dead-end job and suddenly being plopped into a new life, as Sam & Sam leave Atlanta and move to Los Angeles. Spina mixes in some fantastic sketchbook pages (in color) among the diary strips, which I especially enjoyed because they're more characteristic of his other work. There's still an utter lack of pretension to be found in these comics, as he still writes a lot about his job. It's just a job he's always dreamed of, instead of being a waiter. Volume 7 (Having A Time) is even more successful, as Spina's able to devote more time to his diary as it's clear he started to get the hang of his new life. Spina started to expand his autobio stories out to more than a single page on a more regular basis, resulting in richer, funnier stories. Many autobio cartoonists have done a strip about going to the San Diego Comicon, but Spina's focus on details like being unable to sleep, spending time with a friend and being frustrated when his wife wasn't there to pick him up at the station in the middle of the night provided a funny contrast to the usual business-oriented con experiences. There's an Hourly Comics Day experiment that's by far his most successful, a funny account of a trip to Iceland with his wife. more sketchbook comics, and the realization that while his life was great in many ways, he desperately missed the cartooning camaraderie he had in Denver. The highlight of the book is a day-by-day account of precisely how being a storyboard artist works for his show, which was fascinating in terms of the details but hilarious in just how honest he is about how much time he wastes along the way. There's even a point where he's bummed that drawing storyboards has altered his own drawing style. Whatever his concerns, it's clear that Spina is hitting his stride as a creator, as Having A Time is just the right length and has just the right balance of material.

Self, by Meghan Turbitt. Turbitt's parody of trashy women's magazines isn't simply a satirical takedown of such publications, though that's part of it. Self is no less than a total reimagining and warping of women's magazines around Turbitt's own particular aesthetic obsessions. An article about sex tips is an interview with someone that Turbitt has had sex with turns into a consumer goods survey, as she asks questions like "In what ways could I improve the experience for people wanting to have sex with me?" A fashion article titled "How To Wear A $3 Bra" is a hilarious series of drawings where Turbitt is unable to get her breasts to behave when she moves or runs, leading to an encounter with friends where she screams at them not to "look at my boobs jiggle". It's a real exploration of the concept of clothing that's affordable and functional, that at the very least doesn't embarrass the person wearing them. "Bros Who Brunch" is a hilarious but almost loving takedown of an Instagram account featuring guys eating ridiculous foods and absurd drinks in a show of conspicuous consumption. All elements of Turbitt's satire, no matter how mean, are turned at least in part on herself, as she always reveals that there's an aspect of her that loves and wishes she could be a part of that vapid, shallow wallowing in excess wealth. "2016 Best Beverages" is essentially whatever Turbitt found most satisfying at a particular point in time, so it includes things like "Diet Coke from McDonald's" as well as "Coffee in French Press". Turbitt throws in a couple of dirty strips involving men exposing themselves to her, which makes sense since the kind of magazine this satirizes is a reflection on the standards for beauty, grace and culture that are imposed on women by outside sources. One strip features a hilarious punchline where Turbitt uses an exposed penis to open a bottle of wine, and the other is an expose' of what dog owners who don't restrain their pets from jumping all over others are really thinking. There's plenty of familiar, furious Turbitt lines as she's frantically in motion at various points, but the success of this comic is largely conceptual.