Minis: Tyler Cohen

Tyler Cohen's comics vary between her surreal, feminist characters in Primazon and her intensely personal observations in Mamapants. There's a powerful tension in her comics that veers between the radical and the traditional, as she approaches all aspects of motherhood, political action, and artistic expression through a lens that defies any kind of conventional definitions. Her short mini, Shelter In Place, is a diary of the first three months of quarantine in her San Francisco home. The drawings range from expressive, spontaneous scribbles to more carefully rendered and colored art. 

Cohen's self-caricature is a delight. The way she draws herself with a square head, huge square glasses, and a big nose is funny and distinctive, reflecting once again a level of self-deprecatory comfort that at the same time eschews societal norms. All of Cohen's art, in fact, tends to wave a big middle finger to so-called conventional behavior, especially with regard to hierarchical divisions. Cohen is also funny; there's a strip with her kid twenty years from now where they're sitting in a rowboat (because of the rising tides from global warming, no doubt), reminiscing about the first pandemic in 2020. It's funny, but it's also part of a group of strips that refer to the contentious but loving relationship Cohen has with her kid, who is currently in full teenage defiance mode. 

At the same time, there is enormous sympathy for them, considering that this is an age where separation and independence should be happening, and instead there are millions of kids stuck at home. Cohen's observations about the odd quarantine custom at the farmer's market, drawings of herself when she was 18 and 20 (based on internet memes), and a lamentation with her partner that it's hard to have sex in a small apartment when their kid is awake at all hours all reflect her sharp comedic sensibility and understanding of how best to express these details.

Tyler Cohen's Primahood: Magenta

Tyler Cohen's collection of her Mamapants/Primazons short stories and minicomics, Primahood: Magenta (published by Stacked Deck Press) is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. What I mean by that in this case is that the alternating Primazon and Mamapants stories gave each other structure and context in a way that was difficult to achieve in single issues of her minis, where Cohen had to sometimes overexplain what she was trying to do. Here, she doesn't even have to try, as Roberta Gregory's superb introduction makes some important distinctions between the two interlocking storytelling devices. The Mamapants stories are a Cohen's autobiographical comics about being deciding later in life to have a child as a bisexual woman who eschews labels as much as possible. The silent Primazon illustrations depict a matriarchal society whose members seemed to be a mix of insectoid and avian, but still humanoid. They're Amazons, of a sort, in a society that's at once whimsical and fierce. Everyone is at play, but play for everyone is deadly serious.

In the Mamapants stories, Cohen is interested in three things: to record the fierce and highly unpredictable behavior of her daughter, to comment on how she and her partner were raising daughter Nene--and in particular, the ways in which they were trying to avoid patriarchal influences, and finally what other "Primazons" had to say when she asked them questions about their bodies, femininity, and being treated like an object. Cohen was adamant about not letting gender hold her daughter back in any way and she wanted it to shape her personality as little as possible. Of course, the influence of society is powerful, so she came back from preschool wanting to play princess and she wore little else but pink. At the same time, her daughter loved playing outside, being physical and getting the kind of knee scrapes that Cohen got as a child. Still, Cohen obviously struggles with the influence that pop culture and other children have on her child, not to mention the omnipresence of sex being introduced as a kind of commodity.

Cohen's art is a mix of fluid, scribbly and cartoony. It's no stretch to see a naturalistic pose turn into a fantastical one, like depicting her young daughter as a tiger after dreaming she was giving birth to a cat. While spot color is used in the autobio comics, Cohen depends on her line to provide structure and stability for those comics. They are grounded in reality, with some of the color leaking in from lands of fancy in certain panels. The Primazon material is almost entirely dependent on color, often eschewing black lines altogether and sticking to bright, colored pencil renderings. When Cohen relates the results of her various survey, the figures telling the stories are Primazons. In many ways, the Primazons aren't so much an alternating storyline as much as that they seem to exist in the same space but in a slightly different dimensional space. Sometimes, there's some bleed between the two dimensions. 

Cohen has certain hopes and dreams for her daughter, but she's also adaptable and eschews rigidity whenever possible. When her daughter wants a particular doll that mixes monster tropes and Barbie tropes, Cohen relents. In short order, Nene becomes disinterested, which likely would not have happened if Cohen had forbade it. Cohen understands that a child's energy and desires can't be extinguished, but rather only rerouted to something healthier. While Cohen is fascinated by various milestones (like when her daughter's breasts start developing) and genealogical similarities, she's mostly just fascinated by the crazy magic of raising a child and seeing them develop their own sense of energy. When a bystander asked young Nene what she was (princess? ballerina?), Cohen simply said, "She's herself." That self is a slightly inchoate, rapidly developing (and sometimes in a contradictory way) young person who is pushed and pulled by contradictory images and desires that trusts and talks to her parents on her way to new adventures. There's a wistfulness at work here that covers up some of the extremely annoying parts of being a parent to a young child to be sure, as this volume roughly finishes up the preteen years. Cohen does it all with a very purposeful, radical point of view that is less interested in lecturing than it is in simply being honest, humane and funny.  

Autobio Minis: Cohen, Thomas, Williams, Yanow

Primahood #1 & #2, by Tyler Cohen.  These are attractively drawn & colored, slightly trippy and brutally true accounts of being the mother of a young girl. Interspersing her "observations" of the Primazons (a fantasy overlay of her interactions with mothers and their children) with her own stories about raising her "fierce" daughter, Cohen's stories ring true precisely because a parent has only so much control over a child's beliefs, behaviors and fantasy life. A progressive feminist, Cohen is alarmed when her daughter picks up concepts like princesses, marriage and other heteronormative, stereotypically gendered ideas from pre-school. At the same time, Cohen's refusal to bottle up or force her daughter to conform (or in this case, not conform) to societal norms allows her to retain a certain wild individuality, where even the most stereotypically feminine concepts are warped through her daughter's quirky lens.

The second issue is conceptually tighter and better drawn than the first, which isn't surprising considering that the first issue was Cohen's return to comics after years away from the drawing table. Cohen is very clearly interested in the concept of play as a serious form of activity vital to the sanity of children, and views it through her Primazon lens: as a sort of tribal activity performed by untamed and almost feral females. They are all almost entirely naked, other than decorative trappings, with abstract and vaguely animalistic heads. It's a way of making these otherwise familiar forms feel slightly alien and Other. It's a tribe that one cannot ask to join, but that one is forced into when one has children. Play is at the heart of the second issue, and the concluding story "Miss Education" (concerning her daughter's entry into kindergarten and all the new questions it raises) switches between particularly distressing and difficult anecdotes with Primazons playing a hand-slapping and rhyming game/ritual. This is a great take on the newly-burgeoning motherhood comics sub-genre, joining the likes of Lauren Weinstein, Carol Tyler and Francesca Cassavetti in providing an honest look at what it's like as a mother and as an observer of a child's behavior. I hope Cohen keeps this going.

My Life In Records #2: Into My Heart, by Grant Thomas.  Thomas writes autobio stories with the hook that they're mediated through his memories of how music has affected his life. This issue deals with the intersection between two critical events: his near-death by drowning when he was a toddler and his childhood fascination with the actual mechanics of how Jesus enters one's heart. This is a full-color comic, something that is irrelevant (and sometimes even distracting) on some pages but is crucial during those sequences where he's falling deeper into the swimming pool, the water taking on sickly dark blue and green hues. Thomas segues from that event into discussing how a particular christian record aimed at children made such a big impact on him, in part because it came with its own set of crayons. What follows after that is Thomas recreating the sort of theological debate a child might has when debating whether or not to (literally?) open up one's heart and let Jesus live there. His slightly older brother (like Thomas, depicted wearing a bunny mask), explains in his own way about the concept of the Holy Ghost, adding a level of complexity to young Grant's world (good ghosts and bad ghosts?). All of this leads up to his choice of becoming baptized, which in many Protestant circles, involves full submersion. There are some more beautiful pages with the background of a lake, the words of the song "Come Into My Heart Lord Jesus" melding into the background before they loop into a record player, and young Grant practicing baptism in his own bathtub. The final image is one of relief as much as it is joy--a fear conquered and a new step taken in spiritual development. Thomas is deliberately vague as to whether religion continues to be important in his life, but that wasn't relevant to the conflict presented in this issue: fear vs faith. The baptism, as experienced by Thomas here, was a sort of shock therapy after he had prepared for the moment, in much the same way therapists try to help people with phobias of any kind.

Hungry Bottom Comics, by Eric Kostiuk Williams. I've read a number of autobio comics from gay cartoonists detailing coming-out experiences, the awkwardness and excitement of cruising and how one manages to deal with one's own feelings of self-loathing, but Williams' account of his experiences is my favorite. That's because of his wit, his intelligence, his hard self-reflection and a naturalistic drawing style that nonetheless has a rubbery quality to it that allows for some flights of fancy. Indeed, his style reminds me a bit of Phoebe Gloeckner in terms of both his figure work and the way he blends text and image to create a slightly dreamy whole. This collection of strips mixes in single-panel gags about experiencing life as a young gay man, gently mocking both himself and the scene as a whole, with longer and more introspective stories. There's a rough chronology here as his coming-out story with his mom is toward the beginning, and it is hilarious. The fact that his mom basically browbeats him into coming out while washing dishes is alleviated by the fact that Williams depicts her as glamorous singer Kelly Rowland (with the disclaimer; "May not actually resemble Kelly Rowland.")

Those longer pieces highlight Williams' philosophical take on being gay, quoting Camille Paglia and Jean Genet at length, while still going into great detail about clubbing, cruising, drinking, and having lots of anonymous sex. His comics about dating and the disconnect between many gay men's private and sexual spheres are especially thought-provoking, leading to his account of being in a relationship and the unique joys and heartaches that experience generated. When he has an AIDS scare after a condom broke, it understandably forced him to reevaluate himself and the scene; memorably, he excoriates both for pretending that AIDS was over, slowly shifting a scene of dancers at a club into iconic Keith Haring figures. The comic concludes with the campy yet highly self-analytical strip where a despondent Williams meets his "diva totem", who forces him to confront his shame and self-loathing about his own feminimity.  Williams is careful to note that the lesson to be learned here is not simply self-acceptance, but also "admitting the extent to which I've been complicit in instances of cowardice and disrespect". That's heady stuff for such a young person to have come to grips with, but I think his own sense of humor about himself (the title of the comic comes from a vaguely insulting thing someone said to him once) is what makes that possible. The humorous, philosophical, sexual and quotidian aspects of his life all come into play in this comic, as Williams ultimately rejects the sort of cordoning off of one's life that many in the scene choose to do.  I hope he continues to juggle all of these concerns in his future work.

In Situ #2, by Sophie Yanow.  Yanow is one of my favorite new autobio artists, thanks to her interesting stylistic choices, poetic narrative choices and her intense desire to merge personal and political concerns. Generally holding to a six-panel grid, Yanow often fractures her narratives by eliding words, stretching words out over time and space through panel-to-panel transitions, crossing out words and making clear scratch-outs in her art, and numerous other tricks to indicate the flow of consciousness and a genuine sense of inner conflict. Living away from her beloved home city of Oakland in its hour of its greatest political uprising and awareness, Yanow feels guilt for not being there as well as frequent contentment in the equally-bustling and creativity-sparking city of Montreal. There are lighter-hearted moments, of course, especially those that address her sex life and sexual identity. There's one scene where she and a lover are having an inane, drunken conversation where Yanow winds up thinking to herself "Oh my god...really?"; as in all of her strips, Yanow depicts herself wearing glasses that obscure her eyes to distance herself slightly from the reader in the tradition of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie. The next strip, where she and her lover are lying in bed listening to Joni Mitchell lyrics, prompts her lover to exclaim "What is this self-made lesbian hell?" Yanow reflects on her health, her feelings of weakness, her battle with depression, her conflicting feelings about being with others, and the politics of wearing a jacket with a Neil Young patch at a doom metal show. Yanow is part John Porcellino, part Gabrielle Bell, and her work is some of the most exciting from the autobio arm of alt-comics today.