Pich and Booth explore similar ideas in different ways. They are walking cringe generators, but one can’t help but laugh. They are manipulative but also stir complacent characters out of their own personal miasmas. They are chaos agents who blow in winds both good and ill. The result for both books is that they both have lead characters with horrible boundaries but a great deal of goodwill. This surrender brings a kind of enlightenment: the understanding that the experience of being embodied is absurd, ridiculous, and completely stripped of dignity. Their concerns are far more immediate and modest than worrying about careers, conformity, or anything other than what might bring them pleasure and/or relief next. There’s a sense that long before the reader is introduced to these characters, they are self-aware enough to realize that there is no way for them to fit into conventional society, so they may as well pursue every freaky desire, every pleasure large and small, every whim and urge for adventure that they can conceive on a moment-to-moment basis. For Booth’s stand-in and Pich’s Fungirl, it’s clear that both characters just stopped giving a fuck a long time ago. In fact, it’s a frequent topic of discussion, or in the case of Booth (whose comics are silent), illustration. It’s not that their characters don’t suffer from the kind of body image problems imposed by a patriarchal society with impossible beauty standards. For both artists, this type of scene is entirely business as usual in their comics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |