Bully! Number 3
As you can see, my relationship with my hair has been tumultuous from the start.
If you enjoy reading comics about adolescence, awkwardness, and being a girl, you should just go check out Vanessa Davis’ comics instead. She’s better at it than I am.
Davis works mainly with pencil, and generally does not contain her comics to a series of boxes, so her work has a flowing, doodles-in-the-margin-of-your-biology-notes feeling. She is delicate, hilarious, thoughtful, and above all girly in such a good way. Sarah Morean, a zine and comics enthusiast (as well as a fellow Minnesotan), phrases it rather nicely in a review on the Daily Cross Hatch: “[Davis] can even be funny without making jokes. Pathetic without being sad. These are the comics I’ve always wanted to read. There should be more of them.”
I first saw Davis’ work in “Best American Comics 2007,” a very classy and professional anthology. This got her categorized in my head as that “famous/fancy” type of cartoonist. So it was with some surprise that, last week, I discovered her Flickr account. Fancy/famous people don’t have Flickr accounts! But then this sort of thing really shouldn’t be surprising me anymore: the internet has turned fame into something very, very silly. And cartoonist fame has always been particularly relative. Still, getting to browse through Davis’ personal photos felt like a privilege that random fans like me should not be allowed. And yet we are allowed! So you should go take advantage of that.
Next week continues and concludes the bully series—only we’re into high school now…
August 17th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Hey Athena, I’m sitting on a couch and I was just thinking to myself – after an IM exchange with a female friends of mine – back to your one-panel (?) comic about Virgins and Whores (was that it? It was that image of the ‘two types of women’) and suddenly I was thinking to myself, “Hmm… Is there something similar with guys?” Like friend vs. lover as clear divide, nice guy vs. asshole… I dunno, I couldn’t quite grab something out of the ether, but figured I’d leave you a little comment.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:26 am
P.S. I love the things you link in the blog portion. The Tron guy article was really neat.
August 17th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Aw Chris! Guess what? In 12 days, we’re gonna be sleeping under the same roof. I have your walls wire-tapped already.
That is an interesting thought, about Guy Types. I don’t think it’s quite the same, but there is this:
http://www.laddertheory.com/
(Maybe you’ve already seen it.)
I’m so glad you read the article about Tron guy! I loved it.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Nice flashback here. It never seems to fail that the total of assholes in the world is incredibly exponential compared to people that one can get along with, especially during the formative years…way too much of their self-loathing and projecting going on.
Read the article on Tron Guy. I am constantly amazed at the fact that the general public never seems to grow out of high school with their mentality of anything different from the norm. Jimmy Kimmel is to be first smacked for stooping to such a low blow at first, then commended for giving Tron Guy the opportunity to return to his show time and again. And what the hell is up with the network saying “cut out the geek stuff”????? There’s not enough of that, IMHO!