She sticks the landing with a moving, thought-provoking ending. I still wonder about the value of writing pandemic narratives, but I enjoyed living in Graham’s world. ![]() These are characters who have antics, they’re up to something. This is ultimately a pandemic story about love, guilt, and forgiveness in zany technicolor glory. The cover painting for the Fantagraphics hardback is stunning, Graham’s cotton-candy color palette drawing us in as it shows a lone mask dangling from Rosie’s ear. It’s endearing to see sex scenes drawn so lewdly with such feeling. It will be familiar to many who enjoy webcomics on Instagram, the quick drawings paired with complex emotional dilemmas and drug use. The visual vocabulary established by Graham for the comic is rough but incredibly tender and well built. If Minnie Mouse had a pussy, she would be a less hot version of Rosie. Graham is an exquisite painter whose work hinges on the weird and unruly bleeding into a quasi-Disney aesthetic. One character is a painter whose work is in fact a work by Graham, as evidenced by a Brechtian photo at the end of the book. The book eventually finds its way into the Dog Biscuits universe. What is the narrative value of white guilt? How much one can stomach this hand-wringing will greatly affect one’s enjoyment of the work.Ī post shared by Alex Graham book contains a variety of metatextual references, the name of the work came from a Charles Bukowski book Graham was reading during the pandemic. These characters, presumably all of whom are white, reckon with their privilege, guilt, and evasive tendencies. The ethical dilemmas that many white people flirted with in summer 2020 are on full display here. Another character, after having his gaming station destroyed by cops, asks if it would be in poor taste to start a GoFundMe for a new one. One of the characters, a frog, is brutalized after a police raid. Graham has said in interviews it would’ve felt disingenuous not to include discussion of police corruption. Certainly, Graham condemns the cops, painting them as sadistic crazed meth-heads raiding CHOP/CHAZ, the autonomous zone that sprouted during the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle. Graham’s take on police brutality is a little more ambiguous. This dynamic is one of the more interesting threads Graham follows. Just because she is empowered doesn’t mean she can’t also cause harm. Her friend encourages her to not care about the men in her life–but Rosie knows it’s a bit more complicated than that. Rosie, for her own part, is wondering when “girlbossing” is just an excuse for bad behavior. The novel’s ending frames him as the protagonist, even if Rosie feels like the emotional center of the work. After turning to prescription drugs and road rage, he starts painting again after a long hiatus. There’s something endearing about watching people who royally mess up try to rebuild their lives. Gussy in particular has a sweet redemptive arch. It’s true that they are the archetypal “good guys” who still perpetuate patriarchy, but they’re also men trying to understand how their feelings are spilling out around them. In the afterword, Graham notes how much hate was heaped on her two male leads. They are constantly asking Rosie what she wants while also failing to reckon with how larger social structures are playing out around them. Gussy and Hissy are constantly discussing their male privilege without fully considering the implications of their words. How we thought, for a time, it was the end. How people were leaving the City without notice left and right. ![]() It was impossible to tell them how incredibly traumatizing it was to live next to a highway and hear sirens all day and all night. For a time, it seemed everyone I met was a newly arrived transplant to New York. I thought about all the walking dates I went on. Miley Cyrus and Grimace also make their own roaring celebrity cameos. She’s in love with her boss, a dog named Gussy, but also with her frog roommate Hissy–whose mother is Jeniffer Love-Hewitt. Rosie is an employee at a dog biscuit boutique struggling to stay afloat amid economic precarity, police brutality, and a desperate love triangle. Based in Seattle, Dog Biscuits is a take on summer 2020– masks, the Discourse, protests, and sex. Graham’s been steadily increasing her internet presence, painting rabbit vaginas and demons with equal joy. Alex Graham’s comic is less of a stoner sitcom and more of a coming of age tale. Hanselmann released a pandemic comic of his own– Crisis Zone, which was serialized and released on almost the same timeline. ![]() Alex Graham has been steadily rising online in part thanks to her work alongside comics legend Simon Hanselmann. Originally released on Instagram in six panel segments, “episodes” she calls them in the introduction from June 2020 to January 2021. Dog Biscuits ( Fantagraphics, June 21 ) is Alex Graham ’s biggest graphic novel to date.
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