Webcomic Wednesday: July Diary 2013 by Gabrielle Bell

For what I believe is the fourth year running, Bell is spending the muggy month of July making a single-page, six-panel comic about her life every day, all month long. So yeah, I’m stretching my “genre comics” remit some by talking about this. I mean, autobio is very much a genre of comics, but it’s not the kind characterized by the presence of creatures that eat people, generally speaking. This particular autobio comic is characterized by it, though, and that’s a big part of what makes the diary comics of Gabrielle Bell so absorbing.

There are plenty of autobiographical diary comics out there. A lot of them even veer into fantastical flights of fancy to dramatize the mental states of the characters. Bell’s brilliance lies in the way her art relentlessly clips the wings of mere whimsy when she employs devices like that. I’ve written this before, but it took me a long time to come around to her work – the way those smudges of black break up the plane of each panel, the way the proportions of her characters make them look just slightly too solid for the space they occupy, like they’re made of heavy clay. But once it clicked, boy did it ever click. Now I see that these devices are a way for her to remain relentlessly present in the moment, rooting the reader’s eye to that space in that panel, refusing to make it easy for us to move on. This mirrors Bell’s neverending interior monologue of self-doubt, social anxiety, and wide-eyed wonder at her more functional friends, like the single mother she’s visiting above. By the time today’s strip rolls around, she’s dramatizing her plight in a series of discrete visuals – she’s zombie, she’s beset by a horde of disembodied voices, she’s swatting a swarm of insects, she’s alone on an island, she’s living in a box. She makes you feel each image, each idea. (It helps that she can draw like whoa, too – dig the way the folds of her face stretch around that poor toddler’s chubby legs as she gorges herself on him.) She doesn’t just pick the image of her crone/Cronus self eating a child out of thin air and toss it in your general direction, she does the work, the mark-making, to make you feel what she feels when she thinks of herself in this way. This may not be a genre comic per se, but that’s a lesson anyone utilizing the imagery of the fantastic can put to good use.