Breakdown Press has established itself as one of the world’s most cutting-edge comics publishers thanks to their willingness to publish work that stretches, redefines, and challenges our understanding of the formal limits of comics. The oblique, the obscure, and the poetic all have a home at Breakdown Press. All of this describes the two new short comics by Margot Ferrick published by Breakdown: Star Of Swan and Half Gold/Half Dung. Both comics seem to be deep dives into the artist’s own psyches in different ways. Star Of Swan is about the desperate need to create in a world that ridicules it, while Half Gold/Half Dung is a self-professed exercise in explicating one’s own video game character builds in a way that explores gender identity and desire.
As someone who started to play Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager in the early 80s, it’s fascinating for me to see so many aspects of the game seep into the larger culture, especially for younger people. It’s not all that surprising to see so many artists drawn to the game, because the essence of your standard role-playing game is character narrative and world-building. Beyond slaying monsters and acquiring treasure, the real draw of the game is the opportunity to improvise character reactions in a loosely structured setting that provides plot constraints and a setting that can help structure particular character reactions. The opportunity to play someone completely different from your real-life self, as Ferrick describes in Half Gold/Half Dung, is one that can be surprisingly revealing. The increasing sophistication in storytelling in videogames has taken its cues from role-playing games, allowing the player to inhabit an existing character or more often build your own.
For cartoonists, the urge to draw one’s character is irresistible, as is writing narrative about the experience of playing. For Virginia Paine, for example, the videogame Dark Souls is an extended metaphor for depression and how the work of getting through it and living one’s life never gets easier. For Ferrick in Half Gold/Half Dung, the drawings in the first half of the story featured a pointy-hatted wizard whom she realized was a sort of male alter ego. The drawings don’t really follow a specific narrative but they do slip in and out of different situations: romance, peril, heroic posing, etc. They slip further and further into almost uncomfortably intimate drawings, as the main hero lounges with a lover in positions that are not explicitly erotic but are achingly familiar. It almost hurts to look at drawings that are this revealing, even if they are thinly veiled by a veneer of genre fantasy.
The second half of the mini, which Ferrick says has a character whose face turned into that of someone she loves, feels more affectionate than intimate, and this is reflected in the bit of sequential storyline that we see. This knight is trying to get his bearings and recall some past memories, and it’s a fitting scenario for readers, who learn about the knight’s experiences just as the knight starts to piece them together. The visceral quality of some of the memories reflects the “half-dung” imagery mentioned in the title, as this clearly-beloved character starts to understand some of the trauma he’s experienced.
Ferrick’s other short Breakdown comic, Star of Swan, is a surreal travel story about an anthropomorphic swan named Leona. She takes an airplane trip to an art commune of some kind in a world where the concept of adults drawing is considered to be a shockingly infantile activity. Ferrick’s level of detail in this comic is almost unsettling, as the figures never lose their essential avicular qualities even as they move around and act like humans. There is a sense of desperate yearning and longing in this comic that binds it to Ferrick’s other Breakdown comic; it’s a pining not for a person or place but a wish for a kind of utopian state that does not exist, or nostalgia for something that never actually happened. The reader follows Leona through an airport to her ultimate destination, the aforementioned commune. It’s here where her ultimate dream is revealed: to actually be an airplane, “huge and weightless, my insides had been purged & clean, all the nightmares washed away.” She gained the attention of the art commune, led by an anthropomorphic bird man named Myungi, with her drawing of the dream.
This obsession with anthropomorphic transformation (the irony of a bird saying “How could a person ever fly on their own?” is pointed) as a means of salvation is at the thorny center of the comic. The first half of the comic features Leona very slowly going through the airport, including a toy store where another bird-person is buying an inflatable airplane toy but weirdly anthropomorphizing it, even naming it Tammy, before the toy dramatically bursts during a tug-of-war with a kid. All of this is foreshadowing for the bizarre climax of the comic, wherein Myungi has a plan to actually transform Leona into an airplane by inserting “rods and inflatable tubes” into her throat, connecting her to aluminum rings to support the structure, and flushing it with the water of the pool. The whole process, while demented and horrific, has a gentle tone and the full buy-in of Leona, who experiences a sort of body euphoria with this prospect.
Its ultimate failure seems inevitable, as Leona is unable to endure the absurdity of this transformation. Earlier in the comic, she mentions nightmares of isolation and disconnection that somehow felt like memories, and the prospect of a magical transformation that mirrors her one hopeful dream melts away. In the end, she’s left yearning once again, still hoping for art to help unlock her dreams. It’s interesting how the themes that Ferrick reveals in Half Gold/Half Dung, of externalizing one’s subconscious desires, play out in much the same way for Leona in Star Of Swan. If Ferrick is embarrassed by making one of her characters a male version of herself and another character have the face of a loved one, so too is Leona engaging in a humiliating activity in “adult drawing.” It reminds me of the Gabrielle Bell quote, “It is humiliating to expose myself like this, but it is worse to try to hide it.” That’s exactly the sense I get from Ferrick’s work: she feels compelled to expose herself, to spill some ink, and what is fascinating about these comics is the visually exciting and roundabout way she accomplishes this.
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