Editor’s Note: My Body Unspooling by Leo Fox Won the Outstanding Comic Award at SPX’s 2024 Ignatz Awards

Lucille has a ghost-white body. His spirit is a spiked hood that throbs red. When it is not on his head you can see that Lucille has piercing red eyes. Lucille’s body is more masculine one panel, more feminine the next. He seems to be living in an undergrowth of patterns, where creatures of block colour run amongst hues of yellow and purple that bleed into each other.

The thing is, Lucille’s body and the spiked hood that he refers to as himself are not getting along. The body is too “warm”, enjoys too much the “fucking noises, the clicks and pants”, and resents that Lucille’s spirit enjoys too much the things that the body might want to restrict.

My Body Unspooling is Leo Fox’s interlude following the well-reviewed Prokaryote Season, and introduces us to Lucille, who appears again in the very recently published, book-length transgender fable Boy Island. 

Fox is a London-based artist who is in the interesting position of being a student at the formidable Slade School of Fine Art while being published by the counter-cultural Silver Sprocket. Then again, comics have often benefited from high art being forced into ‘low’ formats. The New Yorker once wrote of Slade alumni Lucien Freud that the painter “captured the imperfections of the flesh so completely that they became a kind of perfection.” You can see a continuation of that tradition in Fox’s work, insofar as My Body is a book about coming to terms with the imperfections of these fleshy things we rely on.

The narrative of My Body Unspooling revolves around the question of psychological dualism vs. monism, or at least the necessity of the body and the spirit working in conjunction. However, in visual terms, it is really the flesh and materialization of things that Fox seems most interested in. Take an early panel where guts made of spirits gush out from a partially opened Lucille. Elsewhere, water splashes and bugs are squelched and tree stumps appear out of nowhere. Throughout, there is a Dalíesque interest in surrealist disembodiment: limbs are hung out to dry. The portrayal of bodies as fluid and environments as malleable is reminiscent of Michael DeForge.

My Body Unspooling is a brief, zine-sized comic. The A4 format provides plenty of space for the reader to appreciate Fox’s experimentation with color. He uses a significant amount of black, within which the mix of primary and pastel shades help abstract forms take on a recognizable character.

There is a vibrancy and immediacy to Fox’s work that means I’m not surprised Ignatz nominated him as a promising new talent in 2023. There is enough consistency throughout these pages to give even this brief story the sense that it is taking part within a fully realized world that has its own rhythm and rules.

This zine appears to be a philosophical prelude to Boy Island. It finds Lucille coming to terms with the conflict that can often arise between one’s inner and outer world, and finding that some form of reconciliation between the two makes one stronger, or at least more durable. I wait with baited breath both to see what Lucille does next, and what Fox has up his sleeve.