Christina Lee, a busy illustrator whose work regularly appears in both new (Vox) and traditional media (Business Week, Wall Street Journal), introduced their comics to the wider world relatively recently, with a pretty solid beginner cartoonist’s mini which was followed shortly after by a major evolution with her books The Method and Object. 

Often at shows, I’m given work or traded comics but, sadly, I read less and less of it. I’m spread thin like so many of us, and the days when I could let myself get drawn into a narrative as a reader have dwindled. As a result, I tend to greatly value accessibility. And Lee’s work has that aplenty, offering entries to complex ideas and fully realized protagonists whose stories have something to say about idealization, sexual power, youth as a commodity, body image dynamics, the media cycle, and the individual at the center of the vortex.

Lee is a true fiction writer, not just a cartoonist who pretends to know how to write. For comparison, I think of Julie Doucet or the Hernandez Bros, whose books are funny and candid in a way that is based in pure storytelling traditions. I don’t think of work that is shielded behind the overweening self-awareness we associate with the 21st century. Work like Lee’s is more oriented toward storytelling and, therefore, feels less timebound. There’s nothing to me more magical than making a reader feel like something on a two-dimensional surface is real and unfolding – and when this is done with only lines, it heightens our sense of how much power comics have and have always had. 

Lee’s The Method has a cover done in a limited color pallet that brings to mind the type of celebrity magazines we see, or used to see, at the grocery store near the register. It’s minimal and pragmatic, quickly tallying up which characters are featured (Alexis, Brad) and how many pages are at hand (44). Opening the book, we are greeted with an isolated endpaper designed with a wall of hysterical women’s faces squashed together. Their hairstyles bring to mind a screaming crowd at a Beatles appearance. We see faces in a variety of styles, some modeled carefully and many falling into increasingly frenetic Panter/Jimbo-like marks. The overall effect is of silent hysteria mixed with joy and a sense of spontaneous communal experience.

The first story is “I Can Be Anything You Want Me to Be.”  In increasingly tense fragments arranged in nine-panel grids, we see the rise and fall of a character named Kelly, whose new album is critically lambasted, whose billboards are defaced with obscenities (dicks, slut), and whose father is off-page suffering with a health crisis. Like a short, staccato Ramones song, it introduces Kelly, presents a chorus about her hellish conveyer-belt existence, and ends with an ambiguous shot of her – blood emerging from her nose, sleeping or dying, smiling, holding a magazine defaced with slut across it, close to her chest like a loved one.

Next in The Method, we have “Employee of the Month,” starring an unnamed character. This comic particularly reminds me of The Harry Who Collective and/or Red Grooms. This is the one story that uses a full-color pallet (employing green, in particular, to show the noxious potency of a fart). It’s a short story with low ambitions that manages to be a little triumph of sarcasm, dealing with an unnamed employee who goes on a huge binge at lunch and discovers that they have an almost irresistible need to fart in a crowded elevator. 

All of the stories deal with idealized femme heroines who are struggling with make-up and grooming and exercise to achieve a sanitized and socially acceptable beauty. “Employee,” while having the energy of a fun fart joke, is also loaded with content, suggesting the fart as a release from the bonds of conformity, and it’s the second story that builds up to an explosion, a potential catharsis of conflicting emotions for the author, reader, and characters. 

Finally, there is “Superfan,” documenting the obsessive fixation of a woman named Alexis on Brad, a Dane Cook-like comedian whose poster on her wall touts “The Hard Tip to Swallow Tour.” As Alexis showers and dresses (something we see in time-jumping snippets in a nine-panel grid that seems playful but foreshadows a clinical, potentially violent reconfiguring of reality), we hear Terry Gross interview Brad as they look back on his familiar-sounding trajectory, which includes ten years on SNL and a starring role in an invented Woody Allen 2017 movie called “Seeing in the Dark.” This story builds, feinting left and right unexpectedly, utilizing an array of different rendering techniques (hatching, flatness, solid black) and cartooning strategies (it has the consistency of Olivia Jaimes’s “Nancy,” then will pivot into a rubbery Tex Avery style) and pacing strategies (nine-panel grids, splash pages, floating vignettes) and mood (fragmented, objective, subjective, erotic, then almost horrific and distorted). It’s a story that manages to up the ante of the previous story, continuing to explore the burdens of femininity while tying them into a larger vision of systemized abuse and emblems of tyranny. There’s the faint suggestion of a death camp when we see Alexis prepare herself in the shower stalls alongside the other fans selected to party with Brad. You feel her kneeling before a dehumanizing, murderous machine, full of anticipation and hunger to be part of something bigger. Her chillingly benign expression and enigmatic final look just past the shoulder of the reader reaches beyond us to something only she can see. It’s nihilistic and empathic all at once.

As I said earlier, I think the most impressive thing about Christina Lee’s work is that she seems to be a real storyteller in the tradition of the masters of short fiction. Her characters’ motivations are clear and relatable and lead right to the actions they take and their consequences. They aren’t just purely farce or improvised magical realism or autobio, all of which are great but involve a lot of ways of dealing with the confounding logic of having to craft stories. With few exceptions, the stories follow a hard, linear logic. Things don’t just happen because “in comics anything can happen”, there’s a respect paid to the laws of the world these characters operate in. 

Lee’s newest work, Object, is a meditation on goals and the sense of bodies as objects. It’s told from a male character’s point of view, a middle-aged man reflecting on the incompleteness and the lack of freedom that society has offered him. Object misses some of the sense of tragedy and over-the-top outrageousness of some of the earlier stories, replacing it with a shoe-gaze quality that aims for a different part of a reader’s response center. The same command of structure, color, and exploration of fragmented sexuality is there and it makes me inclined toward the upcoming collection this will be a part of. 

Christina Lee has introduced an authentic new art into this tiny cultural tributary we live in, one surrounded by a largely hellish and destabilizing American moment. Despite the enormity of the chaos around us, her books still manage to carve out their space and assert their significance.