Tag Archives: Ariel Schrag

Strapping On The Man

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An edited version of this review ran at Bitch magazine.
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For a lesbian creator, Ariel Schrag is unusually obsessed with penises.

Schrag started her career making autobiographical comics in high school. Her first two books — Awkward, about her freshman year and Definition about her sophomore year — were insightful, deft, sweet coming of age stories. But as she moved into Potential and her junior year, things got considerably darker. Ariel, the character, began to experiment with her sexuality, and Schrag, the creator began to experiment with comics form, culminating in the mammoth senior-year Likewise, an intense, complicated work using multiple styles and a recursive, allusive structure to chronicle Schrag’s twin obsessions with her way-too-straight girlfriend Sally and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Again, Likewise is an ode to phallicism. Ariel purchases a large dildo for her 18th birthday; she has daydreams about various men with various penises who may or may not be sort of Ariel herself having sex with Sally; she has an intense epiphany while reading Joyce’s description of the ultra-phallic flower Saxifragia stolonifera, “father of thousands.” “Oh my god, that is so perfect,” Ariel in the comic thinks, as Schrag the artist draws the flower in emotive charcoal, one of the loveliest images in the graphic novel.

Given this interest in pensises, it’s perhaps not surprising that Schrag’s first novel, Adam, stars somebody who has one. The title character is not a lesbian, but a nerdy adolescent virgin guy obsessed (like young comic-book Ariel) with girls. He has little luck with them…until he visits his lesbian sister in New York and is mistaken for a trans man. He ends up having to tape his real penis down with Ace bandages in order to use a strap on to have sex with the love of his life, a lesbian named Gillian.

The gender-crossing here quickly becomes vertiginous — especially if you read Adam as Schrag in drag, a gay cis woman pretending to be a heterosexual cis man pretending to be a trans heterosexual man in order to have sex with a cis gay woman. Schrag, for her part, acknowledged in an interview that “Adam is mostly me.” She added:

“I like the idea that 1. Someone reading Adam would find my depiction of a male teen to ring true and that this implies the differentiation between male and female is perhaps less stark than some believe and 2. That someone might read Adam and find that my depiction of a male teen doesn’t ring true to them, perhaps strikes them as more “female” and that this implies that Adam himself is innately “female” in some ways, making his passing as a trans man perhaps less of a (or at least a different nature of) deception.”

The idea of gender as deception is of course familiar from the catchphrase, not-quite-correctly attributed to Judith Butler, that “gender is performance”. Cis-Adam pretending to be trans-Adam can be seen as a kind of dress up. But it can also, as Schrag says, be seen as a kind of truth, since Adam is really Schrag identifying as Adam. Or, to put it another way, you could see Adam as an authentic performance of Schrag’s masculinity.

Schrag herself suggested to me that this was how she sees the character.

“When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, masculinity was very important to me. My hair was cut short, I dressed like a boy, and was often mistaken for one. The primary kind of sex I had with women was using a strap-on and I was always the one to wear it. I would go to strip clubs and get lap dances. I would tell people about going to the strip clubs and be thrilled by their shock and amusement. Acting “masculine” made me feel powerful, and more importantly, cool. It was lame if a guy went to a strip club, but cool if a girl did. I do not have these feelings anymore. Not that I’m anti-strip club, but I don’t think it’s especially cool when women—opposed to men—enjoy them. Much of Adam is about exploring my own relationship to masculinity and the way I observe it functioning in the world.”

Schrag added, “as someone who has sex using strap-ons, I did take a certain delight in forcing this teen boy, all his equipment in working order, to have to use a strap-on as well. ”

What’s best about that last comment is the multi-layered way in which it performs masculinity all by itself. The touch of competitive vindictiveness, the amused-but-still joke about whose penis is better (if not bigger) — those seem like recognizably male tropes.

Which isn’t to say that Schrag wants to be a man, any more than the trans men in the novel are women (despite the claims of one drunk, politically incorrect lesbian in the book.) Rather, it’s to say that the fascination with men, the competitiveness, and even the failure to be a man, are all “definition” masculine, as a younger Ariel might put it. Being a man is about not being a man. And that being a man by not being a man is painful and ridiculous and sad and sweet, much like Adam, or like Schrag, him- or herself.
 

adam_final

One-Panelist Criticism: Likewise

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If you’ve seen the tcj.com homepage recently, you know that we’ve been joined here by a spanking new blog called The Panelists, featuring Derik Badman, Charles Hatfield, Jared Gardner, Alex Boney, Craig Fischer and Isaac Cates (my apologies if I forgot anyone!)

To kick off their blog, The Panelists are doing a round-robin where each of them look at one panel from a comic of their choosing. It seemed like a fun idea, so I thought I’d flagrantly rip them off participate as well in the friendly spirit of interblog amity.

So here we go.

Continue reading →

The Price of the Ticket

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In the comments to Suat’s post on Fun Home, Uland notes;

The milkman bit is interesting, but I think it bears pointing out that a literary allusion isn’t an allusion at all if it’s being pointed out in the text. It’s a reference.

It isn’t that I have a problem with the drawing or the subject matter. It’s more that it all seems so prescribed . The author refuses to allow mystery to intrude upon her strategy. The literary references seem like a huge part of that strategy. Employed in a less on-the-nose kind of way, I think it could’ve been really effective.

I get the sense that Bechdel pulled back and , reminding herself that it’s just a graphic novel, tried to pull all these different schemes into nice little packages. Problem is, it’s a story about confusion, mystery, shame, secrets, etc. Rather than letting them loose, she seemed to want to conquer them..

Agreeing with Uland is always disturbing…but I agree with Uland.

I think the comparison with Likewise is pretty interesting here. Both Bechdel and Schrag have an ambivalent attitude towards literariness and art. Bechdel associates it with her father; Schrag associates it with Joyce (and through Joyce with Ariel’s girlfriend, Sally.)

Schrag uses that ambivalence structurally; her desire to embrace Joyce and distance herself from him is incorporated into the storytelling, both through her use of or dropping of stream of consciousness, and through the artwork, which is in some ways obsessively ordered and in some ways deliberately random. Chaos and confusion are important thematically, so Schrag makes them part of her storytelling

Bechdel doesn’t do that. She criticizes her father for his artificiality and for wanting a neat bourgeois existence — but her own work never gets beyond insistent artificiality and the conventions of a decidedly bourgeois genre. Everything is neat and in its place; if she’s referencing Icarus, she tells you she’s referencing Icarus; if the house is a metaphor for her dad’s obsessions, she tells you the house is a metaphor for her dad’s obsessions. And if she wants to show a parallel between herself and her father, she does it in the most obvious ways possible — look, it’s a split screen! And also…mirrors!

I find Bechdel’s writing itself almost intolerably clumsy…but I think the narrative and thematic flaws of the book are in many ways more crippling. This is a story about the dangers of deliberately acclimatizing yourself to a typical middle-class existence. But the book…deliberately acclimatizes itself to a typical middle-class narrative. Bechdel fits her book about queer fathers and queer daughters neatly into a classic father/son memoir dynamic. As I said in another context:

The American memoir is a fairly simple formula. Clearly identify your colorful ethnic heritage (Chinese, Jewish, Irish…even Appalachian will do.) Milk said heritage for all it is worth. Discuss your simultaneous love of and resentment of said heritage. Milk your ambivalence for all it is worth. Feel deeply. Stir well, then appear on Terri Gross.

Suat notes that “Much of [Fun Home’s] appeal to general audiences must lie in the way it gently eases readers into the comics medium.” Fun Home did appeal to a lot of people. The irony is, of course, that it’s ingratiating in much the same way that Bechdel’s dad is ingratiating. It uses bourgeois and literary trappings to present a familiar and comforting front. Thus, readers can safely condemn Bechdel’s father for his capitulation to convention while reading a book that goes down so easily by virtue of obsessively cleaning up all its messes. Bechdel takes her quirky, colorful past, dabbles it with knowing commentary, and serves the results to a literary audience eager to smack its lips over delectable, safely contained difference. A rich, unusual, ideally painful childhood is the spice that both validates one’s present normality and makes it worth consuming. Sacrificing your ancestors is, as James Baldwin acidly put it, the price of the ticket.

Likewise, A Response

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THANK YOU

First of all, thank you to everyone for taking the time to read, interpret, write about, and discuss Likewise. When I was writing Likewise (age 19, in a windowless basement in Brooklyn) I spent a lot of time fantasizing about people one day analyzing the book. That this is now happening is really exciting.

OVERALL

One issue with Likewise is that it works much better if you’ve read the previous three books in the series. I originally envisioned the series as one 737-page book titled Likewise, Potential for the Definition of Awkward: The High School Chronicles of Ariel Schrag. The series is about the evolution of one person – the developing art and writing over the course of the four books parallels the act of growing up. For this reason, much of Likewise references the other three books.

RESPONSE TO EACH POST

DICK TALK – NOAH

“Ariel thinks about penises the way constipated people think about their bowels. When your bowels are in good shape, they only draw your attention every so often, and otherwise you don’t need to worry about them. If your bowels are off though — well, you focus on them a lot.”

This is a pretty funny and for the most part accurate analogy for the role of penises in Likewise. As we all know, the penis is the focus of sex in society and considered the most important player in the sexual act – there are dildos for lesbians, but no fake vaginas for gay men. Many people (including Ms. Salt!) affirm that dildos are not “penises” – but even if it’s blue and shaped like the Virgin Mary, if you strap it on and fuck someone with it, it’s going to kind of seem like a penis. In Likewise, Ariel is obsessed with the idea that lesbian sex – even though she prefers it – is still missing something.  She fears that lesbian sex can never reach the “ideal” that sex with a penis achieves. So yes, she thinks about penises a lot – but more as a frustration object, than a pleasure object.

This theme ties into ideas of masculinity and identity. If you want a penis, but don’t want to be a man, where does that leave you?  As Noah writes:

“…That last panel, where she thinks “I’m not a woman” — that’s not a victory. Being taken for a man doesn’t make her a man; it unsexes her. When her phallus is most manifest is when she measures up least.”

Noah writes that more important than Ariel’s desire for “a penis” is her desire for “the phallus.” He equates this idea with the discussion of “It”:

“It, then, is cool; It’s ease with authority; It’s mastery. I think Freud would call it the phallus… Ariel in the comic declares, “My comic has It.”

Art is Ariel’s solution to the phallus problem – it’s her solution to every problem. Which becomes the problem itself. To some extent Art as Phallus works – it’s a place where you have total control and the goal is clear.  It’s a way to show off how great you are.

“…far from being constitutionally inadequate, Likewise is, in the way of ambitious art, swaggering. If the book’s about wondering where your dick is, it’s also about pointing down and saying, “check this motherfucker!”…. She demonstrates she has the thing by the skill and humor with which she shows she doesn’t… Creativity, in short, is the biggest, most potent penis of all…”

But art is ultimately outside of yourself – no matter what, it’s still just you at the end of the day. As Likewise continues, the failure of depending on art to solve your life is revealed. As Noah writes:

“…is the distancing of meta; the constant drive to observe and record herself pushing authentic reality away? Or is it working through different ways of holding onto reality — and maybe finding that grasping it a little less firmly makes it easier to hold?

IN SEARCH OF “IT”: A RESPONSE TO A REVIEW OF POTENTIAL  – SUAT

Suat begins this post with a summary of the plot of Potential:

“Ariel goes to high school, “discovers” that she is a lesbian, meets other girls and has occasional sex and alcohol.”

Once I read this summary, I couldn’t take much of what Suat had to say seriously, since he hadn’t really read the book.

Noah’s post BATTLE AT THE LIKEWISE ROUNDTABLE sums up my general response.

LIKEWISE DESIRE – CARO and HOW ALIKE IS LIKEWISE – NOAH

Caro: “So she failed at the impossible task of writing a graphic equivalent to Ulysses — but fucking hell she tried, and that’s much more ambition than most graphic novelists show.”

As was concluded in the comments to this post, I wasn’t trying to write the graphic novel equivalent to Ulysses. Ulysses plays a significant, but not overarching role in Likewise. It is both a talisman and an artistic influence. Caro does a great job of describing Ulysses’s role as talisman, noting that it represents both what Ariel finds so appealing about Sally – that Sally read this impressive book as a teen and Ariel’s desire to be like her – as well as Ariel’s relationship to her comic – her desire to create a Great Work of Art like Ulysses.

As an artistic influence, Ulysses inspired various techniques in Likewise: complex structure and order, significant use of certain words and numbers, stream-of-consciousness narration, employment of unique styles to represent different modes of reality, emphasis on graphic sexual and scatalogical content, and literary allusion.

Caro: “(Parts 2 and 3) prioritize grafting Schrag’s narrative onto the structure of Ulysses and are more Baudrillardian: she tries to follow the contours of Ulysses and ends up creating something that is not-quite-a-simulacrum but that certainly aims there.”

The use of different styles in Parts 2 and 3 of Likewise is inspired by Ulysses, but the goal was not to create a simulacrum. Similarly, while there are some allusions to other books and comics (Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov and Maus, primarily), these references are not central to Likewise the way literary allusion is to Ulysses. Ulysses was an inspiration, and Likewise is in some ways an homage – but it is not a simulacrum. Rather, just as Ulysses is a simulacrum of The Odyssey, Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Likewise are simulacrums of Potential, Definition, and Awkward, respectively. Creating simulacrums of your own books is, I know, completely self-obsessed and claustrophobic – but that pretty much sums up being an 18-year-old.

As a high school senior, the creation of the comic series and the identity that had given me had taken over my life. Creating simulacrums of Awkward, Definition and Potential in Likewise, was one way of expressing that.

In the latter half of DICK TALK, Noah points out many of the ways in which Parts 2 and 3 of Likewise mirror Definition and Awkward. Jason Thompson does this as well in ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT AND OBJECT.

In the Comments, Caro writes:

“But I do tend to think that’s not uncharacteristic of juvenalia: here you are, writing along, working on the autobiography you started when you were 15, and suddenly you have a Big Idea. So you crowbar it into the project you’re already working on, rather than recognizing that it’s its own thing. And then you end up with a single book that’s really two books, and the two books compete against each other. The autobiography part of this could have been much shorter and more focused on interesting episodes, and the Ulysses part could have been much more successful if it didn’t have to mesh with the life story.”

I disagree with this. The idea with Likewise was to mesh teenage autobiography with a book like Ulysses – that’s specifically what I found interesting and novel. I liked the idea of fusing highbrow and lowbrow – a modernism-inspired book confined to the content of one year in the life of a teenage girl. This fusing of highbrow and lowbrow, of mature and immature, is what appealed to me about comics to begin with. Comics were barely a respected art form when I started writing, and I loved the idea of taking a “for kids” medium to write adult (sexually graphic, complex emotions) content.

Noah writes:

“I actually like the way the book both fetishizes modernism and distances it through various techniques (the very lowbrow reliance on diary; the DIY art, parody.)”

The following from Noah in DICK TALK relates to this:

“In this sequence, Ariel’s reading Ulysses, and she comes to a section where Joyce describes a penis… The best bit here, though, is not the visionary penis, but rather the vision itself. The wobbly panel borders above are not just filligree; they’re there because Ariel’s stoned. Her paean to Joyce’s penis can partially be read as “Joyce — he is a genius, and I appreciate him.” But it can also be read as, “Wow—like— everything’s really meaningful when you’re stoned, dude.” Literary critics singing modernism’s hosannahs are deftly equated with gently tripping potheads.”

Likewise is about being aware that you’re a teenager – knowing there’s something ridiculous about yourself. The self-obsession, the sex obsession, the obsession with being cool… these things are with you your whole life – but never as strong as when you’re a teen. You know you’re taking yourself way too seriously, but you just can’t stop.

In the comments, Caro writes:

“Looking back, it’s striking to me that the “father of thousands” scene Noah referenced is almost exactly the half-way point in the book and really marks this shift from her interest in actually existing penises (and phalluses) to the more aesthetized “phallus” of her artistic ambitions. That’s what the different drawing meant to me there: “here is the moment where Art becomes a theme.””

This is true. Shortly after this scene is the first instance of Art usurping Life. On page 221 Ariel is having an emotional breakdown in the car with Sally when Ariel’s stream-of-consciousness narration transforms into a past-tense typed story on the computer. The visual cuts from Ariel and Sally in the car, to the future Ariel typing at the computer. Ariel is saved from this painful event by existing only in the artistic recreation of it. At this point in the book the different methods of recording start taking over the storytelling.

ON TEENAGE FETISHISM

Caro writes: “But by the time you’re 30, if you’re still fetishing teenage screams, you’ve got a problem (and there are a lot more ways in which this is a problem than actually destructive pedophilia). The problem isn’t the teenagers — they’re age-appropriate. The problem is middle-aged people who are still fascinated by adolescent things at the expense of grown-up things.”

I disagree with this. What I love about teenagers and literature or movies about teenagers, is that everything is so extreme. As adults we all still experience many of the same emotions, but because we’re not having them for the first time, they aren’t paid as much mind, or we’re more ashamed of them, or we deal with them in more responsible and practical and well… boring ways. No one should act like a teenager as an adult, but I don’t think it’s wrong to have a fascination – I think that fascination is with your inner self.

ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT AND OBJECT – JASON THOMPSON

I really enjoyed Jason’s post on reading autobiography with an interest in the author as a person as well as a character. It’s how I read autobiography too, and the author is definitely asking for that on some level.

This post is especially important in how it relates to Ariel’s character in Likewise.

The fascination I experienced people having with me as a teenage autobiographical cartoonist strongly effected my sense of identity – and that is one of the primary themes in Likewise. The comics made people like me, pay attention to me, treat me as someone special – and that attention was addictive.  The comics became the most important part of who I was – and it’s always dangerous to have one thing define you.

Jason also writes about comparing the different books in the series to each other:

“It’s the same reaction made by many people within Likewise itself, who are disappointed by the clinical nature of Potential… compared to the exuberance of Definition. To dismiss Likewise for not being Definition is to dismiss Schrag for growing up.”

I appreciate this comment. It always bothers me when I read a review that wishes Likewise was more like Potential, or Potential more like Definition. The books are about someone growing up and exploring all the different parts of being human. To me, Awkward is the most pure, Definition is the most funny, Potential is the most emotional and Likewise is the most intellectual. You may prefer one to the other, but they are all parts of yourself.

NOT JAMES: Y-FRONTS, DICKS, AND DYKES – VOM MARLOWE

“…when one is commenting on a persecuted group, especially when dealing with identity,  it’s worth knowing how a person stands: with, against, or where.  So I’m not straight and I’m female, and there you have it.”

Vom Marlowe’s decision to refer to herself as “not straight” rather than “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual” or “queer” is intriguing. Often (and this is not necessarily true of Vom Marlowe) when women define themselves as “not straight,” it means they at one point slept with women, but are now with a man. Personally, although the “lesbian identity” has had its benefits for me – getting lots of girls, getting to write on a hit TV show – I’m pretty anti-label. I think queerness should be visible and celebrated as part of human diversity, but I also think sexuality is, for everyone – albeit in different ways – ultimately fluid. And labels and fluidity just don’t match up.

“Except she has the same problem I do, ie, hips much bigger than the waist, which means that the damn jeans hang oddly.  (This is why I am in love with certain hip-curvy jeans that came out after Likewise was released.)”

This cracked me up. The low-rise jeans made with 1% spandex that first made an appearance in the early 2000’s are a HUGE improvement on the hips/jeans problem. I often wonder if this section of Likewise won’t resonate with later audiences who take these new jeans for granted.

“…it’s not just Ariel’s sexual identity in question, but her sexual identity in relation with others, especially Sally.”

Much of the gender confusion in Likewise has to do with being in love with a (mostly) straight girl. It’s always fascinated me how a person’s gender representation changes depending on who they are dating. For me, I think there is an inherent “butchness” inside me – something that’s been there since I was a kid – but the degree of that butchness has varied drastically over the course of my life, and often depends on the particular chemistry I have with another person.

“When Ariel goes home, she looks in the mirror, popping zits, and is comfortable with what she sees there.  The regular clothes, the regular face.  It’s not a collection of stressed voices recorded from other people, but her own perspective, her own art, her own voice… I am arguing, that she tried being what Sally liked: played at being more of a man, played at comic-creating more like Joyce, but she decided instead to be who she is…”

Much of this analysis is true, but the last page of the book is more about Ariel’s freedom from the comic than anything else. After the batting back and forth between different recording styles in Part 3, the last page of Likewise ends with the style from Part 1 – the present day, stream-of-consciousness narration. Senior year is over and Ariel finally doesn’t have to keep recording her life for everyone to read. For the first time, in a long time, she experiences a private moment.

GENERAL QUESTIONS:

CARO QUESTION:

“You know — I really wanted to understand what was going on with the occasionally absent facial features and I haven’t gotten that worked out yet. Any tips?”

NOAH: I think it’s an attention thing in part; folks who Ariel’s not concentrating on tend to shift into anonymity.

This is right. I didn’t want to draw attention – although it often seems to draw more attention! I inked the expressions just as I had drawn them in my rough sketch, and if I didn’t draw the mouth or eyes in the rough, I didn’t consider them necessary.

DAVID QUESTION:

I’m especially curious to see what Schrag thinks she would do differently were she moved to recreate the story of her senior year now, a decade later.

I would not be moved to do this.  For one thing, I’m not interested in autobiographical confession and exhibitionism in the same way anymore. The main reason I wouldn’t rewrite this book, though, is that it would go against the idea of the book itself. As I said earlier, the idea behind the high school comic chronicles is the evolution of a character. Many parts of Likewise make me cringe and the writing and drawing could certainly be better, but it needed to be written by a 19-year-old. I didn’t change anything as I inked it over the past decade, as much as I saw room for improvement. The purity of a “real-time” chronicle was the most important thing.

LIKEWISE TECHNIQUE BREAKDOWN

For those who are interested, here is a breakdown of the stylistic shifts in Likewise. While much in Likewise is subtle, these shifts were meant to be obvious, and I think it’s a failing of the book that from what I’ve gathered, most people don’t recognize them. So while I generally don’t believe in over-explaining one’s own book, here it is:

Stylistic shifts in Likewise:

Present Day:

Drawing style:  Black and white with cross-hatching.

Storytelling style: Present tense stream-of-consciousness narration. Dialogue.

Flashbacks (past events in which Ariel was present):

Drawing style: Computer gray tone. No solid black.

Storytelling style: Dialogue and Ariel’s thought bubbles.

Imagination (imaginary scenarios or past events in which Ariel was not present):

Drawing style: Hand drawn stippling. No solid black.

Storytelling style: Sparse Dialogue.

Present Day in which Sally is present

Drawing style: same as Present Day, except without panel borders.

Storytelling style: same as Present Day

Typed Computer records

Drawing style: Ink wash and solid black.

Storytelling style: Typed first-person present and past tense narration. Dialogue.

Handwritten Journal records

Drawing style: Unfinished sketches.

Storytelling style: Journal excerpts on notebook paper. Dialogue.

Tape-recorded Audio records

Drawing Style: Heavy black and white on a black background.

Storytelling style: Tape-recorded dialogue.

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Update by Noah: The whole Likewise roundtable is here.

Not-James: Y-fronts, dicks, and dykes

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I’d like to make a couple of notes before beginning.

Autobiography. I’m afraid that I approached this comic like a book, a story, a tale.  In truth, the story isn’t a story crafted and directed by the author except in methods of portrayal.  The other actors aren’t characters, they’re people with their own agendas and abilities to walk off stage when the story theme would dictate that they stay and kiss under the mistletoe or at least buy a pink rabbit with pearls.  The main character is a person, not a character.  But in order to engage in the story, I treated her like a character in my head.  I liked her, and I grew to hate Sally, and I thought the mom should’ve gotten a grip, and a thousand other reactions that more befit a novel than a nonfiction book.  Throughout this essay, I’ll probably engage with Ariel-the-character as well as Ariel-the-author even though I know Ariel-the-person will be along soon.  *gulp*  But I can only approach it as best I can and as honestly as I can as a critic and as a reader even if I know that the person might be hurt or affected by my words. 

Queerness.  Second, usually I think it’s good to know nothing about the personal life of a given critic, but when one is commenting on a persecuted group, especially when dealing with identity,  it’s worth knowing how a person stands: with, against, or where.  So I’m not straight and I’m female, and there you have it.

That preface over with, I’m going to dive right in.

In this essay, I’m going to address: the art and its changes through the story as well as some technique choices, Joyce and Sally sitting in a tree, lesbian fashion choices, Ariel’s fashion choices, dildoes, and It.

In the beginning, Ariel and her friends discuss It.  I was struck by how close this high schooler discussion reflected academic politics, how much Ariel felt the need to have It, how much she felt Sally had It, and how fashion reflected the presence or absence of It.

In the comic, Ariel portrays herself with a few simple visuals: she has dark, short hair; she wears converse and jeans; she wears a white or a black tee shirt; her underwear are Y-fronts.  All of these code for a butch lesbian, in fashion terms.  At one point in the roundtable, Caro noted (and then later pulled) a comment that Ariel had answered the gender question by saying to the Barnard interviewer ‘I am not a woman’.   But I don’t think the book ever really seriously suggests that Ariel is trans; I think instead it addresses her as a woman, a very butch woman, who is a lesbian in a mostly straight world.

One of the funniest sections in the comic is when Ariel decides to change her appearance.  She gets some new jeans and tries to wear them the way guys do.  Except she has the same problem I do, ie, hips much bigger than the waist, which means that the damn jeans hang oddly.  (This is why I am in love with certain hip-curvy jeans that came out after Likewise was released.)  Ariel compares herself to the guys, trying to wear them the way the guys do, with hilarious results.  She tries them pulled up like most women, especially Sally.  Then she tries the half-hip look, which made me smile fondly.  She ends up wearing something that isn’t what a man would wear–that doesn’t work.  But the femme look doesn’t work either.  So what is it?

I’d argue that she ends up dressing like a butch lesbian.  Which is still female.  Later, she is choosing her dick, a new dildo, and she decides to get a semi-realistic but not skin-toned one.  Her harness is simple.  If I may be delicately blunt here: it reads exactly like a toppy but female choice.  Not a choice that’s going for a true male dick, but for the kind of appendage that allows for a pleasurable toppy experience for a woman with another woman.

There are a few comments in the comic where people take her for a guy and I’d like to address one of the most problematic aspects of this.  I think the Sally issue complicates things.  Sally’s not bisexual; she experiments, but she prefers men.  Ariel’s in love with Sally.  Who among us hasn’t tried to turn ourselves inside out to become the person our loved one wants?  (I’ll grant that some of you out there haven’t, and if so, more power to you.)  Playing at being more male is one way to get Sally.  So to be taken for a man isn’t as simple as a yes no issue, it’s not just Ariel’s sexual identity in question, but her sexual identity in relation with others, especially Sally.

Sally is the instigator of a lot of the fashion choices, the cutting of the hair to super-short, the hip-sliding jeans, the imagining of a pair of older overweight butch dykes walking together.

So if Sally brings up the issue and muddles it, I think Ariel answers it herself.  I think the gender identity is resolved in two places: The first hint comes when Ariel walks into the bathroom on her birthday and looks at herself in the mirror, “I’m pretty.”  She is dressed as herself–same dark shirt and jeans and sneaks and eyeglasses.  She’s just herself.  What she wears when she’s drawing at her desk.

The birthday instigates getting the dick and breaking up with Sally.  Even though Sally wants her again, she says no,  breaking off contact, choosing the healthier route.  The route where she’s not turning herself inside out.

The comic then switches to a whole lot of experimentation.  The first shot of experimentation reveals Ariel in a weird, blocky jacket in a whole new art style.  Trying different things with the recorder and talking to new people, hanging out in new locales, experimenting with different kinds of relationships.

See, I think my fellow roundtablers are right that Joyce’s Ulysses is a main theme and influence for Likewise.  I think they’re wrong to suggest that Ariel is allying herself with Joyce, that she’s trying to do a comic Ulysses.  Instead, I think she’s doing something much more daring: I think she rejecting Joyce and his Ulysses in favor of something else.

In this last part of the comic, the art switches from style to style, sometimes mimicking the emotions at play (as when it slides into scratching gestural drawings for sadness) or shocking with different locales (the music club, the strip club) and more black shapes.  Sometimes the comic becomes washes, sometimes pen on wet paper, sometimes sketches, sometimes obsessively detailed.  It has a patchwork feel, a taking a little of this from here and a little of that from there, and putting it together.  Which is much of what Joyce does.  He takes the structure from other works, makes references and in-jokes, patches together bits of literature from across the canon.  It’s interesting and engaging to be sure, but–

Given the option (as I am), I prefer the Odyssey to Ulysses.

It’s not that I feel the last section of the comic is ineffectual.  I think it accomplishes what it sets out to do: the comic records the voices of other characters through the recorder, through the dialog, through the written poems, through the musical lyrics.  It is as though the artist is trying on different clothes.  New outfits.  Let’s wear Madame Bovary today, or let’s put on some New York.  That’s a very Joyce approach, and I think the tension of what Ariel is expressing (other people’s voices, their stories, the strangeness of emo girl at the signing) is the tension that happens as people create themselves, but also as some of the modernist stories are written.  Bits of this and that, woven together to create something else, but with the bones showing.

And towards the end, the experimentations die down.  The drawings return to a style that seems to be more like the main style of the comic.  Sure, there are ink washes, but it’s still recognizably the base style.   The clothing settles back to a dark shirt, Converse, jeans.  The heroine celebrates her graduation with her real ally, the unapologetic dyke Ms. Salt (who wears very dyke outfits).  When Ariel goes home, she looks in the mirror, popping zits, and is comfortable with what she sees there.  The regular clothes, the regular face.  It’s not a collection of stressed voices recorded from other people, but her own perspective, her own art, her own voice.  Which is different from Joyce’s Ulysses.  Sally loved Joyce, and Ariel read it, and I think, I am arguing, that she tried being what Sally liked: played at being more of a man, played at comic-creating more like Joyce, but she decided instead to be who she is (or be comfortable with who she is) and draw what she draws, write what she writes in her own voice, and let go of Sally (and Joyce).

Update by Noah: The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.

Ariel Schrag, Subject and Object

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ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT & OBJECT

“I don’t wanna write something that like, other people would read, flipping through, I’d wanna write something important, you know?”

“Not really.”

When I read any fictional work, as much as I try not to, I’m always reading it as disguised autobiography. Most manga, as much as I like it, is mainstream genre fiction: written to satisfy a perceived market, rigidly editorially controlled, and produced in discrete chapters and story arcs. Artists are not encouraged to get personal; only a few Hideo Azumas and Yoshihiro Tatsumis, and possibly artists like Hiroyuki Takei whose interests show through in their mainstream work, share their lives with the reader on anything but the most trivial subjects (“I got a cyst on my finger from drawing too much…I love model kits!…Did you see the new Harry Potter?”). Looking for the artist behind the work usually leads either to opaque psychoanalysis (the uniformly corrupt portrayal of sexuality and adulthood in the work of Kazuo Umezu, the androgynous bisexuality of The Rose of Versailles) or the torture-gameshow appeal of watching artists crack and strain under the pressure of their deadlines, producing noble failures which spin off track in interesting ways (the endings of Ashita no Joe, the crassly-marketed-yet-personal anime Neon Genesis Evangelion). Contrarily, American comics culture, even the commercial side, tends towards the idea of “comic artist as rock star.”

So, while I admire formal skill in storytelling, I also have a weak point for art as voyeurism. This cult of personality was part of what drew me to autobiographical comics in the 1990s, a world about as different from manga as possible, although it shared a taste for nice black and white linework. I am the worst type of autobio comics reader. The feeling of a personal connection with the artist, however imaginary, was what got me reading artists like Howard Cruse (furtively, secretly), Gabrielle Bell, Juliet Doucet and Ariel Schrag. I want to feel that I am watching artists go insane for their work, martyrs like Joe Matt, whose works have a sort of “there but for the grace of God go I” quality, and Dave Sim. My shamelessly prurient tastes in “autobio” could be gleaned by the fact that I didn’t read much Harvey Pekar (middle-aged guy, mundane daily issues, who cares) or pre-Fun Home Alison Bechdel (too adult, too secure in its sexuality). Rather, I would have been a perfect target for Benjamin Godfrey’s forgotten 1990s minicomic Girltrap, a spiritual precursor to the fake video blog “lonelygirl15,” which Godfrey wrote under the pen name “Betty Godsmear” as a parody of the whole girl-who-exposes-her-life-to-mostly-male-readers phenomenon (“In this issue: Panties! Stoned! Handcuffs!…Sorry, gang! Less sex in this issue than in the past! But look for my sex tips issue, coming soon!”). Apart from the fact that the other person’s life was presented as “real”, was this fetishistic fascination with another person’s life really so different from Japanese moe manga, those creepy-sweet stories about the cutesy lives of teenage girls, stories consumed by male readers by the ton? So my first reaction to Ariel Schrag’s Definition and Potential was voyeuristic (“She’s so awesome! So insightful! So angsty!”) and only secondarily to appreciate the formal and artistic qualities of her work.

Ten years later, reading different analyses of Schrag’s graphic novels, I’m wary of the trap of thinking of them as “just lala girl story” (to quote Schrag), of basically admiring Definition and her other early works as a kind of teenage art naive, the work of comics’ child star. It’s the same reaction made by many people within Likewise itself, who are disappointed by the clinical nature of Potential (an appropriate feel to a work which draws its metaphors from laboratory science) compared to the exuberance of Definition. To dismiss Likewise for not being Definition is to dismiss Schrag for growing up. Admittedly, my own initial reaction to Likewise was disappointment too. Partially, this was from reading the beginning of the story in the floppy comics form, for which it simply wasn’t suited. But part of it was from the wordy, challenging narrative (my reading muscles made flabby by manga), and the growing distance of the author, the lack of the eagerness which dominated her earlier works. It’s an eagerness which Schrag herself parodies, when she imagines flinging herself under the wheels of a car, a regressive act drawn in Definition‘s chirpy, regressive style. In Likewise Schrag’s art is better (less stiff than Potential) and her dialogue more finely heard than ever, but the emotions which ran wildly throughout the earlier works are now subtler and increasingly mitigated by self-analysis. The dewy-eyed Ariel Schrag who in earlier books had sometimes seemed carried along by the tides, who suffered through unrequited crushes and objectification (whether within the story, or from readers and fans like me) begins Likewise very much as a subject, by breaking up with her girlfriend. Throughout the book Schrag continues to be the primary actor, the experimenter, taking matters (and dildos) into her own hands. And most of all, pens; she self-documents with many tools and layers of narrative, her tape recorder, her notebook, her art. Like Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist, or Joe Matt’s comics, it becomes the story of the telling of a story, but it generally stays unpretentious, and for every panel at the drawing desk there are ten others outside it.

Reading Likewise as it’s now printed, as a single 350+ page graphic novel, takes care of my problems with the pacing. The story moves at first slowly and then with accelerating speed, changing and disintegrating (and sometimes reforming) as it goes, like Schrag’s uncertain family situation, like her feelings on homosexuality, like her love for her ex-girlfriend Sally. In the spirit of a senior year in high school, Likewise gives a sense of waiting, of frustration, but also of purpose, of climbing page by page to the top of a mountain of pages (and experiences) to “the point of no return.” The first two-thirds of the book, the most linear part, is an excruciating portrayal of a post-breakup, a breakup so intense it causes Schrag to question not only her own sexuality but her gender and the entire biological purpose and existence of homosexuality. None of these “arcs” have tidy endings; just when we think Sally is out of Schrag’s mind, she reappears in some other form. The story contains, not emotional climaxes, but emotional fades and dissolves. A relationship only “ends” when every possible combination of the players has been tried and retried. There are no one-liners or unquestioned pearls of wisdom, the kind Schrag’s mom tries to throw out (this is documentary realism all right, having your parents suggest things you should put in your comics). The discussions of “It” (who has “It” and who doesn’t) feel like high-school cliquishness disguised as philosophy, but Schrag faithfully documents this stage in her life along with the rest.

If I could only use one word to describe Likewise, it would be “deliberate”; deliberate choices of what to put in and leave out, subtle effects of insertion (pun intended) and repetition, making a story out of the information overload of life. Having never read Ulysses, I can’t offer an analysis of Schrag’s James Joyce influence, but that’s fine, since Likewise obviously contains more personal and textual references than any one person can get apart from Schrag herself. I think this is the natural outcome of epic, solo comics produced without editorial interference; the tremendous time spent alone, thinking and drawing, makes one want to put everything into the work, and why not? Some reviewers have commented that the increasing (if always selective) sketchiness of the art in the last 1/3rd shows that Schrag was growing tired of the story, as she finished inking her high school epic into (presumably) her mid-20s. But this suggestion isn’t incompatible with a conscious choice: as Schrag cuts her emotional ties to Sally and to high school, as she lets go, the art breaks apart, fading into the past, focusing only when it needs to. The book’s vocabulary of formal and stylistic tricks is huge and sometimes hard to analyze, but it succeeds in that you never have to stop to analyze it; the length and scope of the work gives each technique its time and place. Both visually and textually, it’s dense and deliberate and emotionally affecting, and it establishes Schrag firmly as more than a character in her own story, but as a comics creator of tremendous ambition and skill. And her minicomics are good too.

Update by Noah: The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.