A Review of “POTENTIAL”
by savant on Jun.09, 2009, under Reviews
Potential
By Ariel Schrag
Slave Labor Graphics
ISBN # 0-943151-04-X
If Ariel Schrag were a chocolate bunny, I would bite her head off. I’d run around the backyard, whooping and hollering, her little decapitated chocolate bunny body getting lumpy and misshapen in my pocket. Oh the adventures we’d have!
I mean that in the best, most innocent way possible.
Before Potential, I’d become a little burned out on auto-bio comics, I think. There was too much self-deprecating post-ironic loveable loser stuff passing itself off as panicked faux-suicide notes to a cold and uncaring world for my tastes. Jerking off and being an asshole to your girlfriend, being sad and wistful, but full of a vital, inner light that if only people could SEE! O, tragic life! Silly sullen kid stuff like that all starts to bleed together after awhile. It’s not a genre that holds my interest as much as it once did, I guess.
Why are we so obsessed by saying “no”? We (and by “we” I mean ‘me’, but I need solidarity right now) all allow the terrible Napoleons of our nature take us over and make shitty decisions and rob our lives of new, exciting experiences. If one has, say, bad sex, does one refuse sex forever? No. We know that sex can and will be good again. Even bad adventures are adventures. I think we should all say yes and allow the potential (pardon the pun) of everything to wash over us and later we can decide what bits were worthwhile. A huge comic written and drawn in balls-out savant style by a, what, 17 or 18 year old girl,, documenting every aspect of her life for an entire year? Not for me, I said. Oh, jackass me.
I don’t know why I was resistant. One day at the comic shop, I forced that little Napoleon back onto his Elba Island.
Around the time SAVANT got off the ground, I picked up Ariel Schrag’s Potential. I’d heard about her and her work for a while but hadn’t ever gotten off my ass to check her out. A phone call to Deke finally sold me on it; he’s always been about six months ahead of my own buying curve and anything he recommends is usually tits, so I bit, the way one would chomp gleefully at the head of a chocolate bunny.
The format of the book is odd. Good odd. Big (224 pages), thick (like, um, an inch), and blue (azure, or cerulean, perhaps), Potential looks like a collection of daily and Sunday comic strips, a Bizarro-Dilbert book. It’s a substantial object, that’s for sure. You could brain a guy with the spine if you had to. I don’t know why you would want to. But you could.
If I had to guess-and I’ve done absolutely no research into this because I’m amused by my own dumbass conjecture at this point-I’d say Ms. Chocobunny did this comic on standard 8/12 x 11 typing paper (as that’s the actual size of the collection) which is so charmingly analogue it makes me love it all the more.
The book is a journal/autobio recreation of Ariel’s time as a junior in high school, worked on and completed while a senior in 1997-1998 and the year following. As she tells the reader on the first page, “Junior year, and that means business. Times have been fun, I know it, but from here on out we’re talkin’: A’s to plow for; virginities to lose; proms to attend; we’re talkin’ potential.” The axiom of the entire work is, as the title and first page tells us, potential itself. Ariel’s mind reels at the possibilities of life are making themselves known for the first time. Adult life begins, sex and love and drunks and drugs and college and beyond, the second-hand on your watch sounds like a starter pistol, every thought and feeling magnified beyond endurance, and we ping-pong through it all feeling everything our intrepid narrator feels.
With her ever-present Biology textbook, Ariel navigates the choppy waters of her teenage wasteland fighting the ever-present “drain” and completely-insane “clothes imbalance” (just read it, it all makes sense. Um. Okay, no it doesn’t make sense. But read it anyway.). Embracing her inner dyke, her parents’ complete meltdown and divorce, boys and girls, the heartache of a crush that isn’t crushed back, Potential recounts Ariel Schrag’s year of ups and downs with a clarity both startling and astonishing. Her writing betrays maturity beyond her years with its incisiveness and honesty. As embarrassing and uncomfortable as the events she relate must be, Ariel doesn’t flinch or gussy up her life. Reproductions of notes and journal entries are on hand, from mundane party-planning to a he said-she said diary from the awkward and strange night Ariel lost her virginity.
The whole book is awkward and strange and beautiful.
Her artwork might seem crude to your inner Napoleon. However, there’s something perfect about her imagery and the way it syncs with her writing. Cartoony and vibrant, Ariel’s style shifts back and forth before finally settling on one main style; she intersperses the work with moments (dream sequences or memories, mostly) of weirdly-realistic drawings that almost look like ink or graphite washes, loosing the cartoon style with imagery that show an eye for gesture and expression that may surprise.
I can’t wait to see how brilliant she is several years from now.
Combined with the physicality of the book itself, the aforementioned 8 1/2 x 11 page size, Potential, as a package, feels authentic, a work with a pulse and life all its own. The only thing missing is being able to feel the back of the pages to run your fingers over the pressure marks made. That, and the whole work being presented in a three-ring binder, maybe. With stickers. That would be rad.
I’m sure this will sound not only ageist but sexist as well, but I don’t mean it to: The idea that there is/was a 17 year old girl making comics this good (while actually doing and living all the things she writes about– paragon of time management, this girl!) knocks me on my ass.
Every single thing I’ve ever hoped something like SAVANT could accomplish was done before we even started by a 17 year-old girl whose life was, and is, bursting with potential.
BY MATT FRACTION