Graphic teen angst
Comics populated by teenagers take on first love, family life, and the painful facts about supernatural powers

By Lynn Rapoport

I DON'T THINK I understood the emotional kick in the teeth a good comic could provide until I started looking at the bedroom walls of a Berkeley High School student named Ariel Schrag. It was 2000, and Slave Labor Graphics had just published her comic book Potential, a 224-page, painfully detailed account – graphic in multiple senses – of her junior year at school. That was the year she officially transitioned to full-on dyke, dated inappropriate girls, tried out boy-sex with her friend Zally one disastrous night, and tracked her ecstatic, gut-wrenching, humiliating relationship with Sally Jults, the senior girl who would ultimately rip her heart into tiny scraps of wet paper.

And one night the walls of Ariel's bedroom – papered over with posters, photographs, drawings, and other significant texts – quietly morphed in the background as she sat and talked with Sally. Reflecting Ariel's moods in a funny, sad mimicry of teenage bedroom aesthetics across the land, the walls registered, from panel to panel, every ambiguity in the conversation, every surge of hope, every stomping she took.

I was horror-struck yet fascinated by the revelatory lengths Schrag went to in Potential, seemingly without any thought beyond "let's see, what happened that day?" There was a lot to flinch at and a lot to admire, but for some reason it was the walls that first got to me.

Schrag, now at college on the East Coast, recently released her latest tell-all, Likewise, an eight-issue, 378-page tale of her senior year. And I've moved on to noticing the landscapes of other comics dealing with childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. A dizzying array of trees – similar to those on the cover of Potential – edge up against suburbia in Debbie Drechsler's Summer of Love, which documents the fleeting joys, familial aggravations, sexual explorations, and social agonies constituting one girl's life in a version of the '60s unlike anything you may have seen at Woodstock. The woods and fields and beaches of Black Hole, Charles Burns's lushly illustrated series about teenage mutant burnouts, are nightmarishly cluttered with trash and other detritus stockpiled by outcasts. And another young outcast is transfixed by static, biblical symbology, difficult memories, and many, many snowfalls in Craig Thompson's Blankets, a 582-page graphic novel about first love, religious conviction and doubt, and the gravity and levity of family life.

My attraction to these comics may reflect a nearly unquenchable obsession with narratives of teen life, whether told as soap operatic WB dramas or scrawled in minicomics of minor tragedy. But I also think these comics, as well as Sam Kieth's Zero Girl series and Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's DEMO, are the perfect medium for portraying the experimental anxieties and often-unsatisfying resolutions of adolescent experience.

Originally published as five installments in Drechsler's comic book Nowhere, Summer of Love follows the life of 14-year-old Lil in the wake of her family's move to a stretch of tract housing somewhere in America. In keeping with the bucolic fervor adopted by developers of planned communities, her new home is called Woodland. Miraculously for suburbia, there are actual woods there, shedding a gloomy green light on every panel and reflecting, in their unrelenting narrative presence, the mysterious, unreasonable outside forces – familial, social – ruling Lil's life. She first encounters her summer crush in the woods, and that's where he eventually gives her the brush-off without articulating what went wrong. Later, hiding there, she learns a secret about her younger sister she'd rather not know.

The teenagers in Black Hole, drawn in Burns's signature illustrative style of rich, glossy, gorgeously eerie contrasts of color or black and white, also haunt the woods of their Seattle suburb. And while some of them have literally made themselves at home there, they're terrorized by their surroundings.

It was like a horrible game of tag ... It took a while, but they finally figured out it was some kind of new disease that only affected teenagers. They called it the "teen plague" or "the bug" and there were all kinds of unpredictable symptoms ... For some it wasn't too bad – a few bumps, maybe an ugly rash ... Others turned into monsters or grew new body parts ... But the symptoms didn't matter ... Once you were tagged, you were "it" forever.

So begins the first installment of Black Hole, churned out at the maddening pace of approximately one issue a year, each starting with a similar commentary, accompanied by a picture, yearbook-photo style, of an infected teen we'll never meet. Set in the '70s of Emerson Lake and Palmer and Ziggy Stardust, and featuring no visible evidence of adult life-forms, the comic follows a group of teenagers who party hard, sleep around some, and ostracize their peers when they start to look different – which here can mean anything from facial growths like acne gone horror film, to one girl's long, sexualized, lizardlike tail.

Many of the mutations can be read as hyperbolic manifestations of one teenage dilemma or another – new appendages and dermatologic defects being the obvious examples. One girl periodically sheds her skin. An infected boy has an id-like second mouth growing out of his throat that articulates his private thoughts and sensations. And in a dystopic extension of cafeteria cliques, the buggy teenagers live slovenly, depressed, unsafe lives in a hillside park, anxiously engaged in survival tactics amid a natural landscape crawling with the nightmare underbelly of psychedelic art, while the nicer of their "clean" counterparts turn their backs and the meaner ones turn on their former schoolmates, subjecting them to threats, pranks, and other persecutions.

This literalization of real-life anxieties – sexually transmitted diseases, the metamorphoses of adolescence, the frightening assailability of one's social standing – is reminiscent of a central theme from defunct WB show Roswell, in which teenage extraterrestrials embodied the sense of loneliness and, well, alienation that their peers on-screen and off- were experiencing. The slick, artful comic also seems to have assimilated WB styles, so the emulation cuts both ways. Black Hole's pages are populated by gorgeous pre-bug characters who might stalk across the set of any number of WB teen dramas, or a soft-core porn film – the characters lean toward the 16-year-old-boy-fantasy end of the body-type spectrum. Elsewhere in comic-book land, similar literalizations play out differently, as the dramas go off the deep end.

In Sam Kieth's graphic novel Zero Girl – and to some extent in its disappointing sequel, Zero Girl: Full Circle – the landscape is, at least from the title character's viewpoint, a starkly polarized field of circles and squares. The circle in Zero Girl is no black hole, however, but a zone of sanctuary for Amy Smootster, a prickly, precocious loner whose unlikely superpower involves her ability to draw paranormal strength from instances of extreme humiliation – certainly a mainstay of adolescent existence. Taunted, stalked, and physically threatened by a clique of square-loving high school predators, Amy discovers that during intensely embarrassing moments her feet release an unidentifiable fluid capable of saving her from falling bricks, busting her out of tight spaces, and transporting her great distances to places (circular-shaped ones, naturally) of safety. It's a fantasy solution to the twin teen dilemmas of social persecution and undesirable bodily secretions.

Aside from the superfluid-releasing-glands device, Amy's regular tête-à-têtes with a sow bug named Carl Jung, the fact that the enemy clique ringleader's head starts reconfiguring itself as a cube, and the scene where Amy is magically transported to a pile of circular bar coasters inside an abandoned nuclear missile silo, Zero Girl lacks the kind of fantasy aesthetic that makes Black Hole so beautifully, druggishly easy to consume. In Zero Girl the characters are more problematic, more irritatingly real, and the atmosphere of evil intent is shaded by the awkwardnesses and ick factor that inform so many real-life human interactions. The comic's most off-center element might be the relationship between Amy and her guidance counselor, Tim Foster. It's not quite a May-December romance; it's just the kind that could get Foster fired, if not arrested, were this the real world. The exact distance Kieth is willing to take us outside that world is one of the things that makes Zero Girl so pleasurable, from first gush to final, if not full, circle.

Another comic book that sets supernaturally endowed humans inside the here and now is writer Brian Wood and illustrator Becky Cloonan's DEMO, a 12-issue series of stories released at monthly intervals – a slightly more humane pace than Black Hole's. While I'm one of those pathetic souls who have trouble with short stories because they don't last long enough, DEMO is currently ruling my entire universe, and I'm already mourning the final issue six months in advance of its release.

In DEMO number one, "NYC," a young girl named Marie runs away with her boyfriend and questions whether he's ready to deal with the baggage she's brought along. What she's capable of isn't totally clear, but when she goes off her meds, the energy she emanates is forceful enough to turn a car into sunburst hunks of shrapnel. Previous to this event, when she warns him it won't be easy or pleasant, he tells her, "It's OK. This is our new life. Life is never easy or pleasant, right?" With that kind of attitude, he's a natural for the world Wood and Cloonan are trying to map out.

The back end of each DEMO (put out by San Francisco-based AiT/Planet Lar) is filled with "extras" more satisfying than anything I've seen in DVD format: conversational notes from Wood and Cloonan, suggested mix tapes and reading lists for the issue, rough sketches and previews of future issues. At the end of "NYC," Wood explains the new project by crediting his past immersion in the comics-industry world of superheroes as an indirect source of inspiration. "I have no interest in the mainstream approach to that particular genre anymore, but some of the background themes have always appealed to me. DEMO is my chance to write those themes, in my way and on my terms, and exorcise some creative demons that persist in haunting me."

Characters in DEMO are endowed with superhuman strengths of one sort or another, but they are resistant to the notion of the superheroic gesture. These people are not in the denial stage of a story arc that will end in their saving the world. They're just trying to live their weird lives in the world as we know it, the world as it is. If their struggles can be deemed heroic, it's mostly a testament to how difficult it is to be odd in a normal place.

Superpowers, not recognized as such, are really just enormous problems. And taken literally, DEMO's supernatural aspects somehow become starker and harder to bear. Marie's mother force-feeds her a cocktail of medications designed to shove her back toward the center of the bell curve (a detail reminiscent of the health care industry's addiction to mood stabilizers for children). Elsewhere, a young girl's speech has a terrible power over other people's, leaving her afraid to articulate anything and totally alone. A young man's superhuman strength leads him toward the thug life of a small-town criminal and the depressing knowledge that his friends are using him. None of these themes are solely the property of youth, of course. But an out-of-proportion sense of the effect your actions have on those around you is a regular event of childhood, while messages such as "conform at any cost" tend to be sharply felt a few years down the road.

DEMO number five, "Girl You Want," continues in that vein, with a story that literalizes the notion of people projecting their desires onto others, the temptation to become what people desire you to be, and the overwhelming relief of finding someone who sees you as you are. In the movies that moment of discovery would cue a romantic pop song and a getting-to-know-you montage. But we're still in the world as we know it, the world as it is. And in that bleak place, as envisioned by DEMO, such myths are made to be exploded.

Which brings me to Craig Thompson's graphic – and autobiographical – novel Blankets, whose 600 pages of childish things and adolescent traumas are as far from DEMO's short, ambiguous gasps of plot as you can get. The myths exploded here are taken out in the normal way: true love loses its durability; religious convictions fade as the narrator, Craig, grows up and separates from his family. And Craig is just a human kid – no special powers, no monstrous flaws. But the biggest difference might be that while Craig doesn't have much to depend on in this world, he does have his belief in the next – a conviction largely stemming, he explains, from the difficult events of his childhood and his earnest assurance that there had to be something better.

A coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of some 10 years' distance, Blankets somehow transcends its nostalgic possibilities, in part because the book's text and images serve as counterpoints to one another. A conversation takes place while unrelated scenes from childhood unspool in the background. Scriptural tales are threaded through Craig's ecstatic interactions with Raina, the girl he loves. Panels of snowfall carry a heavy psychic weight, giving voice through images to unarticulated thought. The same techniques that hooked me in Schrag's Potential, also used in DEMO to devastating effect, here provide heart-stopping insights into the particular horrors and scattered joys of one boy's childhood – and turn first love, religious convictions, and their twin unravelings into a story that feels exalted and emotionally charged.

Lynn Rapoport is the Bay Guardian's senior editor.

Potential
By Ariel Schrag. Slave Labor Graphics, 224 pages, $24.95.

Summer of Love
By Debbie Drechsler. Drawn and Quarterly, 136 pages, $16.95.

Black Hole
By Charles Burns. Nos. 1-3 and 5-11, Fantagraphics; no. 4, Kitchen Sink Press, single issue $3.50-$4.95.

Blankets
By Craig Thompson. Top Shelf Productions, 582 pages, $29.95.

Zero Girl
By Sam Kieth. WildStorm/DC Comics, 128 pages, $14.95.

Zero Girl: Full Circle
By Sam Kieth. WildStorm/Homage, 128 pages, $17.95.

DEMO
By Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. AiT/Planet Lar, single issue $2.95.