by Jared Gardner

If Gabrielle Bell were applying to me for a job or, better yet, as a roommate, she would have the spot. She comes off in Lucky as likeable, normal, reliable, and smarter than your average bear. Yes, she is exactly the kind of person I would trust with her share of the rent and the utility bills. I am just not all that sure that I would trust her to be the New Big Thing for comics. Don’t get me wrong (he adds, with the defensiveness her affectless charm demands), I like Bell. (Did I say that already?) I just don’t really think she has much New or Big, or, well, any Thing to say.
Lucky collects some of Bell’s earlier mini- and web-based comics. For those new to her work (that is, those who don’t read “mini-comics” and web-based comics because they have that whole “Life” thing going on), Bell is most “famous” for her diary comics detailing her twenty-something life in New York. These comics are interesting exercises: daily windows into the ups-and-downs of the casually-employed and artistically-ambitious attempting to live in a rich man’s city on starvation wages. The problem, as any of us who have lived versions of this life remember all too well, is that these windows do not offer much view (and even less variety). A sunny day is a day when the roomates do the dishes and the boyfriend stays over. A rainy day is when apartments (or worse, jobs) are lost and the endless rounds of classified-ads begins again. In between there are passionate squabbles about the aesthetic merits of homemade dining room furniture. For most of us over the age of, say, 24, the main revelation that emerges from these diary entries is the vivid memory of just how much being twenty-something really sucked. (That, plus the fact that Gabrielle Bell is very nice, and if she applies for a job or an apartment, you should seriously consider her.) The rest of the book, while breaking out of the diary structure, takes only baby steps away from the basic themes addressed in the first section: apartment hunting, yoga classes, and that delightful mix of hubris and insecurity that comes from being a comic artist in New York.
Given how much I liked Gabrielle (do you mind if I call her by her first name, so well have I come to know her?), I was eager to get on board with the whole New Big Thing bandwagon. But Lucky just wasn’t doing it for me. So I sought out her work from last summer’s Drawn and Quarterly Showcase (#4), which offers a long story by Bell that is totally not about her at all. Really. You can tell because the hero in this story has a bigger nose and blonder hair. No, this story is about a young twenty-something art school student who gets hired by a hotshot bluechip artist to teach his impressionable 12-year-old son how to draw like her, even though both the bluechip artist and our protagonist’s teacher agree that she draws like a self-obsessed illustrator. In the course of this adventure, the 12-year old boy falls in love with the twenty-something art student, the thirty-something bluechip artist flirts with the idea of falling in love with the twenty-something art student, some valuable sculptures are broken, and some surprising real estate transactions are negotiated.
Unfortunately, since the Showcase story was so totally not about Gabrielle Bell, I did not find any solace in how very much I liked Gabrielle Bell. I did not want to hire this protagonist or let her be my roommate. So I quickly ran back to the comforts of Lucky, which, if it did not offer me any real sustenance, at least let me know what I was looking for in a prospective roommate or assistant. And while the cognoscenti may be waiting for the exciting next chapter in this career, I strong suspect that this is as “lucky” as we’re going to get.