By David B. Olsen
When I was a freshman in
college, I shared a dorm room with a soft-spoken,
long-suffering young man whose attitude toward me could be
described most generously as tolerant. Within the
first two hours, our small room smelled like a poorly
ventilated tavern. Within the first two weeks, I had
festooned our walls with a motif that was equal parts
independent record store, child’s Halloween party, and hobo
scrapbook. I was an obsessive student with an ironic
aesthetic and an endless catalogue of angry music, but I
may not have been the best person with whom to spend a year
of collegial confinement. I see that now. The square space
of our room may have kept us physically close, but this
proximity was little consolation for the fact that we could
not have been farther apart as people.
I am often reminded of these months when I read Gabrielle
Bell’s comics, and not just because so many of the most
memorable scenes from her autobiographical series
Lucky are spent searching for small apartments. I
am drawn instead to the way in which her quiet characters
seem to find themselves too near to one another. Bell’s
panels are a survey in different kinds of distance. It
hardly sounds like praise, but she is surprisingly adept at
making and putting things into boxes. Each of the
eleven stories in her most recent collection, Cecil and
Jordan in New York, is like a shoebox diorama: fragile
without being overly intricate, contained without seeming
claustrophobic. Her characters seem comfortable and natural
within the panels, so that the expressiveness of their body
language can almost go unnoticed; their poses are what our
poses would probably be in that situation. (She also draws
better pants than anyone working in comics today, which I
am completely serious about.) Her illustration is more
uniformly flat than that of her first collection, When
I’m Old and Other Stories, which was wonderfully
wordy, detailed, and dense. With less ink and lines,
however, Bell’s new compositions breathe more easily, and
the stories become more about the bearings that people
establish between each other. Just because her characters
seem at ease within the composition doesn’t mean that they
can’t also be endearingly awkward within the narrative.
In the short story “I Feel Nothing,” for example – which,
like two other stories here, was originally published in
Mome – an unnamed young woman is awoken to a
neighbor’s offer of whiskey in the morning before work. In
his apartment, the two of them share a bottle and little
else. He is talkative and trendy; she is quiet and real.
This narrative is anchored by his couch, on which Bell
makes the two of them shift and slide without ever seeming
entirely comfortable with each other. After plying her with
liquor and Faulkner, he eventually offers to pay her all
the money he has in his pocket just to lay with him all
day: “with our clothes on, no kissing, just holding.” She
chooses instead to be alone, and the story ends silently in
her video store; she seems neither happy nor sad here, but
simply at home. In the background, the squares and
rectangles of the store’s many windows, doors, shelves, and
boxes recall the very shape of comics. We see that she is
where she belongs.
Actually, the background of
nearly every story here is a maze of right angles. Windows
and wainscoting, tile flooring, bookshelves and lockers,
blinds, bricks, and bars. We can see, here, how our world
lends itself to comics, or at least looks like comics.
Bell’s environs and edifices become inseparable from the
medium itself, and so her own life seems somehow already
in comics as well. This is perhaps why so much of
her best work is so autobiographical. In “Gabrielle the
Third,” for example, a woman named Gabrielle finds that two
pigeons are serious about starting a family on her
windowsill. Her best efforts to thwart them through playful
tormenting are unsuccessful, so she resigns to let them
remain. Much of the story takes place in this window, and
our vantage is mostly from the outside – the panel frames
the window, which frames Gabrielle. This is not some
tedious postmodern trick; instead, we are simply reminded
that the form of comics is already writing itself in our
lives. Looking out of my own window right now, I can
imagine someone looking in and seeing me as a story. (I’m
not sure watching me type would make for an interesting
narrative, but I guess Bell could have said the same thing
about watching her watch birds.)
One reason why Gabrielle Bell’s work is so good is because
of this familiarity: not just that our lives are also
netted with frames, but the sense that no experience is too
ordinary to become a story. The young Gabrielle runs away
from home for an afternoon in one story, and gets in a
playground fistfight in another. Her older (and usually
more fictional) characters are sometimes happy and
sometimes not. They are sometimes quiet, disappointed, and
frustrated, but also equally alive and funny. One might
expect that it would seem weird when Cecil transforms
herself into a chair in the title story, but I bought it
completely; there is something so incredibly enviable about
not having to worry about where to go anymore. To
find your own small space and stay in it. Even in their
more fantastical or bizarre moments, these comics could be
your comics. She’s just already done the work for you.
