THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Arpad Okay. Things are going from bad to worse. Pet Peeves isn’t as it seems: the irritations aren’t minor, it isn’t personal, and even after a wash is anyone really sure that thing is a dog? Don’t get me wrong, either; Nicole Goux isn’t playing around. In this comic, Bobbie makes the wrong choices and watches her friends recede — all that’s left is the job, the dog, and the burden of waking up. Watch as a soul kicked around too much already sputters and goes out like a candle.
An uneasy read. The fate of Bobbie is drawn to darkness. You get an inkling of who she was, once. Before the bar job she wrote songs, even played them sometimes. But she’s barely holding it together now. What used to matter doesn’t touch her anymore; nothing does. Succumbing to isolation despite sharing a room (partition) in an apartment belonging to her ex(ish). Taking home a weird rag-mop stray dog actually adds to the atmosphere of opaque dread? There’s total Jenny Hval Paradise Rot vibes. A horror story without any gristle, where the self dwindles into foggy nothingness.
Not to say it’s joyless. It’s Agnes Varda Vagabond stuff, the solemn beauty and triumph of leading a fucked up mess of a life. Both Varda’s Mona and Goux’s Bobbie submit to their dark trajectories. The real, tangible life inside of each of them is resilient. The clouds part for a moment here and there. It’s almost made more tragic knowing she’s in there, a bottle corked. The life inside Bobbie is trapped, unable to move through the molasses of occupying a body, of being.
The story is bleak, but how it’s told is visually electric. Goux gives every character, every layout, the life that burns blind inside Bobbie. I loved Goux’s Rituals, a series of figure drawings that forms depth of character out of idiosyncratic details, and Pet Peeves employs the same technique for everyone in it. The way she draws bodies is indie rock Stan Sakai. Her layouts are fabulous, combining illustration and cartoonist conventions to weave the story about the page like music. Each scene beats out a rhythm like a typewriter, or a piston, a dance.
The two-tone, high-relief coloring raises your awareness of the book’s mood. Whenever a comic is done in this kind of stylized, offset printing aesthetic, it makes the reader consider the artmaking process a little more explicitly. The art itself reminds you that intention guides the narrative. What’s up? It isn’t the color dominating the mood; it’s all the black. The brick red brings depth to Goux’s pages but also increasingly serves to mute their brightness. Pet Peeves is cast in shadow.
It’s a story about boiling over. A future dropped and fractured. Destruction without redemption. Nicole Goux is offering to hurt you. You should accept.
8.5 out of 10
Pet Peeves is in stores on May 25. For purchasing information, click this.
Avery Hill Publishing / $16.95
Written and illustrated by Nicole Goux.
Check out this 3-page preview of Pet Peeves, courtesy of Avery Hill Publishing:
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