Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Nicole Goux’s Rituals, available now from Silver Sprocket.
by Arpad Okay. Sitting on the floor next to the bed, across from the mirror. Legs crossed on a cushion, hands that hold a glass atomizer have long acrylic nails. Sitting in the sink. There are hair clippings in the sink, too. A tattoo of sliced fruit. Rituals is portraits. Figure studies that are character studies that are silent stories. What are they preparing for? Fixing their hair, doing their lashes or lips. Each page is stepping into someone else’s world. A place, a moment, where ideas about ourselves and our physical bodies come into sync.
What do these spaces Nicole Goux put them in say about them? The view through a window is another tall city building—or just vines. Rug pattern, ring bowl, toilet brush. The kitchen is next to the room with the mirror; is the apartment small, or does it feel cozy? Makeup and other self-health beauty care stuff just… strewn everywhere. Underthings. Books. Polaroids. A 45 case. Succulents. A cat. Many cats. The things we gather around us because they resonate.
Crumpled tissues, beer cans and wine glasses, toothpaste, trashcan, and toiletries back there with the accessories… not every element added to these illustrations are a personality clue. The reality of keeping your blowdryer under the sink with spare rolls of toilet paper is the character of the room telling its truth. Don’t think of these things as nouns, where what she owns defines who she is, but verbs, where the stuff spread out around her are tools, extensions of self, an act, manifestations of dreams.
A snapshot. An individual in an environment that speaks to who that person is. Rituals is about life as well as the living. The answers it gives to its own questions are incomplete, filled in by the reader. Goux doesn’t explain anything. You put yourself into the silence to find what it means to you.
Here’s what I see:
Ladies in various stages of dress and a variety of positions. The care put into each figure study is echoed in the detail of garments, hair, accessories. Some are pinups, like Gil Elvgren, classy and mischievous. Some body language is totally without presentation to anyone else, somewhere between the comfort of a known place and the focus of being in the zone. They are more voluptuous than athletic, more monde than monoculture. Instead of feeling voyeuristic, these portraits lend dignity to being yourself unguarded.
If you’re going to spend so much time with your eyes sweeping the same page, you want there to be little details to catch you by surprise. Sometimes a leg wouldn’t bend quite like that; a Hewlett-style finger is too long and too square around the edges. But a truly inspired illustrator never lets anatomy or reality get in the way of drawing the right line. Gloriously expressive. A minimum of marks can still imply shape and weight and substance. Rituals is a celebratory book, and the vivid snap Goux’s pen maintains, read after read, reflects that positivity.
The fuzz of her line absolutely sends me. Compressed or broad, each one sings with textural noise. As the fibers of a page push against a pencil, there is an irregular yet constant tremor within the graceful, straight lines that only get better as they get thicker. The static wiggle line technique in Núria Martinez’s marvelous Outspace, or the actual chaos contours of Home Movies comes to mind. The combination in Goux’s hands is Patrick Nagel on the Amiga 1000. There’s an element in their making that varies the thickness of brush lines, powerfully evocative on the page but sadly absent when using a pen tip. But! The movement inside the line in Goux’s art awakens the same brush brio that excites her illustrations with static motion.
The color palettes are hard to describe as a whole, aside from the emotional responses they evoke: compelling, rich, imaginatively minimalist. The page-facing pairings all work, as does the progression back and forth between levels of intensity and saturation. Goux’s ripe fruit of deep jewel tones cools off to more sedate pastels. Some are realist, some stylized, all of them palpably curated. What they have in common is the mark of a strong, distinct artist.
Despite the highly stylized coloring, it’s natural to lose oneself in the imagery. The portrait is just as much of the moment as it is the subject, and so the character of the scene is familiar, even if it’s set in shades of blood orange and burgundy. Unlike most comics, you don’t have to move forward for the story to deepen. The time you put into a page yields more details.
Diving into tiny details instead of focusing on the overall image becomes an immersion in the scene’s world. Where the mirror she is looking into sits, what is sitting around it, what is on the wall behind it—it is less like seeing it and more like being there, or like when you’re reading prose. I don’t know from where Goux drew inspiration for these scenes, where she was or what she saw, but you can feel Rituals crackle with the energy she captures, elegant and inelegant and housed in the same sacred space.
Silver Sprocket / $12.99
Written and illustrated by Nicole Goux.
Rituals is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Check out this 3-page preview of Rituals, courtesy of Silver Sprocket:
More Required Reading:
Witchy teen detectives let emo sparks fly in Sas Milledge’s Mamo
The Paradox of Getting Better is a furious work of self-examination and raw confession
Time has run out of tomorrows and now is all you got in Love in Space
