Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Iggy Craig’s Sad Girl Space Lizard, available now from Silver Sprocket.
by Arpad Okay. The collected Sad Girl Space Lizard is a sum greater than its parts. A comic series part, a behind-the-scenes supplement part. The second half pulls the veil aside, the story’s meaning is communicated, giving new dimension to the first piece. The creative process gets reignited as its reflection is regarded, becoming the genesis of new perspectives, potentials, and directions. The total of Iggy Craig’s struggle with the creative process, bound in pages. The way to crawl out of burnout is to rediscover what really stimulates you.
First, you’ve got a book about Left. Left is a lizard, lesbian, mech pilot, fucking wreck. Her life was destined for second place, but everything changes when her support role is suddenly called into actual use. In a poorly run environment, that’s typically a catastrophe. So guess what, the brickhouse and capable head captain Right overdid it, can’t run things, but can’t let go either. Tension in the two-lizard mech turns to hot sex. Sapphic, not for kids, honest-to-goodness pornographic comics! The relationship shifts as the company that runs the giant robo runs it into a deep, dangerous state of disregard.
Who they are is what they are and where they are. Craig’s chaotic notepad energy has the surety of sketchbook drawings in the good pen zone. There is a love of space stations and technical drawings and the austerity of futurism that keeps everything from looking overworked. Sad Girl Space Lizard is drawn in a minimalist style in a sense, but with specific Ron Cobbish details that come through and make a vision out of the comic instead of a character study.
Then, you’ve got supplements, the story of Left and Right. After what has to be one of the more satisfying conclusions in literature, Craig just lays it all out. The reason Right is this kick-ass beefy mech-queen and Left is a shrimp who is technically capable but never really called upon is because the book is also about artistic burnout and not being able to draw with your dominant hand. Coming back to comics after a rest and wondering if it’s worth it. Left’s comic is drawn with the left hand. The work changes because I, the reader, am changed.
Craig taking time to resurvey the work also produced all this fan art, and from that, alternate reality speculation. Bonus drawings! Generative drawings! Tribute drawings to influential art and artists! A magical confluence of ideas. On the surface, one could compare it to a multiverse: an original idea in infinite speculative reflection, popular in comics, old as Mercury.
But the story is a metaphor, a mask over another inner story. Craig didn’t invent the mecha genre, or antagonistic sexual tension. The base elements are a swirl of the personal and the greater literary lexicon it takes from and adds to. To me, this speaks to the individual’s capability to have universal reach. Writing. Creating art, practicing your craft, this is it. Rembrandt but lizard lesbians. Sad Girl Space Lizard is the free space of creation, the raw material that gets made into comics and the comic itself. Iggy Craig is Hephaestus fashioning lightning as well as Hermes; the book is bolt and forge both.
A tendency towards duality is everywhere in this new compleat edition. The depth of the story is SFF at its peak by being about everyday experience. Hot thoughts like mechs and sex capture the readers’ imagination, used to explore the soul and day-to-day life. The annotation zine makes much of what was previously left unsaid between the book and its creator much more concrete, and all the fan art further solidifies the book’s connections to the world in which it was published. The addition of multiple realities for Left and Right to populate also opens the door to untold stories. What if things developed in this vein instead of that one?
The real Sad Girl Space Lizard can undergo infinite repetition because what makes her up is something real. Something universal in its uniqueness you can dress in any skin, fit in any shoe, try any possibility with. Because what makes the sad girl space lizard Left (or Right) is more than a prompt or a metaphor; it’s allowing on the page for an idea to blossom into life. Craig’s is a diary, unlike the kind we’re used to peeking into when we read comics.
Sad Girl Space Lizard is available now. For purchasing information, click this.
Silver Sprocket / $19.99
Written and illustrated by Iggy Craig.
Check out this 5-page preview of Sad Girl Space Lizard, courtesy of Silver Sprocket:
More Required Reading:
Nicole Goux crafts captivating tales about clutter and clamor in Rituals
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
