Jade LFT Peters defies style and taboo in Influenca

Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Influenca, by Jade LFT Peters, from SIlver Sprocket.

by Arpad Okay. This book may be about sex and violence, but it barely gets around to either. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Jade LFT Peters spends a whole Act nibbling on nipples but also stopping a million times because of the conversation going on. Influenca indulges in the unlikely comforts of the long-term relationship. Domestic chooch snooching. And I think it’s cool as hell to see sex without stress.

However, describing the premise as being trapped in the house with your partner for an indefinite period (because of a rampant viral infection, of course) is looking at this book through the wrong end of the telescope. We’re all working ourselves to death. Being forced to put down everything and spend time with the person you love is a gift.

At least Dodie and Beatriz have an occupation worth doing: zombie killers. Protectors of the people. Not that the positive difference it creates makes their life as freelancers easy. But — just read her interview in Explosée Magazine — the reason Dodie does what she does is legit. Peters handles the zombie killing like the sweaty, sticky stuff; the deal is sealed off-camera, talked about instead of shown. Influenca is more about survival than strength.

So the collapse of everything, yes, but follower counts remain intact, and uncomfortable celebrity interviews persist. The self-reflection Dodie employs by posting through it and answering lifestyle questions is Peters exploring how individual motivation can make a community stronger. Influenca happened because someone asked themselves, what am I going to do about this? Like in the radical procedural How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Peters sets ’em up and knocks ’em down. All it takes is a couple of romantics who dare to try.

I know that I’m saying this book evokes uncomfortable reflections of the nightmarish times we currently live in, but I promise you that it’s also a giddy, silly, and rambunctious goof. Peters’s style is always in flux but consistently clear and very cartoonish. Dark as the subject matter might be, the aesthetic is comedic, its two sides sealed together with the sincerity of black humor rather than bound in irony. Some real Twisted Sisters “bad girl” art going on. Defiant of rules for style and eager to break taboos.

Influenca is a hybrid of traditional comics, prose (you read the magazine in real-time with the character), interface reproductions (drawn phone screen captures), infographics, zine-like combinations. We sometimes turn the pages of what Beatriz is reading for her, and sometimes we just read normal panels. On some pages, characters break the fourth wall and turn a schedule from meta-text to information knowingly provided for the reader by the story’s subjects. All of this to say: this comic is going to do whatever the hell it wants to. The seed of being a zine and answering to no one blooms. Peters channels stylistic yet homogenous chaos to tell a sexy revolution story.

Much like the many formats, brace yourself for the staggering and delightful array of different styles Dodie and Beatriz are drawn in. Once things get down, dirty, and domestic, the teasing mixes with casually cutting conversation, causing a flurry of reaction faces. It’s very cartoony, frequently chibi. But also the details fly in when the mood suits. The muscles in the shoulders and back, tensed, appear out of nowhere. Peters could draw the girls eyes closed; the myriad styles are just evidence that confidence is more powerful in comics than technical skill (which Peters also has, employs when the time is right, etc). It’s a comedy with a lot of talking. Peters makes each and every panel count. Like a newspaper strip, though it’d have to be an alt-weekly with subject matter so blue.

On the bottom of the page, with the little PEMDAS joke, as one panel follows the next, you get two different ways of drawing the same face. I like both for different reasons. There’s a wave that hits, the depth of coolness going on suddenly perceived when the book enters its third, fourth, fifth iteration of sequential art storytelling methods. Peters understands the medium so much that the drawing can play. Not every style flip was a choice in service to a story beat. Shit happens sometimes, just because.

And that’s the larger draw of the book for me. It’s great to see people grow and overcome and succeed, but it’s even better to watch them fucking around without a care because everything’s fine. The moment in time we get to spend with Dodie and Beatriz talking shit and kissing, that’s not a plot device — it’s how life is. Wildly illustrated but true, Peters captures the realness between the recordings.

Influenca is available now. For ordering information, click this.

Silver Sprocket / $16.99
Written and illustrated by Jade LFT Peters.

Check out this 4-page preview of Influenca, courtesy of Silver Sprocket: