Cat and Girl

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:48:00 +0000

Since 1999, Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl has graced the internet with its mordant critique of consumer society, indie rock, hipsters and everything that takes itself too seriously. A volume of more than 200 of these strips was published last year, making it available for the first time in a format suitable for reading on the subway.

There are actually two girls in Cat and Girl, versions of each other: the nerdier Girl and the punkier Girl. (You can tell them apart by their hair – one spike, or two.) There is only one Cat -- ostensibly male, bespectacled, and often dressed in a turtleneck. If Girl is the brain of the strip, Cat is the heart; he brings in the dada with his hare-brained schemes and sailor suits.

The best thing about Cat and Girl is how intelligent it is. Gambrell is a master of the caustic epigram, and can take down her targets with ruthless efficiency. Consider this twofer: Girl observes that calling a boy a “sissy” is an insult “typical of a society that considers the separation of male- and female-identified characteristics more important than the separation of church and state.” The gender binary and theocracy, with one well-aimed stone.

Almost all of Gambrell’s comics are good, but the best ones are soaked in incidental detail, and unravel like a pocket symphony of pop culture criticism. Take “The Blue Comic,” for example. As Cat and Girl roast marshmallows over a campfire, she decries the scandal of manufactured culture. “Marketplace of ideas!” she scoffs. “Ideas never stood a chance.” After a beat, she admits, “I wish I were popular.” “Do you know what’s popular?” counters Cat. “Christian rock!” And the strip ends with four panels of Cat strumming his guitar while singing the evangelical version of Weezer’s insipid "Sweater Song." (“If you want to destroy my savior…”)

Some may quibble that Cat and Girl is formulaic. Of course it is – but it happens to be a good formula! (One could argue that all great comic strips are formulaic.) Other people have told me that they find the strip too bitter, too mean. I would argue that Gambrell’s bitterness is not just choler; it’s critique. That is, she doesn’t merely insult -- she uncovers and undermines. The bitterness of Cat and Girl comes not from pessimism, but from unreasonably high expectations -- unreasonable politics. If you believe in art, freedom and, dare I say it, revolution – (in other words, if you believe in Sunshine and Lollipops) – how can you maintain that sweet tone of voice when everything of value is being flattened beneath the twin steamrollers of irrational exuberance and ironic detachment?

So why not vote for Sunshine and Lollipops?

Written by: Nadia Berenstein, April 30th 2007

Girl Stories

admin — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:37:00 +0000

By Lauren R. Weinstein

Henry Holt

A friend once described the experience of being a Smiths fan at age twelve. Listening to the lyrics of “Half a Person”—“Sixteen, clumsy, and shy, I went to London and I booked myself in at the Y…WCA…”—he felt a pang of recognition with that teenager. Precociously morose, he told me, “I felt so old for my age!”

Reading Lauren R. Weinstein’s comics, I feel a similar sympathetic pang – albeit from the far side of sixteen. It makes me think that the ageless adolescence of the sensitive, artistic, somewhat nerdy kid is a permanent state of being. You’re born with it; you never grow out of it.

Most of the comics included in Girl Stories chronicle the adventures and misadventures of “Lauren Weinstein” during her last year of middle school and freshman year of high school. What kind of girl is she? The kind of girl who, in kindergarten, tells all the Christian kids that the existence of Santa Claus is logically impossible. The kind of girl who repurposes Barbies with scissors, markers, and tin-foil outfits, in order to cast them in dramatic tableaux. The kind of girl who believes Morrissey is her guardian angel. In other words, she’s smart, creative, and strange—and so, inevitably, she’s also lonely.

Lauren’s life is shaped by the tension between wanting something and being smart enough to know it’s no good yet wanting it anyways. She wants to be popular and ends up an outcast (at least temporarily). She wants a boyfriend, but he ends up being a lame, skater dude. She wants her bellybutton pierced; it becomes massively infected.

Weinstein’s drawings are textured, exuberant and enjoyably sloppy. She conveys the terrible swiftness with which triumph becomes humiliation and has a keen understanding of the arcane social logic of adolescence. Her comics are at their best when expressing the higher registers of human emotion—anguish and glee.

The other comics collected in this volume are brief funny pieces about being a girl. Of particular note is “Am I fat?” in which Weinstein describes the double-helping of guilt she feels around food: guilt at eating and guilt at how ridiculous it is to feel guilty about eating. After the comic was published, Weinstein’s inbox was flooded with emails, many from girls asking her for dieting advice. Weinstein, devastated, wrote another comic in response pleading with her readers not to obsess over body image: “Imagine what we could do (and how much more fun we’d have) if we just focused on what we loved!”

Written by: Nadia Berenstein, April 29th 2007