Bernadette

Reviews

Helen Chazan | October 9, 2024

Bernadette Magazine #1 arrives with a feeling of momentous portent. There are a lot of great comics anthologies around at the moment, but none have carried with them the sense of being a defining statement of what alternative comics might now be quite like Bernadette. Maybe it's the large dimensions of the magazine, maybe it's the glossy paper stock that evades both the pragmatic newsprint and the boutiquifying riso format that have been the norm for so much of the scene lately. Maybe it's editor Angela Fanche's stunning cover illustration that brings me to this work with unusual trepidation and awe. Fanche's cover, a gleeful mess of melting digital and drawn forms and candy colors, presents a sickly woman bent over, clutching her stomach, gazing out at the viewer. Fluid pours into her ear from what might either be a fountain cupid or an abstraction, and gushes out the other side, mingling with the liquid form of her hair and her seat. A little circle on her forehead, creased like a stress mark, trails off in a tail that might be a word balloon. Is she smiling? Maybe this anthology is the cluster of her anxious thoughts.

Bernadette hosts a formidable array of 29 contributors, some well-known, some not. At a glance, one realizes that this is an all-women anthology, with the added excitement of the recognition that this is not a touted theme of the collection. No impassioned calls for representation ring through Bernadette's pages, rather the confident assertion that women are pushing the comics medium into the future. If Bernadette's pages are a solid forecast, the future of comics is open wounds, gashes, an embrace of the unfinished, the cluttered, the barren, the messy and ambiguous. Like early volumes of Kramers, Bernadette does not offer page numbers for reference, disparate works and artists bleed into one another with the occasional familiar face. Photography and pure formalism puncture narrative and rough lines stretch into the margins. There is a sense that Bernadette is one work, a collective effort at aesthetic nausea, nocturnal emissions and twisted sisterhood.

If an anthology can be about something, Bernadette is about the troubled inner world that escapes definition by identity or political stake. Gabrielle Bell presents us with two dream comics that do not declare themselves as such, troubling the reader with their proximity to the emotional truthiness of the diary comic form. Sam Szabo's short contribution “Dykes” twists the form of her typical transsexual humor strips into a powerfully weird moment where the very existence of lesbians troubles a confused driver, the faces of the gays hanging over his tearful face as he drives into the night. Co-editor Katie Lane's “I Hate My Girlfriend” begins with an anecdote apparently from life and then repeatedly zooms out to the artist asserting that what she has presented is not true, that she cannot be trusted. I mention these stories not as highlights of the collection, but the works which point to something like a thesis for the piece. It's the sum of the anthology, the succession of ranting narrations, obtuse cartoon forms, erotic-grotesque shapes, blunt humor and brooding surrealism that give shape to Bernadette. Molly Dwyer's ”Ropeburn“ confronts the reader with dreadful and immediate horror, followed by an obtuse menagerie of fictionalized plants in “The Night Garden” by Ana Wolfe. Biographical pieces blend into sketchbook pages, meditations are followed by slapstick comedy are followed by Giger-like grotesques, splatters of jet black ink are punctured by colorful portraits.

A rejection of coherence and embrace of the incomplete is not new to alternative comics. There is a bit of 2DCloud's Mirror Mirror anthology to Bernadette's palate, a bit of Mould Map, a bit of Kramers, maybe even a bit of the Santoro school. But what catches the eye here is the sheer diversity of approach that seems to reject a unified framework. Panel borders are drawn without rulers or fall away completely. No tempo is set, no rhythm, not for long, anyway. But something remains continuous, bleeding to the edge of the page. Editors Angela Fanche and Katie Lane, along with co-editors Juliette Collet and Clair Gunther, offer little more in the way of an editorial statement beyond a call for submissions and a promise of future publications. But somehow the noise coheres, bleeding to the edge of the margins, the clatter of thoughts streaming through the mind of that anxious woman. Maybe a comics anthology can also be a person. Maybe I'll know more about Bernadette when I meet her again, this strange enigmatic woman of an anthology cluttered with new ideas for comics.