Tate McFadden | June 17, 2025
The Devil’s Grin Vol. 1(Fantagraphics 2025) is the first compilation of Alex Graham’s series of the same name. As of now, seven issues of the series have been self-published as large format floppies, with the collection being printed in a smaller format. Graham, who’s been a fixture of the independent comics scene for the past decade, uses her cartooning powers to their fullest effect in The Devil’s Grin. The series is difficult to label with one genre, but I would best describe it as a Lynchian melodrama. You find yourself just as wrapped up in the sexual and romantic lives of the series’characters as you do the more magical elements.
Graham has remarked before that while she loves horror, she doesn’t feel the comics mode is well suited to it as a genre. Rather than horror, Graham is interested in the creepy and unsettling which is obvious if you’ve read any of her work. The Devil’s Grin focuses on three neighbors whose lives intertwine to erotic and disastrous effect: Robert, a struggling poet is infatuated with Dandelion, a nervous, shy woman who left the city for Henryville to focus on her poetry and is smitten with Robert; and Gary, an antisocial Black cartoonist who is jealously covetous of Dandelion.
The small-town setting has an atmosphere of fifties americana, tinged with the grime of the beat generation, a literary movement whose archetypes and ideals Graham satirizes throughout The Devil’s Grin. In one hilarious scene, a character remarks that Robert’s poetry reminds him of Jim Morrison of The Doors to which Robert angrily replies that he’d rather be compared to Burroughs. While the setting and era are quickly recognizable, the story is immediately unnerving, as the characters all begin to be haunted by a devil who seeks to torment and terrify them for unclear reasons. The visions appear in characters’ peripheries before disappearing the moment they’re looked at directly, making each of them worry they’re going insane.
As if things weren’t strange enough, Graham couches her surreal setting within a talking animal comic. Unlike other talking animal comics, even the mature ones, however, the characters of Henryville are almost all weird amalgamations of animal and human. Most talking animal comics rely on the innate recognizability of cartoon animals(show anyone on the planet an outline of the mickey mouse fun house clan and they can probably name one). Graham, however, unseats our stability, and thus our comfort, by making her characters uncomfortably difficult to taxonomize.
Graham also uses other cartooning techniques commonly used in kids’ cartoons. Most notably throughout the collection, characters’ eyes and hearts bulge out like Looney Toons characters. While in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, such fare is innocent and funny, in Graham’s haunting world it emanates a madness and hysteria that sets your skin crawling. In one particularly disturbing example, Robert’s face triples and blurs as he has sex with Dandelion for the first time, his eyes a spiraling swirl of hypnosis, before his face transforms into that of a devil staring down at Dandelion, eyes bulging in terror. But before she can do anything, Robert’s face turns back to “normal” and Dandelion’s eyes swirl into a reflection of Robert’s own hypnotic desire.
The characters of The Devil’s Grin are so insular and scared of being insane, that they never discuss their visions with one another. Watching Graham’s characters go mad lends The Devil’s Grin a voyeuristic feel which elicits a pitying sympathy for her characters. In a recurring vision, for instance, characters see needle track marks on Dandelion’s arms. We see them too, but they disappear maddeningly when Dandelion turns to look at her arm. The dual experience of reading Graham’s story feels more mysterious and tragic than it does infuriating as it might in a slasher. It’s one of unraveling the secrets of a strange and foreign psyche rather than yelling “Don’t go in there!” at the hapless heroine of a B movie.
There are a lot of complex moving parts to The Devil’s Grin, and storylines occasionally get left by the wayside. There is commentary on race in America which is touched on lightly throughout The Devil’s Grin, that can occasionally feel a bit underdeveloped. Gary, the lonely cartoonist of the story, is constantly subject to casual racism from his boss and the police of Henryville, acts for which Gary takes his revenge by drawing vindictive comics which magically come to life. Without the complete story, it can feel difficult to ascertain what the book is trying to say about the Black experience in small-town America. Graham has recently faced criticism regarding a similarly simplistic Instagram comic titled “The State of Culture” suggesting cartoonists of color have begun winning comics awards due to audience members’ white heteronormative guilt.
Similarly, Robert’s sexuality and gender come off a bit half-baked. Several scenes of Robert cross-dressing alone in the mirror along with a wig-shoplifting scene suggest that Robert might be trans and another intense gay sexual experience complicates his sexuality. The scenes are all played with a straight face and Graham has a clear respect for her characters and readers, but they occasionally lack an emotional follow-through, as we never get a chance to see the internal complexities that such experiences come with. These gaps aren’t arresting, but you do find yourself occasionally wondering why these things are happening in the narrative as a whole.
Such flaws are only apparent when reading Volume One as a graphic novel, rather than a trade in a series. Gary’s storyline as a whole and Robert’s sexuality both begin to be developed later in the series, suggesting development further down the line. As a whole, The Devil’s Grin is an exhibition of Graham’s narrative voice as a cartoonist. There’s a real care for tone not just in the art but also the language of her work. It’s a level of attention that makes her work so consistent and yet still so novel at every page.
English (US) · 