PS Comics
By Minty Lewis
Published by Secret Acres, 2009
This collection of comics by Minty Lewis, like everything I've read from Secret Acres, is completely delightful.
I'm a girl who adores the use of personification. All of my early creative writing was of this nature, be it a piece about an irritated telephone endlessly annoyed at being grabbed all day, or my secret conversations with my left foot and my right foot as they forever competed for my attention: "Tie me first!" "No, my turn!"
So you can imagine the utter delight in reading an entire book filled with the ins an outs of daily office life with the employees depicted as a wide array of fruit, or the trials and tribulations of Yorkie schoolmates, Yorkie roommates and Yorkie matrimony. Every chapter in PS Comics was as clever as the one before, with my personal favorites being "Salt & Sugar" and "Craftstival Follies".
The pace of the book has the same quiet cleverness that I liked so much in other Secret Acres books and most recently in Kate T. Williamson's At A Crossroads. What attracts me to this quietness is what it seems to illustrate about the human interaction (be it via fruit or animals) that goes on in between the written words. In the pictures. From the comics I've read, the ones I've liked, this is where I see the talent lie. Minty Lewis is obviously not only a great observer of human behavior and our various idiosyncrasies, but she's evenly matched it with an ability to illustrate those observations. And it's interesting to me when I find that reading a comic that does that so well that it doesn't always mean that the actual drawings are the world's best renderings. But it almost doesn't seem necessary, because the drawings contain the ability to illustrate doubt on a face that didn't have it in the panel before, or to show us a character's intentions and motivations betraying the lie of the dialogue written in the very same frame. It reads like a gift. And yet, even though I don't know a thing about cartooning, it isn't a gift, is it? After all, calling it a gift is just another way of saying that it isn't earned, that it isn't hard--but if it's not hard to do, than everybody would do it. They aren't. Minty is.
It's the same talent of great actors, I think. Sure, there's interpreting what's been written, memorizing and saying the words. That's a talent, yes--but it's also a skill, and it can be taught. But have you ever seen actors who do so much more than that? Like, have you ever seen a fantastic production of Shakespeare? Shakespeare is the ideal way to express my example because although Shakespeare wrote brilliant plays, he left absolutely no direction except for "enter" and "exit." Or "In another part of the Forest." So, what an actor does in between the words or with the words or in spite of the words is where the play is at. The difference is a simple recitation of glorious words in the structure of a play, or an expression and communication of the commonality of human experience and universal truths related through the cleverness of gifted actors. I was honored to work with an incredibly talented group who did just that, years ago. These inspired geniuses took the same-old, same-old As You Like It, and found ways to incorporate actionable behavior in regards to cell phones and golf and things clearly not IN the text, to express and communicate so much more about those words than I'd ever seen in them before. They didn't touch the text. They didn't just add contemporary props. They made the work more palatable to an audience who were positive that you could bring them nothing new.
This is I found in PS Comics. Yes, even in something as silly as an arrogant dog and a "green" cat attending a Craft Festival together. You see the best and worst of our own behavior in them. You can identify with both of them. And they're pets! Likewise, just as the reader begins to feel on the side of our lovable loser "Apple," he does something unlikable. And I immediately thought, of a friend of mine who i generally like until he does that same sort of thing that Apple's doing. A new experience for me -- having a comic book remind me to have compassion and that everyone is human.
On a lighter note, this book is just plain funny. The story that speculates about what has happened to the author's dog when the family car was stolen (with the dog inside) is hilarious. Did he find another dog and spend his time reclining on the beach, glad to be done with that family he'd been with for seven years? That's priceless stuff. It's also a bit painful, as Minty points out, to think about what really may have happened to the dog. (Although it's delivered with such cleverness that its still pretty funny.) You know I was going to love that. Look, my father wrote an obituary for our cat of 18 years, Oreo, making sure to mention how much Orea loved the Philadelphia Eagles, and how he would watch the games every Sunday. This is who I come from. Apparently we love to see ourselves in our pets.
And I guess we're not alone.
-Nina Stone, 2009
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