Bitch Magazine #30 Fall 2005
Bitch Reads
SPANIEL RAGE
Vanessa Davis
(Buenaventura Press)
In the tradition of comics artists like Julie Doucet and Ariel Schrag, Vanessa Davis's autobiographical slice-of-life drawings are both totally relatable and sweetly surreal. Davis, a 26-year-old Floridian living in New York, uses diary-style combinations of words and pictures to depict the self-conscious realizations that can color a workday (in one drawing, Davis is sitting on the subway and realizes her shirt is uncomfortably low-cut); the sickening trauma of disintegrating friendships ("At work I compose emails that are desperate and vain attempts to reclaim relationships I don’Äôt want either"); and the small, redeeming pleasures of solitude ("I am obsessed with eating pad kee mao in front of my air conditioner"). Her scratchy pencil lines capture the tiniest nuances of emotion in her self-portraits, and her attention to detail is impeccable, even if some of the details themselves are disturbing. If I never see another depiction of clown sex, it will be too soon. -A.Z.
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