Miriam #1

by Rich Tommaso, Alternative Comics

Standing on its own, Miriam is a nicely designed, engaging comic. But Miriam does not stand on its own. It is a look-and-feel lawsuit waiting to happen. Miriam is what you would produce if you came from a culture that had the last few issues of Eightball and no other comics. It’s not a swipe, and it’s not plagiarism; but it’s probably the most blatant comics homage since Top Notch Comics appropriated Chris Ware’s esthetic in 1998.

The comic features vignettes from the life of Miriam, who is kind of like Enid-light, focusing on her relationship with friend and occasional crush Peter. Peter is an aspiring filmmaker and Miriam is an aspiring cartoonist, which sounds terribly cliched (and also terribly Clowsian) but it never really intrudes. The main stories are from college, high school, and “age seven,” presented thus in reverse chronological order, and are light on plot and heavy on the observation of minutiae. Perhaps the best of the pieces is the inside front cover. The title panel proclaims, “Miriam and Her Pal, Peter in ‘Who’s the Bigger Dork?’” A small caption in the final panel reads, “Answer: Miriam.” This small callback to the title gives the page a unity that makes what is otherwise a very slight account of choosing Halloween costumes into an actual story.

Like a later Clowes piece, Miriam’s individual stories gain by their interconnectedness. The characters’ relationships become clearer, sure, but the book also hints towards a thematic unity. In the first story (for example) Miriam and Peter watch Russ Meyer’s cat-fight classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; in the second, two girls duke it out for a full page in a cafeteria.

These movies of Peter’s may be Tommaso’s veiled acknowledgment of his inspiration in Eightball. The screenplay of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the source for the title of Clowes’s graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. And when Peter watches Polanski’s Knife in the Water, Tommaso redraws it to look like the cover of Eightball #15.

In one story, a Space 1999 Colorforms set is consistently and mysteriously obscured; it’s in many panels, but it is always drawn as a blank space. Since it is ostensibly these Colorforms that young Peter and Miriam are engrossed in, the effect is strange, and a little unsettling. Is it to draw attention away from the toys and back to the protagonists? Is it to enable the reader to fill in the blank space with a picture more salubrious to his own childhood experiences? Or did Tommaso just get bored or lazy and not draw it? (For that matter, what happened to the hardwood floor in this scene, it disappears too?) What Miriam’s relationship with Eightball is, whether it’s some arcane act of critical commentary, whether Tommaso is just a rabid fan–this remains similarly mysterious.