by Joe Zabel
Sidestepping into a
Pop-culture Continuum
When Cat and Girl recently celebrated its fifth year
as a series, the two characters recollected their
adventures together, including an encounter with a
cursed tchotchke, being held captive in a food pyramid
of doom, and being trapped in an elevator with Bea
Arthur. 'I don't remember any of those things,'
comments Cat. It so happens he's right; none of
those things ever happened. But that's just one more
kink in the continuity of a series that's been on a
five-year-long reality bender.
They may not have met Bea Arthur, but Cat and Girl have met zombie
Dorothy
Parker and Triton, Punisher of Clichés. They've traveled back in
time and to
the North Pole. They've taken bubble baths in a hot air balloon while hanging out their laundry on the string of a kite! But more
frequently
the twosome take a sidestep into a
pop-culture continuum where trends have a palpable
presence. They might be found standing around waiting
for New Wave's big comeback; or dreaming a Dickensian
fable on the evolution of ironic tee shirts; or
getting a phone call from the Patriarchy itself.
They constantly tread the ideological DMZs between
culture and capitalism, art and identity, icon and con art. They even
run
headlong into issues about their own existence as fictional
characters. But
consistently through all these transformations, Cat and Girl are
charismatic, assertive characters.
We may not know what's around the next bend, but we
know who Cat and Girl are.
The very names of Dorothy Gambrell's main characters
hint at the brainy sensibility behind the comic.
'Cat' and 'Girl' don't sound like the names of
individuals. They sound more like transcendent Forms,
ala Plato, pointing to the universal concepts of
animal and female.
The design of the characters also hints at
universality. Girl is a sublimely-realized icon-- an
oval head with two dots for eyes and a volatile black
mark for a mouth. Her brunette hair is worn in a flip
with a prominent part-- her
most characteristic attribute. That white line of
scalp is always visible, and gives
her a vulnerable quality. She is positively
endearing, like a post-modern Shirley Temple in a Peter Pan
collar.
Cat is the wild card-- a slender figure in
goggle-like glasses who's only nominally a member of
the feline species. He's drawn in a straight-lined
style that contrasts with Girl's round features. In fact, he contrasts with her in every way-- he is tall,
she is short; he is active, she is sedentary; he is
shallow, she is deep; he is 'yes,' she is 'no'; he is
animal, she is human; and of course, he is male and
she is female.
Satirizing an Ideological Bent
Girl is the more articulate of the two, apparently the counterpart of
Gambrell herself. A typical episode begins with her railing against
some
social ill, while Cat plays the comic foil. This pattern appeared frequently in the early strips, and in 'From the Secret Files of Cat and Girl,' a crumpled document reveals the artist's template in
which the characters' dialog is reduced to "Replace with offhand reference... replace with text resembling social commentary," etc. Although the pattern may be formulaic, the episodes
distinguished themselves because Girl's complaints have real meat on
their
bones and real idealism in their hearts.
Her critiques often focus on the thoughtlessness with which we embrace
the
materialistic values thrust upon us by corporate capitalism. 'Nothing is real anymore,' Girl complains, 'just a replica of a replica... The artifice of the past becomes accepted as the real.' She also has an ongoing obsession with time and its effect on culture. In the recent strip 'Nostalgia Science,' she complains, '"If we remembered - if we could make an indestructible recording of civilization - there would be no point in living. The bottom of Pandora's box offered not just hope, but amnesia.'
But the series also satirizes Girl's ideological bent. Many of her
rants
are absurdly over-the-top and pedantic. She seems more obsessed with
fashions and trends than the people she's criticizing. In 'Cat and
Girl
Insist Upon Discussing Capitalism', her rant on economics turns out to
be
just an excuse to avoid buying Cat a new pair of socks. In 'Cat 1,
Girl
0' she accuses Cat of being too binary, only to have the accusation
turned
upon herself. And in 'Cat Tries To Watch TV' she starts into
a
rant, asking "Do decades have genders?" "I don't know," Cat replies. "Do decades have call waiting? Do decades invest in real estate? Do decades enjoy borscht?" In one of the finest entries in the series, 'Cat and Girl's
Photo
Album', the two characters compare photos revealing their past lives.
Cat
has starred in a western, been a beat poet, and played in a rock band.
But
every photo of Girl shows her reading a book. "I've wasted my life!"
she
declares.
Cat, in turn, is often the source of slapstick humor, but rarely of
satire.
Perhaps that's because he is generally the observer, without an
obsessive
drive to impose his ideas upon the universe. When Gambrell wants to
satirize male obsessiveness, she usually turns to a minor character,
Boy.
Boy wants to impress Girl, but entirely lacks the confidence to do so.
Invariably he comes up empty, sad and lonely because of his perverse
self-contempt. In contrast, whenever Cat exhibits his masculine side,
he
behaves in the shallow, unstressed manner we associate with a regular
guy.
'Public Transportation Fails Cat' has him trying to pick up girls by offering them a ride-- on
the
bus; it ends with him in his backyard, giving a wash to his imaginary
motorcycle.
Surviving Deconstruction
In the spirit of post-modernism, Gambrell frequently breaks down her
characters into their component parts, reminding us of their fictional
nature. The artist herself has appeared in the strip several times; in 'Cat and Girl Meet Their Maker,'
they
were returning from Coney Island while she had to go to her day job, suggesting that they are living the carefree existence that she cannot. A three-part
'The Creation of Cat and Girl' confides that Cat popped out of a hole in
Girl's
head. In 'Cat and Girl Seek Conventional Wisdom,' their dialog is reduced to Girl repeatedly saying 'no,' to Cat's 'yes.' In 'Cat and Girl Discuss the Meaning of Life', Gambrell
transforms their duality further, replacing their dialog entirely with
pictures. The aforementioned 'Secret File' episode takes deconstruction
to
its extreme, pulling back the curtain to reveal the comics'
superstructure.
In spite of the trials of Gambrell's rigorous deconstruction, Cat and
Girl
survive as believable, three-dimensional characters. And some of the best episodes of the series find the
characters
grounded in stable, comprehensible situations.
One such grace note early in the series is the park scene in 'Cat and Girl Discuss Winning the Lottery',
where
Cat listens while Girl describes what she'd do with the money. "I'd open a laundromat. A rock and roll laundromat. Also at the laundry I'd sell used books. Also coffee- but the cheap, strong kind, not yuppie coffee. And there'd be Bass on tap. And a half-pint would be free with every load of laundry." Girl's musings have an appealing wistfulness that reminds us of lazy days and simple dreams.
Another adventure in grounded reality is 'Girl's Class Reunion.' At the affair, Girl listens to the other women bragging about their vacuous lives,
and
when it's her turn, she says "I, uh, went to see the world's largest
Caesar
salad." Back home, she wraps herself in a blanket and soaks her feet
in a
pail of water, and confides her disillusionment to Cat. "They're so deadened to the world that life makes sense to them. I've never felt so road less traveled."
One of the quietest and most deeply resonant episodes of the series
seems to
have been inspired by an off-hand remark in the preceding strip. In
the
earlier strip, Girl tells a phone salesman that she has no
parents,
and lives with an anthropomorphic cat. Then, in 'Cat and Girl
have
Secrets', Cat interrupts Girl while she's playing in her room. He can
sense she's concealing something, but he doesn't know what. And her
abrupt
answers make it obvious that she doesn't welcome his company. After he leaves, she pulls out a set of dolls and resumes playing with them. They
are
the dolls of a daddy, a mommy, and a little girl.
A Risk-Taking Auteur
Gambrell's artwork started out uneven and sometimes crude; in her archive she labels her early strips 'Cat and Girl Primitif'. But she now projects a satisfying self-confidence in her compositions and linework. She makes frequent and canny use of the repeated panel technique to suggest an absurd stasis-- in 'Cat and Girl wait for New Wave's Big Comeback' she repeats the same panel ten times to create a hilarious portrait of waiting. She also inserts silent panels into the continuity for effective comic timing.
Her approach to scripting is adventurous, frequently experimental, and always fraught with risk. Some strips are pure demonstrations of philosophical principles, as in the pair of strips, 'The Spiritual as a Reflection of the Physical' and
'The Physical as a Reflection of the Spiritual'. In 'Cat and Girl are Situationists,' the strip is handed over entirely to a description of a lesser-known art movement and the practice of détournement. Even when the strip has a punchline, it's generally subtle and sometimes puzzling, especially if you've never heard of Shady Pines or Joseph Beuys.
The prolific Gambrell maintains two other weekly comic strips. The
Ralph
Bunche is a satire of post-Iraq world politics. The New Adventures of
Death
chronicles the Candide-like progress of Death incarnate. Portrayed as
a
kindly simpleton, he settles down to a normal life in a modern
world that seems as bereft of life as himself.
The latter series is Gambrell's most ambitious work to date, rendered
in
full color with often-dazzling graphic experimentation and longer narrative threads. She relies much less on verbosity here, and
much
more on visual storytelling. But that's another review.
Whichever of her series one favors, Gambrell is clearly an artist
on
overdrive, and one of the web's most promising talents.
