by Shaenon Garrity
[Editor's note: artist Dylan Meconis is interviewed elsewhere in this issue.]
I feel almost obliged to apologize in advance to Dylan Meconis. This early in her artistic career, she can afford to be spared extensive critical poking and prodding, especially of a work which is, by her own admission, first and foremost an excuse to write funny dialogue for funny characters. But génie obligé; the work is of a caliber that demands dissection, and the artist must simply endure the critic's knife and tweezers. Dylan Meconis is twenty-one years old, and she has just completed her first major graphic novel.
Not, of course, her first flawless graphic novel. That would be asking a little much. In fact, one of the pleasures of Bite Me! is watching Meconis evolve as an artist, a writer, and a graphic storyteller. The early chapters are light gothic comedy, with an approach to gag writing reminiscent of slapstick manga. Meconis' art style at this point is effective but unpolished: the lettering is cramped and sometimes illegible, the lack of panel borders is distracting, and the characters have the stiff, abstracted angularity common to cartoonists who have not yet grown comfortable with their tools. It's well above average for a webcartoonist, unbelievably good for a teenager, and it's easy to see why Bite Me! quickly acquired a devoted fan following. Nonetheless, the early pages are obviously the work of a new artist still finding her way around a page.
Over the course of the first few chapters, Meconis' art gradually improves. The beginning of Chapter Five, roughly the halfway point of the comic and the point at which Bite Me! moved to Girlamatic.com, marks a dramatic shift: here, unquestionably, the rough edges have been sanded away. Meconis' figure drawing grows smooth, rounded, and natural. Her facial expressions, always well observed, become wittier and more exact. She begins drawing more backgrounds, rich in period detail. She never does draw panel borders, instead using gray washes effectively to delineate panels. Her use of ink wash grows sophisticated and subtle. Her lettering, originally one of the weakest aspects of Bite Me!, becomes one of the strongest. Having discovered Dave Sim, she begins incorporating elegant, carefully-designed sound effects into her compositions. By its end, Bite Me! is inarguably beautiful.
More amazingly, it gets funnier.
Humor is notoriously difficult to define and quantify, and the critic must tread carefully when attempting same. Let it be said that Bite Me! is funny from the beginning, but much of the early humor is the mild, chuckling humor of a writer who assumes you will laugh, if only to keep things pleasant, and isn't about to threaten the jovial mood by trying to trip you up or catch you off your guard. Then comes a change. The critic, treading ever so carefully, marks the turning point as midway down page 89 exactly. On that page, Claire, an eighteenth-century French barmaid-turned-vampire and the heroine of the story, is interrupted while leading a riot in downtown Paris by the arrival of Robespierre, feared architect of the Revolution. Robespierre interrupts Claire's terrified stammering with a grim, "Silence. I am ROBESPIERRE--"
(...a beat, created naturally in the comic by the shift to the next tier of panels...)
"...and I LOVE your work!!"
There's more to it. Robespierre's giddy-schoolgirl expression, Claire's ecstatic, "Ohmygosh! Will you sign my thigh?!?" ("In ink, or in the blood of the ruling class?"), the fact that shortly afterward a major character is hilariously beheaded by enraged peasants. But that's the turning point. From then on, the humor in Bite Me! goes for the throat.
The plot is the least impressive aspect of Bite Me!, which is probably just as well; for her first long work, Meconis was wise to choose a simple, action-oriented story that could be entertainingly told, rather than an ambitious, unwieldy epic. Claire, the aforementioned French barmaid, enthusiastically joins the legions of the undead after being bitten by a fetching if slightly stodgy vampire named Lucien. With the venomous, kvetching vampire queen Genevra in tow, they set out for Paris to rescue the other members of their coven, who have been imprisoned by an aristocrat bent on acquiring eternal life. In time, the rescue squad acquires Luther, a stalwart Bavarian werewolf.
This premise is essentially an excuse to immerse the characters in revolutionary France, where, being bloodthirsty monsters with short attention spans, they fit right in with aristocrat and rebel alike. No matter that some plot devices are implausible even for a vampire comedy, and that the resolution is something of a disappointment, revealing the quest to have been little more than a wild-goose chase. The joy is in the journey.
And what a journey it is. Meconis' fetish for French period detail enriches the story and influences crucial plot elements. It's also obvious that she's read more than her share of trashy gothic fiction, as the characters debate the great multiple-choice questions of vampirehood (How precisely do you kill a vampire? Can they turn into bats or not? What effect is garlic actually supposed to have?) and Anne Rice gets cheerfully skewered. The loose narrative structure allows for entertaining digressions, as Lucien and Genevra (and, eventually, Claire) relate their personal histories. And the characters are entertaining enough that the flimsiest of plots is excuse enough to spend time with them.
The characters do not deepen significantly over the course of the story; on the contrary, as Meconis finds her comic voice, they become more simplified and cartoony. Lucien's blend of intellectual aloofness and impractical romanticism is exaggerated to the point of silliness, Genevra's put-upon attitude makes her the target of improbable levels of abuse, and Claire becomes as hyperactive and violence-prone as Woody Woodpecker. Rather than making the characters less interesting, the exaggeration throws them into sharp relief, projecting them larger than life. They become great comic characters, and more sympathetic for it. They are lovable, as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are lovable.
Meconis belongs to the Pants Press collective, a group of uniformly gifted and precocious webcartoonists. Nearly all of the Pants Press artists have begun long works online, but Meconis is the first to finish one. Most -- Jen Wang's mythic romance Strings of Fate, Bill Mudron's sci-fi comedy Anne Frank Conquers the Moon Nazis, Vera Brosgol's brilliant absurdist fantasy Return to Sender -- either update slowly or have gone on permanent hiatus as the artists have matured and lost interest in the material. In Bite Me!, Meconis seems to have begun wanting to produce a typical gothic comedy, and to have successfully adapted it, over time, into something more: something bolder, stronger, funnier, simpler in approach but more sophisticated in execution. Over the course of Bite Me!, one watches a great humorist emerge.
Meconis has already announced that her next graphic novel will serve as her senior thesis at Wesleyan, and that, as such, it will absorb her attention for the next academic year. Until the summer of 2005, she is likely to publish little, either online or in print. Until the summer of 2005, she will work in the shelter of academia, cloistered from the greedy demands of entertainment-slurping websurfers, from the endless MORE MORE MORE of comic-book fans, from the sharp noses and gimlet eyes of the self-appointed critics of comicdom.
Then we will descend like locusts.
