by Shaenon Garrity
Charlie Troutman, a.k.a. Spike, is a quietly prolific webcartoonist,
although very little else about her can be described as “quiet.”
Without attracting nearly as much attention as she deserves, she’s
built up a battery of remarkable ongoing comics: “Lucas and Odessa” and
“Sparkneedle,” both serialized on Girlamatic.com, “Blikada,” on her own site, and the upcoming WebComicsNation series
“Templar.” Each of these comics is radically different in subject and
tone, although Spike’s bold, liquid, slippery brushwork is unmistakable
in any context. But my favorite remains “Lucas and Odessa,” which has
been purring along on Girlamatic since the site launched, gingerly
circling the two title characters and pondering the fate that brought
them together in a condemned building where they watch bad TV, drink
scotch, and say things that seem amazingly insightful when you’ve been
watching TV and drinking scotch all night long.
Odessa is a teenage girl in the full throes of precocious adolescent
rebellion. She’s short, fat, and angry and has shaved off most of her
hair. She planned to be a ballerina before puberty did a number on
her, and now she skips school, fails classes, and roams back alleys in
combat boots. She has glommed on to Lucas, a cranky, homeless squatter
maybe ten or fifteen years her senior. Together, they wander the
streets, hang out in malls, make fun of television, drink, smoke, and
generally stand back to back, defending themselves from the rest of the
world.
It’s clear that, to Odessa, the chain-smoking, misanthropic,
stalwartly irresponsible Lucas represents a sort of role model: an
ideal of aggressive nonachievement to which she can aspire now that
success is entirely and permanently out of the question, thanks to the
tragic failure of her ambitions in dance. (Teenagers think like this.)
He may also represent something of a father figure, given that
Odessa’s biological father disappeared to Vegas long ago, and Odessa’s
mercurial mother, Penny, an overgrown adolescent herself, is in a state
of constant warfare with her current husband. But analyzing the
pop-psychology motives behind the characters’ behavior is somewhat
self-defeating, since both Lucas and Odessa are the type of people who
will sarcastically enumerate their own personal tragedies before anyone
else gets a chance to do it for them.
They’re so sharp they’ll cut themselves. In one chapter, Odessa
describes her “experiments” with sex to the unimpressed Lucas; as she
says, “And it sucked, by the way,” we get a closeup, for the first
time, of a wedding ring on Lucas’ finger. A few pages later, Odessa
makes Lucas tell her about his nonstarter of a marriage, as she
wrenches the ring off his finger and tries it on. He’s still talking
about it while she pulls off her stockings. There’s no overt
flirtation going on here, nothing that could be specifically described
as sexual tension, and yet it’s no surprise that the chapter ends with
Lucas muttering, “I’m going to jail, aren’t I.” It’s all in what Spike
chooses to show. Despite the thick-lined simplicity of her art style,
she has an eye for detail, my favorite example thus far being the
sight, un-commented-upon, of Lucas drinking Coca-Cola out of a bong.
Spike doesn’t need to go out of her way to explain that Lucas’s living
space is almost certain to contain more bongs than drinking glasses.
It goes without saying, as so much in comics should.
And yet Spike has an ear for dialogue. The characters in “Lucas and
Odessa” speak in ways that are distinctive and funny and at the same
time reveal volumes. Many cartoonists write all of their characters
more or less in the same voice, and, if that voice is interesting
enough, it may not be much of a problem. But Odessa’s flip, brittle
banter is nothing like Lucas’s curt, cynical running commentary on
life; Penny’s manic, trying-too-hard-to-be-the-cool-mom eruptions bear
no resemblance to the bland regurgitations of high-school drama
dribbling out of Odessa’s timid (and much-abused) friend Ashley. The
characters tell us who they are through the way they talk. And there’s
a lot of unforced humor in exchanges like the following:
“Hey, can I have some scotch?”
“Don’t you touch my goddamned scotch.”
“Which means yes. Thank you, Lucas. I’m going to drink all your
scotch now.”
Odessa talks more than any other character, and her register carries
some echo of the John Allison school of arch young-adult wittiness, but
it’s more natural, more clumsily affected, more like a smart teenager
with an inflated sense of self-importance really talks. More than
anything, it’s reminiscent of the dialogue in Dan Clowes’ Ghost World,
albeit less polished. And Odessa does get in some beautiful lines: “So
I can’t be trusted around penises anymore. Even skanky old crusty
ones, like yours.”
Thus far, relatively little has happened to actually advance the plot
of “Lucas and Odessa.” Like one of my other favorite Girlamatic
comics, Jason Thompson’s “The Stiff,” “Lucas and Odessa” is less
interested in what the characters do then in who they are and how they
got to be that way. There are conversations about the past.
Arguments. Flashbacks. A lot of hanging out. It’s absorbing because
the characters are absorbing (and, of course, because they talk a lot
about sex). The narrative seems to prod the characters warily, feeling
them out, looking for secrets. There’s the sense that anything could
happen--or nothing.
Spike’s art fills the panels with the characters; backgrounds are
generally sketched in without detail, if at all. But the characters
are large and lively, drawn in thick, fluid, passionate lines.
Although the art in “Lucas and Odessa” consists mostly of medium shots
of the characters talking--and usually the same two characters, at
that--it never looks static; on the contrary, the figures look
constantly ready to squirm off the page. Spike doesn’t seem to have
drawn the same expression or pose twice. She letters by hand, and over
the course of “Lucas and Odessa” her lettering has become solid and
evocative; characters shout in angry brushstrokes, emphasize in tidy
bold letters. As other webcartoonists increasingly lean on templates,
fonts, and computer-assisted shortcuts, Spike’s work is aggressively
organic. The coloring, by Spike’s husband Matt, is integral to the
work; he chooses a bold, earth-toned palette strong enough to
complement Spike’s muscular line.
Girlamatic is currently my favorite of the Modern Tales sites, and
“Lucas and Odessa” continues to be one of its chief pleasures. The
more Spike reveals about where her protagonists have been, the more I’m
absorbed in the question of where they’re going. And I’m laughing,
because they’re damn funny.
