{"id":152228,"date":"2021-04-27T17:02:59","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T21:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152228"},"modified":"2021-04-27T17:02:59","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T21:02:59","slug":"comics-that-chart-the-swamp-of-adolescence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/04\/27\/comics-that-chart-the-swamp-of-adolescence\/","title":{"rendered":"Comics That Chart the Swamp of Adolescence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know how old I was when I first read Shary Flenniken\u2019s Trots and Bonnie<\/em>, but I definitely wasn\u2019t old enough. I was a precocious reader and pretty sex-obsessed for a child, and my parents would buy National Lampoon<\/em> every now and again and leave it where it could fall into my unsupervised little hands (parenting was a different animal entirely in 1984, kids). I couldn\u2019t have been more than seven, but the experience is as clear and vital as if it happened yesterday: here was something that looked friendly and kidlike, but it was dangerous. It was confusing, it was weird, and it was very, very hot.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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By the time I came of age, I had put National Lampoon<\/em> on my mental back burner. I wouldn\u2019t say I forgot about Trots and Bonnie<\/em>, but I\u2019d stored it away deep in my subconscious, where it formed a bedrock of my sensibility I wouldn\u2019t recognize until years later. When I reacquainted myself with the strip in my twenties, it was like seeing a long-lost and deeply beloved friend. I also realized I\u2019d been ripping Shary off for years. Those blank Little Orphan Annie eyes, the cheerful willingness to be absolutely disgusting, the heady mix of raunch and innocence\u2014all things that had percolated through my own mind and heart and spilled out into my own work, a dim echo of the masterful original. <\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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How to explain Trots and Bonnie<\/em> to the uninitiated? It\u2019s a bit like Little Nemo<\/em>, if Little Nemo<\/em> had been drawn for and by pervs. The titular characters are a girl in early adolescence, Bonnie, and her wry, horny dog, Trots. Bonnie stands as a kind of wise-fool character, observing the often hypocritical, sometimes hedonistic world around her with the candor and freshness of a child and the lust of a dirty old man (if parenting was different in the eighties, cartooning was different in the seventies: a strip featuring a young teen rubbing one out to literary porn penned by her dog might raise more lawsuits than eyebrows in today\u2019s cultural climate). Bonnie\u2019s floppy trousers and slouching posture paired with Trots\u2019s smart-cracking wiseacre role have antecedents in Bud Fisher\u2019s Mutt and Jeff<\/em>. The drawing is lyrical and lovely\u2014all swooping lines and flat textures, like an Ert\u00e9 drawn in the girls\u2019 bathroom at a particularly ill-run reformatory. Flenniken draws like an angel, but, like Caravaggio, prefers the company of sinners.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Bonnie\u2019s adventures are more quotidian than Nemo\u2019s, but no less wild. The lands between girlhood and womanhood are weirder and more unsettling than anything Winsor McCay ever dreamed up. The monsters traversing her landscape are real: neighborhood drunks, uncaring parents, and that biggest bogeyman of all, puberty. Yet she moves through the world with amiable good cheer, in danger yet never a victim. Her hair is a semi-androgynous shag; her high-waisted, baggy pants conceal the randy monster that throbs beneath. Her more worldly best friend, Pepsi, dresses in an incongruously childlike pinafore paired with fishnets, a perfect metaphor for the terrifying underage sex fiend she is. When Pepsi rhapsodizes about condoms or proclaims proudly that her perfect gentleman boyfriend has \u201cthe smallest cock in all eighth grade,\u201d it\u2019s both hilarious and deeply unnerving. Supporting character Elrod, a younger neighborhood boy, gets the worst of their impulses: shot, mutilated, and drowned like an X-rated Wile E. Coyote. Their world is brutal and lecherous and gross, yet suffused with heart and a fierce solidarity with the point of view of its main inhabitants.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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What Flenniken understands and brings gleefully to the page is that adolescent girlhood is positively feral and that teenage girls are both threatened and threats themselves. J.\u2009M. Barrie tells us in Peter Pan<\/em> that children are \u201cgay and innocent and heartless,\u201d and that little weirdo had it right\u2014that\u2019s the terrible power of children, the monstrous innocence that makes them capable of anything, a state of being we fatuously describe as \u201cpure.\u201d You dump a bunch of hormones into a child\u2019s body and all of a sudden you have this awful hybrid creature: a changeling with the self-centeredness and nonexistent impulse control of a child but the body and urges of a breeding-age adult. It\u2019s a dangerous time in a young woman\u2019s life, but as with most dangers, it has a messy, chaotic, super-hot fun side as well. To speak frankly of this fun side is tricky for adults, to say the least. We remember it, if at all, as a fever dream, a sticky, humid jungle of lust and stink. Grown-ups have to blind themselves to the sexual power of eighth-graders, for reasons I sincerely hope are obvious. But the kids can see each other head-on, and they wield their sexuality with all the grace and care of a toddler toting an AK-47. Flenniken dares to write and draw from that swamp with a complete lack of adult-world moralizing or editorial restraint. Arguably, \u201cmoralizing\u201d and \u201crestraint\u201d weren\u2019t really anyone\u2019s bag when she was creating these strips, but there\u2019s still an audacity in her work that I imagine felt as electrifying then as it does now.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Bonnie and Pepsi are obsessed with sex, but they\u2019re not here for the male gaze. Their desire is frank and straightforward and more than a little demented, and it\u2019s depicted with a bracing honesty that feels less like a political statement and more like Flenniken is reporting from the front lines with no filter, no safety net, and no intention of telling anything but the truth. Trots and Bonnie<\/em> ran into the late eighties, but it was born from a seventies worldview, a decadent, anything-goes carnival where thirteen wouldn\u2019t get you twenty. The hangover from this era was vicious and the societal course-correction necessary, but the importance of hearing from girls of the era rather than from the guys who liked to ball girls of the era cannot be emphasized enough. Bonnie isn\u2019t masturbating on the toilet because she wants you to watch. She\u2019s doing it because her body belongs to her and she\u2019s horny as fuck.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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As a child I was mystified and entranced by these strips. As a twenty-year-old, I was delighted anew by their bawdy, anarchic swagger and their pie-eyed charm. As a forty-two-year-old, I am so far from the lawless, deeply screwed-up Eden that Trots and Bonnie<\/em> inhabits that it may as well be documenting life among the Stone Age clans. Part of me wants to call protective services\u2014have I become a scold, or just a mother? Barrie tells us that those who are no longer gay and innocent and heartless can no longer fly. Being earthbound is the price we pay for our experience in this world, perhaps, and maybe to understand danger and value safety is to run the risk of identifying with the wing-clippers of this world. But looking at these strips I feel an echo of that old and savage glee, a distant memory from when I lived in those lands. Would I move back there if I could? Probably not, but we are so lucky to have in Shary Flenniken a cartographer of our most treacherous and rewarding landscapes. Would that we all had such balls.<\/p>\n

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Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Emily Flake is a cartoonist and illustrator. Her work has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, the <\/em>New York Times, <\/em>Time, and many other publications. Her weekly comic strip, <\/em>Lulu Eightball, has appeared in numerous alternative newsweeklies since 2002. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Trots and Bonnie<\/a>, by Shary Flenniken<\/em>, published this week by New York Review Comics<\/em>. Text copyright \u00a9 2021 by Emily Flake. All images copyright \u00a9 2021 by Shary Flenniken.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Shary Flenniken understands and brings gleefully to the pages of \u2018Trots and Bonnie\u2019 is that adolescent girlhood is positively feral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-152228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nComics That Chart the Swamp of Adolescence by Emily Flake<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What Shary Flenniken understands and brings gleefully to the pages of \u2018Trots and Bonnie\u2019 is that adolescent girlhood is positively feral.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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