Marbles in My Underpants
Renee French
(Oni Press)
Truth, beauty, and depravity must all share the same frame. I read that somewhere. I wrote it down as a note to myself: the goal of emotionally rich art. Marbles in My Underpants, the collected work of comic artist Renee French, does exactly that–puts truth, beauty, and depravity together on the page. The drawings and narratives in this collection move between the grotesque of the real word–pimples on an uncle’s neck, a bandaged face, pubescent facial hair–and the beauty of the surreal: A helpless, horse-like creature with a lump on it’s leg appears as every girl-child’s horse dream, until two girls take the animal to their friend the janitor’s basement apartment for “surgery.”
Of course the animal dies, but not before delivering a tiny baby that turns out to piss hallucinogenic and scarring pee. The brilliance of the story is given added dimension through a second narrative, from a few flights up in the same building. A dentist drops a patient’s bridge work down the heating grate. The girls, before finding the horse, steal psychotropic medicine from elderly patients. Later, a nurse interrupts her make-out session to search for the bridge and ends up in the basement apartment, with the janitor and the dead extra-terrestrial horse. The stories collide, creating a mysteriously interconnected world.
In “Cornelia in the Pen,” a big-headed, delicate Cornelia sits alone in her jail cell, until she’s joined by a Beatrice Potter-like Peter Rabbit of a bunny. The bunny, cute and accommodating, creates a brush and ink from its own fur, blood, and bile. There’s an insane drawing of the bunny with its tongue out, concentrating, happily tying fur into a brush as his arm drips blood. He gives this present to Cornelia because, as she says in a line reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s dying words, “These blank walls are killing me.” In some passages, depravity looms larger than anything like beauty: A man turned on by his brother-in-law’s advances via animal intestines in a jar, a woman with her nipple bitten off by the teenage object of her lust, a dog’s penis cut off in a misguided effort to repair the missing nipple, and the teenage son downstairs dying of rabies contracted through his best friend, a raccoon. Collected together, the range of French’s work is clear. Some pages show carefully rendered single drawings, such as a close-up of a man’s hairy chest. Others are fantastical, complicated, and nightmarish. The final panel in the sequence “Nadine,” about a girl with a wart, shows the child sleeping. The girl’s curled figure, in pajamas, is painfully vulnerable. Certain characters and images, such as Cornelia, or an animal with a catheter, resurface. They’re part of the landscape, part of French’s beautifully depraved, evocative, and heartbreaking world.