Tod Davies, founder of Exterminating Angel Press
(EAP), takes a physicist’s approach to social change. It’s not that
she’s extraordinarily precise—it’s that, like the minds behind a
particle accelerator, her primary goal is to cause collisions. She
founded EAP online in 2005 and publishes a bimonthly magazine on the
website. The print arm of EAP is a recent development, having just this
September released its first titles, Jam Today and The
Supergirls.
As Davies puts it, EAP’s line of work is in “questioning dominant
culture and suggesting alternatives.” Although the first entries
in the EAP print catalog were penned by EAP staff members (Davies’
Jam Today and EAP Pop Culture Editor Mike Madrid’s The
Supergirls), in the future EAP will use its online
contributions—gathered from an open call for submissions—as
the fertile soil for books.
The Supergirls is a history of American comic book heroines
by Madrid. It tracks the ebb and flow of females’ portrayals in comics
since their primeval days in the 1930s. Throughout, Madrid draws
parallels to women’s changing roles in pop culture at large—Mary
Marvel is “a flying, bulletproof Judy Garland, minus the diet
pills.”
The second inaugural EAP release is Davies’ own Jam Today, a
diary of recipes that she’s created sans cookbook. Each one is a tale
of food delight. It’s impractical in the sense that the recipes are
rough sketches, but useful in that it provides not only instructions,
but also inspiration to cook. After describing a chicken liver omelet
preparation she writes, “Eating that dinner restored me to myself, and
told that technological alienation to get lost.” She offers up her way
of enjoying food without shoving it down the reader’s throat.
Davies works from her home in rural Colestin Valley, Oregon, while
Madrid is based in San Francisco. They arrived at EAP after careers in
film and advertising, sick of relinquishing creative control and
conceding their daily lives to work. The convenience of their current
arrangement is an embodiment of the EAP mantra of practical
alternatives.
One can criticize their exhortations to self-liberation as
hopelessly bourgeois—after all, not everyone has the luxury to go
out on their own. But why not save the reproving for all of the people
who can, but refuse?