Review: Social Insect, Robot Bildungsroman

A "bildungsroman" is a story about the development of a young person. The new minicomics series ROBOT BILDUNGSROMAN, by Joe Davidson, is about a robot programmed to replace a couple's dead teenage daughter and her unusual development. Unbeknownst to them, the new Marci-bot's creators had other, more sinister plans for her. This comic is like the Spielberg film AI: Artificial Intelligence if it had taken a turn into conspiracy theory by way of a gang story. Marci quickly makes friends with a girl gang at her school and promptly takes a board with a nail in it to her head by a rival gang member. Of course, Marci is made of tougher stuff, and a hidden fighting protocol kicks in to wipe out the other gang. The best way to describe this comic is "straightforward". Davidson introduces characters and weird situations rather matter-of-factly, without much modulation of emphasis. The art is workmanlike: not overly busy but not especially interesting to look at. There's not a lot of flow or dynamic interaction between characters, even in fight scenes. His faces are expressive, but this comic needed a more nuanced understanding of gesture and body language. There is potential here, especially with regard to some of the creepier elements of the story, like a corporate agent camouflaged against a wall. I think this is simply a case of an artist who needs to keep drawing until he finds his voice.

Adam Meuse's SOCIAL INSECT is a series of loosely (but thematically) connected strips about various forms of social interaction. A prior mini, SAD ANIMALS, has proven to be a huge hit at local shop Chapel Hill Comics, and it's easy to understand why: Meuse uses a clear, simple and funny art style and pairs it with gags about despair. There's a wordless page where we see a dying houseplant straining to get to a window with sunlight on top, and a pirate's corpse inches away from a treasure chest with a knife sticking out of his back. There's a horrific but hilarious story about a man whose eyes have grown so large that he can't see anything close to him (like his family), noting "It's just that if I try to focus on anything, it makes it worse. I can't even look at the nothing." That's as a concise a description of existential angst as I've ever heard. Echoing SAD ANIMALS, there are several pages of anthropomorphic cars echoing either blind optimism or dire pessimism. It's what Meuse does best, giving us a series of cute drawings who say unexpectedly grim things. Meuse leaves us his best for last, with a strip called "Air, Land & Sea" that depicts a shore, the ocean and the night sky anthropomorphically (in this case, just adding eyes). After three panels of the shore and sea lapping against each other, the shore asks "Are we frenching?" It's a great gag, and a fitting one in a comic that's about real and imagined connections. The artist can be contacted at meusetrap@yahoo.com