Snotgirl, artist Leslie Hung and writer Bryan Lee O’Malley’s striking, sunny, unsettling character study/mystery/ode to fashions eternal and transient, is back after a long hiatus with its 16th issue. I’m writing this review as a newcomer to the series, but a longtime fan of O’Malley’s other works, such as his recent animated adaptation/stealth sequel Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. To prepare for Snotgirl #16, I read the first three collected volumes — Green Hair Don’t Care, California Screaming, and Is This Real Life? — and was delighted to get lost in the chaotic life of allergy-prone fashion blogger/influencer Lottie Person.
Lottie would like her life to be simple, for everyone to be who they appear to be, and for floating pleasures to be enough. But while Lottie might want that, she knows life is never so simple. Her friends/frenemies have their own lives, complications, and foibles. She’s lonely, longs for genuine emotional and sexual intimacy, and wages a never-ending battle to keep her awful allergies in check (as someone who lives in a pollen bowl beset by multiple trade winds, I GET IT). And that’s what she was juggling before Caroline entered the picture.
Caroline, the mercurial — catty and cruel one day, gentle and insightful the next. Caroline, the unreadable — sometimes she wants nothing to do with Lottie and sometimes seems like she could be Lottie’s soulmate. Caroline the…immortal? She might have survived getting her head bashed in and later falling off a cliff (unless those were hallucinations caused by the side effects of a powerful new allergy med Lottie’s been prescribed). She appeared on the cover of a fashion magazine in 1999, looking exactly like she does in the present (unless that was an as-yet unintroduced relative). Caroline, whose wild side is real — with her brothers working from the shadows on her behalf as fixers, spies, and assassins (they are real, and their deeds seem to be real). Caroline, as of Snotgirl #15, Lottie’s girlfriend? Per Snotgirl #16, yes.
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Snotgirl #16 uses its panels and pages with skill and style. I’m taken by the way Hung uses body language. Lottie and Caroline are image-conscious, constantly aware that they are being seen and can shape that seeing. With Lottie, this is explicit—she narrates Snotgirl, and most of the series is from her point of view. With Caroline, this is implicit—while inconstancy is her one constant, she’s (usually, and possibly always) well aware of how she affects people. Snotgirl #16’s opening throws this off for Lottie and might throw it off for Caroline. Consider the pages above and below.
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Between the injuries she sustained from a fall in issue #15, her exhaustion, her euphoria, and her confusion, Lottie lets her guard down. She relaxes physically and enjoys taking in an unexpected moment with the woman she’s attracted to. While there are good odds that Caroline’s still playing a part, her incinerating the pancakes she’s attempting to cook is chaotic enough to seem genuine. See the last two panels on the page, where Lottie hops from luxuriating in rest and pampering to alarm at Caroline’s unintentionally(?) flambéing breakfast. I’m also taken with how Lottie wakes up on the first page, with her right arm askew—waking up is the one time of day when limbs can and usually will move in strange ways as you shake the sleep off and gradually snap into waking form. It’s fun, substantive character work that Hung contrasts with how Lottie and Caroline move around and with each other as their relationship becomes sexual and how they move out in public with their friends, frenemies, and family members—both established and newly introduced.
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Narratively, O’Malley frames Snotgirl #16’s romantic opening as both a significant break from what’s come before (in that Caroline is at least performing tenderness and intimacy with Lottie over a comparatively extended period) and of a piece with it (in that Caroline’s brother Virgil remains her fixer and has been working behind the scenes to protect her from herself and the chaos that walks with her). He’s working with an unsettled hyperrealism that has space for interiority (such as Lottie’s evolving response to her blossoming sexual and romantic relationship with Caroline and Virgil’s conflicted crush on Lottie’s ex-boyfriend Sunny) and larger-than-life absurdity. (Virgil moves from one of his many disguises to a full-blown Metal Gear Solid-style sneaking suit.) Each side feeds the other, resulting in a compelling book. As a newcomer to the series, I am reminded of David Robert Mitchell’s zonked-by-design late-2010 mystery whatsit Under the Silver Lake, a film I’m fond of. I’m intrigued, dig the craft, like what I’ve read so far, and want to read more. I’m excited to follow Snotgirl. Allergies be damned.
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