Leslie Hung and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl never rests on its laurels. It returned from its long hiatus with a low-key look at fashion blogger Lottie Person’s newfound romance with riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-wrapped-in-an-enigma model Caroline. It dialed up the covert life of Caroline’s long-suffering brother Virgil. It introduced a hidden past in the Japanese idol scene for Lottie’s mother, Kimiko, and her aunt, Aya. With issue #19, Hung and O’Malley have officially moved Snotgirl into the realm of the explicitly fantastic.
Lottie, grappling with an unhappy family vacation and a quiet fight with Caroline, finds herself face to face with Ghostgirl, a ghost. Previously, Ghostgirl might have been an experimental allergy med-induced hallucination. She is not.
Meanwhile, Virgil has found himself a captive of Lottie’s ex Sunny, who Virgil has tried and failed to deny a crush on, and Misty, AKA Lottie’s fellow fashion blogger Cutegirl. They don’t know everything but know enough to ask why the apparently-in-his-early-twenties Virgil keeps journals from 1999 and earlier.
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Lottie wants to square things with Caroline, who Ghostgirl is immensely curious about. She also has to deal with the Person family’s accelerating drama. Sunny wants answers because whatever Virgil’s mixed up in puts him and Lottie in danger. Misty wants answers because she wants to know what the hell is going on. Deep weirdness is afoot (If you’re new to Snotgirl, think of it as a cousin to David Robert Mitchell’s bizarre-by-design, enthralling noir movie Under the Silver Lake), weirdness that cannot be explained by the side effects of experimental allergy meds or one person having a stress-induced breakdown.
Snotgirl’s great creative success lies in how Hung and O’Malley pull the strange from the familiar and the familiar from the strange. Lottie opens up to Ghostgirl because she desperately needs a friend. To the rest of her family, namely her older sister Rosie, she’s talking to herself at top volume in the middle of the night. Sunny and Misty may be interrogating Virgil about his possible immortality in his secret lair/sex dungeon, but Sunny’s still dumbfounding Virgil with the baffling, attractive combination of inherent decency and care and terminal credulousness. Sunny’s not quite a himbo, but he’s very willing to take people at their word who he really shouldn’t—people like, Virgil insists, himself.
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Splitting Lottie’s storyline from Virgil’s is a good movie structurally. Artistically, Hung can play with a broader range of architecture, body language, and fashion. Narratively, O’Malley can use the separation to crank the tension in both stories higher. Lottie and Caroline will have to meet up with Virgil again, and Virgil will not have been able to accomplish his mysterious mission—which pits him against a cult whose shape isn’t yet clear—the way he was supposed to. Neither Lottie nor Virgil’s centers can continue to hold.
And while Hung and O’Malley dial up the tension and set the stage, they continue to have fun. Snotgirl #19 is gleefully raunchy, from Ghostgirl’s immense curiosity about Lottie’s love life to the ways interrogating someone in their sex dungeon can undercut the potential intimidation factor. Hung uses the ensuing awkwardness as a launchpad for solid physical comedy, whether it’s Lottie’s flailing and Rosie’s exasperated wall-pounding in response to what she thinks is her sister talking to herself or Misty and Virgil’s shared exasperation at Sunny’s willingness to take Virgil—a man he knows is up to his eyes in shady dealings—at his word in his secret lair. In other words, in addition to being an impressive character piece, Snotgirl is a continual showcase for Leslie Hung’s mastery of comic-making, a prime example of weird noir, and a funny, funny comic. Reading it is one of the highlights of my month.
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