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By Carol Lay (Last Gasp)
ISBN 0-86719-659-9
During the creative boom of the late 1980s, a vast outpouring of comic material found its way onto the shelves, much of it excellent, dealing with a variety of topics and genres in a number of styles. When the boom became a bust lots of great strips died along with the trash – of which there was an incredible amount. Also a casualty was the spirit of innovation and expectation.
Good Girls, published by Fantagraphics (and later Rip-Off Press), featured two series by professional and underground cartoonist Carol Lay. Along with the tribulations of Miss Lonely Hearts – an agony aunt of sorts – was the ongoing saga of a lost baby heiress (“Richest Woman in the Worldâ€) raised by African Tribesmen who practised female ritual disfigurement. Eventually the adult Irene Van de Kamp is returned to modern western society, where even her billions cannot buy her acceptance and piece of mind.
To Western eyes she is truly hideous. It is to the credit of the character, that she endures cheerfully, however, eschewing any kind of corrective surgery or procedures. By her own deeply held aesthetic lights, she is beautiful and wants to remain that way.
Using the art and narrative style of traditional romance comics as a vehicle, Lay examines social mores and aesthetic taboos, and especially power of conformity to affect the most primal of emotions, Love and Desire (with a huge side order of Greed). Don’t let my pomposity fool you, though. This is a romance, and a daring, funny charming one at that.
Her skill as artist and storyteller in relating the picaresque tribulations are subtly subversive, and you will soon lose any reservations you might initially have been inflicted with. This is wonderful example of grow-up comic literature. The initial series never reached a conclusion, and this volume also contains all-new episodes that conclude the saga of the beautiful, irrepressible and indomitable Irene.
© 2007 Carol Lay. All Rights Reserved.