By Abby Denson (Green Candy Press)
ISBN: 978-1-931160-70-4
Not everybody is comfortable with whom they are and most of us don’t like to be assumed one thing when we’re another. Lulu Award winner Abby Denson is a brilliant, magically subversive cartoonist and journalist with such disparate notches in her belt as the graphic novel Tough Love: High School Confidential (relating the Coming Out story of two suburban teens) and The City Sweet Tooth: a culinary cartoon column about the New York desserts scene currently running in L Magazine. She teaches and her script credits run from Scooby Doo and Power Puff Girls to Spider-Man and the Simpsons.
This entrancing shocking pink parable is an edgy, deceptively naivist fairy tale about gender, place and identity; making telling points in a clandestinely gentle manner. Kitty Ballerina is a doll who escapes from The Factory, refusing to be what her makers tell her to be. During her escape she meets Army Jim, another maverick toy who refuses to conform.
Together they make their way to the Promised Land of Dolltopia, where you can wear, and look like and be whatever you want. With the comradeship and assistance of the cat Mr. M, fashion Divas Candy X and Candy O and the slightly off-kilter, self-taught “plastic surgeon†the Doctor, the renegades make themselves at home and truly free…
However freedom demands effort, vigilance and sacrifice. Some freed individuals seem to crave their previous cultural indenture, and raids to liberate more dolls suffer when the apathetic conformists refuse to cast off their social shackles, but the real threat comes when humans threaten to take away and destroy the hard-won oasis of security the disappointed rebels strived so long and hard to win…
Charming and cleverly controversial, if a little heavy-handed at times, this eclectic black, pink and white tome – complete with cut-out-and-dress paper dolls – is a winning and culturally important addition to the world of adult cartooning. You’d be an idiot not to take a good long look – but of course you don’t have to be what I say you are…
© Abby Denson. All right reserved.