Artist Spotlight: Carolyn Nowak
Hi! My name’s Athena Naylor, and I’m a cartoonist and recent graduate of the George Washington University. I currently live in D.C., and I got involved with Our Comics Ourselves while the exhibit was at George Mason University this fall. I’m excited to contribute to the blog this week!
The first cartoonist I want to highlight this week is Carolyn Nowak, whose recent work has been on my mind ever since this year’s Small Press Expo.
I first stumbled upon Nowak’s work here through tumblr, particularly when her comic “Rungs” achieved some notoriety through the reblogging circuit. But it’s really her mini-comics that stand out to me. I picked up “Girl Town” at Small Press Expo in 2015 and quickly fell in love with Nowak’s cartooning and storytelling style.
Nowak’s characters, along with the world she pens in around them, are endearingly strange. In “Girl Town,” the main characters are women who were rejected as astronauts because they were considered to be “too distracting” for their male counterparts (too painfully typical and relevant), and now they live together in a grungy community of outcast women.
This soft sci-fi set up, however, is really a backdrop for the tale of a crush between our nameless narrator and the source of her romantic obsession, Betsy, her next-door neighbor.
Betsy is not a typical love-interest. She and her roommates are mocked as “lunch-ladies” for their looks, and besides her common-place appearance Betsy’s personality is hardly warm or welcoming. Unlike in many love stories where female romantic interests are portrayed as soft and vulnerable, the narrator of “Girl Town” is enamored most of Betsy’s bold and blatant rage. I don’t know if I’ve ever read another story quite like this where a woman’s anger is cast as her most attractive attribute, rather than a “bitchy” or “shrewish” personality trait. I kinda love it.
I think the sequence that really sold me on Nowak’s story was the one below: any cartoonist who incorporates a line like “her nipples rattled against the windowsill in an odious rhythm” has earned my upmost admiration and respect. How can anyone not pause and grin after this scene?
Nowak’s most recent mini-comic, “Diana’s Electric Tongue,” only shows how much her work has progressed. “Diana’s Electric Tongue” won an Ignatz Award at this year’s SPX, and the initial plot seems fairly straightforward: a woman buys a robot boyfriend, shenanigans ensue. It sounds like a comedic premise, and Nowak’s work does always maintain an undercurrent of humor. But what I did not expect was how much heartache this comic made me feel.
The real driving force behind “Diana’s Electric Tongue” isn’t how Diana navigates a relationship with a robot, though that is certainly explored. The focus is instead on the main character’s motivation for buying the robot. Diana is dealing with the aftermath of her previous relationship, which closely coincided with a disastrous motorcycle accident that caused her to lose her tongue (thus the title). The story becomes more a meditation on heartbreak and how the impact of relationships can be insidious and encompassing, all while suggesting parallels between emotional loss and physical injury. It’s the kind of story I would want to write—one that finds its narrative tension in well-timed disclosures of information and the accumulation of small details that snowball into a final emotional punch. Every time I pick up the book I find new layers to contemplate and I become engrossed, even though I know the story by heart.
Besides all this, Nowak’s artwork with all its organic, fluid linework and pastel candy colors (props to Nowak’s coloring assistant Lisa DuBois) is completely captivating.
I’ll leave it at that since I don’t want to spoil anything else. Know that these review blurbs I’m posting below are correct and that I highly recommend the book.
More of Carolyn Nowak’s work can be found at her website: www.carolyncnowak.com
