When Jacques says
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”
in As You Like It,
Shakespeare is
crafting
a metaphor that reminds his
readers of mortality and
that they're watching a play,
but also that the
people in the seats next to them are actors in
their own personal dramas.
This quote questions the sincerity of people, their actions and
motivations and goes on to
remind us
that we're simply
humans, despite our ornate costumes and
flashy dialogue. While
the stage Shakespeare wrote of was a physical construction, todays
stage is social media, the tool people use to edit
themselves into a finely
primmed digital representation. In
Snot Girl #1, Bryan
Lee O'Malley introduces Lottie Person,
a 25 3/4
year old, image-obsessed, fashion
blogging millennial. With a
picture-perfect life, Lottie gets a painful reminder that her
life isn't quite as flawless
as she would have the Internet believe when
the season changes and her
allergies return.
It's
the separation between how we represent ourselves on and off the
Internet and who we really are
that moves the first issue of Snot Girl.
Living in Los Angeles, the
land of actors and celluloid, Lottie is a well dressed, attractive young woman. She's
proud of her years blogging, where she influences people with her
tips on fashion: “On my
blog, I'm perfect. My nose never runs. Every hair on my head is
exactly where it's supposed to be.” She's
also proud of being the one that gives people nick names. Perhaps
because of this pride, she has problems in the form of an absentee
boyfriend and an in-box filled with messages from strangers and non
from friends. Added to these problems, her allergies are acting up to
make her eyes tear and nose run, which can make it hard to look the
part of a fashionista. These
frustrations bring her to a panic where she wonders out-loud “Why
even bother updating?! Just stop with the maxi-dresses! No one
cares!”
With
her social and romantic life in turmoil, things start getting better
for Lottie when she meets Caroline (aka Coolgirl), another
pretty girl that orders coffee the same way. After getting confidence
in the form of
allergy medicine from a new doctor, Lottie goes
to a bar to meet Coolgirl. While waiting, she rethinks her life and
decides she's changed. In honor of this step in self discovery,
Lottie takes a picture and says to herself, “People
can CHANGE! This selfie proves it!”
It's
this type of humor that keeps Snot Girl
alive. Throughout the book, O'Malley mocks fashionistas and youth
culture. While Lottie stalks
her boyfriend through social media, the joke turns up when the person
tagged in his photo gets written-off for not being as pretty as
Lottie. Watching
people talk to each other via text messages despite looking at one
another through a storefront window, the book goes beyond a
simple critique of social media and starts to comment on how
technology as a whole is changing the way people interact. Leslie
Hung's animerican art style suits a
story that makes fun of
cutesy young characters. But,
when the story starts to get serious, this style downplays the effect
of the dramatic direction it
takes.
Towards
the final pages, Lottie's allergies return while at the bar. In a
social setting with her new bff, Lottie needs to excuse herself to
the restroom. This is when the story takes a turn. While Lottie locks
the door, someone she knows ends up coming in and decides Lottie is
the one that needs a nick name. This is when Lottie realizes “I'm a
monster that knows it's a monster,” and acts like it. In this
scene, the anime influence in the art washes over expressions to
leave a trite and bland aesthetic where tension could be present
through darker tones and rougher lines.
While
the jokes lampooning
social media and fashionista culture are funny enough, there isn't
much else fueling Snot Girl.
The overly polished animerican art style offers nothing new to
readers and doesn't make the story much better (though it's a
lot better than O'Malley's
own). What the book does
have going for it is what waits in the plot. It's hard to know where
the book is going, or how it got to be where it is by the end. What
actually happened in the bathroom and if the pills Lottie's new
doctor gave her have anything to do with it are a mystery that will
keep some around for more. The only question is how much more can
there actually be?
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