Stories From Zoo

I have heard multiple times that a review in Bubbles does more to raise sales of a comic than coverage at this website, and so it pains me to admit that this third book published by the zine captures what its author is up to in a back-of-the-book bio with greater efficiency than I ever could: these are stories of people who think they have one problem, when in fact they have several.

The first thing that strikes you while reading Stories from Zoo is that Anand Shenoy, who releases work under the mononym Anand, is a strong storyteller in the sense of writing craft. It’s been ages since I’ve read a collection of short stories in comics form by a contemporary author rather than a manga artist from decades ago; the longform graphic novel favored by the book market and the zines produced by emerging artists both generally offer just one story in each container. Reading a collection of stories turns our attention towards the skill of storytelling itself, moreso than the development and meaning of the particular elements within a narrative. These eight stories, collected from a self-published series called Zoo, introduce their characters quickly and explain the motivations behind their actions until we reach a natural conclusion. They are plainly fictional, with magical realist or absurdist elements that make it clear they are not based on real events or authorial experience. There is enough distance from each narrator’s perspective for their worldview to be undermined by the unfolding of events, and there is never a sense that the author is trying to privilege any one position as morally correct. Attention is paid to the experience of supporting characters and their view of things, and there is always more to what is going on in a story than the narrator's existence and perspective on the world.

The final story in the book comes close to horror: after a film editor in a small town town dies, a police investigation reveals he was a serial killer. This story is told from the perspective of an adult who, as a child, grew up hanging around this killer, oblivious to the crimes but admiring his outlook on life and philosophy. The problem the narrator thinks they have is their grief, and the question of how to articulate it to other people. The greater problem, realized at the conclusion of the story, is how they have existed over an abyss of uncertainty, the threat of violence that lurked throughout their childhood, the many times they could’ve been killed but were spared due the killer's fear of getting caught. Such a conclusion underscores the greater problems of economic precarity one is able to take so completely for granted it doesn't even register as a problem at all, as it is just the background of one’s life.

The first story in the book, in contrast, focuses on a failing photo studio owner’s desperation to make money; it’s his attempt to remedy this, by stealing from a jewelry store he is able to access via a portal found in one of his backdrops, that sets off a series of events that worsen his situation. This story contains a moment where Anand’s normally naturalistic approach to body language gives way to a cartoonish stylization of gesture, as the photo studio owner grabs onto someone’s leg as they walk away from him, as well as a page where a tense moment culminates with a gag I found laugh-out-loud funny, but despite the moments of light absurdity throughout, humor never seems like Anand’s primary consideration. These moments of levity seem incidental. Laughs are just one of those things that happen when you closely pay attention to people. There is never a sense that the humor comes with a defensive shying away from depth.

Like the '90s alt comics generation of Tom Hart and Megan Kelso, Anand is an artist using comics as a medium for telling stories without seeming beholden to a tradition of influences; rather, it's taken as a challenge that each blank page should be filled with meaning. These are large pages, the proportions closer to a European album than a manga tankōbon, and they take time to read. One is not meant to glance quickly at them and move on. Narrative captions and back-and-forth dialogue move the story forward, demanding to be read.

There are criticisms I could offer of a very basic sort, owing to the fact that Anand is a twentysomthing artist, likely just getting started, and some of the things that would improve his work are pretty fundamental: his lettering could be clearer, and the faces of his characters could be more distinct, as occasionally one needs to focus on clothing designs to keep track of who’s who. A few sequences where, due to varying panel sizes, what panel is meant to be read next is indicated by arrows, get confusing. I suspect that, until his compositions get stronger, he would probably be better served by working at the dimensions of a traditional U.S. comic book, or smaller: Bubbles has also released a minicomic with square proportions, This Loud World, that successfully miniaturized Anand’s strengths into a format that feels told with a perfect jokelike precision, even though the punchline also feels profound in its portraiture of what a long relationship is like.

The pages, as currently formatted, don’t exactly overwhelm with their beauty, or feel particularly composed. The drawings feel akin to heta-uma artists like Yoshikazu Ebisu, though there is no intentional vulgarity to the stories being told, just a tendency towards characters having kind of dumb expressions as they move awkwardly through space. Nothing is meant to stop you in your tracks for you to gawk at: you are being shown where characters are located, and what they’re doing within that space. In the absence of spotted blacks, there’s a slashing brushwork, rendering motion and texture in the same ebullient line. Sometimes a panel approaches a Raymond Pettibon image, in how its crude simplicity stumbles into beauty, but these are not necessarily comics that will grab the eye of the arts-interested passerby that had never thought about all that comics can do. They are comics for people who read enough comics to be surprised when a story is so solid and assured, and find that experience satisfying.