Some comics you can feel straining against the self-imposed constraints of their form. Open any given page of The Collected Audra Show, compiling the first six issues of Audra Stang’s self-published anthology, and you will find a work as structurally well-behaved as anything present on a daily newspaper page (or its modern-day webcomic successor, I suppose, but you take my point). Three two-panel rows stacked neatly one over the other, colored in faux-casual magic marker strokes: three colors to a page, generally, give or take a tone. The suggested effect is one of intimacy, but also confinement; both physically and narratively, we know from the outset that we are reading about lives and characters with very little room to maneuver.
The first issue of The Audra Show would seem to verify this suspicion. Here are two archetypical slackers, Owen and Bea, toiling frustrated toils and dreaming frustrated dreams while working at a fast-food restaurant called Jelly’s in small-town Star Valley, 1988. Owen is a nerd, and more than a little needy, and him and Bea flirt awkwardly with one another while sweeping floors and laying out fish sandwiches. This is slice-of-life material, the stuff of a thousand quasi-autobiographical anthology comics, and we could hardly be blamed for seeing in it a kind of homemade version of one of John Allison’s comics, say: charming and skillfully done, but not terribly interested in pushing itself or its readers out of their mutual comfort zone.
We would be wrong, however, because Stang is actually working out something bigger and weirder than her initial scene-setting implies. The closing sequences of that first issue begin to give away the game: Bea and Owen go for a late-night swim, and Bea discovers (to Owen’s embarrassment) his self-generated gills for breathing underwater - an attempt, apparently successful, to stand out as something special. The revelation isn’t a dealbreaker. Bea is impressed, and maybe a little jealous, and the two of them make a date for dinner some time. And simple as that, The Audra Show has gone from Box Office Poison to Love and Rockets: a dollop of magical realism to make a comfortable story just uncanny enough to be mildly upsetting.
It's a good move. Stang first used some of these characters in short vignettes (some released as minicomics, others as Santoro School course assignments) which she has described as a “pilot” for the later series. Those stories make clear from the outset what that first issue of The Audra Show only allusively suggests: that Star Valley is a bizarre, protean setting, in which the rules of everyday life shift casually into fantasy and back again. In The Audra Show, by contrast, Stang cleverly and wisely allows that knowledge to seep out in dribs and drabs, as each successive issue builds out both the cast of characters she follows, and the temporal periods in which they exist. Issue #2 drops Owen entirely, and introduces a trio of high school kids in 2008: semi-authorial-insert Adelaide, sea-themed amusement park heir Bryson, and the mysteriously squid-tentacled (there’s that sea monster theme again) musician Oliver, whom the other two discover in a dumpster. Issue #3 continues their story while also dragging Owen and Bea back into the narrative, albeit several months later, and substantially more down on their luck. And so on, as Stang both builds out her snow-globe environment with freewheeling improvisation, while steadily knitting together her stories into a coherent, if bizarre, resolution to their mysteries.
This is what we’ve come to call "worldbuilding," and lord knows it’s a dangerous thing. Stang would not be the first writer to fall victim to the trap of letting rich environments stand in for an actual story, and the temptation here must have been very strong indeed. That Stang averts this is due chiefly to the fact that, while her supernatural mystery provides a certain satisfying structure to the six issues, it doesn’t ultimately seem to interest her all that much. At minimum, it interests her less than the characters wandering inside of it, whose fumbling, disappointed, and ultimately jaded attempts to connect with each other lend The Audra Show a certain Schulzian mood.
And this takes us back to form and structure. I mentioned that Stang constructs her pages primarily in six-panel grids, and I suppose my use of the term requires some clarification here. When I talk about a panel grid, I’m using it in the same historically loose sense that Dave Gibbons used it in Watchmen - as a base format which can be tweaked into variations and modifications, but remains wedded to a single basic structure. So Stang’s six-panel pages don’t always, strictly speaking, have six panels: she frequently alternates rows of two panels with a third, single-panel row, for instance, or stacks three single, horizontal panels atop each other for more languorous sequences. But when she does, they stand out as riffs and alterations on her basic form.
This particular choice is, I think, a strategic one. Two-panel rows are built for Stang’s favorite type of blocking: medium close-ups of single figures, typically addressing an unseen interrogator just off-panel to whom they struggle to make themselves understood. The conversations in The Audra Show have many participants, but they always feel one-sided, an effect heightened by Stang’s frequent deployment of the old-school thought balloon to convey the mortification of spoken words gone terribly wrong. Case in point: Adelaide, taking her new friends home to her living room, thinks inwardly, “Wow, I have friends (kinda) at my house! That’s so... normal! Don’t screw this up, Adelaide!” Then, new panel, single-character close-up, spoken aloud): “You bitches want some beverages?!”
The six-panel grid feels, paradoxically, both more expansive and more claustrophobically confined. So too are the pages locked into themselves: almost no page of The Audra Show ends on a note that demands the reader turn to the next one. Instead, every page stands as a singular unit in itself, like an installment of a Sunday comic strip, complete with what we in the post-newspaper century are apt to think of as a punchline. Almost always, it is uncomfortable.
All of which is to say that the magical mystery at the heart of Star Valley isn’t really what matters here: not to the characters and not, ultimately, to us. At best, it is as inconsequential as the murder in a Raymond Chandler story; a MacGuffin to set in motion the fumbling, sincere, and quietly needy characters whose lives Stang depicts with sardonic sympathy. Reading The Audra Show, there were times when I wondered if she would have been better off dispensing with it altogether. Then again, maybe putting a little magic in the prosaically dreary world of these characters is an act of necessary compassion.
When all is said and done, the emblematic scene of The Audra Show comes toward the end, as two teenagers encounter a neighborhood dog peeping through a plastic bubble cut into a picket fence. The teens affectionately point and heckle (“Who’s a good bitch?! Who’s a good bitch?!”) while the dog looks on in wide-eyed delight. Then the voice of the dog’s owner shouts from a window for the freaks to go away, and everyone wanders off to the next page.
The post The Collected Audra Show Vol. 1 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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