Froggie World

"I start to feel like I'm waiting for something that's not coming," Allee Errico narrates in her debut publication, the first volume of Froggie World. It's May 9th, 2023, and she has just finished describing climbing up to the top of a freight train overpass in New York. It's an imaginary scenario, but she sees it perfectly, "as if it's a memory I have." It's a year and change later when I'm reading it—July 10th, 2024—and I have just spent several hours on the road to see a production of Waiting for Godot only to find out that I got the dates wrong, that the ticket I had was for the previous week (the second time, in truth, that I have missed this very production). I wish I were making this up. You start to feel like you're waiting for something that's not coming, indeed.

Published in February of this year by Andrew Alexander's Cram Books, this first volume of Froggie World follows several years of serialization on Instagram; where Errico started publishing her exploits in 2017. The Cram book mostly focuses on the years 2022-23, including earlier material serving mostly as an indication of artistic change and evolution. My belief is that there are, broadly speaking, two types of artists: those who know right away how they view the world and what their aesthetic thesis statement entails, in which case the early stages of their career are mostly focused on fine-tuning their voice to match these sensibilities; and those who use art as a way of understanding themselves and their worldview. Judging by the developmental arc presented in Froggie World, Errico belongs firmly in the first group: the tone of her comics—casual, even playful, but at the same time not relishing in ironic detachment, with a nice balance between poetics and pudenda—is readily established from the get-go, and it's mostly a matter of increasing the refinement in her cartooning.

It is in its texture, most of all, where Errico's cartooning comes alive: her 2020 work is much cleaner, almost bare at times, lending itself more easily to comedic moments (her bug-eyed look of "man I am having sex w[ith]," for instance, when she mentions ordering a strap-on over midday coffee on January 1st); contrast this with the heavy ink hatching applied in 2023, taking on a tactile weight reminiscent of EA Bethea. The collection also shows the more fleeting experiments that don't stick: touches of color appear sporadically; a brief phase in 2022 sees her eschew ink altogether, opting for heavier accents of graphite. This gives Errico the air of a cartoonist who does her best to avoid stagnancy, as well as to find, whether by perseverance or by elimination, the exact tools for her artistic self-fulfillment.

The daily, real-time structure of Errico's comics means she willingly denies herself the framing of retrospective significance; new things happen every day, after all, and she rarely lingers on the same events for more than one page, or one day. See the six-page "Severance," in which Errico is at first downgraded then outright fired from her job; "Severance" is the longest and most 'significant' piece in the collection, but its events are scarcely mentioned again, not treated as a pivotal moment in her life. 

Elsewhere, in the two-pager "Good Grief" (June 11th, 2023), Errico heightens her acts of omission by simultaneously musing on the allegorical manifestations of grief ("I cracked like a sidewalk with a tree root growing under it," the comic begins) and on the etymologies of her own wording and the free-flowing thoughts that certain words bring (the word "crevasse" brings to mind a "grand mal crevice," which in turn she chooses to translate as "big bad crevice"). This exercise in voice is pointedly opaque: the cartoonist does say outright that she is experiencing grief, but elects not to state what, or whom, she is grieving, and her craft is charming enough for a reader to think that, indeed, maybe it doesn't matter; what matters here is the internal process, laid out bare. 

This is a major part of Errico's charm: what takes center stage is not mere 'real life' but the explicit nature of her rearrangements thereof. There is a quality here akin to lyricism, a craft whose core principle is the organization of statements that all orbit a common theme in a harmonious fashion. The best example is the comic titled "Love in the Time of Anticipation" (December 30th, 2018), wherein Errico ties together two largely-unrelated images—a man loudly masturbating in the 'male room' of a Long Island porn shop and a train slowly pulling into the station, pulling Errico out of her reveries; the fourth panel cuts back to the porn shop as the man exits, and the cartoonist narrates: "I hope New Year's is like that – a soft build rather than a sharp climax with a rapid descent."

This precedence of thought process begets a certain sense of object impermanence; even the two most 'constant' presences in the author's life—her roommate and her dog—only appear when they directly figure into the events she wants to relate, and for large swaths of time you begin to forget altogether that they exist. But Errico's portrayal of herself doesn't invite the interpretation of someone who disregards her surroundings or connections; in fact what sets her apart from the 'we who gleefully learn nothing' school of autobio-as-humor comics is her palpable care for communality. She is rarely alone in these comics, and is at her happiest when she is not alone, whether she is with her dog, friends, or sexual/romantic partners.

Though the first volume of Froggie World is divided into four parts—'Love' (dating, sex), 'Angel' (Errico's dog, Sardine), 'Music,' and 'Bike' (both self-explanatory)—these are less hard divisions than they are recurring motifs that easily weave into one another: relationships and music are a substantial part of the cartoonist's life, enough that they cannot be neatly sequestered into their own sections; likewise the dog, as responsibility for another living creature is bound to figure into events. The bike, most of all, takes on a supreme importance: "I have no gender on my bike," Errico narrates in the final comic of the collection, dated June 29th, 2023. "Just constant life-or-death situations (you don't have to be a woman to die of vehicular manslaughter). My body is taking me somewhere I want to go." Here we have the perfect balance of metaphorical and literal, poetic and prosaic: where Errico wants to go on her bike changes from trip to trip; where Errico wants to go in life – well, it'd be hubris to render that with any fixity. This, perhaps, is what sets apart the diaristic from the autobiographical: the real-time, the transient, versus the anchored, rigid matter-of-fact. I don't know where it is that Allee Errico wants to go – but I can’t help but think that, as a reader, I want to go there with her.

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