Vera Bushwack

The cover to Vera Bushwack, Sig Burwash's charming debut graphic novel, published this past June by Drawn and Quarterly, establishes a distinct tone: the presumable protagonist, on horseback, gripping an active chainsaw. The horse is standing on its hind legs, manic, eyes bulging; the protagonist—wearing no shirt and assless chaps—sports an expression of almost Stan Kelly-esque mischief. It radiates a comedy of gleeful abandon, of an almost Adult Swim-like mold.

 

The tonal contrast between cover and interior is so pointed it comes across as legerdemain: the character on the cover, with their overpowering demeanor, is not in fact the protagonist, Drew, but their titular, self-contained alter-ego;  not an existence, not a fleshed-out divergent character, so much as a projected aspiration. The story, or at least the 'real' events therein (i.e. those that take place outside of Drew's imagination), shares very little of that tonality; Drew, in truth, has no horse, only a motorcycle (which they also dub 'Vera'), and they're certainly not nihilistically frenzied enough to go waving a chainsaw around without any regard for safety.

Drew's life, more often than not, is one of slow, ruminative, wounded ambience. There's more than a bit of Tommi Parrish here: the interest in an in-between space of emotion, articulated through round, often-simplified shapes and forms – a cartoonishness slowly eroded by the bluntness of emotional distress. Burwash's cartooning, however, is cleaner, or perhaps barer, than Parrish's, and certainly not anchored by the gouache that gives Parrish's art much of its flavor. It is fairly rare for Burwash to fill their shapes with color, certainly of the representational variety – though full color does appear on occasion, more often than not Burwash favors the approach of Dash Shaw's Doctors, linework drawn directly onto a block of flat color, with sparing environmental detail.

 

When we first meet them, Drew is not very strongly tethered to the world around them; their previous toxic relationship—with a professor of theirs who will not leave them alone following their breakup—having ended, they have left the city and set up a tent in a wooded grove near the shoreline, where they intend to build a wooden cabin. Their only connection to their previous life is their friend Ronnie, whose friendship does not stop her from passing criticism both on Drew's attempts to demonstrate their independence and on the bouts of loneliness clouding their better judgment. Their only human connection to their current, solitary life is Spoons, a man with whom they fell trees for lumber, whose motives for helping are unclear, and whose willingness to collaborate is punctuated with gender-based assumptions of Drew's helplessness. Outside of these relationships, all they have is their dog, Pony: a creature unburdened with the expectations and disappointments of the human world.

As that human world increasingly oversteps and intrudes—the man from whom they adopted Pony sends uncomfortable emails, two women feel a one-sided kinship with Drew only because they all steal wood from the same abandoned house—Drew finds comfort in 'rewilding' not only their living environment but also their perception of self: as they chop lumber, Drew imagines themself as their alter ego, straddling a horse that does not exist and felling the whole forest; to cool down afterwards, Drew goes down to the river with Pony, running on all fours and imagining themself as a fellow dog. It's at these moments that Burwash's art is at the peak of its vivacity. For added dynamism, one might note the cartoonist's approach to inking: the initial penciling is tight enough, the mark-making strong enough, to be legible without inking, and so they ink some lines but not others. This gives the artwork an added verve, a subtle textural variance that renders the artwork is determined but not rigid; there is some existential-kinetic leeway within the dictated geometry. Note, too, the way Burwash draws trees: foliage is almost doodled, in the most pleasant sense of the word: the lines, even when close together, are nonetheless loose and gestural, reminiscent of the simplified geometry of Warren Craghead or Peony Gent; if the human world is made up of neat, cohering shapes, the wilderness focuses more on constituent, untamed lines.

This freedom of self-conception is, of course, inextricable from gender. The strangers Drew meets throughout the book frequently misgender them, referring to them in the feminine and allowing assumptions of personality to emerge from their binary conceptions. In a flashback, they ride their bicycle, narrating, "I began to resent being a girl around that time / I wore my bruises like badges / I didn't want to feel restricted by gender / I wanted to just be Drew." One readily recalls Allee Errico, in Froggie World: "I have no gender on my bike[…] My body is taking me somewhere I want to go." Drew, like Errico, is fueled by that same propulsion, that kinesis that Italo Calvino terms 'lightness', opposing "the weight of living [that, in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Weight of Being,] consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely."

 

Almost three quarters into the book, in a striking 14-page sequence, Burwash juxtaposes the physical act of masturbation with a pantomime within the protagonist's mind: Drew swimming and disappearing into nigh-illegible squiggles of water, doing somersaults astride their motorcycle; when the time comes for the climax, they seem to chase after Vera, who breakdances on horseback. Vera finally stands upright, each leg on a different horse (their singular horse having now multiplied), and ejaculates into the visor-window of the motorcyclist's helmet. This is the first direct depiction of sex in the book, but it follows references to both Drew's overstepping ex and their rape at the hands of a different man, and as such the sequence takes on a facet of recalibration and reclamation. It's noteworthy that they are not masturbating with anyone in particular in mind – only their nonexistent alternate. To build a home within the world, the cartoonist seems to tell us, one must first build a home within their body, both literally and metaphorically.

Toward the end, Spoons, whom previously we had been conditioned to associate with a kneejerk masculinity, a connection perpetuated merely by necessity, is awarded greater depth: a life spent in and out of prison from a young age, resulting in a close familiarity with depression. For both Drew and the reader, this is a moment of profound empathy – the breaking of a mask, through the sudden visibility of what appears behind it. It's a touching moment, finding empathy even in the ostensibly-contemptible – Spoons, too, is tormented in no small part by his performances.

 

"Jan always says to me, 'You gotta be your own 3AM," the band Adult Mom sing, invoking that time when desperate solitude reaches its zenith, and the song could easily serve as the graphic novel's soundtrack. Vera Bushwack is not a story of rugged individualism, nor an attempt to romanticize nature as an escape from modern life; its central act of withdrawal is, explicitly, a defense mechanism, one that Drew themself feels ambivalent about. Having been pushed to the extreme of self-abnegating caution, Drew reacts by imagining Vera—the polar opposite—in the hopes of finding some future safety in-between the two. But that ephemerality, that expiration date, is exactly the source of Vera's appeal– that one day the pain will end, or at least loosen its grip. There is, Burwash says, a home to be found: in one's body, in one's community, in one's world; it only needs to be built – one work partner, one tree, one rev of the chainsaw, one imagined horse at a time.

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