One-Eyed Want

Michael Banas’ One-Eyed Want is built around a look familiar to those who follow indie comics, and likely dismissed by anyone who doesn’t. Pages primarily stick to a six-panel grid. Characters possess simplified eyes, lacking lower lids, their haircuts mere outlines. The figure drawing reminds me of Michiel Budel, Allison Cole, or Daryl Seitchik. Thin lines, unpatterned clothing, boneless faces with the same round shape. One main character, Lorelei, has the single line upturned nose of Nancy. At the beginning of the story, Lorelei is moving into the woods, having been disowned by her parents, for reasons unknown to us. We get the impression that she is angry at the world and wants nothing to do with it. However, she is not adept in the ways of nature, and has never pitched a tent before. Her older brother Lyle, accompanying her into the woods, does this for her, although he himself is despondent, having had his dreams of being a clown crushed, and his last relationship ending with online mockery. He swallows a handful of klonopin in hopes of ending it all.

While these characters are foregrounded due to the amount of negative space in their designs, the backgrounds they emerge from percolate with patterned texture. The coloring is pastel and somnambulant, as gently ambient in its glowing blues and yellows as the woods at night lit by a phone’s flashlight app. When necessary, Banas pulls off effects requiring impressive precision, in sequences that call for his backgrounds to deliver geometric architecture or suggestions of infinity. He creates images designed to carry an impact beyond just following a character through a space or talking with someone.

Little star-shaped guys, fractal paramecium, emerge from the eddies of the creek running through the woods. They move from the water to embrace other forms defined by flowing lines, replacing them with the pattern of their enclosed shapes. Another main character, Elise, says, “You clowns can deal with this cosmic horror by yourselves,” and I can imagine that quote, taken in isolation, raising the hackles of readers averse to characters that seem self-conscious about the genre they’re in. Rest assured, this isn’t some Joss-Whedon-takes-on-Cthulhu bullshit, nor is it the tale of young adult angst the opening section may suggest.

It is instead the sort of thing one vaguely expects to encounter in a self-published novel, and very rarely gets: a personal treatise on the nature of reality and spirituality, seemingly informed by the author’s first-hand experiences with psychedelic drugs. One might expect a book like that to be so deeply personal as to be basically incoherent, but One-Eyed Want remains rigorously plotted and precise, tapping into a power that feels unfathomably bottomless but delivering the reader to the other side of its shores, with characters transformed in the manner that delivers on the expectations of classical three-act story structure.

As our characters get touched by the fleshless hand of otherworldly ooze, they enter into private dreamlike worlds, lost in a grey area somewhere between the isolation of their own minds and a cosmic architecture equally alienating. The book’s sense of humor is retained; our characters are all the sort of people as adept at narrating their own lives as they are commenting on each other. But in this new narrative register, the book achieves a humming intensity. Lorelei climbs stairs that gets increasingly steep. Once she reaches the point where each step is larger than her body, she reaches a plateau, wherein she witnesses and interacts with her past selves from a few moments before. This is where Banas shows he can give his drawing a maniacal tightness, rather than achieving visual grandeur by extended noodling. We also see his skill as a plotter, as, while lost to their own interiority, we get a very impressive payoff from retelling the same scene twice from different characters’ perspectives.

Elise is the character who seems like she might be unharmed or unconsumed by the otherworldly. As she makes her way home to work on her writing, the sense that something has ripped her from her reality is brushed aside as best she can. Elise seems the closest character to an authorial stand-in, the romantic artist of the group, the fan of poetry who tells Lorelei she loves her only to get yelled at: “You’re just obsessed with the fact that I’m not impressed by you.” With this stray line, we get a hint of the social milieu these characters occupy that’s beyond the scope of the narrative, the constructed identities they’ve made for themselves and how they’re treated by those who don’t know them so intimately. Previously, Lorelei has made fun of an idea Elise outlined: “Which ‘genius’ poet can we thank this time? Anne Larson?” It is indeed an idea attributed to Anne Carson in the epigraph of that very chapter. For every bit of youthful earnestness, there is an equal and opposite youthful mockery to puncture any emergent ego.

The characters’ self-consciousness may be glib, but contextualized by Banas’ set of interests, it reads as a way to make approachable what might veer off into the inscrutable or unreadable. Certainly there are psychedelic comics that are hermetic in the extreme, and become abstract. The underground comix artist John Thompson comes immediately to mind. A deep sense of one’s own ridiculousness is common to the people I know who have done a lot of psychedelics in their youth but lived to decisively not tell the tale, because talking about drug experiences is tedious, and having gone outside themselves they’ve learned how they appear to everybody else, and so are funny, empathetic people, assured of their small place in the large world. Others of course have gone into their own mind and come out self-obsessed narcissists, but based on the evidence of this comic, I don’t think Banas falls into that category. Maybe I’m a sucker, but I can’t help but perceive people with an avowed interest in poetry as anything other than sincere, even if they make jokes about “cranking it to the poems of Sappho.”

The book begins with a prologue following a father and daughter, fishing on a canoe in the river, who are subsumed into the star-eyed muck. They reappear later, transfigured, in other people’s respective private universes, sequestered from each other. In that opening sequence too we see people expressing earnest sentiments being mocked for being annoying. As the father expresses accurate sentiments about how days spent in nature will be fondly remembered, his daughter, bored, wishes she could use her tablet. Later, the father will offer hard-won advice to Lyle, lost in a largely empty world, doing battle with hallucinations, and be similarly dismissed with an “I hope he gets laid soon.”

All of these characters are reasonably well-developed and articulated. Each has an arc, although an argument can be made that Lyle, absent from the book’s end, does not. A post on the author’s Tumblr says that the book is inspired by and dedicated to the memory of his brother Tim, who died at a young age. The book is currently being serialized on Tumblr, with a new page posted three times a week since the beginning of November. Tumblr is also the platform Banas reached out to me on to offer me a copy of the finished book. The complete book is a sturdy and substantial thing, a real reading experience. Despite the fact that no panel or page feels overloaded with text, it is not the least bit slight. Instead there is an ambition I rarely see, met and accomplished with seeming ease, although it’s clear years of effort went into it.

Of all the books I’ve reviewed for this site, it perhaps best resembles Alex Graham’s Angloid, with its sense of channeled spirituality manifesting alongside frequent humor, an entertainer’s instincts and an artist’s sense of mission rolled into one. Graham would follow that book up with Dog Biscuits, which like the work I’m discussing today was also serialized online, in six-panel pages, although that work broke through to a larger audience in a way I could not begin to predict for Banas. Tumblr in 2025 is a markedly less popular platform than Instagram was in 2020, and the concerns of One-Eyed Want are by and large not those of the wider world. Still, it is the most compelling self-published graphic novel I’ve encountered since Scott Finch’s Domesticated Afterlife, and I would recommend it to all searchers, whether they seek deeper meaning, or simply a good comic book.

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