From art to hormones to gardening and back, Ana Woulfe's zines champion a DIY spirit. Wolfe's comics are fixated on trans women, plants, creativity and the joy of being a living decomposing being that will one day return to the dirt. Our bodies, cybernetic, medicated and microplasticised as they may be, are as biological as any photosynthesizer. So too is Round World Thinking, Woulfe's newest mini-comic from Reptile House, whose back cover proudly declares its full compostability — “If you don't like it or don't want it I highly encourage you to give it back to the earth!!!!” Indeed, the risograph-printed, threadbound zine itself is a soft, fleshy object, not so boutique as many riso books can feel but light and breathing in its texture, like leaves stretching to absorb sunlight but every ready to fall and take new life as mulch.
Opening the zine, we are greeted by a boisterous woman, pug-nosed and smiling, dotted with pimples and wrinkles, her Eve's Apple protruding proudly above her necklace. She introduces herself as The Femme. The Femme is essential to her community, an "oracle for those seeking warmth and empathy," but today her work is for herself, or rather, for her love. She gestures to the reader to follow her into her abode, where she concocts a truly strange brew, a potion for her crush. Delighted, her crush's vegetative tendrils enfold her. Meekly, a voice wobbles out of the eldritch union, requesting privacy.
A gallery welcomes plants as works of performance art. Their delightful forms enthrall intrigued crowds, until it becomes impossible to discern plants in their own. The Femme narrates this story as a sort of crypt keeper, watching as critics struggle to distinguish artistic expression from plants merely existing before tossing the lot aside. Eyes filled with fire amid a tapestry of static and cartoon bombs The Femme delivers a moral to the story: “The art world must be destroyed!”
Over the zine's final pages, Woulfe's Femme appears as a teacher to deliver for us a discourse on noses, from the many strange forms this part of the body might take, to the peculiarities of the act of smelling itself. It's a showcase of silly little pictures and cartoon absurdities, but the message is loud and clear: bodies are beautiful, all that is strange and abject in the norm of society is beautiful. Woulfe is an obsessive cartoonist, returning time and again to strange plants and equally strange women, and at the core of her humor is a deeply trans-feminist anarchist love of all the ridiculous, gross, beautiful wonders and ideas that live and thrive against the will of society.
The inside covers of Round World Thinking present two images of flower: a Puff Ball (Laguica cuminoides) and a Madonna Flower (Artedia squamata). The source of these images is Wild Flowers From Palestine (1844), a book of pressed specimens from Jerusalem before the current genocidal occupation. In a time of imperialist, racist destruction of a land and her people, these images become something more than beautiful -- in Woulfe's afterward, she names them as a reminder that we are “working towards a decolonized world.” The comics in Round World Thinking are, in this sense, militant -- Woulfe's own words declare an intersectional, queer trans liberation framework with which they must be engaged. Just as a flower may be at once beautiful and remind us of the genocide of the people and land from which it came, Ana Woulfe's comics brim with anger, and also: fun. This is a collection of playful, silly comics, tinkling with the laughter of rebellion.
While the zine itself is a formal experience, Woulfe’s play of Round World Thinking stretches beyond its printed confines in the form of an accompanying audiobook version available on the artist’s Bandcamp page. The audio zine works on a few levels, both an accessibility accommodation and a transformative musical project, bringing home the unique experience of the cartoonist reading as a sound drama 1. Over ten minutes, Woulfe transliterates the visual noise of her cartooning into jovial electronic hisses and pops, a funky and immersive soundscape within which her reading of the text seems to shimmer. Woulfe’s reading of her own words is hypnotic and awkward in that way that reading a comic book so often is, her giggles and vocal fry echoing, the audio levels peaking harshly into squeals and moans that are a little erotic and very confrontational, even bursting into song briefly, the repeated melody “your love is better than ice cream” emerging where a page is left blank in the zine. The audio version is instructive, the cartoonist’s pleasure is central. We can hear the art.
Ana Woulfe's cartooning is naive and impulsive in a way I might also associate with the art of Mark Beyer, or even moreso Rory Hayes, scratched out with an idiosyncratic internal logic, unbound from any formal rule. But whereas Beyer and Hayes are horror artists whose art strives to capture fear (on a surface level, anyway), Woulfe is overtly fixated on joy, and intensely politically activated. The stories in Round World Thinking are consciously allegorical, threading the political struggles of trans people to greater struggles for liberation. In the author's own words, “each section focuses on transmisogyny/femmephobia, capitalism/power structures, ableism/body 'norms'”. Nonetheless, Round World Thinking is sui generis, a celebration of pleasure. Woulfe's comics are special because they are at once political and personal, universal and esoteric, digressive and essential. To take pleasure in times of oppression and uncertainty is revelatory act, even as structures find forms to weave oppression of others into our own joy. In resistance and in pleasure, in confusing the two through artistic practice, Woulfe's comics bloom, stretching to the sunlight, embracing life and decomposition.
The post Round World Thinking appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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