Welcome to my second column here in The Badger Herald, the paper that believes, in spite of all historical and social evidence, that you are mature enough to benefit from viewing racist caricatures ("Oh, so that's what overt racism looks like," The Badger Herald imagined you said. "I was not aware and am now edified and improved").
But there's also such a thing as stuff you might think you're too mature for. If you're into big fancy books with large words in small print but still don't know a thing about underground comics — by which I mean the kind that you can't find at Barnes & Noble — then take out your monocle, stuff it in your top hat and shove the whole assemblage up your ass, because it's time for you to stop thinking you're too fancy to read comic books.
Before we start, here's why you can't find them at Barnes & Noble: because they have only four shelves of comic books. Two of them are superhero junk that you can only enjoy if you've been specially trained from birth; one is new 'indie' comics that they bought because the publishers pushed it on them regardless of how unreadable and self-indulgently pointless a lot of new 'indie' comics are; and the last row is actually good stuff that you've already read if you've got any interest in comics at all.
Of course, if you're the kind of person who already knows about comic-books-as-adult-literature, you don't need me to tell you to go check out "Palomar" and "Los Locas" by the Hernandez brothers at the Madison Public Library, which incidentally will not lend to me anymore after a disagreement involving an ancient and irreplaceable volume of poetry which I claimed had succumbed to accidental water damage. They could probably tell I was lying because it smelled less like water and more like cheap rum. The point is, even though I hate all poetry and especially poetry that my ex-girlfriend checked out on my card and then gave back to me four months late, I didn't actually get around to burning it in a cathartic post-relationship bonfire after pre-treating it with flammable liquid, so I don't see what their problem was.
But this isn't about my personal vendetta against fascist librarians. This is about how you need to get your mitts on a copy of "Potential" by Ariel Schrag.
"Potential" is the autobiography of Ariel, written about her junior year of high school at Berkeley High School in California during the summer following it back in 1997, a time when being big into Skankin' Pickle was not a recognized personality defect. She wrote two other comics about her freshman and sophomore year that shouldn't be missed, but her exceptional talent meets an engaging story in her junior year when she decides to make a concentrated effort to establish her lesbian identity personally and publicly.
No, wait, it's not a feminist manifesto or a tritely twisted coming of age story. Ariel is a teenager and all she cares about is sex — and she's not afraid to say it. In fact, she's not afraid to say much of anything, but at the same time she knows when to shut up and let the story speak for itself. And the story has some delightfully dirty stuff to say, often in the form of what I call "hot girl-on-girl context," which means that you're looking at drawings of teenage lesbians gettin' it on, but you get that safe feeling of enjoying a piece of great art at the same time.
And Ariel is an artist: an impossibly perceptive, talented artist; a scholastic over-achiever; a teenage sex machine super-genius; all id and no ego but with a heart so big that she can't see past it to realize she's too good to spend any time thinking about the adolescent drama that erupts around her. That's just as well, because she's in a perfect position to capture it without seeming the least bit patronizing or, on the other hand, too innocent to have useful observations — although she clearly prefers to let the burn-outs, bull dykes and pubescent punks that inhabit her Berkeley high school speak for themselves.
Take Harriet Jults, for example. Ariel becomes infatuated with Harriet's older sister Sally after meeting her through Harriet, who herself has fallen in love with Ariel after reading her earlier comic books. Sally Jults, the too-cool bisexual sinister sister, quickly takes center stage over the patient and sensitive Harriet, who quietly and politely drops from notice after months of courting Ariel with passed notes and contraband intoxicants.
But despite her minor role and tragic destiny, it's hard not to fall in love instantly with Harriet at the same time Ariel does — when she realizes that whatever Sally may have in good looks, sexual experience and older-kid cool, it's Harriet who has the honesty and compassion in the family for all that she hides it under cheap clothes, a bad attitude and an inferiority complex.
Standing in a dingy school hallway, wearing baggy pants, an oversized jacket and a backward baseball cap, Harriet is pictured under Ariel's profession of sincere platonic love for this simpler sister, and, of course, the sweetest thing Harriet can think of to actually say instead of write in an elaborate note is, "Oh my God, I cannot stand Nora. I like went in looking for you and she was there screeching with this skirt up her ass."
Sally, by comparison, is unable to devote herself to one person or even one sexuality, but something about her status and distance makes her irresistible to Ariel. Sally is Ariel's most reliable escape from a home dominated by her parents' messy divorce, which is unfortunate because Sally's bipolar approach to romance is not the emotional anchor Ariel needs.
But it's not all tragedy — one of the book's most strangely sweet sequences takes place when Ariel decides to lose her “straight” virginity to her ex-boyfriend, best friend and favorite musician, Zally ("boy of my fate"), in an elaborately planned weekend-long deflowering ceremony (complete with awkwardly discovering the proper use of vaginal inserts provided by her well-meaning mother). She achieves her goal with the blessing of Sally who sympathizes knowing that Ariel "can't deal with being a 17-year-old virgin," but insists "you can't have sex with him twice!"
Why does Ariel give the two biggest loves of her life virtually the same alias, but with the first letter a mirror image of the other? Man, I don't know. All they teach me in lit class is how to decode stuff written at least 200 years ago. This new modern symbolism is beyond me. But you're a savvy kid. Go read the thing yourself and tell me. It's a true story of the kind of high-octane adolescence that you might have missed out on growing up in Wisconsin — unless you're from Milwaukee, which, as we all know, is the sin-soaked Gomorrah of the Midwest.
Ben Freund now knows everything there is to know about being a teenage lesbian, so tell him about something else at [email protected].
