Hello I’m Juniper!! Hello! Hi!!! Juniper!!!!!

we were talking on @junipertheory's lego stream today about the specific delight of Real Small Characters i.e. the Borrowers or The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and while I haven't developed these characters too far yet I DO have some designs for a fairy who rides around in her assistant/girlfriend's bra

How… detailed… should I be about what’s about to happen? Well, I’ll try to find a happy medium.

It took a long time for me to finally pick Pilotside Chronicle up, despite seeing it circulate a lot on Cohost (rip). What can I say, I have a big backlog and focus issues. The final prod in my ass to read through the archive came after I begged for comics where not only is sexuality acknowledged, but women actually outright have sex, in a non metaphorical way. A friend pointed out that Pilotside fits the bill with exacting precision, and, abashed, I dove in.

"Exactly what I'm looking for" is maybe the best pitch I can give for the comic, actually, because I struggle to place Pilotside's genre otherwise. It's sort of slice of life, but there's a bunch of weird fantasy elements, and a ton of characters are furries, so it's sort of urban fantasy, and sort of a furry comic, and author Penelope Merch-Lehman keeps shaking up the whole format and style of the comic from issue to issue so even among webcomics it's a bit resistant to formal categorization. It's a blast, but in a way that's hard to sum up for one of these short HLATC reviews.

Luckily, the chapter that ran for the early part of this year gave me a perfect pretext. The whole chapter operates through a framing narrative of three of Merch's expansive soap opera cast at a diner, with one, Vanessa, recounting to the others a dramatic sexual escapade some years prior. (The framing narrative takes place before the comic's "present day" so the whole thing is a flashback within a flashback--I told you this comic could be hard to sum up!) The inner narrative features her getting propositioned for a lesson in Jesus's Love from a dorky young evangelical, with her in turn seducing the hapless young missionary into having sex on a "skeetball" table in a barely frequented arcade. The chapter is fittingly titled "VANESSA DEFEATS GOD!"

What really got me, though, was a feature of the chapter I only noticed when I happened to scroll down and noticed the blog post text posts under the comics. There was a lot of text down there. And it was... well... take this page for example, where Vanessa goes to pay off the sole employee with her giant stack of tickets (she is very good with balls) so she and the hapless missionary can have sex on one of the tables:

If I wanted to sum this up simply I'd say it's a page broken down into three vertical panels with roughly the same shot of an arcade, with our protagonist approaching the girl behind the counter with her tickets. The girl, Threep, quickly catches on that Vanessa wants to "fuck that dorky loser on one of the skeetball machines for a million tickets", and, bemused, remarks that she's never stopped Vanessa from having sex in the arcade before. Vanessa thanks her, blows her a kiss, and exits panel right. If I wanted to embellish the description, I might note the comic is in a desaturated limited-palette color scheme with roughly dot matrix texture that suggests this is part of a flashback. You might find this description style familiar--it's how I tend to describe comics in these reviews, or in alt text intended to fill in people using screen readers, or people who have limited bandwidth.

Here's how Merch's' "alt text" begins in the blog post below this page:

OK, so a little backstory here. You know how Threep is a fox? She wasn’t born a fox. When I met her she was a frail twink, but she eventually took on a witch’s curse to transition into a woman. The caveat being that it would transform her in some way that she couldn’t control. It’s why she has five fingers instead of four. The witch thought this would be bad for her in some way, but she loves it. Kind of a win-win thing. Anyway she was mid-transition at the time, so she still looked like a Hispanic furry trans girl. Oh yeah, she said her ears moving up to the top of her head was the worst part. Apparently she was deaf for six months while it happened. So yeah, if you decide to transition don’t go through a witch or an alchemist, just get HRT. Arena and Gates haven’t had many complaints about it, and they have a local endo they recommend I can give you. I’m not being rude, Jess, I’m being NICE! Like, as a just in case thing! OK, so I ask Threep what I can get for a cool million tickos. ”A million tickos?!” she asked incredulously.

The entire chapter is like this. There's an entirely different prose version of the story, one that notably deviates in a bunch of places from the comic, sometimes using different dialogue, and often featuring weird asides and half-conversations with Vanessa's friends, just casually sitting in the alt text. This whole section opens with a little microfiction about a character we see for I think two pages total in the whole issue! If you're of the "exposition is the devil" school of writing, or the "the story should stay on track and not wander into the weeds all the time" school, this has gotta be like nails on a chalk board, but I love every glimpse I get of Merch's dizzyingly detailed (and honestly sometimes hard to keep track of) world. It's just really funny to get this kind of lore dump in what's supposedly a description of the comic page.

I like this for a lot of reasons, all of which are naturally pretty nerdy. I love comics in part for their information density, the way things like panel compositions, shot angles, cartooning style, drawing medium, all sorts of things contribute to the meaning. If you've seen how I describe comics myself, you might already have a sense that I really don't like text transcriptions that just... record basic action and speech bubbles, as though all that other stuff is just extra fluff. This somewhat facetious "alt text", which freely veers off in its own directions, highlights the way a text description of a comic is always a pretty radical translation.

More than that, though, it highlights the unreliable nature of not just the prose narration (which constantly reasserts this is a story being told with embellishments and omissions) but the comic "narration". I think that because comics are a visual medium, they carry a certain presumption of objectivity, even though they're cartoons. Merch's most recent work makes heavy use of 3d sets and relatively fixed camera angles, which I find adds to the sense that we're "looking in" on what really happened. Of course, none of this "really happened", and while we can talk about shots and angles, there's no camera--an insight that's simultaneously like, well, duh, but which I think can be hard to consciously remember as we're drawn into the comic page. Vanessa stresses that both accounts are an interpretation of events filtered through her own narration, and in the current chapter we even learn that one character here was a completely different species, erroneously assumed to be human by Vanessa's human friends!

These somewhat technical formal games with unreliable narration become quite poignant at the end of the chapter, which in the comic ends somewhat humorously with Vanessa leaving her new friend and lover to sort out his feelings. In the prose version, Vanessa has some more thoughts to share:

Yeah, that’s a clue. Martin’s a trans girl. Good luck narrowing it down though, I know like four or five of them. I won’t say if you’ve met her! Because this story was fun to tell but not fun to live through! We had to work through things a lot. Look, sometimes you get yourself into a fun, porny situation and you’re like ”haha, I’m living the dream, I’m a cool sexy person that no one can stop!” and then you have to live through the repercussions of the interaction and you understand why these situations are fantasies.

I love how this transforms the formal exploration of unreliable perspectives in two media into a broader meditation on our fantasies, our recollections, and how we tell stories. Not only are the comic and the prose versions of her story unreliable, they're particularly slanted towards sex farce and away from drama... only at the end to invite us to think about the entire story in a different, more dramatic light. We're encouraged to read between the lines and gutters.

I tend to be put off by the increasingly common "I consent!" stickers on images or lengthy kink negotiations between fictional characters, as though the audience can't be trusted to understand what they're seeing isn't a documentary--they might even try these stunts at home!! I don't get that faintly condescending sense from this. Instead it feels like an exploration of a character's complex mix of pride and shame over something crazy she did. Roland Barthes suggested, in that essay everyone's always referencing but no one's actually read, that what makes literature so powerful is the ambiguity of prose's speaker, the way language opens to multiple readings. It's cool that Merch, in translating a story that don't forget is about an Evangelical getting seduced into destroying his "entire future for three minutes with a chubby weirdo" via dicking down on a public skee ball table, reminds us that the perspective in comics isn't any more fixed and objective than in prose, truth just as subjective as they are in our own memories--and fantasies.

I love the comics technique of having a whole continuous environment occupying the metaframe (the whole expanse of the page) which a bunch of smaller frames slice up so that characters can carry out their actions on a whole stage. it feels a little bit like how they used to solve the problem of moments in time in renaissance paintings of bible stories: just slap the same characters on the painting multiple times and figure people can keep up with reference to the source text and use of conventional costuming &c.

Sarah Jolley loves playing in this space, and I love these early examples in The Property of Hate.

I mean, these first few pages aren't quite as straightforward as space getting sliced but look at the continuous flow of that last sequence above, where the little sock snake Assok is hopping up and down the calcified sides of the dead tree carrying messages back and forth between RGB and the hero. it's such an intriguingly unusual and irregular thing for a comic to do, and yet it's immediately really intuitive what's going on, the back and forth of the conversation guided by Assok's little hops up and down. follow the bouncing sock! she plays with the diegesis in this really interesting way where Assok's hops up and down the tree can't be quite literal--after all, we see the two other characters in the exact same spots. that's, in fact, part of how the sequence remains coherent, is we can see them changing pose against the same backdrop. so Assok's movements, and the texture of the tree, must be in figurative space, giving us the impression of the movement. ironically, I think that little reliance on what I'll call a subjective diegesis makes the whole sequence feel grounded in the set, which both clarifies the arrangement of speech bubbles, cuts out the tedium of having to have Assok repeat all the dialogue, and enhances our sense of the tree as a setpiece.

that's great stage setting for a few pages later:

...when we get a more traditional example of that slicing of space, as RGB chases the hero around the coral-spike canopy of the sleeping tree. I love the curves of motion here, the way the dialogue makes up one arc along the upper corner of the page, and the characters' motions arc along the lower half, letting the two paths reach a pitched confrontation point at the very bottom right corner of the page as their argument devolves into name calling. the black gutter that divides the page into three passes in and out of the tree's shapes, emphasizing the environment not just as a 2d set they're running around on but a whole 3d jungle gym they're clambering on. and there's even this fun moment where RGB's arm has to reach back up into a previous frame-zone for a handhold as he climbs down into the next, a cheeky little violation of time and space.

the tree is so well realized as a set, in fact, that I suspected it was a 3d model originally, posed in different ways and then painted and drawn over. I asked Jolley what her process was and found out I was half right about it being a 3d model. According to Jolley, "It is- but a very literal one. I made it out of clay! it is sitting on my shelf acquiring dust as I type this." this makes a lot of sense based on the tree's more modeled and detailed texture compared to the comic's typically more cell shaded look! the complexity of the way the environment and paneling play off each other necessitated the model: "I needed to be able to draw it from crazy angles and knew I'd have a hard time, so it made sense to just make it so I could hold it in my hands." the result is a setpiece that's got this otherworldly edge to it. it's a technique that might not work for every comic, but the expressiveness that I talked about before in Jolley's work contextualizes the aesthetic complexity of integrating a clay model with cartoon outlined figures, making it just another part of the wildly exuberant show.

These Le Chats sure are Noir ahahahahaha. Aherm. Uh let me start again.

It feels crass to open a review of an animated film this brilliant with a "wham, pow, animation isn't just for kids anymore!" line, but in my defense the film does invite comparisons. Explicitly: intrepid cat detective Francis, our smartass lead, makes a crack at one point that despite its feline cast, this isn't "The Aristocats". There's even a little kitten later who looks suspiciously like a character from that movie. He's right though. The Aristocats doesn't feature, early on, the discovery of a cat with its throat ripped gruesomely out, windpipe spilled on the grass.

No, as Francis tries to unwind the mystery of these grisly serial murders, the film quickly signals that it is, simply, Kitty Giallo. It's a bit of a mystery, a bit of a noire, and a bit of a lurid slasher with eerie supernatural elements. It never stops reminding you, with its sheer glut of weird freaks, cults, psychic and psychedelic dreams, dungeons and haunted moldering houses, and frank expression of cat horniness, that this is meant to be taken seriously even in its extremity.

It's also Kitty Giallo in the sense that it takes full advantage of the cat protagonists. The feline subjects and the animated medium allows them to perform tense chase sequences and complex set pieces impossible with a human cast or live action subjects. When acrobatics are the baseline assumption of your main characters, you can get much more elaborate when they're pushed to extremes for survival. I can't imagine, honestly, making this film in any other medium than cartooning, which can abandon the naturalistic and literal when it needs to. Some sequences even reminded me of scenes from Pink Floyd's The Wall, such as an extended gruesome nightmare where a towering Gregor Mendel erupts, raving, from a sea of cat corpses. Puppeting the decaying and disintegrating bodies before a terrified Francis, he sings, "Und Hop! Hop! Hop! Und Hop! Hop! Hop! Experiments on plant hybrids! Experiments on plant hybrids!" It achieves that greatest affective frission of horror's art: I want to look away; I'm captivated and can't.

Not just empty spectacle, Felidae puts all this lurid cartooning to a purpose. This is a film about human horrors: vivisection, animal testing, and the legacy of eugenics. The violence that enters the world of cats flows downstream from human violence. Though, notably the film never shies away from nature in all its own special brutality. These cats hunt rats, fuck, and kill each other over territory disputes. Serial murder, though, like the laughing free range rabbits in Watership Down, signifies a baleful human influence on the behavior of these animals. Thankfully, the film also discards a "return to purity" as its own unachievable and ultimately poisonous dream, not opposed to but intimately entwined with these human vices.

It's too bad that historically people haven't known what to do with this film. I didn't, when I watched it in my 20s. I remember being sort of bewildered by the tone, (especially the sensuous theme song by Boy George of all people). The film, like a lot of the animated films on this list that I adore, did poorly at the box office. If this was the original trailer, it doesn't set the film up for success, framing the film as a cat based mystery-thriller more than a film about serial murder, cults, and gruesome unethical animal experiments. Sometimes it's very important to aggressively signal your animated feature isn't a kids' movie! Rewatching it now, though, with a greater familiarity with its genre sources, I can appreciate just what a masterpiece it is. And thankfully, with Deaf Crocodile's new loving restoration, it might achieve more of the recognition it deserves.

Unfortunately.

Now they just make her tired by using her processors for crypto farms.

I couldn't be at Everfree Northwest this year, but I can share the zine I made for last year's show!

Read the rest below the cut to find out who the therapist is!!!

Show everyone you are smart despite your current salary.