I am in sloppy love with this comic. “A web comic about food and making out,” Meat and Bone centers on Anne, a twenty-something just moving into her first apartment in the city. Anne manages a vegetarian restaurant called Spices, but her passion for food is tangled up in agonizing body issues. In one scene, she assures her friends that, yes, she’s totally satisfied just eating a bowl of yogurt for lunch as she sits surrounded by her restaurant’s delicious food, while trying to convince herself that it’s normal because at least she’s eating.
Anne is intimidated by her beautiful, brilliant roommate Gwen, fascinated by the mysterious sexy neighbor lady she sees smoking on the fire escape, obsessed with Jane Fonda, and haunted by Barbarella-themed sex fantasies. In other words, she’s a neurotic mess, but an appealingly individual one. When her inner struggles start to get suffocating, the comic expands out to the lives of the other characters, most recently following Gwen and her boyfriend Priam on a night of tagging.
These slices of life are spiced up by Meat and Bone’s funky artwork. Verhoerven’s art is detailed and expressive with a vaguely ’90s-alternative aesthetic, a bit like Debbie Dreschler but more rounded and dimensional. She draws observant, imaginative street scenes and a thoroughly convincing hipster vegetarian restaurant. The unobtrusive earth-toned palette keeps it all grounded. Also: amazeballs cat drawings. Meat and Bone is now a year old and has been updating, more or less reliably, once a week. Bookmark it.
