Review: Hellbound Lifestyle (2016)
The premise: Cartoonist Alabaster Pizzo takes her friend Kaeleigh Forsyth’s notes app entries and illustrates them.
The result: Deadpan chaos.
To all the bookstagram girlies out there who stan an unhinged female character living a knife’s edge away from personal collapse, this comic is for you. It isn’t about telling a story so much as capturing a vibe and that vibe is “humorous malaise.”
The cartoon version of Forsyth (at least I think it’s supposed to be her) posts a picture of a dead rat on instagram and spends the day obsessing about her like count. (She gets 19 and concludes she’s “not psychologically fit for social media.”) She documents all the life problems she’s “learned to live around” rather than fix. (Example: Having no gas in her apartment for two months.) She sets goals (“cry less in public”).
What makes the comic work is the minimalist, totally affectless design of Forsyth’s character. Her face — two dots and a horizontal line — almost never changes, no matter what kind of absurd situation she’s in. Other people have emotions and show them on their faces. But not our protagonist. It’s like she’s trapped in a wholly separate world, cut off from whatever these emotion things are.
(The only exception to this is when she cries; but somehow, these moments only reinforce how alienating her character design is because her expression STILL doesn’t change, even with tears streaming down her cheeks.)
Of course, she does have feelings. This comes through in the book’s narrative text, which often takes the form of literal recreations of notes app entries. It’s just that the comic seems to take the split we all have between our internal lives and our external expressions of self and says, “here’s what that looks like when you’re really depressed.” In some ways, Hellbound Lifestyle feels like a forerunner of the tsunami of “relatable” (and mediocre) comics about depression that dominate instagram nowadays, except that it is much better executed than most of those.
In sum: A comic that’s both melancholy and funny because sad things are sometimes funny.
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