Review: The Influence (2023)
30 Comics in 30 Days - I’m reviewing a comic every day in November!
Day 5 - The Influence by Laura Knetzger
(I’m not tagging Knetzger because I generally don’t tag authors when I write negative reviews, but you should still go follow and support her (at) lauraknetz because her art is really lovely)
This was a purchase from this year’s @sbcomicsfair. I picked it up because I was intrigued by the premise: The main character, a hot guy with no social media, discovers that his girlfriend has been secretly running a social media account using pictures of him and has transformed him into a minor influencer! It sounds like the set-up for a psychological horror story about internet fame and weird parasocial relationships. But the comic’s execution was ultimately disappointing.
I don’t have any complaints about Knetzger’s cartooning style, which is very good at conveying emotion through expression and body language. But the story itself frustrated me and left me feeling unsettled — though not, perhaps, in the way Knetzger intended.
The main character, Danny, is SO nice, sweet, and perfect that, when he discovers his girlfriend Jenny has been using him as fodder for a fake social account, he’s totally unfazed. Instead of acting like a normal person and getting at least a little upset about this invasion of his privacy, he decides to roll with it and start playing the role of this fake persona Jenny has invented.
Later, he inadvertently ruins the carefully crafted persona — which Jenny sculpted to be sexually ambiguous but probably gay — by posting a picture of her and revealing to his followers that he has a girlfriend. Again, this happens because he’s too sweet of a boyfriend to not praise her publicly on Instagram.
On the other hand, Jenny’s total disregard of her boyfriend’s feelings is baffling. That’s not to say that we don’t learn anything about her: We (and Danny) learn through her family that she had been relentlessly bullied on social media and had a history of crafting inauthentic images of herself (for example: by buying premade cosplay outfits and pretending she’d crafted them herself).
My reading of Jenny is that we’re supposed to see her exploitation of Danny as a kind of psychic compensation for all her own failures on social media; she’s afraid to put her own “real self” on display, so she uses images of her boyfriend to create the idealized persona she always wanted.
Yet I still found myself wondering why she acts like a sociopath. She’s had it tough, but her amoral behavior doesn’t seem to follow from her past experiences. (Wouldn’t she have at least a little empathy for what she’s putting Danny through?) Conversely, I couldn’t fathom why Danny would just accept her deranged behavior — or what he even sees in her as a girlfriend. The comic is only about 50 pages, so perhaps with more development, the characters would’ve come into focus. But as it stands now, The Influence doesn’t feel populated by real humans.
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