Tara Booth describes herself as an Ignatz Award-winning comic artist, illustrator and painter from Philadelphia, whose candid autobiographical comics shed lightness and humour on issues related to mental health, addiction, and sexuality. Her Instagram handle takes that dry description and douses it in colour, plunging readers into a world that is funny yet awkwardly vulnerable. It is the equivalent of walking past the windows of a neighbour who doesn’t believe in drawing the curtains.
To read Booth’s debut collection, Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It, is like being introduced to a wildly entertaining storyteller with no filter. There are comics about bedbugs and buttholes, periods and social anxiety, all told with wry humour and vivid watercolours. It announces the arrival of a powerful talent who effortlessly combines artistic ability with writing chops.
There is something moody about how the tone of these stories veers wildly, ecstatic one moment and crashing down to Earth the next. It is an approach that works because of how it reflects the duality of our contemporary lives, where everyday joys are constantly tempered by the uncertainty of our collective future. Booth taps into those anxieties with ease, showing how something as quotidian as a trip to the airport can be harrowing when one adds security agents and protocol to the mix.
One can draw a straight line between Booth’s work and artists like Julie Doucet, although to do so is ultimately reductive. There are undeniable similarities in how they are both compelled to drag the darkness of private lives into the light, but those parallels fade quickly as their individual voices emerge. Booth’s is the voice of a millennial for whom work is therapeutic, a way of managing knotty personal issues without worrying about who may be around. She isn’t concerned about whether her panels are profound or silly, choosing to focus on authenticity and emotional honesty instead. It makes for stories that are refreshing, yet poignant, because for every page that elicits a laugh is one that acknowledges how the daily stressors of modern living are inescapable.
A significant portion of the book deals with activities like lying in bed or in the bathtub, working out or hiking, and these activities are all marked by unreasonable expectations that increasingly surround all our engagements with the outside world. It is a place where nothing is as it seems, making Booth’s explosions of colour a necessity both as a means of expression as well as an antidote to the feelings she so openly discusses.
Interviews with Booth routinely refer to sobriety and her struggle with addiction. These conversations serve as an additional reminder of what makes her work so powerful. “I want people to feel ok in their own skin,” she has stated, “and know that it’s never too late or too hard to change the direction of your life.” Processing shows what recovery can feel like, with its attendant ups and downs, an ongoing journey that is often far more revelatory than its destination.
Tara Booth (W/A) • Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95
Review by Lindsay Pereira
