Girl Town

Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak

Each mini comic collected in Girl Town is distinct: in one, the lonely and heartbroken Diana orders an “Escort” companion robot to be her boyfriend and help her heal from her recent breakup with a famous food scientist; in another, two women make a podcast about a cult favorite movie they’re obsessed with, processing their own friendship as they do so; another features a gently fantastical setting in which two girls skip school to enjoy a local market where painful emotions about the body and self are brought to light when they find magical fruits to eat. While the stories don’t build upon one another narratively, they each work upon and weave together shared thematic threads of the relationships of women and girls, the ways in which trauma can manifest after being buried, and a speculative, mysterious, almost dreamy vibe.

Nowak’s art does a lot to drive Girl Town’s powerful and provocative energy. From the cover illustration, a nod to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind,” to the creepy dream-sequence still of the last page, the art is expressive and effective. While most of these comics were originally released in uncolored versions, the colored versions collected here are dazzling, with spreads full of soft, almost breathing lines filled in with soft, bright washes of color: pink, lime green, lavender, pale blue. While the main characters have white or creamy skin (Nowak is herself white), there are also characters with various shades of brown skin depicted here in central roles, as well as characters with more imaginatively-shaded pinkish-purple skin.

The stories told here are millennial stories, where abundant feelings, both difficult and powerful, are interpolated through technology and sometimes tenuous-feeling human connection. Angst, lust, shame, empowerment, fear, delight, alienation, connection, and uncertainty intermingle, and the resolutions are never neat or conclusive. Girl Town does not promise any antidote, answer, or trajectory for the complexity of human emotion; what it shows instead is that we can and do still feel complex, overwhelming, and mysterious emotions, a marvelous feat in and of itself considering how much power technology and the economy have over our lives when we have so little power over them in turn.