Bitter Pie #17

Deletist

Bitter Pie #17 is a mouthful. Thick with harsh, amphetamine-y illustrations and sometimes clunky prose, it's also deliciously hard to swallow.

Charlott, our cynical protagonist, struggles vainly to resist the discontent-cum-indifference fitting for a culture of state-sanctioned violence, mass-produced rebellion, and pop frivolity. The latter two, mouthpieces of choice for angry hipsters and the urban upper-class, respectively, also overlap suspiciously, and Charlott wants none of it.

Soon, however, a faceless pusher strolls through a party where Charlott sits scowling by. Part defiant, part defeated, Charlott shrugs and snags a bag; one page and two years later, a decaying, sallow, drug-addled creature slithers down the sidewalk, stutteringly wondering where her passion went, before heading to her room and her white powder to go find it.

As emptiness and confusion clash and implode, Charlott descends into psychosis and near-death. The images such as the one described above, transfix, and linger long after the zine is finished. But the voice flops: is the storybook rhyming that narrates Charlott's downward spiral just awkward writing, or does it serve to reinforce the faux-innocence addicts sometimes employ to give their use meaning? Does it work because it doesn't? Am I thinking too hard? What's with King A-hole and his poopy minions?

Be it method or miscalculation, when the words stumble, the severity of the imagery falters, too. Bitter Pie works best when the text is straightforward and sparse, letting the images speak instead. Still, as condemnations of irony, drugs, and the fucked up state of the union go, nothing is as fantastically savage. Bitter Pie's got brambles in her berries, and I emerged scathed and ready for seconds. Here's to number eighteen.

Review by Sarah Jeanne Lombardo