The Lagoon
Chicagoan Lilli Carré’s debut graphic novel The Lagoon isn’t genre fiction—it’s an art comic. But Carré is interested in gothic fantasy, to a degree unusual among alternative comics creators not named Dame Darcy. The Lagoon is an elliptical love letter to the genre and to its place in the lives of many adolescent girls.
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The frontispiece captures both Carré’s affection for goth and her distance from it. In a circular frame, Zoey, the tween protagonist, sits beside a lake passing flowers to a black, leaf-plastered, faceless humanoid thing. Flowers and tendrils frame the image, suggesting the overripe opulence of art nouveau. But Carré’s linework is spare and even crude—it looks like something Aubrey Beardsley might have drawn when he was six. The creature is cute, creepy, and mysterious, but the scene also has a modernist edge that takes it out of the realm of Victorian melodrama. Beauty is sketched out rather than embroidered; the space between Zoey’s hands and those of the creature is the distance between desire and reticence, the coming contact or its absence.
Or maybe the two things aren’t so different. The solid blacks and blocky grotesquerie of The Lagoon strongly recall Charles Burns’s Black Hole, a graphic novel in which adulthood is equated with monstrosity. Sexual maturity and horror are linked in The Lagoon, too, but that link is mediated by a third element—a metaphor, a song. To be an adult here is not to be a monster but to be charmed by one. Zoey, the child, is the one character in the comic who doesn’t like (or at least says she doesn’t like) the creature’s tune. Aesthetic response equals sexual response, and fantasy is a form of eroticism, the province of grown-ups. Perhaps that’s why, when Zoey asks him to tell her a fairy tale, Zoey’s dad is thoroughly embarrassed—and when he does launch into it, Zoey simply falls asleep.
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