by Anna Ehrlemark
Published by Floating World Comics October 2015.
. . .
"I'm not for the trash yet."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Swirling whiteness giving anguished, uncertain existence to various tortured human forms in lands of shadow.
But no worries: life in the world of Winners is a guaranteed waking hell. If you want to be a winner this world makes you work for it, baby!
A woman is convinced that her sister is an artificial construct assembled by other synthetic people known as 'biosapiens.' She believes very strongly that she is the original-not just the first out of the womb-and that her sister never even gestated. Talk about sibling rivalry!
A sleeping woman's face almost seems to float like a discarded Halloween mask upon a dark river, until she awakes in a hospital bed that swallows her whole. Or does she sink forever into the mattress of her own volition in order to achieve some kind of eternal sleep?
Yet another pair of sisters seems to have been grown in a lab to appear normal when viewed from behind, but then they have monster faces when they turn around. Or, depending on how you interpret the 'edit' of the panels do these monster faces come bursting out of the backs of their heads? Or did the mad scientists brew up what they intended to be as some kind of 'perfect girl' . . . but then the girls were like 'Fuck it' and manifested monster faces to fight free of being manufactured images?
A desperate, starving homeless man warms himself by a bonfire alongside his unhoused comrades until a helicopter descends from the sky to disgorge a sexy woman in skintight pants with large breasts to whisk the starving man away to a feast of rich people in a skyscraper penthouse. That's it. The other homeless men get left out in the cold.
Two women have sex inside a giant champagne glass before a live studio audience until one is seemingly dissolved by the force of the other's willpower in some kind of clandestine struggle. Pornography and the gladiatorial are combined by some perverse alchemy.
Winners all.
This is a world of mutability, jealousy, sadism, competition, paranoia, envy, paradox, oppression, despair, and desperate fantasies of vengeance and/or ludicrous good fortune that makes a mockery of all our notions of meritocracy.
No reasons are given beyond elemental desires for retribution for harms done and a longing for a freedom from want.
The visuals are sinuously grotesque.
It's also quite funny in a sicko way I admire.
Yes, it's a collection of short-short comic book stories, but it works more like an album of thematically connected songs than an anthology of formulaic narratives. I didn't mind this.
Appropriately, the climax occurs inside a circus tent . . . but you'll just have to see that part for yourself.
Hey, you want to be a real winner, right?
Gotta put in the work.
