by Pete Toms
Published by Hic and Hoc in 2016.
. . .
"I had this dream one time where I hung myself with my own DNA strand."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
This-Dad's Weekend-is 24 pages of dialogue-driven comics evoking the depressing truth of how living in cyber-reality makes insufferable children of us all. Doesn’t matter how old you are, how young, how smart, how creative. Internet pushes a glowing god-finger deep into the pleasure centers of your brain to induce non-stop chemical rewards for the overshares, the hype, the exhalations of rancid conspiritosis, the hot takes. It's not about money or fame, even. Dad's Weekend takes as given the internalization of online discourse, and spins its yarn from that basis.
Our protag is a young woman named Whitney. She's between high school and college. She's smart enough to know that adult life is one of drudgery fully albatrossed by oppressive student loan debt. The only relief shall come from prescription medications and the virtualized sense of belonging to be found on social media. If she were a dude, she would be socially authorized to be an asshole who quotes Fight Club and yammers at length about various unlikely film projects. Kinda like one of her IRL male frenemies who pops up to monologue like a weirdo from an unauthorized sequel to Slacker.
(In fairness, the guy doesn't directly invoke Fight Club, but give him a few more panels . . .)
Whitney's spending a weekend with her father, a middle-aged conspiracy theorist who obsessively posts embarrassing videos of himself and his deranged speculations on YouTube. As the story goes on, his breakages with reality put him in conflict with avatars of other sketchy systems of reality organization: a priest, a cop . . . Whitney's dad gets into some deep shit here.
Whitney herself interfaces reality through a set of problematic filters: pop culture tropisms, ironic detachment, the memes, uncompromising cynicism . . . but can you blame her? Internet is the Oracle of our times, reflecting back at us our own subjective truths. Whitney's working off the basis of her experiences of a world of endemic misogyny, racism, and a self-cannibalizing infotainment Blob that amoebically expands and eats up all bandwidth Tetsuo-Shima-style 'til only a singularity of distraction and economic determinism remains.
But Dad's Weekend keeps it lively. It's funny. The visuals have a tenderness that suggest the human frailty that frightens people into donning the mecha suits of church, state, consumerism, and/or conspiracy theories. The dialogue is sharp. There’s an impressive reveal from Whitney's dad at the end where he confesses the ecstatic terror of fatherhood. But his confession only confirms what Whitney had already pieced together for herself. And his cyclical breakages from reality will, perhaps, only continue apace.
