The main conceit of
Babybel Wax Bodysuit (Retrofit Comics, 2016) revolves around those familiar Babybel cheese wheels you can buy by the sackful at grocery stores. Hopefully you’re familiar with them, because they’re quite delicious. Soft. Creamy. Babybel’s claim to fame is enclosing their product in a layer of soft red wax that you have to peel away to enjoy.
What most take for granted is that these cheese snacks, safely nestled in their wax armor, are in fact striking metaphors for the human spirit.
Williams broke into the indie comics scene with Hungry Bottom Comics, a series of autobiographical stories delving into his experience as a “feminine” gay man in an increasingly butch gay scene in Toronto. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read about it. At the time Hungry Bottom Comics is set, Williams felt jilted and pigeon-holed by a scene that was increasingly becoming mainstream and thus normalized. Normalization raised the cultural capital on the “butch” gay man aesthetic, or the gay man who who’s gay but totally doesn’t “look” or “act” gay. Being a submissive and loudly dressed gay man in this atmosphere got him side glances and teasing. William’s got flack from his peers, arguably, for just being himself. This gave him a unique perspective on selfhood and the signs we broadcast when we’re communicating our identities to the world.
This short comic is about externalities. It offers two largely unrelated stories and a few stray pages that casually muse on themes of presenting the self, protecting the self, and becoming true to yourself. How much of what you give to the world as you “self” is contrived? How much of it is for the sake of putting other at ease, or tricking others into believing you are something which you’re not? How much of that presentation was fashioned or imposed by corporate overlords or advertising executives?
In the opening story, “The Literal Word,” Williams recalls his relationship with the moderator of a comic book internet forum who went by the handle “Cross”. She was the “open-minded” Christian type, and he the “painfully realizing his sexuality is a liability” type, and the two bonded over a love of funnybooks. The two inevitably change, their anonymous, non-politicized internet identities ultimately failing to keep the real world out.
Later, Williams offers a science fiction fable based on the life and travails of Britney Spears. If you’re the type to groan at a sentence like that, I feel you. But as a cultural phenomenon, Britney’s life actually has a lot to say about the nature of identity in contemporary Western society. Outward appearance is something to capitalize on, especially when you’re born with, or work to build, a body and face people want to gawk at. It’s a well known business: building bodies, identities, whole personal histories. Williams examines this by way of the Britney Spears mythology of rise-crisis-fall-transformation-resolution. He gives us “Britney Jean,” a cyborg built by production companies, whose own true history is kept from her for the sake of the coherence of her manufacture identity. An ancient order of self-actualized women free Britney’s mind by using a milkshake to trigger hidden authentic emotions. Cyborg Britney obliterates the faces of some corporate totalitarians before escaping and learning the ways of the free woman.
Williams’ visual style is perfect for the subject matter of the book. He doesn’t go nuts with experimental sequencing, but he does make sure that each page’s panels break, bulge, and reach into one another. This works especially well for the first story, where the internet is represented as floating islands of tendriled fungi. Personally tailored identities and forum topics connect and disconnect on branched rhizomatic arterial structures. It’s a good metaphor for the overstimulating information carnival that was the early internet.
There are gold nuggets of randomness placed at the very beginning and the very middle that serve as thematic glue. Their brevity and compact nature make them the strongest parts of the book. One in particular stands out. It’s about the “Gay Clones,” a derogatory term for heavily mustachioed and burly young homosexuals who multiplied in droves in urban centers in the 1970’s and 80’s, and Keith Haring’s artistic response to them. Though brief, the one page sequence is dripping with excellently placed visual cues.
Toward the end of the the second story, the newly liberated cyborg Britney gazes out into the desert and contemplates her intention to wander the world without aim for a while. She doesn’t just want to find herself. “I want to know I’m worth more than all I’ve given to folks,” she says behind her shoulder to the tribal feminists who freed her. This is the basic thesis of Babybel Wax Bodysuit. It’s William’s using his rich visual language to examine the nature of identity and outward appearance, folding and bending it like melted wax and seeing what shapes he can come up with. It’s worth a read.
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