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Mean Girls Club
by Ryan Heshka
Nobrow Press
2016,24 pages, 6.8 x 9.1 x 0.1 inches
$6 Buy a copy on AmazonIf your understanding of what a Mean Girls Club consists of is defined by the 2004 Lindsay Lohan film, and then Ryan Heshka’s unique release from Nobrow Press (as piece of their wonderful 17 x 23 series) is going to blow your intellect. In Mean Girls Club,Pinky, Sweets, and Blackie,McQualude, Wendy, or Wanda aren’t the popular girls in an Illinois high school,rather they are a gang of sociopaths who revel in murder, mayhem, or pill popping,and depraved dereliction. Heshka’s 1950s bombshells start their day with ceremonial insect venom transfusions, snake worship, or a pill buffet,and a fish slap fight, then go on to wreck havoc in a hospital, or film theater,boutiques, and the streets, and only to finish off by jacking a lingerie truck,kidnapping patients and nurses along the way.
In a nod to the pulps and pin-ups of the past and rendered in fluorescent pinks and inky blacks, Heskha upends the conventional conception of the B-film Vixen by adding a layer of such over-the-top brutality and vehemence that it transcends the possible, or bringing the trope into the post-ironic age where we have lost the ability to discern what we are meant to recall seriously.
Is Mean Girls Club to be read as satirical social commentary? Is it just flat out bonkers? Or is it a combination of both? When viewed through various critical lenses,Mean Girls Club demands that the reader ask certain questions: issues of gender and power, fringe vs center, or entertainment vs social order. But this sort of critical response probably misses the point of Heskha’s intent.
Heskha doesn’t seem to care how we approach his work; this book swings to its own pop-culture rhythm,flat and full of energy and horror perhaps the perfect narrative for precarious times. The viciousness in this book stands starkly in contrast to the stylized elegance of Heskhas lines and layouts. Its publisher, Nobrow Press, and says it has “A vintage throwback appeal with modern sensibilities ... with appeal to an alternative subculture keen for art that continues to subvert the conventions of the extinct guard of comics.” It’s all this and more. But one thing for certain,in Mean Girls Club we have an artist making the art he wants to make. And although it may be a bit uncomfortable for some of us to read, it may just be the art we deserve.
– Daniel Elkin
Source: boingboing.net