Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Lie and How We Told It
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Montreal
STATE: QC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Australian
Identifies as a “They” as far as I can tell.
THAT DOESN’T WORK. ENDS UP LOOKING LIKE POOR WRITING. AUTHOR SEEMS TO BE A “SHE”, AND THE SKETCH WRITER LABELED HER AS A “SHE” UNDER GENDER, SO I’VE CHANGED IT ACCORDINGLY. AC
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Australia.
EDUCATION:Attended design school and art school.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Artist. Contributor to the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Attended a residency in Argentina; worked formerly as a server and for a magazine.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tommi Parrish is a Canada-based writer and artist. She works in mixed media, primarily making comics and writing books and short stories. Her characters are often big, blocky, and ambiguously gendered. Originally from Australia, Parrish spent her formative years in Melbourne. She studied design for a year when she was nineteen, and then spent a year in New York City to pursue art. At age twenty-three she briefly attended art school.
Parrish attended a residency in Argentina in their twenties. During this time, she had comics accepted into the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Parrish lives in Montreal, where she moved to follow a best friend and to tour for a book following a successful crowdfunder campaign. She works full-time as an artist.
Perfect Hair
Perfect Hair, a comic book illustrated in watercolor and ink, examines the intricacies of human interaction and connection. Through a series of illustrated stories, Parrish depicts the feelings associated with social anxiety, angst, and existential crises. A central focus of the book, the social concept of ‘fitting in,’ is deconstructed through characters that fail to do so. Stylistically, the characters that inhabit the pages contrast the surroundings that Parrish creates for them, highlighting their disparity. Parrish invites the characters to interact with a failure to fit in by placing them in settings in which they literally do not fit. Experimental styles are utilized to do this, allowing the characters and stories to interact with the paper upon which they exist. One character is unable to fit inside a house, another appears to barely fit upon the page. Parrish highlights this otherness in characters’ oversized clothing, which hang baggily on their bodies, and with unusual body portions, such as an oversized nose or a missing eye.
While Parrish examines the rules of civility, culture, and the experience of anxiety, they do not shy away from raw, and sometimes extreme, human behavior. One story depicts a character weeping in the bathroom of a sex club, while another shows someone stripping off their own skin. In one story, Parrish depicts two sexless, genderless individuals moving toward the act of intercourse. As the reader, we see that the two individuals are seeking to connect, to fit in with one another. Yet their lack of concrete identity prevents the reader from fully connecting with the individuals. Now the reader is the outsider, the one who does not fit in.
RJ Casey in Comics Journal website wrote, Parrish “doesn’t shy away from anything, delving deeper and deeper into distressing psyches,”adding Perfect Hair “made me feel supremely uncomfortable, and that I’m grateful for.” Tom Baker in Broken Frontier website noted: “Recurring themes of loneliness, self-preservation and the complications of adulthood come through loud and clear.”
The Lie and How We Told It
In The Lie and How We Told It, Parrish details the rekindling of a friendship long-gone. Cleary and Tim are old friends from school who have fallen out of touch. A chance meeting at a grocery store leads to evening plans, which, the reader understands, is an agreement of obligation rather than desire for both parties. While the straightforward plot is about old friends sharing a drink, the real story lies in the subtle and delicate moments in their conversations.
Cleary and Tim’s interactions constitute part one of the book. Part two is a story within a story; One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand, a book that Cleary discovers in the bushes. The book details a stripper’s life and their disappointing relationship with a customer. Both stories interact with themes of obligation, secrecy, and misunderstanding.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote: “This orchestration and interplay of refined visual language is never overworked,” adding, “lovers of fine art comics will delight in this worthy discovery.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly January 22, 2018, review of The Lie and How We Told It. p, 70.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, https://www.avclub.com/ (January 30, 2018), Shea Hennum, review of The Lie and How We Told It.
Broken Frontier, http://www.brokenfrontier.com/ (September 7, 2017), Tom Baker, review of Perfect Hair.
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (December 1, 2016), RJ Casey, review of Perfect Hair; (February 5, 2018), Leonard Pierce, review of The Lie and How We Told It.
Eye on Design, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/ (January 22, 2018), Madeleine Morley, review of The Lie and How We Told It.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (January 24, 2018), Etelka Lehoczky, review of The Lie and How We Told It.
Tommi Parrish Tells the Truth About The Lie and How We Told It
By Hillary Brown | January 26, 2018 | 11:00am
Art by Tommi Parrish
COMICS FEATURES TOMMI PARRISH
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Tommi Parrish Tells the Truth About The Lie and How We Told It
The cover of Tommi Parrish’s new book (and sort-of major label debut) The Lie and How We Told It doesn’t really tell you anything about its plot, but it does tell you plenty about what Parrish’s work feels like. It resists being put in boxes, and this scene of a couple of dozen people at a club (men, women, ambiguously gendered folks; people who are enjoying themselves, people who are not; people who are on the make; people reading, drinking, smoking, dancing, flirting, working; looking at each other or looking past one another; in their own heads and very much out of their heads; and then more on top of that) spills off the edges. Some of them show through the words that make up the title and Parrish’s name, but a bit of cigarette smoke crosses a “W” and a beer bottle pokes through the hole of a lowercase “d.”
Parrish’s stuff isn’t all that clearly worked out, but it’s often about things that aren’t so well defined, especially sex and relationships, which get muddy in a hurry. The interior—which features the reunion of two high school friends who wander around, chatting, interspersed with black-and-white line drawings that make up a book within the book—has similar things going on, and Parrish doesn’t clean up the edges of the panels. Everything is bleeding into or over everything else, and you can’t tell what’s a top and what’s a bottom (double meaning very much implied!). The Lie and How We Told It, like Perfect Hair (their previous book, put out by 2d cloud), doesn’t feel quite grown up yet, but it’s lively and full of visual moments that wake you up whenever you start focusing exclusively on the narrative. Parrish answered Paste’s questions over email, including confirming that winter in Montreal is as terrifying as you’d imagine.
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The Lie and How We Told It Cover Art by Tommi Parrish
Paste: So you’re from Australia, right, but now you’re in Montreal? How did you end up there, and what’s it like?b> Tommi Parrish: I did a crowdfunder so I could come over and tour my book Perfect Hair and I got a two-year visa just in case, and I just kind of stayed. I didn’t really know anyone in Canada, but my best friend Lee Lai had moved to Montreal a few months before, and I miss her so much I followed her. Moving countries is fucking hard. Winters go for like six months here, everyone speaks French and it’s so cold outside that you’ll actually die if you’re outside for longer than 15 minutes, but I love it. I’m living off art right now so I barely need to leave the house anyway, every second person’s a gay punk, rent is half what it was in Melbourne and all of North America is like two hours away. There aren’t that many other places to go in Australia and so I was still living in Melbourne (the city I grew up in) and wow I was starting to hate it. I knew too many people, and my whole family could contact me whenever they wanted.
Paste: Six months of winter sounds like the worst thing ever (I live in Athens, Georgia, where we don’t get much of a real winter). How do you cope? Did you have to buy a whole new wardrobe?
Parrish: It’s so fucked up, I can’t even tell you… The dogs don’t even want to go outside. One of my partners is a bike messenger and works outside all winter. Fucking nightmare. Some days I walk to the cafe at the end of my street and it’s a total ordeal just getting enough layers on to be able to leave the house. My winter clothes are all inherited from pals though, which is nice.
People go NUTS in the spring. It’s pretty fun. Like everyone hermits in the winter and then gets super slutty all summer.
Paste: Tell me a little bit about how you started making comics and what you read growing up. Did you go to school for this?
Parrish: I started when I was old (compared to a lot of cartoonists). My drawings started to become comics when I was 21 because a friend showed me a Powr Mastrs book by CF. Until I was 23 I made comics in secret while I made paintings and sculptures for art school. I dropped out of design school when I was 19 and failed art school when I was 23 so I kinda went to for school for it? I realise now that school isn’t really for me, but it took a while.
Paste: I think your figures (big, blocky, ambiguously gendered but not sexless by any means) are really interesting and distinctive. Are they what you started out drawing or, if not, how did they evolve, especially the relative smallness of their heads?
Parrish: I draw the way I do because drawing any other way feels wrong
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The Lie and How We Told It Interior Art by Tommi Parrish
Paste: Talk to me about how you make a page, from start to finish, complete with what materials you use. How long does it take?
Parrish: Each page takes from a day to three days to paint, usually one to draw and from a few days to a few months to write. I use gouache paint and nice thick paper to accommodate for a bunch of watery paint layers.
Paste: Do you know Simon Hanselmann (who provided a blurb for the back of your new book)? I feel like y’all would have a lot to talk about.
Parrish: The comics scene in Melbourne is pretty isolated so people hang out. Simon and Grant (html flowers) lived a few blocks away from me at Grant’s mums house. Me and Grant dated for one second one-million years ago and from there the three of us would draw together and get drunk together. I’m mostly sober now because I find to hard to moderate, but I would get wasted with them and stumble home drunk the next day. We’re grown-up kids who have wobbly mental health, have never not been broke, just want to make comics all the time and hate jobs. So there’s always been a solidarity there.
Paste: How did you decide on that big painting for the cover (which I assume is set in the same bar that some of the story takes place in)? It’s super gorgeous, with all that pattern, but it’s also very different from the interior pages in that way.
Parrish: I just drew that for the inside pages, but my friends kept saying how much they liked it so it turned into the front and back cover.
Paste: One artistic approach that I see a lot in your work is a kind of fascination with translucence and opacity, with things being one when they should be the other. What do you think is interesting about that?
Parrish: Brecht Evens and Eleanor Davis do transparency really well. I mostly just feel like the visible layers give an image this beautiful depth and color that nothing else does. It’s been really fun learning how to use paint. I mean, I’m still learning, but I’m always trying to stretch and bend what it can do.
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The Lie and How We Told It Interior Art by Tommi Parrish
Paste: Who are some of your non-comics artistic influences? Like, Fernando Botero maybe? What about comics influences?
Parrish: I love Ray Johnson’s collages, Van Gogh’s sketched landscapes and David Hockney’s colors. I’ve been looking at Evens’ painting for a while now, and I think Anna Haifisch’s dry humor is actually perfect and Lale Westwood’s movement is incredible.
Paste: Hockney is the best. I got to interview Evens and he also talked a lot about Hockney and what a genius he is. Those colors just kind of sweep you away. Do you spend a lot of time in museums or galleries?
Parrish: Hmmm, not really anymore. I mean I like lots of different types of art, but museums are expensive and annoying to get to and visiting them would cut into my work day. I go to galleries if a friend’s having a show, but mostly I look at books in libraries. Evens is sick, I want to meet him some time.
Paste: Not only Evens’ visual style but the way his characters kind of meander through these beautifully worked out scenes definitely reminds me of your work. How conscious are you of your physical environment on a day-to-day basis? Are you a bit of a wanderer? Or do you just get bored drawing stuff set in the same place over and over.
Parrish: I suppose I wander a little. Usually wherever I’m drawing becomes my whole world for a few months to a year or so. I get itchy as hell when I don’t travel, which luckily I do for art a bunch of times a year now. I try to keep my eyes open regardless of whether I’m barely leaving the house or I’m in a new city sleeping on couches and seeing new things. The world is full of patterns and colors that are perfect to paint.
But yeah, for years and years now my life has had a pretty similar routine only occasionally in different places: I sit and I draw and I sleep.
Paste: Your author bio says you live in a house with two dogs, two cats and six other humans. Do you also work in the same house? How do you hear yourself think?
Parrish: Because I can’t do double rent I don’t have a separate studio. I go to the library and cafes pretty often when I need space and quiet. The place is a collective show space so it’s pretty chaotic and there’s no privacy really. It was a lot a lot when I first moved in. I felt kind of shell shocked by the constant noise and people, but it feels good now. I don’t want to be the kind of artist who isolates. I want a life that’s full of people and movement, even if it’s exhausting, even if I get less work done now. It feels worth it, but yes, it’s fucking exhausting for sure.
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The Lie and How We Told It Interior Art by Tommi Parrish
Paste: Which took longer in this book, the painted pages or the ones in pen and ink, which feel a lot more tightly controlled?
Parrish: The painted pages took waaaaayyyy longer.
Paste: Do you thumbnail out your stuff ahead of time? How much revising do you do?
Parrish: I write and rewrite and thumbnail everything. I struggle with writing a whole script from start to finish if it’s longer, like I need to switch from writing to drawing to painting to stay engaged with the process. I feel like it makes my stories feel inconsistent and writing the whole story before I start drawing is something I want to work on getting better at.
Paste: The kind of central event of The Lie consists of it’s protagonist finding a comic book in the bushes. Was that inspired by personal experience? What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever found on the street?
Parrish: That idea mostly came from a section in this horrible jock comic called Watchmen. It also stemmed from and a bunch of conversations I had with my friend Marc about bookmaking while we were on a long train ride.
When I was a kid I found a thick silver-ish ring on the ground and I convinced myself that it was magic. I wore it on my thumb untill I had filled out enough to put it on different fingers without it falling off. I eventually put it on a chain and then even later it was one of the few things I brought to Canada. I don’t think it’s magic any more but it’s still cool.
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FEATURES
“That’s Just What My Life Looks Like”: A Tommi Parrish Interview
BY RACHEL DAVIES FEB 12, 2018
Tommi Parrish seems to have an unparalleled propensity for depicting the way that we relate to one another. They do so not by passing judgment, or by having their characters make grand statements, but by documenting minute gestures with more care than other artists. This unique ability was demonstrated in their first book, Perfect Hair, which was published by 2dcloud in 2017, but is only stronger in their second, The Lie and How We Told It. In this book, Parrish lends their colorful, expressive style to the story of Cleary and Tim, two friends not quite rekindling an old friendship, but becoming up to date with the past year's events in each other’s lives in the span of an afternoon. Despite being so adamantly colorful, everything about Parrish’s work is subtle in a way that does not bore as a reader, but intrigue.
The real thrill in reading, and rereading, and rereading The Lie and How We Told It is in One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand, a book that Cleary finds under a tree in the story, but which we stumble upon in the middle of The Lie. One Step Inside is printed on different paper, and is entirely black and white, starkly setting itself apart from the rest of the book.The main narrative of The Lie, the friendship between Tim and Cleary, relies almost solely on the dialogue, so it’s exciting when Parrish picks up internal dialogue again in One Step Inside. Interior lines like, “I suddenly realize I’m arching my back in the way TV has taught me men like,” come as a surprise when they find themselves in the middle of The Lie, where we’re mostly left to come to our own conclusions about the way these people are affecting each other.
Upon the release of The Lie and How We Told It, TCJ talks to Tommi Parrish about bookmaking, working at Outback Steakhouse, and the Australian comics scene.
Rachel Davies: So you’re from Australia, you live in Canada now, and I know you’ve done a residency in Argentina. In what way does traveling affect or inform your work?
Tommi Parrish: I normally really love it. I suppose, just the way my life looks, I like work from home ‘cause I can’t really afford to rent, and so there are many days where I don’t leave the house. I just work from home, so my life is really, really, really sedentary. It gets like a little intense, how sedentary it is, sometimes. So traveling really helps me, it really feeds me in a way that I need. I feel awake when I travel, and I’m in just kind of quiet work zone when I’m at home.
What brought you to Montreal?
My friend moved here. A really, really close friend of mine, and I was really upset that she moved away, and I was coming to Canada, and North America [trying to tour Perfect Hair, which I did with 2dcloud]. It’s pretty easy when you’re under thirty, so I thought I might as well just try to apply for a two-year visa. I applied, and I got it, so I just stayed.
Have you lived anywhere long-term other than Australia, Argentina, and Canada?
I mean, I was only in Argentina for a second. I was only there for a few months. I lived in New York for a year when I was twenty. I didn’t do the whole visa thing, I just came here for a holiday because I wanted to be an artist, and I thought artists live in New York, and I just stayed. I overstayed my visa for like a year, and it was pretty bad. I’m 28 now, and so I’ve gone through this whole kind of intense rigamarole to be able to get let back into the States and tour it. Yeah, I was fully deported, and everything. I was put in jail, the whole thing.
Oh my God. That’s so scary.
Yeah, I know. It was so dumb. Really. I was at this point where the border cop was like, “What did you think would happen?” and I was like, “I don’t know.” [laughs]
Yeah, I have a bunch of friends in the States, and I can’t really move there without getting a job, and I remember one of the first times I went to hang out, I had googled, “Canadian just stays in the US what happens,” and I didn’t end up seeing that through.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. Like I said, I was 20, and I had a bunch of really great ideas. Some were horrible. I was working at the Outback Steakhouse in New York, so there were a bunch of tourists there who had stayed for a bunch of time, and they gave me this idea that if I destroyed my passport, there’d be no record of me having overstayed. So I destroyed my passport, like I put my passport in the dryer. You know, obviously then I had to get a new passport.
Oh my God, I’m way too much of a coward to ever do something like that.
I don’t know, there was this whole thing when I was younger, I just didn’t experience a whole bunch of consequences to my actions, and now that I’m a bit older, I’m kind of experiencing those consequences now. Which is fine. I don’t know, it’s cool that it took this long to catch up with me. I feel pretty grateful for that, I had a bunch of years of living in a pretend world.
How did you get a job at Outback Steakhouse? Did you not have to give a social security number?
No. It was like, you know, like America’s so fucked that there are so many places that just pay you in tips, so basically you’re just working there for free. But, yeah, I didn’t have a working visa. Then I guess I came back, and like stayed for a bunch of years, and went to uni, and then moved here when I was 26 or something.
What exactly did you study in university? I know that you also work in sculpture sometimes.
Yeah, I studied fine art. I studied design when I was 19, but I only did that for a year. It was too boring.
Did you start working in comics in Australia, and when you were in university?
No, it was definitely before university. Art school, it seems like things are changing now, but art school really, really hates it when you make comics. I don’t know, there was no––like it’s fine, the only way to really have a job in art is if you’re a teacher, unless you somehow win the destiny lottery, and actually live off your art. So they were trying to produce academics to be teachers. I was making comics in secret, and making fine art for school.
Now that you live in Canada, do you see a big difference between the Canadian, or North American, comics scene, and the one in Australia?
Yeah, a massive difference. There’s less opportunity [in Australia]. There’s a huge difference in attitude. I don’t know, there’s something very validating about being close to a bunch of other people where making comics is their whole entire life, whereas I didn’t really know many people, at all, in Australia [who worked exclusively on comics]. I knew a lot of writers ‘cause I worked at a magazine for a bunch of time, but in terms of people who spend all their time making comics, who wanted comics to be their career, there were three people maybe. I don’t know, that sucks.
Are there many festivals there?
Not really, no. Nothing like the festivals in North America. I guess just because I don’t know, there’s like less people, and with the amount of people, there are fewer schools that are teaching it, and so there are fewer new people who are starting to make comics, and starting to take them really seriously.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But it’s starting, it’s definitely starting to take off. There’s a zine fair called the Festival of the Photocopier which I really love. It’s connected to this kind of community zine-making space that I’ve been going to since I was a teenager, and they do this huge zine fair that’s getting bigger and bigger. It’s very much about zine culture––not comics and art books.
I know that you had some comics in the Art Gallery of Western Australia. How did that come about?
Oh, yeah, that was wild. They did a huge show called Comic Tragics, and like me and Ron Regé, and I was asked to be a part of it when the curator didn’t even know that I was Australian. It was pretty cool, I was the only Australian that was a part of it, which I think says a bit about what comics in Australia are like. Ron Regé got flown over, I got flown over, and Ron spent two weeks there, because he spent a week doing a mural as well. The two of us spent a week there being put up in a hotel doing like media stuff. It was wild, it was really cool.
Wow, that’s so sick.
Yeah, I thought it was a joke when I was asked to do it actually. I was like, “That’s a really mean joke. Why would you ask me to do that?”
So a lot of your work, like the pieces used in that show, and a lot of your older work on Tumblr, seem to revolve around a specific idea, like the idea of doubt, or the “I was just trying to be alive” one about an anxiety attack. Do you feel yourself moving consciously toward more narrative storytelling comics, or was that just incidental?
Yeah, I think I’m just trying to make more interesting stuff. I think also my life might be a little bigger than it was before. I’m just more interested in talking about other people’s stories, than like constantly writing about feeling sad. I think it’s totally just a [product of] maturing as a writer. I was starting to feel frustrated with what my work was looking like––I mean I’m still frustrated with my work, but I was starting to feel frustrated with constantly making the same thing. That’s how it felt, anyway.
I wanted to ask you about writing The Lie and How We Told It because what I liked about it a lot was that there was a lot of tension in figuring out how these people knew each other, and trying to figure out their relationship. That’s part of what made it exciting to read. I was wondering if you separately outlined their relationship, or if you were figuring it out as you were making it?
Well, the relationship was my best friend in high school, and I loved him a lot. We really were each other’s allies for a long time, but he was, I don’t know, really frustrating, and a huge mess, and you know, just kind of an avoidant dude, and an addict. It got, I guess ‘cause of a whole bunch of reasons, we drifted apart. It just got too hard. Also, I was always overseas. Basically I had a conversation with him on the phone because every couple years we try to reconnect, and it’s always awkward. Every time it’s shocking. I had a conversation with him on the phone, and it turned out that he was sleeping with my boyfriend at the time, for a bunch of the time that we were together. It was this huge revelation, and I was really angry and upset ‘cause it felt like a betrayal. Yeah, I kind of wanted to write something about it, but I wanted to write something about it in a way that wasn’t like, “Oh my God, and it was gay the whole time!” I didn’t want that to be the punchline because that’s so boring. I wanted to somehow write about this person who I loved so much, who is so frustrating. That’s kind of where the story started, even if that lynchpin idea never ended up in there.
That makes sense. That’s something that I really like about your work. Like a lot of people are like, “oh, comics have such great representation,” but with your work it seems like it’s not trying to be that way, it just is, so that makes sense with what you’re saying about telling the story, but not trying to just be like, “It was gay the whole time.” [laughs]
Surprise! Reveal! [laughs] Yeah, but that’s just how it is, right? It’s just people living their lives, trying to work it out, and fucking it up sometimes, and not fucking it up other times. They’re the stories that I find really interesting because they make up everything.
Also, just even visually, I feel like sometimes when I’m starting one of your stories, I can’t quite tell––like I was saying the story’s ambiguous, but I feel like there’s a lot of gender ambiguity until you read pronouns, which is also exciting to see. I was wondering if that’s something you're doing consciously, like not using any codes, or anything.
I think that’s just what my life looks like. It feels stressful deciding what––it feels stressful unnecessarily gendering the character. I don’t know, it’s just happening right now, and I haven’t really thought about it enough to have a really succinct answer for it. It just feels right.
No, totally. I think it makes a lot of sense, and that it is often more conscious to try to like gender people visually, than not, and you’re someone who’s not doing it, whereas it seems like most artists are trying to consciously gender characters in the way that they draw them.
Well, I feel like that’s also reflective of their lives, right? I feel like often the characters that you write, and the stories that you write, are a pretty direct reflection of what kind of person you are.
I thought that it was so exciting to see that this book had a book within the book, and the found book––cause she does find that book under the plant, right?
Yeah, and then she’s leave it on the train!
I thought that was so cool. I read this Eileen Myles essay about found books, and I have experiences with found books. Anyway, do you have like any particular experiences with finding a book that feels like it fits into your life?
Hmmm, I think I potentially just put that in ‘cause I couldn’t work out how to weave that into the story, or maybe I just liked that it was connected, but not connected. The tone of it was connected to the overall story, but in terms of the actual dynamic of the characters, it had nothing to do with them like moving through that day. I’m not sure. I think it’s a really cool gimmick, and not just a gimmick, but Olivier Schrauwen does it really well. It’s kind of a trick to ensure people are paying attention. You read a comic, or you read whatever book, and you kind of race through it, but if it’s cut up into sections, it’s sort of like a slap in the face to pay attention. Olivier Schrauwen does a similar thing, his comics are extraordinary, and he goes through a bit of the story, and then he’s like, “Put the book down for a week,” and you do that. Just cool tricks to help the reader stay focused.
Yeah! I also found that whenever I talk to comic artists a big thing people talk about it how with comics you’re spending so much more time making it than people are gonna spend reading it, and with this book especially I found that with that in the middle of it it makes it so much more meaningful to reread. You’re tricking the reader to spend more time with the work again and again. It was really cool because I’ve never seen such a direct way of counteracting that.
Yeah, I don’t know, I love bookmaking so much, and I feel like part of being an artist is working out, you know, making what you want to make, what feels meaningful, but also always trying to think about what will keep people engaged. I feel like if a person doesn’t connect to an artwork, it’s an artist’s fault, it’s not the audiences fault.
Totally. On that note about bookmaking, I was so shocked when I first got The Lie in the mail because of its size ‘cause Perfect Hair is almost like a pocket book, or something you can easily slip into a bag. I wanted to know if when you’re making the drawings, you’re thinking about how it’s going to look physically.
I try to! It’s a really important part of how the story feels, how the object feels in your hand. Ideally I’d like it all to be one of the same. I don’t know if everyone’s the same with this, but it really affects the way that I feel about a piece of writing, if I feel like the vehicle for it is clunky and ugly. I don’t know, making something that’s strange and beautiful, and also trying to make the contents of the book pretty, but also engaging. I want it to all be like… all of it as an object, I guess. I don’t know, I was really unhappy with how Perfect Hair looked.
I really like it!
It was a fun book.
I really like, I don’t know the technical term, but how it has the reflective title.
The spot gloss! It’s all about the spot gloss.
But this book is so beautiful too, I love the different paper stock for the book inside the book. They’re both great. Are you working on any other books right now?
Yeah, I’m just starting to work on another longer story. I was like pretty burnt out after the Fanta book. I kinda just decided that I wanted to work on my writing, and like just work on a bunch of small things, but not rush the process of putting another big thing out. I just finished the Perfectly Acceptable book, and I’m working on a mini at the moment. That’s kinda it, it’s amazing.
The Lie and How We Told It
Publishers Weekly. 265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Lie and How We Told It
Tommi Parrish. Fantagraphics, $19.99 (130p)
ISBN 978-1-68396-067-6
In lovingly painted pages of comics art, with black and white intermissions, Australian cartoonist Parrish tells a deceptively simple story of friends grown apart, who run into one another by chance and spend an evening catching up. Cleary and Tim bump into each other at a grocery check-out and reconnect. Over the course of the evening, as much is concealed as is revealed, but what is left at the end is the stark understanding that, at the threshold of adulthood, one person has made emotionally honest choices and the other struggles with his sexuality and with his own heart. Interwoven with this gorgeously colored tale is another, more austere story, an illustrated novella drawn in satisfyingly precise black line, attributed to "Blumf Mcqueen" and dedicated to "pure, unconditional, everlasting love." This orchestration and interplay of refined visual language is never overworked. Lovers of fine art comics will delight in this worthy discovery. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lie and How We Told It." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=854cb1dd. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839808
The Lie and How We Told It
Tommi Parrish
Fantagraphics Books
$25, 90 pages
BUY IT NOW
REVIEWED BY LEONARD PIERCE FEB 5, 2018
Here is a great truth about our age of gender fluidity, queer visibility, and increasingly ductile sexual identities: regardless of our sexual self-identification, we are all the same. An observation so banal as to be ridiculous, perhaps, but considered not as a platitude, but as a reminder of the universality of the human heart’s interior, it can be seen as both a threat and a salvation. We may not all experience emotions in the same context or conditions, but we tend to express them in identical ways; this is what makes art that is built around our difficulties in articulating the realities of our love and desire both universally resonant at its best and frighteningly banal at its worst.
There’s a little bit of both in The Lie and How We Told It, a gorgeous new graphic novel from Australian comics artist Tommi Parrish. It’s a simple narrative without much flourish: Cleary and Tim are old school friends who have been out of touch for a number of years. After a chance meeting in a grocery store, they have a night out to catch up (though neither of them are exactly keen to do so), and through the course of their conversations, they encourage one another, and themselves, to face up to some facts about their emotional states and relationship choices. It’s not much more than that, though it tries to be; it clearly wants to be something about the Way We Live Now, and on occasion it succeeds. There are moments of honesty and deceit that are telling in the way the two young people dart and slide around the truth of what they’re saying to each other. But there is a razor’s breadth between an author showing us characters who have trouble communicating and a text failing to communicate with the reader, and The Lie doesn’t always land on the right side of that distance.
The Lie and How We Told It draws its name from a song by Yo La Tengo, and the comparisons kept nagging at me while reading the book: with that particular band, you were always taking a chance whether, in performance, you would get them at the height of their expressive powers or a night of feedback-drenched noise that was only enjoyable to them. This was especially pronounced by the 2000s, when they settled into a comfortable haze of soundtrack albums and cover songs, some of them made for the film genre suitably known as mumblecore. For those who don’t remember that particular eructation of American cinema, it mostly revolved around middle-class white people who had a very difficult time making their feelings known to one another, to the detriment of everyone else around them. Despite it being a decidedly acquired taste, the genre has been oddly persistent and has lately turned up in quantity on second-tier television networks. Reading through The Lie, it’s almost impossible not to notice its deeply 2000s-ish feel, and while it dresses up its relationships in the complexities of a genderqueer woman and a man in deep denial about his own conflicted sexuality, it’s still that same old story of people who spend all their time not being able to say what’s on their minds.
Still, there’s a reason we still talk about this stuff. Yo La Tengo, for all their self-indulgence, can still put a bullet between your ears when they’re on their game. The mumblecore directors could sometimes coax a brilliant performance or a surprising observation about human nature out of their claptrap semi-realism. And The Lie and How We Told It, as much as it is satisfied leaving us in the company of two people who barely know themselves, does so with an aesthetic brilliance that commands our attention in a way its characters cannot. It’s one of the most strikingly executed books I’ve seen in years, and Parrish’s talents are impossible to ignore. It’s pretty annoying that we still have to remind people that comics are a visual medium, but here, the distinction is as vital as it is needed. Wherever there is weakness or uncertainty in the text, it is bolstered by beauty and boldness in the art, and the result is a book that reads better than it’s written.
Parrish uses two distinct and complementary styles here. Their normal mode is a colorful painted look that’s halfway between graffiti and street art; in its dimensions, perspective, and use of color, it’s highly reminiscent of the work of Fernando Botero. The small heads, oversized bodies, and large, expressive hands create a sense of emotional depth and physical movement that drives the story along when the dialogue starts to flag. The use of painted color is absolutely lovely, especially in indoor scenes where the characters are backgrounded into their surroundings, as if they are becoming part of a mural we read as it goes. Even more effective is the second style, a finely drawn and precisely delineated ink drawing approach that is every bit as stark and intense as Parrish’s paintwork is loose and inviting. This style appears in One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand, a book-within-the-book by one “Blumf McQueen” that Cleary finds in a bush. It tells its own story of desire curdling into contempt and emotion robbed of expression that both mirrors and exacerbates the main narrative, and the choice to illustrate it in this way is Parrish’s surest and most confident move. It throws their entire dynamic into relief in a way the story itself could not hope to do.
One Step Inside is, according to its introduction, “dedicated to pure, unconditional, everlasting love”, an irony sharper than the rest of the book is allowed to express. The choice to break the book into sections in this way it its salvation; if it were simply one or the other, it would be entirely different and far less successful. The tedium and shapelessness of The Lie and How We Told It would be too much to take on its own, and the severity and bluntness of One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand would probably be too difficult to sustain in a full-length work. But Parrish’s skillful offsetting of the two is what proves the book’s salvation and establishes them as a talent to remember. “These things are always funny until they’re not,” says the nameless protagonist of One Step Inside; the same can be said for tragedy, and that’s what the book is about. Our lives are always tragic except when they aren’t, and the story’s final panel proves that it’s a circular lesson that can and will repeated throughout infinite lives, as universal and ordinary as love itself.
Gorgeous Colors and Fraught Feelings Spill Over In 'The Lie'
January 24, 20188:28 AM ET
ETELKA LEHOCZKY
The Lie and How We Told It
The Lie and How We Told It
by Tommi Parrish
Hardcover, 90 purchase
Egoism and humility pulse like alternating current throughout Tommi Parrish's graphic novel The Lie and How We Told It — which isn't surprising. Creators who draw slice-of-life comics inevitably bounce between the highs and lows of artistic self-regard. On the one hand, they take on material that's small in scope and thoroughly familiar: emotions we've all felt before. On the other hand, they've got the chutzpah to try and make us experience those feelings in a whole new way.
Like Eleanor Davis in a sober mood or Nick Drnaso with the brakes on, Parrish spotlights brief moments, ignorable and usually ignored, in which humans lacerate each other invisibly. The story of The Lie would fit onto two inches of newsprint: Old friends, now estranged, run into each other and spend a couple of meandering hours drinking and catching up. That's it. There's a low-key denouement, but the book certainly doesn't build up to a cry of private agony, like Parrish's 2016 effort, Perfect Hair. At one point the protagonist, Cleary, even says, "That's it? That's the whole story?"
And yet, by the end of this rambling and inconsequential conversation, Cleary's tender heart is as exposed as if she'd screamed about it. (Exposed to us, that is. As is common in this kind of story, the one who wounded her departs the tale more-or-less as clueless as ever.)
Parrish handles the characters' voices deftly, but The Lie might have felt slight if not for a weighty slap of capital-S Style. The book is a big hardcover with the front cover and endpapers bedecked with kaleidoscopic crowd scenes in full color, which continues throughout much of the interior. Parrish employs standard panel structure, but in every other way departs from the usual, combining a wide range of hues, unexpected tricks with opacity and perspective and dense, shaggy shading. The characters are ever-shifting zones of pigment. Heads and hands, in particular, are never stable — the former might shrink to the size of golf balls, while the latter become huge, clumsy paws.
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Often these figures lack all but the most rudimentary expressions, underlining Parrish's implicit contention that the most important stuff is on the inside. At one point, a few word balloons show what the people "disinterested[ly] mingling" in a crowded bar are talking about: "Networking ... money ... cats." But that doesn't mean these people are free from feeling. It's just that, as Parrish observed in Perfect Hair, "the noise of being alive is deafening sometimes."
It's ironic, then, that all the color and visual effects should feel a bit overwhelming. Things get quieter in a book-within-the-book, printed in black and white on uncoated buff paper interspersed with the color sections. In the main story, Cleary finds this small volume under a bush. Called "One Step Inside Doesn't Mean You Understand," it tells of a relationship between an exotic dancer and one of her clients. Since it's a graphic novel too, it seems to allow Parrish to communicate directly with Cleary. The message? Everyone's alone, but only some realize it. "I take my long brown wig off and show him my shaved head," the dancer writes. "This gesture of simulated vulnerability usually gets me good tips."
Parrish handles the characters' voices deftly, but 'The Lie' might have felt slight if not for a weighty slap of capital-S Style.
The clear-line style of "One Step Inside" shows Parrish's wonderful versatility. Stripped down to their outlines, the shapes are both cool and fleshy, like apples and pears in a still life, and the juxtaposition of sharp geometric spaces with the curving lines of the figures within feels somehow brutal. "One Step Inside" looks sparse in comparison to all the color and movement in the main story, but paradoxically, it packs more of a punch.
Once she's read "One Step Inside," Cleary leaves the book behind on the train. It's clear that she's not discarding it, but allowing it to be discovered by some new stranger. The Lie as a whole begs to be passed on in the same way. Its themes may appear simple, but its emotions linger — even if we've felt them before.
Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Salon.com. She tweets at @EtelkaL.
Competing narratives paint a tale of complex bodies in The Lie And How We Told It
Shea Hennum
1/30/18 10:00amFiled to: COMICS PANEL
1
1
In comics, bodies can contort and shift and slide in every way imaginable—changing in size, proportion, color, or detail, from panel to panel, without losing a sense of continuity between them. Gender and sexuality also communicate something to others that changes based on context. In comics, that context can change from panel to panel: The character is (quite literally) remade, again and again, every time the reader moves their eyes. Each time, the body is a little different. The imprecise and uncanny process of remaking the figure serves as the clearest representation for the way that bodies change in real life. This makes the medium especially well suited to representing the body. Tommi Parrish, in their recent graphic novel, The Lie And How We Told It (Fantagraphics Books), evidences as much.
COMICS
Lead
A-
The Lie And How We Told It
AUTHOR
Tommi Parrish
PUBLISHER
Fantagraphics Books
Structured as a story and a story within that story, the book is divided into two parts. The first concerns a brief encounter between two characters, Cleary and Tim. Tim, we are to assume, is a cis-man, and he identifies as straight. Cleary is assumed to be a cis-woman who identifies as bisexual. The two were friends when they were younger, and as they catch up, they experience the mutual sadness that accompanies trying to relive old friendships. They exchange stories of love and lust, and Tim makes a revelation about his own sexuality. Parrish writes it as awkward and fumbling, with Tim’s explanations of events butting up against the terms he prefers to think of himself in. There is a bittersweet quality to the whole thing, and it feels at once true to life and disheartening.
Parrish illustrates these scenes in a lush painterly aesthetic, and they feel soft as a result. The linework is simple and clean, but the characters’ bodies move haphazardly from moment to moment: masses push their lumpy way around characters’ extremities, as though through a squishy tube of liquid. Parrish’s drawings here feel intuitive and affecting, contrasting with the book’s second part, a metafictional comic called “One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand,” which Cleary reads throughout. Here, The Lie And How We Told It’s paper changes, becoming stiff and rough. Parrish draws in a precise, clean style—everything consistent, every object the same from panel to panel. The pages are also produced in a shadow-heavy black-and-white.
Whereas the main book itself feels fluid, dynamic, and intuitive, the metafictional one is stark, stiff, and imposing. The two fictions are pitted against one another as aesthetic opposites, while their narratives mirror one another. “One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand” concerns a stripper and their pitiable relationship with a customer. Unlike the main book, that story is flatter and sapped of affect. It’s colder, but without sacrificing the complex interrogation of bodies, their relations to others, and their relations to themselves. Like the main book, the metafiction plays with gender, sexuality, desire, and pleasure, but it does so through a different—no, a competing aesthetic mode.
The result is something uneasy and abrasive, something cold and warm, something worth admiring for its imperfections as well as its ecstasies.
Tommi Parrish’s The Lie and How We Told It Explores Queer Desire, Masculinity, and the Fading of a Friendship
Words by
Madeleine Morley
Published on
January 22nd, 2018
01
After a chance encounter at the supermarket, two former friends attempt to salvage their deteriorating friendship. What follows is a drawn-out and somewhat awkward evening of booze, fragmented memories, and an impending sense of disappointment. The plot of The Lie and How We Told It is simple, yet with each hand-painted panel, author Tommi Parrish communicates an intense atmosphere and delves thoughtfully into the themes of queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the fading of past relationships.
Based in Melborne, Australia, Parrish’s illustration work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines to date, and in the form of small zines and comics. The Lie and How We Told It is their first graphic novel, released by Fantagraphics this January.
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Tommi Parrish, The Lie and How We Told It, 2018.
One of the most intriguing and striking elements of the book is Parrish’s formalized play: rapid experiments with paint, texture, density, and the thickness of lines make up the majority of the spreads. The way that Parrish depicts bodies is particularly interesting to observe: at times, small heads without faces peep out from long, cumbersome shoulders and arms, evoking awkwardness—that feeling that your body is too present. Then, when the reader discovers more about a character, their face is depicted with intense detail, heads swelling to fill an entire panel. At other times, the red hair on top of one protagonist becomes nothing other than a sketched outline, or their hair disappears altogether, leaving a smooth bald splodge of paint in its place. This illustrative splintering enacts the way that a person can fade in and out of memory; how a shared moment can make someone clear and seem very close, only for them to vanish again a second later as if never there in the first place.
Parrish uses a similar technique for speech bubbles, too. Text might suddenly lack a white background during a conversation, designating a lie, or a feeling of uncertainty, or a fissure in confidence. The red-haired friend who is openly queer remarks, “I didn’t say you were [gay]” when the two protagonists sit at a bar. The other responds, “Good because I’m not.” A lack of a confident white box to encase this response is as loaded as a voice cracking.
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Tommi Parrish, The Lie and How We Told It, 2018.
In Parrish’s world, the interior self and external surrounding bleed into one another a little; the density of a line, or the texture making up a body comes to represent emotion. This technique makes for a sympathetic and raw graphic novel, and it keeps the reader on their toes.
While half of the work is created using this thick, continually morphing paint technique, a second part of it—emphasized by a change in paper stock—is rendered entirely with thin black ink on white paper. The lines of this section don’t dance or waver but keep perfectly still instead. This second narrative belongs to a novel that one of the characters finds in a bush—a classic case of a book within a book—and it appears halfway through the main story. The zine-like meta-novel recounts the tale of a non-gender conforming person hooking up with a rugged truck driver, and musing on the way they suddenly conform to heteronormative gender roles—“I suddenly realize I’m arching my back in the way TV has taught me men like” they write in one panel. The solidness of the drawn lines evoke certainty: it’s as if the reader of this book—the red-haired protagonist who found it as they sit on the street—feels more at home reading the novel than in the fragmented company of their former friend.
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The Lie and How We Told It, Tommi Parrish.
Parrish’s story weaves between this second narrative and the central tale. It’s an interplay that speaks to the way that fiction—whether a comic or a novel more generally—can feel as solid and affirming as a close friendship can at times. Parrish’s ode to a fading relationship, but also in a way to a new one, considers how we tell lies to ourselves about our past, our sexuality, and our sense of self. It also considers how we sometimes detangle these lies, fashioning our selves and affirming our identities by reading and relating to other people’s lies and how they tell them, write about them, or even draw them in fiction.
Perfect Hair
Tommi Parrish
2dcloud
$17, 72 pages
BUY IT NOW
REVIEWED BY RJ CASEY DEC 1, 2016
coverYou’re at a party and someone is telling you all about their new job, new significant other, new something. You’re trying to listen, but all you can concentrate on is making eye contact, like you’ve been taught. Don’t look over their shoulder or at their moist mouth. You try staring at the left eye. Then the right. It’s not possible to split focus on both eyes, is it? You start fixating more on the performative act of communication than the actual practice. That zone right there — where you’re half-listening and fraught and floating with self-consciousness — that’s the feeling Tommi Parrish explores in Perfect Hair: a book that may not make you happy to be alive, but sure will make you glad you’re a comic reader.
Perfect Hair is a collection of water-colored short stories full of anxious, marble-headed people trying to take one day, and one breath, at a time. The attention paid to characters’ uneasy inner lives make me think of another 2016 stand-out, Beverly by Nick Drnaso, but Perfect Hair is devoid of all of Beverly’s Midwestern hush-hush “aw shucks” niceties. Parrish transitions from someone crying in the bathroom of a sex club to someone else arguing about identity with their dying, hallucinating grandmother. The exaggerated barrel bodies of all these longing humans are also highlighted by Parrish’s page structures. At one point, Parrish depicts a character stripping off their skin and then slowly strolling into the white abyss of an empty page and disappearing. Parrish also deploys inset panels, which is always a risky move, especially in a young artist’s first book. But here, they are utilized to shake free minute expressions from the larger panel it sits atop of. When used commandingly and sparingly, like Parrish does here, those inset panels really have an effect not only on the pacing, but also the subtle details that make these stories so haunting. As a reader, you never quite get settled in, even when Parrish’s artwork does.
sample-1
There is a superb 4-pager in the middle of the book called “Generic Love Story”. We learn about “Figure #1” and “Figure #2” — their fears, their odd habits, their favorite bands — as they get closer to having sex. Parrish draws each figure with one black pupil and an indistinct long nose. When they kiss, a transparent blue tube connects one orbed head to the other. They are bald, naked, and genderless, which prevents you from relating to them, even as you learn more and more intimate details from the narrator. You don’t know if they are long-time lovers, or they just met a minute before Parrish opened the door to you. This all makes it pretty exhilarating and voyeuristic. The fact that it’s augmented by literally looking down on these two people from above makes the reader, along with the narrator, treat them like an impartial commonplace case study. I’ve never felt so connected to detachment.
sample-2
Lonesomeness, dread, selfhood — these are some of the main themes touched upon in the 72 pages of Perfect Hair. These topics are never easy to talk about or even comprehend, but Parrish fully realizes them and with surefooted confidence, doesn’t shy away from anything, delving deeper and deeper into distressing psyches. Pefect Hair, like many 2dcloud books, made me feel supremely uncomfortable, and that I’m grateful for.
Perfect Hair – Characters Struggle to Fit in Both the World and the Panels of Tommi Parrish’s 2dcloud Collection
by Tom Baker September 7, 2017
10
0
For people who have trouble fitting in, the issue is sometimes very literal. Social anxiety arises from, or exacerbates, a feeling of being physically incapable of comfortably occupying a space, of really feeling like they can’t fit in the world. People shrink into themselves, hands in pockets, hunched over as they ride the bus or walk the streets outside their home. That’s the case for the figures populating Tommi Parrish’s 2dcloud collection Perfect Hair. None of them quite look right. Which is not to say they are in keeping of the current “ugly” trend of indie comics, or the semi-related faux-naïve styles which are ten-a-penny.
The characters look instead as if they don’t fit into their ascribed settings, at times crouched as one does when entering a house with low ceilings, at times struggling to have their frame accommodated even by the comic panels they’re contained in. There is a strong sense of weight to the figures in Perfect Hair, each of them oversized with disproportionately tiny and totally round heads. Clothes hang shapeless and baggy over their large shapes. Moreover, they occupy not the two-dimensional planes of the gag strip format or the suggested three dimensions of a comic using vanishing points or layered film camera-style staging, but an isometric plane similar to 16-bit video games attempting to simulate 3D at a time it was technologically impossible.
Which is all to say the exterior lives of the characters in Perfect Hair are as off-kilter as the interiors. It’s a book full of that aforementioned social anxiety, angst and crises, physical and existential. Hemmed in, those heavy, constricted limbs look on the verge of a panic attack at any moment, bursting the claustrophobic confines in a violent freak-out, albeit in circumstances largely more figuratively and literally colourful than a soul-baring autobio book. Don’t worry though, there are some killer deadpan jokes involving inappropriate emoji usage as well.
In this collection of short comics, a woman flees an orgy in a sauna to quell a panic attack in the bathroom; another is chastised for dressing like a boy by their grandma, whom she’s visiting in hospital, and suffering from hallucinations of flowers and children; in the longest piece, a sex worker plays out a surprisingly domestic fantasy for a client where she pretends to be his wife. In telling these stories Parrish flits between ink, pencil, and watercolour (sometimes in the space of a single strip), the backgrounds getting blurred around the ages at times via use of the latter, whilst the outlines of the characters stay solid by virtue of the former. Things are in flux, never sure, except for the weight of the figures on the page.
Despite a tongue-in-cheek table of contents at the front promising “air, calm, anxiety, movement, safety” and “light (dappled)”, the cartooning itself is never so vaguely-defined. Whether in the more abstract and wordless illustrations of limp bodies and figures literally casting off their defining features to, say, the fully-painted final one-page strip where a person sits cross-legged with a sampler in front of their stuffed toys and plays a song “based around the misfortunes of desire,” recurring themes of loneliness, self-preservation and the complications of adulthood come through loud and clear.
Tommi Parrish (W/A) • 2dcloud, $16.95
Available to buy from the 2dcloud store online here