We Live As We Dream, Together: Sara Varon

Sweaterweather by Sara Varon. Alternative Comics, 2003. Out of Print.

Chicken and Cat by Varon. Scholastic Press, 2006. $16.99.

Robot Dreams by Varon. First Second, 2007. $16.95.

As an artist, Sara Varon specializes in funny animals: funky chickens, big-eared rabbits, wide-eyed birds. Here's a sample from her children's book Chicken and Cat:

I first came across her menagerie in Kramers Ergot #3, Rosetta, and other anthologies, and the contrast between her work and the other artists was sometimes jarring. Dave Cooper's drawing of a disgusting fast food tableau on the cover of the first volume of Rosetta, for instance, promised raunchy underground comics, and so I was thoroughly unprepared for--and thoroughly charmed by--Varon's wordless, gentle tale of a friendship between a snowman and a pointy-eared fox. (It felt a little like Carl Barks sneaking into an issue of Zap.) Since then I've followed her career through the three solo books she's published--Sweaterweather, Chicken and Cat, and Robot Dreams--and watched with pleasure as Varon lobbies, ever so quietly, for a change in the social order.

As a child growing up in Chicago, Varon loved Jay Ward cartoons and Donald Duck comics, and hated superheroes. As a grown-up, she discovered Goodbye, Chunky Rice during a visit to alt-store Quimby's, and went back and bought more graphic novels by artists like Brian Biggs, Ted Stearn and the Actus Tragicus collective. Varon studied animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and one of her cartoons, The Tongue (1997), showed at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin and received a "Director's Citation" from the prestigious Black Maria Film and Video Festival. In September 2000, Varon moved to New York to attend graduate school, and in 2002 earned an MFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts, where her favorite teacher was David Sandlin. Since then, her art has appeared in the New York Times, Nickelodeon magazine, and other high profile venues, although there remains an appealingly low-fi aspect to her career too: her website features mini comics, iron-on patches and silk-screened prints hand-made by Varon and available for sale.

Sweaterweather is an anthology of several of her short pieces, with covers decorated with silver-ink flecks of snow and interior pages that alternate between black-and-white and full-color. Chicken and Cat is, in Varon's words, "a lot like the comics in Sweaterweather, only formatted to be a kid's book." While the story is a lovely fable of a cat who decides to plant a garden in the city, it feels a bit slight because Varon told similar stories in less pages (and thus, with more bang-for-your-buck) in Sweaterweather. Robot Dreams, her first extended narrative, is in its own understated, accessible, funny-animal way, brutal. The plot revolves around a dog who builds a robot to be his friend, but things go wrong: the robot rusts and is unable to move after swimming at the beach, so the dog abandons his friend to the elements:

This all happens in the first few pages, and the rest of the graphic novel examines in unsparing detail the robot's pain even as the dog subliminates his guilt and gets on with his life. Robot Dreams is my favorite Varon book, partially because it displays that her mute, cartoony storytelling is versatile enough to deal with guilt, sorrow, and other profoundly serious subjects.

I love the deceptive simplicity of Varon's work for a partisan reason: for me, her comics represent a very sweet, very genial spit in the eye of the Dubya zeitgeist of fear and isolation. While our leaders torture in the name of freedom and crank up security alerts, we work alone in our cubicles all day and drive home to fall asleep in front of the TV. There's less of what sociologists call social capital, defined by L.J. Hanifan as "those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely, good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit." The definitive diagnosis of our shortage of social capital is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, where social scientist Robert Putnam spends 500+ pages proving that since the 1960s there's been a massive drop in political, civic and religious participation, and a growth in depression, mistrust and violence among individual citizens. What is Varon's response to all this? She tells stories about a turtle that shares its shell with a freezing bunny; about friends who shop and cook dinner together; and about a sheep and a turtle who build a public pool. A tiny flyer inviting "all species" to swim in the pool was inserted into every copy of Sweaterweather, and though a trip to the beach takes a disastrous turn in Robot Dreams, even that bleak story reaches a conclusion that exemplifies forgiveness and peace. All of Varon's stories remind us that the surest cure for fear and alienation is to hang out with friends, even when they break our heart.

Cynics might claim that Varon's funny animals are too lightweight to bear this interpretation, but lightness is precisely the point. In these heavy times, Varon's fables give us a healing, utopian vision of friendship and community that's lighter than air, and all species--and ages, and genders, and ethnicities--are welcome to share this vision. Everybody into the pool!

Comments

[Katherine F.]

Well said. The fact that it is possible to tell a story about loss and guilt and responsibility and solidarity using "funny animals" is one of the things that makes the comics medium so uniquely powerful. Robot Dreams is suitable for children, in that it's simply told and easy to understand, but it's not lightweight by any means. I don't want to say that it's dark, because it's ultimately optimistic, but both Dog and Robot go through a very long Dark Night of the Soul before reaching that final healing.

Something that occurred to me as I was writing Robot Dreams up for a list of recommendations is that none of the creatures have any explicit gender markers. They register as "male" only because we tend to assume that a neutrally-presented character is male unless otherwise specified. I don't know if this was deliberate on Varon's part or not; in any case, it makes her stories even more universal.

[Craig Fischer]

Katherine, your point about the lack of "explicit gender markers" is exactly right. It's an aspect of Varon's universality I hadn't considered.

And thanks for being too polite to point out that I make the "assuming a character is male" error in my post, when I write that "the dog abandons his friend to the elements." D'Oh!