I can tell already that Robert Kirby’s new series, THREE, is going to get a lot of mileage out of its title. So many good things come in threes – like wishes and bears and the hot soccer triplets down the street whom I fervently know are 18 years old – or multiples of three – like a six pack (a three pack would look weird with a partnerless odd-ab-out) and… no, a six pack is the pinnacle of all things “six”, I’d say. And to begin his latest anthology venture (the sublime Boy Trouble book preceding), Robert and two other cartoonists – Eric Orner and Joey Alison Sayers – each offer up a story of a moment. Filed under “s[tuff] you can’t make up”, I’m tempted to say there is a semi-autobiographical revelation that comes from these moments. Whether by accident or design, there is a theme of “one” in each cartoonist’s work (yeah yeah yeah, it’s also issue number one) that has the ring of verisimilitude which I say can only come from personal experience. Like so:
Weekends Abroad by Eric Orner sets the bar high for every story in every issue including and following this one. Ostensibly a tale of what an American Jew working in Israel does on the weekends (cruise guys on the Internet, go to clubs, get laid), Weekends is a sad story. Not suicide levels of sadness by any means, but I feel for the nameless protagonist. And that is my point in a nutshell: can it get any lonelier for this cartoon stranger in a strange land who doesn’t speak Hebrew and who can’t find a decent guy to schtup than we readers not even knowing his name? I doubt it. There are moments of comfort, but the anonymous hero isn’t part of them – Markot games, Vox, finding the mysterious graffiti poet; he’s an observer. But, as with most things, there is grace in the end.
Joey Alison Sayers’ Number One is an odd piece, but it made me laugh. My six-year old nephew is going through his “bodily noises and functions are funny” stage, and, yes, my brother and I are encouraging it, not only because burps that scare birds out of trees are funny, but also because they’re natural and everyone does them (we’re trying to avoid any kind of shaming issues). Recently, the three of us were at Sara’s, a local beach-front hamburger “stand” which has my favorite ice cream in the world: soft-serve orange sherbet, when my brother belched unexpectedly, like, “Kronos eating his children too fast” belched. We all started laughing then realized a woman and her daughter sitting next to us were chuckling along. Scott was immediately embarrassed and apologized for interrupting their meal, though I have to give him credit for not stopping laughing. The mother said she looked over because she thought her son was nearby as he also doesn’t cover his burps in public. My nephew and I were amused by this, like, groundling amused. This is the charm of Number One: we’ve all been there.
Robert Kirby’s Freedom Flight rounds out the issue with another story about loneliness in the middle of a crowd. Drew has always wondered what it would be like to disappear, so when his boyfriend blows him off to work one afternoon, Drew leaves their apartment to meander around NYC. Kirby’s “one” could be seen as a companion piece to Orner’s, but much darker. In both stories, the protagonists are lost in the Big City, mostly because they’ve never been connected to it. But unlike Orner’s leading man, whose interior monologue connects his past to his present and to his future, Kirby’s Drew cycles around and around in a never-ending present, an existential “Groundhog’s Day”. And finally, there is no grace to save his Drew in the end: “one” simply becomes “none” (worse, “no one”). It’s a sucker punch in the gut, to be sure. It’s also honest and real.
Robert Kirby promises this is the first issue of an on-going series (a promise backed by the art samples for #2 on the final page) with contributions from old and new names in queer comics. It’d be a shame to not get on-board for this sure-to-be spectacular ride now. Order a copy of THREE here as soon as you reach the period at the end of this sentence.
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