Esther Pearl Watson is a gifted painter, illustrator, and comics artist. Her lovely and naïve paintings of life in a small Texas town are poetic and layered in meaning. But, to most of her fans, Watson is better known for her illustration and comics than she is for her sweet and imaginative paintings.
Once every couple months, I go to the newsstand to ecstatically paw at the new issue of BUST magazine, fresh on the shelves. The first thing I turn to, like clockwork, is Watson’s brilliant comic strip Unlovable—always on the back page. Unlovable, for the uninitiated, is a raw, smart, insanely funny piece of comic genius. The strip illustrates scenes from the life of a pre-teen girl in the mid-1980s named Tammy Pierce. Based on a diary that Watson found in a gas station bathroom, Unlovable expresses the purest, most cringe-worthy aspects of girlhood, social pressure, and the strange culture of a challenging decade.
Executed in wildly loose pen and ink, Watson’s comics are primitive with a style that recalls the school-day doodles of a 14-year old girl. Written in diary format, it’s fitting that the drawings look at home next to passages about crushes on teenage boys, getting stood up at the prom, eating pizza, and shopping at the mall. But Unlovable’s simplicity is deceiving: beneath the quirky and grotesque illustrations lurk the very real anxieties of young womanhood, humiliation, and American teenage vitriol.
Tammy is a fully-formed character. She is persistently unaware, idealistic, superficial, and sympathetic. Her concerns, while completely self-involved, are timeless and sincere. Her vivid, pathetic life is dominated by mascara, acne, leg warmers, and heartbreak. She is routinely teased, her best friend is always looking to borrow a dollar, she receives endless prank phone calls, and she has to bribe boys to hang out with her by buying them burgers and pizzas. Tammy’s life is uncomfortable, and more challenging than she realizes. But Watson’s incredible ability to produce a sympathetic character from grotesque illustrations is a testament to her talent.
Unlovable’s brilliance is its honesty. Watson does not gloss over difficult memories and situations, but confronts them directly, with a faux-naïve pen. Her drawings are scratchy, rotten high-caricatures, brutal and inspired.
The collected Unlovable strips were recently published in two glittery neon volumes in a slipcover case by Fantagraphics. Highly recommended.
