Monica Gallagher's Bonnie N. Collide

Bonnie N. Collide

By Monica Gallagher

Normally I want to focus on Comic books rather than comic strips.  Bonnie N. Collide is the exception  that proves my reasons for this preference.   It is hard to develop and expand a sense of space and motion in three to five panel chunks.   You can see, here in her 72nd strip, Gallagher is challenging some of the spatially linear tendencies of the comic strip medium.  It takes some dramatic shifting angle on single character in motion to set up the punch-line.

http://eatyourlipstick.com/comic/bonnie-n-collide-72/

I think of comic strips as more like poetry that prose or more like punch-lines than comedies.  Bonnie N. Collide has been making serialized narrative out of stand alone vignettes.  Over that last five years of building narrative I have found myself more attached to Bonnie and the crew than Nona La Bette from Gallagher's long form comic Lipstick & Malice. 

Bonnie splits 90% of her time at here 9-5 job and 110% of her time at the roller derby.  She goes careening through her life, on and off the derby track, in skates and roller gear.  There is a great strip that explains the Roller Derby that you can skip to before digging into the story.

Bonnie's office is populated by the mundanely named Herb, Sherry, Barb, Greg, Carl and her love interest Stuart.  Her 'off' hours are spent in grueling practices and bruising competition with the more colorfully named Hattie Hellfire, Mimi Madness, Mouthpiece Molly, Fresh Meat Fran and Agro Amelia.  There is a playful unreality that normalizes Bonnie's office space derby antics.  The rest of the office is more or less normal with the exception of Herb who is a werewolf with a file cabinet of meat.  This is not a spoiler; you never see Herb with out hair sticking out of his button-down.  The magical unreality of it is that nobody in the office is reasonably disturbed by this.

I have come to count on Gallagher for strong well rounded female roles.  Bonnie takes her knocks; she has personal and competitive upsets but she always bounces back.  This is kinda rare in light of some of the genre and the medium expectation  of  a romantic comic strip.  Bonnie is a busy lady; she doesn't have time to sit around feeling sorry for herself.

http://eatyourlipstick.com/comic/bonnie-n-collide-61/

Bonnie N. Collide is a true romantic comedy.  Romance comics were briefly a possible alternative to the horror comics of the 1940's mainstream comics.  There has been more romance in the self published indie comics.  Both Jamie and Gilbert's long works in Love and Rockets as well the works of Terry Moore are explicitly romances.  I'd also like to give a shout out to Fade to Blue that I picked up the first trade paper back many years ago and am looking for issues 6-10.  There are also important romantic arches in Scott McCloud's Zot! and Wendy Pini's Elf Quest.  How excellently fitted the medium of comics are for romance is often overlooked.  To bring a romance to stage or screen you need not only a writer and director (Gallagher like all writer/illustrators wears both hats), you also need the skills of at least two actors and an x factor called chemistry.  Comics allow for the illustrator to do all of the acting. 

http://eatyourlipstick.com/comic/bonnie-n-collide-91/

What Gallagher shares with the Hernandez brothers, Moore, McCloud and Pini is a delight and mastery over expressive body language and dynamic facial expression.  Look at how expressive everyone is in strip #91.  She pulls this off with a minimum of lines.  Take the time to note how Gallagher refines her style over the course of this strip five year history.  It is a rewarding study in how much human emotion can be conveyed with a few elegant lines.

Part of the reason I felt I needed to review this strip is just how much enjoyment I have gotten out of Monica Gallagher's Bonnie N. Collide updates as well as her own blog.   You can follow these for free but the hand made Bonnie and Lipstick & Malice collections are pretty cool.  You can pick them up from her at her on-line store, as well as her auto-bio mini comics.  I still have to read Middle School and Go For The Eyes but her other mini comics have been awesome.  She had some great web content on her old web-site especially her Relentless Buzzing.  She should be uploading it at some point and you can keep eye on her page here.

The inspiration for my Blog came from Indie Spinner Rack and the way Charlito and Mister Phil created a community to encourage and celebrate indie comics.  The motivation that keeps me posting with some regularity is the example and advice that Liz Prince and Monica Gallagher shared at the Women of Webcomics panel discussion Staple! 2012 and in their regular posts.  You can meet Monica at Baltimore Comic-Con September 8-9 and at Emerald City Comic Con March 1-3 (which means we will miss her this year in Austin).