One Coin Reads 7: Monsters, by Ken Dahl

Monsters, by Ken Dahl

2009

I've never heard of Ken Dahl, I didn't particularly like the cover, but something in the Amazon listing made me pick it up. It was cheap, and he's Ignatz award winning and Eisner nominated. It's great!

The title and cover reflect the content of the book well, but it didn't reflect the cartooning style inside. I saw this marked down multiple times before making the plunge and buying it, but upon reading, this was right up my alley.

Monsters is an autobiographical comic about Dahl (a pseudonym for Gabby Schultz) and his own experience with herpes. Admittedly, it's not an appealing topic, but that's why it's called Monsters. What I found with it though was that it was as brave and honest an autobio comic as I've ever read. The major theme of the book is the shame and self-destructive emotion the stigma of this very common STD causes. The direct effects of the disease itself isn't what causes Dahl's troubles.

Dahl works in four modes in this book:

-straight autobiographical recapping of herpes' effect on his life and relationships

-reflective self-analysis on his thinking during that time

-more metaphoric autobiographical work, where he illustrates his experiences, but lets himself play as a cartoonist to illustrate his own emotional state

-occasional fact bombs about what herpes is, what its physical effects are, and what the statistics are, but done using cartooning skills

Throughout, he uses a lot of techniques to tell his story. Sometimes it's a very light, loose line, sometimes it's a heavily rendered image. My preference is the zone in between those poles, where he very clearly cartoons, but he has a strong texture to give the cartoons weight. The cartooning quality ranges from good to great.

Dahl shifts his cartooning styles throughout the book, this self-representation is more realistically proportioned despite the not-actual-size herpes virus

This isn't a book for kids. Dahl "goes there", he draws the effects of herpes as he researched on the Internet. The worst case scenarios become his own nightmares, which he fully illustrates even though his own case is mild. That is to say, he sometimes draws scabby genitals. It's not something anyone wants to look at or consider, but it is something a lot of people might confront at some point in their own life even if only the fear of it, so I appreciate Dahl's commitment to honesty and mature presentation.

Some people might have an experience with herpes and just ignore it and pass it along. I don't  think most people are like that. Most would be shell shocked by the news and use it as a starting point for self-reflection, if not the seven stages of grief. That's Dahl, whose social life seems knocked off course for years due to the disease.

Living with shame

Reading this, I was taken back to the indie comics that really excited me when I was 20, when I was trying to figure out just who I was and who I wanted to be. I read the 80's autobio of Robert Crumb, and the work of Chester Brown and Joe Matt. I saw myself in them a lot, and received some relief that my emotions were "normal" but not necessarily excusable or acceptable. It's a challenging territory, which mainstream works don't usually venture into. Dahl's book shares some characteristics with those artists, in its frankness and emotional honesty. It's very personal work, but work that most readers should be able to see themselves in.

Ultimately, Monsters is a book about living with herpes, not becoming a hermit, so it has some resolution, and is not bleak in its final outlook. It's not for everyone, but it's a book, to quote Jeffery Brown on the back cover, "for anyone who has had sex, is going to have sex, or wants to have sex."