Zine Panique was founded in 2019, and since then the French publisher has been releasing anthologies of deliciously good quality. Previous projects have featured the likes of Casanova Frankenstein, Nathan Cowdry and M.S. Harkness, and stunning covers by the likes of Nate Garcia & Josh Pettinger and Pol-Édouard, and I regret not picking them up sooner, especially since each release is limited to around 350 copies and typically sells out.
As with many of Panique’s anthologies thus far, the majority of the strips are in English, some are silent, and the ones in French come translated via an insert. While there's always something a little odd to me about having a comic strip as a cover for a comic, Baptiste Virot's cover for Dark Side of the Food is a suitably surreal one-page tale of a fork that eats its holder, aptly setting the tone for the pages to follow.
The theme is, of course, food and its dark sides. Themes can be tricky. Oftentimes magazines and anthologies tend to sort of give up halfway through, but here the concept is taken to its various logical (and illogical) conclusions from beginning to end.
There’s a few splash pages of absurdist gags provided by Mister Kern dotted throughout the book. These adverts are for a food brand called “Mitbols,” and are done in the style of those leaflets that display the discounts available at the local supermarket. Kern presents glazed fruits that scream at you through the jar, a decent amount of cheap wine approved by a famous French wino, and a “My Fat Pony” lasagna, amongst other things, portrayed in a color palette that makes these pages look like how dusty houses smell. Tasty.
Taking up a substantial amount of the page count, and by far the least fantastical of all the included stories, is Glenn Pearce’s "The Urban Guide to Hippy Hell." Due to the use of photos and first-person narration, I presume that this is an autobiographical tale, though I’m unable to find relevant information online. Even with the proviso that all autobiographies come with dramatic additions, Pearce’s story is especially unsettling in parts precisely because the reader presumes it is a reflection of a reality.
Specifically, Pearce’s reality is his working life as a chicken catcher at a factory farm, bookended by his experiences living with drug addiction. For much of the space, tight panel arrangements frame a scratchy illustration style that makes it look as if the artist is presenting work made in the field, so to speak - or from memory, reluctant to round off its edges in fear it would dull the intensity and immediacy of the work. This approach is effective. Pearce intermittently reaches for uncanny and metaphorical imagery, presenting oversized chickens with human features, which are in one way or another torturing human captives.
Much of the story recounts the smell and the texture of the task of catching chickens, and of Pearce’s mixed feelings toward this deeply unsocial work and the unsociable characters it attracts. George Monbiot and Jonathan Safran Foer might deign to eat a bucket of wings in exchange for work this unsettling and upsetting. But this is not a moral tale, and Pearce is not necessarily trying to teach us anything here. The inclusions of sex work, beastiality and sexual assault as routine aspects of life in this trade are as off-putting as anything about the violence meted out to the animals. On the final page we see an image of a man tightening a belt around his arm; I’m usually very skeptical of depictions of drug use, as the aesthetics of it have been too Tarantino’d and over-romanticized. But here it works well as a grim closing note to a story which portrays the way in which violence and desperation have their own forward motion.
Elsewhere in the anthology, Jemma Sharp’s work dominates the first and last spreads. She provides a surprising contrast between cutlery and a strange image of a Victoria sponge in the shape of a baby on one side and some sort of food substance being rubbed onto a bare chest on the other. It’s cartoonish enough so that you can intuit it’s meant to be metaphorical, but it’s also done with enough detail to make it unnerving. Like much of this anthology, it feels a bit like a fever dream. Not so much "all hail the new flesh" as all beware the flesh that is food, and that flesh can be food.
Bhanu Pratap has been interested in elongating and de- and re-constructing the human form and its hidden fat and muscles for a while now. He stretches and folds, transforming anatomy to create curious patterns, applying bright colors and thick shading to add a sense of depth and mood. Here, Pratap provides more a series of vignettes than a cohesive story in any sense; a split pomegranate falls out of a mouth and spaghetti is eaten from a stomach (at least I guess it’s spaghetti). In such a strange world the most surprising moments are when things become more recognizable: the utility pole and a messy garden at dusk provide meditative interludes.
Sam Grinberg’s "Cookie Crew" story is the most traditional cartoon comic in the anthology and adds some light relief because of it, though the conceit of the characters being cookie-cutter personalities with biscuits for heads feels like a bit of a cheat given the inventiveness of the rest of the work here. Having said that, Grinberg’s interiors, background details, interesting angles and solid pacing (a lot happens at a good flow in only four pages) makes it a fun reading experience. Travis Rommereim provides another four-pager, although this time it’s humans which are the food, for dogs with human bodies.
From people with food for bits of their body to fully anthropomorphic food, Rahel Suesskind, who recently appeared in the pages of Fantagraphics' NOW, gives us "Creepy Pasta," a lesbian pasta love story of a kind which involves a farfalle engaging in consensual sado-cannibalism. Even with a translation of Noémie Barsolle’s “Lady Broccoli Goes Beserk!” made available, I’m not sure I can succinctly summarize this tale beyond stating that it’s about a feminized broccoli going, er, berserk, and following her insatiable appetite for a sausage.
We’re then treated to more black & white comics by Stathis Tsemberlidis, who probably doesn’t need any introduction at this point, and who once again serves up the goods. Tsemberlidis’ work is predictable, but always in a way that is very satisfying; no one does geometricity quite like him. Someone needs to allow him to design a sci-fi epic ASAP. Francis Masse’s “Topor Sport Panique” feels a little truncated, given that it’s limited to one page, but it makes slightly more sense when you know it’s dedicated to (and presumably inspired by) the 20th century Surrealist illustrator/cartoonist Roland Topor.
Garrett Young provides a Grimm Brothers-esque dark folkloric tale in "Tarrere," in which an unwanted and unloved child roams the woods. Whenever he is taken in by a patrician figure or the army, he ends up taking his new guardians as sources of protein. It feels like a story someone would tell to scare a child, and Young’s liberal use of dense black on every page gives the story a distinctly gothic and horrific flavor.
Dark Side of the Food is often silly, bursting with talent and imagination, and very compelling. Given a chance to provide a twist on a daily ritual, these artists have delved into many of the anxieties and presumptions we have about what is eaten and who eats it. It is Pearce’s story that leaves the biggest mark; in depicting society’s harsher edges, it is a deeply honest and uncomfortable portrayal of life in the belly of the beast of food production. Overall it’s an energetic, diverse and inventive anthology, the sort which we expect from Zine Panique, well-deserving of its nomination for the Alternative Comics award at Angoulême this week.
