Commissioned by the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival, Joe Decie’s There’s No Bath in this Bathroom debuted at Toronto Comic Art Festival a few weeks back when – in a magnanimous gesture of philanthropic generosity – an initial 100 copies were given out for free by Joe. Its 24 pages look back on an evening of comics festival-related revelry from the year previously when Decie and a group of fellow artists ended their socialising in a rather unforgettable pizza restaurant…
I’ve covered Joe Decie’s work a few times over the years at Broken Frontier – either in the environs of this column or in our reviews section – including books like The Accidental Salad, Pocket Full of Coffee, and The Listening Agent. His idiosyncratic take on slice-of-life storytelling, where pure autobio comics can suddenly veer off into the realms of hazy surrealism, led me to speak of Decie’s “undoubted status as one of the most unique creative voices on the current British comics scene” when I last reviewed him at Broken Frontier.
There’s No Bath in this Bathroom is a divergence from some of that previous work in that it’s less about sideways trips into bizarre rambling fantasies and more firmly grounded in the realms of straight autobiography. The thing about a Joe Decie comic, though, is that they always have such an oddly detached internal rhythm to them that even when his anecdotal meanderings are entrenched in the real world there’s still something appealingly dream-like and disconnected to them.
Decie initially captures the transitory nature of a night’s drinking with a deft visual shorthand; single panel snapshots of memories encapsulating a greater reality as events flow into a fast food finale at the pivotal location of Uncle Jack’s Pizza, a romanticised location of urban legends and terrifying toilet facilities. It’s here that the passage of time between frames slows significantly as Joe ends up on a perilous quest to the filthy bathroom of the book’s title, encounters a strange lurking presence, and spends the rest of the evening worrying that the grime he has come into contact with therein may contaminate his food…
From the outset communication is a running theme in There’s No Bath in this Bathroom – contradictory uses of the same language across continents is, of course, manifest within the book’s title itself – but Decie toys with this notion throughout. The humour inherent in British euphemisms, the unfathomable vernacular of youth, and the social niceties of interaction through a language barrier all feature, underlining that sense of displacement and dislocation in a familiar yet simultaneously alien setting. Eagle-eyed viewers may also spot some neat Easter Egg nods to other creators here and there…
There’s always a sense with Joe Decie’s work of moments of apparent triviality coming to represent life’s great mysteries in fleeting, ephemeral microcosm. Perhaps that’s something to do with his unassuming, laidback presence as narrator, or maybe it’s the melting shadowy feel of his visuals with their almost contradictory synthesis of the authentic and the ethereal. That transformation of the inconsequential and the negligible into the vital and the mystifying sits at the narrative centre of the comic ensuring that, even shorn of some of Joe’s wilder flights of fancy, There’s No Bath in this Bathroom is still pure, unadulterated Decie at its most appealing.
For more on Joe Decie’s work check out his site here and follow him on Twitter here.
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