Over the last four years at Broken Frontier we have covered the collaborative work of the Nicole Goux-Dave Baker team on a number of projects, including Fuck Off Squad, Everyone is Tulip and Forest Hills Bootleg Society. Today’s review subject, though, marks something of a diversion from that pattern with our first look at solo sequential work from Goux, whose graphic novella Pet Peeves debuted recently from Avery Hill, that longstanding and pivotal fixture on the UK indie comics publishing scene.
Pet Peeves is the story of Bobbie, whose dreams of becoming a musician post-university are slowly slipping away from her. Trapped in a bar job and with her life slowly stagnating, Bobbie’s world has become an aimless and drifting one. After a night of excess leads to a drunken encounter with a stray dog she decides, much to her flatmate’s dismay, to take the canine in. Slowly becoming dependent on her new animal pal, Bobbie fails to notice how the manipulative Barkley’s presence is leaving a trail of destruction in its wake, destroying relationships and pushing her ever further away from her aspirations.
The press for Pet Peeves has leaned heavily into describing it as a horror story but the reality is that what Goux is conveying here is far more nuanced than simply genre shock narrative. Have I over-used that line about there being things that are the readers to discover for themselves in my reviews at Broken Frontier? Almost certainly. But Pet Peeves is a book that works on multiple layers; a tale of a dog with malevolent and undue influence on one, and a powerful allegory for co-dependency, the creative struggle and self-sabotage on the other.
What Goux evokes so successfully here is that odd directionless period after graduation when, if your studies weren’t vocational in nature, you can find yourself in an existential limbo. It’s that time when, like Bobbie, our lives had been building up to one significant point and suddenly we find ourselves unprepared for the real world, scared by the realities of no longer having an obviously achievable target, and descending into an existence of procrastination and avoidance. That the story provides no easy resolutions to this familiar experience only serves to make it all the most hauntingly familiar in tone.
If you’re already a fan of Goux’s work elsewhere then you will be unsurprised to hear that Pet Peeves is as replete with dexterous applications of the tools of the form as her collaborations with Baker are. Goux’s ever shifting page and panel structures constantly play with the passage of time, counterpointing bursts of frenetic activity with slower, more pensive moments where the reader is invited to linger on single images and absorb their emotional intensity. The humdrum routine of the working world becomes all the more pronounced for pages that scroll down into an abyss of ever-multiplying panels, while Barkley as visual metaphor becomes ever more sinister as events progress…
Sublime in composition and subtly communicative in message, Pet Peeves is a visual essay on creative endeavour and the nature of our own self-destructive impulses that will no doubt strike a familiar chord with many readers.
Nicole Goux (W/A) • Avery Hill Publishing, £12.99
Review by Andy Oliver
