Lilly Williams’ Scaredy Cat Gets Pregnant Part 1 is another reminder, if we needed one, of the breadth of approaches to capturing personal experience over the last two years of this seemingly endless pandemic. Williams’ zine-style short comic, though, has a very specific central focus dealing, as it does, with not just the everyday changes we all faced as lockdown loomed but with the realities of pregnancy, childbirth and first-time parenting in that time.
Art from Scaredy Cat Gets Pregnant has previously featured at Broken Frontier this year when we covered Sean Azzopardi’s Framed exhibition in Hull; a show which includes Williams’ work. As the “Part 1” designation implies this is a short taster for longer work and comprises twelve pages of vignettes across a broader timeframe. Williams adopts anthropomorphic animal avatars in place of human characters, ironically evoking an added layer of humanity through their relatable simplicity.
Events depicted herein include Williams and her partner discussing the practicalities of starting a family during a global health crisis, the added existential angst of creating life as the world crumbles around you, and reflections on identity and what the future holds for herself and her child. There’s no narrative throughline in this sampler beyond a chronological one as one scenario merges into another but that, in its own way, acts as an effective parallel to the skewed sense of time’s passing that many of us felt in those early pandemic months.
Visually Williams has an illustrative style that has a certain naïve rawness to it but this is actually a strength in terms of embodying the immediacy of the moment, and adds a greater veracity to the uncompromising honesty of each sequence. A page of meditation on the evolving world – both outer and insular – makes great use of white space around Scaredy Cat/Williams, for example, to create a sensation of loneliness and despondency. Vivid colour choices also emphasise a heightened perception of the surrounding turmoil.
Again, this is more of a teaser for (presumably) something longer-form but it’s another memorable example of how comics continue to be so important in recording personal vantage points of the last two years from a variety of perspectives. You can pick up a copy of Scaredy Cat Gets Pregnant Part 1 from Williams’ online store here.
Lilly Williams (W/A) • Self-published, £6.50
Review by Andy Oliver
