Katie Lane has been a comics artist, writer, editor and critic in her long career. Single Camera Sitcom first appeared online on Webtoons and Instagram around 2019, and was subsequently collected in two small volumes. Thomas Campbell of Comics Blogger Books, for the first time, brings us the complete Single Camera Sitcom series under one cover at a generous 7.5” x 7.5” format that is essential to bringing out the intense detail of Lane’s unique presentation.
Broken Frontier has, of course, covered collage zines and comics in the past. Most prominently varied Colossive Cartographies, as well as works by Jessika Green, Sonja Ahlers, and veteran Simon Moreton.
However, Katie Lane takes the medium of collage and the comics format and marries that to the layout of a storyboard to create the titular Single Camera Sitcom. She introduces the main characters in a way in which each is represented by a static image that is consistently used throughout the narrative: Raymond is from Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’: Kitty, a hunchbacked woman, also seems plucked from a Bosch painting; Thomas a golem-esque faceless giant; Harryet a tall green insectoid figure; and, Victorian gentleman Wesley. Everything is constructed from found images, besides the typeset dialogue in and below the panels. This makes all the more striking the occasional use of handwriting or graffiti-like scrawl in the background. Considering all of this, the whole book is incredibly seamless.
All these moving parts seem daunting at first glance of the entirety of Single Camera Sitcom‘s 117 installments. Lane constructs a multi-level narrative template based not only on the script of a sitcom running a separate dialogue beneath each panel, but also streamlining each installment like a sitcom scene where they run together serially to form easier to digest shorter stories within the larger framework.
The pivotal early serialized story ‘Raymond Becomes A Capitalist’ is spread over eight chapters with two prologue strips and an epilogue. Raymond meets the “plastic gem of value” (literally a purple toy gem with the word “value” pasted on) in the park and is overtaken with a very abstract need to acquire wealth. He meets with his old college chum who has morphed into an abstraction of greed and power called The Factory Man. A penultimate ugly scene in the restaurant where girlfriend Kitty works leads to a final scene where Raymond’s newfound greed causes him to split in two and eventually go back to his old self. This whole situation sets up the relationship between Kitty and Thomas that continues through the rest of the book (a later arc has them on a hilariously absurd cooking reality show), and Raymond eventually meets Wesley forming a very healthy loving bond. This leaves Harryet as the third wheel/friend plugged into the story as needed. All five characters are basically mixed together in multiple combinations to further the narrative progression of artificial personal growth common in sitcoms.
It’s remarkable that at the time Katie Lane was creating Single Camera Sitcom she was mainly a writer for other alternative cartoonists and comics criticism. Eventually Lane went on to create wonderfully abstract line drawn solo works such as Sine Qua Non and Perception Through a Gap. These later works mirror Lane’s command of form and unique vision for what comics are capable of, that were evident right from the start of her career. Hopefully this exquisite presentation by Thomas Campbell of Comics Blogger Books will encourage all brave comics souls to immerse themselves in Katie Lane’s ambitious, accessible exploration of gender and relationships.
Katie Lane (W/A) • Comics Blogger Books, $30.00
Review by Gary Usher
