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Only one more issue left in the Whit Taylor series Effervescence go after the fourth and fifth numbers, and the fourth number turns inward, while the fifth has flashbacks and competing forward movements. The story revolves around Claire, a twenty-something adrift living in Los Angeles who finds herself in an orbit of mutual aimlessness with her rich stoner boyfriend Andy. He works at a high-end yuppie tea shop whose owner, Poppy, is image-obsessed and hyper-focused on her extremely specific niche of interest. Claire develops an interest in creating gourmet popsicles with unusual fruit flavors, and the only person who really takes it seriously is Dick, Andy’s grandfather. Dick gives her a citrus taxonomy book to cheer her up.
What the reader doesn’t know at this point is exactly how Claire ended up in this position. She had alluded to a shitty family and being separated from her family, but that doesn’t quite explain how she ended up in Los Angeles after growing up in New Jersey. It was also unclear what attracted her to Andy in the first place. Taylor spends a lot of time answering both questions in these issues and develops an unusual character narrative in Claire. What do you do with a character who has no motivation other than trying to figure out exactly what he wants? Basically, Taylor presents Claire as a character whose motivations are defined by negative space. That is, Claire may not know what she wants, but she quickly realizes what situations she doesn’t want.
The fourth issue features an extended flashback in which her father forgets to pick her up from school and young Claire has to walk to her mother’s house. She is comfortable with television and, in particular, the type of shows with romantic angles. Currently, she is increasingly frustrated with her lazy “musician” boyfriend, who scoffs when Claire tells him that her mother is getting remarried. Claire is so angry that she accepts Jaime, her work crush,’s offer to hang out.
The fifth issue takes place between her first long date with Andy and her platonic day with Jaime. Here, Taylor reveals why she was drawn to Andy: he represented a total sense of freedom from responsibility that she had clearly longed for. Living in a family marked by conflict and with a father who barely acknowledged her existence, pushed her to want to be with someone who loved her exactly as she was. What the series suggests is that she had been adrift in a fantasy world, trapped in a warm cocoon where she didn’t need anything because of her rich boyfriend, but she also wasn’t encouraged or acknowledged to have any meaningful sense of agency. Meeting Jaime, a resourceful and ambitious man who clearly valued her passions and found ways to encourage them, was clearly an unprecedented event that caused her to begin to doubt everything about her life. Doubt, but do not yet act on these doubts. I’ll be curious to see what happens in the final issue.
Taylor sells it all with work of exceptional character. Claire’s facial expressions tell the story in a way that her dialogue does not; the barely suppressed rage expressed as hard facial angles, the brief moments of closed-eye bliss, copious amounts of sideways glances and frowning anxiety. Andy’s sloppy character design resembles someone whose own sense of inertia is highly cultivated; He has never known poverty or real unrest, and it shows. Poppy’s hair and glasses instantly give the reader an instant sense of how serious she is, but also her complete disregard for anyone outside her “influencer” sphere. Most fun are the fantasy segments in which Claire imagines someone on a dating show where the central woman dates anthropomorphic versions of planets. Taylor just loosens up visually during those segments, as she plays to her strengths regarding keeping things focused on the characters, but also displays a confident visual ambition that’s a new element of her work.