High-Low: I, Candy by Ruby Carter

Ruby Carter’s me candy reveals another facet of the artist. His bird comic (published by Fieldmouse Press) featured minimalist caricatures, deadpan humor, and low-level anxiety throughout. However, his other works (often in color) are colorful, strange and grotesque. me candy is explicitly intended to be about reification and consumption, and those elements are certainly evident. The title has a double play on words regarding both elements. There’s another word Carter uses in the back cover blurb, and it’s the most applicable: visceral.

The comic features the titular performer in fishnet stockings and dressed in a tight suit before a crowd of lascivious eyes. Carter uses a repeating motif of her lipsticked lips twisting, biting and distorting. The effect is not only visceral, but deliberately lurid. Throughout the comic, Carter subverts the image not only of a performer on stage, but of any woman who endures the gaze of society in general (and not just the male gaze). The protagonist Candy complains that she is “always hungry”, and the implication is that she is left devouring herself. That is until the end, where she takes out her tampon and chews on it, completing the performance and finally satiated.

Carter’s commitment to the part and subversion of burlesque imagery helps punctuate what is at once a solid joke, a political statement, and a howler. Making red the only color seen in the comic helps highlight the interpretive aspects of the comic, both from the character’s perspective and Carter’s technical choices.