The Stranger reviews MAKE ME A WOMAN

Vanessa Davis's art is, in fact, deceptively simple. She draws in a noodly, Lynda Barry-like style, full of details and scribbles and words. Make Me a Woman is a collection of short stories about the awkwardness of her teenage years, told in full-color strips, black-and-white strips, and outtakes from Davis's sketchbook in a variety of art styles. Even those sketch pages, which often feature a single cartoon in the center of a blank page, somehow feel claustrophobic; the lines all somehow point inward, as though Davis's art wants to slink away, slump-shouldered, because it's too embarrassed to be seen. Davis owes a lot to Barry (and to Aline Kominsky-Crumb, too, although Davis is a much better cartoonist) but she has her own sensibility, a self-critical distance from the stories. Is it simply generational? Does it have something to do with Facebook or what the fuck ever else cultural critics have said has changed us forever as a species this week? Maybe. But I think it has more to do with Davis as an artist: She's confident, at least, when it comes to putting awkward lines on paper. She's such an assured storyteller that her awkwardness becomes the reader's awkwardness. Davis is a young artist at the very beginning of her career, and this book is a solid first step for an artist who could very well become a Robert Crumb-level talent.