Ruby Carter's I, Candy

Ruby Carter's I, Candy reveals another side of the artist. Her bird comic (published by Fieldmouse Press) featured minimalist cartooning, deadpan humor, and low-level anxiety throughout. However, her other work (often in color) is often colorful, weird, and grotesque. I, Candy explicitly purports to be about objectification and consumption, and those elements are certainly evident. The title has a double pun regarding both of these elements. There's another word that Carter uses on the back-cover blurb, and it's the most applicable: visceral. The comic features the titular performer in fishnet stockings and squeezed into a tight outfit before a crowd of leering eyes. Carter uses a repeating motif of her lipsticked lips twisting, biting, and distorting themselves. The effect is not just visceral, but deliberately lurid. Over the span of the comic, Carter subverts the image of not just a performer on stage, but of any woman enduring the gaze of society at large (and not just a male…