Continuing to go through the work of some TCAF notables, Beatrix Urkowitz is an up and comer living in Providence who graduated from SVA a few years ago. It’s fair to say their work is firmly in the Michael DeForge school of detached musings and blobby realism, although infused with a dose of Terry Toons comedy, but Urkowitz’s work more than hold its own.
Big Busty Psychic Celeb Votes Satan (available on Zcomx – give them a dollar if you can!) in particular is a companion piece to Sticks Angelica, DeForge’s GN about a the world’s greatest celebrity who retreats to a woodland kingdom to bring joy and glamour to its denizens. Angelica is itself a companion to DeForge’s current Leaving Richard’s Valley, which is the dark flip side of this narrative, with the benefactor turned despot.
In Urkowitz’s comic we meet Jennifer Nova, a similar larger than life celeb whose doings and giant breasts obsess the world. But this time we go inside her day and reactions as she confronts her fame with ambivalence and, we learn, longs to escape from it in a shockingly literal way.
Big Busty Psychic deals with a lot of sexual themes (its definitely NSFW), and the very real obsession with the Kardashians of the world provides ample fodder for an examination of how we idolize and abstract real women as vessels for our own desires. Telling the story in millennial pink was a brilliant stroke.
This is an early work for Urkowitz (who formerly worked under the name Ben Urkowitz.) More recent comics include The Beauty Theorem, a story about a branch of science whose fundamental theory is proven wrong, and how that affects the scientist who study it and a higher truth.
She’s Done It All is a longer story serialized on the blessed site Hazlitt. I haven’t read the whole thing but will update this post when I do.
Most intriguingly, perhaps, is Penelope’s Property, billed as the start of a longer work with only three tempting pages on display. Urkowitz’s work deals with many of the common themes of Teens indie comics: identity, fame, gender, but in an evocative, multi-leveled way, and I’m eager to see where Urkowitz goes with their work.
