Alex Graham’s storytelling, however weird its twists and turns, often feels so true to life it hurts
The Devil’s Grin collects the first six issues of Alex Graham’s ongoing, self-published comic series. It focuses on the lives of a series of artistic types who are both self-obsessed and lonely, who use the first quality to fuel their art while countering the second with more-or-less humorous attempts to realise their fantasies of love. More broadly, you could frame this book as a reflection on the struggle to be both an individual and part of a collective social group. Graham’s surreal graphic style, in which you can find echoes of everything from Otto Dix and R. Crumb to contemporaries such as Simon Hanselmann, is at once utterly immersive and uniquely her own. And her storytelling, however weird its twists and turns, often feels so true to life it hurts.
Most of the characters appear as human-animal fusions of pigs, dogs and rats, and have conversations with pets who seem little different to their ‘masters’. In the background lurks the ghostly face of the titular grinning devil. Even as he morphs from a Scream-like ghostface, to David Bowie, to resembling various characters in the book before vanishing in a puff of smoke, he’s not the strangest thing about this evolving, intertwined (many of the characters live in the same building) cluster of tales. Robert, the doglike character around whom everything revolves, was discharged as a foetus into a toilet and then, unwanted, flushed by his mother, Harriet, so that she could fulfil her desire to become the greatest painter there ever was – principally as an act of revenge against the poet who jilted her. Robert is suckled by a sewer rat and eventually sucks the life out of her. As an adult, his poetry obsesses about sewers; his sexual kink is sucking breasts; he’s having multiple affairs with women, but he’s really in love with his car, Agnes; and his apartment is filled with copies of Art News chronicling the rise of the mother who abandoned him. And that’s not even to get into Robert’s Black neighbour Gary, who, when not playing the cornet and railing against the ‘crackers’ who are oppressing him, hides in bushes spying on the other characters in order to ‘research’ the comic book he is creating – a comic book that appears to be the one we are reading.
The Devil’s Grin: Book One by Alex Graham. Fantagraphics, $29.99 (softcover)
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
