The Past is a Grotesque Animal

A rich collection/scrapbook of over two dozen short stories, plus diary entries, photos, and other images fueled by a propensity to understand the way we relate to each other, and told with a visual and lyrical beauty — and raw emotion — that collectively reaffirms the power of art.

Tommi Parrish is an Australian trans cartoonist and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Balancing emotional honesty with a keen awareness of the human condition, Parrish navigates fear, loneliness, identity, body politics, queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the ever-fluid nature of all human relationships. The Past is a Grotesque Animal collects over two dozen short stories of varying lengths, interspersed with ephemera from Parrish’s own life: diary entries, photographs, illustrations, paintings, and more. Parrish’s autobiographical elements inform their voice as a writer, and the ways their characters constantly find one another adrift in their own seas of experience, current situations, trauma, and desire—and how those things coexist, and how they are complicated by outside forces and internal ones that affect our hardwired need for meaningful connection. The book also showcases Parrish’s singular and assured visual style, blending clear lines, expressionistic character designs and gorgeously complex, hand-painted color.

“I think of my work as trying to work out how to cultivate a type of intimacy that doesn’t have a roadmap, and everyone is just feeling around in the dark trying to work out how to do it,” Parrish says. “I think that’s what I am always trying to get at – how to cultivate that closeness when you’re also really fucking traumatized and lonely. I know a lot of people where that’s their story. There have definitely been moments where that’s my story as well.”