The Past is a Grotesque Animal

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 colour. '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 traumatised 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.'

No cartoonist working today does interpersonal drama as authentically as Parrish.-- "Four-Color Apocalypse"
Parrish has one of my favorite traits in a cartoonist: intense passion for the craft. They are rapidly evolving and experimenting wildly and it's joyful to watch.--Simon Hanselmann (Megahex)
Parrish is great at making panels that you can both read and linger over.--Dash Shaw (Bottomless Belly Button)

Tommi Parrish (b. 1989, Melbourne) is a trans Australian cartoonist and painter living in Western Massachusetts. Their debut work, The Lie and How We Told It, won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for the best LGBTQ graphic novel, was nominated for the Ignatz award, was featured in many best of 2018 lists, and translated into 11 languages worldwide. Tommi was the 2020 recipient of the Center For Cartoon Studies Fellowship and their work has been showcased in The New Yorker, Granta Magazine, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Vice, and many more.

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