How Loathsome

    (NBM, 2004)
™ and © 2004 Ted Naifeh & Tristan Crane

Co–creators Tristan Crane and Todd Naifeh modeled How Loathsome’s protagonist Catherine Gore on the life of San Francisco-based writer/stripper/performance artist Danielle Willis, a player in that city’s underground art scene. Willis gained notoriety in 1990 with the publication of Dogs in Lingerie, her book of semi–autobiographical poetry heavily informed by her post–postmodern sexuality and frequent drug use.

People in Willis’ scene felt alienated by the relentlessly upbeat and determinedly cheery 1980s. Many who experienced the Reagan era as a time of social and cultural retrenchment found comfort in the artistic output of counterculture types like Willis who offered unflinching, unsanitized accounts of life from the margins of mainstream society. How Loathsome is heir to the sexual and urban counterculture Willis lived in and wrote about.

How Loathsome intermingles Catherine’s misadventures in sex clubs and dive bars with the poignant and haunting short stories she writes to keep herself going. Like a modern–day Genet or a transsexual Hunter S. Thompson, Catherine inhabits a nocturnal world populated by drug-addled lovers just passing through, hipster parasites looking to score, and inscrutable beauty that resists possession.

— Leland Burrill
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