No Better Words by Carolyn Nowak

What a serendipitous encounter this was! I picked this up at Vault of Midnight Comics in Grand Rapids, MI while visiting home. Despite living in a major metropolitan area of the Chicagoland suburbs, none of the comic shops that I have easy access to carry small press comics. Low and behold Vault of Midnight had an entire wall! The cover art of No Better Words immediately caught my eye and the "18+" sharpie inscription on the bag and board sealed the deal. I study internet pornography and thus have an academic interest in these things...

This comic is horny. Reading it made me horny. It evokes such a clarity of sexual desire as it depicts the experience of lust within specific moments of the day. It’s evening and Mallory is lying in bed, burning up. Writer and artist Carolyn Nowak depicts desire as multifaceted: affective physical responses, postures, and a personal relationship to images. Images first as daydreams—in the theater of Mallory’s mind—then pictures on the phone (fap material indeed).

Nowak’s line work is incredible. No Better Words is visually about gesture, posture, and glance. It is these elements, so precisely articulated, that convey the longing, desire, and lust of the comic. Her pronounced style often feels like a lumpier, more porous Daniel Clowes with expressionistic aspects of manga to convey emotional states, but I worry that comparison makes her style sound derivative, which it most certainly is not.

I greatly admire how well Nowak incorporates genital responses into the panels. Several close-up penetration shots are fluidly marked by the desire expressed in eye movement and mouth shape. It isn’t a hard break from clothed bodies as lesser artists would portray—the shock of cocks and pussies—nor is it cold and distant. No Better Words is thus a holistic approach to desire: daydreaming, wetdreaming, awkward flirting, computer mediated communication, waiting, and cuming. I absolutely love the way she draws naked bodies. A softer Schiele that merges the language of facial expression with the bounded frankness of flesh. 

reference:

1. No Better Words Carolyn Nowak Pub. 2017 Read 1/2/18
2. image source and Silver Sprocket press purchase link (here)