It’s been a year and a half since the first hand-stapled copies of Dirty Dino Rock comics started showing up in coffee houses and bars around the city. Since then, artist Anne Marie Wonder (yes, that is her real name) has written, illustrated, printed and distributed six issues, all while finding time to design images for T-shirts, flyers, posters and work a full-time job as a graphic/broadcast designer.
I discovered Dirty Dino Rock a few months ago when a copy of the “End of the World Issue” caught my eye in the VCU area Crossroads. When I finally got around to reading it a few days later, I knew immediately that I had stumbled upon a local talent. A few weeks later, I found a copy of “The Pink Shadow” by the same artist and had to get in touch.
Aristotle once quipped that the secret to humor is the proper use of the element of surprise. By this standard, Anne Marie Wonder is hilarious. Her stories are often (but not always) built with familiar frameworks that are colored with absurd, dreamlike twists. When I ask Anne to describe her writing style for people who don’t know anything about comics, she says, “You know when you fall asleep watching TV and what you’ve been watching becomes your dream, but with weirder stuff happening? I guess that’s what I want my comics to feel like. You think you know where it’s going, and it kind of gets weirder and weirder. My rule of thumb is that either the characters can be absurd and the situation serious, or the situation absurd and the characters very serious.”
These rules are perfectly illustrated by the first two Wonder comics I discovered. In the “End of the World Issue,” a highly contagious disease accidentally released by a greedy corporation is eliminating life on the planet. This may sound like an all-too-familiar setting, but rather than the expected zombies, the infected citizens of Anne Marie Wonder’s world turn into… candy beans.
The juxtaposition of this familiar, ominous plotline and dead-serious characters with the lighthearted, unexpected elements of candy and jokes makes for a great read. People die, civilization collapses, but all you can do is smile.
“The Pink Shadow” was a project for 24 Hour Comic Book Day, which challenges artists to create a 24-page comic in a single day. The familiar framework here is a classic superhero comic. A tortured hero-by-night tries to balance the emotional strain of his dual identities and the relationship issues that they cause. The twist: Our hero is a pig named David.
The jokes are sometimes loud, sometimes subtle, as when Diane suggests that they “talk about this”. (David cannot talk about anything. He is a pig. He has not a line of dialogue in the whole comic, aside from a single “oink”.)
And if you require a little irreverence in your comics, Anne still has you covered, with stories surrounding everything from pizza-themed pornography to deadbeat dads to secret agent blowup dolls. Here’s an image she designed for a fundraiser to help a friend afford his pit bull’s leg amputation. Tumor included.
One of the downsides of distributing so much work around the city is that there isn’t much in the way of feedback. “I love actually making the issues. That’s a huge part of what I enjoy about the comic, just sitting down and stapling for 4 hours. But I have no idea how many people are reading it.”
Paper copies of Dirty Dino Rock are still in production, but panels are also being posted every Monday and Friday on Anne’s new website and Tumblr and sometimes even Facebook, though she admits that social media promotion is not her strength. She hopes that being able to track views of the comics online will help her better understand the size and interests of her audience.
Anne says that she has found in RVA a community of people who are incredibly motivated self-starters, and hopes to find a way to collaborate more with other artists and filmmakers in the near future. She especially thanks Patrick Godfrey and “all the guys at Velocity Comics” for being supportive of her work, James Callahan and Barf Comics for their local inspiration and Strange Matter, Lift, and Crossroads for letting her drop off issues of Dirty Dino Rock since its inception.
