Alex Graham doesn’t leave her house or see other people often.
“And that’s the way that I prefer it,” she told me. “I could go years without seeing anybody besides my husband and be totally happy. I just love to sit in my room and invent characters and hang out with them all day or channel dead people and listen to music. It’s awesome. I’m so happy.”
The 36-year old cartoonist, currently on the rise in the alternative comics scene, is about halfway through her biggest and most ambitious comics project yet: The Devil’s Grin, a throwback to her earlier, more mystical work.
Graham, also an accomplished painter, first became known in comics for her series Cosmic BE-ING, later collected by Kilgore Books as Angloid, which told a semi-autobiographical story that also involved aliens. Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she serialized a comic called Dog Biscuits on Instagram, a work more topical and grounded (other than the anthropomorphic animal cast) than her other comics. Fantagraphics published a hardcover collection of Dog Biscuits in 2022.
A Fantagraphics publication comes with a certain kind of prestige in addition to new readers, and Graham loves being a part of the publisher's legacy. She moved to Seattle, in part, to be closer to Fantagraphics. “I always wanted to be published by them because Robert Crumb was published by Fantagraphics,” she said.
However, posting Dog Biscuits for free on Instagram provided the biggest boost in readership, according to Graham.
“I think the Instagram comic was what really set my career in motion, because Simon [Hanselmann] shared it, and that’s when it started taking off,” she said. “And pretty much everybody that discovered it discovered it through Instagram.”
She doesn’t post her comics on Instagram anymore, though. Graham releases new pages for $5 a month to subscribers on Patreon and Substack. She also sells self-published print issues measuring 8.5” by 11”, a large format that looks nice but that she regrets adopting because of how expensive it makes the comics. (She’s selling the most recent issue, which contains 84 black & white pages, for $18.) Eventually it will be released as a book, which Graham expects to be about 600 pages.
Ending Instagram serialization might seem like a straightforward business decision, pushing readers away from a free service to a premium subscription, but Graham’s issues with Instagram go deeper than that. She’s found that readers have over-the-top reactions to isolated scenes of her ongoing stories taken out of context. And she hates contributing to social media scrolling.
“I feel like Instagram is evil, even though I’m still on there every day,” Graham said. “Even when I was publishing Dog Biscuits on there, I felt bad for giving people a reason to scroll, because I think scrolling is probably the worst thing to ever happen to humanity.”
The comic itself is fascinating, creepy and funny - a classic Alex Graham comic, in other words. It feels very much like an amalgamation of Graham’s previous work, but at a much larger scale. Its interpersonal dating drama will be familiar to Dog Biscuits readers, but there’s something demonic lurking around these characters.
The plot of The Devil's Grin is difficult to summarize. It’s described on her Substack as a comic “about residents of Henryville and their intertwined lives.” When asked about the story, Graham said it came to her after watching Netflix’s Night Stalker: The Hunt For a Serial Killer, about Richard Ramirez.
“Watching that docuseries and learning about him, he’s such a scary, demonic human being. And I wanted to capture that terror that those places that he was terrorizing felt. Like, the spirit of a serial killer overtaking different people in a town,” Graham said. “That was the basic premise that I wanted to do. And then that evolved into basically Richard Ramirez’s ethos: became just a demon, The Devil’s Grin.”
The pages typically stick to dependable six-panel grids, and Graham’s cartooning has steadily improved over the years. The Devil’s Grin has smooth linework, expressive cartooning and detailed shading and backgrounds. Graham has become more self-critical of her artwork over the years, she said. She wanted her work in The Devil’s Grin to be more detailed than that of Dog Biscuits.
“Not that I care a lot what people think, but some of the reception to Dog Biscuits was people being like, ‘the story’s good but the art sucks,’” Graham said. “And I wanted to shake them and tell them, ‘I know how to draw. You guys are only seeing this because this is the most minimalistic art that I’ve ever done, and you’re judging me just based on this.’ So I guess I kinda wanted to prove to people that I can do better than that. And then once I prove it with this, I’m going back to the minimalism.”
In the past few years, Graham has managed to make her comics and artwork her full-time job. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, a restaurant she worked at furloughed her. When she returned to work, it was often dead, so, with the blessing of her coworkers, she would sit at the bar and draw comics. She lost the job again, and when her manager offered it back to her, she had just finished Dog Biscuits. She chose against going back and instead doubled down on comics.
The most worrisome part of her finances, she said, comes from an illness that regularly halts her productivity for up to two weeks at a time. She has written about this in a publicly available Substack post.
Still, Graham said she’s happy to spend long hours working on good days. She loves being an independent cartoonist.
“I fucking love my life, man,” Graham said. “I wake up when I’m feeling good, and I drink coffee, and I sit down, and I take some THC tincture and I just draw until like 8:00 PM. And then I watch a movie, and then I go to bed. It’s so fucking awesome. I’m so grateful.”
