Comic Book Review – Parasocial

Parasocial (Image Comics)
Written by Alex de Campi
Art by Erica Henderson

The other day, I was looking over the upcoming DC Comics solicitations and realized something. I am old now. I just looked at the covers, the blurbs for stories they were announcing, the lead-ups & preludes to the next big event, and I thought, “Boy, am I tired.” I know part of this is that the writers that are up and coming in comics right now are, for the first time, my age or younger than I am. It was an inevitable point I would reach one day, but experiencing it is still strange. Having grown up reading comics written by mostly Baby Boomers, there’s a particular style & tone I’m used to. It’s not better than what is new; it is just different. When I read something like Parasocial, I have mixed feelings – I like a lot of the ideas, but the execution is not what I expected, so I’m left feeling ambivalent. 

Luke Indiana is an actor best known for his role in the science fiction series Rogue Nebula. He was not part of the original cast; he was a new role brought in a couple seasons after the show began airing. Luke apparently stole the spotlight, and by the time the series ended, he was getting more acclaim than many original actors. In many ways, he’s a male version of Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine. He doesn’t think much of his time on the show, but it gets him more attention. Try as Luke might, he cannot escape his public perception as being that character. In the middle of the pandemic, Luke attends a fan convention in Texas where he hopes to make some money doing photo ops with the masses. An obsessive fan stalks Luke and eventually ends up kidnapping the actor, tying him up in her house.

If you’re thinking about Stephen King’s Misery after reading that summary, you would not be far off. Thematically, Parasocial is touching on these same ideas. Celebrity stalkers have been around for centuries, the first recorded mention of one being Edward Jones, who stalked Queen Victoria in the mid-19th century. Edward was said to have sneaked into Buckingham Palace to spy on the monarch and steal her underwear. 

I remember tabloid shows like Inside Edition and A Current Affair in the late 1980s/90s regularly featuring news about celebrity stalkers being arrested. I’ve never felt that strong of a connection to any public figure to want to possess them. It’s a mentality that’s always felt alien to me. I suppose it’s a desire to have intimacy with someone so widely beloved that it, in turn, makes you a celebrity? It’s very much couched in delusion and psychological issues at the end of the day. 

Part of what I like about Parasocial is how it presents the digital landscape on the page. That’s a tricky feat and one storytelling element that could not have been in the comics I grew up reading. The book opens with a photo and caption from Luke’s Instagram feed. That is followed by a group chat between Lily and her friends, with a Cameo by Luke, which her friends purchased for her through a charity drive. We introduce Luke through how Lily knows him – a person who exists in the digital space. So, the next two-page spread depicting Luke sitting in his car in the parking garage of the expo center shifts into a new layer of perception. We now see Luke in a way that Lily cannot – a depressed typecast actor trying to muster up enough energy to fake a smile.

The parts of this comic that work the best are the ones focused on Luke as a struggling actor and his fan interactions. There’s a wonderfully cringey bit where he has a brief moment with one of his former co-stars who cannot stand Luke. Luke’s interactions with the convention worker assigned to him are also fun. I’ve never been into any sort of fandom. As much as I love Twin Peaks, I have not felt compelled to go to conventions or embark on pilgrimages to Snoqualmie. I think it’s also one of the reasons why organized religion has never appealed to me, either. I don’t believe places & objects hold any sort of mystic power. What I am fulfilled by is the art, the performance. Seeing the actor speak at a concert isn’t the same experience. 

I enjoyed how Parasocial was able to satirize obsessive online culture, but when the central event happens – Luke gets kidnapped by Lily – some steam ran out of the story. It goes by so quickly, and the ending feels profoundly inconsequential. If this was the intent, I didn’t understand what I meant to derive from that. It felt like a story that got cut off early. Because this is a graphic novel clocking in at 123 pages, it doesn’t have room for the conflict to breathe. I felt that I understood a lot about Annie Wilkes when Misery concluded. I do not feel the same about Lily; she remains an enigma, a rough sketch of an obsessed fan. 

The artwork by Erica Henderson is spectacular. At first, I thought it would be one note, but she completely surprised me by switching styles to emphasize Lily’s fantasy version of how things were playing out or underscore a moment of change. There’s kinetic energy to the pages so that it flows by quickly. That’s also part of the problem; I felt like I reached the end so fast and wanted there to be more to this story. 

The parasocial relationship doesn’t appear to be going anywhere or being diminished. It’s a new religion. Look at the way fans of people like Taylor Swift perceive her without an ounce of reasoned critique. The same has happened to the political scene, with people becoming fanatics for elected officials and these same leaders coasting on that fandom, using it as a shield to do nothing. Admiration is lovely; there are many people worthy of it who have accomplished great things or created fantastic art. But these are people, at the end of the day, flawed, imperfect people like the rest of us. When building hierarchies of humanity, we only make life miserable for most people, crushing them at the bottom or forcing them to see themselves as valueless because they aren’t famous. The only way out, they can surmise, is to somehow attach themselves to those already renowned.