The Lumpy, Lonely Protagonist: Today’s Comic Persona
TEDWARD. By Josh Pettinger. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2025. 160pp. $29.99.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
Josh Pettinger’s latest comic and his rising profile among graphic novelists should tell us something. Born on the (British) Isle of Wight, living in Philadelphia, he is widely regarded as being in a sort of humor family that prominently includes Simon Hanselman and Daniel Clowes. Publishing Goiter, the story of a traveling ventriloquist’s adventures, Pettinger established himself as a wacky type. “Anything can happen and usually does,” the tagline of an otherwise forgotten television show in an era that Pettinger and others might have found more comfortably mundane. Absurdism works best among the normals.
In Tedward, the protagonist as well as the title of the book, the credulous loser finds himself in the most improbable situations, with the least probable advisors and girlfriends. He stumbles through his adventures, ever credulous. This is comic art slapstick, with social anxiety at the center.
Looks count heavily here. The book starts with a romantic breakup that he believes may be due to his slightly overgrown, blonde flat-top, and proceeds to a memory of a lost love, regretting, “I never really appreciated her hair cut.” (p.5) He’s not a deep thinker.
On the verge of suicide, he is wooed to sanity by a most unusual business agent (with a black curl dangling into otherwise white hair) and soon meets an assistant, a woman with a curiously floral hat. Leading Tedward into the warehouse district of an unknown city, she guides him into a den of wild sexual excess, marked by pudgy, out-of-fitness naked bodies. It’s not anyone’s ideal of the standard orgy. But it is the most dramatic moment (and pages) of the comic, if only we could understand their larger meaning.
Tedward at rest.
There are two or three things to note, as we ruminate the history of comic art styles.
The first is how oversized, often overweight, characters can be found all across the funny pages and comic books. They almost never escaped being stereotyped. That is, no one would confuse them with heroes, heroines or even central figures. Very often, they were played for laughs. Pretty much as were nonwhite characters.
Thoughtful readers of comics will come up with ample exceptions, perhaps starting with Walt Wallet of “Gasoline Alley.” Pudgy or more properly shapeless, but also kindly, the world’s greatest step-father, also an affable businessman until his auto shop somehow disappeared, etc. The strip, which more than any other introduced funny pages readers to daily comic-narrative continuity, also included an embarrassingly stereotyped, oversized African American family cook, Aunt Jemima style. Today’s readers, like comics historians, can only wince and move on.
Chris Ware, more than anyone else, may have introduced a new but related type of characters. His piquant protagonists, male and female alike, seem to be both heavy-set or at least shapeless, and lonely. Even Ware’s imagined father-type, the Superman famously seen apparently laying dead in the street, has anything but a Superhero physique.
Page from Tedward.
Daniel Clowes added wild science fiction to the cause of loneliness, with characters roughly opposite to the physique-ideal comic book science fiction characters, especially the impossibly-beautiful/sexy spacewomen of the 1940s. Closer to real life, the Moderns are famously lonely, cannot escape being lonely. We never really learn why but we cannot help suspecting that in a world of omnipresent fitness opportunities and Ozempic commercials warning of the diseases of being overweight, purported or otherwise, they don’t feel good about themselves. The jolly fat man of yesterday’s comic strips, the “buddy” character who wants to help but somehow always appears foolish—these seem to be succeeded by Tedward, the protagonist himself.
Out-of-shapeness and loneliness; but we also need a third element: grotesque, uncensored sex. Tedward features some pages of sex that owe heavily to the Underground Comix and before them, the so called “Tijuana Bibles” available only under the counter or from the back of delivery trucks. Here, however, sex becomes a bizarre plot line: Tedward’s job is to spray the naked, post-coital men and women “clean,” preparing them for more sex. He never joins in, and at the end of this defining adventure, he is face-to-face with his former girlfriend, an avid participant. What could be more demoralizing?
The remainder of the comic floats along, from one improbable adventure to another girlfriend, overweight and, like him, notably hairless below the waist. He blunders into losing her, even calls the cops to arrest her for the high crime of somehow stealing a rented television. Toward the end of the book, an equally plump Asian fellow in shorts makes him an intimate friend and then, naked in a sauna, tries to force Tedward to undress. And so it goes onward toward a bang up conclusion of an apparent murder victim, rebirth in outer space, and return to a hospital bed on earth. At the end, imprisoned for murder, Tedward becomes a sort of Charles Atlas of superhuman physique, happy and thus at last a hero of his own life, without romantic prospects unless roommate, naked on the toilet, might count. Like the rest of the book, the conclusion is painfully funny.
All this undoubtedly tells us something, but what is it? Clowes’s Monica, which received grand billing in the New York Times book section, has a more ordered, historically-situated narrative, albeit with a Sci Fi ending that takes us to imaginary worlds almost as wild as Pettinger’s version. Tedward, like its lead character, is unbounded by anything, historical context, time or space. Whatever his final girlfriend (she, of a large black spot amidst her otherwise perfectly pink hair) seems wise as she tells him to realize his destiny, or at least feel better about himself, by searching “from within” (p.136). This is the best advice he is ever likely to receive. But what can he do with it?
