Luke Healy Lays On The Metaphor In His Wonderful “Permanent Press”

Do other people get a thrill out of footnotes? Is that a comic mashed with a play?
Luke Healy’s Permanent Press combines all of my favorite things and insecurities into a graphic novel, and if that means I have a case of metaphoritis, too, set-up an appointment with my shadow psychiatrist and let the evolving into a cartoon mouse begin.

Luke Healy wants to write another award-winning comic. His shadow wants him to get dressed before 2 pm (if my shadow could talk, she’d be ample to say the same thing in twenty minutes). What transpires is the creation of two separate comics: “The Unofficial Cuckoo’s Nest Study Compendium” (which in real life was nominated for the Ignatz Award and Slate Cartoonist Prize) and “The Big and Small”.
“Cuckoo’s Nest” is the one that incorporates stage directions and script parts, and generally messes around with form in playful and expressive ways. After directing a failed production of Macbeth, Robin Huang makes her stage return adapting a book nobody heard of until its author won a prestigious fellowship.
The story isn’t told exclusively through script (there are speech bubbles, too) but the question is whether to read them together or apart. My theory is the scripted lines are Robin writing the conversation that she wishes took place and the dialogue bubbles are what gets said aloud, but Healy draws no conclusions. This is also where the “Study Compendium” part of the title comes in. The script fleshes out information that would otherwise go unsaid.
I might be in denial about this reference landing, but Slings and Arrows fans will appreciate Robin’s struggle to get her show off the ground. Between a set designer who refuses to hire help and a producer who wants to move up the date for opening night, it’s a pressure cooker for comedy. You need to, and have cause to, laugh at everything that goes wrong. Robin realizes the author looks like her ex-husband and spends a conversation imagining his face as a photo of her ex. Healey uses an actual photo and the mixed media stands out, but then when you see the author, drawn in profile, holding a photo in front of his face, it stops being only in Robin’s head (though maybe not literally) and becomes this lovely, absurd joke.

“The Big and Small” tells the story of Amir and Mo. Spurred on by his father’s desire to see him become an accountant, Healy (or the Healy who’s a character in this book) uses numbers to compare the neighbors, who live on different floors of an apartment building. Maybe because “Cuckoo’s Nest” was published before, “The Big and Small” is intercut with more scenes of Healy talking to his shadow (tip: never take your eyes off Shadow because he’s rarely behaving as he should), but Healy’s increased presence also connects him to “The Big and Small’s” plight, which is whether numbers deserve the regard they hold in society.
As Shadow points out (“Deadline? For what? Are you getting paid for this?”), making money and art don’t always go together, and combined with Permanent Press‘ theme of technology taking over (Robin can’t resist responding to a message while her daughter’s talking, while Healy charges his laptop beside his bed, so he can check it right away), not all of modern society’s trends have been beneficial. Take it from Healey. He’s transforming into a mouse.
For a wonderful experiment in how to make comics more dramatic (and metaphoric), Permanent Press is available now from Avery Hill Publishing.