Two soulmates, engrossed in reading the same book, pass each other on the street without ever meeting. A clique of teenage ponies is ravaged by scandalous gossip. As a world-ending meteor barrels towards Earth, a triceratops reflects on the fact that it never got to see the ocean.
Ben Dewey’s Tragedy Series on Tumblr is a single-panel compendium of mishaps large and small. Illustrated in a buttoned-up, old-timey style, like the sketches of a befuddled naturalist reporting from some adorably accident-prone alternate realm, the series collects what it calls “depictions drawn from regrettable accounts of the less fortunate for purposes of instruction; so that one may avoid similar missteps.”
These tragedies often befall the cute, but Dewey’s work is more than just an visual mashup of bad things happening to good animals. Though the artist has an undeniable knack for drawing helpless kitty cats, lazy lemurs, and conniving sloths, the tiny heartaches it dramatizes often hit just close enough to home to elicit a genuine wince. In a sense, Dewey told WIRED, the Tragedy Series is “about death and about the loss of things that you love, or coming up against obstacles that seem insurmountable or impossible to navigate.”
“There is a bittersweet quality [to life] that you start to understand more keenly, that becomes more acute, as you get older,” said Dewey. “Every time I watch Cosmos with Carl Sagan, I think, ‘Here is the best communicator of science that there has ever been. He investigated the world with a fearless love for everything, and he died at 62, of forces beyond his control.’ And the same thing happened to my dad, and my friend Greg. Making a point of observing the sad things in life, taking stock of those bittersweet qualities, is what I see in my favorite art, and that’s what I’m trying to reproduce.”
The Tragedy Series operates within a set of parameters that keep the world consistent, even as the subject matter veers wildly from week to week. “I like surrealism in my comedy. I don’t like scatological stuff or pervy stuff,” Dewey explained. “The internet has plenty of that, and there are people who do it much better than me. And I want to keep the subject of the joke outside of living memory. If it hits too close to home, then it starts to seem like more overt social and political commentary. Sometimes I’ll be prompted by a thing that’s happening, but I’ll try to take it two or three steps removed—so it’s not about the death of James Gandolfini, it’s about losing a talented person from the world, something more universal.”
A native of Ohio, Dewey attended the Cleveland College of Art and Design before moving to Portland at age 25, where he landed an internship at Periscope Studio and began posting the Tragedy Series to Tumblr in 2011. He posts three comics a week, every week; as of this writing, he’s reached Tragedy #420. The self-imposed mandate to come up with three gags a week was part of the comic’s initial inception. “Even when I don’t necessarily feel like, ‘I’m inspired!’, I still have the pressure to come up with something,” Dewey told WIRED. “I don’t like the myth of the artist waiting around for just the right spark to ignite something. That’s not sustainable with making a life in the creative industry.”
Dewey just released the second self-published chapbook of Tragedy comics, available via his Etsy store. He plans to conclude the Tragedy series when he reaches 500 comics, or just under six months from now, though he says he may follow up with a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style comic miniseries using characters from throughout the Tragedy Series. “I’m trying to plant the seeds of that now, so if it does turn into something people can look back and see it was in there,” said Dewey. In the meantime, the Tragedy Series remains his hallmark, with its helpless kitty cats, lazy lemurs, and a perspective on the world that feel as bruised as it does charming.
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