“The Devil’s Grin” by Alex Graham
Alex Graham’s The Devil’s Grin is one of the most ambitious ongoing comics projects in American independent cartooning right now. The Fantagraphics collection pulls together the first seven self-published issues into a 400-plus page volume, but Graham has been running the story daily on Substack for years and is already past page 670. You are, in other words, getting the beginning of something much larger.
The setting is 1974 Henryville, Idaho, a small town wrapped in a haze of Beat Generation grime and rock and roll mythology. Robert, the story’s fractured centre, was flushed down a toilet at birth by his mother, carried into the sewer by a demon, and suckled by a rat. As an adult, he writes poetry, chases women, and models himself on Jim Morrison, right down to the self-destruction. He is a character born from darkness who keeps trying to pass himself off as someone who wasn’t.
Dandelion, a young poet who falls for him, begins having terrifying romantic visions she can’t explain. Gary, their neighbour, hides in bushes observing the other residents of Henryville, drawing vindictive comics that appear to be the one you are reading, breaking the comic-book fourth wall.
View this post on Instagram
The characters are human-animal fusions: pigs, dogs, rats, and hybrid-things harder to name. Graham deliberately makes them difficult to categorise, where the discomfort is the point. If the surface reminder of Bojack Horseman is immediate, the tonal distance is enormous. Bojack uses the animal conceit as a satirical softener, a way to let you laugh at characters you’d otherwise find too depressing; Graham uses it to unsettle you. A more striking comparison is Lynch’s Rabbits, his 2002 web series in which three humanoid rabbits inhabit a sitcom set, speaking in disjointed fragments while a laugh track fires at random intervals. Lynch called it a sitcom; he also described it as a story about modern life. Both things are true, and neither one prepares you for what it actually feels like to watch. Graham is doing something structurally similar: taking the visual grammar of a form associated with innocence and running something genuinely disturbed through it – the familiar signals are all present; the comfort is entirely absent.
Graham similarly shares Lynch’s interest in the rot beneath wholesome surfaces, and his sense that evil doesn’t announce itself so much as seep into the peripheral vision of ordinary life. The grinning devil of the title haunts the edges of scenes, vanishing the moment any character looks directly at it. Each character suspects they’re going mad – none of them tells the others. Graham turns this collective isolation into something genuinely sad rather than just creepy, which is harder to do than it sounds.
Where the collection is less sure of itself is in its handling of Robert’s gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing scenes and a charged gay sexual encounter land without much emotional follow-through, and Graham’s treatment of race, though clearly intentional, can feel underdeveloped in places. Gary’s subplot, with its casual racism from his boss and the police, and his supernatural revenge comics, deserves more space than Volume One gives it. These are fair criticisms of the collection as a standalone object. Read as the opening of a much longer story, they read more like foundations waiting to be built on.
Graham posts pages daily, builds stories organically, and the result feels alive in a way that planned, completed graphic novels rarely do. Whether you come in through the Substack, the self-published floppies, or initially discover the Fantagraphics collection, you’re entering something still in motion. The best reason to start is that you’re already inside it when it reaches wherever it’s going.
The story is ongoing on Graham’s Substack, where she posts pages daily for paid subscribers, and to date has reached page 670-plus.
Header via https://alexgraham.substack.com/
