Zooming in on Ben Passmore

Abstract

abstract:This article is about Ben Passmore's DAYGLOAYHOLE (2018–present), the collection of webcomics published as Your Black Friend (2018), and various essays and interviews. Analyzing these texts has led me to develop a new interpretive framework to explain a pattern of zooming in and out as Passmore's dominant aesthetic strategy. I argue Passmore's comics force the reader's focus—a kind of requisite zooming in—on the humorous and the bizarre, drawing attention to the small, seemingly inconsequential, and trashy. Passmore's particular brand of activism is motivated by his wariness of what he terms "political edifice" propped up by a mindless internet culture and is situated around an anarchist vision of dismantling corrupt institutions and oppressive ideologies. This is expressed predominantly through the "zoom," which is a kind of aesthetics of scale. The zoom as an aesthetic mode generates friction that encourages a slowed-down reading of Passmore's comics, which may expose the possible shortcomings of Scott McCloud's vision for the "infinite canvas." I also consider three of Passmore's activist interests as represented in his work—multiracial identity and Blackness, gender and sexuality, and New Orleans and gentrification—which I argue constitute a more conceptual zooming in on social problems.