“Did You See Me?”

You know that feeling that the lines are blurring between our online and bodily realities? Where we social beings no longer maintain separations between our worlds on screens and the worlds we reach out and touch? Of course you know. It’s the theme of every other piece of contemporary media, mostly pessimistic fables about our smartphone-ruled consciousnesses.

But what if all those filtered profile pics, curated feeds, and pastiches of Likes/Favs/Emoji reactions aren’t just what we hide behind? What if they are, in fact, how we reveal ourselves to each other?

Cover by Foster-Dimino

Written and Illustrated by Sophia Foster-Dimino

Did You See Me? follows a man through his growing obsession with a woman who may or may not be real. Taking place partly in reality, partly on social media, and partly in dreams, Did You See Me? looks at the role of fantasy, wishful thinking, and roleplay in romantic attraction.

To review this book, I have to first tell you how it landed in my possession. One of those surprising sources of great, great comics is a thing called “ShortBox”, which I can promote with no conflict of interest– ShortBox did not even provide a review copy of this book for me. Every three months, ShortBox independent publisher Zainab Akhtar selects and gathers a bundle of comics from gifted cartoonists like Sophia Foster-Dimino, comics that reside somewhere in the territory between mini-comics, short graphic novels, and one-shots (I’d just like to call them, as Akhar does, “comics”). You can pre-order a box of those comics, trusting Akhtar’s editorial prowess, which has proven trustworthy every time IMHO. (It’s not a subscription, so it’s been the quality of the compiled comics that keeps me coming back every quarter.) Or you can order the individual books a month after they’ve shipped to the pre-orderers. It sounds like an off-beat distribution method, but fans and critics have taken note: two ShortBox titles wound up with Eisner noms last year, though I’d contend they’re a strange fit in their “One-Shots” category.

“Did You See Me?” came to me via ShortBox 9 a few weeks ago, which means if you’ve caught the ShortBox bug like I have, the beautiful magazine-sized book is already in your hands, and if you haven’t, you should be able to order it in a few weeks on ShortBox’s site.

But describing how you get the book isn’t just my PSA for avid collectors, it’s part of my fascination with the book’s themes. Because it came in a box of comics I ordered sight unseen, how it arrives to me is also a layer to the nagging question of its title, “Did You See Me?” For reasons I don’t want to give away, the title image on the cover plays intriguingly with textuality, surfaces of visual connection, and recognition, all in ways that didn’t strike me until I finished the comic and mulled it over. The fact that the book comes under such mysterious circumstances, ordered online through blind trust rather than picked up and thumbed through at a comic shop, seems to me part of its mystique, the very mystique the book plays up.

Inside, the story begins with a now-familiar device of providing exposition through the Twitter feed and DMs on the phone screen. Ten years ago, it’d be a disorienting method of ascertaining relationships and context– today, it’s all-too-natural for us. From the back cover we meet the ironically-handled @hardcoverdavid who is an editorial assistant at a publisher and a podcaster about literary fiction. Through his Twitter we encounter the strange, troll-like intrusion of an “emma,” who first pops up in mentions, then slides into his DMs, and then, mysteriously, makes their way into David’s actual dreams.

If “actual dreams” is even a thing.

Really, the whole book becomes a question about what is “actual” about any of the realities we live in. David In Real Life has a girlfriend, a job, a subway to ride and a cubicle to work in. But the surreal and entrancing world of David’s dreams, drawn by Foster-Dimino with a rapturously off-kilter shapeliness that reminds me of Eleanor Davis or Keren Katz, somehow asserts its reality in equal measure. David is shaken, piqued in a way he can’t brush off, by how the persona on his Twitter feed takes on an alluring life in his dreams. Soon, he is interacting on the screen. Soon, that allure is realer than his actual girlfriend.

As I suggested at the beginning, and as the title posits, this book is asking questions, not wagging fingers, about our social fabrics, dramatically reconfigured by social media, and how they wrap up our quivering hearts. “emma’s” opening contact on Twitter is a demand for an apology from David for “bumping into [her] last night” and making her drop her sandwich. David recalled no such incident happening. She’s convinced it did… in their dreams.

That strangeness doesn’t subside, though it perhaps gets less creepy and more haunting, as David sinks deeper into a relationship that is oddly physical and tangible despite existing entirely on his screen and in his dreams. Meanwhile, David’s bored eyes while he mills around his material life betray that his mind is elsewhere. Ultimately (again without spoilers), we’re left to question whether in fact the over-produced, fretted-over representations of ourselves that we funnel through our online avatars, “reality” TV shows, or crafted 280-character utterances are false fronts, or whether they are actually a means to see each other, to see humanity, perhaps in ways that our dull eyes wouldn’t otherwise afford.

The book hangs on that question mark, and Foster-Dimino’s cagey use of four or five different art styles leaves much more said in the gaps between defined objects than in their boundaries. The dream scenes are delectable, the 2am kind of sensual. The characters are drawn with the most deft deceptiveness of simplicity, as the story itself explores in a kind of meta-commentary of its Sphinx-like characters and their Mona Lisa eyes. And Foster-Dimino masters the manipulations of color and texture, from the bubble-gum backgrounds that pop and recede like addictive apps, to the spongy marker quality that makes a TV-based scene reside in the unreliable vibrancy of strong memory.

I’ll be plain: ShortBox is a fascination, an odd box of provocations, never boring. Even under such creative company, “Did You See Me?” shouts its originality and relevance from cover to cover. It’s a brief stroll in the park. The kind that lingers, and you keep wondering about.