“Oops, Isaac” is a high point of New Animals not just because of its length but also due to its hybridity. The only speaking subject in this 12-page comics sequence is the ram, whose “bah bah” noises serve as a kind of emblem of isolation and tragedy realized by those who are simply human, trapped in civilization’s scripts. In the last paneled sequence of comics in the story, Abraham sees the tardy angel and the ram only after slaying Isaac.
They exist in relation to, on par with, transforming into, and in this case undone by animals. Instead, here and throughout Potter’s collection, people are displaced from the center of things. No one perspective is sovereign, and those of humans are not privileged. As the perspective of the panels shift - from a focus on characters to the home to the larger terrain to Isaac’s lingering, as if he anticipates what Abraham is planning to do - the world opens up to multiple interpretations. In these pages, Potter’s hand-drawn panel borders are expressive, yet minimal line work furthers the narrative’s tonal range, enhancing its meditative quality and its imbrication in our contemporary commodity clutter. The comics pages that appear in the story detail, in nearly wordless panels, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac as they walk from their home to a hill. The operation states specifically: pre-sacrifice arrival and audible announcement, “Psych!” it is inexcusable that the knife landed in flesh. The council will note ineptitude in terms of angelic monitoring and intervention regarding the subject, Mitchell IV, and his mismanagement of Abraham-and-Isaac with relation to Abraham’s commanded sacrifice of Isaac. In the “official report” documenting the angel’s failure to intervene in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, for example, the language of contemporary HR merges with Biblical violence: The story’s setting both deflates the Biblical story to mundane proportions and estranges the piece’s contemporary diction with odd references, as if the reader is learning the acronyms of a workplace not their own. Angels are incompetent employees of a just-in-time delivery service, Abraham is a down-and-out farmer, Sarah is a preoccupied homemaker.
What follows involves the punishment of the angel, the resurrection of Isaac, and marriage trouble between Abraham and Sarah.
In the collection’s longest story, “Oops, Isaac,” Abraham actually kills his own son Isaac, because a new angel was late in bringing a sacrificial goat to the scene. The book’s stories are frequently set in a kind of mild dystopia, a world where characters still have access to various modern tools and equipment, but much of what we know has been stripped away. Instead, experimentation not within but between media can enliven aesthetic concerns - especially concerns that, like Potter’s, focus on the transformative slippage between humans and animals and seek to imagine new ways of thinking about ecology and identity. But by placing comics stories alongside more conventional prose stories, Potter makes clear that the contemporary generation of cartoonists and writers need no longer pay any mind to the high/low or literary/popular distinctions that have preoccupied so many scholars and artists in previous generations. The book creates a thematic unity amid this formal hybridity: the pieces are all preoccupied with transformation and the blurry boundaries between human and animal, death and life. Some of the short stories are conventional prose pieces some of the comics follow a normal four- or nine-panel grid and other selections combine prose paragraphs, comics panels, and single-page illustrations. NICK FRANCIS POTTER’S New Animals is a collection of short stories and comics.
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