When cartoonist Elana Pritchard violated a court order, she was sentenced to two months in the Los Angeles County prison system—hardly a well-spring of inspiration for most artists. Pritchard’s mentor however, is famed cartoonist and animator Ralph Bakshi, perhaps best known for his brilliant feature-length cartoon Fritz the Cat, the first animated film to receive an X-rating from the MPAA. Bakshi encouraged Pritchard to chronicle her time behind bars, and what she produced using only a golf pencil and whatever paper she could scrounge up is a gorgeous comic memoir.

Stylistically, you can see Bakshi’s witty influence in her work, but there are notes of R. Crumb’s exasperated humanity and Jon Kricfalusi‘s wild sense of movement and form as well. The filth, the scarcity and the brutally, nonsensically regimented life of a prisoner is all drawn out with humor and pathos. While Pritchard portrays most of her fellow inmates with vigor, character and charm, she draws herself as a literal hapless baby, barely able to function. As you might expect, authority figures aren’t quite so flatteringly depicted.

To read more about Pritchard’s prison time, check out her essay at LA Weekly, where she talks about the dreaded “squat and cough,” being shuffled around without explanation, trying to keep clean when laundry, hot water, toilet paper and maxi pads were never in abundance and even a harrowing encounter with some male inmates attempting to trade tits for meth. I wonder what the MPAA would think of that.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via LA Weekly