This review originally appeared in the Sequential Tart Webzine on December 1, 2006.

Publisher
Brooke Spangler
http://agirlandherfed.com

Credits
Creators: Brooke Spangler

Grade: 7
A Girl and Her Fed follows the daily life of a young, single, female, liberal journalism intern who is under the surveillance of the fed. Her fed knows that she is not a terrorist, but ever since she has written an article defending civil liberties, he has just been doing his job by following orders to open her mail and watch her. This sounds like a deadly serious subject, but the topic is rendered hilarious by its treatment by Brooke Spangler. For example, her fed has had an annoying Pocket President, an AI version of George W. Bush, installed in his brain without his consent. His Pocket President does battle with the ghost/hallucination of Benjamin Franklin, to whom our heroine has been talking ever since an LSD trip. I laughed out loud intermittently as I followed the progress of the story.

Spangler does both the writing and the drawing for this comic. She herself says that she likes writing a lot more, and that she knows it shows. She’s right about that, but the writing is so funny that the comic is enjoyable to read in spite of the crudeness of the drawings. I’ve never read a political comic quite like this. I usually don’t find political cartoons or comics hilarious. Sometimes they get a smirk out of me. They rarely make me laugh out loud. Spangler manages to avoid being didactic, in spite of the intelligence and relevance she often allows to creep into her characters’ dialogue. She even humanizes the fed. This comic is a satire of what a liberal’s paranoia might look like, while also being a satire of the reasons for the paranoia that some feel in our era. It’s also an example of the freshness that can issue forth from somebody’s imagination on the web.