Content warning: the below piece contains descriptions of disordered eating.
“I'm an ugly, horrible person,” moans Anne, the central character of Kat Verhoeven's debut webcomic Meat and Bone. Lying fetal and glassy-eyed in the aftermath of an eating binge, she resolves, “I'll get rid of it. Everything I have. A dinner party. A big housewarming... I won't eat a thing.”
Anyone who's struggled with disordered eating can probably find a twinge of horrified relatability in those words. In Verhoeven's comic, whose collected print edition is out on May 24 from Conundrum Press, Anne and her best friends Gwen and Jane move in together to start new chapters in their lives after a trio of bad breakups, but Anne's fragile mental state soon leads her back to her long-dormant anorexia and bulimia. Lost and in pain, Anne finds a connection with Marshall, a model who makes starvation her lifestyle, and the pair form a passionate and toxic relationship around their shared self-harm.
Though their dynamic is poisonous, it's fascinating to watch Verhoeven's protagonists fall in love — Anne, a stifled writer plagued with visions of Barbarella's hourglass silhouette; Marshall, a trans woman slowly killing herself in the attainment of cisnormative beauty under capitalism. Queer women aren't often centered like this in stories about disordered eating, even though research has demonstrated we experience higher rates of eating disorders compared to the general population due in part to minority stress; in this media landscape, Meat and Bone is a breath of fresh air. Verhoeven spoke with them. via email about stereotypes, self-loathing, and writing characters that aren't “safe.”
One of my favorite pages in Meat and Bone is Anne's dream about Marshall, standing at the top of a mountain dressed as Barbarella. What made you choose Barbarella as your avatar of unattainable body image for this book?
Meat and Bone is a comic set quite firmly in our current era and reality, and while it has some fantastical graphic elements, it's no science fiction, not even magical realism. I was craving something that would let me flex my creativity beyond bricks and glass, and Barbarella had come into my life around then. It's an over the top, campy and iconic film about sexual liberation. Barbarella herself is the ultimate female sex icon (in the 60s, anyhow), something Anne desperately wants to be but will never achieve. She obsesses over that ideal. Not only did playing with the image of Barbarella give me fun visual opportunities as an artist tied to a very plain world, Jane Fonda’s reminiscences on and difficulty with the role — as well as her own vocal struggles with having an eating disorder and trying to embody the 'it girl' stereotype in her youth — struck a chord with me, and with the story I wanted to tell. Anne idealizes this 60s sexpot when she could look deeper into the woman who portrayed her and find a strong role model.
Marshall is a fascinating character to me, and one that we don't get to see very often, if at all. She and her relationship with Anne are very toxic and codependent, but she's incredibly relatable in how damaged she is, and the way she and Anne bond over self-harm is a certain kind of messy most trans characters don't get to explore. How did you get the idea for Marshall as your tragic “antagonist”?
I hope we're beginning to come to a point where there's enough of a variety of trans characters that they don't always have to be safe. Trans representation has up until recently fallen into a few stereotypes, a lot of sex workers and awkward, damaging narratives. We’ve seen more empowering stories recently that want to give these characters hopeful, triumphant futures — happy journeys instead of the trite pain, struggle and death that's stereotypically been their lot. (You see this in comics in particular, where own voices have so much ability to make their own books.) And this is good! But I am interested in difficulty and mess. I like characters who aren't neatly good or safe. Most of the women in Meat and Bone are messy and bad in some way, and Marshall is like that too. I know she won't sit well with everyone, and when I hear negative feedback about her I plan to listen, but I didn't want to be too scared to make her interesting or challenging. I've tried so hard to make her human and relatable despite how deeply hurt and flawed she is.
As for her origin, in the very first drafts Anne had a pen-pal, an old ex-lover who she got into this feedback loop of anorexic advice and habits with where no one in her physical life could see what was happening. I decided that telling it that way felt too removed. I wanted something closer, both accessible and larger than life. Marshall is a bit like Barbarella that way. She starts out as someone that Anne sees and imagines, a fantasy metaphor, but unlike Barbarella she becomes real and acts on Anne's life and isn't this simple person who can be easily understood. She seems like an ideal, but she's just a person.
Anne gives in to Marshall's enabling so swiftly in part because Marshall is the only one speaking her language; a lot of her early comments to her friends and roommates read very transparently as cries for help, but those around her shut down her negative self-talk instead of giving her outlets to express how she's feeling. Do you think there are problems with how we culturally attempt to give support to people struggling with disordered eating?
This is hard for me to answer, because my own experience with it, when I wasn't eating, I was hiding that from everyone and definitely not talking about it. So I can't speak from my own experience about how people react to that. Writing Meat and Bone actually forced me to come out about how I had been treating myself and I found my friends to be supportive, if baffled — but by the time I was talking about it, the experience was mostly past-tense already.
People with eating disorders know that they'll get shut down and don't often reach out, and there's a fierce protectiveness to keep up those eating habits. It's very hard to offer support to someone who is against being helped, and especially in a culture where being thin is prized, people don't always see a problem when it's happening. Talk to any woman who's lost weight during an illness. Guaranteed she was praised for her looks.
There are a few details you've omitted, like the names of products and chemicals, in order to (I presume) not enable others' disordered eating by proxy. But sometimes the omission of certain events and experiences feels even more haunting than any depiction you could have drawn. How did you approach what not to put on the page?
When Meat and Bone was running as a webcomic, I did list some of those products! And a reader reached out and suggested maybe that wasn't a great idea. I agree. Anorexics, other people with eating disorders, are known copycats. I don't really think my omission will keep anyone determined not to eat from building their own bag of tricks, but at least I'll know they didn't get it from me. I can haunt and horrify without enabling.
I've watched most of the movies there are about ED, and that's one complaint I have against all of them. They deeply embrace the voyeuristic gaze and fascination healthy people have with how anorexics and bulimics get their weight down. There's very few I think are good works of art. It's a big reason why I didn't want to bother much with the “how” of ED, because that's really not the point. The emotional state is what I want to the show, the desperation and self loathing that fuels these bad decisions, and the sense of control.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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