Review by Frank Plowright
A defining insight into Roxane’s life is supplied over the opening pages. Her social security payments have been stopped as she’s not attended meetings, so she reacquaints herself with a boyfriend she dumped in the hopes he’ll bring some beer round.
Without her dole payments, though, she needs money, and after an online porn session masturbating to a Colin Farrell video, she signs up for a site where women can sell their used panties. It seems easy money, and Roxane rapidly discovers more can be earned by handing over the underwear in person and catering to people’s kinks.
Maybelline Skvortzoff maximises the possibilities of Roxane’s dissolute lifestyle, lacking any form of judgemental attitude, with each scene informing a little more about her tastes, and it’s all handled with a wry sense of humour. As the sample art displays, there’s no glamourising events for the audience, with the only explicit nudity over the first two-thirds of Dirty Panties occurring during a disturbing dream sequence, and Skvortzoff is masterly about ensuring any incipient erotic thoughts are immediately squashed. Several funny jokes about eating out prove the point.
Playing into that, the art isn’t conventionally attractive, yet it’s very good. Roxane and those she interacts with can be known from their expressions and reactions, and locations are pieced together from scratchy lines and occasional cross hatching. When the more erotic content arrives in the final stages Skvortzoff creates a disturbing, distorted world, messing with angles of vision.
Dirty Panties is Roxane’s awakening and re-awakening, the first being a sort of passive acceptance and the second a realisation. Despite the funny moments, her journey of discovery reveals her as selfish and unlikeable, someone who’ll always do what suits her best at the time without any consideration for others. It’s a rare personality for a leading character, so a brave move, and the ending involves a new form of self-delusion. It’s all very smartly on the edge of credible, involving anecdotal incidents you could imagine being spun for comical effect on a panel show.
As Roxane is drawn throughout with an extremely prominent nose and shares the name of Cyrano de Bergerac’s unattainable love in the famous French play, there seems some obscure joke going on, but as there’s no further connection perhaps it’s just coincidence. Her story is captivating and without redemption, and all the better for that.
