Ten Years of Tommi Parrish in a New Fantagraphics Book

• A Decade of Evolution: The book compiles ten years of Parrish’s career, tracking their development from early “Advicecomics” to complex, painterly narratives.
• Brutal Honesty: The anthology explores uncomfortable human experiences—fear, imposter syndrome, and trauma—with a visceral, “no-shame” artistic approach.
• Critical Acclaim: Parrish is established as a leading voice in independent comics, with previous honors including a Lambda Literary Award and features in The New Yorker.

Published by Fantagraphics and set for an October 2025 release, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”, the brand-new collection from cartoonist and painter Tommi Parrish, is an intimate anthology that gathers over two dozen short stories.

Tommi Parrish (born in Melbourne, 1989) is a trans cartoonist and painter living in Australia. They are by no means a new name to those who follow the international independent comics scene.

Their debut graphic novel, “The Lie and How We Told It” (published by Fantagraphics in 2018), won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Graphic Novel and has been translated into 11 languages. Their second book, “Men I Trust” (2022), solidified their reputation, earning a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2023. Parrish also received the Center for Cartoon Studies Fellowship in 2020, and their work has appeared in prestigious publications like The New Yorker, Granta, and The New York Times.

A worship of fear and pleasure

This collection is like opening Tommi Parrish’s drawers and finding ten years of work scattered across the table. From 2013 to 2023, everything that’s obsessed them: fear, loneliness, identity, queer desire, the body as battleground. What emerges, right from the first few pages, is a confident artistic voice and a willingness to explore the human condition with an almost brutal honesty.

The first story, “And They Rush on Me Like Some Kind of Fragrant Dream”, hits you hard. It’s about art (drawings of “Blake”), bodies everywhere twisting into “masks of ecstasy and agony”, chasing extreme sensations just to stay awake. It’s visceral, ritualistic, a way of saying “fuck you” to shame.

But then you find completely different things, like “Doubt”, a short, straightforward comic about the artist’s imposter syndrome. Or “For Those Among Us Who Wake Up Crying with Laughter”, where Parrish uses the surreal format of a Maury-style talk show to gut trauma and the fear of being alone.

Parrish shifts from an almost childlike drawing style to dense, dark painterly compositions, like in “Destroy All Monsters”. Here they tell a story about a relationship and generational trauma (a mother who “was only drinking because she was drowning”) with colors and framing that echo expressionism.

There’s also a section called “Advicecomics” (2013-2018), a collaborative online project where various artists answered questions from readers. Parrish (signing as “Sally”) tackled unrequited love, feminism, dating.

“The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” isn’t an easy read. But if you want to follow someone who isn’t afraid to dig into the most uncomfortable corners of human experience, Parrish is your artist. One of the most original voices in contemporary comics.

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