Bitchy! The Exasperating Existence of Midge McCracken
Cartoonist: Roberta Gregory
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication: July 2026
Oftentimes, when creating works of semi-autobiographical (and even autobiographical) <a href="https://comicvibe.com/inside-san-diego-comic/” title=”Inside San Diego Comic”>comics, there’s an air of melancholy to them. Be it Eddie Campbell’sAlec, Tillie Walden’sSpinning, or Alison Bechdell’sFun Home, there’s a sense of yearning for a time long since passed, even if it was but moments ago. Even more acerbic works like Harvey Pekar’sAmerican Splendor still have that touch of melancholy that helps make it sing.
Roberta Gregory’sBitchy!, by contrast, is a madcap work that presents a world of casual cruelty and abject horror that refuses to flinch even at the monstrosity of its own authorial self-insert. In some regards, this is akin to the various works of Steve Parkhouse, in particular The Bojeffiries Saga or “Best Man Fall.” While both more fantastical in the reality presented than in Bitchy!, they nevertheless carry the vibe of a world of deranged people out to slit people’s throats for the sake of minor slights and displaced traumatic responses.
This befits the world of Midge McCracken’s childhood, being subjected not only to the typical cruelties of children, but also casual racism, sexism, and antisemitism that she perpetuates without thought or care. To say nothing of the truly horrific sexual assault within the first chapter, presented without a degree of titillation or grotesque explicitness, allowing its absence to remain the central focus of it all.
Artistically, Gregory utilizes a rather sketchy art style that rejects realism in favor of an emotional reality. Some characters are presented as traditional human beings with the proper proportions while others have no eyes, their face little more than a vessel to contain their massive lips. Bodies frequently distort — either because of their emotional realities or the actions of their fellow human beings.
Most horrifically of all is Uncle Stanley, drawn as an oversized human being, his blocky hands constant groping at McCracken’s young form, his face never seen until he’s little more than a withered corpse kept alive by machines and nothing more. This makes the moment of his sexual abuse of the young girl all the more horrifying than if it was depicted directly to the reader. We can feel the emotional reality that makes McCracken, in the words of the blurb, such a bitch.
This emotional reality emanates throughout the book, from the Christmas after the sexual abuse to working a 9-5 office job that feels like hell to the relief and joy felt at no longer experiencing cramps. We jump throughout McCracken’s life to find no true resolution in the sense of, say, Uncle Stanley meeting any real justice in the material world or McCracken atoning for being a racist to her best friend out of peer pressure and traumatic relitigating via teenage boys whipping their dicks out to girls they’ve just met or even a “This is the final chapter of the book” catharsis of a final issue.
Instead, we see a complete portrait of a woman who grew up in the sixties and continued to live in the 90s and 00s. Warts and all. And, in spite of it all, one can’t help but be engaged with the absolute mess of a woman we see.
Bitchy! is out this month from Fantagraphics
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