Nathan Cowdry’s Crash Site

posted by Emily Gosling May 24, 2021

Don’t let the cute lady with a big, manic pixie dream girl fringe; the pink playful cover typography; and the sweet teddy bear-like dog fool you: there’s very little that’s cutesty about Nathan Cowdry’s Crash Site.

Published by the esteemed comics house Fantagraphics— which has put out the likes of Tomi Ungerer, Daniel Clowes, the Complete Peanuts and Simon Hanselmann—this is the debut graphic novel from Cowdry, though he’s previously created a number of comics that have been published both as solo works and in compilations such as Fantagrahpics’ Now #4, which included his pieces I Thought Of You All The Way Down and Kewpie. In 2018, British cartoonist Cowdry published Shiner, which like Crash Site, makes use of flashbacks and potentially unreliable narrative voices. The stories also share two dual obsessions found pretty much everywhere in literature: sex and violence.Crash Site doesn’t so much showcase sex as female nudity, a masturbating dog and pornography. There’s a hell of a lot of pubes here, and Cowdry doesn’t shy away from the formal details of a woman’s body when she’s taking a piss outside. As far as the porn reference goes, it’s pretty hilarious: we see the male dog character perusing a mag titled ‘Woke Babes’, in which busty beauties use their feminine wiles to challenge all things #problematic. This means we see one sporting a dagger strapon, and a scene involving The Simpsons’ Apu in a sort of rape revenge fantasy. “Here comes my white privilege!” the dog explaims as he climaxes. Nothing is out of bounds for Cowdry, it seems.The aforementioned dog, Denton, is our protagonist throughout Crash Site, and we first encounter him waking up in a hospital confused, having just come out of an induced coma. As the narrative is revealed through his recollections and flashback scenes, we learn that Denton and his owner, a young woman named Rosie, had been travelling the world with the aim of trafficking drugs back to the UK from Brazil. On their flight home, the plane crashes over the heart of the dense, seemingly inescapable Amazon jungle. Denton lands with £50,000-worth of cocaine in his little dog belly, and has somehow survived intact. However, that soon unravels thanks to the peculiar third member of their group: a sadistic, anthropomorphised pair of knickers dubbed Pants Dude that tricked Rosie into wearing him one day on a beach.It’s a deeply peculiar, very dark and extremely compelling story that I’d defy anyone not to devour in a single sitting. While none of the characters are likeable, you find yourself sort of rooting for them anyway (aside from Pants Dude, who’s downright horrible.) Pants Dude reveals himself to ultimately be the agent of the most violence, and it’s his actions that explain the blood splatters that denote the various chapters of the book. The comic timing is superb, and it’s the specifics of the gags that reveal a true comic wit. It’s often the jokes that give us the most insight into Crash Site’s trio of unlikely characters. Rosie briefly compares Britain’s Got Talent to Schindler’s List, for instance; Pants Dude reveals himself to be a Holocaust denier. As well as being just hideous, Pants Dude does have a knack for an acerbic jibe: when Denton is understandably struggling to adapt to life in the amazon basin, Pants Dude suggests he might be “one of these 3-to-a-sleeping bag fire poi crustys” and asking if it’s his “first time in the woods without glow sticks and ketamine.” Ouch.
Cowdry’s drawing skills are somehow beautiful in opposition to the bleak themes of the book, and demonstrate his skill as both draughtsman and storyteller. Crash Site is hilarious, for those with a strong stomach and a finely tuned bullshit-detector.