Simplicity
Cartoonist: Mattie Lubchansky
Publisher: Pantheon Graphic Library
Publication Date: July 2025
“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.”
–Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner
Is there a better way?
The story of Simplicity, as written and drawn by Mattie Lubchansky, is a story about alternatives. It focuses itself on the Spiritual Association of Peers (or SAPs), a commune in the upper side of a not too distant future in New York. Our outside observer is one Lucius Pasternak, an anthropologist hired by a corporation to investigate said commune for the purposes of historical preservation.
Readers of the more left leaning persuasion who typically read Lubchansky’s comics work will no doubt see the writing on the walls immediately, especially given the framing of the narrative through a series of museum artifacts that leave out plenty of details. The first being a bust of the founder of SAPs, Gerry Estroke, whose name is supposedly lost to time despite it being public knowledge. Information is often lost for reasons involving the needs of the powerful alongside the natural entropy of all things.
And yet, it is that inevitability that fuels the heart of Simplicity. While starting out as a work of folk horror in which our hero finds himself edging closer and closer to an unscrupulous cult, Simplicity reveals itself to be a mournful yet optimistic tale of living outside of society. Outside of the cameras and boxes and hierarchies that demand deference and submission. Where your gender identity can be accepted by everyone, including the people you love.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in the whole comic full of heartbreaking scenes is when Lucius gets his heart broken by his ex-boyfriend, David. You can feel the layers of self-loathing, dysphoria, and longing for a guy who is, frankly, an asshole justifying his attitude with his leftist politics. (Also, and I might have misread things, but I think he’s a bit of a transphobe.) There are certainly areas to critique Lou. He did fall for several red flags that have disastrous consequences for the community he grew to love.
But at the same time, Lou tried to fix his mistakes. Which, when living in a society based on cruelty, that makes you believe the only way forward is atop the bodies of countless men, women, and children, that encourages ignorance and obedience above all else, that puts us into boxes to categorize us into something that can be defined and neutralized, that tells us we’re alone and deserve to be alone and should just roll over and die so progress and civilization can trample forward into this brave new world we call America… Fixing your own fuck ups isn’t nothing. The ground can be tended—healed—so that something new can grow within it.
Of course there’s a better way.
“It’s not really giving up our freedom to be close with people. Because freedom only exists in relation to other people.”
–Margaret Killjoy, The Barrow Will Send What it May
Simplicity is out this month
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