Sweet Paprika #3 // Review
She’s an editor. A novel she’s working on just got picked up for a film adaptation. It’s happening in a New York populated quite literally with angels and demons in the third issue of Sweet Paprika. Writer/artist Mirka Andolfo continues a very earthbound story that only happens to feature weird horn-and-halo iconography clinging quite literally to everybody. The fantasy element of the story remains on the surface of an interpersonal comic drama of a high-powered executive quite literally from hell. The story and the setting continue to have a casual dance with each other in another amusing chapter.
Paprika has got her hands full, just trying to be social. Why would anyone want to talk about anything other than business? It IS, after all, a business party. There’s a deal that’s been made with Purgatory Pictures, more or less guaranteeing success of the book it’s based on. Maybe there’s some sort of an issue with Paprika and her history with the author. And maybe there’s some issue with desires towards the head of Purgatory, but why bother with any of that? There’s business that could be discussed. Perhaps she could just stick around for a little while. Hopefully, she won’t get into too much trouble.
Andolfo’s deliberate ambiguity with regards to the devil/angel dichotomy is actually developing in kind of an amusing direction. The angel characters tend to be a bit sinister. The devil characters are often shown in an appealing and sympathetic light. As the story progresses, however, complexities and individuals threaten to make the visuals kind of superficial. Every character has a complex interplay of conflicting motivations. Horns and halos are just there for show. There’s no reason this same exact story couldn’t be done with an entirely earthbound visual reality.
Of course, if it WERE the case that this was simply a metropolitan story of a woman struggling to find happiness...it wouldn’t exactly appealingly meet the comics page. Andolfo’s playful use of angels and devils keeps the world of Sweet Paprika just outside the realm of day-to-day life. The fantasy of the story is amplified by the manga-like exaggeration of emotion that remains almost tolerable in the third issue of the series. Time will tell if the series can meet a satisfying conclusion.
The dramatic metropolitan comedy is still fun, but it feels like it’s drawn rather unpleasantly out of the mundane. There isn’t enough insight into the Paprika’s complexity to move very far beyond the surface-level cliches that Andolfo has been playing with throughout the series thus far. If there was just a bit more attention paid to the weird cosmology of a world populated entirely by angels and demons, it might be a bit more appealing...but it wouldn’t be a Mirka Andolfo series. The writer/artist has her own idea of what she’s looking for, and she DOES seem to be making it work. It’s just too bad that it’s not more interesting.
