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Tiana Richards

Prof. Ethan Youngerman

Writing the Essay: The World Through Art

February 10th, 2020

Bjenny Montero Process

All of Bjenny Montero’s work is created with the same materials: watercolor paper, black

pen, and the same “like seven colours” of watercolor (Montero). Although Montero now resides

in Athens, Greece, he ships in his watercolors from a specific art supply company in Melbourne.

He doesn’t “want to upset the balance”. He then uses these materials to create short comic strips,

usually no more than four panels. His art isn’t what one would typically define as art. It is more

likely to be seen in the Sunday funnies rather than the MOMA. Yet the content of his comics is

melancholic, self-critical, and patently millennial. The characters in the comics are all

anthropomorphic animals, birds, dogs, and frogs being the most common. It’s all pretty easy to

digest: bright colors, some short lines of dialogue here and there, and every day animals

delivering the text. If it weren’t for the frequent references to marajuana, mental illness, and sex

these comic panels could easily be mistaken for pages from a children’s picture book. Montero’s

characters are always vibrant, but his backgrounds vary in detail and color. Sometimes the

background is plain white, putting emphasis on the characters and their experiences. Other times,

the backgrounds are incredibly intricate and just as bright as the characters that inhabit these

worlds. Not a single detail is missed, giving the viewer a delicious display of all that this world

contains.

But why comics? If Montero has such strong artistic ability, why is he not expressing his

point of view on the world through “high-brow” art that could give him serious recognition. I
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think the answer lines in a snippet from the journal article “MASS MARKET MODERNISM:

COMIC STRIPS AND THE CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION”. In this article, author Ian

Gordon claims “First, comics can be seen as a response to the process of modernisation and

second as a humour based response to the problems of representation faced by a society in

transition.” Modern art has developed in many different directions: the extravagant abstraction of

avant-garde, desperate recreations of the classics, or cheap, kitschy cash grabs in attempt to all

audiences. The comic strip is a response to all of this. A seizure of the high-brow artist’s tools

and melding it with the humor and sensibilities of the average person. Using the same materials

that Monet worked with to create four panels of sardonic commentary on the perpetual loneliness

the creator feels. And these panels are created quickly, sometimes within mere hours. But I don’t

think this means there isn’t an important labor at play here.

Montero’s mode of production is a reflection of how quickly we can express our

emotions to the public in this modern world. Millenials and Gen-Z (my generation) have the

ability to create an aesthetically pleasing Instagram post that has a rant in the caption. We all

have the means to tell the world how we feel, sometimes oversharing. We also have the means to

dress up this oversharing of information in a way that provokes our aesthetic sensibilities.

Montero is doing just that, but without technology. His characters speak in a way that is

fragmented and abstract yet deeply familiar and completely understandable by his audience. We

know that when a Montero character says “Everyone has a Shmoopy-Bop but me” that he’s

referring to the fear that everyone is in love but you, even if we have never heard the phrase

“Shmoopy-Bop” in our lives. This is the power that comic strips have: simple yet creative

relatability.
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Works Cited

Gordon, Ian. “MASS MARKET MODERNISM: COMIC STRIPS AND THE CULTURE OF

CONSUMPTION.” ​JSTOR​,

www.jstor.org/stable/41053781?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.