eddy atoms pinky & pepper forever

I’m a sucker for any art that makes me aware of it as something that was made. I love Brecht, whose theater is all about making you aware that you’re watching a play, or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which is admirably dedicated to stopping you from losing yourself in its language. Eddy Atom’s newest book, Pinky & Pepper Forever(Silver Sprocket 2025) is such a comic. The story is about Pinky and Pepper, a lesbian couple of anthropomorphic dog girl art students who end up dead in hell, training to be grim reapers.

The art is hyper-stylized and incredibly campy, drawn with various media including several kinds of paint, scratchy colored pencil, digital art, and even a sculpture. In a book populated by less frenetic characters, driven by a more subdued plot, this kind of change would be jarring, but in Pinky & Pepper Forever, the style is illustrative of the wild subjectivities of suicidal, BDSM-obsessed puppy-girl lesbians. 

Like many stories about artists, Pinky & Pepper Forever has a meta narrative woven throughout the book. The intense, psychedelic colored pencils of Atoms’s world don’t just reflect the fun colorful mania of his two protagonists, but also the ways which artists hyper editorialize their own lives, turning them into Narratives, rather than face the intrinsic unpredictability of lived reality. Such editorialization takes on a more sinister note when paired with the obsessive  toxicity of Pinky and Pepper’s relationship as the story develops(Pinky ends up committing suicide to spite Pepper, whom Pinky believes doesn’t appreciate her art, turning her body into an art piece).

Their relationship is a combination of melodrama and kitsch, emotionally intense enough to end in suicide, fraught with all the very real complexities of a queer relationship, and yet also about as mature as two children fighting over a toy truck on the playground. It’s this interplay from which much of the campiness of Pinky & Pepper stems, fueled by Atoms’s beautiful, affected art style. As a kitsch art object, Pinky & Pepper Forever is a wild success. 

Unfortunately, the narrative complexity of Atoms’s work gets lost in this sea of camp. The themes of victimhood, self-worth, art, and suicide, all within a queer relationship don’t get the room they should to breathe, ending abruptly in a rather forced “happy” ending. Our introduction to Pinky and Pepper’s relationship is so fast that we don’t get a chance to understand their status quo before they fall apart. This problem persists throughout the story, with each story beat feeling over before it’s begun. The pace adds to the whirlwind, manic feeling of the two’s relationship, but reading a book centering queer relationships and suicide without being allowed an emotional attachment to the characters and their struggles is frustrating. 

janethesturgeon july 5, 2025