Tiana Richards

Prof. Ethan Youngerman

Writing the Essay: The World Through Art

February 12th, 2020

Bjenny Montero

The first time I saw one of Bjenny Montero’s comics, I was struck with a sense of

melancholic warmth that I had remembered experiencing so many times before, specifically at

my grandparent’s house. My grandpa was and still is obsessed with the ​Peanuts ​comics and

movies. I spent so much of my childhood reading these comics and becoming acquainted with

their themes of simplicity, loneliness and the pitfalls of everyday life. The characters, especially

Charlie Brown, seem to be in a constant loop of sad yet inconsequential failure. When Charlie

Brown is neglected by his peers, the sympathy meant to be provoked from the reader is coupled

with humour and a recognition of one’s own struggles. We feel sadness because of how common

the experience is, yet are also able to laugh at the non-seriousness of the issue because of how

common it is. This same universal low-stakes melancholy is a major theme in Montero’s work.

Montero’s art style, especially in his more elaborate works, is heavily influenced by

psychedelic art of the 1960s. Marajuana can be a theme in Montero’s work, but even in his drug

free works the backgrounds feature the swirlings colorful lines and “vibrations” featured in

psychedelic art. I can clearly see influence from artists such as Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and

Bonnie MacLean. Other symbols in Montero’s work that reflect his genre include peace signs,

“third eye” imagery, visual depictions of music, and outer space. I would say both his influence

from ​Peanuts ​comics and psychedelic art are both closer to Lethem’s discussion of plagiarism.

One of Montero’s comics, “It’s So Nice To Lie Down”, features a yellow bird that

preaches how “nice it is to lie now” and how he wishes “he could lie down forever”. He says this
of course from a bed in which he is… lying down. In the fourth panel of the comic, the blue bird

he was preaching to visits the gravestone of this friend. The gravestone is engraved with the

phrase “It’s so nice to lay down”. The message is a bit dark, but the blue bird has a smile on his

face, almost as if he knows his friend is at rest. Compare this to a ​Peanuts c​ omic, also four

panels. This comic has a lot less text: it is merely Snoopy sitting up on his iconic red doghouse,

stretching and yawning, and then in the last panel thinking to himself the phrase “born to sleep”.

This comic is definitely more lighthearted than the previous Montero comic, but it still explores

the same theme. In birth we are given the opportunity to have a full life in which we can

theoretically do whatever we like, yet so many people simply desire to rest. Not only is this

theme the same in both the works, but both the works present this theme through an

anthropomorphic animal rather than a human being. Perhaps the thought that sleep is more

desirable than consciousness is too depressing when it comes from a human narrator.

In a departure from his typical comic strip format, Montero has also designed

merchandise for indie and psychedelic rock artist Mac DeMarco. The bright oranges and pinks of

the DeMarco merch is reminiscent of psychedelic album covers of the late 1960s and 1970s. One

specific album cover that comes to mind is that of ​Disraeli Gears b​ y the British rock band

Cream. Both Montero’s work for DeMarco and the Cream album cover feature the name of the

musical artist as part of a larger collage of images all within the same color scheme. The symbols

in the works both meld into each other to create one cohesive and iconic “cover”. The art tries to

recreate in visual form the “trippy” effect that the musicians try to emulate in their music.