Paper Cuts: What Happens Next

Comprising the serialized comics Dog Names, Someone Else, No Matter What, and Victim Impact Statement, Max Graves’ What Happens Next is a fiendishly intelligent and relentless sendup of true crime which tells, in elliptical, self-involved fashion, the story of the people involved in and impacted by the killing of teenager Haylie Gorski. Out from the swamp of religious fundamentalist homeschooling culture Graves dredges his characters one by one, dissecting their suffering and the suffering they inflict on others with simultaneous efficiency and penetrating insight. Graves’ dialogue is masterfully confident from the word ‘go’, blending true crime narration, online conversation, and Millennial/Zoomer ennui into a seamless but richly varied dialect spoken distinctly by each character. Milo’s terse, highly therapized brittleness, Claire’s earnest military-mom-esque bigotry, the laconic back and forth between Youtubers Vikki and Xandra — the ear for dialogue needed to master so many contemporary voices, much less to keep them easily distinguished from one another, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Milo alone is a character for the ages, the most rancid smol bean imaginable presented not with a dismissive sneer but with deep and genuine feeling. It’s much more painful to look at someone like Milo head on than it is to laugh nervously at his obvious and intense dysfunction and then hurry away, but Graves keeps us firmly situated in his strange, sad life. The branded shirts, the cozy tumblr account dripping with content warnings and self-pitying suicidal ideation, the plushes and children’s toys with which Milo surrounds himself — it’s a vision of a deeply stunted young man trying to cling to the childhood innocence he never had. That he was a willing accessory to Haylie’s murder, cutting her corpse apart with a saw on instruction from fellow homeschooled trans boy Griffin Petty, is a circle he can’t seem to square, a trauma he can’t let go of or take responsibility for. Watching his pitiful, fearful attempts to make a connection with Gage, a serial killer aficionado and Griffin’s new partner, is equal parts heartbreaking and repulsive, and knowing his repellent family set him up again and again for just such failures does nothing to take the sting out of watching it unfold.

Graves’ art is simple and clean with strong, expressive lines and impressively evocative backgrounds. The same materialist approach to the mid-late 2010s timespan covered by the comic is everywhere in costuming, backgrounds, and conversation. Characters discuss television shows, debate the ethics of fiction, dress themselves in branded merchandise. The sense it gives is of identities in flux, of young people desperate to communicate something of themselves to an increasingly hostile and uncaring society. What Happens Next does have a central plot, following Milo’s expulsion from his grandmother’s home as well as Claire Gorski’s embrace of transphobic conservatism as she burns herself out in an attempt to enshrine a new law allowing harsher sentencing against minors, but the vibes and mess of it, the ripples caused by Haylie’s death, are much more to the point. Its characters live in a society rendered incoherent, a world where the worst things they ever did or had done to them are splattered across Reddit, Twitter, tumblr, and a thousand other cesspools, endlessly relitigated as though they’re happening in real time. They’re trapped in an endless present, and it’s eating through them like acid.