"Parrish has one of my favourite traits in a cartoonist: intense passion for the craft. They are rapidly evolving and experimenting wildly and it’s joyful to watch." —Simon Hanselmann
"Lonesomeness, dread, selfhood — these are some of the main themes touched upon in the 72 pages of Perfect Hair. These topics are never easy to talk about or even comprehend, but Parrish fully realizes them and with surefooted confidence, doesn’t shy away from anything, delving deeper and deeper into distressing psyches." —The Comics Journal
Parrish’s art excels at worrying these boundaries between symbolic thinking and actual experience, endowing big, clayey bodies with rarefied grace. —The Globe and Mail
In Perfect Hair you see what you hate most about yourself, and it reminds you how strong you are as you make your way through. —Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
This is an audacious debut by Parrish. It's interesting that Dash Shaw offered up a blurb, because among the many influences that Parrish cycled through in the course of this book, Shaw was the most significant. The layout, the use of diagrammatic text, the use of textual onomatopoeia in place of more typical sounds effects, and simple line are all there--except when they're not. Eleanor Davis is another obvious influence, and there may be hints of Gary Panter, Chris Ware and many others. What's remarkable is the way they are able to dial in and out of a particular visual style, often in the middle of a story. In "Train Scene", Parrish begins with a naturalistic color setting at the station, then switches to a pencils-only page, and then to the big, blobby character design they use for much of the book. In other words, the "real" image, the self-image, and the way he looks at others. The result is a style for Parrish that becomes uniquely theirs, whipping the reader from narrative fragment to narrative fragment while still retaining a cohesive set of character profiles.
A vivid cross-section of relationships, identity, and the gradations of emotion that color them.
Tommi parrish is a cartoonist who lives in-between Melbourne, Australia and Montreal. Their work has appeared in various anthologies, magazines, mini comics, gallery shows in New York, Argentina, and throughout Australia. Tommi has work in the permanent collection at the gallery of Western Australia and has presented talks and workshops for the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers Festival, and the Girls Write Up Festival.
