The B Book

Freelance designer and multimedia artist Randall has produced a kitschy high-concept comic book recounting the rise and fall of Miss Bee, a teenager from suburban Sunnyview who sets out to build her own corporate empire. An inveterate material girl, Miss Bee becomes a successful manufacturer of everything from clothes to cars to real estate; she graces the cover of every imaginable magazine and engulfs the world in products stamped with her trademark B. Success nevertheless transforms the imperious Miss Bee into a campy tyrant, a hybrid of Richy Rich, Mussolini and Joan Crawford. When she torments her workers and raises their taxes, Miss Bee is overthrown and forced to return to humble, edenic Sunnyview. This oblique fable about corporate greed is equally lavish and bizarre. Each plate is an elaborate collage of cartoonish backdrops, painted models in theatrical poses, sets bedecked with hundreds of trinkets and thrift-store collectibles. Like its heroine, this unique book suffers from an ideologically conflicted, post-Pop art sensibility: at once critical of and shrewdly exploitative of corporate hype and commerce, it fails as a modern morality tale and will likely be offputtingly weird to most readers. (Aug.)