Fleas
Manga artist: Mara Ramirez
Publisher: FieldMouse Press / $16.95
September 2025
Who is the flea? At the beginning of a graphic novel, she is featured at the beginning of a graphic novel that shares her name, dislikes, and strange facts about her. Mala Ramirez’s fleas were painted and there were fleas before it was released. After you close it, she remains. Without an attitude, some may say brash. In a nutshell, it’s perfect.
The story becomes a series of vignettes as we meet. Want to know who the fleas are? Meet your family. It tells the story of her childhood when her hair was burning. You jump to the minor outings, minors, at a bar that starts with socks in the eyes and ends with tricks in the bushes. The night really ended with a can of beer and I was kicked.
The chisels are art brutes. The moment of wrinkles in front of the gorgeous alcove is more realized in terms of the details depicted. Most of the books are done in a disadvantaged, loose, gesture style with detailed boundaries. Fleas and co. It flows across the pages, as Ramirez would like, without background or borders of painted panels, without worrying about anatomically correctness.
When Mala Ramirez builds a Gothic church from a business front in the closed downtown business front, or lends relatively invaluable details to a butterfly that lands the goalkeeper’s nose on a flea during the game, they both get destroyed by a kicked ball. What’s bigger than our victory or trauma is the flipper and pinball connection.
Usually, the small moments outside the story of our lives (who’s not a flea?) dominate the day, and the more moments become, the longer it takes to make it happen. The climax is a psychedelic arcade sex fest, where the body and the game end up erasing the devastatingly whimsical and conscious tableau. Fleas transcend reality because reality sucks.
It’s wild that you can get so much, especially when the story, art, gives you very little. There is rarely a background. Suddenly they are at the bar. They were on the street, where are they? Readers are well given. It’s not a problem where the free stands when she makes the call (“outside”), but what’s important is what’s said on the phone. There is no name, place or definition unless Ramirez wants them to know specifically about them.
The fleas trust that readers can navigate the story without such a thing. It’s like one of the word puzzles that lacks or is not broken, but you can read it anyway. This also applies to the amount of narrative elements and art details. From the context, it’s three clouds with quotes, but if you’re reading, it’s also the highly horny Greg Araki who tweets when faced with despair. Raw, authentic, artistically and clearly manufactured.
It’s absorbed into the veins of Sofia Foster Dimino and Jane Mai, but both seem to be bozo texinos like drawing style Ramirez. The art of fleas reminds us of the minimal fearlessness of this woman’s work from Julie Delport, Beck T or Di Saworander.
The key to a good comic is to know which parts of the story are important. The dog in front of the dog makes sure they jump in behind and aren’t too confused by their sensitivity. It’s the paranoid world we live in. And it’s pretty miserable with arcade shows and arcade shows of parts readers who are witnessed at home with her family.
The details of the flea are like a wolf misunderstood for her aunt, a hard drinking spider for her mother, a grandmother with fleas of the same antennae, a boyfriend who doesn’t take off her hat. What people say and how they act will tell you their story. It means instantaneous, butterfly, and beer cans. No rules. no problem.
Fleas are available from Fieldmouse Press.
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