Modern Miracles!

A dark comedy about reproductive health

News & Reviews Magazine

This article is part of our September edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!

The piece you’re reading now is by Eloise Grills. Eloise is an award-winning artist and writer living on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung land. Her illustrated memoir-in-essays, big beautiful female theory was published in Australia by Affirm Press in 2022. The book has been shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize, shortlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Award for Illustrated Nonfiction, highly commended in the 2023 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards for Nonfiction and highly commended by the judges of the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Nib, Kill Your Darlings, Guardian, The Rumpus, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper and others.

Ever since a bunch of our monkey ancestors discovered animal bones and started clobbering each other on the head (or at least that's how I remember the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey) people have been harnessing technology to gain supremacy and the right to torture their inferiors with it. In this comic, I was thinking about these advances: who gets helped by them, who gets clobbered, and who gets left out altogether—allowing myself to indulge in my favourite blend of sarcasm and rage, like an angry school teacher savouring a shitty Nescafe in the staffroom.