Little Bubby Child

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Sarah Baird on a work of art that's redefining online Appalachian culture.

Appalachians might not be able to agree whether or not it should be legal to sell Budweiser tall boys at gas stations or if using instruments during worship services is a sin, but every holler-adjacent person—particularly those under 40—can agree on the goodness of Little Bubby Child.

The brainchild of Kenneth Pergram, an eastern Kentucky Gen Z artist, Little Bubby Child is a social media-based series of comics that speak to a next-generation way of capturing the day-to-day humor of Appalachia through a (largely family-inspired) ensemble cast that forms a Venn diagram of oddly relatable, sentimental, and downright hilarious personalities. The titular Little Bubby Child is inspired by Pergram’s real-life little brother, Wade, a red-headed kid with a braided rat-tail and a couple of regional clogging championships under his belt, but there’s also Mawmaw Eula Pergram, a sweet granny with a wild streak and an affinity for bedazzled western blazers, and Papaw Zennith Pergram, a rowdy old man without a filter who inspired the classic Little Bubby cartoon, “If God didn’t want us to eat meat, he wouldn’t have give us dynamite to fish with.”

The cartoons are both evocative and familiar, with drawings like a crazy quilt of overheard conversations between two blue-haired church ladies and family reunion musing from a cousin-once-removed. Typically single panel with a lone illustration that has drew-this-in-on-the-back-of-a-Hardee’s-napkin energy, Little Bubby cartoons range from commentary on material culture, like a shirtless, squat-headed teenage boy with a single Dorito tattooed over his heartthat reads, “My cousin has a cool rainch dorito tattooed on his heart from where them chips has meant so much in his life,” to riffs on what outsiders think of Appalachians, like an older man wearing a hat that reads “in backer we trust” (that’s tobacco, for the uninitiated) railing into a microphone with the caption, “When my papa went on the news they done captions like he was speakin a furrin language.”

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