High-Low

Minicomics Round-Up: Nichols, Zwirek, Puppyteeth

2012-02-01T05:51:00.000-08:00

I'm still poking through the minicomic riches I received at SPX, and today's batch yields some interesting gems:

! and A Shadow And Its Source, by L.Nichols. There's a restlessness to Nichols' work that I enjoy, as she's constantly flipping between genres and formal elements in her narratives. !, for example is a 24-hour comic that's a sci-fi story about a mad scientist whose experiments defy the ruling theocracy. The comic details the "Shadows" sent to hunt him down and the efforts he takes to retaliate. Nichols uses a fat, bold line that is perhaps meant to imitate a Kirby-style of powerful genre storytelling. This comic is obviously a lark, but it's a successful experiment in that she manages to create tension and depict action in a fluid manner. There are also plenty of drawings that are simply nice to look at. A Shadow And Its Source is the polar opposite of ! in that it's comics-as-poetry. It's a meditation on the work of artist & filmmaker William Kentridge, known for creating images built on erasure and repetition of images regarding his native South Africa. Nichols connects the pain expressed in his work with pain that she feels, both as an individual and an American. Flipping between Kentridge's photorealism and her own more whimsical style creates an interesting tension between the two, as Nichols doubts her own ability to communicate even as she creates striking images.

Blackstar #5 and Leper, by Jeff Zwirek. Zwirek's debt to the Brunetti school of figure drawing based on geometrical structures is obvious, but he goes in a lot of narrative directions with it. This issue of his anthology series Blackstar features a wide variety of genres and formal approaches. "The Lost Plumgrove" is a full-color fantasy story involving shenanigans between a couple of poor travelers and a vicious guard. Zwirek's work really takes nicely to color, and he makes some bold choices here to help tell his story. "Chicago Typewriter" was featured in his own Pinstriped Bloodbath gangster anthology, and it's one of his best stories. It's about the history of the Thompson sub-machine gun and how a weapon designed for American soldiers became the weapon of choice for gangland massacres. The other stories in the anthology are less remarkable; I found his Mario Brothers-inspired story to be difficult to understand and his pharaoh story to be dull. However, "The Reason", an attractive one-pager about fatherhood, was clever because of the use of color to depict the protagonist's dwindling reserves of energy throughout the day--until he got home. Leper is an odd but beautifully-designed mini about being a victim of violence & trauma, how it wreaks havoc on one's everyday life, and how one can help combat this trauma. Zwirek is a bold visual storyteller and his best comics are usually the wordless ones, and this mini is no exception.

Puppyteeth, edited by Kevin Czapiewski and Liz Suburbia. In terms of design and format, this is a bare-bones anthology photocopied somewhat haphazardly. In terms of content, this showcase for young and relatively unknown artists is understandably uneven. Suburbia's story "Our Lady Of The Bridge" opened the book and turned out to be the strongest story in the anthology, detailing two kids and their near-fatal encounter with a shadowy creature. It's a genuinely suspenseful story leavened by a bit of unexpected humor toward the end, and its effectiveness is owed to the expressiveness and clarity of Suburbia's line. Darryl Ayo contributes a handful of strong one-page pieces done with his usual piercing wit and increasingly confident line. Matt Czapiewski's story about an extremely old minor-league baseball player was hilarious both in terms of his thick, exaggerated line and his understanding of the psyches of sports fans. At the other end of the art spectrum, Jess Wheelock's collage-and-pencil meditation on curmudgeonly Statler & Waldorf characters from The Muppet Show was clever and touching. On the other hand, Martinez E Garcias' "Sex Zombies From Outer Space" was one of the single worst stories I've read in a long time. Worse than the hackneyed premise was that Garcias spelled out the entire plot (such as it was) with the very title of the piece! Alex Martin's "Gotcha" was trying to be clever in its attempt at meshing game and story but wound up as difficult to parse. The other stories were mostly forgettable, which is not all that surprising for what promises to be a loosely-affiliated comics collective that will keep roughly the same lineup from issue to issue in an attempt to get better in public.

Three Minis By Grant Thomas

2012-01-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

Grant Thomas is a cartoonist who enjoys working with and around formal constraints to achieve varying effects. His one-man anthology series Dodo provides a grab-bag of stories told in such a manner, revealing his interest in the way other arts can be expressed through comics. In #2, his "Homage To Leone" is a series of panels derived from the Sergio Leone "spaghetti Western" The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Given that that film is famous for its tight close-ups on the principal actors, it was only natural to take that a step further and freeze those famous images on paper. I like the looseness of Thomas' pencils here in avoiding a simple copy of frames, but he loses it a bit in the final panel with a figure that's too sloppy. "Drawing From Life" is an amusing but unremarkable anecdote about art school and nude models, with a whimsical line that heightens the humor of the situation. "Visions of Johanna's Concert" is a Comics Pantoum, which involves a repetition of panels from line to line in a specific, rigid pattern. It's comics-as-poetry of a different kind, emphasizing form over content. That form was somewhat interesting but ultimately didn't make much of an impact in terms of how the strip was read. "Why Have You Shut Your Eyes?" shows Thomas using a more decorative line as a sort of homage to religious art in this anecdote about an encounter between a man and a demon.

His mini My Life In Records #1 has a much tighter focus: autobiography as mediated by his experience listening to records. Starting from his earliest memories, this issue focuses on anecdotes about him and his younger brother. They are represented as anthropomorphic versions of the stuffed animals they held dear: in Thomas' case, a rabbit, and in his brother's case, a bear. It looks very much like they're wearing animal masks, a familiar but effective trope. This book reminds me a bit of Jesse Reklaw's Couch Tag autobio series in that deeper personal truths are expressed through a mediating factor of some kind, but there's not much darkness to be found in this comic. Indeed, it's more a spirited tribute to his brother and the memories they shared experiencing and creating art. That creativity is at the heart of Thomas' work, a kind of restlessness that demands thinking about storytelling in a number of different ways and trying to find any number of different methods of expressing oneself.

As a cartoonist, Thomas' formal thinking sometimes exceeds the grasp of his draftsmanship. Some of his images look over-rendered and more under-rendered, as though he's struggling to find a style that he's fully comfortable with. That struggle emerges in the micro-mini Submarine, which cleverly folds in on itself to amusingly tell the tale of a doomed vessel. The drawings themselves just aren't quite interesting enough to hold my attention, nor is the joke beyond the format itself funny enough to prevent that from mattering. Thomas is certainly getting more assured as he continues to experiment in public, and I expect his formal boldness to match up with the maturity of his linework sooner rather than later.

Changing Fortunes: Streakers

2012-01-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

Nick Maandag's Streakers is an odd little book. There's much about this comic that's traditional, even conservative, in the way it tells a story. It's a slice-of-life comic about three losers who have little in common but their unusual mutual obsession. All three of them go through crises of self-confidence and loneliness as all they really have is each other, which is a dubious prize at best. The figures are somewhat flat and stiff, while the hatching and cross-hatching are almost mechanical in effect. What sets this book apart is that the three protagonists are all streakers, a phenomenon once confined to fad status in the 1970s that occasionally lives on in frat houses across America.

The two main characters in the book are a middle-aged streaker named Xavier who can never quite reclaim the fleeting glory achieved streaking during a marathon in his youth, and a nebbishy younger man who hasn't yet screwed up the courage to actually streak. That character, Tim, is a hilarious sad sack who is subjected to a series of humiliations at his job. Harboring dreams of being a chef, he's a dishwasher who's eventually demoted to "junior dishwasher"--with all of the other dishwashers being named as "senior dishwashers". Amazingly, Maandag creates real pathos and depth for this trio of losers, as the reader comes to care about their struggles.

The fact that so very little is at stake here makes their quest to return streaking to its former status of cultural phenomenon all the more compelling. Everything about this book is both quiet and unassuming in its comedic approach, and outrageous only in that its protagonists are naked throughout much of the book (and not especially attractive). The flatness of Maandag's line highlights the characters' nudity without going too far in the direction of the grotesque or the exaggerated for the sake of a laugh. The end of the book has a surprising moment of human empathy followed by an exhilarating bit of silliness and a moment of epiphany for the boorish Xavier. Mining the humor of discomfort while still managing to get the reader to empathize with these weirdos is a neat trick for Maandag, whose potential as a humorist is intriguing.

Checking In With Rob Jackson

2012-01-25T05:52:00.001-08:00

Rob Jackson continues to be one of the most prolific minicomics makers in the world, as crazy ideas seem to flow out of him faster than he get them down on paper. While his draftsmanship remains rudimentary at best, there's a delightful wit to be found in his comics. I got the impression that his most recent comics "It's A Man's Life In The Ice Cream Business" and "Flying Leaf Creature" were more about him just wanting to tear through an experience and record it in the former example and playing with a new format and color in the latter.

"It's A Man's Life..." (the title is a take-off on an old slogan for the British military service) is an autobio story of Jackson abandoning his cushy job in order to sell home-made ice cream and soup at local farmer's markets. Jackson gets into the nitty-gritty of how he tried to find new markets, the experience of trying to offer something no one else did and the frustrations that went along with the times where ice cream wasn't selling. This is a very British comic in that Jackson discusses how certain fruits are only enjoyed by people in a small radius, but that a ice cream made from that fruit becomes a real delicacy in that market. Jackson's dry, self-deprecating wit (the notion to quit his job comes from a Cat Wizard talking to him at work) and bespectacled, blank-eyed self-caricature give what is otherwise a straight procedural comic a large degree of warmth and humor. While his line here is strictly for utilitarian purposes, there are portions of the comic where his drawing is rather lovely, like when he's drawing old cottages and vegetation. The second issue of the series is more of the same, as Jackson tries to create new flavors and figure out new wares to offer. Battles with the weather and other cheese & ice cream distributors emerge as new annoyances for a family trying to make a living in an unconventional manner.

Jackson is perhaps better known for his sardonic fantasy comics, and "Flying Leaf Creature" is an interesting variant on this sort of story. It's printed on a newspaper broadsheet and in full color, both of which are firsts for Jackson. Of course, Jackson makes odd use of the extra room, essentially jamming four pages' worth of material on each broadsheet page. One gets the sense that he originally wrote this comic as a regular mini and transferred its contents late in the game. This is a typically demented story, mashing together mad scientists, inter-dimensional travel, stereotypical gangsters, mysterious woodsmen and monsters into one delirious package. The figures are a bit more raw than usual for a Jackson comic, but he makes up for that with his bright, almost lurid use of color. That use of color seems arbitrary at first, until Jackson ingeniously shifts the reader into an alternate dimension of grey-scaling. While that was clever enough the first time he did it, the story's climax features a grisly but subtle use of red in that world of grey that made me laugh when I saw it. It was an extremely clever storytelling solution, to be sure.

The Good Stuff: Feynman

2012-01-10T18:10:00.000-08:00

Jim Ottaviani is a writer who's been doing comics about scientists for fifteen years now. While he's written about scientists and pseudo-scientists in any number of fields, he's most at home in his own field of interest--physics. His first comic, Two-Fisted Science, was mostly about physicists, including some colorful anecdotes about Nobel prize winning professor and teacher Richard Feynman. Feynman was not only well-known as a theoretical genius who had a hand in the success of the Manhattan Project, he was also known as a quirky raconteur who strove to make his theories clear to laymen. He was most fascinated by everything when it presented itself as a puzzle or game--a code to be cracked. Such activities were fun, but he inevitably was able to apply seemingly random events to deeper theoretical problems. That philosophy of fun was one he also applied to his personal relationships, disregarding the potential disapproval of others with the phrase "who cares what other people think?" Like Albert Einstein before him, Feynman became known beyond the scientific community as the model of "genius scientist", an approbation he did not take seriously. He did take education seriously, in part because quantum mechanics is so difficult to explain that it drove him crazy that he couldn't explain his Noble-winning ideas without a great deal of difficulty.

Indeed, it really came down to the fact that no one could explain quantum electrodynamics (how electrons and photons interact at a subatomic level--that is, light and mass) in an intuitive manner. One thing Ottaviani emphasizes in the book is that it not only bothered Feynman because this was a puzzle solved that couldn't be easy explained, it was vexing because the answer was so inelegant. Seeing the beauty in science and the world was a life-long interest of his that extended to the mysteries of art and why some things simply look right and why some things don't. There's a lot to admire in how Ottaviani approaches his subject, unearthing stories about his early life and peppering the reader with plenty of amusing anecdotes. However, Ottaviani does not shy away from the science. Like Feynman, he tries to keep things as simple as possible for readers without a background in the subject, but there was simply no possibility of creating a full picture of Feynman without discussing his theories in some detail.

Ottaviani takes the risk of immersing the reader in a first-person account of Feynman's life told by the man himself in his later years. It's a risky move because the reader is thrown into the deep end of physics right away, but the charm of the subject quickly helps to quell any narrative difficulties. Ottaviani wisely breaks the book up into dozens of three to four page chapters that each have the feel of an anecdote even if they're carefully crafted to create a narrative. Another smart move was leaving the details of Feynman's theory to the very end; by skipping over its details in the main part of the narrative, the reader doesn't get stuck on challenging material. Instead, the reader gets the benefit of having absorbed Feynman's other but related thoughts on the world before diving into particulars. One also gets to read Feynman's account of working on the atomic bomb, being part of an advisory committee that determined what went wrong with the space shuttle Challenger, his relationships with friends, family and lovers and assorted adventures on the road. Ottaviani packs a lot of material into 250+ pages, but it's so compulsively readable that the book flies by.

The quality of Ottaviani's artistic collaborators has varied wildly over the years, and while Leland Myrick had a difficult task in drawing a comic this long and without many obvious visual hooks, he didn't do the story any favors with his bland art. His thin line is devoid of liveliness, his character design is dull and his page layouts are unimaginative. The art simply does the bare minimum of not getting in the way of Ottaviani's prose. The austerity of Myrick's line is a spectacular mismatch for a personality as colorful as Feynman. The coloring only make things worse, graphically displaying the lack of imagination at work in terms of layouts and backgrounds. This is all very unfortunate, given that Ottaviani turned in the best script of his career and tied story threads together in an elegant fashion.

Another Minicomics Round-Up: Jihanian, Dragons!, Ayo, Robinson, Davis, Burke/Harris

2012-01-04T04:47:00.000-08:00

Let's dip into yet another set of minicomics that have come my way:

A.R.R.O., by Alison Burke and Tara Harris. This is clearly an early effort by the artist and writer, but this low-fi sci-fi comic is ambitious in its own way. It's a day in the life of some sort of military/scientific base and the people who work there. The book is full of character interaction and seemingly minor schemes and betrayals, leading into much bigger stakes by the end of this first chapter. Burke has a nice ear for dialogue and adeptly creates an easygoing, relaxed pace for the narrative. Harris has a strong eye for color, making the choice of using subdued tones like olives, browns and mustard yellows to match the languid nature of the story. There are a number of signs that this is beginner's work. The lettering and letter balloon placement are both distractions due to their sloppiness. Harris' character work and overall line isn't confident or fluid; the stiffness of the characters is another distraction for the reader. Depicting motion and how characters relate to each other in space are other problems. One thing that would help is learning to vary her line weights in order to help give her characters more pop on each page. Her style does possess a certain idiosyncratic charm even at this stage of her career, but fixing some of the basics would go a long way in playing up that charm.

Buster Monster and the Roughage of July, by Chris Davis. The artist notes that this comic was inspired by Jesse Reklaw's Ten Thousand Things To Do (which in turn was inspired by Lynda Barry), a daily diary strip. Unlike Reklaw, who uses a strict four-panel grid and provides a scale to measure his energy level, alcohol consumption, pain level, etc, Davis uses a free-form, sketchbook approach. Davis makes the crucial decision to provide as little context as possible regarding his life to the reader, trusting them to figure it out. We learn about his routine working for a cafe/caterer, working a variety of events in the Portland area. We see him deal with waking up with pain, living with his girlfriend, and a variety of crabby co-workers to whom he gives funny aliases (PB&J, The Frog Princess, etc). There are also a number of comics about his dreams, which give him an opportunity to draw more interesting imagery. There are two major factors in his favor: his lettering is distinctive--stylized but legible; and his drawings are full of life. His figure drawing in particular is sharply observed, but he's not afraid to get a bit silly or stylized when the occasion calls for it. There's a lovely image of him shaking the hands of his elderly grandmother that captures both his respect and her grace simply by the way he draws the figures. This looks like it's done mostly in pencils and is slightly smudgy, but Davis makes that work for him. Hopefully his output as an artist will continue to increase.

Vortex #2, by Don Robinson. This is a good old-fashioned underground comic book in the vein of Gilbert Shelton. Robinson uses a dense line and makes his pages busy with tons of detail and eye-pops. While most of his strips are gag-oriented, there are a few fantasy/sex drawings reminiscent of S.Clay Wilson and a story that's a tribute to EC horror stories.. There are also a series of more simply rendered parody strips that are less interesting to look at and certainly to read. Most of his parody strips (like The Flintstones or Catcher In The Rye) revolve around smoking pot; others are weak-sauce pokes at Johnny Ryan and diary comics. There's not much of a gag there beyond "I don't like these things". It's ironic that he makes fun of Ryan's scatological humor, given that much of Johnson's humor revolves around coarse material and that Ryan himself is so much more effective in his own parodies. Ryan may be mean-spirited and unfair, but there's no question that his barbs stick because he is so familiar with his subjects. It's the vagueness of Robinson's jokes that rob them of their effectiveness. I'd love to see Robinson illustrate someone else's stories, because his rubbery, lively line and attention to detail are both solid.

Lizzie's Tail, by Darryl Ayo. Ayo won the Promising New Talent Ignatz award at SPX this year, and this comic is a highly assured sign of his progress as a cartoonist. I've been following his career more-or-less since he first put pen to paper, and it's clear that he's done the hard work of getting better in public. This comic is a flight of fancy that tracks one woman's story about how she got a particular object hanging around her neck. That turns into a borderline absurd fantasy piece wherein she possesses a tail, walks in a stream alongside a forest and battles several opponents with her knife and mermaid ally. Ayo takes some cues from Fusion comics in the way he blends in a certain kind of fantasy character design with a certain roughness and odd pacing common in alt-comics. He spots blacks to create dramatic tension as well as using zip-a-tone effects to create texture in his panels. After a mini full of conflict and dramatic poses, Ayo pops the balloon of this narrative by inserting a gag at the end. This is a minor work but one that illustrates that Ayo is certainly on the right path.

Dragons! (Comics and Activities for Kids!), edited by Greg Means. A Free Comic Book Day mini for kids that's not simply an Archie comic or a superhero comic is a tremendous idea, and leave it to Greg Means (editor of Papercutter) to put such a thing together. Using a number of regular contributors to that minicomics series, Dragons! is chock full of comics, mazes, jokes (by two superior gagsmiths in Karen Sneider & Joey Sayers), detailed drawings, word searches, find the hidden image drawings, connect-the-dot drawings, mad-libs, mythological tidbits and more besides. The "Dragon Maze" is an especially impressive achievement, as Kazimir Strzepek jams every inch of the page with eye-pops and gags. The lead comics feature is by Alec Longstreth, and it's a typically agreeable feature emphasizing the joy of reading and how a dragon finds an optometrist. What was impressive about this comic is that it's clear that no contributor half-assed their offering, which I attribute to Means' strong editorial hand. The overall effect is that of an issue of Highlights For Children with a dragon theme and in minicomics form. As a kid, I'd devour that sort of publication, so I imagine this comic might be appealing to children even now.

Danger Country #1, by Levon Jihanian. This fantasy comic is typical in terms of its set-up but fantastic in terms of its narrative execution and character design. The issue ends with three characters being thrown together for a quest: the apprentice daughter of a wizard, her cat-warrior companion, and the sole survivor of a village that was wiped out at the beginning of the issue. The pacing and Jihanian's sense of detail make this issue stand out. Jihanian stretches the narrative over its first sixteen pages, emphasizing the grief and shock of Evan, the sole survivor of the village. The quest he's given is what the reader expects will take up the rest of the book. Instead, that journey is sped up so that we can see his immediate goal (a wizard city hidden by mists) and the threat to it (a vampire wizard dressed in armor). Jihanian employs a clear-line style with a minimum of hatching or spotting blacks; the level of detail on his faces despite the simplicity is remarkable. That's because of the level of control he clearly has over his line, which is the key to creating a world that's at once strange and accessible.

Two From Koyama Press: Comics Class and Gloria Badcock

2012-01-02T04:22:00.000-08:00

Publisher Annie Koyama has a knack for providing homes for unusual projects that are somewhere between comic book, graphic novel and art object. Simply by publishing Michael DeForge's series Lose, her Koyama Press has attained instant credibility and importance. It's obvious that she has a discerning eye for talent, and is especially (but not exclusively) focused on the works of Canadians who might not have another publishing option for a shorter work.

Matthew Forsythe's Comics Class is a good example of this sort of in-between book looking for a home. Best known for his children's comic Ojingago (published by Drawn & Quarterly), this book is a quasi-autobiographical work that satirizes his own attempts at teaching comics. This was an interesting departure from the mostly sweet and clever Ojingago, a book aimed at children done in a very precise, labored style. Comics Class is satiric and heavily self-deprecatory, as Forsythe lampoons his own persona as artist and teacher on page after page. The art is much sketchier and heavily dominated by shortcuts like zip-a-tone effects; he was clearly going for something quick and punchy.

This is a funny series of events that falls outside of the art object aesthetic of Drawn & Quarterly. Forsythe's self-loathing sense of comic timing is sharp, like in a sequence where his supervisor is observing the class and his young students spit back his complaints at him ("You said you were a fraud....oh that you had writer's block"). There's another sequence where another supervisor tells him that some of his students were having nightmares of "Villages burning. Rape. Beheadings", and an excited Forsythe is simply glad they were paying attention while he was talking about Lone Wolf and Cub. This book is full of such comic beats and well-constructed gags. They tend to pound the same notes every time, but the brevity of the book (just 44 pages) allows him to wring every last bit of humor out of this scenario without outstaying its welcome.

Maurice Vellekoop's The World of Gloria Badcock is so frothy it fairly threatens to float away. This is a delightful, sex-positive romp that skates on genre as its narrative skeleton, but all of that merely serves to provide a platform for Vellekoop to draw various characters having sex in an assortment of positions and with an assortment of partners. His clear-line, cartoony style is backed by a rock-solid understanding of anatomy as well as a sense of how bodies (literally) relate to each other in space. This book is a perfect example of the niche that Koyama Press serves to fill. Vellekoop hadn't published a comic since the late 1990's, but I can't imagine his old publisher (D&Q) putting out this sort of comic. Koyama understands, that as a boutique publisher, she can afford to publish a boutique item like an old-fashioned porno comic book. Vellekoop is a perfect example of a Canadian alt-comics artist whose current work doesn't quite fit within the interests of other publishing concerns.

This comic is silly (the time machine runs on cole slaw, and it wasn't until the populace started the French Revolution that they got the cabbages they needed, thanks to those vegetables being thrown through a window), beautiful and unabashedly sexual. Each of the characters is having a good time, where it's a French count, fashion maven Gloria dreaming she was Dorothy and having sex with the Tin Man, or young Gloria getting off on images of Adam & Eve. There's not much else to say about this comic other than that it's porn with a healthy sense of humor about itself but that still is very much porn in execution and intent.

A Few Notes On Tales Designed To Thrizzle #7

2011-12-31T05:15:00.000-08:00

A new comic from the top humorist in comics is always welcome. This issue is the usual combination of dada and surprisingly tightly-wrapped narrative gags surrounding the sort of cultural detritus mined by Drew Friedman & Mark Newgarden. Let's survey some highlights:

1. Front Cover/Back Cover. This is a classic series of nonsensical Kupperman juxtapositions: a slightly-deranged looking woman in an evening gown next to a woodpecker is on the front cover, while a woman's foot wearing a purple shoe is about to hit a flashing "contamination alarm". The front cover is closer to his older, denser style of rendering while the latter is his simpler, more iconic style. As always, they are presented matter-of-factly and with no further comment.

2. Inside Front Cover. This is a variation on a common parody of editorial cartoons: an arm (labeled "arm") is pulling a cord for a light bulb (labeled "light bulbs"), which illuminates a piece of paper (labeled "writing which requires light to be read"). The caption: "The scam continues". It's done in the sort of shaded penciling common to such cartoons and has a punchline that's absurd (how is a lightbulb's purpose a scam?) and direct (someone has it out for the lightbulb industry).

3. "Scary Bathtub Stories". This was the weakest of the longer features, as bathtubs are derided as frightening vessels of death and horror in a couple of stories. The punchline (it's a publication done by a showerhead store!) is OK, but Kupperman adds to it by listing out thirty different kinds of showerheads, including "Elliot Spritzer" and "George Wash-A-Ton".

4. "Quincy, M.E.". Kupperman gloms on to the idea that there's just something funny about Jack Klugman: those craggy features are fun to draw and the original show was fairly ridiculous. This is one of Kupperman's best strips because he keeps adding new layers of plot to an already-ridiculous story. Quincy has a word with St Peter, finds himself in St Peter's own comic book series, is told by Leo DeCaprio that this is all a "Quinception", and then dreams himself into observing Reservoir Dogs 2. Snake 'n Bacon show up, along with an analyst riding a giant hamster. Every details manages to tie together, winding up as a bit of commentary on the silliness of the show itself.

5. "Hamanimal", "McArf", "Twain and Einstein" and "A Voyage to Narnia". The latter strip is a bit of fumetti that continues from an ad in the Quincy story, detailing a man's "voyage to Narnia" that mostly consists of standing in a closet. He somehow manages to convince his wife's friend to come with him, saying "farewell, reality!" as the door edges closed behind them. I'm not sure what making this fumetti added to the strip, other than getting his friends to do something silly. The other three stories are about dumb superhero origins (a ham struck by lightning that turns into animal shapes), gritty PSA dogs ("scum turn my stomach, yet I spend most of my life among them...") and the white-haired duo dealing with a case of alter egos.

All told, we get an all-time great story with Quincy and a bunch of solid comics. It's notable that this issue is all-comics, unlike the longer text pieces that had had started doing in some previous issues. Perhaps knocking out that Mark Twain book sated Kupperman's appetite for such pieces, although it seems obvious that letting color do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the storytelling is making things easier for him as an artist. "Hamanimal", for example, looks like a sketchbook piece knocked out in just a few minutes; the key was to get across the gag, and using a sickly green for the title character did the trick. I still miss the sheer density of detail in Kupperman's older work that made reading it almost exhausting, but the avalanche of ideas remains intact, as does his ability to elicit laughs.

Minicomics Round-Up: Spina, Robinson, Solomon, Kirby, Ullman/Brown

2011-12-29T04:59:00.000-08:00

This batch of minicomics is a true grab-bag and is hard to pin down to any one particular genre:

Fight, by Sam Spina. This comic won a Xeric grant for Spina and is not unlike a slightly gentler version of Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit. While Spina's diary strip may be prosaic at times, his fiction has always been extra-crazy in response. He comes up with wacky premises, carries them through to their logical extremes, and then bombards the reader with uncomfortable gags along the way. Fight features a world where certain creatures have been bioengineered for specific tasks. This comic focuses on humanoid creatures bred only to fight for entertainment. The plot follows a creature called Fight, his downfall and eventual triumph over the female Super Fight that defeats him via trickery, her psychopathic offspring that forms as a result of their brief coupling, and lots of battles along the way. Spina loves gross-out gags, like when Super Fight gives birth to a bounding creature or the truly revolting Boobstadon, a sort of walking set of teats with a brain that is forcibly milked. The scene where an overeager farmer fondles it lasciviously is hilariously uncomfortable, but Spina tops it with Super Fight's child unexpectedly ripping it (and everything else in its path) to shreds. Spina's line is simple and energetic, and the mini-sized format helps add a density and urgency to each page. It's definitely an interesting step for an artist still developing his voice as a humorist.

Box Office Poison #78, by Alex Robinson. This minicomic represents Robinson's failed attempt to revive his first comics series, as he was looking for a new direction after some false starts. He has said that he thought it might be easy and fun to see what his characters were up to a few years after the conclusion of the series (which of course was collected by Top Shelf in one massive tome), but he abandoned this path as well. This mini represents a few pages from that attempt, packaged as though Robinson had never stopped doing the series as minicomics. It's clever and a delightful little gift for fans of the series. All of the BOP trademarks are there: interstitial stories focusing on one character, character surveys, a guest pin-up, a letters page, and a page from another abandoned Robinson project, a sequel to Lower Regions. Seeing some of Robinson's tricks like temporarily abandoning a realistic style for cartoony anger or filling up pages with thought balloons was also quite welcome. That said, I can understand why he abandoned the project: he wasn't saying anything new. He had a fairly definitive ending for BOP, and while it might have been tempting to see if protagonist Sherman Davies could be rescued from a hellish existence with his girlfriend Dorothy and find a healthy relationship, I thought that originally downbeat ending was a more appropriate way to leave the character. It was still nice to see the sprawl of characters even in this short minicomic; this is where Robinson has always excelled as a writer. That's why I prefer BOP and especially Tricked! over Too Cool To Be Forgotten; being able to explore a number of different emotional states and personae seems to be precisely the kind of challenge that pushes Robinson to evolve.

Our Fantastic Universe, by Lizzee Solomon. This odd little comic is the black & white version of a story that's going to be published in a collection dedicated to extraterrestrial sex. This version puts the emphasis on Solomon's grotesque linework, balanced against the amusingly sedate and even detached narration of the "host" of this "series" about alien sexuality. The story details the mating habits of cactus-like creatures called Milchigs and tiny, airborne creatures called Fleart, as the two species have a synergistic relationship. In pulsating, undulating and throbbing detail, Solomon shows us both the typical, nature-show style side of their sexuality as well as some unexpected aspects of their lives. The Fleart, once ingested by the Milchigs, engage in frottage. The Milchigs, once engorged by having ingested Fleart, engage in an extreme form of S&M that not all of them survive. The effect is a variation on body horror, where instead of physical transformation being a source of fear or dread, it's a source for pleasure. For the reader, it's no less strange an experience to read and just as unsettling.

King For A Day, by Rob Kirby. This comic is an interesting departure for comics veteran Kirby, best known for his slice-of-life relationship comics as well as for helming the queer-themed anthology Three. This is a silent comic about a man who is literally shat upon who then finds a crown. That suddenly inspires instant worship and admiration from everyone he happens to come upon. Of course, this sad sack character can't quite end up with a happy ending, even in his own dreams, and Kirby takes great delight in piling on a series of catastrophes, humiliations and general physical comedy. His art is simple and classically cartoony, with rubbery character design that expands into full-out exaggeration during certain scenes. The way he varies line thickness is a big key to the success of the comic; a thicker line usually indicates something significant happening, but that slight variation also makes the lines comprising his characters pop out on the page. The result is a delightfully charming comic that makes the most of a thin premise thanks to funny drawings on nearly every page.

Old-Timey Hockey Tales, by Rob Ullman & Jeffrey Brown. This is a comics rarity: a straightforward series of stories about sports. It helps that cartoonists Brown & Ullman chose to write about the most visceral of major sports, ice hockey and that its early participants were kind of crazy. The design of this mini is typically handsome, thanks to Ullman's eye for detail. Ullman selected items that were more anecdotes than narratives, like a strip about Maurice "Rocket" Richard being banned from the NHL and the ensuing series of riots, or a tight-fisted owner resisting the league mandate to put the names of players on the back of jerseys and protesting with names that were the same color as the uniforms themselves. Brown favored more sustained narratives, like when how the Detroit Red Wings wound up playing a group of prisoners; how one player got revenge on a coach who tried to trade him; and why anyone who messed with Gordie Howe was an idiot. Ullman's story about the great goalie Terry Sawchuk (originally published years ago in an SPX anthology) is still one of his best, documenting Sawchuk's skill as a player and how awful he was as a person. At 28 pages, this mini left me wanting more, especially because the two cartoonists have art styles and approaches to narrative that are so different. I'd love to see an all-sports comics anthology; Dan Zettwoch has done interesting work about basketball & baseball (if I had a million dollars, I'd commission Zettwoch to create an illustrated version of the book Loose Balls, an oral history of the ABA), while Dennis Eichorn has written a number of stories about football. This would be truly "mainstream" work, given America's love of sports.

A Few Notes On Motherlover

2011-12-27T21:01:00.001-08:00

I won't be formally reviewing the new 2D Cloud release Motherlover because I wrote the foreword to the book. Instead, I'll just contribute a few notes about the book, which is an anthology featuring the work of Nic Breutzman and the team of John & Luke Holden.

1. The Breutzman story "You Can't Be Here" was originally self-published as a broadsheet. In the anthology, it was redesigned and a layer of sickly green and purple was added by editor/publisher/colorist Raighne Hogan, giving the story another layer of alienation. Here's my original review of the story:

"Nicholas Breutzman is an exciting young artist whose grim comics inspire feelings of dread and malaise. Breutzman has been ambitiously and aggressively experimental with regard to format and design with his early works as he’s explored some uncomfortable subjects. You Can’t Be Here was done in broadsheet format, giving each panel a certain power and heft that he filled with zip-a-tone. Breutzman once again zeroed in the subjects that have informed his small body of work to date: the darker side of small-town life, the way the claustrophobia of such an existence leads people to do strange things, and the ways man and nature have an adversarial relationship. Breutzman is a master of both the single striking image and overall restraint with his storytelling, a combination that helps create that air of dread. The reader always gets the feeling that something awful has happened or will happen. The image of a washing machine on the side of a wooded road as roadkill and its subsequent “crossing” is Breutzman at his best, combining the absurd with the unsettling.

Breutzman’s style is unusual in that he mixes naturalism in terms of his backgrounds and character designs with slightly loose, rubbery expressions on his characters’ faces. The result is both amusing and disturbing, like a boy appearing on an ATV with bugged-out eyes, freckles and a crew cut. This comic concerns a down on his luck young man who leaves New York (after having been swindled by fake crack) to return to his small town. His recollection of two kids he knew when he was younger who did horrible things to the local opossums early in the story referred back to the title of the story, giving it a different meaning. It’s not just that he and his friend weren’t allowed at a nearly abandoned housing development, it was that simply being back in old patterns was going to lead him down a dark path, one that part of him knew he would enjoy taking. Breutzman is going to be an artist to follow for quite some time."

2. Speaking of which, Hogan has a huge hand in creating the atmosphere to be found in the Holden Bros' "The Boys". The spattered green & purple add a lot to the loose, grotesque pencils and sordid, haunted subject matter of a group of boys desperately trying to find pornography.

3. Breutzman's first story in the collection, "Photograph", is a crisp story about a missed connection on one end and the latest in a series of dead end encounters on the other end. Breutzman's stories are all about trying to establish connections and how difficult that ultimately can be.

4. I won't be ranking this book in my top 50 for conflict of interest reasons, but I would certainly place solidly in my top 25 if I did.

Minicomics and Genre: Doug Michel, Jason Viola, Tim Rocks, Mike Fisher

2011-12-20T07:26:00.000-08:00

A number of minis I receive fall into the category of gag work or humorous genre. Let's take a look at a few of them:

Monkey Force One #7 & #8, by Doug Michel. This comic is part epic adventure and part spoof, as Michel blends the X-Men, James Bond, sci-fi, scatological kids' humor, Scott Pilgrim and coming-of-age stories into one dizzying package. It helps that Michel keeps his line simple, varying his line weights to make his characters pop off the page but keeping everything else fairly clear. That's helpful for the reader, because Michel is a "kitchen sink plus" kind of artist, cramming his panels with details, figures, weapons, posters and other chicken fat. There are occasions when Michel indulges in a more detailed extreme close-up of a particular piece of action the way a video game might cut away to that sort of animation. The weird tension in these issues is between the shared indy rock band past of several characters and how their lives are intersecting in the middle of a zombie invasion of St. Louis. I found those conflicts more interesting than the zombie fights, which are all pretty standard issue. Indeed, Michel's main weakness as an artist is depicting action; the stiffness of his line that's appropriate for scenes depicting conversation makes his fight scenes less interesting to look at. That's especially true for fistfights, where Michel seems to have a shaky grasp on how bodies relate to each other in space and how to hook the reader into immediately turning their attention to the next panel. Michel is at his best when he's poking fun at the genre conventions he genuinely enjoys, like when a rapper comes across Zombie Tupac and Zombie Biggie Smalls and demands to get a picture with them for his next album. It's that breeziness that gives these comics their energy and appeal.

Pete Moss: A Kid Who Has Adventures, by Tim Rocks. This is a hyperexaggerated screwball comic somewhat in the vein of Peter Bagge, in terms of the frenetic quality of its storytelling. It's about a kid who mistakenly receives news that he's a terminal case, who then proceeds to try to get laid before he dies while tricking a variation on the Make-A-Wish foundation. Rocks gets across most of his humor with funny and/or grotesque drawings and over-the-top satire. The drawing is much more interesting than the writing, which aims for shocking and falls well short of shock or even pointed commentary. On the other hand, Rocks is unrelenting in the avalanche of gross and funny images he throws at the reader, making this comic interesting to flip through if not especially memorable otherwise.

Jay's Brain, by Jason Viola. Viola is best known for his webcomic gag strip Herman The Manatee, but I've often enjoyed his side projects more. This is a series of gags about Viola and his anthropomorphic brain, and what's most interesting about it is the obvious discomfort the artist feels from drawing these strips. For an artist who does pretty silly gags (even the ones that touch on despair still feel like shtick), Viola is surprisingly personal and even confessional in these strips that touch on panic attacks, saying horrible things to those he loves, a lack of inspiration and other issues not unfamiliar to readers of autobio comics. The difference is that his brain character turns every strip into a punchline, no matter how awful or uncomfortable the premise. Viola turns his social anxiety into some pretty fertile ground for humor (the page of tweets from his brain is especially amusing--it tells Viola things like "You shouldn't have said that" while wondering "Why don't they put flavor crystals in EVERYTHING?"), making this his single strongest work to date.

3-D Pete's Star Babe Invasion Comics, by Mike Fisher. This comic/zine is exactly what it claims to be--a celebration and examination of sexy women in science fiction films. What makes it enjoyable is the light tone Fisher employs throughout, deemphasizing prurience and playing up humor. It helps that he has rock-solid fundamentals as a cartoonist, capturing the naturalistic essence of a figure without losing the cartoony quality of his compositions. Speaking through his mouthpiece character 3-D Pete, Fisher discusses Jane Fonda in Barbarella and which Star Trek guest actress was most appealing, as well as silly strips where Pete encounters less-than-sharp aliens and tries to get on a space ark. The interview with a model from a sci-fi themed beer commercial is entirely gratuitous; it doesn't really add much to the comic other than letting us know that he managed to interview a model. While the comic is entirely disposable, Fisher's line is wonderfully fluid and expressive. A full length genre story from Fisher would be quite pleasant to read.

Checking In With Caitlin Cass

2011-12-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

Caitlin Cass is a young cartoonist mining territory not unlike that of Kate Beaton. In my review of some comics of hers from 2010, I noted that "As she figures out her style, her already-sharp wit will be better served by clearer, more dynamic and simpler images." It's clear that this is precisely what she has done in her most recent work, part of a series of minicomics she sends out in the mail. (The series is called "Great Moments In Western Civilization Postal Constituent"). Design and details like lettering have become much crisper, more powerful and fluid. Her wit remains intact, but she's directing that in a more coherent fashion as well. Beaton's work is primarily comedic, using her knowledge of history and literature as a framework for jokes. While humor is also an important element of Cass' work, it's frequently more subdued and less gag-oriented. It's clear that she's still steeped in her unusual corner of academic obsessions, which is not surprising considering her training at St John's College, an institution devoted to studying the Great Books of the Western World.

What Cass learned from her earlier comics is that it's not enough to simply make references to philosophers and hope the reader gets something out of it. She learned to synthesize her particular and personal ruminations regarding the work of certain thinkers with a visual approach that's engaging for the reader and fairly fully-realized. Take V2 #12 of the Postal Constituent; it's all about Friedrich Nietzsche. This was done on cardstock with duo-tone blues. That's eye-catching on its own, but her character design is simple and striking. The story focuses on Nietzsche's last days, when he was faced with the logical endpoint of his philosophy and lived it all the way through. Claiming "I am god. This farce is my creation." is as close as possible a bridge between what would become existentialism and humanism, yet that path led to madness. Feeling oneself responsible for all of the evils of the world is the logical extreme for Nietzsche's particular brand of megalomania.

"A Thing About Things" (V2, #4), is a huge illustration on a single sheet of paper that also unfolds. It evokes a certain 19th century feel in terms of the way the illustration is carefully designed, constructed and labeled. It's a quasi-farcical history of "things" and man's relationship to them. Cass still doesn't quite have the chops to pull off the complexity of this illustration (her drafting skills are a little wobbly), but it's an ambitious attempt. "Relics" (V2, #1) is a more personal story about the hermeneutics of discovering a shard from a plate as a child. It was found at the site of the first building in her town, and the mere possession of it led to Cass creating creating connections between the shard and its potential history and ramifications. The shard can only be understood in terms of its larger historical context, but that history is brought to life but discovering the artifact. One can see the leap Cass made as an artist between this issue and later issues, both in terms of simple drawing ability and the ambitiousness of her design.

Finally, "The Arabian Babbler" (V2, #8) is a standard minicomic distinguished by some striking illustrations and the boldness of her lettering style. This is the only one of the comics here that deals explicitly with another one of her interests, which is the history of science. That particular field of study is closely linked to philosophy because it is based so heavily on theory, as the works of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper demonstrate. This comic is a more light-hearted but no less pointed critique of the ways in which science can become rigid and its conclusions applied in misguided ways that can be harmful. In it, a scientist comes to certain conclusions about human nature because of a species of bird that gave things to other birds for no good reason. He concluded (certainly not the first conclusion sound reached with a faulty premise) that altruism was counter-evolutionary and we should stop doing it--until he observed a bird stealing something. He experienced not so much a paradigm shift as a paradigm shattering. Cass's drawings of birds make this a distinctive and beautiful comic, especially in the way she combines word and image. Cass is starting to become an artist well worth taking notice of, and I'm excited at the possibilities of a longer-form work from her at some point.

Asking The Tough Questions: Whit Taylor's Watermelon...

2011-12-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

Whit Taylor is an interesting young voice in comics, one who generally relates humorous anecdotes about her friends, culture and her dating life. With Watermelon...(And Other Things That Make Me Uncomfortable As A Black Person), Taylor gets a bit more serious and directed with regard to her subject matter, but still treats the most serious of issues with a light touch. Taylor has her own opinions on any number of controversial subjects, but they're carefully considered and discussed; this isn't a series of rants. Instead, it's an attempt to examine, understand, critique and appreciate her own culture, as well as understand it in a wider societal context. As the title promises, the book opens with a focus on why watermelon became a cultural stereotype for African-Americans, and how to this day it isn't something she cares to eat in public.

Taylor flips from lighthearted topics such as what she does at the beach since she doesn't lay out for a suntan to the n-word and its origins. There's a funny bit where Taylor appears on panel and informs her white readers that it's essentially never acceptable for them to use it, even if Dave Chappelle or rappers do. "You just can't. End of story." I enjoyed the fact that Taylor didn't feel the need to go through a lot of gyrations as to why, focusing instead on the fact that the history of the word and its use is so pernicious that she wasn't going to give white readers carte blanche to say it.

The other highlights of the comic include an extended meditation on hair and the ways in which African-American men and women both attempt to a (white) societal notion of what hair should look like as well as ways in which more natural looks are cultivated. Including anecdotes about her own personal experience (like a girl mistaking one of her hairs for pubic hair) fleshed out what otherwise could have been an overly familiar piece about the importance of the hair salon and barber shop in black culture. Another highlight was her story about almost dating a (white) South African man when she was studying abroad in Australia. She notes that there was part of her who did this as a sort act of self-loathing but eventually broke away from her infatuation when his casual racism became much more overt.

In terms of her art, Taylor's layout and character design are both solid. It's obvious that her control of her line isn't what she would want it to be; she tries to draw a number of things in a naturalistic manner and falls well short of making them compelling as drawings. Some of them (like drawings of famous people or things like cars) hurt her storytelling because they take the reader so far out of the panel. Taylor needs to go in one of two directions: either work harder on the facility of her line for a more naturalistic approach, or go to a simplified and streamlined approach that's consistent in how it presents information. That kind of stylization is difficult for a young artist. The ambition, production values and thought behind this mini indicate an artist who's serious about making her mark as a cartoonist and who wants to get better. As such, I suspect that Taylor will ultimately strike a middle ground between naturalism and stylization. As long as she keeps drawing and keeps trying to improve, watching her evolution as an artist in public should be interesting and rewarding for readers.

More Autobio: Kat Roberts, Bill Burg, Jason Young

2011-12-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a look at three different kinds of autobio minicomics.

March, by Bill Burg. The bulk of this diary comic takes place over the course of March in two different years, but as the cover indicates, it's also about the inevitable march of time. The cartoonist chose to begin a daily diary strip in parallel with his friend Rob Ullman at a crucial time in his life: shortly after the death of his beloved father and right when he and his wife found out she was pregnant. His line reminds me a lot of Ullman's, in fact: simple, supple lines and slightly cartoonish storytelling. This comic is all about the attempt to come to terms with grief and how hard it is to balance that grief against the emergence of new life and new responsibilities. Implied is the challenge that Burg finds it hard to become a father while no longer being his father's son.

Given that this is a diary strip, there's plenty of quotidian details and little jokes that fill up its pages, but they're all tinged with a certain melancholia as Burg frequently finds it difficult to find joy in life. It's not that he's not working or being dutiful or inattentive to the needs of his wife, it's that the things he used to enjoy no longer hold the same attraction. In other words, he was going through a particularly difficult grieving process. One of the things I found most interesting about this comic was how Burg explores the feelings his father had for his own father, who died a few days after Bill Burg was born. That man was abusive and awful in any number of ways, but Burg's father loved him deeply despite his many flaws; reconciling the memory of a loved one with the reality of their existence is one of the toughest parts of the grieving process. Later in this comic, Burg does very much the same thing with his own father. While his dad was always kind, attentive and loving as a parent, he had his detractors with regard to his career as head of a power company in Ohio. Burg reports that his dad was on many "worst executive" lists and many people had demanded his resignation at various times. Burg doesn't try to refute these charges or defend his father; he simply states the facts as they were as part of an effort to understand and accept his father, warts and all. While this comic didn't provide the sort of catharsis he had hoped for (as he addresses in one strip), it seems like both the process of making it and the journey he took as a father himself did put him in a different place by the end. The thoughts expressed by Burg are familiar, but there's a wonderfully humane, understanding quality to his work that elevates it above standard autobio fare.

You Are Always On My Mind, by Kat Roberts. This is a collection of dream comics that tie into autobiographical moments. It's a handmade comic with some full color segments and is a lovely overall package. The tenor of these dream comics is amusing, with titles like "I Lost My Virginity To Jim Morrison" and "The Nude Suit". There's a wispy, ethereal quality to her line that makes it all the more effective when used for comedic effect. While the notion of Morrison showing up in a thirteen year old's dream as a life-changing event is ridiculous (if fitting, given the perfect fit between the histrionics of the Doors and the moods of a teen) and Roberts plays up the laughs, she also is careful to note how serious this was to her at the time. "Nude Suit" is played for both laughs and terror, as Roberts performs in some kind of forest theater in a "nude" bodystocking, dancing to a song whose lyrics went "my nude suit! my nude suit!". She tries to play it cool, not knowing the song would go on interminably--but the audience did. There are a couple of other, more typically jumbled dream stories involving eating her sins and building a boat after chopping down a tree; these stories feel like standard dream comics. For someone who's best known as a webcartoonist, Roberts has crafted a comic whose tactile qualities are a large part of its appeal.

Veggie Dog Saturn #5, by Jason Young. These autobio stories mostly focus on tales from Young's youth and are played for (frequently off-color) laughs. The book opens up with "Salad Days", a story about young Jason going to a restaurant, eating nothing but the salad bar, and then vomiting into the restaurant's bathroom sink. The punchline involves the next person who walked into the bathroom and the dirty look he threw Jason's way. Throughout the book, Young spins tales of a family gleefully visiting a cemetery to plan out a family crypt, meditates (in excruciatingly funny detail) about what music one would really want in a "desert island scenario", and muses about his past as a casual shoplifter. "The Tape" is about his brother's magical ability to find naked women on a video cassette, turning into a surprisingly emotionally earnest (if amusingly gross) anecdote about the connection he shares with him. "The Day I Met Kenny Rogers" sums up the nature of these anecdotes: randomly profane, mostly innocuous and funny both in and of themselves but also mocking bad past behavior. Young doesn't always have great control over his line; some of his figures are cruder than others and his line weight sometimes fades to near-imperceptibility. What makes it work is a steady, amusing self-caricature--both as a child and a bearded, almost Muppet-like adult.

Attention: New Address!

2011-11-29T06:06:00.000-08:00

To all the artists who may wish to send me something for review: I have a new address. It's:

Rob Clough
404 Tall Oaks Drive
Durham, NC 27713

Autobio/Diary Roundup: Dabaie, Wertz, Baylis, Spina, Marcej, Harbin

2011-11-23T13:04:00.000-08:00

Let's take a look at a variety of diary and autobiographical minicomics.

He Also Has Drills For Hands!, by Marguerite Dabaie. This is a self-curated collection of Dabaie's best daily strips over the span of a year, and the result is a minicomic that leaves the reader wanting more. These are drawn in a sketchbook and combine the intimacy and loose feel of such a drawing with a surprising level of detail and some attractive decorative features. In her Hookah Girl comics, Dabaie isn't necessarily known for her sense of humor (though there are funny moments), but her daily strip is far more likely to end with a punchline of some kind. The title of the strip refers to one of her childhood crushes--a character from a video game with drills for hands. Dabaie throws in bits and pieces from her childhood, creativity, daily life, her then-fiancee (and now husband) and a tale about inadvertently meeting John Cusack. In the selection of comics she published in this mini, it seems that she takes great pains to tell an entertaining story of some kind in her strips, rather than just focus on relating particular quotidian events. That said, Dabaie does reveal bits and pieces about her life through stories about her grandmother and things she sees on the streets of New York--it's just that every strip has the same slightly comic and exaggerated flavor, heightened by the charming immediacy & roughness of her line.

Spinadoodles: The Second Year, by Sam Spina. This is the latest big batch of diary comics from Spina, a cartoonist who's clearly attempting the daunting task of getting better in public. In over a year and a half worth of daily strips (he never missed a day), Spina tries different art styles and moves a bit away from the obvious influence of James Kochalka. The overall experience of reading this was not as rewarding as reading the samplers from Marcej and Dubaie, two cartoonists who pared down their strips to a "best-of" selection. Spina chose to steam ahead with every last strip, no matter if they were half-assed, uninspired or repetitive. This mini is a document not only of his life, but also of his development as an artist. It wouldn't be quite truthful to omit strips done while he was dead tired from a long day at work, but the resulting reading experience was a bit of a slog at times. This is not to say that there weren't highlights; indeed, about 1 out of every 4 strips either landed a decent laugh, contained a personal revelation or had an interesting drawing. Given that there are 400 or so strips (with 4 crammed to a page), that's still a fairly solid showing. And some of the best strips (like the ones where he shows snippets of arguments with his girlfriend) are all the more effective because their tone is so unlike his other comics. The strips that work best are usually the ones that look the least like Kochalka's; that is, strips with less line weight (especially in the panels) that rely more on the basic figures rather than textures.

One thing that surprised me was that after a certain point, the rhythm of the strip started to grab me. It wasn't so much that the individual entries became noticeably stronger over time, but rather the kind of observations Spina was making started to become appealing on their own. Spina portrays himself neither as a deep thinker or someone who's especially introspective, but the raw surface energy of his observations has a propulsive quality. Eventually, Spina's simple caricature of himself (big, angular nose and sharp chin), frequently childlike enthusiasm, and self-deprecatory charm leave more of an impression than any particular anecdote. Projects like this eventually tend to have diminishing returns (Spina himself complains about how much more productive he might be if he wasn't doing a daily strip in one entry) unless they become one's life's work, ala Ben Snakepit. I don't think this is true of Spina, so I imagine there will come a point where what he's getting out of drawing these strips is far exceeded by the amount of time and effort he puts into them.

So Buttons #4, by Jonathan Baylis and various artists. Baylis has been writing autobio comics drawn by others for the past couple of years, but this issue of So Buttons represents his biggest leap forward in all respects. First off, the format and coloring of this mini are clean, attractive and reflect a lot of attention to detail. Second, the ordering of the stories was deliberate (as Baylis notes in his introduction) and far more effective than in past issues. There's a beautiful flow of styles as Baylis roughly moves in chronological order. Third, everyone in his roster of artists did a fine job. More on that in a moment, but Baylis' past contributors in particular have made real strides in their storytelling. Lastly, Baylis has finally learned to rein himself in a bit. A huge flaw for many writers who don't draw (especially those that do autobio) is that they tend to over-write their stories. They simply don't know how to let the visuals of the story work as an equal partner. There's also a tendency to ramble on for too many pages instead of distilling an anecdote to its essence, the way that Harvey Pekar did so well. Baylis still has a tendency to overexplain the significance of certain events rather than letting the event speak for itself, but that tendency is lessened when he writes shorter stories. The fact that the stories in this volume were all between two to four pages seems to be a key as to why they were so effective.

Much of this issue is an ode to filmmakers that have meaning for Baylis, often in connection to specific life events. "So...Chalk It Up To Konglateral Damage", drawn by Thomas Boatwright, is interesting because Baylis associated the movie with Thanksgiving--and that he never got to see it all the way through. "So...Stranger Than Parrot Eyes" (also drawn by Boatwright) is a more cartoonish story about Baylis seeing director Jim Jarmusch on the street. Baylis fantasizes about hanging out with him and his "Sons of Lee Marvin" friends while ruminating on what appeals to him about film and what turns him off. Noah Van Sciver draws "So...Loyal", a history of his baseball fandom. Van Sciver eschews a literal approach in terms of the imagery he uses to illustrate Baylis' narrative in favor of a more whimsical take. It's an approach I haven't seen before in a Baylis comic, and it works. Fred Hembeck draws a very funny story about Baylis' internship at Marvel Comics and how he was put in a position to correct John Romita, Sr. on a piece of art. That there are so many stories in this issue (eleven plus a bonus page from Van Sciver) gives it a nice weight and denseness; the issue turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts.

My World And Welcome To It, by Richard Marcej. Marcej is a toy designer and occasional cartoonist who decided to do a diary comic as a way of getting himself to draw every day. The subject matter is mostly standard diary work: movies he sees, bathroom habits, notable sights and events from his life. He is, however, extremely open about his life in terms of his dating habits and family tragedies, treating them with respect but also with the same level of detail he uses in his other strips. What sets this strip apart from similar work is the fact that each entry is cleverly composed and extremely well drawn. Marcej uses a single large panel frame and varies the strip's internal structure depending on what sort of story he's telling. For things like movie reviews, he splits the page up into four panels, underneath the date and a title for the strip. In the strip above, a single image dominates the entire page. In other strips, he'll lead the reader in three different panels that bleed into each other. Marcej pays special attention to clarity in his storytelling while adding a lot of detail such as hatching, cross-hatching and carefully-rendered structures. Marcej is also a fine letterer, a crucial but overlooked aspect of diary comics--especially for wordy artists like himself. The clarity and simply pleasing quality of his lettering makes even the most text-dominated strips nice to look at. Marcej isn't exactly being innovative with this strip, but it's one of the best examples of this sub-genre.

The Great Pretenders And Other Stories, by Julia Wertz. Some of these stories have appeared in past Wertz minicomics, but this mini is the best collection of Wertz's new trend in storytelling until her new book comes out. All of the stories here are from Wertz's childhood and they're entirely unsentimental, raw takes on the ways in which children parse the adult world. There's a reference in the title story to a baby in Wertz's family dying when she was just a child, leading to a game with her older brother wherein he pretended he was his own fictional twin brother. There's a running theme in Wertz's comics of wanting to be someone else, wanting a different life and identity. There's a tension between being a near-solipsist and someone desperately craving meaningful interaction, and that conflict is evident in these childhood strips as well. Wertz has a constant sense of things not being quite right (like the amazing strip where she and her brother are momentarily excited that they might be getting a heat lamp for Christmas instead of a Nintendo video game system), and that feeling is hilariously warped through her own logic as a child. The dread that Wertz felt as a child also emerged in her anxiety over "killing" Jesus in a tea party game and living at the foot of a mountain that supposedly housed vicious flying monkeys. Wertz's bug-eyed drawings are getting more and more self-assured; she's found a clear, distinct and funny drawing style that works well for her.

The Doug Wright Awards 2011, by Dustin Harbin. This is a collection of the strips Harbin did at tcj.com earlier in 2011 as part of their Cartoonist's Diary series. It's essentially a love letter to Canada and its Doug Wright Awards, a ceremony honoring the best of English-language Canadian comics. Harbin is impressed by the simplicity (just four awards), sincerity and seriousness of the event. It's an event that everyone involved believes in, a group that includes the greater Canadian cultural community, not just comics. Harbin heaps on the praise a bit exorbitantly, though he's aware that his status as an outsider perhaps blinds him to Canada's flaws. That said, there's no question that Canada has produced some of comics' greatest artists over the past thirty years or so, and so an event like the Doug Wright Awards is certainly warranted. The real appeal of this comic is Harbin's remarkable skill as a caricaturist, really nailing artists like Chester Brown & Seth without belittling them.

Tom Hart and Leela Corman Need Your Help

2011-11-20T07:17:00.000-08:00

In an unspeakably heart-rending tragedy, Rosalie Lightning, the young daughter of cartoonists Tom Hart & Leela Corman, died unexpectedly this week. Their friend Lauren Weinstein is setting up a Paypal fund to help defray the awful expenses at this time, as well as possibly establish a scholarship in Rosalie's name at Hart & Corman's new Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, FL. Hart found a working space for the school just a few weeks ago and released the first curriculum for the 2012-2013 school year, when SAW will open. Here's the link to Weinstein's Paypal account. Please consider making a donation if you can.

SAW-Related Comics and Broadsheets

2011-11-16T12:49:00.000-08:00

I've previously mentioned the Sequential Artists Workshop that Tom Hart & Leela Corman are opening in Gainesville, FL (home of the University of Florida). Recently, the school announced its initial curriculum for the fall of 2012. Hart spent years at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is writing a text on teaching comics; he's a fine writer about and critic of comics as well as being one of the best cartoonists of the Xeric generation that sprang up in the early 1990s. Hart is known for his close relationships with many of his students, and as such he's been selling two broadsheets at conventions that reflect his interest and guiding hand.

The first is Seriously Comics, a broadsheet that Hart says was inspired by Peter Bagge's classic I Like Comics fanzine from the 90s. Hart wanted a goofier, more irreverent take on comics than something like The Comics Journal or Comic Art and wanted it in a cheap, disposable format. As such, this broadsheet is a great success. While Hart is all over this publication, his former student Stephanie Mannheim is the engine behind nearly every feature, which functions as the most entertaining school newspaper ever. The cover functions like an issue of The Onion, with snippets of "stories" like "Webcartoonist Just Can't Seem to Make Cathy Existential", "Is Dewey A Gay Icon?" and "Pizza Island is WOMEN!" mixing with teasers for actual stories. The combination of Hart's enthusiasm and sincerity with Mannheim's boundless energy and smartass attitude results in a publication that's more than just a lark. Indeed, the interviews with Dash Shaw, Gary Panter and Keith Mayerson (yes, this is a highly SVA-centric publication) are substantive and revealing.

That said, it's the ancillary material, the frosting on the cake, that sets this apart from other comics publications. In addition to a page of comics by Aaron Renier, there's a good old-fashioned fumetti strip featuring "Stacey Nightmayer" and various cartoonists, a photo feature on the amusing "Ballpoint Boxers" event (wherein female cartoonists drew on men, a flip of an event from 1950 wherein a bunch of male cartoonists drew on women in bathing suits), and a hilarious feature called "Vote For Your Favorite New York Cartooning Couple". This send-up of tabloid journalism was perhaps a little in-jokey, but most of the people buying this will probably get the references. I hope that Hart & Mannheim can keep this going.

The other broadsheet Hart's been selling is Isra Rushes Out Of The Sandcastle, a collection of one-page comics from various of his students hand-picked by Hart. It's a surprisingly strong anthology given that much of it is student work (with some stories directly adapted from assignments), featuring a number of different visual approaches. There's delicate, image-driven comics as poetry from Alexander Rothman, brush-heavy confessions from Li-Or Zaitzman and a hilarious, scatological manga-inflected comic by Kendra Wells for starters. There are excerpts from larger works (like a surreal, expressively-drawn story from Maria Sputnik and a page from a Mannheim comic that frankly doesn't make sense outside its larger context. Not everything in here sparkles (Hillary Allison's crack at a daily, gag-driven comic strip features fairly stale observations and Shauna Grant didn't have the chops to pull off her manga-meets-classic-cartooning stylings), but it's all at least solid and some of it is outstanding. In particular, I thought the last three cartoonists featured all had distinctive visual styles. Henry Fernau's kinetic woodcut-style piece had a wonderfully expressive economy of storytelling. Alabaster did a fine job of channeling classic cartooning and balancing it against classic literature. Finally, Katie McEwen's delicate illustration reminds me of the fragile work of Aidan Koch or Amanda Vahamaki.

Mannheim's own Nate The Nonconformist Crashes A Party minicomic is over-the-top social satire in the vein of Peter Bagge's Hate! Mannheim employs a similar kind of grotesque, exaggerated figure work to take aim at the sort of self-styled punk "non-conformist" who thinks a t-shirt bought from Hot Topic is a cultural and political statement. The targets are broad and a little easy in this comic, but Mannheim makes up for that with bugged-out eyes, sharpened teeth and some pretty trenchant jokes. (Having songs like "Whip My Hair" and "Black & Yellow" playing at the party was pretty amusing, for example.) Having the titular character crash an intervention because he mistook it for a party was another great gag. Mannheim is more directly parodic than Bagge in terms of her targets (no one in this comic resembles a realistic character), edging more towards Johnny Ryan in terms of the way she sets up gags and how far she's willing to take them. She definitely has her own style, however, and it's fully-formed and distinctive.

The Comics of Emma T. Capps

2011-11-10T04:16:00.000-08:00

Emma Capps is kind of an odd case to review. She's precocious and wants the reader to know it, plastering the fact that she's an award-winning 14-year-old cartoonist all over her comics and promotional material. This would be grating if she wasn't otherwise so endearingly enthusiastic about every aspect of comics and art. It must also be said that she sent me the most organized and best-looking press kit I have ever seen from an individual artist. There was a crisply-written letter of introduction, a selection of her hand-made postcards with personal messages, an impressive sheet with pull quotes, a business card and the comics themselves, all collected in a folder that has a Chapel Chronicles sticker on them. I'm not sure if her fastidiousness is a way of letting adults know that she's serious about all of this and wants to do the best job possible or if that's simply her nature. Either way, one couldn't help but be impressed with the packaging and her confidence.

The magazine-sized comic she enclosed is a collection of The Chapel Chronicles, Capps' webcomic. Chapel is loosely based on Capps, drawn with big red hair and huge feet. Despite the strip getting off to a rocky start when Chapel introduces herself as "zany" (violating the basic storytelling tenet of "show, don't tell"). Capps quickly wins the reader over with her charming and stripped down character design. These strips don't generally feature gags, per se; instead, they are built around the amusing observations and foibles of its lead character. Capps takes us through a night of playing board games with a babysitter, how Chapel does (or doesn't do) her chores, how Chapel becomes obsessed with Lady Gaga, and what happens when Chapel gets a pet hedgehog. It's all lightweight and cute, unburdened by pretension. What makes it worth reading is Capps' obsession with detail: adding eye pops, taking jokes to strange places (like popping into Alice's Adventures In Wonderland at one point) and even her artist's comments below each piece. The main problem with this comic is that her use of color is occasionally garish and overwhelming. There are times when she seems determined to have something eye-grabbing in every panel and relies on color splashes instead of the strength of her composition. Her drawings are certainly expressive enough on their own; a splash of color would more than suffice to provide a vivid reading experience.

Her more interesting and ambitious comic is Jam Days, an autobio story about Capps' quest to get enough cherry plums to make her own jam. Other than employing a lot of weird perspective, this is a solidly designed and attractive comic that brings life to some quotidian details about a day spent adventuring outside. The comic captures her constantly whirring mind, giving a fairly quiet set of events a surprising amount of momentum. Her use of color is much more restrained in this comic, and the result is a palette that flatters her linework. Capps has pretty good chops at this stage of her career, especially in terms of drawing from life and drawing objects. She's also a solid storyteller. It's obvious that she has a relentless work ethic, which is the only way a young artist can get better in a relatively short period of time. Capps' work at this stage is not unlike Ariel Schrag's first book, Awkward: enthusiastic, episodic and having more to do with being a child than being a young adult. I'll be curious to see how she continues to develop, what kinds of choices she makes as an artist and if her devotion to comics will remain steadfast as she grows older.

CCS Minis: Cockle, Frakes, Taylor

2011-11-07T17:30:00.000-08:00

Annotated #7, by Aaron Cockle. This is Cockle's best work to date, a comic where the artist found a way to match his rendering ability with his deliciously enigmatic and bold storytelling choices. Cockle is very much interested in telling genre stories, but it's hard to pin his work down to a particular genre. I suppose "science-fiction" is as good a descriptor as any, especially given that aliens are a major presence in this story, "S.O.S." It concerns an author living on an elaborately-equipped ship at sea, visited by alien luminaries and reporters while dealing with foreign dignitaries and traitors in his midst. Cockle has a way of unraveling a high concept out of sequence, but does so in a way that intrigues rather than confuses. He also loves playing with text and information; for example, the author's name is redacted throughout the story. The story centers around the author's unique discovery: the ability to change around human consciousness and memory through an elaborate series of Edits and Revisions--a sort of MLA guide applied to the mind. Cockle is careful to keep the author's motivations a mystery but hints that he may not be exercising as much free will as he thinks. The author is depicted with a delightful bulbousness--all jowls and nose and receding hairline. This is the latest in a loosely-related series of stories (at least thematically) dealing with Cockle's fascination with eschatology, each one dealing with a different way in which secret deals and knowledge might cause the end of the world. Cockle's work grows more exciting with each passing issue, and he's on his way into developing into a major talent.

Tragic Relief #10, by Colleen Frakes. This is a typically strong entry for Frakes in her oeuvre of dark fantasy/fairy tales. The way she spots blacks in particular is quite striking, as the trees in the forest are just jagged lines of white standing in relief against an oppressively pitch-black night sky. This issue is the the third part of her unsettling but humorous adaptation of the Basket Ogress myth, and it builds to what seems to be an exciting climax. The Ogress took one girl away from a sleepover for telling stories about her, leaving the other to track her down, with the help of a series of animals whose speech she is suddenly able to understand. In a clever sequence, the captured girl entertains the Ogress (waiting for the rocks to heat up so she can eat the girl) with the story that details her demise as the other girl finds a way to defeat her (in an amusingly gross and fantastic fashion--she slid down the giant Ogress' throat and tossed lit matches into her stomach). Frakes' brush captures the simplicity of shadowy figures as though they had been scrawled in the dirt or on a cave wall, rendering them in a more cartoonish fashion on other pages. All told, this seems like a much more all-ages story than her usual, more visceral fare, but there are genuine scares to be found in this story, like in all good fairy tales. I'll be eager to see this story in its eventual collected form, because it will really pop off the page given the right format.

Light Riot: Departure, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Taylor labels this truly strange comic "Fantastical Autobiography", and I've certainly never read anything quite like it. The comic opens with a psychedelic, anthropomorphic pterodactyl creature who lives in the moon ordering her servant to bring him a special soul from Earth for testing. That soul turns out to be that of the author, drawn in a manga-influenced (almost superdeformed) style, pondering whether or not his girlfriend is a junkie. From there, his soul gets separated from his body, which goes on to live and act without him. The soul goes through a series of trials with the insectoid servant of "Mother" on its way to the moon, while the body is retrieved by friends, where he learns that his girlfriend killed herself. "Mother" tells Rio that she's going to help him learn how to control his pain as he learns his "spiritual capacity". Taylor doesn't skimp on sci-fi spectacle in the action sequences of the book, with all sorts of eyeball-melting pyrotechnics, flying death's head marauders and a trippy light show on the way to enlightenment. The autobio elements are raw and almost uncomfortably intimate, assuming that those aspects of the story are based on Taylor's actual experiences. Even if they aren't, it's a heavy counterpoint to the fanciful sci-fi story. Taylor isn't quite in control of his line just yet; his gestures and body language is a bit stiff at times, and there's an awkwardness to the way his characters interact in the space of a panel. At times, his intense stylization is ahead of his basic storytelling ability and character rendering skill. Taylor is an artist who is clearly thinking about deeply spiritual issues, which are further explored in his four-page mini "Masks That Grown-Ups Sell Me And The Lies They Tell We". The point of this comic is to approach the world by seeking hopeful spaces and trying to remain as child-like as possible in the sense of not hardening our masks of identity, fear and pain. Taylor is treading on territory similar to that of Theo Ellsworth, another artist who lives in a different headspace at times, but he's clearly willing to go pretty deep into the well of his own personal pain. That's powerful stuff, even if he's not all the way there yet as a storyteller.

Gags From CCS: Bonesteel & Life Is Good

2011-11-03T04:42:00.000-07:00

Let's take a look at a couple of minis from two grads of the Center for Cartoon Studies that have specialized in humor.

Bonesteel, by GP Bonesteel. This is a collection of fanciful diary comics from Bonesteel, a cartoonist with a limited range in terms of his line but an expansive imagination. He's a fine storyteller who isn't afraid to push the envelope in many of his comics, but the humor here is surprisingly tame and typically geek-friendly. Bonesteel seems to be going for a highly simplified, cute character design style not unlike a typical syndicated cartoonist. While his own self-caricature is perfectly rendered, he seems to have a lot more trouble drawing women (including his fiance'). The best jokes in the comic are those that aren't so heavily dependent on pop culture references and that push the bounds of good taste (like a hilarious strip about showing his love for mini-wheats cereral by depicting himself masturbating to them). There's the kernel of a good strip here, but Bonesteel needs to work on figuring out a direction that works best, making it different enough from standard webcomics to stand out, and honing the designs of his other characters to make them more interesting to look at. (Fixing the strip's many spelling errors certainly wouldn't hurt.) Like many webcartoonists, this feels like Bonesteel trying to get better in public by working steadily, emphasizing production and discipline above all else.

Life Is Good #7, by Steve Seck. Seven issues into this anthropomorphic social satire, Seck has really tightened up his art, focused his narrative and resolved the storyline in a funny and satisfying manner. Seck made the wise decision of giving his funniest characters the most screen time without overusing them, as slimy vegan poser Dr Peace Rock conspires against Charles the Gator and awful crusty-wannabe Sewer Gator annoys lead character Brownie on virtually every page. This comic is all about losing one's job, living on the margins of society, dealing with the weird characters one finds on those aforementioned margins, and the hypocrisy that can result by conflating principles with ego. Seck's lettering is still a little hard to read at times (especially when he mixes upper and lower case letters), but there's a much greater clarity to his work now, even on pages when he jams in as many as a dozen panels. I'll be curious to see if there's another storyline featuring these characters or if Seck goes in a completely different direction.

The Comics Journalism of Josh Kramer

2011-10-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

Cartoon Picayune #2 by Josh Kramer. Kramer, like Dan Archer before him, had journalism on his mind when he went to the Center for Cartoon Studies. Unlike Archer, whose comics have a political bent, Kramer seems to prefer human interest stories. The second issue of his journalistic anthology series finds him including other correspondents, but all of them are subject to his rigid rules regarding sourcing and quotes. Even if the stories are drawn as a narrative with dialogue, Kramer makes a point of making the reader understand that his stories are "rigorously reported". The Cartoon Picayune reminds me most of Brendan Burford's Syncopated anthology, which features similar first and second person reporting styles. Unsurprisingly, Kramer's reach is a local one, with stories about a local high school ski jumping team, a gubernatorial primary, a day camp for rock, and the evolution of a local brewing company.

"Fly By Night" is hampered by being the second part of a story about that ski jumping team. The angles he was approaching did become quickly evident, however, like the young rookie girl and the team's star who was trying to beat the best jumper in the state. When Kramer is drawing diagrams or depicts motion, his art is certainly up to the task of getting across his ideas. His major flaw as an artist is depicting different faces. In this story that features so many different characters, this is a significant problem. I think Kramer is cognizant enough of this problem to get around it by emphasizing emotion through using lettering and body language. Kramer is admirable in that he doesn't try goosing the results of his story to make it more dramatic, which is especially unusual for a sports-related story. Instead, Kramer is more interested in the mechanics of the sport, how the kids got into it, and the minutiae of how a ski jump meet is conducted. In terms of the action, Kramer is best at drawing sharp angles, which made him perfect for depicting the actual jumps.

"School's In For Summer" sees Kramer change some of his approach a bit, giving his characters tiny white circles for eyes. There are still some awkward drawings of characters in some panels, but there's generally a better balance between character and background. The story itself is a quick but thorough examination of a "school of rock" summer program, going through the program's goals and interviewing some of the kids. Kramer also did a separate mini called One Place, One Cheese, which details the process two local cheesemakers go through in creating their product, as well as providing other details about their lives. In each of his stories, Kramer has a way of letting his subjects speak for themselves without adding his own editorializing as to why they're interesting or significant. The simple choice he makes to write about them indicates that he thinks they're worth of reportage.

Bill Volk's story about the history of Iron City Beer in Pittsburgh, "'arn", suffers a little from letting the new CEO talk at length without really challenging any of his premises. Volk's cartooning is quite lively, however, and the slightly grotesque touch he added to his character designs was an interesting choice. The folksy reporting style of James Sturm and the delicate character drawings of Katherine Roy were a perfect match in the depiction of a day in the life of a candidate for the governorship of Vermont, "Honk and Wave". Given that this was a story consisting entirely of talking heads, it was to Roy's credit that she made it so interesting to look at. Kramer certainly did a nice job as an editor, balancing three different kinds of stories in the sort of anthology that's quite rare. Kramer's rock-solid standards as a journalist and his editorial eye are a great foundation for his work; it will simply take time and experience as a cartoonist to bring that aspect of his work up to the rest of his standards.

Brief Comments On Short CCS Minis

2011-10-25T17:49:00.000-07:00

Finding Moby Dick, by Laura Terry. This is "a collection of sketches, drawings and comics"; more half-formed ideas than anything coherent. I don't have any interest in critiquing the content, given that the ideas are half-formed. Instead, I wanted to mention that this little sketchbook mini (in full color, no less) is further evidence of just how far Terry has come as an artist. Her figure work is so much more self-assured, for one thing, as is her general command over line and using different line weights. Most impressive, however, is the highly expressive way she uses color. In one story snippet, she shapes the story of a shipwreck using only midnight blue and blacks for spotting. Another image of three skeletons dancing on the ocean is rendered in aqua blue and sea-foam green. Her figure work in general is lively, full of personality and edged with humor. This is an artist who's ready for a leap forward in terms of the scope of ambition in her projects.

Zee Leetle Prince, by Katie Moody. This mini is an interesting exercise in style, as Moody takes the classic story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery "as filtered through Ed Emberley". Moody turns the book into kind of a goof for kids, rendering the characters in illustration teacher Emberley's trademark simple style (everything is basic geometric figures, lines, and squiggles--things almost anyone can draw) and adding a Pepe' LePew style French patois (The first line of the comic is "Zere wonce was a leetle prince"). The only problem with the comic was that there simply weren't enough images, and most of those images were just too small. An Emberley-style book packs a lot of visual punch into each page, even if the figures themselves are tiny, and this was dominated by text. That's not to say that the mini didn't have its charms, especially since Moody never strayed from the silliness of her text, but it didn't succeed in what she set out to do.

Moose #3 and #4, by Max de Radigues. De Radigues' series takes true narrative form in these two issues. The protagonist of the series, a nervous teen named Joe, is exhibiting all sorts of odd behavior, we learn, because of the way he's harassed by a bully. He has the opportunity to talk to a teacher about it in #3, but with his tormentor standing right outside the door, he has to hold it in. This issue is all about setting up the hopelessness of his situation in conventional terms. The fourth issue is about Joe managing to hide from the bully and his crony (whom he keeps in line with threats of physical violence when he's not gung-ho about torturing Joe). There's a sweetness to this issue as Joe doesn't exactly solve his problem, but he does derive some satisfaction from frustrating his nemesis (whose self-esteem seems to derive entirely from tormenting him). As always, de Radigues uses a fragile, simple line that emphasizes angles and negative space. His characters, though simply-rendered, are lively and bursting with emotion. de Radigues' ability to portray body language is remarkably intuitive, and he seems to thrive doing this short episodes that include eye-catching covers and incidental illustrations by guest artists.

Freeloader #1, by Nomi Kane. This is a typically charming and well-drawn set of short strips about being unemployed and living with one's parents after graduating from college. Her thoughts turn from her preferred job (illustration) to slightly less glamorous pursuits (like waitress, delivery person and stripper). Kane's all about the gag in this story (her bit about being unable to jiggle as a stripper was especially amusing), though the gag covers up real stress. This comic is also about the rare opportunity she has to live with her parents for an extended time as an adult, which is both stressful (because of the limbo she finds herself in) and an unexpected delight. Kane's character design and self-caricature are enormously appealing and have always been her major strength as an artist, and this comic is no exception.

Twelve New Drawings, by DW. DW is a CCS student who is clearly heavily influenced by Fort Thunder and the old Highwater Books comics. His drawings have the raw, hypnotic power of Ron Rege and Marc Bell, without the level of craft and sophistication of those two masters. There's not much narrative at work here, but each page is worth close inspection as DW mixes decorative patterns with hidden messages, surprising images and even small narrative snippets. It feels like sketchbook work, a form of graphomania almost, in that the artist is drawing just to draw, to make marks on paper. His bold sense of design is something that will serve him well as he shapes this vision, especially since CCS emphasizes narrative structure in even its most avant-garde students. He's someone to keep an eye on.
Early, by Joseph Lambert. This is a full-color charmer that involves Lambert's typical subjects: quarrellous little kids and the sun and moon as anthropomorphic beings. This eight pager finds a kid getting mad at the sun for melting his ice cream cone and throwing a spider at him. The sun freaks out and sinks early (a lovely metaphor for the way time can pass for a child), only to reemerge later and ask the moon if she's afraid of spiders. What's interesting about this strip is that Lambert cuts way down on his typical level of detail in favor of letting the color tell the story. The back cover has the unexpected bonus of telling the story from the poor spider's point of view.

Music As Map: Beth Hetland

2011-10-15T08:55:00.001-07:00

The first two issues of Beth Hetland's Fugue are indicative of a young artist who has taken on an ambitious, personal project as one of her first major works. Choosing to attempt to depict music on the comics page is a particularly difficult trick for a young artist, but Hetland's obvious understanding of musical composition turned this into one of the comic's main strengths. Fugue is the story of Patricia Gullo and her journey through music. Its subtitle is "a family in three parts", and that's the true focus of the book: the ways in which families support, pressure, disappoint and eventually pick each other up. While the performance of music is a key component of the story, the way music is written is even more important. A score is not the music, but rather a map or puzzle that can lead to the treasure of music once it's decoded. To go back to Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville, maps as we understand can be decoded to understand our relationship to space. Comics can be read to understand a narrative as it relates to time and space. A musical score, once played, makes the sublime audible. That is, music is not an art form that can be reduced to a privileged material structure (like a sculpture or painting) or even reproduced like a comic or book. The art form is not even the recording of the music; that is an imperfect attempt at capturing the sublime experience of hearing music in one's head as a composer does. Only the map of a piece of sheet music comes close to providing the clues that will allow a listener to pick up on this.

That's why Patricia throughout both issues is so obsessed with the composer's original intent: music isn't just about fun, self-expression and camaraderie (though these elements are important as well), it's about chasing the sublime experience. The first issue was about her having the courage to truly pursue music as her passion, to have the confidence to work hard in testing the limits of her talent. There's a great two page spread where her future boyfriend (and husband) gives her a tab of LSD and they listen to Pachelbel, an immersive experience that helps cement the idea that nothing is more important than music. Pursuing the sublime has its price, however, as she freezes up at her senior recital and is unable to perform. She's afflicted by a kind of vertigo as the fear is not of performing per se, but a fear of not doing justice to the work as it was originally scored. That fear of not being great is a paralyzing one, a fear that has nothing to do with creation or performance and has everything to do with expectation and judgment. Or as Lynda Barry puts it, the Two Questions: "Is this good?" "Does this suck?"

The second issue explores this dynamic with her three daughters. It's clear that they all have some kind of musical talent and/or interest, but it's immediately suggested by her husband that she's pushing them to do play. In other words, she wants to live vicariously through her children to finish the job of performing and grasping the sublime. But that's not what it's all about; indeed, she also simply wants to share herself with her children, to play with them as a way of expressing a mutual love for something they love dearly. Who better to play with than one's own children? And "play" is an interesting term to use, because just as playing an instrument is an expression of joy that's done with great seriousness, so is play for a young child a matter of great focus and concentration. Beyond wanting musical partners, Patricia wanted to pass on the simple joy of music to her children. It's something that keeps her in check when she was about to go too far in pressuring her children to play the way she wanted them to. The danger of inculcating a hatred of music in her children was too horrible to contemplate, and that allowed her to come to her senses before she went too far.

Still, the idea of one of her children being good enough to reach for that kind of musical mastery continued throughout the book. Her first daughter, Alison, was clearly a talented player but had no interest in learning how to read music. That was too much like work and music to her was simply a matter of pleasure. Her second daughter, Beth (presumably the author or the author's stand-in), could read and understand music (and certainly loved it), but she was much more interested in drawing than playing. It was the youngest daughter, Rachel, who shared the same gift as her mother. She was portrayed as being developmentally delayed: quiet, grim and distant, she doesn't talk until she was four (when she sneaks out of her blanket fortress to play at the piano). When everyone else noticed, she copped to learning by ear--which happened to be her first words! She grew up to have the same kind of talent as her mother, but faced the same dilemma: mastery of a certain Mozart piece was beyond her grasp, and the fear of not being able to face up to the task of performing the music in front of a group of witnesses paralyzed her just as her mother was paralyzed. She and her mother are both dreamers, something that gives both of them inspiration but also can provide the seeds of its own ruin.

I'll be curious to see how Hetland ties all of this up in a third issue, but I wanted to comment on some formal aspects of the work. First of all, Hetland repeats certain motifs throughout the comic much like a piece of music might. The most common set of "notes" she repeats is the passage of time as expressed as a child sitting at a piano bench, getting noticeably older panel-by-panel. There's also the sort of conflict and resolution you might hear in a symphony, expressed in the form of both panels and notes. Of course, the second issue resolves in much the same way as the first, providing each issue/movement with a recurring theme. The eyes of Hetland's characters are black dots, while their eyebrows are simple lines; clearly, they are meant to imitate notes on a scale. That's made clear on one page where notes and a stripped-down version of Rachel's face are presented in alternating panels. Hetland's line is simple and unfussy. The main critique I have of her work is that she's better at page design and panel composition than she is at drawing figures. Sometimes, the way figures interact with each other in space is distorted. Her anatomy (even the way she simplifies it on the page) is also wonky at times, with arms and legs bending at strange angles in otherwise normal scenes; even if this was intentional, it's a distraction to the simplicity of the story. Lastly, she relies too much on facial expression to get across body language, which has the effect of making the bodies somewhat irrelevant. It's not an accident that the pages that are talking heads and musical notes are the strongest in these comics. These drawbacks don't mar the ambition of these comics and the cleverness with which she's designed them. In her own pursuit of the sublime, Hetland has simply gone for it in a very public fashion, and I'll be excited to see how she manages to stick the landing.

Flipping the Channels: Ben Horak's Grump Toast

2011-10-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Of all the graduates of the Center for Cartoon Studies, Ben Horak seems to have improved the most. He always had crazed, violent and hilariously disturbing ideas, but didn't quite have the chops to carry them off. However, in his solo anthology series Grump Toast, he's proven that he is willing to do the work in order to get better. The odd twist in this series is that there are serials with recurring characters, each one quite different in tone. "Monkanonee" is Horak's quasi-autobio series, going to some rather odd places. For example, the first issue features Hoark's plans for his own funeral, which involve him being catapulted across canyon with dynamite strapped to his body as "Benny and the Jets" is being played, timed to explode at the chorus. This is pretty much Horak's sense of humor in a nutshell: off-kilter and spectacularly violent.

The apotheosis of this concept is his "Asphalt" character, a ridiculously over-the-top, deluded and quarrellous frump of a man. The design of the character is key to its success, as he resembles a 1970s detective with a trenchcoat, bushy moustache, sideburns, flapping tie and cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The first issue finds him trying to return a dog for a reward only to lose it and try to kidnap someone else's dog. The second issue starts with Asphalt waking up to discover that he has a switchblade sticking out of his side (after he initially thought it was just hunger pangs). The leads him to try to discover the source of his stabbing, sparking an amazingly visceral sequence where he tries to remember the bar he got drunk at the previous night, gets it wrong (unbeknownst to him) and proceeds to cudgel, gouge, punch and stomp every innocent person there. The payoff gag for the story is a particularly memorable one.

Horak veers between the violently exaggerated in "Asphalt" and the violently surreal in "Pinky Palms". The latter is about an anthropomorphic hand who is a Vegas-style lounge singer. In the first issue, he helps out the ghost of a fellow singer try to get back his girl, only to discover that she's become monstrous. The grotesqueness of that story paled in comparison to the story in the second issue, which finds Pinky trying to prevent the suicide of a friend on his birthday by throwing him a party, only to be menaced by pudding-spawned zombies. This story approaches Matthew Thurber levels of weirdness, and the simplicity of Horak's design and the control he has over his line makes it work.

There are other highlights, like the shenanigans of "Unfortunate Face", a serial wherein the disguise of certain characters inevitably reveals something horrible. His drawings of his toast mascot (shades of Alfred E Newman!) imitating characters from Horak's favorite movies are perfect filler. If there's a weak link in the series, it's "Giggleton Holocaust", an ultraviolent send-up of Warner Brothers characters. The strip doesn't work for two reasons: Horak's character design isn't quite rubbery enough to mimic the classic designs, and those cartoons were so incredibly violent in the first place that the parody falls flat. Fortunately, Horak doesn't linger on this strip for long, as he's only produced a few pages of it so far. There's a gleefulness to Horak's use of violence in these comics, a commitment to the sheer absurdity of these acts that eschews mean-spiritedness. At this point, Horak needs to continue to work on refining his line and perhaps adding more decorative touches to his backgrounds. I'd also be curious too see him modulate his tone a bit; he can only go over the top so often before he starts to run out of ideas. In particular, I'd love to see more of his "Monkanonee" and his autobiographical daydreams.

Jon Chad Comics: Bikeman and Drop Target

2011-10-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

Jon Chad is one of the best of the Center for Cartoon Studies' grads in terms of pure technical skill. In terms of character design, backgrounds, body language and detail, his comics are a joy to look at. He creates a fully-defined world for his characters to inhabit, jammed with clearly-delineated leaves, branches and small objects. The clarity of his line and understanding of when to emphasize character over place means that every panel is remarkably easy to parse and process. He switches between the naturalistic depiction of animals, cartoonish character design and diagram-ready drawings of bicycles and makes all three cohabit the same panel without jarring the reader. In fact, Chad deliberately tries to create visual tensions in order to draw readers in, drawing characters and evoking a world that are simultaneously grotesque and absurd, realistic and silly, dense and light.

Bikeman is his fantasy series where all of these factors come together. In almost every respect, the world he creates is a familiar one: a vaguely medieval world where hard-working villagers struggle in a world filled with intelligent and frequently vicious animals and mercenaries. The kicker in the story is that everything in this world revolves around the use of bicycles, many of whom are sentient at roughly the same level as a dog or horse. As a result, fashion and language revolves around bicycles as well (there's a character who wears glasses with spokes on them), a conceit that would be ridiculous if it wasn't played straight by Chad. The first issue of the series introduced as to the young villager who's the primary protagonist, as well as the titular character. He's a bike shepherd who wears a crafted bear's head to indicate his connection to the fierce but benevolent animals he's devoted to. Each issue has widened the scope of the world to Jeff Smith levels (it's clear that Chad owes a lot to Smith's world-building in Bone), introducing a bounty-hunting human with a grudge against the Bikeman, a pack of evil wolves who also seek revenge on the Bikeman and his guardian bears, a host of villagers, an intelligent bike who can speak, and a variety of other characters and conflicts. Other than a few minor errors here and there (spelling gaffes, a few lines that could be tightened up a bit), this is a marvelous bit of fantasy storytelling. Hopefully, Chad will continue to take his time and let things play out slowly.

I also wanted to mention Chad's pinball zine/minicomic Drop Target, which he co-writes with Alec Longstreth. Anyone with even a passing interest in pinball machines will enjoy this labor of love, as Chad & Longstreth interview the owners of a pinball-centric bar in Portland (and former editors of a pinball zine), talk about their favorite game, dream up and design new games, and talk about places with good pinball machines. The highlight of the issue as a comics reader is "From Zeroes to Heroes", Longstreth's typically breathless account of how he and Chad became obsessed with pinball machines. This is a niche zine, to be sure, but it's an obvious labor of love and done with a meticulousness that one would expect from Chad and Longstreth. Chad has done illustrations for some childrens' books and has his own kids' comic coming out in 2012, and I sense that he could very well have a career trajectory similar to Smith: working in genre fiction and alternating between work aimed squarely at kids and work that's slightly darker.

Another Worthy Kickstarter Effort: Motherlover

2011-10-10T04:32:00.000-07:00

I'd urge interested parties to donate to the Kickstarter fund for Motherlover, an anthology featuring Nic Breutzman, John Holden and Luke Holden. It's edited and colored by Raighne Hogan, whose 2D Cloud will be publishing it. I wrote the introduction to the book, which is unsettling and beautiful.

Comics Readers Digest: Hive #4

2011-10-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

Hive is an odd duck as far as anthologies go. It's not a standard anthology where all of its entries are new stories. Instead, editor Jordan Shiveley reprints stories from some of his contributors and gets new work from others. Shiveley's selections as editor are all over the place, ranging from personal & autobio stories to slick genre stories, arranged in a manner that occasionally defies rhyme or reason. Hive reminds me a bit of Josh Blair's Candy Or Medicine in that it looks like it takes all comers, from veterans looking for a venue to publish to new creators trying to get exposure. Hive is well-designed and attractive, but the size of the anthology doesn't always do its contributions justice.

For example, in issue #4, Hurk's story "Sculptor" is ill-served by the book's 5 x 8.5" dimensions. With 16 panels per page, there's a level of detail that's hard to parse given the small size of the page. The same was true for O'Shell's story, which had up to 17 panels on a page with tiny lettering. Even the strongest material in the book, a selection of Noah Van Sciver's best stories, doesn't look nearly as good as it did in his Blammo! series. There are other questionable publishing decisions, like publishing Jose' Antonio Alonso Barrueco's story in its original Spanish. I appreciate Shiveley's willingness to publish international material, but printing a story that its target audience can't read doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Another problem with the anthology is that Shiveley's tastes as an editor are too broad. Peter Richardson & David Orme's "Cloud 109" is a standard genre story, and a horrible example at that. The story is ill-suited to the anthology (it looks like this was originally a color story that was reduced to gray-scaling here), the lettering is tiny, the art is slick and soulless and the story itself trite & dull. That it takes up a full twenty pages of a 130 page anthology makes its presence all the more tedious.

That's unfortunate, because there are certainly the makings of a good anthology to be found here. Joe Decie is a real talent and the two-page anecdote he relates about his parents, New Year's Eve and toilet seats is hilarious. Cole Closser's "Sweet Sammy" looks like Shiveley took a minicomics version of the story, put it on a photocopier, and then printed the results. Strangely, that adds appeal to what looks and feels like an ancient artifact, as though Milt Gross did a minicomic decades ago. While Van Sciver's work isn't printed in a way that flatters it, these really are some of his best stories, like "Fame", "Process" and "Convention". Stories by Malachi Ward, Iain Laurie & Craig Collins were all welcome, if familiar contributions. In terms of artists who were new to me, I was impressed by John Kinhart's "Screw You" (a funny reminiscence of the consequences of swearing as a child) and Gloria's sparely-drawn strips about travel and grotesques. I'll be curious to see where the anthology goes from here; I like the idea of a well-designed entry-level anthology, but one with a sharper focus (even at the risk of printing lesser material) would make this a more consistent read.

Another Worthy Kickstarter Effort: The Strumpet

2011-10-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

I've enjoyed Ellen Lindner's work for some time now, both her solo comics as well as the anthology she co-edited, Whores of Mensa. That anthology is being reconfigured and retitled as The Strumpet (a brilliant choice), and they're doing a Kickstarter campaign. They're only stumping for a modest $1000, and given the quality of the contributors (Lindner, Mardou, Megan Kelso, among others), I'm hoping they can meet their goal without too much trouble.

Four New CCS Anthologies

2011-10-06T04:32:00.000-07:00

Anthologies have long been the lifeblood of the students and alumni of the Center for Cartoon Studies. Self-published anthologies are frequently the first place they publish, but many alumni continue to edit and publish them long after graduation. Let's take a look at four recent anthologies by alumni, students and faculty of CCS.

Too Far, edited by Joseph Lambert. This is a very strong anthology from One Percent Press, the minicomics and music collective that includes Lambert, JP Coovert and James Hindle. They've done a number of anthologies but this one shows both their growth as artists as well as their taste in picking new contributors. Of course, this is really Lambert's show in terms of editing and design, and one can clearly see him evolving in every aspect of comics. Hindle's piece, "Microscopic", combines the very specific pain of dealing with a one-way breakup with the sort of phenomenology of space as it applies to emotional states that Tom Kaczynski does so well. Alexis Frederick-Frost contributes a story done in his recent, more relaxed style that's not quite so heavy on the blacks. With that thinner line, he crams a ton of ornate but clear detail into a hilarious period piece about society functions and how women started wearing ever more ornate hats with live birds on them. This is a wonderfully witty story that fully exploits its premise and ends with a great punchline. Coovert's piece is one of his fantasy/autobio pieces involving an argument with his finger after he picked at it. This is a wisp of a story, but some of the cartooning involved is clever.

Jose-Luis Olivares offers a typically visually crazy story about Superman and Storm giving birth to a baby hurricane. His line is simple but dense, using thick, swirling strokes to create an atmosphere of chaos. At the same time, this story is whimsical yet strangely affecting emotionally. Even when Superman learns that Mickey Mouse is really the father (a move that scored Olivares a hat trick of copyright infringement), he embraces the baby as his own--even as it destroys the world. Lambert follows a story by one of the most original stylists from CCS with another, as we get a Dane Martin story involving his bizarre bird people. There's always an inchoate rage present in Martin's comics that matches the bleakness of his dotted backgrounds and the blank expressions on the faces of his characters.

Lambert's own story is his best-ever, perfectly encapsulating the theme of the anthology as expressed by its title. Lambert's stories tend to center around sibling rivalry and the viciousness it can entail, putting that conflict on a fantastic, over-the-top stage. This story sees a scared child literally eating his father and then the entire world (truly a "going too far" moment) and then following up on the ramifications of this action by exploring what happens to the world when it's eaten. Lambert always had flash and slickness in his line, but he's now branching out with experimental and even quirky solutions to visual problems. Finally, Alex Kim picks up on the eschatological themes present in this book with a story about a man at an Antarctic base being confronted by the end of the world in the person of a woman who shows up at his door to tell him the news. "Too far" in this instance is less about nuclear devastation than about an extra act of shocking cruelty, and the paranoia in the story is heightened by Kim's trademark wavy line. There's no question that Too Far is on my short list for best minicomic of the year.

Stranger Knights #2, edited by Bill Volk. Volk expanded this genre-based anthology from the first issue, and while there's some interesting and off-beat stories to be found, the anthology as a whole is sloppily assembled. The work of some of the contributors feels rushed and even dashed-off in some cases. It doesn't seem like any editing or proofreading was done on any of the submissions and the errors are glaring as a result. Mary Soper, for example, has a pleasant enough style, but it's hard to tell her characters apart. This comic looks like it was drawn on a computer, but in any event Soper's line lacks weight, depending way too much on gray-scaling to give its characters some presence on the page. Volk's own stories are typically eccentric, but I'm not crazy about his new style. It's cartoonier and more spare than his old style, adding some interestingly deformed character designs, but it still feels like Volk isn't quite comfortable with it yet. What is never in doubt is Volk's wit, as the story of a "future archeologist" interpreting 21st century culture entirely through tattoos was very amusing. The weakest story in the anthology was Shawn Atkins' "The Rise of Phoenix Nine": the narrative is one cliche' after another, it's rife with spelling errors (due, no doubt, in part to its computer font), and the occasionally lively facial expressions are marred by pedestrian layouts.

On the other hand, the offerings by Morgan Pielli and Casey Bohn were a cut above the rest of the entries in the book. Pielli's "A Forged Man" is visually stylish, playing on Frank Miller-style figures and use of blacks to tell a story of a hero trapped in an awful loop. Pielli is really starting to hit his stride of late. Bohn's lumpy style is reminiscent of Steve Ditko, down to the stark simplicity of his character design and clarity of action. There's something slightly crazy going on under the surface of his staid-looking comics, creating an interesting tension between form and content. Overall, I'd say Volk's desire to expand the anthology's contents got the best of either his editorial judgment or attention to detail with regard to the other submissions. The idea of an alt-genre anthology is a good one, but the overall level of craft and care is not yet up to the standards of other CCS anthologies.

Subterranean #3, edited by Sean Knickerbocker, Alex Bullett, and Andrew Greenstone. All three of these artists were new to me, but this mini was surprisingly tight and impressive. Each brings a different set of visual and narrative approaches to the table. Knickerbocker is a student at CCS, and he draws his inspiration from underground comics and contemporary cartoonists who take their cues from classic comics, like Sammy Harkham. His story "Hunters and Gatherers" is a grim take on two hunters exploring an environment, with the tragic outcome for one being mourned but briefly by the other. "Pekar" is a meditation on the great writer, done in the style of a Pekar/Crumb collaboration. His true gem is "My First Panic Attack", a (presumably) autobiographical story about a young man who experiences a panic attack when confronted with the age difference between him and his girlfriend. The attack manifests as he and his girlfriend transform into Floyd Gottfredsen-style, vaguely anthropomorphic characters and are menaced by a spider/cop. Knickerbocker clearly has a bright future, especially when he's fully processed his influences.

Bullett's story about two bumbling aliens sent on a mission to assassinate a political leader feels like a Heavy Metal pastiche/parody, and as such it's got a wicked wit. From the (subdued) spectacle of the villain wearing only a mesh tank top and sunglasses (a funny comment on the way women are dressed in such stories) to the distorted and grotesque figures, Bullett's chops are just good enough to tell the story the way it needed to be told without unnecessary clutter. Certain panels could have used backgrounds and more decorative detail to fully bring this world to life, but he certainly gets the point across. Greenstone's thick lines and clutter make his story about a vampire wage slave looking for love and inspiration at a hipster party spring to life. His cartoony style gives every drawing a springy energy, one that's contained by the generous helping of zip-a-tone effects he adds to nearly every panel. About the only problem I had with this story is that his lettering is just a bit too big and intrusive; the lettering itself is fine, but I would have preferred a little more visual impact in each panel and a bit less word balloon. All told, this was an impressive showcase for all three of these young artists, each of which has talent and potential.

This Isn't Working: Comics About Ex-Boyfriends, edited by Robyn Chapman. Chapman was never actually a student at CCS (she went to the Savannah College of Art & Design), but she's been an active part of the school in various capacities since virtually its inception. After years of editing and self-publishing her own comics as well as anthologies like True Porn and zines such as Hey, Four Eyes!, Chapman has officially launched her own minicomics publishing concern: Paper Rocket. She'll be reprinting classic minicomics series as minicomics (an ingenious idea) as well as doing new comics and anthologies. This Isn't Working is an anthology that includes several CCS folks in the mix, and it's exactly what the title suggests: autobio comics about relationships that didn't work out for one reason or another. The range of cartooning styles as well as experiences helps create a variety of stories. There are tales of woe, angry anecdotes and funny stories about crazy relationships. It's a short, tightly-edited anthology that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Cara Bean's pleasingly ornate tale of a rocky relationship she had with a man who was as miserable as she was ends with a tragic but not surprising result. Her self-caricature as a sort of walking potato was simultaneously endearing and self-deprecating. I've always admired Caitlin Plovnick's ability to use her limited skills as a draftsman to nonetheless create clear, simple and direct narratives. This story of a hideous recurring dream that turns from warm to horrible when an ex-boyfriend pops up is especially effective as she cleverly renders herself losing all definition after she wakes up from the dream. Chapman's spare and cartoony style has always grabbed my attention through the use of a thick, economical line surrounding key aspects of people and objects. Her story concerns her slight obsession with a long-ago boyfriend, wondering if he thinks of her the way she sometimes thinks of him.

Liz Prince's story of the hurt that remains long after the breakup with her boyfriend was surprisingly powerful. I thought her depiction of that relationship in Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? was lightweight and twee, but there's a level of thematic complexity at work in this story that goes beyond the simple drama of a break-up as she ties music into the narrative in an interesting way. Jen Vaughn's "Let's Go Out" is hilarious, depicting why cunnilingus after eating hot sauce is always a bad idea. As always, Vaughn is better at depicting clever visual solutions to compositional problems than in rendering actual figures, a factor that detracts a little from the story's punchline. Finally, Mari Naomi contributes another of her "Kiss and Tell" stories of people she's dated; this time, it was a rebound relationship after she broke up with her fiance'. The stark simplicity of her line, the frankness of her confessional story and sheer storytelling momentum she manages to conjure up out of minutia make this a strong closing act for an anthology that will hopefully have future volumes. Chapman clearly knows what she's doing as an editor and publisher.

NBM Spotlight: Yslaire/Carriere, Nix, De Crecy, Geary

2011-10-04T04:41:00.000-07:00

Let's run through a number of recent releases from NBM.

The Sky Over The Louvre, by Bernar Yslaire & Jean-Claude Carriere. This is the latest volume of NBM's series done in conjunction with the Louvre and French publisher Futuropolis. It's also the biggest and flashiest, with the script written by legendary French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and art by hugely popular Belgian cartoonist Bernar Yslaire. Carrier wrote most of the scripts for surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel as well as scripts for Milos Forman and Louis Malle, among others. This was his first comic, and what was surprising was how relatively spare the text was. That was partly illusory, as there are several text sections, but the creators found a way to emphasize image above all else. Yslaire is a scratchy and scribbly penciler whose line reminds
me of MAD's Mort Drucker, believe it or not. His characters have long, narrow faces, prominent and pointy noses, puckered-up lips and retain a lively naturalism even when their actions are cartoony. He wisely uses a highly muted palette so as to make the actual paintings depicted in this book really pop off the page.

That's a fitting treatment, considering that the book is about the earliest days of the Louvre right before Robespierre's Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Its main protagonists are the famous painter David (founder of the Louvre) and Robespierre himself. As a narrative, The Sky Over The Louvre is simple, as it follows the two friends as their relationship fractures in light of The Terror and Robespierre's obsession with David depicting the Supreme Being in a painting. The through-line of the narrative focuses on a mysterious young boy named Jules Stern, whose presence becomes the catalyst for the conflict between the book's protagonists.

Thematically, this book is complex. The precise relationship between Jules and David is unclear, though the homoeroticism surrounding the aesthetics of the Revolution is quite evident. The intersection between art and politics is another major theme, as David is happy to act as official portrait propagandist for the Revolution (painting portraits of martyrs and training
future generations of artists). Robespierre is portrayed as a somewhat sympathetic figure despite the paranoia of the Terror; he's an idealist given absolute power. Still, David is willing to along with this until Robespierre becomes obsessed with depicting the new Supreme Being, reintroducing the specter of religion back into the culture. Once the guillotine caught up with
Robespierre, it didn't take long for David to glom on to his true model for Supreme Being: the "handsome like antiquity" likeness of Napoleon.

The book is filled with people facing a vacuum of morality, as the Committee For Public safety's reliance on "reason" becomes just as capricious and merciless for the people of France as the old monarchy. As a result, it's easy for Committee members to attempt to justify their actions in the interest of rooting out traitors and protecting the Republic, a story that doesn't have to be presented as a history lesson for it to become instantly familiar to a modern reader. At the same time, David's willingness to sell out the revolution and Robespierre's absolute devotion to his principles (no matter how insane) muddies the waters as for whom the reader should feel sympathy. At just 66 pages, The Sky Over The Louvre moves along at an economical clip, quickly & efficiently setting up its protagonists and their conflicts. That efficiency allows for long looks at historical paintings, while the oversized album size provides a proper format for appreciating the sumptuous art.

Salvatore Volume I, by Nicolas De Crecy. This compendium of the first two translated volumes from De Crecy is slyly charming both in terms of its narrative and its aesthetic appeal. The story follows a dog mechanic named Salvatore who surreptitiously steals parts from his customers in order to build a strange vehicle to take him to his true love, half a world away. De Crecy uses an anthropomorphic style that's both cute and slightly disturbing. The character design is disturbing because De Crecy clearly finds it funnier to draw his characters closer to animal than human, and as a result his choices of pig, bull and cow lead to hilariously grotesque and bloated figures. The narrator of the story is frequently harshly judgmental, so much so that even the characters comment on the narrator from time to time when it explores and sometimes condemns their questionable moral decisions.

What I like best about this comic is the way De Crecy slips between whimsical flights of fancy and harsh naturalism. One of the main characters in the book is a myopic pig named Amondine. Her husband worked at a slaughterhouse until he was downsized--and the form that this downsizing took was his being turned into meat! It's one of many quietly grim gags in this book, like a piglet of Amondine's being captured and strapped to a cross by a group of goths before he's rescued by a teenage anthropomorphic cat. While there's a definite narrative to follow in this book, what makes it delightful is De Crecy's willingness to follow a tangent for a long time. There's an extended sequence where the half-blind Amondine drives her car off a cliff but doesn't realize she's in great peril as the car bounces on an airplane, soars off a ski lift, and crashes on a roof. This is one of many such sequences in the book, and that incidental character material winds up being the true meat of the book. The rich colors by Ruby & Walter mesh perfectly with De Crecy's scribbly line, complementing the relaxed energy of the pencils without overwhelming them.

The Lives of Sacco and Venzetti, by Rick Geary. This is the latest in Geary's "Treasury of XXth Century Murder" series, and each volume tends to have a different theme depending on the historical event he chooses to cover. Famous Players was about the ways in which the magic of Hollywood was truly founded on lies and illusions that in many ways poison the art that proceeds out of it. The Terrible Axe-Man Of New Orleans was about the ways in which fear can spin out of control, take on a life of its own, and wound the psyche of a city. Sacco & Vanzetti is the rare Geary book that's more about the trial than it is about the crime (though there's certainly a great deal of detail about that as well). As always, Geary editorializes as little as possible, but this case was considered worldwide to be a matter of red-scare blaming and a railroading of two innocent men.

Geary does acknowledge that there's at least the possibility that the gun that killed one of the victims of the crime could have belonged to Sacco (thanks to advanced ballistics techniques), but the fact that the judge was quoted as delighting in punishing the two Italian anarchists and the legal system made it impossible for any appeal to have a chance of success certainly demonstrates that the prosecution lacked anything near the sort of proof necessary to earn a conviction. The case was a simple matter of xenophobia and a fear of the anarchist movement driving the legal system and derailing justice, and there is an obvious resonance between this story and the current xenophobia in the US. As always, Geary's pencils are incredibly tight, as he's the master of hatching. The detail on suits alone makes this book a visual feast, but it's the way he brings people alive that's truly impressive. The facial expressions and body language of the men and women in court is what secretly tells the story; a sneer from the judge, a raised eyebrow from a lawyer tell much more than their actual words. I'm eager to see what he intends to tackle next.

Kinky & Cosy, by Nix. This translated collection of gags about marauding teenage sisters is billed as "shocking! disgusting!" as well as "darkly subversive". It's certainly mild in comparison to actual shock humor, and the gags themselves are more hit than miss. That said, there's a certain self-possessed weirdness about the whole enterprise. The hardback cover has cut-outs for the googly-eyes that pop out from underneath it. There are bizarre, entirely self-indulgent fumetti segments in the book featuring various men dressing up as Kinky, Cosy or their parents. There's an entire section devoted to "Brain Teasers": mazes, matching images, and assorted counting games featuring the strip's cast. Of course, they do things like throw anvils at the teacher, so it's not quite a typical activity page.

Nix's work reminds me a little of Joe Daly, only without the existential ruminations and level of detail in his art. The best way to read it is not to expect shock or killer gags, but instead to settle in and enjoy the strange rhythms of this book. As silly and absurd as this world is, it's clear that Nix has a great deal of genuine affection and enthusiasm for it. He seems to enjoy dropping in on these characters to see what odd thing they're up to with little concern as to either traditional comedic set-ups or lock-solid punchlines. Instead, we get strips about the mother's various forms of vibrator (including buying one from a roaming vibrator truck and finding a miniature alien space probe) as well as her falling in love with a recycling bin. Kinky & Cosy is a singularly odd entry in an increasingly crowded market of edgy humor books, one that's gentler in nature than one might think at first but is not distinctive for its actual jokes.

Pleasant Distraction: Frog & Owl

2011-10-02T03:49:00.000-07:00

Frog & Owl is a webcomic collection by the talented Molly Lawless. Lawless is best known for her baseball history strips that combine a nice, tight line with a wry take on baseball's less glamourous moments. Her upcoming book, Hit By Pitch, will go into detail about one of the sport's darkest hours. While not drawing men in ill-fitting uniforms holding bats, she lets off steam with her webcomic, which is entirely continuity-free. The titular characters are essentially a joke-delivery system: sometimes they're lovers, sometimes they work together, sometimes they're strangers and sometimes they're enemies. The strip is an excuse for Lawless to draw some funny-looking animals doing silly things while dropping bon mots.

Lawless works strictly in pencil, and the simplicity of her characters allows her to add all sorts of detail around them. There's one strip where Owl is wrapped up in a quilt that has a delicate checkerboard pattern. There's another strip where Lawless comments on the simplicity of her figures by drawing naturalistic versions of her characters who note that "something is amiss". Most of the strips don't rely on visuals to tell the joke; Lawless simply makes each strip nice to look at as a matter of course. In many respects, Frog & Owl is a throwback strip, something that might have appeared in the newspaper forty years ago in terms of its size and aesthetic qualities. Of course, by throwing out any sense of continuity, Lawless simply makes it about the gag every time, slapping a different story on these two blank slate characters in every strip. As far as the quality of the gags themselves, Lawless has a pretty good hit to miss ratio, with most of them being pleasant chuckles rather than laugh-out-loud guffaws. Frog and Owl is the epitome of pleasant if forgettable, though if no particular strip was especially memorable, I still wanted to read more of them.

Between States: Badaboom Twist

2011-09-30T04:23:00.000-07:00

David Libens, a fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies, is one of many cartoonists who has done a daily diary strip. What's interesting about his strip is that there wasn't necessarily an initial intent to even publish it; it had a more therapeutic purpose. What's also interesting is that while it's very much a quotidian diary strip featuring details from his daily life as a husband and father, there actually is an underlying narrative. That narrative concerns his future: whether to stay in Belgium or move to America, his wife's country and one to which he feels a connection. To date, he's published four minicomics collections of his strips, which can be found at his blog.

In general, I thought these comics were some of the best autobio stories I've read in a while. There's a raw honesty in them and a willingness to be real on every page, even when he goes back and forth between the details of his day at work or with his family and his own doubts. The underlying narrative is really part of a larger theme, which is the feeling of being caught betwixt and between. He's unsure of himself as an artist because of his day job. He's uneasy living in Belgium and feels like the other shoe could drop any day and his family split up. He's uneasy being alone and uneasy at times being with his family. He has a great affinity toward America (indeed, he talks about wanting to publish comics in English) even if he's uneasy about the thought of being away from his own family if he moved there. In sum, there's a wide swing between resentment and empathy for both Libens and his wife, as they're both in an intractable situation. There are also moments of joy and ease to go along with that tension, and one senses that his anxiety is played up in these strips as a way to blow off steam.

There is a ragged simplicity to Libens' line here, as his hair is depicted as a few simple, unconnected lines. That gives his self-caricature a slightly disheveled look, especially when he depicts himself as stubbly as well. Everything about the strip feels spontaneous and expressive, which is frankly the only way in which these kind of strips can really work. The result can look rough and the page composition can be wonky as a result; some pages are way too wordy and it's clear that he rushes through some panels in an effort to crank out a strip on a given day. The thing about these sort of strips is that it's not the impact of a single strip that's important, but rather the cumulative effect of these comics. The reader slips into the artist's stylistic skin, so to speak, and Libens makes it easy for a reader to adapt to his style and voice because it's clear that he's so comfortable in it. It's that ease with his own voice that makes it possible for Libens to get across how uncomfortable he is with all other aspects of talking about his life.

Some CCS Minis: Forsman, Barrett, Bohn, McFadzean, Vaughn

2011-09-28T04:16:00.000-07:00

The advent of SPX has once again brought a bounty of minicomics to review. Here's a quintet of minis from assorted students and alums of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

The End of the Fucking World #1, by Chuck Forsman. One of Forsman's specialties has become the depiction of losers, creeps and the generally alienated. This mini concerns an extreme example of such a person, a nameless teen who at a very young age has an awareness of being a psychopath. That manifests in his inability to laugh or feel, leading him to extreme behavior in an effort to generate some kind of emotion or sensation. The result is a lot of dead animals, two of his fingers mangled by a garbage disposal and contemplating the murder of someone who more or less pushed her way into being his girlfriend. The issue ends with him slugging his father and stealing his car. Forsman's line continues to grow simpler and more economical as he evolves as an artist. He still adds a lot of hatching and cross-hatching in the corners of his strips, an effect that rounds the tops of his images and contributes an air of gloom and dread. He also has a knack for depicting kids with long hair with just a few lines. This is an intriguing little comic and I'm eager to see just where Forsman will take this story.

Dental Damned!!, by Pat Barrett. This is the fourth issue of Barrett's one-man anthology series, Oak & Linden, done in a completely different format. This is a 7x3" comic (landscape, essentially) done entirely in color, and it looks like it may have been drawn on a computer. The color is more than a little garish as Barrett is trying to emulate animated features moreso than comic books. Another clue in that direction (other than the Looney Toons tribute on the inside front cover) is the way his characters move: in fits, spasms and jerks. The story concerns a Barrett stand-in character on his way to the dentist to fix a tooth that's been knocked out. Along the way, he spins fanciful reasons as to how the tooth got knocked out (fencing match, orgy, dance party) until the merciless dentist makes him tell the truth. What I liked about this story is that Barrett takes standard autobio tropes (a story about a medical problem) and spins it into an exaggerated series of gags. In terms of images, the panel where one sees a huge penis juxtaposed against Barrett's cute drawing style was especially funny, as was the naturalistically-drawn close-up of the rot & gore in his mouth. This is not Barrett's best comic, in part because it doesn't flatter his most significant skills as a draftsman, but it's an interesting experiment nonetheless.

After The Future, by Casey Bohn. Some artists come into CCS without a real style to call their own. That is not the case with Bohn, who uses a simple line predicated on chunky figures and the dominant use of black to emphasize backgrounds and deemphasize figures. His line has a somewhat creepy quality, as his figures resemble something like 1950s clip art or advertising art. It lends his comic a weird, artificial quality, as though it was an object that was found instead of drawn. That sense of disorientation is an apt match for this comic about an inventor alienated from his magnate father who transfers his consciousness into robot form. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic and makes the issue feel more like an origin story than a one-off, but the quirkiness of Bohn's style is enough of a draw to make this a worthwhile reading experienced.

Ghost Rabbit, by Dakota McFadzean. McFadzean is one of the most accomplished draftsmen I've seen from CCS, and it's clear that his storytelling instincts are also well-refined. Despite his obvious skill, there's a sense of restraint in his storytelling that elevates his work above its basic visual appeal. This story features the parallel narrative of a young girl growing up in a house where her mother struggles with her own mentally decaying mother along with an anthropomorphic rabbit haunted by the titular ghost rabbit. The lingering images of memory loom large in this story and they're elegantly portrayed by McFadzean, starting with the vellum cover featuring the ghost rabbit and an intact country house that transforms into a house ravaged by age when the page is turned. McFadzean implies that the anthropomorphic rabbit's narrative is a product of the girl's imagination as she processes the repeated phone conversations her mother has with her grandmother, until she actually sees a rabbit in the wild. Initially, that real-life meeting leads to a joyous fantasy sequence (featuring two pages of the characters dancing with each other excitedly) but the ghost lingers further when she understands that the rabbit is sick and soon dies. We see that small ghost hop after her when she comes inside after covering the dead rabbit with leaves, as the girl has acquired the same sort of ghost that she imagines her mother is burdened with. This is a simple, elegant and poetic comic by a highly promising young artist.

Heavy Flow, by Jen Vaughn. This is the third in a series of Vaughn's hilarious and frank "Menstruation Station" comics, this time focusing (in minute detail) on the mechanics of the menstrual cup and why it's a superior alternative to tampons and pads. Vaughn has always been ambitious and creative in her page design and panel composition, adding elements of diagrams, instructional manuals and decorative illustrations in an effort to create a narrative around her campaign for alternative menstrual cycle care. Vaughn also makes a number of interesting side points related to gender with a helping of wit, but she doesn't soften her rhetoric while doing so. For example, she refers to tampons and pads as "yet one more tax for being a woman" and includes things like birth control and ibuprofen but also adds "unicorn figures" and "creepy hair removal products" to the list, with an asterisk that notes "some items optional". What's disappointing about this mini is that while Vaughn has a definitive and powerful voice as a writer and designer, her line simply doesn't live up to the material. Vaughn's line is in a limbo state between naturalistic and cartoony, a state not uncommon for artists who are trying to draw something very specific but simply don't have the chops to draw it effectively. Part of Vaughn's problem is that she rarely varies her line weight (except when lettering). Another problem is that her attempts at hatching and cross-hatching seem rushed and sloppy. As a result, some images create distraction instead of imparting information and telling a story. Vaughn does have a nice knack for body language and gesture, and the pages that feature two characters interacting with each other are her most successful. I get the sense that Vaughn will simply improve over time, but I hope that she one day redraws these minis when she's ready to collect them.

A Dozen Thoughts On Love & Rockets: New Stories #4

2011-09-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

This isn't a formal review, per se, but instead a few gut-reaction thoughts on the remarkable new issue of Love & Rockets: New Stories (#4). I've never bothered to do this before in a review, but the nature of this issue demands that I note that there are spoilers below.

1. Gilbert's "King Vampire" is another in his line of Fritz-related grindhouse movie adaptations. It's also a brutal takedown of the current cultural obsession over vampires. Vampire fiction eroticizes the monsters at the core of their stories, equating bloodlust with simple lust and essentially glorifying rape fantasies. In one shockingly disgusting scene, the sexy vampire in the story squashes a guy's head against a wall in the most visceral manner possible so as to make it easy for his new prey to drink his blood, but also provide an object lesson. For a predator, its prey is little more than an object at hand. That scene bluntly drains all of the eroticism out of the story and rightly smashes the whole vampire erotica genre to bits.

2. Gilbert's "And Then Reality Kicks In" is a sober, complex and layered conversation between Fritz and an old boyfriend. Like a lot of things in this issue, this story has an air of finality to it, a capstone of sorts. I haven't figured out which old lover of Fritz's this is (I need to go back and reread), but there was something satisfying about seeing her in possession of hard-won wisdom.

3. Speaking of an air of finality, Jaime's follow-up to last issue's "Browntown" and "The Love Bunglers" is what pushes this issue into the stratosphere. I literally have no idea where he goes from here with his Locas characters.

4. It is cliche' to talk about one's favorite characters as though they really exist and feel like friends. It is certainly not a very sophisticated way to read a story. That said, if any cartoonist has created work that's earned this mark, it's Jaime. When Ray Dominguez was getting his head bashed in by Calvin (truly the most tragic character in Jaime's cast), my gut reaction was "No!" Ray is Jaime's Everyman character--a decent if slightly underachieving guy who never had the cool of someone like Speedy or Hopey (especially in his own eyes) and so always feels like an underdog in earning Maggie's affections.

5. The theme of the past two issues has been emotional steadfastness and patience. Characters are forced to put their cards on the table about their feelings. For some, like Ray, it was a move of maturity, of realizing what he wanted as a middle-aged man and that he had no more time to waste. For some, like Reno, it was trying to act on long-supressed crushes but not understanding the difference between fantasy and reality. For Vivian "the Frogmouth", it was an expose' of her essential vapidness, a lesson learned too late. For Maggie, it was a lesson learned almost too late that one must jump on opportunities when they arise, that putting aside one's own baggage is the key to moving on. Maggie could simply never get out of her own way. Calvin's story was one of devotion never being rewarded and becoming warped as a result. Intimacy was conflated with assault in his mind as he tried to "protect" his sister.

6. Those themes are tied up in "Return To Me", which is a sequel to both "Browntown" and "Wigwam Bam". The latter, in my opinion, was the high point of Jaime's work in Love & Rockets Volume I. The flashback stories in the past two issues have served the purpose of filling in a couple of crucial emotional blanks in Maggie's backstory. "Browntown" established how her parents' divorce cut her off emotionally from her family on a permanent basis, but also how her relationship to her best friend Letty started to fracture a bit. "Wigwam Bam" was Letty's story from Maggie's point of view, a crucial entry in that it revealed where Maggie was emotionally right before she met Hopey. Letty was of course killed in a car accident, but the heartbreaking "Return To Me" documents her friendship with Maggie from her point of view. Maggie always feared that Letty was too cool for her, but Letty never let Maggie out of her heart. This story was all the more tragic because Letty felt so awful for Maggie that her mother left her behind in Hoppers and was prepared to take her in and really nurture her. Instead, she was cruelly cut down, and Maggie never quite knew how her friend felt about her.

7. The last chapter of "The Love Bunglers" was a tour-de-force, a walk-off grand slam of a story that was thirty years in the making. I doubt there were any dry eyes on the part of long-time fans of the series while reading this, yet every single moment was completely earned organically. There was no easy sentiment on display, but rather thirty years' worth of hard-won lessons and building emotion. What was especially powerful about the last chapter is how slow and easy the pace of the prior chapters was. In retrospect, one can see how Jaime was building up to this in the earlier chapters (just as the flashback stories enhance and comment on the present-day story), but the scene where Calvin has a psychotic breakdown (after once again seeing the blue sun, a metaphor for the way Calvin sees real things that others don't and ignore) and thinks that Ray has done something bad to Maggie was heartbreaking. Ray was typical Ray in that scene--slightly exasperated, more than a little patient and trying to do the right thing--and got his head bashed in for his troubles.

8. Considering the tragic circumstances of Calvin and Ray's own hard-luck life, I honestly thought that's where the story was going to end. Jaime's narrative equivocation about Ray's fate didn't feel manipulative to me; instead, he effectively inserts us into Maggie's perspective while giving the reader enough extra information to make the scene where she's talking to the guy in the record shop about Ray all the more heartbreaking. Jaime also inserts a bit of humor when she visits a brain-damaged Ray at his parents' house when his mother notes that all he says is "Maggie", "fuck" and "shit". Jaime is a master of body language and gesture, and the panel where Maggie curls into a ball was devastating.

9. That set up the two-pages with a nine-panel grid on each. The Maggie page is something we've seen before with her, and this page took us from her time as a baby to now. Seeing that the next page not only did the same with Ray, but when I realized as a reader that each corresponding panel on Ray's page commented on Maggie (and in most of them, because they were eyeing one another), it was a stunning gut punch. This was Jaime at his finest, "sampling" old stories, telling a story without a true narrative and using his command of gesture to recapitulate a thirty-year story.

10. The final scene with Maggie (now a mechanic once again) taking Hopey's son back to her was pitch-perfect. There's hasn't been much interaction between the two characters in a number of years, yet Jaime still has a way of conveying an astonishing amount of meaning in a very short number of panels. As always, there is both ease and tension between the two women, even as they have their own very different lives. Hopey inviting Maggie in several times and Maggie demurring was a crucial narrative point, though that's not clear until we see Ray. In other words, Ray is now Maggie's top priority.

11. Finally, the last scene with Ray was simple, powerful, emotional--again, all of that feeling felt earned, with Maggie's saying "Of course I waited for you, I love you" succinctly summing up this complex, messy, beautiful relationship. That scene was also a connector to the opening sequence of Jaime's stories in this issue, as we meet a long-time couple and see them go about their daily routine; it's decidedly unsexy and is all about devotion. The man is Yax, Maggie's new business partner, but that relationship is a referent to Maggie and Ray growing old together.

12. Again, where does Jaime go from here? Does he continue to examine Maggie & Ray's relationship as they grow older? Does he turn his eye back to Hopey as she raises a son? Is Calvin's story over? Will we see more from Penny or Izzy? Or does he turn back to depicting youth as Angel goes off to college? Perhaps at this point Maggie will be more of a background character for a few years. Perhaps he'll start over with something completely different. Certainly, his "Locas" universe feels as finished as it ever will. Whatever he decides, Jaime certainly stuck the landing on his life's work to date.

15 Observations From SPX 2011

2011-09-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

A few thoughts regarding SPX 2011, the eleventh I have attended since 1997.

1. Like many, SPX was the first show of its kind that I ever attended, years ago. As such, I not only have a great deal of affection for it as a friendly and inclusive show, it's also easy for me to see certain patterns repeat, year after year.

2. For example, it's been de rigeur since 2003 or so to claim that the show "just isn't the same". Part of that is a natural cycling through of artists, as it's the energy of the show's youngest participants that frequently creates the show's particular strains of mythology as "cartoonist sleepaway camp".

3. The show's biggest change was the move from the Holiday Inn to the Marriott in 2006, which put every exhibitor in one one room and increased the overall number of exhibitors. That made many of the show's trends that much more obvious to all, in addition to a key sea change in comics: the rise in popularity of webcomics.

4. As I have noted several times before, by 2006 it was possible for fans in entirely different camps of comics to come to SPX and have completely different experiences of the show. Kate Beaton is of course the model for this kind of experience; she drew mobs to her table at past SPX's with either no works or print or a self-published collection of cartoons, a phenomenon that mystified those not in the webcomics world. Her long lines at her Drawn & Quarterly table this year were a symbolic mixing of the two camps, especially as more alt-cartoonists are taking to the web these days.

5. The real divide at SPX has always been that of indie mainstream vs alt-comics. SPX has also always been especially supportive of local artists, whatever their particular artistic inclination. As long as there's been an SPX, there have been cartoonists self-publishing their own fairly ordinary superhero/fantasy/horror/zombie/other genre comics, distinguishable from Marvel or DC only by a lesser level of professionalism and (occasionally) a personal stamp of originality. SPX is also a con where one can see an extreme level of entry-level amateurism, as its all-comers nature has always enabled its participants to attempt to get better in public. It isn't, and never has been, a show with a consistent definition of or desire to categorize great comics art. It's always let the crowd decide what they want, though there's no question that the more inclusive and slightly middlebrow nature of the show has always been a reflection of the steering committee's tastes.

6. Given that the show is a fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an organization that defends retailers and artists alike, I think that inclusiveness has always been an appropriate stance. There has always been ample room for art comics at SPX, as well as room to nurture minicomics makers who later exploded onto the larger scene, like Kevin Huizenga or Paul Hornschemeier. There have been years where that scene seems to shine a bit more brightly than most, but there were plenty of interesting art comics to be found at this year's show.

7. What is certainly true of this year's show is that it was exceptionally well-run. With an incredible run of national publicity leading up to the show, the staff and its volunteers weathered the single biggest day of attendance ever at SPX. Even at 1pm and 2pm, there was a long line of people just waiting to get tickets and get into the show. By that point, the aisles were already packed with people. What's remarkable is the way that one-time volunteers eventually step into leadership roles when executive members decide to step down. A word of thanks needs to be passed onto Karon Flage, the long-time executive director who stepped down after last year but continues to be a strong presence at the show. (The fact that she found my missing sketchbook is icing on the cake!) Greg McElhatton, Eden Miller and Caroline Small were other key personnel this year who performed tasks great and small. Of course, Bill Kartalopoulos did his typical great job putting together a programming track that emphasized art comics but still had plenty for a slightly more mainstream audience to find something of interest.

8. That said, the figure of Warren Bernard as the show's new executive director loomed large over the show. The retired busisnessman has spearheaded any number of initiatives that have enhanced SPX's legacy as a cultural institution, and has done so with remarkable vigor and clarity of purpose. SPX has always had the chance to be a comics festival more than just a simple swap meet, and getting the Library of Congress to preserve the show's art, Ignatz Award Nominees and a select group of minicomics (wisely curated by a small committee) is a fantastic first step. The program that donates graphic novels to local libraries is another smart move that will both help grow audiences as well as grow good will. These are legacy moves whose true impact may not be fully understood for a generation.

9. Bernard is a blunt, no-bullshit, clear-thinking leader. Upon surveying aisles that inhibited free movement for its patrons, Bernard quickly announced that the show would take over another ballroom and add 50% more floor space. He quickly noted that this would only mean adding something like 10-12 more tables (which will be no problem considering that their waiting list had over fifty people on it) for exhibitors, a few more tables for SPX itself and a lot more room for those walking the floor. He said that the committee would carefully study the new space to determine what the best floor plan set-up would be. Bernard also dropped the bomb that he got both Chris Ware and Dan Clowes to commit to next year's show, a whopper of an announcement given that neither had ever attended the show. I'm not sure either artist has been at the same show of any kind in quite some time. Bernard is a man with connections who isn't afraid to use them; his story about how he cinched the Library of Congress deal involved five years of volunteering at the institution as well as access to high-powered lawyers who helped maneuver through high-levels of bureaucracy was a dizzying one.

10. It certainly doesn't hurt that Bernard is a comics historian with real credentials, having just published a book about advertising art with Fantagraphics. He has as deep an understanding and appreciation for comics as art as anyone who has ever connected with SPX. Simply being able to give key guests of the show tours of the Library of Congress has to be a powerful inducement to attend. While it's clear that Bernard has refined tastes and will clearly promote the art-comics aspect of the show by getting the best guests and programming possible, I think he's not blind to the fact that the entry-level, community nature of the show is one of SPX's unique traits. Even the least professional of exhibitors is all about comics qua comics--not t-shirts, art objects or anything else.

11. That certainly played out in terms of the crowd. It skewed quite young, with dozens of teenagers and young 20somethings either eager to check out the scene or else trade their minicomics. The show is generally well-attended, but the show's own initiatives as well as a series of articles & interviews by Michael Cavna all had to play a part in generating interest. By the end of the show, many exhibitors had either sold out of their comics or were down to their dregs. This is during a soft economy, to boot.

12. Another interesting thing about the crowd, and this actually is a generational change: it was not only young, it was also at least half female. While this was always true of MOCCA, SPX used to be heavily skewed toward male fans. It certainly helps that something like 40% or more of the exhibitors were women and that much of the programming featured women and topics of interest to women. All of this was quite an organic process (it's the way the show has evolved), but I also get the sense that this is an important value for the show's organizers.

13. Regarding commerce, I spoke to a number of happy cartoonists who essentially swore off MOCCA and its $400+ tables. Given SPX's more reasonable $300 per table (a number I don't see rising), large table size, many amenities, friendly atmosphere, free-flowing booze on Ignatz night and (above all else) a crowd that was eager to spend money, I'm guessing most of the exhibitors will make an effort to return next year. Even given the expense of the hotel and travel, it seemed like many exhibitors were making money.

14. My own panel, "Stories of Cultural Identity", featuring Sarah Glidden, GB Tran, Marguerite Dabaie and Jessica Abel, was quite successful. The artists answered questions regarding identity in their works, how their comics are perceived in the community, the idea of insider vs outsider status and how their being American affected all aspects of their work. I look forward to seeing much of the rest of the programming on video.

15. As I noted elsewhere, the death of Dylan Williams cast a pall on the show on Sunday. People were in the mood to talk and reflect, and it was a day that reflected the community found at the show far more than simple commerce or revelry did.

A Big Batch From Silber Media

2011-09-14T04:26:00.000-07:00

Silber Media's Brian John Mitchell sent me a huge batch of his latest micro-mini comics. As always, these minis are 2x2" and range from 12 - 40 or so pages. They're almost entirely written by Mitchell and drawn by a number of collaborators, though Mitchell does do stick-figure drawings for some of these comics. Mitchell's minicomics publishing empire is one of the odder phenomena in comics today, and I always look forward to a new shipment. Given the size of this latest shipment, I'll do a lightning-round style evaluation of each, with just a sentence or two of commentary.

Poit!: WTF and Poit!: La Jetee, by BJM and Dave Sim. The common thread for all of these comics is a palpable yet restrained sense of desperation. These stick-figure experiments with Sim feature precisely the same art in both minis, with completely different dialogue (written by Mitchell) in each. In one, the protagonist pops in and out of horrible events as a time traveler. In another, he constantly dreams about killing his girlfriend. In both cases, suicide winds up being his solution.

Lost Kisses #21, by BJM. This has always been Mitchell's best series: a series of stick-figure drawings featuring dialogue with narrative captions that provide a funny counterpoint, although that humor is cynical and frequently pitch-black. This one also focuses on time travel, musing on how it might affect his life.

Built #1, by BJM & Joe Badon. This story about a robot with human emotions who strives to move beyond his station in life is about 90% filler, plodding on long after its premise was established.

xlk: Extreme Lost Kisses, by BJM & Nick Marino. Best way to describe this comic: if Rambo had been done as a stick-figure cartoon with an overdubbed narrator pontificating about his mission ala Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.

Ultimate Lost Kisses #12, by BJM & Jeremy Johnson. This story about a teenager who becomes pregnant and is determined to keep it feels a bit like a Dave Kiersh comic, minus compelling imagery.

XO #7, by BJM & Melissa Spence Gardner. This is the continuing story of an introspective assassin who muses about his life and his relationships. In this issue, he falls in love with a woman who should raise red flags, and winds up paying a price. This was a genuinely exciting comic, and Gardner's simple gray-scaled art is effective in giving the reader short sharp shocks on each page.

Small Art Series: American, Awake, Climb, Professor Horton, Why Birds Sing, miscellaneous, by BJM. All of these feature color photos of assorted textures, meant to mimic wood, fire (Professor Horton is about the original Human Torch), plumage, etc. These tiny comics are worth a glance, though not a lingering look, because it's less about aesthetics than concept.

Monthly #1, by BJM & Eric Shonborn and Star #1, by BJM & Kurt Dinse. Mitchell loves flipping seemingly mundance stories into supernatural thrillers, all while maintaining the initial dramatic/romantic thread. Monthly drops an early clue as to why its protagonist can't find the right girl to fall in love with and why this is so important, and then spills its reveal halfway through. It's a funny, effective bit of shock, aided by clear and stark art by Shonborn. Star's concept is similar, though it lets the cat out of the bag a little earlier and so starts to drag halfway through. There's also too much clutter on the page.

Vigilant #1, by BJM & PB Kain. This comic about vigilantes is both tedious to read and boring to look at. It's one of the rare total misfires from Mitchell.

Some Thoughts On Dylan Williams

2011-09-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

(photo by Neil Brideau, by way of Raighne Hogan)

Sunday at SPX 2011 was part convention, part therapy session for many of its participants as most everyone woke up having heard that Dylan Williams, the publisher of Sparkplug Comic Books, had died. There's a pretty remarkable outpouring of grief and moving remembrances of Williams happening on the web right now; both Tom Spurgeon and Brian Heater are attempting to capture all of these links. What I hope to do here is not discuss his influence as a publisher or work out his importance as a historical figure in comics. I will be spending ample time in the future on this topic and those results will appear elsewhere, but it's important to at least note that one of the keys to his legacy is indeed the few dozen excellent, idiosyncratic and poetic works of comics published under Sparkplug's blanket. Instead, I want to work out some personal thoughts and ideas about Dylan.

I first met him at SPX 2002. That show had been long-awaited, as the 2001 iteration was canceled thanks to 9/11. As a result, that show was absolutely stacked with talent: the Hernandez Brothers, James Sturm, Ivan Brunetti, Jason (in one of his first US appearances), Charles Burns, Phoebe Gloeckner and many more. Jeff Mason's Alternative Comics was at its height, with the first collection of Gabrielle Bell's work and the Rosetta anthology. Still, I noted at the time that the fledgling Sparkplug Comic Books "may have had the most exciting books at the show", which included Jason Shiga's Fleep and Hello, World, and the excellent Orchid anthology (which I later tabbed as one of the best of the decade). T. Edward Bak and Ben Catmull were also at his table, with Catmull selling his Xeric-winning Paper Theater.

That's back when I occasionally wrote for Savant, attempting to inject some alt-comics flavor into what was mostly a Vertigo-inspired publication. Dylan quickly took notice when I started writing for sequart.com and started sending me everything he was publishing. That's when I learned that he, like me, had remarkably catholic tastes. He loved a lot of different things that can be called comics and was unambiguous and effusive in his affection for everything from golden age comics to select silver age to undergrounds to humor to autobio to burgeoning forms like comics-as-poetry and immersive comics, two styles that he championed far more than any other publisher.

We always shared a warm and cordial relationship, and I felt we understood each other well. He was one of the first publishers to take me seriously as a critic, and saw how seriously I take this endeavor. I only got to see him at shows, and I have great memories of collaborating on how to shape a publishers' panel at SPX 2008. We would write each other notes about things the other had written, which was all too rarely in Dylan's case. In some respects, Dylan was a modern-day Bill Blackbeard. He genuinely loved comics, not as an obsessive/collecting/fetishizing hobby, but as beautiful objects with meaning that are unjustly discarded by the wider culture. More to the point, Dylan subsumed both his career as a cartoonist (where he had been quite active for more than a decade) and a historian (he should have been in a position to have written several books) in order to publish, encourage and nurture the works of other cartoonists. This was not perhaps the most glamorous of choices, but it not only wound up having the greatest benefit for comics (much like Blackbeard's editing so many anthologies changed the lives of readers forever), it was the right use of his skill set.

Dylan was a good cartoonist but not yet a great one; he may well have reached that level, but it was clear that it was something that didn't come easily to him. I think the same may have been true as a writer; I got the sense that he didn't trust his own voice sometimes. Simply put, he didn't enjoy self-aggrandizement or much personal attention in general. On the other hand, he was a phenomenal publisher. His instincts were unerring. He nurtured talent like no one else. He would see things in artists, very early in their career, that they themselves could not yet perceive. This is not to say that he was disingenuously kind; he only accepted work that met his demanding standard, yet always encouraged those he rejected in very specific ways on how to get better.

I think the key to understanding Dylan Williams is that he always thought as a cartoonist, first and foremost. And as a cartoonist, he was an outsider. Publishers rarely touched his work. As a publisher, he was an outsider. While no alt-comics publisher is really out to make money, Dylan brought a scrupulously fair and ethical approach to publishing inspired by punk icon Ian MacKaye. That business model was a small, self-sustaining approach driven not by maximum profits but by a realistic publication schedule, reasonable prices and fair practices for artists, all in the support of work he believed in completely. Dylan felt uncomfortable when artists and editors talked more about book deals and money grabs than they did about the actual comics themselves. I'm not sure he felt comfortable thinking of himself in the same company as Gary Groth or Chris Oliveros, publishers who obviously put out books they believe in, but are also businessmen who have a bottom line and who can only afford to finance a few big losers. Those two are also beholden in some respects to Diamond, which wound up putting the kibosh on a number of their low-selling series. Dylan steadfastly avoided dealing with Diamond and found a way to make it work on a small scale, no doubt at the cost of possibly thousands of dollars.

Dylan may have been an outsider, but he was not an iconoclast. From the start of the career with the Puppy Toss minicomics cooperative, he was a networker. He networked not to move up in the world of comics, but to bring people together. In much the same way disparate artists found themselves part of a community in the 60s with the underground movement and in the 80s with the Newave movement, Dylan helped foster that same sense of purpose and encouragement to another generation in the 90s. Sparkplug was the reification of that ideal, one made at around the same time he was originally diagnosed with cancer. I don't think this was a coincidence.

Dylan thought himself an outsider, and the biggest tragedy of this viewpoint is that he did not understand until it was almost too late just where he stood in the eyes (and hearts) of others in the comics world. As a close friend of his told me, he didn't think of himself as a beloved or inspiring figure to twenty years' worth of cartoonists. He thought of himself as someone getting the job done, as doing the best he possibly he could by the art form & the artists that he loved so much and that had given him so much inspiration (or as he once told me, "Just do your best, always."). In the last few weeks, when there was such a bountiful outpouring of support, love and money after his plight became publicly known, he finally understood, in no uncertain terms, just how everyone felt about him. Fans and friends fell over themselves to buy books. Critics rushed to recommend books. Peers started up an art auction for him, one that is still ongoing and whose need has not passed, given that more bills will need to be paid. Dylan felt that love, which makes it all the more shattering that he died in such a sudden manner.

His death certainly leaves a void in the lives of his family and friends. Clearly, the uncertain status of Sparkplug will be something to consider at a later time, after the mourning is over. There aren't many like him in comics today. That said, the narratives springing up about him and his impact reveal him to be a huge, nurturing tree whose branches spread far and resulted in sprouting blossoms across the world. He provided a model for how to think about comics, how to act with integrity as a businessman and how to treat others as a publisher, and this is his ultimate legacy: he upheld fairness in the arts field with the history of the most inhumane, unfair practices. It's now up to those he inspired to carry forward his example.

The Strange World of Max Mose

2011-09-12T04:28:00.000-07:00

Max Mose is unusual for a graduate of the Center For Cartoon Studies in that his work is quirkier and darker than most of his fellow alums, yet still sits squarely in the genre camp. The closest comparison I can make is it's a bit like alum Dennis St. John but also a lot like the sort of thing that Matthew Thurber does, only not as polished. Beyond the brushy and scratchy nature of his line and the air of gloom & dread he applies to the page's atmosphere with his use of grey, Mose's dialogue is deliberately ornate in an almost stilted manner. The dialogue is anti-naturalistic and even bombastic at times, as characters speak in a patois that seems to belong to a bygone era. He's crazily ambitious, with ideas, jokes, weird asides and other strangeness just spilling off the page. There's going to be a seasoning period for him where he refines his technique and ideas (both are a little on the sloppy side), learning how to stay loose while staying in control, but he's an artist whose next comic will be an exciting event.

Tenebrous feels like an early attempt; it's an 8 page mini at roughly 8.5 x 11". There's a lot of interesting imagery and weird ideas to be found in this literally-titled comic: a hall filled with columns wherein a king looks away from an idol painted red; a toy chest that opens to reveal a scene being performed for children; and an entity trapped by "links and waves". In order to work, the comic demanded a level of precision and balance that just wasn't there; several figures are drawn awkwardly in terms of anatomy and how they relate to others in space, for example. This comic was interesting as a visual exercise, but not much else.

On the other hand, (Agent of the) Counter-Revolution plays with genre conventions and dream-logic comics, making interesting connections between the two. This was the most Thurberesque of his comics, following a mad scientist in a jungle, his greatest creation (a sort of robot Frankenstein monster) and an immortal space goddess in their various quests. There's an actual narrative to be found here, crazy as it is, but Mose is never afraid to stop on a dime and twist around the reader's understanding of reality as the focus unexpectedly shifts from character to character. The design of the comic is interesting, with a cover dominated by lurid pinks and greens and a strange shape (6 x 8", printed landscape). The dialogue is so deliberately weird that it almost feels like a lost Fletcher Hanks comic; consider lines like "Now look at that thing like it's the ugly truth on a chalky ball of dung" and "Reassuringly, the sound coming from this hollow and the whir of my atomic heart a very similar" give one a flavor of how the entire story reads.

All Aboard is the longest of the three minis, a 50-page maritime horror extravaganza that goes over the top ten pages into the story and then continues to pile on from there. In terms of concept, story and tone, Mose crafted a story that is part period-piece romance drama, part horror story, part monster story and a sly parody of all three. Mose doesn't quite pull it off in terms of visuals; his line is frequently wobbly in a way that's distracting. He vacillates between too much detail and too little; backgrounds drop in and out of panels with no warning. There's an occasional awkwardness in the way his characters pose, creating stiffness where there should be fluidity.

That said, there are some amazing images in this book. The close-ups on various characters' faces are a constant source of amusement, thanks in part to the strange angles Mose employs. The way the eyes bug out are especially interesting to look at, and they remind me both of St. John's work as well as Lauren Weinstein's drawings. Of course, the real gems are the drawings of various sea creatures storming a yacht, intent on murdering everyone therein. It's not enough for flying fish to bite crew members; an octopus slithers down a hall and shoots a man with a gun it's pried away from him. A monstrous creature in a kitchen sink slices open a man's skull and sucks his brain out, shouting "The ocean of the soul is where I MARAUD". A giant octopus drags a helicopter underwater. All the while, the family drama plays out, revolving around the daughter of the heir of an oil corporation wanting to marry a business rival.

One gets the sense that All Aboard was produced with some deadline pressure involved, given that it was likely a comic he was doing as an end-of-semester project at CCS. This accounts for some of the sloppiness as well as some of the shortcuts he takes. When I speak of sloppiness, I don't mean that Mose should try to use a clear line or "draw prettier" for lack of a better phrase. Instead, he needs to make every line feel like it's in the right place. Thurber and Weinstein draw using a deliberately grotesque style, but their control over their lines makes it work for them. Mose seems like he's bursting with ideas and simply needs to corral his imagination and be a little more patient in how he depicts it. I am eager to see what he will do with his next long-form work.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2011; High-Low @SPX

2011-09-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

I will be at SPX 2011 this year. I'll be hosting a panel on 9/10 at 3:30 in the Brookside Conference Room on "Stories Of Cultural Identity". I'll quote the blurb from the website: "America’s own culture wars are only part of a global struggle with identity, as nations the world over attempt to address the challenges of assimilating multiple cultures within a stable society. Moderator Rob Clough will talk to Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Marguerite Dabaie (The Hookah Girl), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) and G. B. Tran (Vietnamerica) about comics that deal with issues of cultural identity." I'm looking forward to it.

As always, I'm happy to review whatever comics cartoonists choose to give me.

Here are ten young artists to seek out at SPX, on the basis of their potential and/or significant debuts at the show. A number of them are up for Ignatz awards. In alphabetical order:

1. Darryl Ayo. Ayo is an Ignatz nominee for Promising New Talent and is someone who has been steeped in comics and comics culture for a long time, even for a cartoonist as young as he. He's become a sharp observer of social mores as well as a mark-maker whose style has begun to coalesce.

2. Pat Barrett. This graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies is one of its best draftsmen and stylists. His Oak & Linden minicomics are well-crafted one-man anthologies, and the actual anthologies he's been a part of (Nymphonomena and Tag Team in particular) are rather good.

3. Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie is on my panel and has proven to be an interesting young voice with her Hookah Girl comics, which are autobiographical stories about growing up as a Palestinian-American. Dabaie is a fine draftsman with an eye for intricate detail.

4. Mike Dawson. Dawson is one of the more established cartoonists on this list, but his new book Troop 142 debuts at the show and it's his strongest work to date. He'll also be hosting a panel on his Ink Panthers co-host (on ten years since the publication of his first major work, Box Office Poison) that will likely be hilarious. Look for an extensive interview with him (by me) at tcj.com very soon.

5. Lisa Hanawalt. She's one of the top humorists in comics, full stop. I don't know if she'll have anything new, but now is your chance to pick up both issues of her awesomely gross and hilarious series I Want You.

6. Melissa Mendes. This CCS grad has a bright future ahead of her and will get a bit of spotlight with the release of her collected Freddy stories. Mendes' scratchy line and ear for children's dialogue make her comics a wistful pleasure.

7. L.Nichols. Nichols is a talented artist still restlessly searching for her ideal style. Her Jumbly Junkery one-woman anthology comics feature an assortment of diary strips, longer autobio stories, fiction, comics-as-poetry and other experiments. Like the other young cartoonists on this list, she has a relentless work ethic and it shows in her improvement.

8. Laura Terry. Terry's up for an Outstanding Minicomic Ignatz award for Morning Song, a comic I greatly enjoyed. Terry's work has a lyrical quality that complements her interest in formal experimentation quite snugly.

9. Matthew Thurber. Thurber is the genius behind the 1-800-MICE series, which is now done and will debut in its collected form from PictureBox. He'll be on a panel at 1pm on Saturday titled "Drawing The Grotesque".

10. Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is another hard-working cartoonist who's gotten better thanks to his willingness to publish everywhere possible. His recent mini The Death of Elijah Lovejoy will likely be one of my top 25 minis of the year. He has a book coming out with Fantagraphics next year, but until then I'd buy up copies of his one-man anthology comic book Blammo.

Small Press Anthologies: Three #2, Candy Or Medicine, The Sorry Entertainer

2011-09-07T03:33:00.000-07:00

Let's take a look at three anthologies of various shapes and sizes:

Three #2, edited by Rob Kirby. Nothing in this issue of the queer-themed anthology of Three matches Eric Orner's story from the first issue, which earned an Ignatz nomination. That said, there's a certain sweetness and vulnerability to be found in each of the three stories in this issue. "Dragon", written by Sina Evil and drawn by Jon Macy, is the least compelling of the three. It's about a young man who meets a cartoonist he admires and feels close to on the basis of his familiarity with his material. They have a romantic encounter during which the young man is coerced into doing things that made him somewhat uncomfortable, yet are rationalized away because of the connection he imagines between them. The "dragon" metaphor (and insertion into the story), however, is a painfully obvious metaphor, especially when something dramatic happens. It's annoyingly "cinematic", adding little to a story that's already a bit bland to look at.

Things pick up with "Help Wanted", a jam between Jennifer Camper and Michael Fahy. This is a delightful little comedy of misunderstandings with a distinct romance comic flair. What's surprising is that even though Fahy and Camper alternate panel tiers, there's a remarkable sense of continuity in terms of both story and art between the two. This is quite unusual for a jam comic, which usually tend to be huge messes. I don't know if the two improvised from tier to tier or if they wrote it beforehand, but the smooth result speaks for itself. I like the way that Camper and Fahy play up the romance comic tropes, down to lines like "Happy, darling?" being followed by "Oh yes! A thousand times yes!" coming after a man's FTM transexual boyfriend reveals that he's pregnant and once had a fling with his sister.
The best of the three stories is "Nothin' But Trouble", a collaboration between Craig Bostick & David Kelly. It's a story of a closeted country-western singer who picks up a prostitute after a gig but falls in love with him. There's a clever narrative trick where the story is told first by the singer (Jimmy, drawn by Bostick) and the prostitute (Butch, drawn by Kelly), alternating every couple of pages. The trick comes in terms of coloring: the red-toned pages belong to Jimmy and the green-toned pages belong to Butch, allowing the cartoonists to make whip-crack transitions with a minimum of narrative disruption. Bostick has always had an appealingly clear line, and the cartoony quality of his line is a nice counterpoint to the low-key melodrama of this story. There's no easy happy ending to be found to this story, yet both characters wind up having a surprising and positive effect on the other. It's a pitch-perfect slice of life story, with the two artists meshing remarkably well despite portraying two different but complementary narratives.

Candy Or Medicine: The Compleat First Year, and Candy Or Medicine #14 & #15, edited by Josh Blair. Blair decided to reprint the first four issues of his all-comers minicomics anthology which has a lower hit-to-miss ratio than virtually any other anthology, yet always yields some gems. As Blair notes in his introduction, this is a deliberate strategy. He's less an editor than an "OE", to use APAzine parlance. That is, he serves to collected and publish material sent to him, with the money he earns from sales (at just a dollar an issue, it can't be much) to support collating and copying each issue. His hope is that every story will appeal to at least some readers, even if they aren't necessarily the stories that he likes most. From the very beginning, Candy or Medicine attracted people who could barely draw or conceive of a coherent narrative as well as great cartoonists with no other print outlets. Brad W Foster (a Newave era stalwart) and Matt Feazell (the DaVinci of stick-figure minicomics) make early appearances with drawings instead of comics. The strip has also drawn an unusual number of international cartoonists eager for any kind of exposure to American artists, like Greek artist Kostis Tzortzakasis and Briton Kel Winser.

The most recent volumes (#14 and #15, sold as a two-pack for two dollars) show that the anthology is both much the same but has also started to attract a better quality of cartoonist. #14 is a particularly strong issue, with a strange and beautifully drawn story about how the mold in a kitchen spawned a new ecosystem and saved a marriage as its centerpiece. Emi Gennis contributed one of her "Wikipedia List of Unusual Deaths" comics, this time about an old man who was exercised to death by his wife, who happened to be a MTF transsexual and who also happened to be the child of old family friends thirty years his junior. Gennis' line just gets sharper and sharper, matching her wit as well. Lauren Barnett's absurd scribble is typically funny, especially in the way it makes fun of her own limited draftsmanship. Issue #15 doesn't feature any stand-out strips but is still interesting for publishing short comics from Lithuania and Guatemala. I love that Blair is so committed to this anthology, giving cartoonists the opportunity to get better in public.

The Sorry Entertainer, edited by Simon Moreton & Nick Soucek. This is a cheap newsprint anthology from the UK that includes contributors from Ireland, the US and Argentina, based around the theme of performing and performers. The results are a mixed bag, as some of the artists don't really rise to the occasion of using the space in an interesting manner. On the other hand, there's plenty to like here from a number of artists who have been making some noise in the UK and US scenes the past couple of years. Moreton's own strip follows a schoolboy persecuted by his peers who slips into fantastic reveries, acting as a sort of prologue for the kinds of stories that follow.

The tone of the anthology slips from light-hearted to the contemplative. Paddy Lynch, for example, submits a wispily-drawn story about a man going to a park musing about how difficult it is us for to live in and enjoy small moments while listening to a guitar player, only to have a policeman come by and shoo the guitarist away. Jason Martin's adaptation of Mike Watt's tour diary is hilarious, with his rough style a perfect match for Watt's whole demeanor. Another example of that swing is David Z. Greene's full-page wrestling strip that winds up with a silly (if bloody) punchline. Greene's one of the few artists in the whole broadsheet who really makes use of the space, filling up the page with big images that go a long way in selling his gag. Rol Hirst and Andrew Cheverton's "Face For Radio", on the other hand features an ex-DJ with a new gig: introducing records at a retirement home.

The ubiquitous Noah Van Sciver contributes a story about a four-eyed man shunned by society who joins a traveling freak show, grows embittered and kills his audience and the circus. Van Sciver crams the story into fifteen panels, yet nothing feels cramped and his drawings carry the story. The bitterness of performing is ground that's covered by Richard Worth & Jordan Collver as well as Chris Fairless. The former story is a detailed character portrait about a magician who first waxes nostalgic about his career, and then when the page is flipped, complains bitterly about it. Its outer border is that of a playing card, and his story is supported by a lightly penciled series of figures in the background. It's a clever bit of cartooning. Fairless' story is about a young immigrant who performs in a park by speaking truth to power until he gets busted, and then simply performs as a statue. Fairless uses shadow and light contrasts to tell his story, and the modulation of these tones is what gives the story its emotional power.

Other highlights include a typically goofy strip by Lauren Barnett about a sad clown who performs for Jesus, a funny strip about a comedian with a particularly lowest common denominator for a gimmick by Sam Spina, Peter Batchelor's story about a psychic with a horrible secret, Soucek's account of a story about a rock band who got the greatest gig of their lives under dubious circumstances, and of course an epic bit of full-page lunacy from the inimitable Rob Jackson. His account of an entertainer who recalls his life's story is full of hilarious non sequiturs, with his typically rough style somehow accentuating the effect of his silliness. While there were no true duds in the anthology, none of the rest really registered after an initial reading. That said, this broadsheet was an interesting alternative to the typical minicomics anthology, allowing artists the opportunity to go big with a theme vague enough to allow them to tell the sort of story they wanted.

A Couple of Notable Fundraising Sales

2011-09-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

The great Skip Williamson lost his home in the Vermont floods recently. He's suggesting that readers who might be interested in helping should buying a copy of his autobiography. I consider Williamson to be one of the greatest of the underground comics artists, up there in the same company as Crumb and Justin Green. As a stylist, he has no peer, with his cartoony and psychedelic drawings having influenced dozens of other cartoonists and animators. He's been both political (with his own work and illustrating stuff like Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book) and earthy (working in porn for years). Please consider helping him in his time of need.

Artist, critic, raconteur and all-around great guy Frank Santoro has moved from Pittsburgh to New Mexico and needs to raise funds to support himself so he can draw his next comic. Rather than go to Kickstarter, he's decided to sell off his collection of weird comics. Anyone who's gone through his curated back issue boxes at a show will know he always sells some gems. In addition to selling comics (and this time around, it's weird examples from the 80s black & white explosion), he's also selling a sketch he's made of that comic's cover. Fans of Santoro and weird comics should check it out.

Graphic Classics: Poe and Christmas

2011-09-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

Let's take a look at some recent volumes from the Graphic Classics line.

Edgar Allan Poe is the fourth, expanded edition of the very first volume from Graphic Classics. The results are a mixed bag, due in part to the difficulty in translating the atmosphere of dread and madness essential to Poe's work into comics form. One example is Rick Geary's adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart", one of Poe's most intense, gripping stories. While Geary's rendering is spot-on and suitably creepy, the short adaptation lacks the same impact of the short story, in part because this abbreviated version doesn't have the same tense, crazy momentum of the short story. The story puts the reader in the grip of the narrator's madness, whereas the reader is merely an observer in the comic. On the other hand, the straightforward rendering by David Hontiveros & Carlo Vergara of "The Pit and the Pendulum" makes the story clearer, in part because it's less about the mental status of its protagonist than it is about a particular environment. There story fairly cries out for a visual component.

Art by Matt Howarth

The other problem with this volume is that a number of Poe's stories have a certain sameness to them, differentiated only by length and tone. A number of his characters wind up in the grip of madness, frequently precipitated by bouts of alcoholism ("William Wilson", "The Black Cat"). Two stories feature people being bricked behind a wall, be it alive or dead ("The Black Cat", "A Cask of Amontillado"). "The Tell-Tale Heart" famously features the titular body part driving the narrator mad after he commits murder. Two stories concern premature burial, with "The Fall of the House of Usher" the more elaborate of the two. That story was adapted by Matt Howarth (of Those Annoying Post Bros fame) and he brought his trademark manic energy to it, with lots of hatching and cross-hatching in play to emphasize the dread the title house invokes. The other such story, "The Premature Burial", had pleasingly neurotic-looking art by Joe Ollmann, best known now for his Drawn & Quarterly work. Milton Knight's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" was actually one of the more successful adaptations in the book, partly because it didn't try to match Poe's tone of dread and instead went to a more broadly humorous interpretation of a boastful bet gone horribly wrong.

If the book of Poe adaptations was uneven, the Christmas Classics book was remarkable in its consistency. What's impressive is that this volume provided a wider range of tones and storytelling styles than the Poe book did, even if the subject would seem to be far more restrictive. Pomplun was aided by once again publishing a full-color volume, which has helped the most recent volumes in the Graphic Classics series really pop. He also did a nice job cherry-picking a couple of traditional Christmas pieces (like A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and A Visit From St. Nicholas by Clement Moore) with more obscure pieces by famous authors like Willa Cather, O. Henry, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He also gave the artists some room to let their stories breathe, with page counts ranging from 8 to 46.

The Dickens adaptation, by Alex Burrows and Micah Farritor, was a fairly straightforward,
painted version of the familiar story. The story retained more of the flavor of the original Dickens story than most adaptations tend to. The Rich Rainey/Hunt Emerson adaptation of Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" was an absolute delight, thanks to the great Emerson's cartoony, angular features. Sherlock Holmes stories do quite well as comics, thanks to their emphasis on plot and action, but Emerson added a level of visual wit that made this especially memorable. The O.Henry story's eventual plot twist was more restrained than usual for his stories, and Cynthia Martin's naturalistic style was well-suited for it. Willa Cather's crazy story about the White Bear who protects Santa's reindeer and the vicious Werewolf Dog who menaced them was heightened by the occasionally lurid colors of Evert Geradts, striking an interesting balance between comics and storybook graphics.

Art by Cynthia Martin

Fitzgerald's "A Luckless Santa Claus" was written when he was just sixteen years old and displays a wit and sophistication that was far beyond his years. Simon Gane was up to the task of drawing a snowy New York City near the turn of the 20th century, and the result is a treat for fans of Fitzgerald who may not be familiar with this story. Finally, Pomplun unearthed a fascinating story by an obscure 19th century author named Fitz-James O'Brien that was a sort of proto-fantasy/conspiracy story about a group of villains plotting to kill all the Christian children in a city with toys animated by evil spirits. O'Brien lacked the sophistication and subtlety of great authors like Cather or Fitzgerald, but his pulp storytelling instincts were quite sharp and added a wicked edge to a collection of stories about Christmas. Pomplun is really on a roll with his most recent volumes and is getting the most out of adapting these stories as true comics, rather than just illustrated text.

Minis From Across The USA

2011-09-02T04:09:00.000-07:00

Most of the minis I receive tend to come from comics strongholds like Brooklyn and Portland. Of late, I've received minis from some unlikely sources. Here's a quick survey.

Foie Gras #1 & 3, by Edie Fake. Fake is the "minicomics sommelier" of the excellent Quimby's in Chicago, a city with a traditionally vibrant comics scene that is now spawning a younger generation of cartoonists. Fake's Foie Gras minis feature art appropriated from the old Joy of Cooking books, focusing in on desire and transformation (the twin subjects Fake usually tends to be interested in). Fake adds other images to the clear-line drawings of food cutting, preparation and assemblages while adding commentary that is frequently hilarious. In Fake's sexually charged fantasy comic Gaylord Phoenix, the penises of his characters are depicted as tubes--the sort of spiraling tubes that one sees folded and handled in The Joy of Cooking. So there's a superficial level of humor to be found here (like when a fist is thrust into a puckering hole in a pie), but there's also tenderness to be found in the commentary, as well as a commentary on how and why we adorn ourselves and what this means. (That's especially true of #3, which contains a number of highly elaborate food preparations with commentary hinting at why we play dress-up.) Of course, Fake turns these minis into beautiful little art objects, with silkscreened and brightly colored covers. These comics are an interesting take on comics-as-poetry.

The Dudes, by Alex Schubert. Schubert is from Kansas City, MO, and these three stories mix slacker lowlifes, a biographical comic about two weird brothers, and a set of gags about "famous last words." The title story is the most interesting one in this short comic, following a group of guys who hang around in parking lots to pass the time, with one claiming to be in a gang called "The Dudes", allowing him carte blanche in their narrow world. There's a relaxed, almost benign sleaziness at work in this short story, aided by Schubert's simple character design. His "famous last words" strip takes actual last statements from various historical figures (the "uh-oh" quote from space shuttle Challenger captain Michael Smith was especially nasty) and piles them up, juxtaposing the funny, the poignant and the tragic. Overall, this feels like an old-fashioned kind of mini with mild ambitions. It's a dumping ground for ideas, scenarios and relaxed drawings, and Schubert makes the aimless, vaguely dangerous world of his slackers sleazily appealing. Schubert would fit comfortably in an anthology like Hotwire, and I hope to see more of his comics.
Sequential Vacation #1, by Sar Shahar. Shahar is from Los Angeles. This silent comic was a compelling read and the artist shows a great deal of promise. The comic centers around repetition and grids, as it follows a window cashier at a fast-food restaurant through his life. The book starts with nine straight panels of the world outside his window: different faces from different cars who all want the same thing. We then follow the character to a club, where he waits in line (lines and waiting are also repeating motifs in the comic) to get in, but is slump-shouldered and miserable until a young woman wearing huge sunglasses takes him by the hand and they wind up sleeping together. For him, it's a transformative experience. For her, it's another day, a fact hammered home when she drives through his line at the fast-food joint. She's not just another face in the window for him, but she very much views him as an "object-at-hand", a person who does a job. There's evidence that him being a fast-food worker turns her off, given that she seems to lead an idly rich life (going to a matinee of the hilarious named movie "Motorcycle Vs Helicopter II" while he's working, perhaps breaking a date they had set up earlier to see the film at night). When he meets a new girl who happens to start working at his story who looks a bit like her, it all seems like fate will break his way--until she tragically is killed and he has to clean up the mess. (That bit of commentary on the dehumanization of minimum wage workers was especially affecting.) He winds up with another lookalike in the end, but it's unclear what will come of it. Unlike the other comics in this survey, this story feels closely tied to the locale of the author. The city feels like LA, with its car culture, emphasis on grids and night life. The repeating visual motifs are clever and striking, and the stark use of black & white reminds me a bit of what Robert Sergel does in Eschew. Shahar is not as clean a draftsman as Sergel, especially in terms of character design, but the page composition shows an artist who clearly thinks a lot about images and how they carry a narrative. I'm eager to see Shahar's next comic.

Brain Dead Phylum #1 & #2, by Kyle Nolan. Nolan is from Davenport FL, which is near Orlando. It's obvious, however, that he's heavily inspired by Fort Thunder-era comics, bringing a slightly more jokey version of the Brian Ralph/Mat Brinkman/Brian Chippendale aesthetic to his minis, the sort of thing that Sam Gaskin does. The backgrounds are dense in the way they create a solid environment, with every brick and stone drawn in detail. Nolan's not nearly in their class in terms of his draftsmanship, so some of the pages look a bit wonky in terms of their rendering, distracting a bit from the overall visual effect. Fortunately, this comic is played strictly for laughs, so the occasional slapdash drawing is ameliorated by the gags at hand. The comic follows a couple of robots out in "The Sludge Pit" who desperately need some coffee and go on a quest to get it. Their dialogue is amusing and contains random influences to pop culture (some of it outdated), like one robot being named Parker Lewis and another asking what Survivorman would do. Their spaceships are oddly named after brands of cheap beer. The second issue brings them to "Salt City", wherein they encounter a not-exactly-subtle parody of Mormons awaiting their arrival. What I like most about these comics are the shapes of the protagonist robots; their character design compels the reader to look at them move across the page, thanks to their appealing boxiness. I get the sense that Nolan is throwing every idea he has against the wall to see what sticks in this series and will hopefully refine his style, narrative focus and humor as he progresses from issue to issue.

Class Reunion #2 & #5, by Charlie Newton. Newton is from Birmingham, AL, which is not exactly a comics hotbed, but these minis also show heavy influence from underground and Fort Thunder style comics. Each of these comics is very short (six pages, plus front and back covers), but they have a strong visual impact. Issue #2 features a character that's a cross between an octopus and Humpty-Dumpty sitting at a table and hallucinating all sorts of horrible thing, including a brain oozing out of the bottom of a skyscraper. This silent comic is about the ways our minds can wander to the most grotesque of images. #5 features two characters with enormous heads having a conflict over waffles, only for one of them to be pursued by a waffle-hungry monster. There's also a wordless comic involving one of Newton's blobby characters trying to find out where "the delicious" is, starting a dialogue with the man in his TV set about it. There's no real attempt at true narrative in these comics, but rather a stringing together of emotional, visceral images. Newton doesn't have total control over his line and page design, so the going can be rough at times, but his draftsmanship is good enough to provoke the reader into paying attention, even if the rewards are small at this point. Certainly, his comics are interesting for his strange point of view, and I suspect they will become increasingly coherent but complex.

Indestructible Universe Quarterly #6 & #7

2011-08-31T04:52:00.000-07:00

Morgan Pielli specializes in elegantly designed minicomics that feature unusual genre stories. Indestructible Universe Quarterly continues to be his grab-bag for anthology work, webcomics and other ephemera. Issues #6 and #7 finish up the first chapter of the forest-horror story "Driftwood", a classic nature vs man story that features logs attacking people and turning them into leaves. There's something wonderfully absurd about the image of someone being reduced to a pile of leaves surrounded by clothes. Along the way, Pielli interjects a myth about a cruel and clever bird and how the forest rose up against it, with the dawning realization that the bird was a stand-in for man. The final reveal of who is likely responsible for the forest uprising here is clever and surprising while being instantly recognizable. Along the way, I like the way Pielli explores horror-movie tropes. There's a touch of the grotesque in his character design, aided by his thick brush work.

The rest of the contents of #6 mostly consisted of material I had seen earlier, including two stories from his "Lightsmith" characters: werewolves and other shape changers engaging in training and troubleshooting of some sort. The ideas here are solid but the execution is sloppy, both in terms of the art (I had trouble making out some of the action on some of the pages) and overall execution (sloppy lettering and a significant number of spelling errors). Both stories simply feel rushed, as though Pielli was trying to beat a deadline for inclusion in the anthologies these stories first appeared in. The other story in the issue, "The God Snare", dips into the Jack Kirby playbook for the design of the giant, armored god figures he introduces. The contrast between these hulking, mysterious figures and the understated myth-telling of the narrative makes it all the more effective.

Issue #7 is perhaps the strongest of the whole series. With three four-page stories and a ten-page story, Pielli keeps his stories brief and crisp, giving us premise and conclusion for these EC comics-flavored stories of malice and horror. "Gold, Silver, Death" starts as a work procedural and ends with an intended victim of the a crime being one step ahead of the person who was going to harm him. "Picker" is about the process of becoming an archetype: the sort of person you see on a subway and think of in a particular way. In this case, perception is reality, as becoming an archetype strips one of individual thought and action. "Living Room" was a touch on the melodramatic side, beginning with the classic set-up of a man in a dark room who doesn't know which way to go and revealing he's a prisoner of a particularly inspired trap. It's less a story than a premise spelled out with some character details added on the back end.

Finally, "The Twisting Kiss" is probably the best story I've read from Pielli. It's a bit of body horror that begins with an interesting premise: a venereal disease much like herpes that twists one's lips into a number. No one knows how or why it started or what it means, until the climax of the story, which involves a grotesque transformation that turns intimacy into something altogether else. The final scene, where the protagonist's friend sees him jump into the ocean, is a chilling one, especially when he is reminded of a potential romantic hook-up awaiting him. The story is a clever way to blow up the terror of sexually transmitted diseases and fear of intimacy to an absurd but still horrifying extreme, recalling the work of Charles Burns a bit. There's a simplicity and groundedness in the way he portrays the friendship of the lead characters that adds a bit of emotional weight to the proceedings as well. Pielli could successfully fill up a book that leaned more toward the psychological and emotional aspects of horror; it's what he's best at right now.

Better Late Than Never: Top 50 Books of 2010

2011-08-29T05:20:00.000-07:00

I realize that this list may likely be useful and interesting to no one but me, but it's been nagging at me for a long time to complete. Books that I haven't formally reviewed in a past iteration of High-Low will get a paragraph or two below; otherwise, I've provided links to all of my original reviews along with a brief description. 2010 was a deep year that had plenty of great comics by the usual suspects but seemed to lack a consensus #1 book. A strong argument could be made for any number of the books in my top twenty to be the #1 choice. There were also some lesser-known books that I hope might get a second look from new readers. I've excluded minicomics, broadsheets and some single issues from this list; you can see my choices there in this Comics Journal column. I also decided to exclude the usual classic cartoon strip reprints for this list.

1. Artichoke Tales, by Megan Kelso (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. This is Kelso's master work: a meditation on war, ethnicity, and family relationships that pauses long enough to let the reader understand what's at stake in terms of its environment and doesn't provide any easy answers.

2. Mome #19, edited by Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. Reynolds hasn't done much cartooning in recent years, but the last few issues of Mome have felt like his own personal expression in the sense that they so precisely mirror his tastes and values as a cartoonist and editor. Each piece complements the next perfectly, with a one-two-three punch of Josh Simmons/Shaun Partridge, Olivier Schrauwen and Gilbert Hernandez opening up the issue. This issue is deeply affecting, strange and hilarious and provides a wonderful snapshot of the state of underground comics in 2010.

3. Love & Rockets: New Stories #3, by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics). A lot of praise has been heaped on this comic and justly so. The new iteration of the classic series and its 100 page format has seemed to reinvigorate "Los Bros", allowing them to present longer stories in a single issue rather than stretching it over months or years. Gilbert's "Scarlet By Starlight" may be my favorite of his "Fritz in B-Grade Movie" stories that seem to be his new personal obsession, because he compresses the action to a bare minimum of pages. The shock/shlock nature of this story of some scientists on an alien planet with a race of humanoid cat people was made all the stronger without any kind of first act set-up; Gilbert plopped the reader right into the middle of the action and expected them to swim. His "Killer * Sad Girl * Star" is the latest in his stories about Guadalupe's daughter, a simultaneously shrewd and innocent character beset by all sorts of sleazeballs in her potential career as a B-grade actress like her aunt Fritz. Like most of his post-Palomar stories, it's suffused with a highly bleak view of humanity, leavened only by the loyalty of family.

With due respect given to Gilbert's usual solid work in this issue, I have to concur with critical consensus and say that Jaime's "Browntown" (and its accompanying "The Love Bunglers") is one of the best stories of the year and probably the best of his entire career. There are two key takeaways from this story. First, while this is a powerful story on its own, even without any prior knowledge of Jaime's Locas characters, I found that as a long-time fan of his work that its impact was simply devastating. Jaime has always left large lacunae in the accumulated personal histories of his characters, and it was those gaps that always left the reader wondering how someone wound up in a particular situation. With his flagship character Maggie, the reader always knew that she was estranged from her family but didn't know quite why. Jaime quietly, subtly drops bomb after bomb on the reader as to this history and raises the emotional stakes when introducing us to Calvin, Maggie's younger brother and a heretofore barely mentioned character.

The second takeaway and the emotional core of the story is the way that a parent can trigger an emotionally crippling event through simple neglect or dismissal of their childrens' feelings. There are a couple of dominoes toppled in "Browntown" that echo through Maggie's entire personal history (the scene where Maggie simply repeats "I'm sorry" when her mother decries her for revealing a secret about her father is heart-rending and reminiscent of the two-page slapping sequence in Love & Rockets #50), but the more obvious cause-and-effect comes with Calvin. His loyalty to family is repaid with nothing but scorn, neglect and abuse. The result is both tragic and noble, warped and touching. Wrapping the secret of this storyline in and around the personal narratives of Maggie in part one of the story and Ray D in the second part was an incredibly effective bit of narrative sleight-of-hand, concealing the eventual jaw-dropping reveal. As always, Jaime's line looks effortlessly perfect, combining naturalistic and cartoony work from page to page and panel to panel. No artist captures the body language and behavior of children quite like he does, and he's also the king of gesture and depicting how bodies relate to each other in space. Love and Rockets is hitting its thirtieth anniversary and it continues to set a standard of excellence for comics.

4. Acme Novelty Library #20: Lint, by Chris Ware (Drawn & Quarterly). This is the fourth chapter of Ware's epic Rusty Brown story, the second of which focuses in on one of seven principle characters from the book. Because of that focus, it's easy to read each chapter as a stand-alone unit. Lint focuses on Jordan "Jason" Lint and marks the first time Ware has spent any time examining the inner life of a privileged Alpha male. When the reader was first introduced to Lint in an earlier chapter, he was a sullen, long-haired bully who tortured weaker kids and hit on every girl in sight. Like every other character in the Rusty Brown saga, Lint suffered emotional pain as a child that went on to inform every subsequent experience. In many ways, he has a lot in common with Woody Brown (Rusty's emotionally abusive father who was the focus of the previous issue) in that both of them were buffeted by forces beyond their control, in part because neither had the courage to take charge of their own lives. When it came down to it, neither had the courage of their convictions or their dreams.

The full array of Ware's formal tricks and techniques are on display here, illustrating not what is real but rather what is perceived and remembered. Each page represents a year from Lint's life; sometimes just a moment from that year, sometimes the highlight events of each year. The red circle that's been a repeating motif throughout this story once again takes center stage, appearing in Lint's first memories in various forms: his mother's breast, a light, his own penis, a flower, etc. The opening few pages of the book in particular are a tour-de-force as Ware takes on perception, memory and emotion as a child might understand them. What's remarkable about this book is the way Ware ties apparently throwaway bits into a larger narrative, like seemingly innocuous actions having dire consequences and misremembered events disrupting personal narratives. In particular, one positive memory Lint had ascribed to his deceased mother in fact happened with his despised stepmother. It was a poignant moment, but also a moment designed by Ware to alert the reader not to trust what they see. It's a lesson that bears fruit throughout the comic, as the self-deluding and self-pitying Lint ruins the life of any number of women as well as his children. He dies alone and unloved after suing his own son, after multiple attempts to reinvent himself as a good person that never quite take, in part because he never truly owns up to his mistakes. (There's a hilarious sequence where he tries to impress a potential girlfriend how little he cares about Nebraska football, only to secretly check the score of their bowl game and curse when he finds out they lost.) What's clear about the Rusty Brown narrative is that while Ware understands that abusive behavior has its roots in abuse (and he is sympathetic to their plight), he refuses to let these characters off the hook for their behavior.

5. You'll Never Know Book 2: Collateral Damage, by Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. The second part of Tyler's masterwork focuses on her own mixed feelings about her parents (including feeling bad about having mixed feelings), the ways in which war continues to have an affect on her family relationships and present relationships, and a couple of devastating stories about daughters lost and almost lost. Tyler's work is just staggering, retaining a sense of optimism and cheer despite heartbreak and tragedy.

6. Make Me A Woman, by Vanessa Davis (Drawn & Quarterly). Here's my original review. Davis is Tyler's most obvious younger heir as the top memoirist in comics today. Their shared background as painters contributes to their unique, open-panel style. Davis' cheer steers the reader through her depictions of personal battles and discussions about her faith and background.

7. The Zabime Sisters, by Aristophane (First Second). This is the first work by the late Guadeloupean artist translated into English, and it made me immediately wish for the rest of his tragically small body of work to make that transition as well. Aristophane wielded a brush like no one save the masterful Blutch, alternating between dense and detailed images of his native land and the use of white space when it came time to focus on character drama. There's a deceptive simplicity in this coming-of-age story that flips between the titular trio of sisters and a group of boys. While there's a narrator's voice that slips the reader inside information from time to time (usually revealing secret knowledge or true feelings), Aristophane leaves unsaid the tremendous feeling of sheer, palpable ache on the page. Like in the autobiographical comics of Lat, Aristophane manages to convey his deep affection for all of his characters without indulging in sentiment or letting them off the hook. The story follows a group of kids during summer vacation, including the bickering but affectionate sisters, a couple of boys who are on their way to a fight, and various other social outcasts. Aristophane nails the ways in which kids fight, taunt and torture each other, raising the stakes in a fight until someone crosses a line. The ways in which the lines of the social order are drawn and re-drawn is exemplified by the sister who taunts a boy by refusing to give him back his father's broken pipe but later is in awe of him when he defeats a hated bully. Even at that, Aristophane's narrator is careful to explain that the bully has a lot of problems and the victory is a hollow one, even if that doesn't stop the victor from basking in glory. Aristophane's brushwork is dynamic yet clear, illustrating every emotion felt and every character nuance. This book could be classified as Young Adult fiction given its subject matter and restraint, which would make it one of the greatest YA comics of all time. It's certainly one of the best comics I read from 2010.

8. Curio Cabinet, by John Brodowski (Secret Acres). Here's my original review. To quote that review: "[Curio Cabinet is] series of stories where quiet moments quickly become outrageous and horrific in a way that is frequently ecstatic, and outrageous moments unexpectedly become calm and contemplative." Like much of alt-comics horror, this book works on a number of levels, not the least of which is as comedy.

9. Special Exits, by Joyce Farmer (Fantagraphics). It's no exaggeration to say that this is Farmer's greatest work, a semi-autobiographical labor of love about her father and step-mother's last years and her role in their lives. Farmer was perhaps the leading light in spearheading underground comics for women in the early 70s, organizing a number of all-woman anthologies and giving a number of female cartoonists early encouragement and exposure. I've read a number of autobio comics, but this is the first that ever addressed issues surrounding elder care and mortality in such a direct manner. There are no villains or recriminations in this book, save perhaps for Farmer's portrayal of doctors and rest homes featuring staff that are less-than-dedicated and compassionate. Indeed, this is a book about forgiveness, about accepting our families warts-and-all, about struggling with when to intervene in someone else's life and how to do so in a way that allows them to retain dignity. At 71 years old, Farmer has only gotten better as a draftsman, filling this 200 page book with lively, expressive characters in a manner that demonstrates the total command she has over the page. There's not a drop of sentimentality to be found in this book, as Farmer leavens her portrayal of her father, her stepmother and herself with moments of prickliness, selfishness and irrationality. In other words, this is the most human of character studies and the most humane of projects. I hope Farmer keeps cartooning until she's 100 years old or more, especially if she has a few more books like this in her.

10. Bodyworld, by Dash Shaw (Pantheon). Above all else, Shaw is an artist who seeks out projects that are challenges, problems to be solved. With each project, he seems to pick up a different skill set that can be brought to bear on future books. Bodyworld represents a multitude of formal challenges for Shaw that he takes on with relish. First, he had to think about how to format this strip in its original form, as a downward scrolling webcomic. Second, he had to think about how to reproduce that effect for print. Third, he wanted to explore color as a storytellling tool rather than a strictly decorative one. In terms of story, Bodyworld is one of the most successful of fusion comics, mashing up Dungeons & Dragons, science-fiction, high-school drama, psychedelia and humor. There are also any number of sly homages to other comics, like a nod to Archie Comics as well as several tributes to Steve Ditko. In terms of character design, body language and stiffness of action, there's a lot of Ditko to be found in this book. Shaw makes it all his own, however, jamming the reader first into the world of experimental forest town Boney Borough and then into a perceptual spider-web in how Shaw depicts empathetic telepathy.

Given his career-long fascination with formal experimentation, something Shaw isn't given enough credit for is his frequently wacky sense of humor. While there were lots of funny moments in Bottomless Belly Button and (especially) The Mother's Mouth, Bodyworld gives us the unforgettable Professor Paulie Panther, one of the most ridiculous characters I've ever encountered. The protagonist of this book, Panther is a hilarious satire of the drugged-out hipster, a pathetic, lonely worm of a man who is all bravado but little courage. Every line out of his mouth is gold, but the true highlight of the book is a fight between Panther and two security men from the local school. The two men are silly enough on their own (especially the nerdy, bespectacled Arthur "Death Artist" Ames), but their weaponry (sai and nunchakus) is straight out of a D&D game or a Frank Miller comic. There are any number of dramatic and even tragic moments in this book, but as a reader the moments that linger the longest for me are the funny ones.

Of course, the formal innovations are impressive. Shaw's dissonant use of color veers into the abstract at times, but it's ideal in attempting to depict the experience of not just hearing someone else's thoughts, but experiencing them experiencing your own thoughts and feelings. It's an interesting concept and one that reflects on the old existentialist idea that because we can never truly know another person's thoughts and experiences, we are essentially alone. Shaw flips that idea around by saying that truly knowing someone else would result in sheer chaos, to the point where we might be "infected" by others (which is what happens to the rebellious schoolgirl who falls for Panther). Shaw solves the downward scrolling problem by making the book a vertical read, with cardboard endpapers that flip out with D&D style maps (a grid with numbers and letters so the reader can quickly orient themselves to location changes). He also adds some amusing decorative elements (like "Bodyworld" being spelled out in what's supposed to be highlighter on the page edges, much like a high school textbook) and then goes to the trouble to craft an ironclad, straightforward narrative with a resolution that's initially a fake-out, revealing an ending that's far more sinister. When Shaw returns to comics (he's currently doing animation), I'll be curious to see what he tries next, but there's no question that this is a tour-de-force.

11. Gazeta, edited by Lisa Mangum & Maria Sputnik. Here's my original review. This is a dizzyingly visually diverse anthology featuring an international cast of artists, many of whom rarely see print in the US. The strong editorial hand of the anthology is what gives it its power and authority.

12. Gaylord Phoenix, by Edie Fake (Secret Acres). Fake takes inspiration from a number of different sources for an exhilarating and frequently bewildering Hero's Journey. Fake draws heavily from mythology, from the origin of his titular hero to the nature of the trials and tribulations he faces on the the road to self-actualization. The early portion of the book (as well as much of the figurework) seems to owe a lot to Fort Thunder-era comics, with Mat Brinkman's brand of environment-explorations, lumpy character design and crystalline decorative touches all in effect. Fake changes styles from chapter to chapter, opting for more psychedelic effects later in the book, as well going to color to represent an ascent to a higher plane. The Gaylord Phoenix was once an ordinary explorer who was bitten by a "crystal claw", transforming into his magical self but finding himself saddled with a blood-lust curse. That curse manifested when he met his soul-mate; after a scene of amazingly-depicted sex (where their penises are detachable tubes that look much like annelids), GP savagely attacks his lover. That begins his journey of redemption and reclamation of his memories, traveling from realm to realm and either fighting or screwing the various beings he encounters (and sometimes both). At its heart, this book is as much about gender identity as it is about sexual identity, as GP has to shed many false skins to get at the essential truth of its gender duality and see him/herself through his/her own eyes--instead of the eyes of others. This book is strange, spectacular and ultimately uplifting, even as it masks its ideas in mythological tropes and eye-popping visual effects. Fake is able to control the reader's experience thanks to the simplicity of his character design combined with the complexity of his page composition and decorative touches. While aspects of the book feel familiar, they are melted down and forged into a unique aesthetic experience.

13. Weathercraft, by Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics). Many refer to Woodring as comics' greatest surrealist, and while I think that term has taken on a somewhat vague meaning over the years, Woodring's work does actually bear more than a passing resemblance to the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s. Both are obsessed with a kind of hyperreality of confronting their audiences with strange images that have disturbingly familiar feel to them. The work of both is deeply symbolic and even Freudian. The work of both subverts language and creates its own reality. There is a powerful earthiness mixed in with shifting landscapes and bizarre images, as everything winds up coming down to the essentials of our existence as physical beings. Reading Woodring's comics is a deeply immersive experience, as the artist demands that the reader adjust to the reality he brings to life on the page, dropping the reader into the deep end of the pool of his vision. This visual shock treatment not only aides the reader in swimming in this pool, but also allows one to breathe the metaphorical water. In Weathercraft, Woodring's first long-form story about the Unifactor, the world in which chipmunk-cheeked Frank and his peers live, the effect is intoxicating as one is drawn into the world of the loathesome Manhog: his struggles, his epiphanies and attempts to evolve, and final comeuppance. As a reader, resurfacing from this world and trying to read something else brings about a dissonance that's the equivalent of the bends. Speaking of waves, it's Woodring's ever-present, vibratory line in the background of the comic that gives it such a powerful reality-warping quality. His line is so clean and precise that his bizarre creations have that much more solidity and weight, as though they were carved instead of drawn. While Woodring offers an FAQ at the end of the book and a description of each of the characters, they really don't prepare the reader for the experience of reading the book. Even Woodring can't get at the sublime nature of his work through mere discussion.

14. Habitat, by Dunja Jankovic (Sparkplug). Here's my original review. Jankovic is one of the greatest of the Immersive cartoonists, and this is a particularly intense series of whirling images of an artist dealing with a series of nightmarish and absurd travails at home.

15. It Was The War Of The Trenches, by Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. This is Tardi's most extended statement on one of his personal obsessions: the nightmarish weirdness, waste and hypocrisy of World War I. It's my favorite of his comics that he both wrote and drew.

16. Wally Gropius, by Tim Hensley (Fantagraphics). There are any number of ways to read this comic and any number of its attributes to focus in on. It can be viewed as a warped pastiche of Harvey Comics and the work of John Stanley. It can be seen as a Will Elder-inspired zany farce, jammed with eye-pops and wordplay. There's a deeper commentary at work about culture, capitalism and intergender relationships. It's a towering accumulation of Michael Kupperman- style absurdity and dada moments. What I see it as is a European-style album with iron-clad plotting and a straightforward narrative that's disguised by all of these other features. The book's twist is supported at every turn by details that, at the time, seem absurd, horrific (like the shocking apparent incestuous sexual assault that occurs midway through the book) or even trivial. It's an adventure story where our protagonist is an unwitting dupe who almost blows everything but is saved (off-panel) by those who know better. Hensley accomplishes all of this with an aesthetic that is simultaneously familiar & strange, light-hearted but densely packed with information, and that delivers plenty of surface delights but also carries multiple meanings. Hensley's work is like no other cartoonist working today; in the pages of Mome (where it was originally serialized), this story acted as a sort of extreme palate cleanser that served as a highly effective break between entries. With the story all in one place, it's the book's fabulous design (oversized pages, hardcover, nice paper) that serves, like a shell game, to distract the reader from its weirder elements by making it seem like dozens of these sorts of books have been published before. It's Hensley's insistence to the reader that everything they are seeing is perfectly normal that gives so much power to its quirkier and darker moments alike. In a book with such a bright, overpowering four-color comic book scheme, it's funny to note that it's Hensley's restraint and understatement that make this book such an achievement.

17. Market Day, by James Sturm (Drawn & Quarterly). Here's my original review. This is a thoughtful, restrained account of working as an artist in a dying industry as well as a statement about mental illness.

18.Picture This, by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly). This book is a kind of incantation for creativity. It's a creative anti-virus, burrowing its way into one's brain in order to make its readers come down with ideas. It's a meditative guide to the healing powers of drawing. This book is a companion piece to Barry's stunning What It Is, her guide to writing. This book lacks the shock of the new, given that What It Is was a remarkable combination of memoir, collage, childhood art project, lecture and narrative. Picture This in many ways is much more straightforward in the lessons it imparts on not just different approaches regarding drawing, but also in terms of its theories. The central questions of the book are "Why do we draw as children?" and "Why do we stop as adults?" While that's partly related to the Two Questions of the first book that stymie creativity ("Is this good?" and "Does this suck?"), Picture This applies a metafictional narrative featuring her Ernie Pook's Comeek characters finding a book called Picture This that features a near-sighted monkey doing slightly inappropriate things while suggesting all sorts of mysterious art-related activities.

In many respects, What It Is was theory, while Picture This is practice. It's less interested in Barry's own story (covered in the first book) and is more concerned with seeing what kind of stories she makes now. Most every page features drawings, paper constructions and especially water color paintings done by Barry and her husband as a sort of automatic collaborative process (they did not speak about their paintings, they just did them). The book is broken up into four chapters, each corresponding to a season. "Winter" is all about shapes, encouraging the reader to create art by folding, cutting, gluing and smudging rather than drawing. This most basic of activities speaks directly to the way that the tactile, visceral nature of creating art has some surprising side effects. "Spring" is about all kinds of lines and curves one can make and the simple sensation of making marks on paper. Once again, Barry talks about how doodles can clear one's brain as a sort of meditative activity. "Summer" is all about color, featuring page after page of how a simple alteration of color can change the meaning of a page. (This is an aspect of comics that only the most avant-garde of cartoonists are really starting to understand.) Finally, "Fall" is about process, addressing how we access our ability to create and how to get to that place. The key quote is "The image world is not part of our mind--our mind is part of the image world". How do we get there? Through the repetitive and meditative action of taking pen or brush to paper, we induce that mind-clearing state. It is in that state where we are most capable of being fully creative, of tapping into the stories we have stored away. It's in the least intentional of states is where the artist not only can tap into motions and marks that are soothing and meditative, but also capable of producing marks (and stories) that can have the same effect on readers. This is what Barry does at her best.

19. Wilson, by Daniel Clowes (Drawn & Quarterly). Here's my original review. I see this as Clowes' take on the Sunday comics page for a feature drawn over many years, with most of those pages removed. It's a funny, nasty take on middle age and mortality that's not quite as powerful as previous works but still reflective of an artist at the height of his powers.

20.The Wild Kingdom, by Kevin Huizenga (Drawn & Quarterly). This is a third reworking of material that Huizenga's been developing for a number of years in various formats, but the addition of color and some new strips flesh out Huizenga's ideas in bold fashion. This book is about a series of hidden conflicts, most notably about nature vs technology and how this plays out in the obliviousness of man to his environment. More to the point, this book is about communication and language in particular. What I find interesting about the book is that Huizenga's critique of language, technology and civilization seems to be a Heideggerian argument. What I mean by that is that Huizenga, through a series of stories, strips, diagrams, gags and various combinations thereof, seems to be critiquing what the philosopher Martin Heidegger would say is a false view of looking at the world, one where everything and everyone is treated as "objects-at-hand". That's especially true of nature, as commodified and classified by the reference to the old "Wild Kingdom" TV show (nature as entertainment), the way that the suburban streets of protagonist Glenn Ganges are crossed with telephone wires, and especially in the series of gag strips addressing advertising in the latter half of the book. Heidegger posited that this inauthentic way of looking at the world was rooted in language itself, because this is our primary tool in trying to understand (and hence master) the world. In direct opposition to the comics where Glenn looks at phenomena qua phenomena (like his famous "The Sunset"), the strips here are all about the ways in which language is a trap that imprisons humanity (and by extension, all of nature). All of this is done with an incredible amount of wit and with no didacticism whatsoever; it's up to the reader to figure out what is being satirized and why.

21. Drinking At The Movies, by Julia Wertz (Three Rivers Press). Here's my original review. All of the usual funny nonsense from Wertz, this time with a loose structure that ties together the observational gags and touches on personal tragedies and difficulties. This was the first mature work of Wertz's career, and it's a positive augur for her future.

22. The Troll King, by Kolbeinn Karlsson (Top Shelf). Here's my original review. A strange and wonderful book from Top Shelf's "Swedish Invasion"; as I said in my review: "The Troll King is a startling, unsettling, and ultimately life-affirming book that spins a mythology that is at once alien and familiar."

23. Undeleted Scenes, by Jeffrey Brown (Top Shelf). Here's my original review. This is another great collection of autobiographical stories from Brown; quoting my review: "Undeleted Scenes is a kind of autobio comics Ph.D program, detailing one artist’s journey through trying to express himself in a number of different ways. While some of those experiments worked better than others, Brown’s work is remarkable in that he never lost sight of his overall emotional project, no matter if he was trying to get laughs or depict a poignant moment."

24.Werewolves of Montpellier, by Jason (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. Another great genre romance story by Jason. From my review: "Overall, this is a pitch-perfect, expertly-crafted story by an artist who is clearly working in his comfort zone. It’s remarkable to see a creator go to the same well so many times and yet continue to produce nuanced and powerful variations on the same themes."

25. Whirlwind Wonderland, by Rina Ayuyang (Sparkplug/Tugboat Press). Ayuyang's first book is a delight as she meditates on family and its connections as well as her cultural obsessions (like football and the TV show Murder, She Wrote). The highlight is "Crack O' Dawn", a long story that flips from magical realism in the depiction of Ayuyang's morning commute (complete with Brad Pitt as dance partner and symbol of dread regarding the responsibilities of impending motherhood) to a hilarious story about going to a function for distant and annoying family members. Ayuyang delights in her Filipino heritage and how it butts up against her identity as an American, especially in turning the spotlight on her parents. Ayuyang uses a scribbly, appealing line that gets better as she allows herself to make it even simpler for the later stories in the book. This is an assured debut from an artist who had been honing her skills for quite some time, elevating quotidian events into moments of great significance (and frequently, moments of great hilarity).

26. Palookaville #20, by Seth (Drawn & Quarterly). Here's my original review. Seth reinvents his long-running series in a handsome new format, complete with a bracing autobio tale, annotated photos and illustrations about an exhibit of his work, and the latest episode of "Clyde Fans".

27.From The Shadow Of The Northern Lights, Volume 2, edited by Johannes Klenell (Top Shelf). Here's my original review. This anthology of Swedish alt-cartoonists is notable for its variety of styles and the depth of its roster.

28.Little Nothings 3: Uneasy Happiness, by Lewis Trondheim (NBM). Here's my original review. This delightful autobio series finds the artist dealing with a welcome problem: his life is pleasant and offers few real obstacles. Trondheim draws out laughs by focusing on quotidian details and ruminating on his standing in life.

29. The Whale, by Aidan Koch (Gaze Books). Here's my original review. This wispily-drawn story uses erasure as a tool to dig at memory and loss; it's the spaces in-between and the details that fade that make this such an effective work.

30.. Solipsistic Pop Volume 2, edited by Tom Humberstone. Here's my original review. This is an elegant anthology that doesn't overthink its use of theme and instead concentrates on presenting each of its contributors in the simplest and most beautiful manner possible.

31.Young Lions, by Blaise Larmee. Here's my original review. This long-form narrative by Larmee is both a story and commentary on art, theory and artistic communities.

32. How I Made It To Eighteen, by Tracy White (Roaring Brook Press). Here's my original review. This is a simply-rendered, restrained and starkly beautiful comic about dealing with one's own pain.

33. Tales Designed To Thrizzle #6, by Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. Kupperman uses color to ground the reader and force them to dig into each panel as he creates masterpieces of absurdism and demented parodies.

34. Lemon Styles, by David King (Sparkplug). King's comics mix cute figures, strange gags, and the quiet, haunting poetics of John Hankiewicz. Lemon Styles features the return of his grown-up kid characters from his Danny Dutch comic, only on a much larger scale. The dimensions of this book (about 7x7") are unusual, bringing to mind some kind of strange, old printed artifact. At forty pages, one quickly becomes immersed in King's way of thinking and drawing, which is a disorienting but fascinating experience. King's style evokes deja vu, bringing to mind something familiar and old told in a strange, hypnogogic manner. This particular comic is roughly in two parts: a series of unconnected four-panel "gag" strips and one longer narrative. Both juxtapose a stillness of action with occasionally outrageous dialogue (like one strip where an otherwise austere man is writing an x-rated love note). In others, the dialogue is sometimes plaintive, sometimes lyrical, and sometimes abstract. The longer story is about loneliness and the reasons why people stay with each other, even when there's seething mutual resentment. This comic lingers in one's memory because of the control King has over the page. His cute, bigfoot figures have huge heads and exaggerated noses, dressing and looking like something out of the 1940s. The relationships between his characters range between convivial, desperate, puzzled and contemplative, as each one is trying to work something out on the page. Lemon Styles is an existential gag comic that is puzzling and rewarding to read as well as a delight to look at.

35. Lone Pine, by Jed McGowan (AdHouse). This is a curious blend of comics-as-poetry attached to a hard-boiled, deliberately cliched action plot. The book is a series of misdirections, bluffs and mirrors for the reader in an effort to get them to pay attention to its smallest, seemingly inconsequential details. It's about a young man in a forest who is being chased by some criminals, but he is able to evade them. His girlfriend is missing, but he's aided by a mysterious female benefactor who leads him through a series of clues. All the action and plot essentially take place off-panel; the real struggle here is between the protagonist and...not just his environment, but reality itself. The desolate weirdness and stillness in the book (both in terms of affect and environment) reminds me a little of a DeChirico painting, reflecting how alone the main character is. The only clue worth following is the instruction he's given by his benefactor: "Be a tree". In other words, be still and do nothing, but don't mistake this as mere passivity. Indeed, this is an insistent imploring on the part of the benefactor, that the only way to truly move is to allow oneself to be still long enough to become attuned with something outside oneself. The ending is abstract and open-ended to the point where it can be interpreted in any number of ways: actually crystallizing and disappearing, hallucinating that he's becoming an abstract form, his perception of the world becoming "true", or something in between. While nothing seems to happen in this story in terms of conventional narrative, I'd say that the protagonist goes on the world's most abstract and passive Hero's Journey, eschewing brute force action to eventually reach a kind of enlightenment. The beautiful use of light blue, black and zip-a-tone contributes to the overall, deliberately flat nature of the project as well as the emphasis of shape over character. This is a comic where the artist wants the reader to know that they are looking at marks on paper that form shapes. While the characters look bland and act bland, the shapes on the page are sharp and distinct. This Xeric-powered book is of a kind with other anti-plot books like The Whale and Young Lions, and I'll be curious to see what McGowan tries next after this experiment.

36. Studygroup 12 #4, edited by Zack Soto. After a six year delay, this anthology that's sort of a second cousin to anthologies like Kramer's Ergot and Blab! finally reappeared on the scene. SG12 has always been part comics, part sketchbook portfolio, so it's no surprise to see that true of this edition as well. Soto has also never shied away from giving emerging talent the spotlight, even if it made each issue uneven. All of this is true of the most recent issue, with its highs being some of the best short stories of the year and the lows being instantly forgettable. Trevor Alixopulos was the MVP of the anthology with three haunting, intriguing stories, and then appeared as a character with a great gag in a Vanessa Davis story. T. Edward Bak's "autobio" story is a hilarious parody of autobio and poetic comics, artfully mimicking their rhythms and verbiage with a deft touch. Other highlights include a welcome return from Richard Hahn in a perfect, open-aired first story of the book, an ingenious two-page spread from Michael DeForge trailing a number of characters across the page ala Lewis Trondheim, Jennifer Parks' creepy and atmospheric horror story and Jon Vermilyea's typical bit of nonsense involving a gang of anthropomorphic breakfast items. While there's plenty to like here, the anthology as a whole doesn't quite cohere as well as the other top anthologies of the year.

37.Bound & Gagged, edited by Tom Neely. Here's my original review. This is a gag-strip anthology featuring artists who aren't necessarily humorists; the results are fascinating across the board.

38. Flesh & Bone, by Julia Grfrorer (Sparkplug). Here's my original review. Grfrorer once again delves into fairy tale tropes to deliver a story that's in turns horrific, philosophical and funny.

39.Trigger #1, by Mike Bertino (Revival House). Here's my original review. An old-fashioned alternative comics pamphlet, Trigger is a one-man anthology with a relaxed approach to its storytelling and varied kinds of gags and narrative concerns.

40. Big Questions #15, by Anders Nilsen (Drawn & Quarterly). Here's my original review. Nearly a decade in the making, this is the final issue of Nilsen's existential epic about a community of birds and the interlopers who shatter their world. This issue is the aftermath of the violent and devastating events of the previous issue, which is fitting considering that the series' best moments were its quiet ones.

41.Hey Princess, by Mats Jonsson (Top Shelf). Here's my original review. This is a bluntly honest, funny and endearingly shabby and all-over-the-place autobiographical comic by one of the top cartoonists from Sweden.

42. Dungeon Quest Volume 1, by Joe Daly (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. Daly combines a deft eye for detail, a cartoony sensibility when it comes to character design, a talent for slacker-style dialogue and a delightful understanding of action tropes.

43. Newave!, edited by Michael Dowers (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. This is a fascinating historical document of how comics' underground movement continued to flourish through the zine and minicomic explosion of the 70s and 80s. While much of the content is highly uneven, one can see the careers of many future greats in their earliest stages and comics from cartoonists who never quite rose to that level.

44.How To Understand Israel In 60 Days Or Less, by Sarah Glidden (DC/Vertigo). Here's my original review. This is an interesting first major work by an artist whose ostensible narrative (her reaction to going to Israel as a left-leaning American Jew) masks the deeper issue of her personal identity and how this plays out in terms of recalibrating her belief system.

45. Set To Sea, by Drew Weing (Fantagraphics). Here's my original review. This is a lush, gorgeous and even old-fashioned nautical fable that is modest in its ambitions and restrained in its storytelling from one of the best draftsmen in comics.

46.Dungeon: Twilight Volume 3 (The New Centurions), by Lewis Trondheim, Johann Sfar, Kerascoet & Obion (NBM). Here's my original review. The two stories in this volume are dramatically different, as one focuses on the usual outrageous & brutal political intrigues and the latter is a left turn that's as much a storytelling exercise as it is a work of satire.

47. Closed Caption Comics #9. The latest anthology from the Baltimore collective is actually the first I've managed to get my hands on. The loose theme is "your body", which most of the artists in this genre-bending book took to mean "body horror". The results are pretty uneven, though there are a few stand-outs. The chunky black lines of Lane Milburn in particular evoke EC horror and science-fiction comics. His sci-fi story features a female protagonist posed in such a sexually exploitative fashion that it felt like a parody of Heavy Metal. The story he drew that was written by Conor Stechschulte similarly parodies high school horror splatterfests, introducing a twist where a character not possessing her virginity winds up saving her life.

The real stand-out stories are by Noel Freibert, Ryan Cecil Smith and Molly O'Connell. Freibert uses a lot of white negative space in setting up a horror-mystery story about a young boy who is reared to come to a gruesome, mysterious end. The lack of detail and spare line lends the story a weirdly antiseptic tone that makes it all the more creepy. Smith's story is a slightly sillier, cartoony story about Hercules running a mountain top strength institute and a particularly disgruntled student. Smith expertly runs several characters through total communication breakdowns in a very amusing manner. O'Connell's incredible linework is among the best I've ever seen in the Immersive school, demanding total reader engagement in this story about a set of brothers on TV, their secretary, and the weird body horrors that seem to lurk everywhere. The way she emphasizes the decorative aspects of lettering in particular made this an absorbing read.

48. Temperance, by Cathy Malkasian (Fantagraphics). Malkasian's comics trade equally in darkness and whimsy, and this tale of cultural myopia, bellicosity and the lies that bind us together is no exception. Malkasian tends to keep one foot in grimy reality and one foot in fantasy, as a sentient tree and an all-destroying would-be father figure take center stage. The book is at its strongest when it focuses on life in Blessedbowl, a stone city whose citizens have been raised to believe that it's a ship sailing toward the enemies imagined by the malevolent and deceptive "Pa". Pa is a weird figure, at once an abusive monster who also takes on a veneer of familial kindness after convincing his victims that someone else destroyed their towns, an invisible enemy that only he can protect them from. Life in Blessedbowl centers around my favorite character in the book, the dumpy Minerva, whose lies have kept everyone in the city alive, including her beloved husband Lester, a man that Pa nearly killed 30 years earlier when he tried to prevent Pa from raping Minerva's older sister, Peggy. I thought the book's climax was perhaps too oblique for its own good but the final pages brought everything together as all the principle characters were reunited in an unexpected fashion. Malkasian's work reminds me a little of Renee French's comics in that they both are fascinated by the darker aspects of fantasy stories, have an exacting pencil style, and don't mind bending their comics to the grotesque side. Even amid the book's gloomiest aspects, there's always a through-line of hope to be found.

49. Three #1, edited by Robert Kirby. Here's my original review. This is a strong debut for this three-author anthology series that spotlights gay artists. Its unique and coherent point of view is due to the strong editorial direction of Kirby, who modulated his own content to fit in with fellow contributors Joey Sayers and Eric Orner.

50. El Vocho, by Steve Lafler. Here's my original review. This is a pleasantly rambling trip that mixes Lafler's typical psychedelic musings about art and life with romance, as well as a crime story. Its relaxed pace is its greatest asset, as Lafler is in no hurry to get from point a to point b in terms of plot and is more interested in getting to know the characters.

Sequart #174: Inkweed

2011-08-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a review of one of Sparkplug's best-ever releases, Chris Wright's Inkweed. This was originally published at sequart.com
**

The last book I'm reviewing in the latest wave of releases from top-notch boutique publisher Sparkplug Comic Books is Inkweed, by Chris Wright. Publisher Dylan Williams once again provides a platform for an artist with a distinctive voice and style, collecting stories from a number of different places into one thematic whole. The gestalt of Wright's work may be as fully-formed as I've ever seen from a relatively young artist, with the stylistic choices he makes fitting in perfectly with his themes. The result is a comic that is unnerving, uncomfortable and relentlessly compelling. His work is one of contradiction: his figures are grotesque but majestic, scratchy yet imaginatively designed, and monstrous but recognizably human. Wright employs a scratchy, dense line jammed with cross-hatching and shadow. His figures are often distorted but expressive, and he never sacrifices clarity for effect. His use of gesture and body language makes his characters recognizably human even if they don't quite appear to be. The oddness of his figures is especially given context with the way he uses the eyes of his characters to guide the reader.

Wright's themes overlap, and he cleverly arranged the stories in the book such that one theme led to another. The first story, "The Unmerciful Gift", is about an artist who can no longer paint works that others can see--they simply look like blind canvases. The story is about sacrifice, obsession and the ultimate futility of that pursuit. Here, Wright's cross-hatching creates an emotional weight, a density where there is no relief for the reader. Wright observes obsession from a different point of view in "Tapestry", about an aging astronomer who desperately reaches out to his young female assistant. The desperation is not born simply out of loneliness, but out of the terror of his increasing realization of his insignificance in the face of the infinite. In the end, she leaves and he has no choice but to continue to try to chart the abyss that he studies every night. The way Wright contrasts the astronomer's bravado by day (asserting how much more scientists now understand) with his terror at night was the story's master stroke.

"Snake" and "Truth" both look at love from different points of view. The first as a form of temptation that no one can avoid, and the second as an actively pernicious force that we nonetheless are endlessly drawn to. In both tales, Wright creates a vaguely mythical, fairy-tale type background for the stories. Those two shorter stories prepare for the true gut-punch of the collection, "Urn". It's Wright's most devastating and masterful short story, with an introduction that piques interest and warns us that tragedy is ahead, but the reader could not possibly be prepared for what was to come. The story is about "love", but it's really about the many things we call love that are really something else. It's about guilt, lies, self-hatred, self-deception and the way all of these things come home to roost in the end. The most devastating part of the story is that the most despicable character is also the only fully truthful one.

Inkweed is also about creation and destruction, slipping between the stories of gods and artists. "The Sea Demon" essentially presents a set of dilemmas not unlike faced by the other artists in the book. "Rags and Turpentine" is interesting because it features one of the few characters in the book that is at the height of his creative powers, only he doesn't know it. An artist in love (or probably lust), he's conflicted by his desire for a woman who is also an artist and the possibility that he doesn't even like her work. Like many of the characters in Inkweed, the artist character gets drunk as a response to his surroundings. The loopy panel design reflects his wobbly orientation. Wright balances the philosophical, probing nature of his stories with visceral, earthy concerns that often put the lie to many of the characters' beliefs.

That tension between mind and body is at the heart of Wright's stories. In particular, Wright gets at the disconnect between the two, as his characters don't always understand their own motivations or don't figure it out until it's far too late. Wright modulates pleasure and pain here, as there are many ridiculous, laugh-out-loud moments to go with the melancholy or horrific ones. The intersection between obsession and desire is painfully evoked by Wright's art, and his unusual character design sucks the reader into this world where "he who learns must suffer", where journeys of discovery come at a terrible price.

Sequart #72: Bookhunter

2011-08-28T05:13:00.000-07:00

Here's another old Sequart.com review of a Sparkplug comic that I greatly enjoyed, in support of Dylan Williams.
**

One reason why I love comics is that one occasionally runs into a creator producing art that would only work as comics. I prefer not to use reductive terms like "pure cartooning", but I have a great appreciation for many artists who rethink this idea of making marks on paper for a narrative intent and come up with different angles. One such artist is Jason Shiga, an artist who simultaneously manages to have a cult following in the world of comics and a broad following in the larger culture. He's been contributing his odd choose-your-own-adventure comics for Nickelodeon magazine for some time, and his twisted sense of humor has been perfect for that venue. He's also crafted a series of minis, collections and odd art objects that elicit nothing less than sheer delight.

Shiga has a degree in math and works as a librarian in his day job. Coming from that point of view, he views comics and storytelling quite differently than most artists. At the same time, that point of view is in tune with what all great gagsmiths and storytellers must do in creating a narrative: state a premise or problem and then go through the process of solving it. If Shiga reminds me of anyone, it's Lewis Trondheim, whose intuitive approach in boiling down conflicts in pursuit of a gag always leads to satisfying and sometimes unexpected conclusions. Shiga's approach appears to be more studied, but the mechanics of his process drop out on the page thanks to his absurd (and often surprisingly dark) sense of humor.

Shiga's created comics that are visual palindromes, complicated (and violent) choose-your-own-adventure comics, and comics that are problems that have to be solved. In his longer-form work, Shiga displays his facility for writing taut, tense stories that use genre trappings for unexpected results. Double Happiness was about an Asian man who grew up in a mostly caucasian community who goes to live in an Asian community where he feels equally out of place. This comic isn't about teaching some kind of lesson in identity or acceptance--it takes several sharp and shockingly violent turns to an ending that is unsettling. Fleep begins with an incredible premise--a man awakes with no memory, finding himself trapped in a phonebooth that's been covered in cement--and works as a sort of logic problem, as the man uses his possessions to try and find a way out. His ultimate identity is the kind of twist that was there all along but was cleverly hidden from the reader.

Shiga's art is simultaneously utilitarian and idiosyncratic. He uses crude, blob-like figures that somehow manage to capture emotion and expression with great sensitivity. They way these cute figures provide a counterpoint to the sometimes savage violence seen in his stories makes reading his comics all the more jarring. The cuteness of his figures is always played straight, however, and they usually fade into the background of one's mind as the reader gets involved with the story.

His latest comic, Bookhunter, is perhaps his most ambitious integration of image, figure and story. The plot of the book is simple: it's a police procedural about a stolen book and the team that tries to track down both book and thief. It's the details of the story and the variables that Shiga alters that make this one of the best comics of 2007.

First, the book is set in 1973 Oakland. Shiga is clearly inspired by the look and feel of 70's cop pictures, and the sepia tones he uses throughout the book are meant to invoke that era. With the look and feel of the book established for the audience, Shiga changes just one variable that turns out to be a major curveball: the existence of the Library Police. That is, an entire branch of the police force dedicated to tracking down rare book thieves and the tomes they plundered. This team at times must use SWAT-team tactics but also employs high-tech (for 1973) forensic science and the latest in technology. Despite the ridiculousness of this premise, Shiga plays it straight as the library police goes through its detailed and painstaking process of trying to figure out who committed the crime.

Shiga ups the ante by making the theft "three concentric locked-room mysteries", tackled by Agent Bay and his team. Shiga takes obvious delight in constructing the mystery, having a team attack it and cracking it through equal parts hard work and luck, and do it with technological limitations that would be unthinkable today. As a librarian, it would seem that Shiga would be quite well-versed in the history of library science and security, and so when thinking about how this crime could be committed, ran through all of the possibilities in his head. Whether or not he was an expert in early-70's library security protocols, his authorial voice is so confident that it's not important.

The tropes found in 70's cop movies are touched on here, mostly as a way to add tension and dynamism to the story. The book begins with a sort of mini-feature of another case that Agent Bay and his team were solving, and ends with a spectacular and hilarious act of violence that immediately sucks the reader in. From there, we move on to the main story, starting with Bay and his team speeding to the scene of the crime. The team investigates the crime scene, analyzes evidence, finds clues, and begins to understand that this may have been the perfect crime. The relentless Bay pushes his team, follows hunches and long-shots, and uses every resource available to him (including a primitive internet). The search for the thief resolves in spectacular fashion once again, and Shiga's art once again adds a touch of the absurd to the proceedings even if the events are played straight. Shiga then adds an additional twist and climax that make this an enormously satisfying read.

The simplicity of Shiga's style doesn't obscure the spectacular quality of his composition. Cinema is once again both an inspiration and an object of parody, like in the mute scene near the beginning of the story where Bay observes a day in the life of this library. He's asking questions but Shiga leaves out the dialogue, almost like a camera wanting the viewer to concentrate on the visuals of a scene. It culminates in a 2-page panorama shot of Bay standing at a rail
overlooking the rest of the library at a dizzying height, reminiscent of the famous shot of the Library of Congress from All The President's Men. Shiga borrows from film in this comic, but one could never imagine this comic as a film.

There's no one else quite like Jason Shiga. The way he looks at comics as problems to be solved gives them a kind of narrative tightness that draws the reader in immediately and holds them. Combining that sort of precision with a delightfully loose line, warped sense of humor and fiendish sense of timing makes him one of my favorite creators.

Sequart #37: Mine Tonight

2011-08-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

In support of Sparkplug, here's another old review of one of their releases from Trevor Alixopulos. This is from 2006 and sequart.com.

***********

Those that follow the minicomics scene will observe that geography plays a large part in forming artist support groups. These groups provide encouragement and critique for young artists and play a part in their development. The recent development of a sustained book publishing beachhead in the world of comics has suddenly made being an art comics practitioner potentially lucrative--or at least something that could pay the bills. Look at Raina Telgemeier. She went from self-publishing minis to getting a story in an anthology, which led her to get a contract to do graphic novel versions of the Babysitter's Club novels for Scholastic. Then there's the FLIGHT crew, who took a chance with a full-color anthology that has become so successful that the third volume was picked up by Ballantine.

In recent years, those loose associations have yielded some interesting results. In St. Louis, the USS Catastrophe crew of Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch and Ted May have not only served as a focal point for minicomics distribution, they?ve gone on to much wider regard. Huizenga and Zettwoch in particular are rising stars for Drawn & Quarterly and the cutting-edge Kramer's Ergot anthology. Huizenga also has a series for the prestigious Ignatz line at Fantagraphics. In Chicago, the Holy Consumption group of Paul Hornschemeier, Jeffrey Brown, Anders Nilsen and John Hankiewicz have also taken the art-comics world by storm. Three of the artists have regular gigs in Fantagraphics' wide-reaching Mome anthology, and between the four of them, have comics published by Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Dark Horse, Sparkplug Comic Books, Top Shelf and Buenaventura. Just a few years ago, they were honing their craft in minicomics. Thanks to their talent and a broadening market, they're now significant figures in the comics world.

As a writer, critic, editor and general observer of the comics world, I make it my business to track the most promising minicomics artists. Not only to determine who might produce great work in the future, but because the minicomics themselves are such an engaging and immediate form of the comics experience. Emerging from a West Coast group of artists that includes Jesse Reklaw, Andrice Arp, Lark Pien, Thien Pham, Jason Shiga and others, Trevor Alixopulos has shown an astonishing learning curve in recent years. He's gone from making crude but promising minicomics where he was clearly working out his influences to developing his own voice.

That voice is hard to characterize. There's an edginess, a certain paranoia, that surrounds his best work. In particular, a long minicomic called Dread was a big step forward for him. Mine Tonight manages to combine all of his interests in one cleverly-designed format. It's part paranoid political thriller (albeit with a 21st century twist), part love story, part dream journal, part history lesson, part autobio comic. It's got the feel of noir fiction and slacker/punk stories. The art is loose and expressive, with a moodiness belied by his exaggerated figure drawing. The nervousness and anxiety that his characters feel is expressed nicely through sweaty faces and a sense of claustrophobia. The whole package works, and the result was a story that was a genuine joy to read.

The story follows Lukas Blum, the sort of lost soul not unfamiliar to noir stories. Except Blum followed a run of dissolution by hooking up with an unusual political machine, headed by mysterious Hungarian financier George Miklos. Miklos is a thinly-veiled version of George Soros, the billionaire who donated money to groups like Moveon.org in support of John Kerry. Blum had met him at the last great moment of American protest: the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle. That event looms large in the book, as Blum flies to New York to put a plan of Miklos' into effect. That plan is for Blum to find 5 million dollars that Miklos has hidden in a shell organization and get it to Kerry's campaign in order to help him win the 2004 election. Despondent, adrift and confused, Blum contacts the one person he knows in New York: cartoonist Trevor Alixopulos.

The book takes plenty of side trips and diversions, as Blum reads a weird strip by Alixopulos in a weekly newspaper, we get detailed accounts of dreams that are haunting Blum, and we see a story by Alixopulos about his own involvement at the WTO protest. It's clear that the experience was a significant one for him, but that he also went through a long period of disillusionment and confusion. He also is clearly self-deprecatory towards his own career up to that point; one senses that he regretted wasting time on trivialities but that he's past that point now. Through his own character and that of Blum (a sort of alter ego), this book feels like the author taking stock of his career. There's a certain wistfulness here, but also hope for the future.

While the book has a noir feel and plot, Alixopulos subverts the reader's expectations at every turn. The culmination of his mission is deliberately anti-climactic, partly because of the electronic age we live in. Blum has every opportunity to act the tough guy, but can't bring himself to do it, and falls in love with a woman who's the key to completing his mission. In the end, the book was really about the possibility of reinvention and ends on a hopeful note.

Sequart #167: Hot Breath of War

2011-08-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I'll be republishing some old reviews of various Sparkplug comics. Today, it's a pair from Trevor Alixopulos. This review originally ran on sequart.com.
**

Trevor Alixopulos struck a nerve with his paranoid capitalist spy thriller Mine Tonight, and he follows that up with war parables in The Hot Breath of War. His style is more eccentric and playful than usual, channeling Jules Feiffer and Elzie Segar into his work. He's always had a loose and expressive style, especially with regard to his character design, and he unleashes that here on pages that are mostly have just one or two panels each. Alixopulos' opening salvo is his invocation of a Thomas Paine quote noting that "He who is the author of war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death". This book is as much about the collective consciousness of a society as it is about war itself, and what happens to its citizens when times become warped beyond comprehension.

There are six separate stories in the book and they are loosely connected in terms of theme. Roughly speaking, the stories break down into stories about soldiers, stories about victims and stories about life during wartime. The two stories about a pair of soldiers, "We Are Defeated" and "Vallodolid 1936", couldn't be more different in terms of tone. The former is political satire as slapstick, as Alixopulos is at his most playful, culminating in a punchline and a plop-take. Body language is one of Alixopulos' greatest strengths: his characters are always slumping, leaning, slouching or falling forward. The exception is "Vallodolid 1936" where a communist soldier fighting during the Spanish Civil War is captured and sent to die before a firing squad. As the chapter nears its inevitable conclusion, the art becomes more realistic and the prisoner stands ramrod straight, defiant in the face of death and meaninglessness.

The two stories about victims, "There's A Monkey On My Back..." & "...and His Breath Is Hot" read more like fairy tales or parables, albeit without a moral. The former story takes a child who resembles Huck Finn (or perhaps Dennis the Menace) and forces him into a mythic journey. The narrator guides the reader through the story and simultaneously deconstructs it. The boy comes to what appears to be a happy end, at least in his own mind, but the doomed expression on the faces of those who save him tell a different story. "...and His Breath Is Hot" mimics the action of a stage drama, as a soldier returning from war meets a girl dragging her dead mother away in a wagon. The formal nature of their dialogue and the give-and-take between the two characters is deliberately stiff and awkward. The reality is that there's really nothing left to say for the girl and the soldier.

The life during wartime stories, "A Journey Into Time" and "Data Recovery" find Alixopulos on his most familiar and firmest ground. These are variations on the sort of urban romances he's been writing for quite some time, only far bleaker. "Data Recovery" finds our protagonist skipping out of his night shift job in a desperate attempt at seeking connection in a world that's become increasingly unreal and meaningless. In an echo of Hurricane Katrina, he finds that the party and subsequent hook-up he gets into are really the last revel before the apocalypse, as the ocean sweeps away his city. As much as the protagonist is looking for connection, he's also looking for something to do, trying to forestall boredom (and hence oblivion) in the face of the chaos he encounters.

"A Journey Into Time" interweaves the stories of three characters, including a carefree anthropomorphic cat. The cat lacks the desperation of the other characters, flowing freely along life's tide to create a balanced existence. The girl in the story is seeking human connection even as she must cut herself off from a relationship that was in danger of wrecking her own sense of narrative. The man in the story is an agent of crass materialism, seeking to possess what is not his and threatening to destroy what he can't have. He possesses an enormous sense of entitlement, wanting what he hasn't earned because he figures it's owed to him somehow. The specter of war looms in this story from two servicemen who run a bar (one horribly injured) to the sense that this feeling of entitlement is what keeps wars running.

The overall effect of this book was somewhat scattershot. It took a few readings to really grab on to it, to not only absorb each story but try to contextualize them in relation to the others. That effort is more than worth it, especially when one understands the way Alixopulous not only is paying tribute to classic cartoonists but also recontextualizing familiar war iconography. Sex is a key undercurrent of the book. In Freudian terms, this book is very much about the eros and thanatos drives, and the way the latter affects and pathologizes the former. Alixopulos' greatest feat was creating a work that is very much a political statement that avoids didacticism, one that examines issues from a variety of viewpoints but that allows the reader some flexibility in playing with these ideas. While it's not quite as crisp a read as Mine Tonight, I think Alixopulos was deliberately trying for a much different effect. His passion for dissecting issues related to global politics has become perfectly integrated with his understanding of how best to depict them in comics form.

Another Way To Help Dylan Williams

2011-08-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

This is a release from retailer and friend of Dylan Williams, Jason Leivian, owner of Floating World Comics in Portland, OR:

"Dylan Williams would never ask any of his friends to do a benefit like this. Not his style.

Sorry Dylan, I know you said no gifts, but your friends love you too much and you're just going to have to accept this present.

A few days ago Tom Spurgeon and others sent out a call for people to support Dylan by buying Sparkplug Comic Books. When I heard how serious the situation was I felt shock and sadness. Felt a little helpless, then I think yesterday we all got the same idea at the same time. Gotta do something to help our friend. Jim Rugg emailed me last night about putting together an art fundraiser show which I'll start organizing this weekend and I'll have more info on Monday.

In the meantime we're going to have a benefit sale at Floating World next Monday and Tuesday, August 29th - 30th.

We're going to donate 100% of our proceeds from those two days to Dylan's medical care (Dylan has no health insurance). We'll have a special section of Sparkplug books for you to check out but the sale includes everything you buy on Monday and Tuesday. "