Koyama: Ben Sears, Alex Schubert

Blobby Boys Two, by Alex Schubert. Frank Santoro really nailed it in this slim collection of Blobby Boys comics, in that Schubert's aesthetic resembles that of a crude video game, with weird bits of debris and unused artifacts hanging flatly in the background. There are certainly cartoons and other comics that have come along since Schubert debuted his strange characters that use the same kind of "attitude" and shock value, but few can match the intelligence and care that Schubert packs into each panel of his comics. Everything in Schubert's comics is flat: the characters, the colors, and certainly everyone's emotions. He rides the line between having his green, alien, stoner hipster title characters ride roughshod over their environment with no repercussions like Evan Dorkin's Milk & Cheese and having them constantly dealing with their feelings like Simon Hanselmann's characters. That was seen in a strip where a big fan of the Blobby Boys band joined the group, only to get terrorized by the actions of the band in a number of hilarious scenes. The more deadpan the strip became, the more Schubert could get away with.

Even better than the Blobby Boys strips was the Fashion Cat epic. This ridiculous character is every fashion model cliche' rolled into one, as he goes from hyper-aggressive and arrogant in one moment to hyper-insecure the next. That whiplash effect is used repeatedly throughout the story, like when he pours out his heart to a flight attendant in one beat and then asks her if she's "trying to suck my cat dick" in the next--and then tells her to get out of his face when she says no. Schubert has a knack for drawing humor from the most entitled and abusive of characters, getting laughs from their over-the-top actions while understanding that their position means that they will never get a real comeuppance. If the Blobby Boys are a sort of nihilistic set of punchlines, then Fashion Cat represents the ways in which outrageous privilege conveys a similar set of reality-warping values, where every whim can be indulged and the possibility of meaning becomes ever more elusive. Schubert's comics are great because they work both as visceral, transgressive gags and deadpan satire.

Night Air, by Ben Sears. This is a breezy little sci-fi/fantasy/humor romp about a young guy named Plus Man and his robot friend. Sears' overall aesthetic is sort of like if Farel Dalrymple's comics were a lot more light-hearted, as they share a similar, subtle palette as well as a vivid imagination. Plotwise, Night Air is as boilerplate as it gets: a young rogue escapes those he swindled at a card game and then gets drawn into trying to find treasure at a castle. He gets overconfident at the castle and winds up imprisoned. While the tropes are all familiar, Sears makes this comic entertaining but slightly warping those stale story elements with gags that aren't quite as self-reflexive as the sort of thing that Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar do in Dungeon, but they're wacky enough to draw laughs and subvert reader expectations. For example, the evil master of the dungeon wanted to capture heroes for the purpose of having enough attractions to open up his castle as a haunted house. There's also the fun of Plus Man actually being kind of dumb and making rash decisions, and encountering allies like a severed floating hand, a shrunken head and a haunted typewriter. Sears clearly doesn't take anything in the book very seriously, with the exception of the actual aesthetics of his story. Sears certainly has the goods with regard to his drawing chops, his page design and character design. I founding myself wanting a more substantive story despite enjoying what I had read, given his obvious talent. At 56 pages (and with some pin-ups in the back to fill up some space), this felt like a teaser of Sears' talent, and I'd love to see him build up a more substantive world with characters who are better defined.

Going Underground Again: Lange, Schubert, Valasco

Misc., by Liz Valasco. This is a mysterious little six-page mini about a bullying incident on a bus involving a kid with a Moon Pie for a head. Valasco's cramped, scribbly style is a good match for the story that begins with the absurd, moves into the tragic and ends on a mystical note. The Moon Pie kid, it is hinted, is some kind of immortal being who nonetheless appears to be a child and who goes to school with other children. Valasco's dialogue is pitch-perfect in the way that she depicts a particular kind of cruelty, one that's almost inquisitive and inviting, and then turns on a dime into fantasy material. It's solid work.

Blobby Boys, by Alex Schubert (Koyama Press). I've been seeing dribs and drabs of this comic in anthologies, minicomics and various other places for quite some time. Even this slim, collected edition feels like yet more prologue to a larger, denser work. I'll repeat what I said in an earlier review: "Schubert is a funny cartoonist whose work seems heavily influenced by Dan Clowes' early Eightball work. There's a large array of gag-oriented strips that take on cultural detritus that feature cartoony, grotesque characters. Schubert also touches on true absurdity in his takedowns of tough post-modernist posing with his title characters, who are literally slime-shaped people who get into all sorts of mischief, including killing members of a rival band after a gig at a club. With characters like Aging Hipster ("Have you heard the new Arcade Fire?") and Punk Dad as well as Schubert's own observations like Paper Blog and a review of a bizarre musician called The Spoiler, there's a tremendous amount of skill and polish on display here for such a young cartoonist." There's additional material in here involving Cyber Surfer and Killer Driller, wherein Schubert invokes some Michael DeForge style "drippy drawing" in a more overtly humorous and deliberately stiff style. There's also an extended strip featuring Art Critic, another Clowesian send-up that aims to generate more laughs than particular satirical points. Indeed, even if many of Schubert's comics have an aesthetic or cultural point of view and make that point in a forceful manner, the joke is still the thing. His peculiar drawing style transcends his influences as they mesh together computer drawings, graffiti, video games, album cover art and other cultural touchstones outside of but related to comics. I could read another 200 pages of gags set in this particular visual world.

Trim #1, by Aaron Lange. Speaking of Clowes, Lange draws his visual inspiration not so much directly from Clowes but from the sort of art that inspired him: advertising art, romance comics, and junk culture. Lange is a smart storyteller and observer whose work is a sort of second cousin to that of Tim Lane's, as he documents and interacts with people who are outsiders, cast out of and away from society. Take "Vietnam Tom", a story wherein Lange listens to the rantings of a Viet Nam veteran that show moments of clarity and sensitivity in-between moments of sheer, ridiculous madness. Lange keeps it light in this story, setting up the anecdotes as a series of gags.What I like best about Lange's comics is that he has an interest in underground culture without necessarily revering it. For example, "When I Grow Up I Wanna Be Like...William S. Burroughs" takes a wrecking ball to the legendary writer's mystique and hilariously catalogs all of the awful things the writer did and had happen to him. Worst of all: "be read by idiots".

There's no question that the highlight of the issue is "Dog and Kitty", an epic autobio story that reads sort of like a Denny Eichhorn story (or maybe Peter Bagge's Stinky Brown), only one where he makes nothing but bad decisions. It's a story too ludicrous to be faked, as it involves Lange and his burgeoning heroin addiction some time back, and the violent, psychopath dealer he hung out with from time to time ("Dog") as well as his crazed, bestiality-loving girlfriend ("Kitty"). It's a story that involves guns, Nazi fetish porn, accepting an offer to let Dog grow pot in Lange's basement, and the horrible numbness to everything that comes along with being a junkie. Trim has the feel of being an exploitation comic, only Lange is exploiting himself and his own observations and experiences for maximum comic effect.

More Minis: Schreiber, Madden, Juresko, Lindo, Brown, Schubert

4090, by Nathan Schreiber.A lot of the comics published by Box Brown's Retrofit Comics have deliberately skewed in the direction of genre, perhaps in emulation of monthly superhero comics. After all, Retrofit is all about bringing back the comics pamphlet, albeit with content and art that's personal instead of being under the auspices of a corporate entity. Schreiber's sci-fi story looks like a cross between a Jack Kirby comic and an Alex Toth comic, with lots of visually dynamic and kinetic art mixed with sketchier, more minimalist linework. The story concerns a future scenario wherein most every attempt at saving humanity from a poisonous atmosphere have failed, and the assembled characters are attempting a desperate end-run around the end of the world while negotiating failed and fractious personal relationships. Interestingly, it was completed for Frank Santoro's drawing correspondence course, so my immediately went to see how the grid was arranged on each page. Sure enough, Schreiber went with a three panel page, with each panel stacked horizontally. The only exceptions were pages with explosions or big reveals, which collapsed the top two panels on each facing page. The story is unremarkable; it's typical character-driven sci-fi stuff. However, Schreiber's visuals make this comic worth a long look. The way he flips between drawings that have a real solidity and life of their own with drawings that are clearly drawings gives the book a real sense of power, as though reality is crumbling or blinking in and out of existence. Schreiber clearly absorbed Santoro's lessons well (even if his page structure is a bit on the nose), and I'll be curious to see his future work.

Sock, by Box Brown. Brown excels at depicting losers, oddballs and sleazebags in their natural habitats in a minimalist yet still grotesque style; it's a sort of mix between Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. Sock follows a young man at a party who's just done a line of cocaine (or possibly crystal meth) who then navigates the people there in an effort to perhaps get laid or at least have a good time. He's the sort of person who can't get out of his own way, a goofball who's part misplaced aggression and part frustrated affection. While nothing very good happens to him, nothing very bad happens either, as a geeky, enormously fat (drawn almost like a snowman, with circles on top of circles) wrestling nerd gives him a ride home after he blacks out. Brown clearly has a lot of affection for these sorts of crude characters who are just trying to find some kind of happiness, even if they lack the kind of emotional self-awareness to ever achieve it. Brown's drawings are just excellent, mastering the Ware/Brunetti school of characters as geometric figures.

The Blobby Boys #1, by Alex Schubert. Schubert is a funny cartoonist whose work seems heavily influenced by Dan Clowes' early Eightball work. There's a large array of gag-oriented strips that take on cultural detritus that feature cartoony, grotesque characters. Schubert also touches on true absurdity in his takedowns of tough post-modernist posing with his title characters, who are literally slime-shaped people who get into all sorts of mischief, including killing members of a rival band after a gig at a club. With characters like Aging Hipster ("Have you heard the new Arcade Fire?") and Punk Dad as well as Schubert's own observations like Paper Blog and a review of a bizarre musician called The Spoiler, there's a tremendous amount of skill and polish on display here for such a young cartoonist. It is only a 12-page minicomic, yet Schubert packs a lot into it, including a letters page that seems to be of dubious (yet amusing) authenticity. Schubert's talent is obvious, as is his comedic timing. At this point in his career, I'm curious to see more of his work so as to see how he's processing his influences and how he chooses to use that talent.

Gray Is Not A Color, by Sally Madden. One of the things I've enjoyed about reading Brown's Retrofit Comics is being introduced to artists whose work is new to me. Madden falls into this category, and I was impressed both by the scribbly yet confident quality of her line as well as how carefully she considered each of the vignettes in this autobio comic. It's about the time she spent as a teenager working at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which is a museum of medical oddities. The anecdotes tend to fall into three categories: stories about weird things encountered in the museum (shrunken heads, baby skulls, assorted creepy medical equipment, bloody outfits given as donations, etc), personal anecdotes about Madden, and anecdotes about her bosses. Of the three, I enjoyed the stories about her eccentric bosses the most because of Madden's clear affection for them. Madden's own self-caricature is a winner, with her hair pulled up tight in a bun and her jaw drawn squarely. This is a fine exampled of what I like to call mediated autobio: true life stories that focus in sharply on one particular aspect of life so as to shed light on the rest of one's story, even if that focus leaves out certain details. The artist reveals oneself by what one chooses not to talk about as much as what they do choose to talk about. In Madden's case, she's stingy with her own personal details but reveals much about herself in the way she chose to dress and the ways in which this environment was so nurturing and encouraging for her. She really stepped up to the task of providing an entertaining story in the Retrofit format.

Bad Breath Comics #5, by Josh Juresko. I'm still not sure what to make of Juresko's stiff art and homages to cheesy horror comics, but I find myself fascinated by his comics. They're a mix of EC-style creaky moral plays, non-sequiturs and flat-out anti-humor. Take "A Favor To Ask". It's about a kid who's clearly on the autism/Asperger's spectrum who buys a bunch of candy bars and gives them to some fratty guys at his school. Of course, he demands the wrappers back after they eat the candy. It's a bizarre story that goes nowhere, except that it heightens a maximum of social awkwardness and then stretches it out over several pages. The small "Dumbfuck" character is a cross between an early Dan Clowes strip and a Rick Altergott strip. "Atilla The Honeybee" is my favorite bit of glorious weirdness, as a guy in a bee suit happens upon a man relaxing outside and squirts him with a water pistol, saying "'Water' you gonna do about it?" before flying off, laughing maniacally. The strip felt like a random daydream come to life, drawn as soon as the artist thought about it."Haunted House...Spookier Conversation" and "Weekend" both appear to be send-ups of slice-of-life comics, as the former edges into ghost comic territory when the "host" of this comic seen on the inside front cover makes a cameo appearance after listening in on the inane banter of two girls going to a party. The latter is about a woman missing her bus stop and being forced to walk a few blocks.  That's it--not further commentary. I imagine this comic would infuriate a lot of readers, but Juresko never breaks character, as it were, by trying to explain what's going on and why. That's the reader's job, which is really part of the joke.

Super Lobotomy, by Sara Lindo. This is a wordless comic about a young anthropomorphic brain and his mother. He's a lazy sort, despite his mom encouraging him to help her with housework. He gets a "superhero cape" and takes a bus to the big city, where he gets in a variety of misadventures until he's arrested and finally makes himself useful. This is the best comic I've seen from Lindo; she clearly challenged herself both with her choice of drawing subject and her storytelling method. There were times when her wordless storytelling wasn't entirely clear, in part because of being thrust into the genuinely weird world where brains have arms and legs and read pulp magazines. Lindo creates a number of great gags once the brain-boy gets to the city and starts working mischief, but I couldn't help but wish the comic had been a bit more tightly edited to reduce some narrative padding. Lindo's definitely moving in the right direction, as her drawings look confident and her page design is clever. Hopefully, she will continue to push herself and get weirder and punchier in her drawing style and storytelling.

Minis From Across The USA

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.