Andrew Neal's Where The Rent Went

Andrew Neal's evolution as a cartoonist in his Meeting Comics strip has been fascinating to watch. He transformed it from an inchoate series of gag panels to an absurd but fully fleshed-out narrative chock full of complex, layered characters. Of these, Val Cannon became his breakout star, thanks to her give-no-fucks attitude and full possession of her sexuality. One of the fun things in Meeting Comics is when Neal randomly reveals a new fact about one of his characters. With Val, it's that she was the lead singer of a punk band called Titty Blud. 

Neal went down a rabbit hole with Meeting Comics #21: it's a one-and-done story titled "Where The Rent Went," featuring Val in 1996. Couch-surfing in precisely the kind of post-college house familiar to the sort of person still figuring things out after graduation, the story was set in a house party where Val performed. When one of the housemates reported that the envelope containing the rent was missing, the story suddenly turned into a combination of a detective story and a romance/sex saga. 

It's compelling as both. Interviewing the housemates led to a wide array of people with varying motives, which she eliminated one-by-one. Neal is thorough in not cheating with regard to providing clues but doesn't telegraph it, either. It also serves as a kind of origin story for Val as a sexual being, where she becomes aware of how much everyone in her house is into her. Cleverly, Neal solves the story's mystery but leaves the issue on a cliffhanger. 

One of the reasons why Val is so compelling is her character design. Her glasses obscure her eyes, making her seem more opaque and mysterious. Even with a mohawk and a tight leopard-print dress, she retained that air of mystery that was a big part of her attractiveness. Every character in this issue feels very much like an archetype, like long-haired Ricky with six-pack abs or a concert nuisance dubbed Dick-Out Daryl. Neal uses a pretty thick line and a lot of greyscale shading that gives his comics a sludgy feel that fits the overall mood of his work. His character design is highly stylized and wouldn't really work with a lot of cross-hatching. 

VALue Added is a bonus mini that discusses Neal's process. He goes into detail regarding Val's background and how he slowly added to it, changes he made to the script as he expanded the story, and photos back from his days living in a Chapel Hill house not unlike this. Neal also captures a certain feeling of being that age, when rather than feeling the possibilities of youth, one instead feels like life is already passing you by. That it's nearly too late to do something interesting with one's life. It's a suffocating feeling, but Val is the one character who always smoothly navigates it, no matter what. 

Andrew Neal's Meeting Comics

Andrew Neal was the owner of Chapel Hill Comics, one of the best comics stores in a America, for a number of years. When he sold the store, he eventually took a new job, and that job one day inspired him to do a loosely-sketched, four-panel comic about an office meeting that took place during the apocalypse. Just as surely as Charles Schulz's first Peanuts strip ("Charlie Brown...Oh how I hate him!") set the tone for years of work, so too did Neal's wobbly line establish the absurdity and sheer ridiculousness of office life. Also like Schulz, Neal slowly shaped his characters into complex, funny, and memorable personalities with long-running stories. Throughout his run on Meeting Comics, Neal has never deviated from making this a gag strip, even when the jokes are dark and the subject matter is satirical. 

A collection of the first six issues of the minicomic was published by AdHouse, and it unsurprisingly looks great, just like all Chris Pitzer-designed books do. Neal kept it simple, as a squarebound paperback printing each strip chronologically, with plenty of extra material in the back. The strip also appears on Neal's Patreon, in minicomics form (I believe it's up to #19 at the moment), and earlier strips are appearing on Solrad. Neal hustles this strip, and it's easy to understand why: his storytelling is so brisk, his characters' designs are so clever, and his gags so smooth that it approaches the status of compulsively readable.

Upon reaching the end of the collection, I also read issues #8 and 9 (I'm missing #7 and haven't seen #10 and up yet) and a related mini called 320 Shades Of Greg. The first dozen or so strips all have that hastily-sketched, spontaneous feel to them, and they are unpolished as a result. While Neal had been drawing on and off for years, it's obvious that it took a little while for him to grow into Meeting Comics as his first true, long-range project. It takes a little while for archetypes to evolve into characters and for gags to first become recurring gags, and then characters of their own. A good example of that is the HR robot Rob, who began as a gag and then became a regular member of the cast as the ex-boyfriend of Val. (There's a later joke about "on-again, off-again" relationships that's particularly inspired.)

Val is the Snoopy of the series, the wild break-out character. With her trademark hair in a bun and big earrings, it's also interesting that this lead character is a Black woman. The diversity in the strip is pretty casual and woven into the humor. Don is an older gay man, while Thomas is a Black man who has to deal with a lot of shit--but also has a secret identity as the Ribbon Cutter, a superhero who foils the mayor's attempts to cut ribbons at openings. But Val is a fearless, funny, ass-kicker and hedonist. That said, Kevin is often the focus of the strip, as a manager who lives a conflicted double-life as an activist and musician. Even douchey Gil, a management bro, is a fully-realized character. 

The key to the success of the strip is that Neal passes no judgments on these characters. They are most certainly Part of the Problem as managers in a corporation with unstated aims (it's part of the joke that they don't quite know what the business does), but they are also people who need to make money to live. Neal is casual about the company's corruption and evil, because these things are understood. How each person navigates it for their own personal hustle is what makes the strip funny. These characters drink, date, fuck, gossip, and seek out some degree of connection along the way. Even when Jesus shows up as a character and joins the company, it makes sense. That makes side projects like the bizarre and hilarious 320 Shades Of Greg so funny; the story is weird on its own, but the actual punchline is an awesome groaner. 

Neal is funny, and what also helps make the strip compelling is that he can go to a few different wells in any given strip. A punchline might be a pun (there's a gag about an old ska band becoming janitors that made me laugh out loud), a funny image (Val hiding from her mother in a filing cabinet), or a carefully-constructed bit of character humor. The slightly surreal quality of the comic makes it easy for a reader to accept all of this as part of its reality. One gets the sense that the best is yet to come from Neal, both in this strip and future projects. It's certainly been a lot of fun watching him figure it out on the page.