31 Days Of CCS #30: Andy Warner

Andy Warner, along with Josh Kramer, Eleri Mai Harris, Dan Nott, Dan Archer, and a few others, make up a group of CCS grads whose primary interest is in comics journalism. Unsurprisingly, Warner has been a longtime mainstay of The Nib, and he's one of their best contributors. His minicomic, Eruption, is a good example of his Nib work. It's meticulously-researched, thought-provoking, and provides a human angle on everything. This is about the eruption of Mt. Kilauea in Hawai'i a few years back. In his clear, rich detailed drawing style, he gives the reader a sense of what it was like when the volcano erupted, but he also provides information as to the implications and repercussions of the event, both geologically and economically.

On the other hand, Spring Rain, his memoir of being in Beirut in 2005 when a revolution was breaking out, is sprawling, self-indulgent, messy, and raw. As he discusses in the book, he's told a lot of stories about Beirut in the course of his comics career, but he always left out all of the significant personal details. This book integrates a significant mental breakdown he experienced, the fraught relationships he was dealing with, and the extremely tenuous political situation that exploded around him. All at the age of 21.

Writing this kind of book was an all or nothing proposition. After years of holding back, Warner had to discuss everything, no matter how embarrassing or painful it was. It's clear that he was as honest as he possibly could be in telling this story, because he does not make himself a sympathetic character. Indeed, his time in Beirut could be described as a continuous series of bad decisions, starting with breaking up with his girlfriend in America prior to the trip, for no reason other than being apart. He regretted it immediately and talked to her via email when he could, but it was obvious that he had unfinished business there and it gave him a baseline level of misery.

That was balanced against Warner making a number of remarkable friends. Some were natives of Lebanon, while others were from the US like he was. Living abroad, it wasn't surprising that the isolation of this experience would lead to him making such fast friends, and it was clear that they knew that he needed them. They encouraged him to go out instead of stewing alone in his depression. A major subplot of his story was that many of these friends were gay men, which puzzled a few since Warner was ostensibly straight.

That in itself was a key element of the book: Warner coming to terms with his own sexuality and how that related to trauma. An incident from high school where a guy he wanted to be friends with grabbed Warner's crotch against his will confused and traumatized him. That led him to stop trying in a class, and one day the teacher punished him by laying him down on the floor and telling him to hump it. Shame, rage, humiliation--all bottled up. On top of all that, Warner's family had a history of mental illness. All of that subsumed trauma combined with genetic tendencies made Warner a ticking time bomb.

Throw all of that on top of a genuine political uprising that alternated moments of hope and solidarity for the Lebanese with cynical machinations by Syria, the PLO, and America, and you had an almost absurd outward manifestation of the roiling paranoia and despair that Warner felt. Indeed, almost every one of his friends had their own inner struggles. One gay friend took a bunch of pills to kill himself because he knew his parents would never approve of him. As the world became more uncertain, Warner's relationships with his friends grew closer but also more unstable. His next-door neighbor and close friend came on to him despite him having a boyfriend, but Warner agreed to hook up with him several times. He had sex a few times with one of his female friends and both tried to pretend it didn't mean anything until it did. When he tried to get her to hook up with someone else at a party, it was an act that demeaned and hurt her. Of course, the group throwing drugs into the equation did little to calm things down. All that did was accelerate the madness, matching the madness around them.

Warner's own depiction of his breakdown and near-suicide attempt is harrowing. It was unsparing and used the full range of his considerable skill as a draftsman. For weeks, he had heard voices. He had seen threatening faces. The whispers grew louder on that night, and then eventually they passed. It is no coincidence that he had decided to do a story about his high school experience, releasing that trauma a little. The importance of art in Warner's life is one of the big emphases in this book; he never comes out and says it, but it's obvious that art saved his life. It's also clear that writing this book is something he had to do. Everything that happened was too big to wrap his mind around, but he couldn't help but try to do it anyway. Warner tries to give the reader a sense of Beirut and its history, what its people are like, and what it's like to be a student abroad. Then he tries to do this as a completely unreliable narrator in a volatile political situation while on drugs. It never quite coheres, but neither did his experiences. A bunch of horrible and beautiful stuff happened to Warner. He made a number of bad decisions and hurt some people's feelings as a result. He made it through as best as he could, and came clean with regard to trauma and mental illness through his art. If nothing else, he paid a debt to himself and others by being open about what happened to him in Beirut, bridging the gap between journalism and memoir in a graphic, compelling, and expansive manner.

Silver Sprocket: I. Rotman, J Woodall, Io/Dukes/Warner/Fisher

No Gods, No Dungeon Masters, by Io, Rachel Dukes, Andy Warner & Hannah Fisher. Published by Avi Ehrlich, Silver Sprocket has become a publisher at the intersection of punk culture and geek culture. After years of releasing punk records, Ehrlich slowly made the transition to comics, and their most recent line of comics has cemented this. This mini was reprinted from the Subcultures anthology published a couple of years back, polished up a bit and recolored. The story is very much about a genderqueer person deeply steeped in RPG and geek culture who also identifies as an anarchist and part of punk culture. The story involves them going from a D&D session to helping thwart a police crackdown on a squat ("he just started screaming 'cast magic missile' and throwing bottles"), wondering why this cultural intersection didn't seem as natural to others as it did to them. Dukes was a perfect artist to portray this, as a queer person also deeply rooted in geek culture and punk politics. As such, there's a cheery, bright quality to this comic that carries over into the more political aspects of the story, since they are folded into the main character's fantasy life anywya

Girls, by Jenn Woodall. One of the big questions frequently asked by Silver Sprocket is why women (cis and trans), genderqueer folk and people of color aren't more readily accepted in punk/anarchist communities. Ben Passmore's brilliant Your Black Friend takes down the racial aspects of this in a measured, funny and angry way (he richly deserved his Eisner nomination) and Woodall's Girls, a collection of mostly silent images that scream more than a thousand words each, handles sexism. Often, quite literally with a baseball bat. It's a spiritual twin of Hellen Jo's Frontier #2, only with a different kind of aesthetic and purpose. Above all else, this is a comic about agency actively and forcefully expressing themselves in the world  in a variety of ways, from a variety of perspectives and aesthetics. From the young woman vomiting flowers to the weary astronaut on a moon orbiting Saturn, this is one long howl against discrimination, objectification, rape culture, violence against women and the patriarchy in general. It's also very much an affirmative display of women, not just a reaction. Woodall is a talented illustrator who manages to combine fantastical elements with an expressive naturalism. Every woman is vividly brought to life on their own terms, and Woodall emphasizes that despite a common desire to resist and struggle, the ways in which they do that differ for everyone here. There's also a sense of joy to be found in the righteous anger expressed in this comic, as it's a part of claiming that agency.

Siren School, by Isabella Rotman. This is a perfectly executed series of jokes about mansplaining. Rotman takes the sirens of myth and conceptualizes them having to learn modern techniques on how to lure men, as simply sitting on a rock and looking beautiful doesn't cut it anymore. Instead, each of the sirens develops a patter that flatters and encourages men to mansplain to them about cars, video games, Star Wars, fantasy sports and especially allowing men to think that the sirens don't recognize their own beauty and that only men can bring it out of them. The siren wearing glasses and saying that she plays video games, but not real video games, is a hilarious stab at the heart of the heinous "gamer gate" controversy and the whole "fake geek girl" nonsense that is so prevalent in pop culture. Each page is a single panel that continues to build until the inevitable: a siren showing her teeth, getting ready to reel in her prey. The concept of sirens playing to men's fantasies in an entirely different but modern way is a hilarious one, only Rotman tells the story not so much to emphasize the ways men are weak, but rather the way that their egos blind them to reality as they treat women like the weak-willed and ill-informed objects that the sirens pretend to be. It's smart, funny and just the right length at 22 pages.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #19: Andy Warner

Andy Warner isn't shy about calling out his influences. In the case of Warner's clever, frequently funny book Brief Histories Of Everyday Objects, it's Larry Gonick's smart-ass The Cartoon History of the Universe. There are a number of differences, however. The most obvious is the visual approach. Gonick described historical events using a cartoony, exaggerated style that was somewhere between Robert Crumb and Milt Gross. Warner uses a steady, detailed naturalism that has a great deal of clarity thanks to his steady use of a thick line weight, a sparse use of spotting blacks, eschewing hatching and cross-hatching and a strategic use of grayscaling. Unlike Gonick, whose drawings are purposefully funny, even when drawing serious events, Warner draws humor from his writing. He might then exaggerate his drawings to emphasize a joke or a running gag, but the humor there is mostly that something absurd is happening in an otherwise normal scene. The humor is always conceptual.

For the purposes of this book, that approach works just fine. Unlike Gonick, who took on sweeping historical events and reduced them to vignettes, Warner examines a number of common inventions and tells the reader not just how they were made, but the social and historical context in which they arose. In other words, he makes small events big. Limiting himself to four pages per invention, Warner created a formula that makes each entry a perfect length for a quick read. As such, the book can be read straight through or an entry at a time, and Warner has rewards for each reader. For the reader who finishes the book in a single sitting, Warner provides a number of callback gags that accrue throughout the book. One of them is a running list of unfortunate inventors who didn't patent their work and had it stolen out from under them. Another is a character exhortation not to cheat at whatever games were being invented at the time ("I'll bash your head in!"). Then there's the general oddness with regard to Norway and inventions. The strips are still quite intelligible if you're reading out of order or over a long period of time, but they slyly play into one of Warner's themes in the way that exploitation is something that repeats itself.

Warner usually draws political cartoons in the form of comics journalism, and they are rarely about cheerful subjects. As such, it was a little jarring to see him crack wise for a book's worth of interesting trivia subjects. That said, he often turned that sense of humor on racism, sexism, and the exploitation of workers with regard to a number of inventions. For example, there's "Shampoo", which was the story of Sarah Breedlove, who was born just a couple of years after the abolition of slavery. Warner drew on the many tragedies in her life and racism that she encountered as she eventually became the first self-made female millionaire in American history. Warner relates a story of her being asked to pay a higher price at a movie theater because of her race, and she responded by building a huge entertainment complex that catered to African-Americans.

A number of the entries related stories where someone forced into a menial job found better and safer ways to do it. In "Shoes", for example, Afro-Dutch machinist/engineer wound up having to work as an apprentice shoemaker in Philadelphia in the 1870s because of the color of his skin. Shoes were still a luxury item that were made by hand, and he literally gave up his life to find a way of automating the lasting process of shoe construction (attaching the top to the sole), which was the last barrier to mass production and affordability. Years of neglecting his health led to him dying young, just after he finished his invention. Other stories discussed how certain inventions that benefited women (as described in "Sports Bras") had to be invented by women because men had no interest in doing so.

There are stories about inventors selling their patents for a pittance to companies that went on to make millions from their products. While there's a focus on how many of the inventions made life better, the ordinary quality of the most of the inventions allowed Warner to focus on topics like market forces. For some of the women and people of color, it was only their ability to generate money through the marketplace through their sheer ingenuity that lifted them out of poverty and put them on more equal ground. A large number of those inventors tended to put their money back into their community and fight for social causes. Other inventors had to grapple with their inventions being used to put people out of work; Walter Hunt invented the sewing machine but did not patent it once he realized its potential repercussions, but Elias Howe had no such compunctions. Lizzie Magie invented "The Landlord's Game" as a way of demonstrating the negative impact that land monopolies had on rent; it was later twisted around and sold as Monopoly in a way that celebrated monopolies! Warner's humorous approach to all of this is frequently grim and sardonic, as characters break the fourth wall and essentially say "What did you expect?".

While Warner's aim is to educate and inform, he makes sure to pack each four-page story with jokes. Essentially, there's a joke in nearly every other panel, and he jams each page with anywhere between four to eight panels. Another aim of the book is to get the reader to think about how much we take for granted in modern society and to consider what everyday life was like before and after particular inventions. While some inventions, like the paper clip, have a fairly small but relatively positive impact on everyday life, other goods have far darker legacies. Tea is the most prominent example and is an object lesson regarding trade imbalances. When tea made its way from China to England, the English took to it like no one else. The demand for tea was insatiable, so much so that England started to suffer from a perilous trade imbalance, because the Chinese had no interest in any products the English had. They wanted to be paid in silver, which soon put the country in trouble. So the English introduced opium to China and soon got the country hooked. This eventually led to a war, which China lost, leaving that empire a shell of itself for many years and wound up having enormous repercussions down the line. While this is an extreme example, it was one of many ways of Warner getting the audience to consider the consequences that the grinding gears of trade can have, both on everyday life and on history itself. That he is able to do this with a nod, a wink and a grin is what makes this such a satisfying and enjoyable read.

Thirty Days of CCS #30: Irene

In the sixth volume of the premier CCS anthology Irene, editors DW, Dakota McFadzean and Andy Warner continue to bring together established but overlooked talents, up-and-coming cartoonists, and artists from all over the world into one challenging volume. The fact that each of the three editors has a totally different aesthetic (both in terms of the contributors they bring in as well as their own work), yet they somehow work together to create something coherent and disquieting.

Part of that coherency is the use of two different sets of interstitial material. One is a silent narrative from Jai Granofsky, wherein a rabid man running from a rabid tiger is eviscerated, creates a smaller version of himself, is eaten by a penguin, gets the penguin sick and comes out as an ice cube and finally gets put in a drink. It's a funny palate cleanser of a story, as each panel gets one page and plenty of negative space around it so as to create clear divisions between stories. The other recurring feature is a series of one-page strips from Kramer's Ergot veteran Leif Goldberg in crisp, cartoony and silly pencils. Each of the strips is about consumption in some way, be it squirrels collecting nuts, police eating sentient hot dogs after a crash, a robot collecting bananas for a rave or a man pondering a love potion.

Marta Chudolinska's "Genesis" splits neatly into bored aliens working a shitty job and the life they accidentally create on the backwater planet they visit, combining greyscaling with cartoony figures. Carolyn Nowak's "Girl Town" starts off with the premise that three young women started living together after being "kicked out of astronaut school for being too good-looking to be sent into space". Mixing slice-of-life narratives, ritualistic oddness, and painful romantic feelings in an amusing and heartfelt stew, Nowak's confident and sharp line fits both the strange and mundane aspects of the story.

Tillie Walden's "Dreaming" is a completely different aesthetic approach: a naturalistic line that employs an extensive use of negative space surrounding the protagonist's face. It's a series of interlocking nightmares that bleed into each other and daily life, as Walden makes the clever move of not differentiating the visuals from nightmare to nightmare. Lebanese cartoonist Lena Merhej's story mixes a dream-like reverie with abstracted women's bodies that focus on genitalia.

While Irene is certainly anchored by narrative, there are certainly more abstract and non-narrative pieces as well. Natsuko Yoshino's drawings feature swirling human bodies interacting with each other, while Marc Bell's typically loopy drawings are pointedly titled "Not Comics Department". Bell's sly sense of humor is certainly on display here, both in terms of how he titled it and the hilariously daffy internal logic in each drawing. Ben Juers' "Flowerpot Heads" features beautiful, strange figures juxtaposed against each other in a fluid manner. Of course, there's DW himself, whose piece combines his intense pattern work, simple figures and repurposed text.

There are several works that touch on personal reportage and political issues. Nick Cartwright's "Station Life", for example, is a funny and sometimes unsettling account of life in an Antarctic station during both summer and winter. His thin and scratchy pencil drawings in an open-page layout add to the sense of vast whiteness, stillness and isolation, with funny visual interpretations of text leavening the sheer anxiety of life at the South Pole. Warner's own "An Unravelling" encapsulates the idea of "the personal is political" as he relates a story of travel during his stay in Lebanon. With his typical naturalistic style, he drew parallels between old civil wars in Lebanon, the current civil war in Syria (including a town he visited with friends) and the real collateral damage that's been done to his friends who are still there, all while connecting it to his own career and ideas. It's one of his best stories to date. Egyptian artist Shennawy's scribbly and distorted silent story concerns the real human cost of political demagoguery. Ben Passmore's funny "It's Not About You" is about a guy being introduced to a female-appearing person who goes by a they/them pronoun, provoking a paroxysm of anxiety, doubt and resentment that is only resolved in his head when his inner mentor tries to eat him. I love Passmore's sweaty and cartoony line that nonetheless has rock-solid fundamentals.

It's hard to describe McFadzean's own aesthetic sometimes, but "personal and unsettling stories set in isolated locales" comes close. His "Good Find" is a slice-of-life story about two kids looking for stuff in an abandoned (and possibly haunted) house. What goes unexplained is that every character is grotesquely disfigured, with various boils and growths on their bodies. It's meant to throw the reader off-balance, to given them something to think about in addition to the pleasant little escapade they just read. Along the same lines is No Tan Parecidos' "Indian Rope", which is a story about waiting with each character rendered in a distorted and elongated fashion. It's more a fragment than a story, but it adds to the book's atmosphere.

Luke Howard's "You Come To A Strange Town" is the book's best story, and it certainly fits in the McFadzean wing of aesthetics. Drawn using a minimalist and angular style that recalls John Porcellino and Warren Craghead, Howard spins vignette after vignette about a small town and the weird things that happen in it. From the woman who can't get off a swingset to a taxi with no driver to a hotel that traps certain of its guests to the hilarious story of the Ghost Bike (it shouts "Human Blood" while threatening no one at all), Howard nurtures a bunch of disparate gags, images and characters into a single, coherent environmental narrative.

There are also a number of more personal stories. Norwegian cartoonist Froydis Sollid Simonsen's "Siberian Stillness" cleverly transposes an anecdote about life in ancient Siberia with a turbulent relationship. Katie Parrish's "Drink More Water" smartly uses word balloons to describe thoughts gone awry in a relationship with a scrawled, intense line. Lucy Bellwood's "Salt Soap" and Jackie Roche's "Hopes Up" are more conventional slice-of life stories, with the former being about slowly recovering from a bad break-up and the latter about the continual disappointments of being in school. Both employ a smooth, naturalistic line. Sean Knickerbocker's "Killbuck" excerpt shows him at his best: depicting the hopes and fears of young people in small towns who are desperately hoping for something better.

Finally, there's an in-your-face, underground inspired piece by Kevin Uehlein called "Dozens of Cousins", which features anthropomorophic characters doing disgusting things. Uehlein's own sense of self-awareness has him doing meta-jokes about hillbillies that turn into a series of hilarious running gags. It's a scatological romp with brains. It also points out that the editors may have their own tastes, but they've gone out of their way to include as many different approaches to comics (in terms of style and aesthetic as well as making sure it was balanced in terms of gender and had an international bent as well) as possible.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 29: Irene 4, 5

Irene continues to be a consistently well-edited, designed and produced anthology. Each issue is a self-contained and coherent entity, even as certain themes and artists tend to pop up from issue to issue. Editors DW, Dakota McFadzean and Andy Warner are the essence of the anthology, as each brings elements of their own aesthetics and methods to the book, both in terms of the actual stories and the contributors who are selected for each issue. Warner's naturalism, McFadzean's emphasis on open spaces and how they can be haunted (both figuratively and literally) and DW's mark-making weirdness make for a surprisingly even blend, in part because all three show a remarkable amount of flexibility and respect with regard to the points of view of their fellow editors.

Irene 4 features a number of stories that can be called personal, even if they aren't directly autobiographical. For example, Jan Burger's fanciful tale of his child being called forth from his wife's womb by the family cat is a warm and wonderful story about waking up to the demons that keep us distracted from what's important: being creative. Burger's supple line makes it perfect for fantasy stories such as this. Then there are directly autobiographical stories like Georgia Webber's "Access", which is about the injury she suffered that made it hard for her to speak. In this short, she talks about social media and how easy it is for her to get lost in it, because she doesn't have to be conscious of her injury. At the same time, in this story full of cascading windows, she understands that a life filled with nothing but social media is an empty one. Jai Granofsky's "Cauliflower" walks the line between the two, as a series of dream sketches and gags about pizza, what "comics" are and the logic of cauliflower.

Warner's interest in reportage drew in a couple of entries. Emi Gennis is well-known for her interest in unusual deaths, and in "Nyos" she reports, in her typical naturalistic style, of how an eruption of carbon dioxide from a nearby lake killed nearly everyone in an African village. The point she hits on that's interesting is that the mysteriousness of the event made the very few survivors think that the world had ended, and wondered when they left if anyone would be there to see them. Jackie Roche's "Black Boots" takes a micro view of a big event: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. You might know that he was taken to a room across the street; what you might not know is that the room was a boarding room rented to a soldier named William T. Clarke, who later charged admission to his room for morbidly curious onlookers. "A Dream", by Warner & McFadzean, has the feel of reportage, as it's about a woman recalling a dream she had about imprisoning her brother, only to have her situation reversed. It's very much a "tell not show" story, as the artists are more interested in evoking the sense of a story being told then telling that specific story.

DW's presence can certainly be felt as well. He crafted a story surrounding the interstitial characters from a prior issue, "Veronica And The Good Guys" that Warner drew in his mixed cartoony/ naturalistic style, about a rock band being chased by a planet full of "bad guys" hungry for their skins. Amy Lockhart's "Drawings" fit in with DW's aesthetic; this weird mix of stippled, naturalistic anatomy with big foot/big nose qualities warps reader expectations. Carlista Martin's gender-bending, highly detailed drawings tread similar ground but with an entirely different approach. "Generals and Gods" features McFadzean writing and DW drawing a story of possibly misplaced mercy. The Mat Brinkman-inspired line is the only visual approach I could have imagined for this story. "Walk Like You Mean It" combines DW's cut-up text technique with the drawings of Power Paola, and the resulting cute/weird imagery looks like something out of Paper Rodeo.

Finally, the stories that defy categorization. Mazen Kerbaj (almost certainly brought in by Warner) has a story called "Boats", which is a hilarious treatment of boats as anthropomorphic beings that actually hate water. Luke Howard's "Zapruder 313" is about two guys sitting around watching the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy getting killed. It's less a morbid exercise than it is a simple exploration of the idea of how things can be one way one second and then radically different the next. James Hindle's "Yellow Plastic" is Hindle's best-ever story. It's a story about a teen meeting a mysterious girl who appears and disappears suddenly from his life, the sort of person who leaves a mark on a guy even if their interactions were brief. Laura Terry's "The Dark" is a visceral, disturbing story about addiction and self-destruction couched as a fantasy about a shadow creature encouraging such behavior in a woman desperate to get away from it. It's one of her most powerful stories, one that still uses her witty and clear line but subverts it for emotionally devastating effect.

Irene #5 follows a similar path in terms of genre, mark-making, illustration personal stories and reportage. The cast of characters, other than the three editors, is entirely different. "Fire Truck Duck" is by Warner, and it's a touching bit of quite sincere nostalgia regarding how their father used to tell them stories, and how the occasional recording, preserved today, recreates the experience to a degree. Dave Ortega's "como un tren" is a different kind of memoir, one about his family's journey from Mexico to El Paso and religious freedom. The sketchiness of the art reflects the artist's own struggle in telling the story of someone else, of knowing when to invoke creative license and when to stick precisely to the facts.

After that is an incredibly clever cartoon by R.Sikoryak mashing together the long-running Simpsons with the Tyrones of Eugene O'Neill's semiautobiographical play, A Long Day's Journey Into Night. The idea of Homer as James Tyrone (a successful actor pigeonholed into a single role) parallels the notion of the Simpsons becoming cultural icons at the expense of the overall quality of the series. That, and some Bosch-inspired drawings by Emanuel Schongut, provide a palate-cleanser for the longest piece in the book: a story written by the FDZ and drawn by Fouad Mezher called "The Fifth Column". It's a story set in Lebanon, by Lebanese cartoonists (once again, Warner's connections come into play here). It's a story that starts as something personal, then political, and then slowly descends into total horror. That horror is born of reality, of roaming packs of dogs and checkpoints, which makes it all the more chilling.

Following that bit of naturalistically-drawn genre is a bit of mark-making lunacy with DW and Mark Connery. Luke Healy's "Mountain Take Me" is another cornerstone of this issue, one that I've covered elsewhere. After a bit of comedic weirdness from James Stanton and Bailey Sharp (the former in the tradition of underground artists, the latter more like Anders Nilsen), Pat Barrett's "You Are We" is a tremendous bit of sci-fi combined with the possibilities and difficulties surrounding identity. Jon Chad's "Compleet Pwner" is a hilarious, nasty and deliciously drawn fine-line extravaganza featuring monsters, spaceships and the moon. In other words, all the things he does well. DW follows these two genre stories with something that's purely him: mark-making and pattern-creation in the service of exploring consciousness through the use of repurposed text.

Finally, Dan Rinylo and McFadzean contribute two stories that dwell on ontological concerns. For Rinylo, it's being given an absurd and meaningless tour of the world by a higher being, who shows him his total insignificance in the face of things when he complains about the stupid stuff he's being show. For McFadzean, it's a memory of using clay to create creatures called Gnoshlox; it's a child's magical realist memory that supersedes anything that came earlier. In both cases, pondering meaning is fruitless, even though it's something we either can't resist trying or can't stop from entering our minds. McFadzean's stories always linger in one's mind when he talks about the lives of children, not unlike an Eleanor Davis. That's why it's so exciting to see him collaborate with like minds as well as creators he respects who work in an entirely different style; it's clear that editing Irene has stretched all three of the editors.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 16: Andy Warner

Andy Warner is an interesting CCS grad in that he has effortlessly bridged the gap between Applied Cartooning in the form of research & reportage and his own personal, slice-of-life work .The Palace Of Ashes is a perfect example of long-form reportage that one would probably call a "feature" if it appeared in a newspaper. It's a thorough, interview-driven account of how an old San Francisco creamatorium called the Columbarium has been slowly restored by a single man named Emmitt Watson. Warner has the gift of being a solid naturalistic cartoonist, capable of conveying tiny but crucial details regarding a subject. He's not quite at Joe Sacco level (who is?), but he's definitely in that style shared by the likes of Josh Neufeld. Solid, utilitarian cartooning that gets at the details and the facts while telling someone's story. And this comic is less about the building than it is one man's life's work, a work he knows he will not complete. It's a simple, beautiful story.

Warner treats his fictional characters with the same degree of care and compassion, even if their paths are a little more crooked and winding. When We Were Kids, a collection of short stories originally published in the first three issues of the anthology Irene, has a remarkable sense of continuity both in terms of theme and in style. Each of them is about an intimate but not sexual relationship and the ways in which that relationship takes on a special resonance due to circumstances. In "Come Into My Heart", for example, a pair of teens drop acid and walk to the sand dunes. The unnamed boy confesses to his friend, an unnamed girl, that his drama teacher made him perform a sexual act as punishment for not finishing an assignment. The confession comes as the boy is at the same time keeping both his friend and the world at arm's length, only to symbolically let her in when they have to huddle in the wind in order to light a cigarette. It's a clear but nicely crafted metaphor, one that's not belabored.

The same goes for "Champions", about a young boy's adoration of his live-wire older brother. Living in a house with an abusive stepfather, he sees in his older brother's reckless disregard for any kind of authority or sense a sort of heroic virtue. As his drunk brother prepares to go on a snowmobile race, Warner doesn't have to tell the reader the outcome of the race for the message to be clear: this is a doomed situation. Finally, "Boat Life" is the gentlest of the three stories. It's about a pair of friends in a classic Enid/Becky (from Ghost World) situation: one of them is going off the college and the other is staying home. How they carefully negotiate their future (through the language of put-downs and trash talking) is grafted to the graveyard setting, where the duo is getting high and dodging the creepy caretaker. While still firmly ensconced in their old paradigm of friendship, they take small, tentative steps to create a new one. Every one of these stories is about finding one's role, all of them to varying degrees of success. Warner's stories are polished without being overly slick and always try to get at the essential humanity behind every character.

Thirty Days of CCS #29: Irene 3

Irene is currently the best of all the CCS-related anthologies. The editorial crew of Andy Warner, DW and Dakota McFadzean is not only a talented group in their own right as artists, they also seem to have a great sense of how to bring each of their aesthetic approaches to bear in the anthology in a manner that produces a cohesive final product instead of a bunch of stories that clash. For example, DW's scribble aesthetic and repurposing of text for decorative reasons is in line with the old Fort Thunder group, so it only makes sense that Leif Goldberg should contribute a story here. In "Newton's Mist", we see a figure battling against the forces of physics in a magical forest; though just two pages, the images are primitive and powerful. DW himself takes on what I like to call the Mat Brinkman spot in the anthology: creating a series of related interstitial images. In this case, it's scrawled, funny images of a band called "Veronica and the Good Guys". Some of the drawings are tiny and fine, while others are blown way up in order to give the reader a sense of the thickness of the line. Indeed, the essence of DW's drawings is to constantly remind readers that they are drawings, that they're made out of ink.

Andy Warner's influence can be felt with the presence of Barack Rima, a Libyan cartoonist and filmmaker whose dream comic "Nap Before Noon" is a fascinating trip not only through his own subconscious, but through the cultural and political landscape of Libya. The shadowy, hand-constructed look of each page certainly bears the mark of his cinematic influence, yet he's interested in the single, striking image above all else on page after page. This story held down the middle portion of the book, and it served as a fascinating change of pace, resembling nothing else in the book. Warner's "Boatlife", by contrast, is a slice-of-life story told in his typical naturalistic style. Relating two teenage girls hanging out in a cemetery, it's the sort of "nothing happens" story that's nonetheless full of crucial emotional beats and events that create lasting memories.

McFadzean's closest aesthetic compatriot in this comic is Sophie Goldstein, whose "Edna II" I reviewed here. Like McFadzean, Goldstein's storytelling is crisp, clean and assured, which allows her to go off on flights of fancy or use cartoony figures in a story that is otherwise naturalistically told. McFadzean drew DW's story "Ten Minutes' Break", a fascinating and funny workplace strip about three creatures essentially dealing with creation myths and alien civilizations. However, it's entirely from the point of view of working stiffs taking a break from their otherwise endless labors. McFadzean's every bit as good drawing fantastic characters and weird scenery as he is drawing average people and the plains of Saskatchewan.

Certainly, there are creators present here who cross lines. Alabaster's "Gin" combines the fanciful, beautiful and cartoony art with a story that's emotionally painful and raw, all wrapped in a quirky, decoratively interesting package. Jess Worby's "The Sasquatch In Brooklyn" has a heavily-shaded, ramshackle aesthetic that fits right in with DW, but it's easy to see how its humor and characterizations fit in with the other editors. The same is true for Mark Connery's "Whots It Mean", bringing more of that ragged art that brings a bawdy sense of humor to the proceedings. I would guess that the origin of this fused editorial aesthetic is that the CCS experience is one that encourages artists to understand and appreciate the work of artists whose approaches are radically different from their own. I would also guess that the editors deliberately sought out work that combined different aspects of their own aesthetic interests.

The stories by Luke Howard and Ben Horak are other good examples of this. Howard's "Dance Yourself To Death" is perhaps his most original, best-realized story to date. Using a slightly flat line and character design style, this story of the dark ways in which artists gain inspiration has a powerful payoff at the story's climax and then another shock in its denouement. In an anthology filled with downbeat and often disturbing stories, it was the perfect capper for the book. Horak's "What're Fiends For?" is a more broadly comic story, but no less dark than Howard's work. It's the ultimate example of a well-meaning but utterly destructive friend. Horak impressively manages to up the ante of menace in a rhythm not unlike that of a Looney Tunes cartoon, only with a viscerally disturbing ending.

It's likely that Kramer's Ergot and perhaps Non are significant influences on Irene. Both of those anthologies were fueled in part by Fort Thunder's influence and contributors; Goldberg himself is a KE alumnus, of course. It's certainly not a straight copy, but rather an influence in the sense that the editors wanted certain kinds of aesthetic approaches to comics to be present in the anthology, and once selected, they wanted those artists to have total freedom. For example, Dan Rinylo's "Find 'Sleepy'" is less a story than a reader activity, as they must find the one "sleepy" ghost on page after page of other ghosts. Cleverly, the pages are designed to make the reader's eye explore a space in much the same way a Brian Ralph or Brian Chippendale story might, only it could easily appear in Highlights or the old Nickelodeon magazines as well. Irene continues to be an anthology that's greater than the sum of its parts, a statement that's all the more impressive when one considers how individually excellent many of the stories are.

Thirty Days of CCS #19: Adam Whittier, Josh Kramer, Andy Warner

Josh Kramer's fifth issue of his comics journalism comic The Cartoon Picayune continues its steady improvement, thanks in part to the participation of two polished artists known for their powers of observation and history. Andy Warner's "Sex Workers of the World, Unite!" is an even-handed history of the sex worker movement that was born in San Francisco. It's a movement designed to gain rights and legal protections for all classes of sex worker, from stripper to porn actress to prostitute. Warner did the legwork of getting interviews from a variety of different points of view and key members of the movement. Starting from a place of at least being sympathetic to the plight of sex workers led Warner to making a number of fine distinctions in the internal conflicts within the movement, which I found fascinating. As always, Warner's naturalistic style is clear and bold, with an emphasis on thick lines and spotting blacks as a way of drawing in the reader's attention, and a slightly cartoony style used for character design.

The other major story in this issue, Emi Gennis' "The Radium Girls", fits into her interests by being about unfortunate and unusual deaths but also snugly fits into this issue by unearthing the facts regarding the radium poisoning of female factory workers and the astounding callousness with which the Radium Dial Company treated these young women. Radium poisoning, which was in fact encouraged by the factory owners when they told the workers to swirl the radium-laced paintbushes in their mouths, is an especially painful way to die, but the company sandbagged and died until the end. Gennis' elegant, clear and decorative style frequently used an open layout and distinctive lettering, making it an appropriate pairing with Warner's piece. Kramer's own "Feeding the Meter" is much sketchier and lighter by contrast, which makes sense for this short story about a food truck owner's struggle to stay solvent in the face of onerous new laws. Erik Thurman's "Seoul Grind" is about the explosive coffee shop market in South Korea, how shops struggled to find out the best ways to make coffee and how shops manage to survive in the face of stiff competition. It's less a story than an interesting anecdote, one suited for just a couple of pages. This issue really seems to get it just right, mixing past and present while juxtaposing certain commonalities between both while getting at issues with some resonance.

Andy Warner's The Complete Brief Histories of Everyday Objects is a skillfully assembled mini that uses a consistent design model to deliver interesting stories about the origins of common objects. He manages to find intrigue in objects like ballpoint pens (which initially sold for an outrageous $12 apiece as part of a speculative demand bubble), cinnamon sticks (which were protected and monopolized by Arabs for nearly 3000 years thanks to a monster story) and the safety pin (created in a rush to settle a debt). I especially liked his piece about the bath tub, which is less about the tub and more about legendary writer H.L. Mencken gleefully spreading misinformation about its origins. This makes him the father of fake trivia. Warner then ends each two-page piece with bonus "fun facts", cramming additional research into one row and creating punchlines with single panel commentary. 

Adam Whittier's Phoenix: The Ford Pinto Story, is a tirelessly researched history of the Ford Motor Company's disastrous and dangerous Pinto model that was responsible for several deaths due to the way its rare gas tank leaked and exploded, even at slow speeds. Whittier documents the culture of auto makers at the time, which was that "safety doesn't sell", which led to the Pinto being rushed into production to compete with foreign competitors. The comic directly quotes the many outrageous things said and done by Ford executives, led by Lee Iacocca. Whittier makes some interesting story choices by going with a bright, whimsical drawing style as well as the decision to make "Phoenix", the Pinto prototype, have anthropomorphic qualities. In the context of the story and Whittier's rendering choices and (especially) color choices, having Phoenix talk made sense. In a story with events that were hard to believe (balancing profit over human lives), the fantasy element of Phoenix (as well as the prototype Edsel that came around telling Phoenix the real story) fit right in with larger-than-life characters like Ford and Iacocca. Balancing that fancy with direct quotes and stringently-researched hard numbers gives Phoenix the unusual distinction of being a critical documentation of corporate culture that's also entertaining. Whittier also touches on the idea that trying to recreate historical scenes always adds a fictive, narrative element; putting a talking car in there simply heightens that for the reader and allows Whittier to create a sort of Candide-like character whose fate is controlled by others.

Whittier's A Most Unfortunate Face is a smaller minicomic that shows off his facility for creating grotesque character designs, something that plays into Phoenix on a lesser scale. Whittier's exaggeration is limited to that character design, because he's careful not to overstate his case by using erroneous information that overinflated the number of people who had died in Pintos. Phoenix isn't Whittier's attempt at doing a Ralph Nader-esque Unsafe At Any Speed screed. Indeed, he is even-handed and understanding of certain aspects of corporate logic, especially when it's driven by consumer demand for cheaper products that don't sacrifice certain luxury add-ons. He condemns Ford and Iacocca for the lengths they went to in ignoring the pleas of their safety engineers and their sheer arrogance in how they thought a jury would never punish Ford. Whittier also notes how this trial was the flashpoint for making safety something that consumers would start to demand. This is a solid piece of historical writing, one backed up by primary documents and that has a carefully considered point of view that focuses on historical context as well as the events themselves.

CCS-Powered Anthologies: Irene 2 and Sundays 5

Irene #2, edited by Andy Warner, dw and Dakota McFadzean. This is another strong entry from this mostly-group of grads from the Center for Cartoon Studies. I like the push-and-pull in its sensibilities with Warner (a naturalistic storyteller), McFadzean (an artist with a delicate but cartoony line) and dw (who specializes in abstractions, patterns and text appropriations), leading to a book that has a bleakly humorous streak. Take McFadzean's "Standing Water", for example. This one features a young boy making his way around his neighborhood wearing a mask, only the entire area is under water. Friends, family and pets float limply in the water, and his attempts at interacting with the world reveal a hidden well of meanings that have lost all their significance in the wake of what is essentially the end of the world. What seem to be acts of revenge or cruelty lose their meaning, leading him to a sense of sad resignation in a totally absurd situation.

Both sets of "Drawings" from dw serve to accent and set off the more conventional narratives, sounding a discordant and occasionally confrontational note in the way they use text and challenge the eye with their psychedelic patterns. After his first set of drawings come three dark stories in a row: Beth Hetland's "1838g", Warner's "Champions" and Sean K's "Ghosts". The first story is about the steady drumbeat of a nightmare that stops and starts. Is the woman in this story pregnant and afraid, imagining her baby to be a hideous parasite? Is she giving birth in the end or having an abortion? Warner's story is from the point of view of a young teen living in the rebellious glow of his older brother, following him as he storms away from his step-father and gets into a drunken snowmobile race that can only have tragic consequences. That Warner has the young narrator filled with nothing but hope makes its subtext all the more sad. "Ghosts" is shockingly straightforward: a young couple enters their house, douse themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire. The causes of their despair are never mentioned; the drawing of a pentagram on the floor simply indicates that they had run out of options.

I was unfamiliar with Omar Khouri's work before seeing it in Irene, but his smudged, brushy story about a young man in Lebanon refusing to accept his father's legacy as a political strongman was funny and fascinating. The story is filled with scathing political satire that reflects both the sense of hope and cynicism inherent in the "Arab Spring" of the past few years, getting across the sense that the reins of power are loose enough for protest to make a difference but leaving a lingering sense of doubt that any change could be lasting or real. The back half of the comic is slightly less bleak, as Sophie Yanow's account of being escorted by a kind African cabbie in Paris consists entirely of the view from the cab, with no human figures present at all. Marc Bell's rubbery drawings and comic eye-pops make for a nice contrast to dw's drawings. Jonah McFadzean's "Monster Soup" actually works to reduce a sense of active dread with a child's logic and problem-solving. Finally, Bailey Sharp's story about being a poor cartoonist working in an art gallery and being confronted by a high-rolling elite asshole ends the book on a much-needed laugh. Her grotesque approach and willingness to take the piss out of everyone (artists, punks, the rich) leads to a number of very funny plot and character twists, and her critiques of the art world are as dead-on as her self-critiques. The book is well-edited and nicely designed, and it has the potential to be an impressive series if the editors decide to do future volumes.

Sundays #5, edited by Chuck Forsman, Sean Ford, Alex Kim, Joseph Lambert and Melissa Mendes. The Sundays anthology debuted years ago at the MOCCA festival and caused a big stir, thanks to its production values, ambitiousness and unusual format. This was especially the case because it came from a group of total unknowns, and it acted as a shot across the bow from CCS that its cartoonists were worthy of attention. The third and fourth volumes were absolutely outstanding, with the third coming in an innovative three minis in way package and the fourth simply loaded with cutting-edge cartoonists. The fifth volume, released a year ago, is filled with strong work but doesn't hold together like past volumes. Simply put, I'm not sure every participating artist had the same commitment to publish their best work here as they had in the past.

For example, editor Chuck Forsman didn't even contribute a comic--just a two page illustration. Max de Radigues seemed to have contributed a few pages from his Moose comic. The first four pieces in the book took up a lot of room but looked ill-suited for a black & white anthology. The lack of a clear link or theme also made these stories a slog; I eventually gathered that a loose theme may have been "life and death" or more specifically the line between the two. Damien Jay's "leaf writing" comic was fascinating as an experiment in immersive comics making, but once again it seemed to cry out for color to add greater clarity. Some of its pages were very difficult to read.

Things picked up in a stretch that included a grim but hopeful story by Melissa Mendes and a James Hindle story that popped off the page thanks to its cartoony clarity. Joseph Lambert stepped up with one of his best-ever short stories about a fight between two best friends. No one expresses sheer rage quite like Lambert does, and though its protagonist winds up in hell, she makes things very unpleasant for the Devil. Michael DeForge contributes just a couple of pages, but he manages to cram in a lot of story, as a hunter brings back a stray animal from the forest for his family to eat. It's just that the animal is a human child, eaten entirely with nonchalance. Alex Kim's young girl bringing animal heads to her "papa" in the forest is chilling and enigmatic; even if this is just an excerpt.

John Brodowski's "Wolf Eyes" is a typically hilarious piece that follows his exceptionally-rendered heavy metal fantasies out into the desert, as a sax player's furious solo and the cries of a wolf become one. The final image, of his sports car driving off into a sunrise that features the image of a woman's legs and ass boldly astride mountains, is typical of the wonderful ridiculousness of his comics. The highlights of the final third of the book include Warren Craghead's fascinating drawings of what seems to be a tidal pool over the span of a few hours, his drawings directing the reader's eye by numbering lines as he tries to depict simultaneity; his comics are as much about time in a single image as they are about place or object. Jeff Lok's chicken comics are typically alarming in their comedic structure, as his use of static images clashes in an interesting manner with the cartoony nature of his stories. Colleen Frakes' story about a woman getting food from the ocean was later expanded upon in her own mini, but it fits snugly here. Finally, Alexis Frederick-Frost's short about balloonists encountering a giant bird was typically elegant, horrifying, funny and delightfully-rendered. Sundays 5 is not a bad anthology. At least 2/3 of the work is good-to-excellent. It's just not quite as groundbreaking or sharp as its most recent predecessors, which to be fair is a tough standard to live up to. Given that its editors are busier than ever with their own projects, I'll be curious to see if they continue to publish the anthology.