Minis: Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, Simon Hanselmann, Anna Bongiovanni

Phylum, by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell. Valero-O'Connell went all-out with regard to the production values of this small mini. From the silvery, translucent cover stock, to the use of spot pinks to the micro-mini comic inserted in the middle of this comic, this mini is a triumph of the combination of formal elements, decorative elements and content. The story is simple; familiar, even. A young woman finds a mysterious plant that felt warm in her hands when she pulled it up. She cooked it and ate it alone, in the absence of her partner (whose absence throughout much of the story is a key plot element). After she ate it came the micro-mini in the middle, with the pink image of a tiny plant creature slowly growing on black page after black page. The expected plot twist one would expect would be a sinister one, where the plant would be evil, control her, make her give birth to it, etc. Instead, the plant is happy to live inside of her, and she winds up being happy having the plant inside of her, pleasantly singing.

Valero-O'Connell uses an arsenal of interesting formal approaches. First, her character design is quite different than in her other comics; it's a clear-line style that emphasizes negative space around it on its single panel-per-page layouts. It's somewhere between Eleanor Davis and Megan Kelso, but her own naturalistic style still comes through in the way she draws everything else. The spot colors draw in the eye without being intrusive; they add a level of emotional shading. She also uses sous rature in her text, crossing out lines but leaving them visible to indicate something thought but daring to share it. The mini in the middle is a nice touch, confirming the obvious turn in the story while adding a layer of ambiguity to the proceedings. My favorite part of the comic is the way that the real narrative is about the slowly fracturing nature of the relationship, that decay paralleling the beneficent nature of the new growth inside of her.

Landscape, by Simon Hanselmann. Hanselmann told me that all of his stories are autobiographical, thinly disguised by his appropriated use of children's characters as well as a variety of anthropomorphic characters. Most of his Truth Zone comics do not tend to be collected later on, and I'm guessing that he uses this format specifically to go even darker than normal as well as go meta with regard to comics and the comics industry. In other words, it's the opposite of being truthful about his own experiences and instead functions as a take-no-prisoners send-up of all sorts of things. Hanselmann opens with nonsensical and paranoid musings about art from the odious but still oddly-sympathetic Werewolf Jones as well as body image and scatological jokes involving Megg the Witch, The deranged highlight of the comic is the truly unsettling "Mysterious Skin". The sensation of reading this comic was like simultaneously being tickled into hysterical laughter and given painful electrical shocks. Using a 12-panel grid, Hanselman depicts Jones photographing his sons. He's done plenty of weird things with his young kids, but it took a few beats to recognize that he was taking nude, pornographic photos of them and then rewarded them with cartoons and junk food. He then uploaded the photos to Owl's computer and called the police, and was thrown in with the child molesters. The uncomfortable genius of this story is that Hanselmann doesn't let the reader get away with treating this as absurd; he makes it very real and frightening, especially in terms of Owl's reactions when he gets out of jail. This was all done out of revenge for Owl writing a bad review of Jones' zine on the old Hooded Utilitarian website ("It was fair!"). This was by far the most extreme prank Jones has ever pulled, and Hanselmann's restraint in the face of it by dutifully executing the joke as one would expect was remarkable.

There are other inside baseball references, including Megg ripping up an Owl mini devoted to Warhammer with some all-star contributors, rightfully critiquing him for making something so empty. "Funded" is a parody of pop-up comics schools that Jones somehow gets money for, shoots at The Paris Review's offices (in a sort of Charlie Hebdo shooting parody), and gets a young woman to commit suicide for biting Aidan Koch's art. (Truly a joke only a handful of people would get.) It ends with his school being raided at sea by the feds, the Navy and "the guys from NoBrow", as an imprisoned Jones transcends his incarcerated state by drawing panels with his own shit on the wall and having his spirit join god while ejaculating. Fans of Hanselmann's more outrageous side will need to track this down, especially because of the remarkable control he has over his line. The utterly deadpan (and downright dead) quality of his characters is key to making the jokes land as hard as they do, with the earnestness of Owl making him the effective straight man for everyone else.

The Mother Fuckin' Grease Bats, Sexxx Can Suck! and Uncompromising Petty Girlfriend, by Anna Bongiovanni. Bongiovanni first came to my attention with her more serious comics, but they're a skilled humorist and observational cartoonist as well. Their Grease Bats comics (regularly posted on autostraddle.com) feature queer characters Scout and Andy, best friends who maneuver their way through relationships, drunken revelry, dealing with straight culture, and holding each other accountable as only best friends can. Scout's a romantic and Andy's a cad, and Bongiovanni calls out the behavior of both, as this mini features the repercussions of Andy sleeping with women and then ghosting on them, and Andy confronts Scout on holding on too long to old relationships. Bongiovanni uses an unusual format, with three panels on top and two panels on the bottom of each page. The figures are loose and expressive, emphasizing body language and facial expressions above all else. Bongiovanni is interesting in that they address socio-political topics in the context of telling stories about these two characters, touching on ideas like identity and pronouns, queer misogyny, consent, the hegemony of straight culture and personal responsibility. They accomplish this in the context of the story and the emotional lives of the characters themselves, cracking jokes while making their points. It's the 21st century successor of Alison Bechdel's old Dykes To Watch Out For strip.

Uncompromising Petty Girlfriend is a Riso zine whose title describes its contents perfectly. It's told from the point of view of a woman who is not just self-centered and narcissistic, but appears to be the top in a BDSM relationship that involves significant psychological components. The restraint Bongiovanni uses in their single panel-per-page drawings only adds to the psychological and sexual tension of the comic. Sexxx Can Suck! is the opposite; it's an autobio zine talking about bad (consensual) sexual experiences, ranging from lost tampons, something called "Cock Rocks" that wound up a gooey mess, and the humiliation of being told that one tastes bad. Where the comic started to get real was when Bongiovanni discussed a relationship where they thought her partner was cheating on them, so their reaction was to cheat on their partner in return. Things only got worse from there, with Bongiovanni not trying to justify any of it in retrospect. Even in a situation as serious as that, Bongiovanni's comic timing, especially in the way they use exaggerated facial expressions, made the entire zine funny, even if that humor was at their expense.

2dcloud: Christopher Adams, Minis from Bongiovanni, Breutzman, Donsker, Miles

Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. This column closes out my look at some releases over the past couple of years. 

Strong Eye Contact, by Christopher Adams. One of 2dcloud's virtues as a publisher is their willingness to give emerging artists a platform for unusual and nonintuitive work. Christopher Adams is a perfect example of this, as his work is immersive in a way that's unusual. Instead of demanding that the reader allow a complex page with little negative space to slowly reveal itself to them like many immersive artists, Adams instead offers up variations on narrative that contain a great deal of negative space but focus on quotidian moments and an emotional journey without the anchor of dialogue or narrative captions. Adams walks the line of providing a clear emotional through-line while leaving much of the narrative itself for the reader to decipher. The book is about a stand-up comedian who happens to be African-American; both are interesting choices because Adams seems to be going out of his way to write about someone whose experience is similar to his in some ways and radically different in others. The unnamed comedian is a different race than Adams and specializes in an art that is almost entirely reliant on audience reaction for success. The book's title hints that the story is very much about performance, and the titular "strong eye contact" is a key to a comedian connecting to and engaging with their audience.

The first part of the book alternates between quotidian events in the man's life and abstract patterns that resemble landscapes or wave patterns. The fact that he's a stand-up comic makes the veracity of these events fluid, as some of them seem to be either fodder for stand-up material or Adams' way of getting across a stand-up storytelling comedian. There's one bit where he's in an amusement park with a woman and what appears to be her son, and he winds up accidentally kicking the kid in the face while wearing roller skates. A cameraman in the last panel casts the reality of that sequence into doubt; was this for a TV show? Are the abstract pages reflective of his "real" thought processes, as opposed to the calculated way in which comedy works?

The second section is in scrawled crayon and tells a single story. Compared to the crisp and sharp drawing and coloring of the first section, the second is deliberately jarring as it depicts the comedian playing mini-golf, getting locked out of his car, dealing with the cops and eventually making it home. Adams piles woe after woe on his protagonist, with the use of crayon simplifying the narrative and making it plainer for the reader. The final section is heavily cross-hatched to an almost abstract idea, as the patterns the cross-hatching creates are recognizable as drawings but also have their own plastic identity as a series of interlocking shapes. The section is not so much a narrative as it is a series of stills (photographs? post cards?) that tell a fractured story of travel and adventure. It's yet one level further removed from the reader, as the "strong eye contact" is nonexistent in this section, even if on a meta level it's still about performance. There's a short interview mini that goes with the book, as then co-publisher Justin Skarhus interviews Adams and the two grapple with the book's content and how to promote it. 

Yule Log, by Christopher Adams. Adams goes in a completely different direction here, emphasizing a lush  pencil line in this story about a man hired to be Santa Claus aboard an airplane that then crashes in the mountains. The book is very much about conspicuous and crass consumption, as the private jet features champagne being popped and every luxury imaginable. Adams then uses several pages to get across the awesome and indifferent power of nature, as the man manages to survive the wreck, calling out the names of loved ones (presumably his children) as he crawls through the snow. He passes out when he sees the Northern Lights, only to wake up tied to a Christmas tree that's being towed by a snowmobile. Santa's work is never done, as he sees a small shack and two kids jumping up and down in the distance. The cover, featuring masking tape over rolls of toilet paper, is hilarious, getting at the essence of the conflation of holidays (and human interaction and closeness) and commerce. Adams' pencil work here is unbelievably detailed but lively, as he emphasizes visually arresting events though he notably leaves out the visceral aspects of the crash itself.

The 2dcloud minis are a fascinating mixed bag. How It Happened is an autobio comic by Jason T. Miles that details the first time he went to Fantagraphics co-publisher Eric Reynolds' house. Reynolds is never mentioned by name, but Miles drops enough hints to make it pretty obvious. I've always loved Miles' use of negative space and giving shadows a visceral quality. Miles goes after nervous energy in this comic, as he's trying to stay cool in meeting someone that he clearly admires. The use of text as part of the drawing adds to the slightly claustrophobic nature of the story, which has a funny punchline when he reads a truly disgusting comic that Reynolds did.

Adams' Easter Island features the artist engaging in comics-as-poetry, as he constructs comics "sculptures" on each page, with text horizontally bifurcating the text on each row. Each image is responsive to the nature of being split in half, with each page documenting a memorable moment in time. Mayme Donsker's The Arborist's companion uses single-page photos to create a narrative of a person interacting with a tree: looking at it, sawing a branch off, and essentially doing other things to ponder or prune it. Like many 2dcloud works, it asks the reader to consider wordless art and contextualize it.

Nicholas Breutzman's Harvest is a viscerally drawn, cartoony account of some ranchers gathering calves' testicles and bringing them to a local bar and grill. A bunch of oilmen come in and start a fight (a big mistake), and things only come to a close when the "Rocky Mountain Oysters" are fried up and ready. It's a hilarious, rollicking read that sees Breutzman really cutting loose on the page. Bongiovanni's Cavities and Crevices is visceral in another way, as it addresses the idea of penetration, consent and rape, beginning with a witch who "is lustful but not young". It's about the power of naming things and power dynamics in general. It's unsettling and powerful, and Bongiovanni's spare, scratchy art burns itself into the reader's mind.

Minicomics: Burkert/Rhodes, Paine, Bongiovanni, R.Jordan, Van Sciver

Too Many Nitrous and 2 Many Nitrous, by Billy Burkert and Samuel Rhodes. These sillly and entertaining comics are very loosely based on the silly and entertaining Fast and the Furious movies. The Vin Diesel character is reimagined as a former fat kid who only takes up bodybuilding and driving as a way of getting revenge on a masked driver who destroyed his favorite fast-food joint. The comic is at its best when making fun of the ridiculous "street" lingo from the films as well as the nonsensical gearhead content relating to cars and add-ons. That latter element appears especially ridiculous as the cars are all drawn with what looks like a primitive drawing program, making the racing scenes ridiculous instead of exciting. The figures are cartoony and exaggerated, with dark, bulbous noses and rubbery faces that mimic the smirks and mugging found in the acting styles of the movies. There are absurd sub-plots (like one friend of protagonist Dom [the Vin Diesel character from the movies] going off to find ghostly racing apparel worn by his father), over-the-top slang ("Streets is up!") and other such nonsense. Fans of the films will likely enjoy the gentle pokes the comics aim in their direction, though others may be utterly baffled.

Alamo Value Plus #1, by Rusty Jordan. This is a new series by Jordan, who seems fascinated by mutating the world of low-value retail into bizarre, improbable adventures. This one features recurring Jordan character Duane and a ridiculous character named Baldemar Pretzeldorf, who recounts a harrowing tale of escaping from the Nazis with his mother while on break. Jordan's rubbery character design employs nice, fat, rounded lines and exaggerated character poses. The effect matches realistic storytelling with highly cartoony figures, not unlike a Skip Williamson drawing. Jordan actually makes the action sequence quite compelling, especially when contrasted with the adult Baldemar's bombastic speaking style ("That's the smell of another wonderful day in variety retail!") and the younger Baldemar's slang that's informed by Arnold Schwarzeneggar-style quips. This issue is packed with crazy events, yet it's really just a set-up issue. Jordan has a way of stopping on a dime and escalating the lunacy of his stories, so I'm curious as to just how demented the second issue will be, when Baldemar is confronted by his old Nazi nemesis.

Selfie, by Anna Bongiovanni. Bongiovanni's comics tend to trade in dark themes and wilderness settings, exposing the raw nerves of emotion and experience. This hilarious mini couldn't be any more different from those comics, even as it pokes at loneliness and awkwardness. The comic features a couple of friends named Riley and Sam; both are lonely and having trouble finding company in different ways. Sam is a straight woman who isn't being helped much by her flatmate Riley, an out 'n proud lesbian who is a self-described "creeper". Rather than being told in Bongiovanni's usual dense, cross-hatched style, this story is instead done in red ink with occasional yellow zip-a-tone effects and drawn in a loose, scribbly style. The only other visual effect is that whenever someone uses a phone to take a picture (like one of the titular "selfies"), an actual b&w photograph is used on the page. Whether or not that's meant to suggest that this story is loosely autobiographical or not is beside the point, because the arc of the story, featuring Riley as someone who's both swaggeringly confident and relentlessly insecure about herself, leads to some sharply-designed comedic sequences. Indeed, Riley takes a picture of a girl she instantly crushes on from afar, then winds up drunkenly running over her with her bicycle. Bongiovanni captures the desperate need for affection along with the genuinely funny tension between friends Sam and Riley, a pair that's gone far beyond the ability to truly offend the other. Bongiovanni is truly on a roll this year, and this mini is proof that she can tell any kind of story.

Kit and Luisa Stories, by Virginia Paine. This mini features three stories about a couple of teens who have a tenuous sexual and romantic relationship. Kit is a taciturn, hoodie-sporting young woman who has a serious crush on Luisa, a religious girl who nonetheless feels compelled to put Kit's affections on a string by sending her mixed messages. Paine seems to have done a lot of thinking about these two characters and knows them inside and out, which allows her to be restrained about what she chooses to show. There's a lot of deep, churning emotions and a powerful but enervating tension between Kit and Luisa, a tension that drives Kit to walk away at the end of the book even as Luisa once again is unable and unwilling to safely navigate the waters between friendship and flirtation. Paine heightens this tension by subtly introducing fantasy elements, like Luisa's ability to control fire and Kit's bizarre job involving a demented potato room. Paine's greatest asset as a drawer is her ability to zoom in and subtly depict emotions; she's on shakier ground when she tries to show dance club scenes and other, wider environments. Still, Paine's clearly hit on something here, and I look forward to seeing this story evolve as a webcomic in the future.

Saint Cole Part One, by Noah Van Sciver. This is a collection of the first 46 pages of Van Sciver's strip on his website, The Expositor. It's a typically bleak, hilarious account of a loser in over his head. In this story, a waiter named Joe has to work crazy shifts as a waiter to barely support his girlfriend and infant son. Like many of Van Sciver's characters, he is slowly undone by his own actions (boozing on the job, fantasizing about screwing a co-worker's 17 year old sister) as well as others (his hilariously shiftless, profane mother-in-law who forces her way into living with them). There's a level of grungy authenticity that's almost poetic in how Van Sciver creates a character who is unlikable yet entirely sympathetic. I can't wait to see where this one goes.

Autoptic and Everything Before in Minneapolis

From Friday 8/16 to Sunday 8/18, Minneapolis was the alt-comics capital of the US. Combining the resources of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), the minds behind PFC and the organizing committee behind Autoptic, comics fans were treated with a true comics arts festival. The focus was on guest of honor Jaime Hernandez, who gave a talk on Friday at MCAD in support of the closing of his exhibit in the MCAD gallery. However, collaboration was the theme of the weekend, as a week's worth of collaborations between North American and European artists was on display on Saturday. All of these artists attended the inaugural Autoptic show. Let's take a closer look at each event.

1. Jaime Hernandez exhibit and talk at MCAD. Friday night was the closing of the Zak Sally-curated exhibition of Jaime Hernandez' work, with the artist himself giving a talk in a packed auditorium. I had an opportunity to go through the show slowly before the crowds arrived. While I've never been a big proponent of comics in galleries, I thought Sally did a fine job in giving interested parties a good reason to study the show closely. Before one entered the main exhibition room, there was a wall dedicated to media coverage about "Los Bros" as well as posters and other ephemera. Sally sensibly arranged the art to reflect Hernandez's evolution as an artist over the years, dividing it into a variety of eras. He was careful to select a few stories here and there and display several pages in sequence, a decision that helped preserve the sequential nature of the work. There were also displays of the original, self-published Love and Rockets #1 and dozens of issues and collections under glass.

The top two pages were cut up and combined into the bottom page for "Spring 1982".

Hernandez is known as one of the greatest comics draftsmen in the world, so getting to see original art was fascinating. In the early days, he actually used quite a bit of whiteout. In the pages I saw from the recent story "The Love Bunglers", there was almost none. The real discovery of this exhibit is that Hernandez had a few out-take pages from several stories, including the only extant original art from "Flies On The Ceiling" (the originals were "lost" after being displayed in a gallery). Another outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets" was thrown out because it depicts Hopey writing a letter to Maggie while she's touring; Jaime realized that Hopey simply wasn't the kind of person who writes letters and scrapped the idea. Other pages were simply abandoned after a panel or two. It was also interesting to see him draw a couple of pages and later cannibalize them, combining them into a single page as he switched around or threw away panels. Also on display were a few pages from his scripts, which he continues to write on yellow legal pads. He used to throw them away until someone urged him to keep them. He told me he now has a huge stack of them and doesn't know what to do with them. I suggested he donate them to one of the many universities now collecting comics-related work. He said he's thought about that, but that he's also thought about selling them (he's selling some of his art now).

Outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets".

Stories highlighted in the exhibition include the aforementioned, "Spring 1982", "Home School"; and "The Death of Speedy"; Sally hit the highlights hard. At the end of the exhibition, there were two couches and a bookshelf with various volumes of L&R for readers to peruse. The crowd then streamed into the building's big auditorium on the campus of MCAD. It was standing room only in the hall, with a video feed being piped into the overflow room next door. Sally interviewed Hernandez in his heartfelt, passionate style, and it was clear that the artists had established a clear connection in working together on this project. As Sally enthused later, Hernandez indeed told stories he hadn't heard before. A big focus was on the role of his family in becoming a cartoonist. Jaime talked at length about his mother, who used to collect comics in the 40s and 50s but had to hide them from her own mother. He talked about drawing with his brothers one day, and his mom brought out a stack of drawings she had made of various comic book and comic strip characters. He and his brothers were awed by the fact that she had done this and it became something very cool to them.

The author in the reading section of the exhibition.

He noted that he and his brothers had simply always drawn comics. "It was just what we did. Get up, eat breakfast, draw comics". It was a cheap way to get a bunch of little kids to quiet down for a while. His older brothers did it, so he had to do it too. Sally made a joke about wanting to have introduced the Crumb brothers to the Hernandez brothers. I ran with that idea and asked Jaime about the hierarchy in the family, noting that Charles Crumb was the comics boss of the family and the other two brothers followed along. I wondered if he was ever told to draw a certain way, or if he was told he was doing something wrong. Jaime replied that it was never like that. Instead, it was just a constant sense of excitement from his brothers, but especially Gilbert:. "Hey, let's draw!" There were suggestions about fun things they could draw together but never orders.

An outtake from "Flies on the Ceiling".

Jaime said that during the academic year, comics were frequently forbidden until they got their grades up. When summer rolled around, his mom would take out a huge bag of Archies, Dells, Gold Keys, etc. (Mario's Marvel collection was considered to be "the good stuff" and off-limits for rough re-readings.) Those frequent re-readings refined Jaime's eye and made him realize what excited him. He remembered an issue of Dennis The Menace (most likely drawn by Al Wiseman) where Dennis and Joey walk down a street, having a conversation. This excited young Jaime for reasons he didn't understand, but he started to love the scenes in super-hero comics were they were in civilian clothes instead of the fight scenes. That launched him on his way.

Zak Sally and Jaime Hernandez. Photo by June Julien Morrisey.

There were any number of other interesting anecdotes as Sally and Hernandez got to the heart of how comics and music were meaningful to them. One common theme to Hernandez talking about his own comics is authenticity; he wants to depict things accurately and honestly. That extends to growing up Mexican-American in Texas and California, to the punk scene in early 80s Los Angeles, to how women think and act, to writing gay and lesbian characters. When I mentioned to him that a mutual cartoonist friend was working as an apartment manager in LA like Maggie, he said that he had run into her and she had told him that story. His main concern: "Did I get it right?" The other interesting theme that emerged about him over the weekend is how important it is to him to be part of the current comics scene. There was a long period where "the phones stopped ringing" and he and Gilbert stopped being hot cartoonists. The show and the reception he got the entire weekend spoke to just how important he is to young fans and cartoonists alike.

2. PFC Exhibition. Coinciding with the Jaime Hernandez show and the Autoptic festival was Pierre Feuille Ciseaux #4, or "Rock Paper Scissors". Organized by the ebullient June Julien Misserey and brought to the US by way of Zak Sally's suggestion, this was a weeklong experimental comics camp that brought together artists from North America and Europe. PFC is all about constraint comics, wherein artists are asked to draw stories given time limits and particular limitations. In one "game", an artist would draw a panel. The next artist would continue the story by drawing a panel above that panel, to the right of the panel and under that panel. The next artist would have to draw five panels, and so on, all the while keeping up the narrative. Another game saw the artists have to draw themselves captured by Wonder Woman's lasso and forced to tell the truth about something. Another game, called "Fuck This Thing" (printed as a free mini) forced each artist to draw the the thing they hated drawing the most until they got sick of it; they got to write "Fuck drawing thing x" as a sort of reward.

The roster of artists included Kevin Huizenga, John Porcellino, Eleanor Davis, Lisa Hanawalt, Genevieve Castree, Jim Rugg, Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carre', Marc Bell, and Tom Kaczynski from the US and Canada. Representing France and Belgium were J.C. Menu, Misserey, David Libens, Max de Radigues, Benoit Pretesille, Domitille Collardey, Eugene Riousse, Sandrine Martin, and Pierre Ferrero. All of these cartoonists have reached their mature style, but all of them are still in their primes. There was a careful balance of styles, from naturalistic to cartoony to minimalist. The artists also collaborated with a group of MCAD students on a number of projects, and the students came up with their own games as well. Something remarkable about this assemblage is that even by Saturday, the last day of PFC, the artists still couldn't stop drawing. A number of professional cartoonists sat in with those stopping by for a public zine/mini making workshop. Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis made a last-second mini for Autoptic. When I stopped by the main studio on Saturday, the artists were hanging around, helping each spot blacks and make beautiful, accordion-style minicomics.

The Saturday Comics Workshop at MCAD. The author's wife is in the lower left-hand corner. Photo taken from PFC website (presumably by June Misserey).

In speaking to the participating artists, most of them were apprehensive to begin the week. The joke of the situation was that every artist felt like they weren't as good as their neighbor--they couldn't draw as well or as seemingly effortlessly as everyone else. That was true from John Porcellino to Jim Rugg, representing a beautiful and minimalist style to a highly elaborate, detailed line, respectively. Critic Xavier Guilbert  discussed how being forced to work with another cartoonist, especially a stranger, was a way of breaking the ice for you. You each had a project to do and had to find solutions together, which naturally led to talking about everything else. Menu noted that artists from both Europe and North America not only have drawing in common, but the common language of storytelling. Even someone like Marc Bell, who works in a kind of dream logic, is working in that common language of narrative. Being forced to engage in these games forced the artists to work in their most spontaneous and natural styles, putting down their purest line before doubt and the need to clean up lines or the urge to choke a drawing to death took over.

The assignment board for "Break Something".

The ostensible goal of the week was to create a screenprinted comic. Each artist was asked to pick a character from a list. A North American artist was randomly paired up with a European artist (in most cases), combining their two characters with the theme "Break Something".  The screenprinting studio Aesthetic Apparatus printed them and they were cut on site as the artists pitched in with folding and cutting. There are a lot of great collaborations, but the Kevin Huizenga ("The Devil") and Sandrine Martin ("God") was the best, as God was a cartoonist and the Devil kept burning up his work. I also quite enjoyed Eleanor Davis & Max de Radigues doing a Soldier and a Corpse. All of the cartoonists used the sort of rich color screen that popped when screenprinted on thick paper stock.

Another highlight of the day was getting a guided tour to the students' exhibition of their PFC challenges by Barb Schulz, a professor in the comics program at MCAD (I should note that Sally is also a professor there). She talked a bit about particular students and the curriculum for undergraduates. MCAD has offered cartooning as a major since 1997 and they're now up to fifty or so cartooning majors in a school that has about 700 undergraduates. A number of the cartoonists wound up tabling at Autoptic. Mandie Brasington was one interesting artist who runs the Dead Cartoonist's Society, which published an anthology. Dawson Walker is a senior who has serious cartooning chops. Frosh Rosemary Vallero-O'Connell's cartoons for PFC really stood out; despite her lack of publishing experience, it's clear that she has real talent and ambition. I'll have a more detailed MCAD artist report for my High-Low column over at tcj.com soon, once I plow through the pile of minis I got from the cartoonists who tabled at Autoptic.

L to R: Genevieve Castree, Zak Sally, John Porcellino, Jaime Hernandez, Max de Radigues. Photo by June Julien Misserey.

There was an interesting lightness I observed in the PFC artists as I saw them working. Combining the social aspects of a convention with an environment that demanded actual productivity led to work that was mostly light-hearted and even crude in nature, but there was also a lot of cleverness and truth-telling to be found in the PFC exhibition. The sheer amount of comics they produced was staggering. Even Jaime Hernandez got into the act on Friday night, drawing a couple of images for a Nancy animation and getting in on a couple of games. Lisa Hanawalt naturally started a comic involving a woman's ass, knowing that Jaime was taking part and knowing that he'd "knock it out of the park" when he got to it. (Needless to say, he did.) Porcellino and Misserey both described the week as one of the best of their lives. I imagine a number of the other artists concurred. The lingering memory I'll carry of the day is Porcellino flitting from table to table and room to room, cracking jokes, spotting blacks and whistling Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy".

I'll be curious to see what the future of PFC might be. The last event in France had all sorts of logistical problems, and there was talk that that might have been the last one. Bringing it to the US was a logical move that obviously bore great fruit. I could see the event moving to England for a year, given the now-high concentration of interesting cartoonists there. I could also see it coming back to the US. The Center for Cartoon Studies would be a logical home. SCAD in Savannah might work as well, or perhaps Columbia College in Chicago (Ivan Brunetti would be a total natural in this scenario!). Those institutions might have the money to make this possible. A longshot but interesting possibility might be SAW in Gainesville, which would be fitting because Tom Hart is a longtime OuBaPo participant. This is a worthwhile experiment that foments enthusiasm and productivity, and I hope to see it continue on an annual basis.

The funkiness of the Aria Building.

3. Autoptic. The show itself was a one-day affair held at the Aria Building, a renovated former warehouse and theater that's now an all-purpose event space. Others have raved about the space for the purposes of this show and I have to agree. The exposed brick, the quirky accents and the airy feel of the place reminded me a bit of the Puck Building in the MOCCA festival's early days. The fact that the show was free combined with a sunny day meant a number of curious passers-by came to take a look, given that the building is in a walkable part of downtown near the Mississippi River. The organizers of the show smartly had a hot dog stand and a food truck set up outside the show, and there were raves about both. There was clearly a great deal of thought that went into any number of decisions related to the show, even as they ran into some last-minute snafus.For example, the programming for the show was supposed to be at Alliance Francaise next door, but there was a mix-up in scheduling on their part that froze out Autoptic after 4pm. So the organizers quickly made a room in the back of Aria into a makeshift programming area. This had mixed results, as the microphones were all hand-held and the ambient noise out in the hall muffled a number of panel members. Luckily, the room was small enough that most information got across.

The show itself was just the right size for a one-day event, with just over a hundred exhibitors. Some of them were printmakers, local radio stations and local independent music labels. A few artists noted that prints seemed to be the biggest sellers in the room. For the most part, the room was still dominated by cartoonists. What I found interesting about the character of this show was that it drew a number of west coast cartoonists who I'd never met who were able to afford a ticket to Minneapolis (and in the case of some, drive there). This show was also a chance for the thriving Minneapolis comics scene to make itself known, especially students and graduates of MCAD. Of course, the American and French PFC artists also tabled at this show and made a big splash. West coast artists on hand included Elijah Brubaker, Rusty Jordan, David King, Greg Means, Tom Neely, and Virginia Paine. There were a number of Chicago artists who made the short trip up, including Sam Sharpe, Laura Park, Keiler Roberts and Marnie Galloway. The locals filled out many of the other spots, including Anna Bongiovanni, Kevin Cannon, Zander Cannon, JP Coovert, Max Mose, Will Dinski, 2D Cloud, Tom Kaczynski, and MCAD students and alumni like Dawson Walker, Leigh Luna, Mandie Brasington, Danielle Chenette, Alexis Cooke, Amara Leipzig, Jay Ragorshek and many others. There were any number of other familiar faces and micropublishers, but seeing that local color in a juried show gave the show an unusually high level of overall quality.

The Dead Cartoonist Society table from MCAD. L to R: Jen Silverman, Joel McKeen, Kitty Berry

Sales ranged from low to solid. John Porcellino said he did quite well and sold a lot of comics to non-comics readers who were curious, including plenty of his own King Cat series. Annie Koyama also reported good sales despite having nothing new for the show. Having Jaime Hernandez on hand certainly helped Fantagraphics (repped by the tireless Jen Vaughn) move a decent number of books. The total attendance for the day neared 1500, which is about what the defunct Minneapolis Indie Expo (MIX) did in its second year. The low sales were perhaps not surprising give the fact that the show drew in lots of local fans who weren't necessarily sophisticated comics readers. However, even a publisher like Secret Acres, which pretty much took a bath at the show, said that they want to come back if possible when the show is held again in two years because of the show's many other attractive aspects.

I had a strong hand in programming the show's panels after volunteering in the early going. Bill Kartalopoulos suggested doing a Q&A with Menu. I didn't get a chance to see it, but Bill said that the Alliance Francaise had a bottle of white wine on the table and the two of them drained it over the course of an hour, leading to a very relaxed panel. I put together the "Impact and Future of Micropublishing" panel and handed it over to the very capable hands of local writer Greg Hunter, who was also a big help in the A/V department during one of my panels. That panel included Justin Skarhus (2D Cloud), Virginia Paine (Sparkplug), Kartalopoulos (Rebus Books), and Barry Matthews (Secret Acres). Zak Sally moderated a panel on "Independent Culture" that included Koyama, a printmaker and a indy record label producer, while Isaac Cates' "Animals as People" panel had Lisa Hanawalt, Anders Nilsen and Sally.

L to R: Max Mose, Anna Bongiovanni, Eamon Espey, Eleanor Davis.

I moderated two panels. The first, "The Dark Roots of Myth" took an unexpected and personal turn in the early going. Featuring Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, Eamon Espey, Max Mose and Anna Bongiovanni, each artist noted that their frequently dark and fictional comics are rooted in autobiographical concerns. For example, Davis said that she is every one of the characters in her stories, and so conflicts presented are really internal conflicts. Espey said that some of his violent, meat-grinding imagery reflects an unpleasant job he was working at the time. Skaalrud and Bongiovanni both said that comics are a way of working through their own personal issues without having to talk about it at a conscious level. Bongiovanni said that she depicts motherhood and babies in the unusual way that she does as a way of working through her own childhood trauma. Mose works through political issues that burn at him (like the Louisiana oil spill) using monsters and horror so as not to be didactic. All of them mentioned using primal imagery as something direct and easy to understand by a reader and easy to translate as a creator.

L to R: Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, the author.

The second panel was a conversation with Jaime Hernandez and Lisa Hanawalt. I was well-prepared for my first panel, but I was mostly winging it here, counting on Lisa to make Jaime laugh for an hour. This is more or less what happened, to my great delight. I had a few questions prepped for them, mostly along the lines of when they first encountered the other's work, what you saw in their work that you wish you could do, etc. Right before the panel, Lisa brought Domitille Collardey up to the panel to participate, to my great delight. Jaime recalled meeting Lisa in a van at Comicon in San Diego, getting a ride with Matt Groening and Lisa to some location. He remembered being thrilled to actually hang out with some of the younger cartoonists. Then he said that he signed up as "an old man" on twitter, stalking his favorite young cartoonists. Domitille said that one of her crowning achievements in life was getting Jaime to favorite a fart joke that she made, but he replied that he favorites all fart jokes on twitter.

 L to R: Domitille Collardey, Lisa Hanawalt, Jaime Hernandez, the author.

The panel was an interesting mix of frivolity and sincerity. After taking up about half the panel with my questions (mostly of the explanatory nature mentioned earlier), I turned it over to Lisa, who had told me she had taken some notes during Jaime's lecture on Friday night. Jaime talked a bit about how embarrassing but true it is that he has a crush on a number of his characters, but especially Maggie, because he "knows" her best. Paradoxically, he puts her through the emotional wringer because he's interested in seeing her display a range of emotions in different situations, but he exclaimed that when he does it, he wants to yell, "I'm with you, Maggie!" He also revealed a couple of simple narrative tricks that were head-slappingly obvious when he talked about them but were things that I had never noticed. Because he knows Maggie, we the reader get full access to her thoughts and feelings, but from the point of view of an outsider. Hopey is a character who is a little more unknowable, and so the reader never gets to see her thought balloons. Ray is a sort of reader substitute so his comics feature first-person narration in captions.

The artists also talked about process, with both Lisa and Domitille both being relieved to hear that Jaime encounters problems he sometimes can't fix when trying to tell a story. Jaime mentioned putting some stories in a drawer and coming back a few months later to see if the problems magically worked themselves out. If not, back in the drawer they go. Lisa described her version of this process as putting her pages in a drawer in order to "let them think about what they did." Lisa and Domitille also talked a bit about Pizza Island, their old studio were all the artists were women, which received some funny publicity as a result. I noted that Pizza Island is the sort of concept that Jaime would have done twenty years ago.

At one point, Jaime suggested that Lisa aim some of the questions meant for him over to Domitille. On cue, Lisa said, "So Domitille, what was it like to grow up as a Mexican-American?" Jaime ended the panel by saying that he was happy to do it to tell the artists how much of a crush he had on their work and to let them know it. Lisa elaborated on a point I made toward the end, in that Jaime is drawing packed rooms and has a lot of younger fans: "Deal with it!"

The Autoptic organizers spelling out "Thanks!!" at the end of the show.

Regarding Autoptic as a whole: as others have noted, the lighting was too low in some parts of the room, there was no easy access to an ATM, and while the crowd was decent, many of them weren't interested in buying comics. Still, there was a tremendous amount of goodwill in the crowd and affection toward the organizers and volunteers (mostly MCAD students) who tried to solve problems and offer help as quickly as they could. Like the city of Minneapolis itself, the home team wanted the out-of-towners to have a great time and love their city and scene as much as they did. The show and the city certainly made a believer out of me.

Critic Xavier Guilbert and the author, both in black, at the kick-off party on Friday night. Photo by June Julien Misserey.

4. The Social Scene. I generally tend not to focus on this sort of thing very much in my convention reports, because it's not generally relevant to the show, and no one really cares unless you were there. That said, the kick-off party, held at the CO Exhibitions building that was housing an Anders Nilsen-curated exhibit of the PFC artists, featured cheap PBR and a number of interesting musical/performance art pieces. This is when guests of the show started showing up en masse, and the place was packed and full of nervous energy. After Autoptic, there was an afterparty at a restaurant/bar called the Red Stag Supper Club. While the ambiance and weather were both absolutely perfect, the restaurant was a bit overwhelmed by the crowds of cartoonists and service was spotty as a result. When the hour grew later, the place emptied out of non-cartoonists patrons and a great time was had by all. The evening benefited from the general good vibes of the show, as crowds ebbed and flowed together and artists of multiple generations entertained each other. Goodbyes were long and lingering, and the conversations ranged from serious discussions of art to fall-down laughing anecdotes. I know of at least one editor who got a cartoonist to quickly sign on to his anthology as a result of their conversation. Even though some cartoonists and publishers didn't make a lot of money, the low-key vibe and relatively small size of the show (the juried guest list was top notch) made for an intimate and pleasant weekend for all and struck a powerful claim for the Minneapolis comics scene as one of the most exciting in North America.

Special thanks to the ever-amazing Laura Jent-Clough for taking photographs (all photos taken by her unless otherwise credited). and to Annie Koyama for being Annie Koyama.

Anthologies: Little Heart

2D Cloud's Kickstarter-funded anthology Little Heart is uneven as far as the quality of its contributions goes, though in some respects that's beside the point. A portion of the book's proceeds went to [MN]Love, a nonprofit dedicated to marriage equality in Minnesota. As an adopted North Carolinian, enduring the results of Amendment One this past year was disgraceful, as it made so-called "marriage protections" part of the state constitution. Until the US Supreme Court rules otherwise, more states are in danger of having to deal with these barbaric and discriminatory practices. As such, one can forgive that some of the entries in this anthology either aren't comics or else display more enthusiasm than skill.

Let's take a closer look at the stories themselves. One thing that I liked about the anthology is that there was no specific requirement for the contributors to make their story about gay marriage. Indeed, a number of the stories are personal accounts from people who are single or have no desire to get married. I thought two of the better (if on-the-nose) stories came from Virginia Paine and Maurice Vellekoop, respectively. Paine talked about that even when she dated men, she never thought of marriage as an attractive option, but did say that having a choice like anyone else is important.Vellekoop, the great Canadian illustrator, interviews some friends after nearly a decade of equal access under the law in his country. It's a fascinating piece and a nice capstone to the book, as some of his friends discuss the pros and cons of marriage as well as their own mixed feelings about the institution. A couple of his friends felt it was too imitative of the straight world (a quite common claim), while others liked the idea of being part of an ancient institution and making it their own. It's a fascinating discussion of some finer points of the experience that many don't think about, drawn in Vellekoop's trademark angular, attractive style.

A couple of stories were personal accounts of deciding to get married, focusing in on specific aspects of the experience. For Emily Carroll and Kate Craig, their story focused on the simple engagement ring purchased online, which had an inscription from another couple. It's a simple sentiment, wondering about who these people were but focusing more on the present. Mari Naomi's account of proposing to her husband was more complicated, as she spoke to one queer friend whose less than enthusiastic "How nice for you, that you're able to do that" spoke to the divide between gay and bi individuals as well as the dilemma many hetero partners feel when they think about marrying. That said, the sheer enthusiasm and nervousness comes through on every page, and the splash page featuring the proposal was nicely understated, as Mari Naomi puts the image of her proposing in the bottom left hand corner, surrounded by tons of white space.

Some of the strips focus less on the idea of marriage than the experience of being queer and exploring that identity.Alex Fukui's "Footsie" for example, is a painful example of having desperate yearnings as a young person and wondering if someone you have a crush on is interested in as well, with the added layer of total fear about being a teen and being gay. Ed Choy and Sam Sharpe's "Roosterlegs" is by far the best-looking strip in the book thanks to the bold, confident lines, clever character design and interesting use of spot color. It's a strip about a young person trying to investigate the realities of what being queer means in nature and exploring the possibility of trans identity.

Other stories focus on being alone vs being with someone and the sacrifices one makes in either scenario. Christopher Adams' evocative silent story about a priest going about his day, hanging out with members of his congregation, speaks to the nature of the solitude of his position and the peace he has ultimately made with it. Hannah Blumenreich's story of a lovable pre-teen oddball who earnestly believes that she is psychic is endearing precisely because of her lack of self-awareness, even as she makes subtle shifts in attitude when reality dictates it. Joseph Remnant's excellent story about a guy crushing hard on a girl he sees at a bookstore and subsequently talks to at an art show is funny because of the quite deranged nature of obsessiveness overriding reason. The fact that this story gets a happy doesn't feel like a cheat so much as an indication that the leads occupied the same place in their circle of friends and really did find out by accident that they were perfect for each other. Noah Van Sciver's account of Richard & Mildred Loving's struggle to have their mixed-race marriage accepted in the south is especially poignant given that their union was opposed on many of the same supposed moral grounds as gay marriage is today. Jeremy Sorese's story about his divorced parents remarrying provides the structure for his own mixed feelings about marriage in an elegant and stylish series of highly stylized images. He gets at an interesting point: even if gay marriage is a big deal, why should a 23 year old be worrying about marriage anyway?

Most of the other stories are pleasant enough, if forgettable. I thought the inclusion of spot illustrations didn't do much to strengthen the anthology, especially since few of them were especially memorable. The handwritten coming-out story of Tammy Ray was impassioned but wasn't really comics, and Rachel Kowarski's poem did not fit at all. Editor Raighne Hogan likes to take risks in his anthologies and errs on the side of leaving in submissions that perhaps should have been cut. He leaves it up to the reader to decide their worth, which is admirable, but I'd love to see him exercise a firmer editorial hand. Of course, this anthology wasn't necessarily the place to do so, and erring on the side of enthusiasm in this case made sense. There's no question that it's a beautifully designed book, as all 2D Cloud projects tend to be, and I hope that it makes a difference.

Supernatural Minis: Lewis, Bongiovanni, Wiedeman

Time to take a look at three minis that take an offbeat approach to horror and the supernatural.

The Lettuce Girl #2, by Sophia Wiedeman. This is the second part of Wiedeman's take on the story of Rapunzel, or at least a variation thereof. In this issue, we learn how the lettuce girl came to live locked away in a tower by a crone. It gets at the heart of the themes Wiedeman tackles here: the ways in which the desires and weaknesses of parents inevitably extracts a price on their children. A mother-to-be wanted nothing more than to eat lettuce, even if her husband had to steal it. The way in which Wiedeman depicts the ravenousness of the pregnant woman is slightly unsettling if amusing; reason and ethics took a back seat to her craving. Of course, he gets caught by the owner of the garden, who may or may not be an actual witch, and in his cowardice he agrees to offer up his potential daughter to spare his own life. Wiedeman implies that this act permanently destroys his marriage, especially when he offers up the cold comfort of "We can have another."

The girl grows up thinking that the witch is her mother, who visits from time to time to bring her vegetables (only vegetables). The girl is tired of living in the keep and longs to leave, but her "mother" forbids it. The issue ends when the girl encounters a sort of magic serpent looking for its mother. Once again, Wiedeman loops the reader around to absent and bad parenting, where the girl is abused by her adopted mother but still loves her, because it's all she's known. She strains against that relationship, but only leaves when presented with someone who is missing their own mother. What makes this book so interesting is that unlike a modern fairy tale, where the girl is kept apart from her noble parents by a witch, the young parents in this book are far from ideal. Their own greed and fear wind up costing them their child, forcing the reader to ask if they even deserved to have a child in the first place. Wiedeman's art combines a simplicity of form with some nice usage of crosshatching. Her figures are admirably loose and slightly scribbly, giving the whole comic a fluid quality. I'm interested in seeing how unconventional she's going to become in the greater narrative of the story.


The Offering, by Anna Bongiovanni. This creepy tale of witches with a ragged, fragile line reminds me a bit of Julia Gfrorer's Flesh and Bone. It starts with two sisters in a forest, with one excited about going to a gathering of witches in a coven and the other creeped out. When their activity escalates into human sacrifice as to create a hideous demon baby, things take a truly horrific turn. With her light and almost delicate line, Bongiovanni nonetheless expertly evokes fear and disgust in equal measure, with an ending that provides an interesting twist. Just as creepy as the actual bloodshed and witchcraft is seeing the witches freak out about "their baby", a play on hysterical parents in real life that's quite clever. Bongiovanni has been a consistent stand-out in the Good Minnesotan anthology, and this comic represents some of her strongest work to date.




Klagen: A Horror, by Jon Lewis. This smudged, scribbled comic done in pencil and printed on yellow paper feels as much like an artifact retrieved from a dark corner of an occult bookstore as it does a comic. That atmosphere allows Lewis to submerge the reader in a death cult conspiracy that's essentially going about its business and using the objects at hand (i.e., people) to create a creature to act as their servant. Lewis wraps all of this in a mystery/conspiracy theory involving a man looking for his best friend, only to discover that he's been transformed into a "black dog", a man turned into a creature thanks to being seduced by pure nihilism. Lewis undercuts reader expectation by making the protagonist nothing more than a witness; there's nothing he can do against an enemy that's everywhere and that's already won. He escapes from the ritualistic rape by the black dog of the woman he was obsessed with, and why not? The cultists (who speak in white-on-black text found in the hoods that cover their faces) know where to find him and he has no understanding or way of stopping them. In just sixteen pages, Lewis creates a world of fear and dares the reader to engage it.