NoBrow: Jen Lee, Bianca Bagnarelli

Vacancy, by Jen Lee. This is one of NoBrow's "17x23" line, a sort of deluxe mini-comic, complete with French flaps. Because it's a NoBrow book, color is the most important aspect of its aesthetic, using a bright and warm palette draw the reader in and quickly differentiate characters. Lee uses a fairly uniform and thin line weight in order to emphasize not just color, but also gesture, body language and the ways the characters relate to each other in space and from different perspective. There's one panel (above, second page, panel 3) where the visual field of the protagonist goes from eye level to looking straight up, and Lee orients the reader partly threw the use of a light green sky's negative space. That allows her to frame the panel with the back of the dog's head at the bottom of the panel and the top of the deer's head at the top, creating a pleasingly balanced composition. Note that in the last panel on the page, when the deer is crashing through the fence, that Lee switches the background color from light green to white, in an effort to really draw the reader's eye to the action with a starker choice for negative space.

The story involves a house dog who's been abandoned, hoping every day that his people will join him but also feeling the pull of the wild. When a deer and raccoon happen by, he begs them to take him along and teach him the ways of the forest. The obnoxious raccoon constantly leads the dog astray, while the good-natured deer has nothing but bad advice. Of course, when a pack of coyotes comes to prey on them, it's the dog's familiarity with home turf that winds up saving the day. Lee cleverly informs the reader of exactly why the dog was abandoned in a chillingly casual way and reinforces it as we see abandoned house after abandoned house. The anthropomorphic animals pause at the end as they take up residence in the dog's house, looking at their human-appearing shadows, understanding that they're truly the ones who are living in the house and the suburb. Lee's character design is sort of like a cuter Michael DeForge, but still containing a hint of danger and visceral animal behavior.

Fish, by Bianca Bagnarelli. This is in the same format as Vacancy and is similarly dependent on colors to push forward its narrative, but in an entirely different way. The dominant colors here are light purples, pinks and oranges, all of which have an almost sickly tint. That's fitting for a comic that features a teen named Milo who is in the process of trying to deal with the deaths of his parents. Handling grief as an adult is difficult enough, but for a teen who's already trying to deal with hormones and exaggerated emotions, it's almost impossible to wrap one's head around it. Different people will cope in different ways, and for Milo, it's musing on the fragility of life on a visceral level. That is, what is keeping our very organs from bursting forth? When he's ridiculed by his cousin, Milo attacks him. There's a great dinner scene where everywhere Milo turns, his eye turns toward death or decay: wilting flowers, the visceral quality of the food and even lingering on his aging grandfather. The book's climax comes when he's faced with the dead body of a girl who had gone missing and he reacts by vomiting. It's a cathartic moment though not a comforting one, as he gets confirmation that we really are all just meat and that our illusion of control is just that--an illusion. That said, when his grandfather picks him up at the end, there's a moment of comfort, as his aging grandfather is still alive and still capable of being there for him. The sickly hues are key to understanding Milo's view of the world: not so much a dark and gloomy one, but rather one where the veneer of reality conceals that we are all potentially sick and beginning to rot. Like the titular fish, we're either meat or predator, depending on circumstance. Milo understanding this fact and starting to accept it demonstrated that he was on his way to actually processing his grief.

Mini-Comics Grab Bag: Bagnarelli, Ghetti/Schiesaro, Lafler, Alabaster

January The First, by Bianca Bagnarelli. Bagnarelli is a big-time talent from Italy. Her cartooning looks and feels cool and detached even as the actual events of the story are intense and often upsetting. Consider this short story, a first-person retrospective narrator about a young woman going off for a drive with two shifty young men. Bagnarelli uses cool pastels and a stripped-down approach to character design, with a small line and a few simple loops here and there for faces. Those faces rarely betray the uncertainty felt or the later sense of betrayal, as everything and everyone is deadpan. That sense of restraint is almost agonizing, considering the outrageous but absurd level of violation she experiences. This one's from the Italian publisher Delebile.

Myriad, by Lorenzo Ghetti and Ugo Schiesaro. Also from Delebile is this first chapter of what promises to be a longer work. The art here is scratchy and cartoony, giving this story of life on a space station a grimy, lived-in feeling. As the first chapter unfolds, the reader is slowly made to understand the order of things on a station that's been inhabited for years. It's actually modeled on industrial revolution-era family life, where there's a child class, an adult worker class and an elder class. In the case of this ship, the elders are there to provide instruction to the children until they're ready to take over leadership from the adults, who then become the new elder class while the adult women are impregnated and prepare to have children. What happens to the former elder class is the subject of this issue, wherein conflicts between generations are hinted at and something goes horribly wrong when the elders are being "processed". This comic is a great use of genre as a setting, because it allows Ghetti and Schiesaro to create a social engineering experiment and expand upon its implications.

Death In Oaxaca #2 (Alternative Comics) by Steve Lafler. An alt-comics veteran since the 80s, Lafler continues to make great use of the periodical format. He describes the contents of this series in a text feature at the end as "reportage, satire, self-discovery, and surreal fantasy". In other words, it's Lafler as usual. Even his truly crazy series like Dog Boy that were essentially excuses for his id and subconscious to go on a walk together still had elements of political content, autobiography and social commentary. For Lafler, it all goes hand-in-hand, and no one element is more important than the other. That said, his fantastical elements have certainly always stood out, and this series is no exception. The story is about a family of ex-pats moving to the remote, historical city of Oaxaca in Mexico. Along the way, the father, Max, hooks up with a group of local musicians (much like Lafler) and starts having conversations with Death. Death is a musician who jams with him and reveals that he had been here before in a past life.

Meanwhile, Gertie (Max's wife), dons lucha libre tights and decides to fight crime. A friend of theirs is revealed to be an ancient vampire who was Max's father and Gertie's husband in a past life. Along the way, Lafler provides a loving look at the sights and smells of the city, gently mocks ex-pat culture, and generally rambles his way through the issue with episodic little vignettes. Lafler is in no hurry to get anywhere, as scenes in markets and with musicians jamming having a languid quality. At the same time, the issue feels packed, thanks to the weird images and rubbery art that's Lafler's trademark. Lafler's drawing fundamentals are rock solid, especially with regard to anatomy, body language and gesture. That allows him to loosen up his figures, sometimes going dramatic with the occasional use of hatching and detailed, decorative features on the story's more supernatural elements. Lafler's character design looks a lot like Steve Ditko's, especially in the confidence he evinces in the odd and slightly ugly nature of many of his characters. In Lafler's eyes, the world is beautiful just as it is and doesn't need any sort of idealistic sheen being added to it.

Mimi And The Wolves,Act I by Alabaster. I was introduced to Alabaster's work in The Complete Talamaroo, which highlighted the essential frisson in her comics. That is, her delicate line and ultra-cute character design are simply the facade for a much darker, weirder world where sex and/or violence can spring at the reader on a moment's notice. Consider the first few pages of this comic: we see the faces of the characters, and they're all adorably stubby-looking. Even we we meet a spooky figure in the woods, it's more pleasantly eerie than anything else. When we meet the titular Mimi (a sort of cat girl), she's busily gathering flowers with which to make garlands. She then goes off with her self-described mate Bobo (a little dog man), they go to work on the farm of friends and later go into town. It's a little jarring when the characters undress at the end of the day given Alabaster's style, but that should be the reader's first clue. This isn't a fairy tale, but rather a world that's quite real for the characters involved, and they act as anyone might. After that pleasant day, Mimi has a nightmare with some grotesque, violent and sexual imagery out of an Eamon Espey comic--and it turns out this is a recurring nightmare.

Things get more intricate and complicated, as the story takes on feminist undertones given the reactionary and controlling actions of Bobo when she starts to explore her dream and meets up with wolves who claim to worship the woman that Mimi sees in her dreams. When Mimi and Bobo break up at the end of this first chapter, she essentially cuts off her last tether to society as she knows it--and she says "I feel free." That said, the wolves seem to be on the up-and-up, but it's clear that they're not telling her everything. This comic is all about the freedom to explore one's true self and how that sometimes leads to uncomfortable and unpleasant conversations and confrontations. Alabaster creates a world that's bursting with life, with each page cluttered in all the right ways. She's careful to leave a lot of negative space in each panel so as not to get in the way of her storytelling, but the small panels and lack of gutter space between them is a strategy that allows her to use a lot of quiet moments at a fast pace.