Minis: The Yeah Dude Comics Box

Philadelphia's Pat Aulisio has been steadily publishing his own work as well as the work of others for quite a while. The beautifully constructed cardboard box that houses the Yeah Dude Comics mini-sampler is quite the attention-getter for a variety of comics. Aulisio essentially constructed a portable mini-library for these comics.

Most of them are very short and raw. Going in order of the table of contents, Josh Bayer leads off with Hot Desert Fever. It's one of his riffs on Sylvester Stallone and Stan Lee, as he imagines Stallone desperately wanting to write comic books like Lee. The resulting Human Torch story is a classic Bayer parody: altered character design (the Torch wears a helmet and carries a gas can), scatological humor, and visceral violence. Bayer's ability to fully inhabit the minds of these hyper-masculine, ridiculous characters and somehow make them come alive on the page is one of his greatest talents. Even in a story as absurd as this one, where Stallone has a butler that he names as Jarvis or Alfred, depending on the panel, and where he grows a tiny version of himself as Rocky to give him advice and encouragement, Bayer's always working within an internal set of logical rules.

Ian Harker's Face Force is a parody of 90s era Image Comics, with Rob Liefeld in particular being a touchstone. Nothing much actually happens in this comic, which makes it a particularly apt satire. McDonald's National Cemetary (sic), by Michael Gerkovich, is a series of strange images and clip art surrounding the idea of McDonald's going back to ancient Egypt, and to imagine what one would find if a site was excavated. Some of them riff off McDonald's iconography, like a Hamburglar looking through a telescope or a pharaoh having Ronald McDonald makeup on. The actual images match the meaningless absurdity of the concept itself, and Gerkovich gleefully runs with it. Josh Burggraf's International Geographic cleverly takes the you-are-there anthropological premise of the source material it's parodying with similar shots of nature, candid shots of "native" life, and the rituals from an alien world that are as baffling to the reader here as indigenous societies are to western societies. Burggraf's skill as an illustrator sells the joke, which is short enough to not outstay its welcome.        

         
Aulisio's Diabolik! is a parody of the Italian anti-hero, and he nails the way the narrative in the comic spells everything out. Getting pushed aside by his girlfriend Eva was also amusing in the way he puts everything in annoyingly modern speech patterns. The use of shadows and effects like zip-a-tone also made it reminiscent of its source material. Tara Booth's Daily Routine reminded me a lot of Jerry Smith's Rattletrap: extremely crudely-drawn comics, printed at tiny size, that hilariously and disgustingly address quotidian issues. Booth holds absolutely nothing back, like an early strip where she's over at a friends' place, falls asleep on her couch and accidentally urinates on it while asleep. When she wakes up, she leaves as fast as possible, as the caption "Run away from pee couch" indicated with a combination of shame and glee. Booth isn't afraid to get absurd or exaggerated, like in her strip where her face resembles two eggs and bacon, another where her dog licked her face off, and a truly disgusting entry where she gives birth to a "food baby". The cheery wave the food baby gives is what puts the strip over the top. There's an essential sweetness to these strips despite the frequently disgusting and scatological subject matter, and that sweetness ties in to her willingness to confront issues that normally are couched in terms of shame. She forgives herself and allows herself to be human, and that shines on every scrawled page.

Issue one of Box Brown's Softcore is something I have reviewed elsewhere, Skuds McKinley's Korgok is straight-up, visceral sword-and-sorcery. After an epic-establishing introduction, the actual comic is all highly-detailed violence. Keenan Marshall Keller's The Goiter #1 is another standout in this collection. Keller's work is not unlike Ben Marra's in that he uses hyperviolent and exaggerated situations for humorous intent, only that humor is bone-dry and at times indistinguishable from the actual genre comics and movies that he is paying homage to. In this case, Keller starts out doing a story about stoners and transforms it into a supernatural/horror story, as a young man who's working for an elderly woman hears a voice coming from the enormous tumor on her head. Keller leaves open the possibility that the young man is insane & hallucinating, which makes the scene where he "frees" the tumor by cutting it off, leaving her body spurting blood, all the more disturbing (and yet hilarious because of its ridiculous nature). Keller goes over the top in his figure work, deliberately overdrawing and cluttering up his page in an effort to keep the reader off-balance.

Finally, Erika Davidson's enigmatic Hadaka is a dreamy, surreal version of the Japanese festival where a minimal amount of clothing is worn. All the figures here are women, as they walk into rooms filled with or filled up by various women's erogenous zones. It's a brief mini whose mission seems to have been getting down those images on paper, of putting something that came from dream logic and fantasy and making it partially tangible. Thomas Toye's Entering A Room Full Of People is another visceral horror story, this time involving a frightening, serpentine home intruder who encounters a voracious plant that has killed the family living in the home. This almost entirely silent comic is typical of the works found in this box: rough, visceral, iconoclastic, visually distinctive, uncompromising and entertaining. The actual quality of each comic varies, as does its ability to sustain interest after a single read, but this was a great sample of a particular kind of comics aesthetic that a number of artists are currently pursuing.

First Second: Box Brown's Tetris

In telling the story of the video game Tetris, Box Brown went into some deep philosophical territory. He begins the book by delving into gaming theory and asks the basic question of why is it that people play games? From that simple question, Brown spins a crazy story involving art, commerce, creativity, cold war politics and outsized personalities. What would seem to be a simple question (how did a particular game get designed?) demanded a timeline of the history of Nintendo, an understanding of the way world economics used to work in the Soviet Union, and an attempt to understand how and why some games become incredibly popular. For game designers, there's even a sense of trying to reverse-engineer successes in an effort to understand why they become so popular.

The book (and the game) begins with a couple of computer-programming friends in 1984 Moscow named Alexey Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko. Pajitnov posits that rather than simply a way to pass the time, games have a specific psychological function. Brown runs with that idea, even making a distinction between the physical aspect of sports versus games. Early sports may have been a way of recapitulating human competition in terms of survival, whereas games are an expression of the same urge that comes from creating art. Games are a merging of competition and the childlike need to process the world and learn about it by way of play. Play is far from a frivolous process; anyone who's ever observed children playing knows that they take it very seriously, as they transport themselves into a world with particular rules with a lot at stake. In the same way that a work of art no longer truly belongs to the artist once they've finished it and displayed it, so too is a game no longer quite the possession of its designer. It becomes part of the imaginations of those it captivates.

Brown breaks this idea down further, suggesting that games excite the pre-frontal cortex, the brain's executive functioning center. It strengthens one's brain while tricking it into learning through fun. In learning and becoming drawn into a game, it can improve one's higher-order processing and decision-making. Unlike the way we resist rote memorization as a means of learning, learning through game-playing combines the practice necessary in order to excel at anything through repeated gameplay with constant stimulation of the brain in a way that's motivating and pleasurable. Brown does not state this, but one of the arguments of the book is that it's more important than ever for adults to play games that motivate them and not abandon them as childish things.

Brown parallels the history of Nintendo (which started as a card game company) with the history of Tetris' design, because it gets to the heart of development in a capitalistic society vs a communist society. What's interesting is how Brown played up a number of similarities that led to success for both. Nintendo became successful in the electronics and video game markets because of visionary CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi and genius engineer Gunpei Yokoi. The successes came because Yamauchi trusted Yokoi's creativity and ingenuity as assets that would allow Nintendo a leg up in the market. When video games took the world by storm, they hired a conceptual artist named Shigeru Miyamoto to come up with ideas for games and leave it to Yokoi to figure them out. That process led to the insanely popular Donkey Kong, which later led to a huge empire based off of the original game. Video games touched a nerve, as good ones demanded problem solving skills and heightened hand-eye coordination. In a capitalist society, demand is at the heart of profit. Brown goes on to discuss a number of Nintendo's other moves, including conceptualizing handheld games that could travel with the game (that eventually became the Gameboy). The greater the number of platforms available for a game (gaming system, computer, arcade game, handheld device) meant that there were more and more rights to secure, making the process cutthroat at times.

By contrast, Pajitnov created Tetris because he felt compelled. He was obsessed with the shapes, the way they interlocked and how clearing out a row was such a fulfilling feeling. He did it on his own time and simply gave away copies for free, because he wasn't eligible to sell something of his own creation in the Soviet state. The game was such a hit that some businesses had to ban it from their computers because it killed productivity. The genius of it was that by removing violent, genre or competitive aspects of the game, it appealed to an incredibly wide demographic. Licensing the game or the idea of inventing different platforms for distribution never even occurred to him, yet the game was a success, like Nintendo was a success, because the creative talent was left alone to build the game as they saw fit. The genius of Yamauchi was that he recognized that he didn't know everything and instead surrounded himself with smart people that he trusted. 

The second half of the book is a dizzying account of the quasi-legal nature of foreign software companies trying to get the license to the game going up against Soviet bureaucracy at its best. There were billionaires, bullshit artists, and children of moguls going up against a Soviet group that on the one hand was trying to nickel and dime them but on the other didn't fully understand the nature of what they had. The most colorful personality was Henk Rogers, a game designer who got frustrated trying to deal with the man who apparently had the foreign rights to Tetris, so he simply fly to Moscow unannounced in an effort to make a deal. Brown emphasized that the way he barged in was simply not the way they did things in the Soviet Union, but the fact that there was a new, shrewd chief in charge of the game in Moscow made things interesting. There were double-crosses, companies making illegal versions of the game and all kinds of other crazy chicanery. There was even an attempt to get back the market rights when a billionaire made an appeal to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as a federal court decision that decided who had game rights: Nintendo or Atari.

Brown weaves a taut tale with all of these crazy events and synchronicities with his trademark restraint and stripped-down, iconic figures. Yellow is the only color used, giving the whole book an odd, slightly artificial feel that mimics screen time. Brown provides breaks when introducing new players in the story on an otherwise black page, allowing the eye to rest as he tore through the book at a fast pace. That sense of pacing is what makes this history book with deeply philosophical underpinnings so successful. With no real action on the page, Brown made things interesting simply by making the reader's eye whip across the page, trying to take in the story as quickly as possible. It helped that there was tension in the real-life narrative that gave the book a tight second-half structure, as opposed to the more episodic set-up of the first half. The tension between companies and countries about the game spoke to the way that the need to play stimulating games crossed cultures; the demand for the experience is what made everything so high stakes. The book is a success, and more successful than his Andre The Giant book, because with Tetris, Brown found a way to take a popular subject and plunge into its depths while making a number of fascinating connections. In the Andre book, there just wasn't enough there to go deep, and while that "star is unknowable" concept wound up being part of the book's point, the actual execution simply felt like a series of well-told but barely-connected anecdotes. In Tetris, Brown found a way to bind any number of characters to the book's central theme, with the anecdotes providing a climax to key tension points instead of wandering. Brown really stepped up his game in this book, and it's clear he's found an interesting niche in the world of comics. 

Humanizing A Cartoon Legend: Andre The Giant: Life And Legend

Box Brown's attempt at making sense of pro wrestler Andre the Giant's life was a noble attempt that tried a number of different techniques, but it ultimately doesn't quite cohere. This is not entirely his fault, and in fact it has quite a lot to do with his attempt to make this look at Andre something more than just a recitation of tall tales. However, in doing a book on a wrestler who died in the early 90s, he started with a foundation laid over quicksand. Pro wrestling is a spectacle that's part live-action superhero comic, part improv performance and part circus. Its job is to sell a lie to a crowd that wants to believe it. Brown notes how difficult it is to do credible research, given that it's difficult to discern whether or not the sources of information are telling the truth or spinning tales.

It does help that Brown drew the book in his trademark stripped-down style that's a descendant of the Chris Ware/Ivan Brunetti aesthetic. The simplicity of the figures is given some weight by a heavy used of spotting blacks as well as a fairly thick line weight for his character designs. What he sacrifices in depicting the visceral qualities of watching wrestling (especially a live match) he gains in creating narrative clarity and continuity. There were times that I wished for multiple visual approaches in the book, much like Brown used a variety of narrative approaches.

The book is essentially less a narrative than it is a series of biographical vignettes. The amusing story of Andre being driven to school as a teenager by Samuel Beckett was simply too good not to put in the narrative, even if it only served to provide a tiny bit of detail regarding Andre's early life. It's clear that Brown was not trying to write a hagiography, because he points out a number of unsettling incidents regarding the wrestler: being an absentee father to a child born out of wedlock, making a racist comment in front of an African-American wrestler, or getting drunk and frequently surly with those around him. This is all done to paint a portrait of Andre as human, above all else, capable of ugly behavior.

At the same time, there's not doubt that Brown overall is enormously sympathetic toward Andre. All wrestlers have a larger-than-life persona to some degree, but as someone who saw Andre wrestle live a child, Andre the Giant was something else altogether. It's almost as though one couldn't quite believe their eyes when they saw him in the ring, which is why he added so many comedic gimmicks in his matches. The fact that he was constantly stared at, mocked, challenged, etc. ate at him. Brown gets at his constant, aching loneliness. The problem was that the tonal shifts in the book are so sudden and jarring, and there's so little stringing together the vignettes other than the interstitial material that Brown himself provides, that the book sometimes reads like a writer trying to do a "realistic" version of Superman who has a lot of unseemly personal flaws. Brown is the only one in the book who's not trying to spin tall tales, which makes his analysis of a typical Andre match and a late-career appearance on David Letterman so interesting. A book filled that kind of analysis would not have the same kind of appeal than the book that Brown wrote, but it might have been more cohesive and perhaps accurate. This is a book where many of its parts are fascinating, but the book isn't greater than the sum of those parts.

Catching Up With Box Brown

Though most of the press Box Brown is receiving of late is regarding his new Andre The Giant book with First Second, he's been remarkably prolific on the minicomics front as well. Let's take a look.

Softcore 1-3. Brown is at his best when examining the fine details of the lives of the scummy and scuzzy. These comics are about a couple of guys who hire models to jack them off on camera, for placement on a website. Each issue is from the point of view of a different character; in #1, we follow a young man doing this for the first time with a model from Russia. After they conclude what he describes as a hand job detached enough that it felt "like we were fixing a toilet together", her handler makes a series of bizarre hand signals. The anxiety-ridden young man concludes that he was cursed by "Russian voodoo" in a hilarious but harrowing series of physically debilitating experiences. For him, the neurosis of this experience was channeled into a supernatural feeling, replacing his guilt and self-loathing.

The next two issues are from the point of view of Candy, the model, who mostly sees the men she works with as an opportunity to separate them from their money, and her fellow Russian Karlina. From Candy's point of view, her friend who put a "curse" on the protagonist in the first issue is a video game nerd who was just throwing up signs from a game, and she used him to essentially drain him of a lot of money in order to bring her friend over. Karlina in turn went over to Frank's apartment, another guy who does videos, essentially in order to case him and see what he was all about after drugging him. Every figure in these comics is designed to look like a cross between a Chris Ware character and a Michael DeForge character in that they are highly simplified while appearing at weird angles. Every character is crooked,slanted and exaggerated in terms of both posture and motive, as Brown examines a number of desperate and lonely people either looking to make a connection or else get ahead in life. I'll be curious to see how the series continue to develop.

Beach Girls is a loving tribute to spring break movies and the culture that surrounds both vacation spots and vacations themselves. Once again, Brown populates this comic with a cast of low-lifes, morons and opportunists, all of whom are either after thrills or money. Those after thrills are easily separated from their money by the locals who survive on tourist money; in a sense, it's a less creepy version of the sort of relationships found in Softcore. Brown also treats these characters with considerably more affection, especially true believers like Hank and Phoebe. Hank is the lunkheaded surfing true believer who resents the presence of tourists and is indifferent to bilking them out of their money at the skate/surfing shop at which he works. Phoebe is the "plain" friend who accompanies two other, more conventionally attractive friends to the beach and is in search of authentic experience. The relationship that develops between her and Hank is sweet and defies many expectations. Brown seems to have a lot of fun drawing cartoony, minimalist faces on top of beach bodies, giving all of them a certain cheap tackiness that defies the real-world ideal that we think of when we consider the glamour of the beach. The back-up by James Kochalka is pretty much what one would expect of Kochalka: silly and disposable.

The best of his recent work is certainly Number 1. The lead story, "Kayfabe Quarterly", wraps up Brown's fascination with professional wrestling into the story of a kid who grows up obsessed with the notion of "kayfabe". This is a professional wrestling term referring to the wrestlers staying in character and pretending what they're doing is real, no matter what. It leads him to wonder how many adults in his life are practicing kayfabe, saying one thing but meaning and doing another. "What's real? What's a work?" (A work is a match whose outcome and events are entirely predetermined and scripted.) This leads to a chronology of the history of his magazine, leaving him to wonder at times "What if there's not enough bullshit out there to write about?" Ingeniously, Brown eventually turns the story in on itself, as the protagonist slowly evolves and comes to terms with his brother's religious tendencies, his father, and friends he's fallen out with. All wind up as fodder for his magazine, frequently befuddling and enraging his readers. Even as the magazine retreats to the internet, there's a fundamental sweetness at work here that's typical of Brown's work. Even the crudest character is capable of personal insights and the ability to evolve. The DIY nature of the publication also reflects Brown's own status as a DIY publisher, something that's distilled a bit more harshly in the second story, "The Documentarian". It's a series of one-panel strips about a film documentarian and what he's doing at that moment. That figure is always in silhouette, but it may as well be Brown or any number of creators barely hanging on, receiving some crumbs of recognition and then getting back to work without ever truly being able to cope. Brown gives a sympathetic portrait in both stories of people who work mostly on their own in an attempt to further their own dreams and what it costs them in order to do so. Brown's work is best when he works big, and the character design looks great on page after page. With his sketchy style, he relies a lot on zip-a-tone effects to give his pages some weight and depth and relies heavily on spotting blacks on other pages. He varies his visual approach depending on how old the character is, which helps move the story along in time as well as varying imagery for the reader. It's a simple, unobtrusive tactic that is quite effective. Brown is building up an impressive library of characters who are in society's margins but nonetheless have complex inner lives and stories to tell.

Minicomics Round-Up: Aucoin, B.Brown, Meloro, Bird, Fisher

Doublethink #11, by Matt Aucoin. This CCS grad has decided to do a subscription service for his twenty page, two-man anthology featuring fellow CCS grad Kevin Kilgore.Aucoin's video-game influenced line usually doesn't do much for me, but I like the scribbly, tossed-off line he uses for the classic four-panel diary comics in this comic. Kilgore's comics are about his adventures in South Korea teaching English. His line is cartoony but confident and bold, and he lands a number of solid punchlines in these strips that remind me a great deal of Keith Knight's work. The upcoming subscription will serialize a monster story by Kilgore, who hasn't published much in terms of paper publications but is nonetheless talented. I like the way that Aucoin is adapting the Chuck Forsman/Oily Comics model on a much smaller scale, forcing himself to produce work on a regular basis while giving the spotlight to a deserving friend.

Operation Pizza, by Box Brown. This is a rare all-ages comic by Brown, printed on a risograph at the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, FL. It's a silly story about the captain of a vessel and his first mate who are trying to explore a bizarre island that stands out for its use of red and blue. They saturate the page when the reader is taken underwater and are otherwise used as spot colors. The story itself is a bit of silliness that involves a pizza tattoo, ancient underwater cave paintings of pizza being worshiped, various underwater sea vessels and funny character design. It's more wacky and nonsensical than funny, but I always love the way Brown uses simple and basic shapes to construct his characters and his settings. Combining that with the way he uses bright, primary colors makes the entire package an eye-catching one, even if there's not much "there" there.

Himzal #1, by Anthony Meloro. This is another Fort Thunder-inspired, genre-style comic.Ben Marra is another obvious influence in this story of a man trying to rescue his stripper girlfriend from a slave-trading ring, only to be savagely beaten as a way of getting the attention of the girlfriend's stripper. She happens to be the titular character and a witch to boot. This was quite an enjoyable comic, as Meloro's scratchy line and character design is boxed into a six-panel grid, which in itself is squashed between narrative panels at the top of the page and decorative designs at the bottom. Just when the reader knows what to expect, Meloro busts out splash pages with spot color introducing Himzal, including Michael DeForge-inspired stylized fonts indicating all of the pages she will have to visit. There's a crude enthusiasm about this comic that makes every page worth looking at, lending an added air of strangeness to a story that is otherwise boilerplate in terms of its plot (act of violence, vow of revenge). Meloro has done a lot of fine arts work and it shows in the way he created this comic as an art object, but he still values narrative and the experience of the reader above all else. I'm eager to see more from him.

Bird Brain #2, by Bird. This wordless (save for some pictographs and text on the inside covers) comic is simple in the way it's drawn (likely with a computer), yet it's surprisingly complex in the way it depicts loneliness turning into contentment. It's about one of three roommates bringing home alcohol, only to be rebuffed by the other two, who head out. With a split panel style that simultaneously depicts space and time passing, Bird shows us the man relaxing in his outdoor swimming pool, diving into it from the roof of his house. It's a slightly crazy and reckless series of moments that nonetheless unfold perfectly, as he floats in the water and starts to have dreams of weightlessness. The comic ends with an interruption, pointing to the frustration of wanting to connect but ultimately being alone while knowing that we always have to deal with the problem of other people. This is an artist whose line may be unremarkable, even dull, but his understanding of how to put together a page makes all the difference.

3-D Pete's Star Babe Invasion Comics #4, by Mike Fisher.  This is another loving tribute to female actresses from cheesy sci-fi and fantasy films from a couple of generations ago. Fisher is a skilled cartoonist and designer whose drawings are both tasteful and attractive. The best parts of this zine are always his amusing rundowns of his favorite old-school sci-fi films and the attractive actresses therein. This issue focuses on the actress Caroline Munro, with a story dedicated to the awful Italian Star Wars rip-off titled Starcrash. With a sharp but relatively gentle wit, he makes fun of the film while praising the loonier aspects of its design and dishing out bits of trivia. Fisher also has a special knack for drawing in a naturalistic style that doesn't deaden the vitality of his characters on the page. Even his pin-up pages are full of life, thanks to the slightly cartoony quality he brings to each figure. This comic is extremely silly fun aimed at fellow fans of the genre, executed with great panache and enthusiasm.

Telling a Story: Baddeley, Brown, Jackson, Skelly

Silent V #7, by Kyle Baddeley. This trippy sci-fi/fantasy/monster series has been the equivalent of a comics MFA for Baddeley, whose draftsmanship has tightened up and whose storytelling has become much more fluid. From designing pages to understanding how to fill particular panels, Baddeley is a far more assured artist. I'm not going to attempt to connect the finale of his time and space spanning story of robots, monsters, babies, space gods, monks and cults to the rest of the series. Suffice it to say that the hero of the story makes it back to Earth after a pit stop at a space burger, only to ultimately be left out in the cold. Baddeley's crazy imagination makes him one to watch; keep an eye on his new collaboration with Rob Jackson titled LetterBomb.

California #3 and #4, by Rob Jackson. The final two chapters of Jackson's Steinbeck-meets-Lovecraft mash-up are every bit as crazy as the first two installments, yet both are held firmly in check by Jackson's mastery over plotting and fine details. After everyone disappears after his sinister preacher brother's machinations, Billy (the hero of the story) tears out of there to get some help. He's lucky in that his old boss knows some Wise Folk who set him on the path to save his family from their mysterious fate. Things get really weird after that, as a ritual turns Billy into a head floating across the dimensions until he finds his house, and he must rescue everyone while dodging a monster and an evil intelligence. Just when it seems the story has reached its end, Jackson turns the craziness up another ten notches and injects some genuine suspense into the story as Billy desperately tries to find a way to stop the evil intelligence that threatens his town. Jackson really delights in drawing wriggly, disgusting and slightly absurd monsters, and this comic is a special treat as he goes all-out in #4 in depicting the final battle. This may be his most cohesive story yet.

Memorexia, by Box Brown. This is a short, powerful comic about a man going to a clinic in order to recover some especially painful memories from a futuristic machine. All throughout the story, it's emphazed that he can feel the memory but can't actually alter it. The result is a wistful and sweet story with a twist ending that feels earned. The use of techniques like zip-a-tone, diagrams and a rendering style that's simplified with the exception of its character designs make the comic all the more effective, as the reader slowly begins to learn that all the the technological mumbo-jumbo is just a smokescreen for a quietly and effectively portrayed moment between a father and a son. Brown contrasts red and blue throughout the story to add to the sense that one is reading a simple diagram or map of some kind, one of many contrasts found in the story. The difficulty of his relationship with his father is contrasted against the way their relationship ended, so even abusive language by the father is met with a smile. It also points to the way our minds try to create their own narrative, even in the face of memories to the contrary. This is one of many stories by Brown that I've read that have characters with abrasive exteriors that are nonetheless loving and beloved in turn.

Operation: Margarine #1, by Katie Skelly. This is the opening chapter in a stylish caper series about a rich young runaway named Margarine who gets mixed up with a rough and tumble hellraiser named Bon-Bon. After figuring out her strengths and weaknesses as a cartoonist with Nurse Nurse, one can really see Skelly's strengths on full display here. Her characters have a mod, stylish quality to them, lending a pulpy and delightfully affected feel to the adventures and interactions of the main characters. It feels like a movie or a story even as it's being told in a straightforward fashion. Skelly is just great at drawing interesting clothes, styluzed character poses and mannered yet entirely believable character poses. The way she draws huge and expressive eyes is a particular draw, especially because they are never cute. Rather, Bon-Bon's big almond eyes have a vague hint of menace, while Margarine's rounder eyes express a wide variety of emotions, allowing her to act as the in for the reader. The story itself just gets off the ground in this issue with a minimum of fuss: Margarine skips out on a mental institution but gets ratted out by a guy she thought was helping him. When she confronts him and things go south, Bon-Bon steps in and punches him out, leading to the pair escaping on a motorcycle. I'm looking forward to seeing what Skelly does with this sort of runaway set of tropes in terms of characterization; I'm sure it will carry her usual sense of style in terms of the drawings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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