Oddball Minis: Winslow-Yost/Rae-Grant, Dugan, Mitchell/White, Phelan, Bong

Popcorn Muscles #1, by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Michael Rae-Grant. The duo behind the deranged Steel Sterling comic once again takes Golden Age superheroes and villains like TNT Todd, Iron Skull, Master Mystic and Airmale & Stampy and does odd things with them. Using a day-glo color scheme that recalls the greatest excesses of Paper Rad as well as the deliberately posed and stilted character designs of Michael DeForge, this comic explores some different areas than their first effort, which was both more comedic and more kinetic. For example, Airmale and Stampy here are retired heroes and lovers who must use all sorts of devices to prevent themselves from floating away in their civilian lives. An extended sequence where Stampy is trying to take a shower and Airmale trying to prevent his lover from hurting himself. Stampy is tired of living like a freak, which leads to a surprisingly poignant ending that's revealed by a pot full of wilted flowers. Pink, yellow and blue are the dominant colors here, and their assault is so prominent that the conventionality of the set-up and the emotional rawness of the piece are both considerably muted, leaving the reader to sort and sift through it.

The Iron Skull sequence is a series of three identical images of a bizarre character with an irregularly-shaped head waiting to hear thoughts in his head from someone else. Like in the first strip, there's a lingering sadness at work in the wake of the clashing, psychedelic colors; it seems to be about someone losing his mind. The story of TNT Todd gets at the heart of what GWY and MRG seem to be after, which is the transparency of the constituent elements of their art. That is, they want the reader to see that this was drawn by computer, that it's constructed of very simple geometric elements, that its intelligibility is entirely dependent on the reader's ability to make connections in what they see. The mangled use of language, the out-of-panel asides to iconic images like his "g-man badge",  and the increasingly psychedelic and nonsensical flow of images almost make this feel like this is a story being told (or read) by someone with an aphasia. That said, there are enough clues that make this feel like an extreme, abstracted "cover version" of an original Golden Age story, one where the title character is indeed captured by skull creatures, encounters thieves wearing gas masks, is gassed and shot at and finally triumphs by shooting everyone with lightning. The last few pages are a particularly intense read with the bright red background initially obscuring the other colors on the page until one's eye learns to process it. The simplicity (and frequently, sheer stupidity) of the original stories and characters gives the artists some interesting material to work with, especially since they manage to channel the original frenzied energy that went into the Golden Age characters and turn it into something quite different. I am once again curious to see how they will follow this particular comic, though the #1 on the cover seems to indicate that this may be their new two-man anthology for the near future.

After The Gold Rush, by Dave Dugan. This is a genuine comics/zine oddity. Published in a manila folder with an untitled doodle, this is a collage of paper scraps, drawings by Dugan, and band announcements for his friend Nate Solod. Solod was a drummer and singer for a variety of funk bands as well as a roadie for the band G.Love and Special Sauce. The narrative, such as it is, is carried along by Dugan paraphrasing the Neil Young song "Tonight's The Night", which is about a roadie friend who died due to a drug overdose. During the course of the comic, Dugan reveals that Solod committed suicide. There are some neat lyrical symmetries; for example, in the original, there's a line about "playing guitar with a shaky hand". That's changed to "pound the drums with a shakyfoot"; "Shakyfoot" happened to be one of Solod's many projects, and Dugan designed a logo for it. There's an amazing sequence halfway through the zine where a vicodin wrapper is altered with Dugan's drawing and various words highlighted and circled ("depression", "overdose", "drug addiction"). stapled to it is the back of a cane sugar bag with a drawing of a woman that says "kisses sweeter than wine". That's what I enjoyed most about this comic: the total, frenetic commitment to its concept. There are other touches, like blank doctor's physical examination forms being used to draw on but also partly filled out in clever, telling ways. This comic is beautiful, strange, moving and psychedelic all at once. It is no more and no less a tribute to a friend, one designed to honor a friendship and history of collaboration entirely in the language of the nature of that collaboration: comics and music. If some of ideas seem a bit on the nose at times, the sheer sincerity and handmade effort of what is most assuredly an art object won me over.

REH #5 by Brian John Mitchell and Andrew White and Lost Kisses #25, by Brian John Mitchell. Mitchell has been producing his weird little micro-mini comics (2" x 2 1/8") for years. Many of them are skewed takes on genres from sci-fi to horror to westerns to the supernatural, done with artists with a wide range of skill. My favorite two series are represented in this latest batch. Lost Kisses is drawn in stick figures by Mitchell himself. There's a narrative box (usually at the bottom of each page) and a figure in each panel, with the figure saying something that's either in support of or at odds with the narrative caption. What started with just a series of somewhat despondent/ironic takes on life has morphed into something futuristic. Taking a page from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, his unnamed character has become "unstuck in time", popping up in a post-apocalyptic future. It's a typically, funny weird and strange comic that's as much about cringe humor as it is about a particular plot. REH features the private writing of the author Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. Taken from when he was taking care of his mother and trying to scratch out a career as a writer (and get paid for the stuff he got published), White's spare and moody pencil work is a perfect complement to Howard as filtered through Mitchell. With just a single image available per page, White has to buckle down and waste no lines in creating atmosphere, as he must get across a single idea in dramatic fashion. It's a great series about writing and the writing process, as well as a window into another era.

St Packrat's ABC and Alice B. Toeclip's Stay-in-bed Yoga Ritual, by Jacquie Phelan. These are self-described as "chapbooks", and they are micro-minicomics that feature drawings and text pasted in. Phelan is an interesting character; she's a former road and cyclocross bike racer and was a giant in her sport. These comics reveal a whimsical and philosophical soul, one whose spiritual investigations are leavened with a great deal of humor and self-deprecation. The ABC mini is a primer that talks about a mouse character's proclivity for hoarding and how it affects her life--and how it's also a symptom and manifestation of depression. The Yoga mini is a funny series of diagrams that detail her routines for doing yoga while still in bed, with positions like "cinnamon roll". It is at once deadly serious and light-hearted. The minis themselves are at the crudest possible level of technical ability; the photocopying is badly done, and Phelan had to pencil in by hand words and images that got deleted from the copies. Her drawing is rudimentary at best. That said, if Phelan can improve the technical aspects of her comics, she has the potential to be a very interesting artist. As someone who's led a rich and interesting life, I imagine there's a lot she could talk about regarding her experiences. Beyond simply expanding on things that she's done, her sense of humor and point of view are both huge positives regarding potential future work.

World of Bong, by D.R. Bong.  This is a short, black and white mini that's essentially meant as a teaser for the webcomic. It is a self-consciously goofy, crudely-computer drawn strip. Everything about this strip is awkward and stilted and not in a way that's funny. It's the sort of comic that relies on the idea of a Spanglish-speaking protagonist named "Mustachio" is inherently funny. The crude drawings don't even have the advantage of a human hand being directly behind them, and the awkwardness of their creation on the page and the inability of Bong to draw figures that relate to each other in space in a way that makes sense further dims whatever small, absurdist appeal the comic might have had.

A Big Batch From Silber Media

Silber Media's Brian John Mitchell sent me a huge batch of his latest micro-mini comics. As always, these minis are 2x2" and range from 12 - 40 or so pages. They're almost entirely written by Mitchell and drawn by a number of collaborators, though Mitchell does do stick-figure drawings for some of these comics. Mitchell's minicomics publishing empire is one of the odder phenomena in comics today, and I always look forward to a new shipment. Given the size of this latest shipment, I'll do a lightning-round style evaluation of each, with just a sentence or two of commentary.

Poit!: WTF and Poit!: La Jetee, by BJM and Dave Sim. The common thread for all of these comics is a palpable yet restrained sense of desperation. These stick-figure experiments with Sim feature precisely the same art in both minis, with completely different dialogue (written by Mitchell) in each. In one, the protagonist pops in and out of horrible events as a time traveler. In another, he constantly dreams about killing his girlfriend. In both cases, suicide winds up being his solution.

Lost Kisses #21, by BJM. This has always been Mitchell's best series: a series of stick-figure drawings featuring dialogue with narrative captions that provide a funny counterpoint, although that humor is cynical and frequently pitch-black. This one also focuses on time travel, musing on how it might affect his life.

Built #1, by BJM & Joe Badon. This story about a robot with human emotions who strives to move beyond his station in life is about 90% filler, plodding on long after its premise was established.

xlk: Extreme Lost Kisses, by BJM & Nick Marino. Best way to describe this comic: if Rambo had been done as a stick-figure cartoon with an overdubbed narrator pontificating about his mission ala Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.

Ultimate Lost Kisses #12, by BJM & Jeremy Johnson. This story about a teenager who becomes pregnant and is determined to keep it feels a bit like a Dave Kiersh comic, minus compelling imagery.

XO #7, by BJM & Melissa Spence Gardner. This is the continuing story of an introspective assassin who muses about his life and his relationships. In this issue, he falls in love with a woman who should raise red flags, and winds up paying a price. This was a genuinely exciting comic, and Gardner's simple gray-scaled art is effective in giving the reader short sharp shocks on each page.

Small Art Series: American, Awake, Climb, Professor Horton, Why Birds Sing, miscellaneous, by BJM. All of these feature color photos of assorted textures, meant to mimic wood, fire (Professor Horton is about the original Human Torch), plumage, etc. These tiny comics are worth a glance, though not a lingering look, because it's less about aesthetics than concept.

Monthly #1, by BJM & Eric Shonborn and Star #1, by BJM & Kurt Dinse. Mitchell loves flipping seemingly mundance stories into supernatural thrillers, all while maintaining the initial dramatic/romantic thread. Monthly drops an early clue as to why its protagonist can't find the right girl to fall in love with and why this is so important, and then spills its reveal halfway through. It's a funny, effective bit of shock, aided by clear and stark art by Shonborn. Star's concept is similar, though it lets the cat out of the bag a little earlier and so starts to drag halfway through. There's also too much clutter on the page.

Vigilant #1, by BJM & PB Kain. This comic about vigilantes is both tedious to read and boring to look at. It's one of the rare total misfires from Mitchell.

TCJ Post #33: Minis From Silber Media

Rob reviews a variety of comics from Brian John Mitchell's Silber Media over at The Comics Journal.

Minicomics Round-Up: Smith, Cagle, Mitchell, Stafford, Pasty Anthology, Volk, Candy Or Medicine, McAndrew

Time to take a look at the latest batch of minicomics that have come to my attention. Included are minis by Bill Volk, Phil McAndrew, Susie Cagle, Brian John Mitchell, Ryan Cecil Smith and Tyler Stafford, as well as anthologies Candy or Medicine and the Pasty Anthology.

TWO EYES OF THE BEAUTIFUL and UN PETIT CARNET DE VOYAGE II, by Ryan Cecil Smith. Smith is the first of the Closed Caption Comics group that I've had a chance to read, and I was impressed by both of these minis. TWO EYES OF THE BEAUTIFUL is an adaptation of Umezuo Kazuo's "Blood Baptism", billed as "a grotesque horror manga". It's an over-the-top, jam-packed story about an actress with a disfiguring facial disease and a mysterious doctor who compels her to do all sorts of horrible things for a potential cure. Smith throws the kitchen sink at the reader visually, with zip-a-tone, photorealist panels, and heavily rounded Tezuka-like figures. The highlight for me was a witty four-page sequence where the actress is trying to tie up an innocent girl for hideous purposes--with nothing but zip-a-tone and sound effects representing the dark room. Smith cleverly captures the crazed nature of J-horror, mixing warped humor and genuinely disturbing images.

UN PETIT CARNET DE VOYAGE is a travelogue in the tradition of French comics, showing off Smith's lush brushwork. He is currently teaching english in Japan, and so made the trip from Osaka to Hiroshima, ostensibly for a sake festival. He notes with some delight that he feels like he's learning to draw trees, and they are indeed some of the most striking images in this minicomic. It's interesting seeing him mix Japanese imagery (especially with regards to trees and buildings) with a more French style of line with regard to his figures. This is one of the most beautiful minicomic sketchbooks I've ever seen, and I only wish it was printed bigger. It's obvious that Smith has tremendous tools as an artist, and I'll be eager to see how his time in Japan continues to influence his work.



THIS AND THAT #3, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH?, THE SECRET THOUGHTS OF HAROLD LAWRENCE WINDCRAMPE, and PEARLY WHITES, by Phil McAndrew. McAndrew is all about character and caricature in these comics. SECRET THOUGHTS... is a Jules Feifferesque mini about an ineffectual guy who whines about not having a girlfriend and then spies a perfect candidate...only to lose her to an alpha male. It's nicely drawn but with a predictable ending, though he did get off a great joke in the middle ("Lola is too picky" after rattling off a capricious list of reasons why all the girls he knew weren't good enough for him). THIS AND THAT sees the artist collecting a variety of sketches, gags, and short stories in a variety of styles. He seems most comfortable drawing slightly grotesque caricatures with lots of angles, bushy eyebrows, stubbly facial hair and bulbous noses.

Speaking of facial hair, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH? was the funniest of these entries. He combined his scratchy line, pointy noses and exaggerated character design with an excellent gag: a wimpy suitor impressing his girl's hyper-masculine father with an "awesome drum solo" so powerful that the father's moustache flies off of his lip and on to the suitor. He rides away with his lover with a motorcycle summoned by his moustache. PEARLY WHITES features another grotesque, scribbly, hyperemotional figure who regrets a lost love. McAndrew backs up a good final gag involving a creature sending him back in time in exchange for his teeth with a series of funny drawings. McAndrew is leaning heavily on his chops at the moment and still seems to be finding his way with regard to story structure. Of course, his control over his line is pretty remarkable at this stage. With his skills, it's likely that he will improve from story to story, as he continues to develop and refine his style and story interests.



O WOE! and DOMESDAY by Bill Volk. The first effort I read from this Center for Cartoon Studies student was a 24-hour comic (THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED). While that mini was rough in presentation, one could see a witty voice emerging. O WOE! is an account of the creation myth and apocalypse of a civilization that rose out of the remains of a giant space sperm. It's a clever idea with some funny and even disturbing bits (like a society that fell because of "doubling", wherein the rich made duplicates of all their possessions, up to and including cities--only to leave them unused), but Volk's chops weren't quite up to making their society as vivid as it needed to be. I'd love to see Volk redraw this comic at some point.

On the other hand, DOMESDAY is a comic that plays to Volk's strengths as an artist: character design, gesture and exaggeration. The story's about William the Conqueror's rule over England, and follows a young man following the king's decree of counting the possessions of every man in the country. The young man, of Norman descent, is terrified of the savage English, and Volk gets a lot of mileage out of the young man fearing for his life and begging god for mercy. The superdeformed looking character design is clever, giving this historical account a certain playfulness. Historical fiction, especially of an obscure nature, may well be Volk's forte, and I'll be interested in seeing how he continues to develop.



FOLK #3 by Tyler Stafford. This is a 24-hour comic by this intriguing cartoonist who works in the Brian Ralph/Mat Brinkman tradition. The best thing about the comic, other than a surprisingly well-defined plot, is the delightfully loony character design. The story follows an escaped prisoner on an alien world who is captured after breaking out and returned to his cell. Stafford then takes the story in a weird direction, as the jewel on the alien's head pops out and it magically rescues them all...with some unforseen complications at the very end. The way Stafford manipulates the shapes of his characters is what appeals to me the most: the oval-headed heroes, villains with bullet heads and creatures with heads that look like light switches, the weird Vaughn Bode-like helmet of the female leader and the toy-like proportions of the spaceship. This is a goof of a comic that does what Stafford does best: put funny-looking characters in motion.



NINE GALLONS by Susie Cagle. Cagle cleverly mixes the personal, the political and a keen eye for caricature in this account of her time with Food Not Bombs. This mini was the first part of a longer work related to this subject, and is unusual for a story with a strong political point of view in that it's not a polemic. Instead, it's a warts 'n all love letter to the various people she met when she was helping feed the homeless of San Francisco. Cagle takes aim at herself as much as anyone as she encounters, depicting herself as hemming and hawing and having trouble asserting herself. The story she relates is equal parts ambivalence and affection, given the friable and flaky people she encountered in the organization, like the group leader who always passes on cooking duties and urges her to go faster when she's chopping potatoes. Her most affectionate portraits are reserved for the people she helped feed--even the ones who screamed at her. There's a freshness to Cagle's point of view and a lot of verve to her line, making her an artist to seek out for those interested in political cartooning and comics journalism.



JUST A MAN, WORMS #4, XO #5 and LOST KISSES #9 & #10, by Brian John Mitchell, et al. These are tiny micro-mini comics, measuring about 2x2", and range from 16-40 pages each. Mitchell is the writer for all of them and is also the (stick-figure) artist of LOST KISSES. Most of these are parts of a series, all of which are easy to pick up on as Mitchell hops from genre to genre. JUST A MAN, drawn by Andrew White, is a sort of hard-bitten western, stripped of glory. A farmer sees his house burned down, his infant son killed and his wife disappear. He's pretty sure he knows who did it, and hunts them down, one by one. I liked the voice Mitchell used for the character, but he overwrote this story. That's not unusual for a writer collaborating with an artist, but the story would have had a bit more power if the first-person narrative had been sparer and he let the visuals carry the story.

WORMS and XO fall into the realms of sci-fi/horror and crime noir, respectively. WORMS had a zippy pace to it and appealingly minimalist art by Kimberlee Traub that fit the story nicely, one that featured a young woman who witnessed the death of her father and was the subject of an experiment in a lab. This issue found her gaining power through some strange worms, subduing her tormentor, and escaping. The single panel per page format fit with Traub's striking and hallucinatory imagery. XO had a similarly snappy pace to it but was let down by Melissa Spence Gardners art. It was competent, but it didn't fit the story's mood or add anything to Mitchell's narrative, which needed a moodier style.

The stand-outs in this set were Mitchell's issues of LOST KISSES. These stick-figure comics were first-person, meandering observations about human behavior and the narrator's own misanthropy. What's clever about these strips is precisely the same thing that hamstrung JUST A MAN: there's a narrative caption working against the image and dialogue on each page (it's a panel per page for all of these comics). However, in this comic, there's a comedic tension that arises as a result of that juxtaposition. Issue #10 was especially amusing, as it was a takedown of the concept of love and those who insist on expressing it, with the author worrying about falling for that fallacy himself. I love how unassuming and direct these comics are; there are no frills or pretensions here--just a writer and artists who are experimenting with a variety of means of expression.

CANDY OR MEDICINE 4-7 and LUNARCY, edited by Josh Blair. Blair's modest little anthology continues to roll on. Each issue is 16 pages long (including covers) and is just a dollar. The focus is on up-and-coming creators, though virtually issue has work by at least one reasonably well-published cartoonist. The highlights of #4 are a great gag strip by Blair and Ray N (punning on "Love Is Blind" in clever fashion) and Kevin Richardson's strip about a loveline DJ who gets his heart broken in a bar. His character design and use of gesture carry the strip.

Issue five has a couple of Shannon Smith strips later reprinted in his own minis, a "missed connections" strip by Ed Moorman that had a certain sweet wistfulness to it, and a cleverly-designed strip about a sleepwalker meeting a series of horrible fates. The sixth issue's highlights center around gags, featuring up-and-coming cartoonist Lydia Conklin with a couple of surprisingly silly punchlines, Jason Viola contributing a typically cartoony strip about a playground lawyer, and Patrick Morgan selling a character named Blobby for all that he's worth ("Do you dance?" "I shimmy..."). The latest issue's best story was from Tyler Stafford, who contributed a typically quirky tale of a tiny space creature that winds up popping a hole in a giant space whale.

LUNARCY is a comic filled with silent-beat gags involving the moon hanging in the sky, eventually making absurd or witty declarations. Blair is a crude draftsman but I admire the level of devotion he has to his gags as well as his sense of timing. In general, CANDY OR MEDICINE is an interesting if uneven sampler of new voices in comics from across the world, from an editor who is clearly devoted to creating a showcase for these voices. Many of the comics in this anthology aren't very polished, but I admire the diversity of styles and aesthetic choices featured here.


THE PASTY ANTHOLOGY, edited by Rob Jackson. This is anthology devoted to the glories of the British baked goods known as pasties, a quirky and geographically specific theme that was somehow delightfully conveyed. The stories range from Steve Butler's cautionary tale of why being a health nut (and denying oneself a tasty pasty) can be hazardous to one's health to Dave Hughes' pasty-obsessed character studies to Jackson's absurd history of the importance of pasties throughout history.

What I found surprising about this anthology was how much witty cartooning there was to be found. Jim Medway's calendar comic featuring anthropomorphic animals buying food at a pastry shop was a clever talking head strip with surprisingly expressive characters. Francesa Cassavetti's account of being scared as a girl because she swallowed chewing gum (leading to her ignoring pain that would turn out to be an appendectomy) was my favorite strip in the book, thanks to her loose character design and appealingly sketchy line. Even the text pieces in the book fit into the uncompromisingly provincial nature of the anthology. Jackson's hand as an editor is quite evident here, given each artist's total commitment to absurd ideas and seeing them through as seriously as possible.