31 Days Of CCS #22: Jai Granofsky, DW

It's funny; whether or not DW sends me something directly for review, he always winds up in my yearly CCS round-up anyway. That's because he loves collaborating with other CCS folks. This year, it's a comic's worth of collaborations with Jai Granofsky. The sole thing I had reviewed from him was Waiting For Baby, a bracing and frequently grim bit of memoir. It's clear that his real forte' is absurd, weird, and sometimes transgressive vignettes. In Taglianuccis, he and DW switch off on creative duties. "Cerrito" is a surreal account of a film director's life as told by a woman who knew him slightly. DW wrote this and Granofsky drew it, and it's interesting to see how Granofsky drew a lot of extra detail in order to give the reader something to look at. The story itself seems to be about familiar creators until DW threw in weird details about magical beasts. "Home Away" was written by Granofsky and drawn by DW in his stripped-down style that resembles an Ed Emberley drawing. It's every bit as weird as the other comics, as two creatures first discuss scatological functions in a refined manner and then talk about an assassination assigned to them. The rhythm of the whole thing reminded me of a Gerald Jablonski comic.

The humor ranges from absurd to upsetting to things based on misunderstandings, like a DW-written strip about a man who misidentifies the actor Garret Dillahunt as Garrison Keillor in a bar. There's a weird flatness to the work that looks partly deliberately banal and partly sinister. That's true of so much of this comic and Granofsky's work in general. It's mostly naturalistic, so the weird flourishes or monstrous figures are especially disturbing and unexpected. Granofsky's own comic, What The Actual, is every bit as odd as his collaborations with DW. There's a vibe that's sort of a cross between Eric Haven's embrace of mainstream tropes and Paul Hornschemeier's skill in cartooning and rendering in a style the blends naturalism with certain cartoony flourishes.

In "Old Friends," for example, a guy who looks like a drawing out of a Billy DeBeck comic strip meets up with a guy who could be in a Harvey Pekar story. The result of their meeting is a violent fight, a car crash, a decapitation, and a juvenile meta-joke. There's a story about a "party donkey" and the world's most violent game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey as two kids try to one-up each other. There's a story about a kid who gets a guy to come over to play a video game with him as the world is about to end and fried chicken is delivered by helicopter. An astoundingly vicious masked superhero delivers "justice" that's ridiculously disproportionate to the original infraction. Granofsky is deliberately messing with genre tropes here, either by exploding them or taking them to extremes.

In the second issue of What The Actual, Granofsky runs a bunch of different narratives together. It starts with "Midnight Motor Mike," a stunt cyclist who deals with a heckler by pulling him out of the audience and threatening to shit down his throat. There's a funny flatness of affect in the dialogue, as though Granofsky was piecing together terrible grindhouse movies together. Another story features an anthropomorphic duck who loves to text. The next features two women who are running from some kind of invincible zombie creature, ala a standard horror film. All of these storylines then mash together, as the women stumble on Midnight Motor Mike. Several eviscerations later, the original heckler of the cyclist seems like he's about to get his revenge before the masked hero from the first issue shows up out of nowhere. The texting duck is even connected to everyone, as the unseen victims of the zombie are his friends as well. The whole package is just...odd. There's a feeling of stream-of-consciousness at work, but also a creative process akin to long-form improv. There's nothing quite like it in comics at the moment, where Granofsky just goes straight to his id for inspiration and finds it mediated by a variety of pop culture influences.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #25: Kevin Uehlein, Pat Barrett, DW

Pigeon Man #2 and #4, by Pat O'Brien, Zack Poitras (writers) and Pat Barrett. Barrett drew this visceral, disgusting and over-the-top satire of politics, capitalism and the culture that surrounds them. If anyone was up to the job of drawing the adventures of a superhero who combined the aspects of pigeon and man in the most revolting ways possible, it's Barrett. His humor comics have always had that quality of being game for anything, and that's certainly true here. I unfortunately was only able to read the 2nd and 4th issues of the comic, so I can't comment too much on the story. The basics are that the mayor of New York City is kidnapping orphans and grinding them into sausage, and only Pigeon Man and his friend the Commissioner of the police can stop him. Hilariously, the mayor uses the New York Rangers hockey team as his stooges. Pigeon Man himself is a disgusting character, frequently lapsing into heavy drug and alcohol-fueled binges as he does things like go down on a bat. Tucker Carlson gets seduced, various rescue missions are attempted, horrific sausage is consumed, and Pigeon Man's prison-bound daughter wreaks havoc. The comic is a bit of a grind sometimes because it never lets up, making it something of a breathless experience. Still, Barrett's saturated use of color and ability to mix a cartoonish style with realism make the gags work.

Kevin Uehlein's solo project was the immense minicomic Quit Rasslin' Me!, an epic deconstruction and parody of the WWE and pro wrestling in general. Featuring his anthropomorphic characters Disgusting Duck and Dumbass Dog, those two go from "back alley wrestling" to the WWE when the corporation was beset by steroid scandals, sexual harassment claims and being increasingly out of touch with the fans. As ludicrous as the action in this comic is (and it goes way over the top), virtually everything in it is based on something that actually happened. The Duck is chosen to be the new, hot babyface and even gets tabbed as the new champ, since he's cheaper than maintaining the older, Hulk Hogan-like mainstay. The Dog is chosen to be a heel who can reliably take chair shots to the head and get sent through tables, no matter the damage to his body. There's turn after turn here, as an arrogant Duck gets taken down by an Undertaker-like version of the Dog, who then decides to become a born-again Christian. This is a funny, silly comic with appealing, rubbery art that is entertaining in its own right in addition to being a dead-on satire of the WWE's greed and questionable ethics.

KJC 4 is Uehlein's sketchbook collaboration zine, done with the artist DW as well as James Stanton and Dakota McFadzean. Uehlein's bigfoot wackiness and DW's intense mark-making and pattern designs make for a compelling mix, and they do all sorts of things to create a variety of visual experiences. For example, there are pages that are transparencies, laid over a paper page. The drawings on the transparency interact with the drawings on the page in interesting ways, deliberately adding new details and contexts for them. In the middle of the comic, there's a stapled-in micro mini that features Uehlein-designed characters talking, only their word balloons contain DW's patterned drawings that feature strange animals and fossils in the middle. There are also occasional comic strips with interjections from DW that contribute to the dense glee of this project.

Compulse 10 and an untitled mini from DW round out the comics here. Compulse is Uehlein's micro-mini sketchbook project, and this edition focuses on a female character with various hairstyles in profile. Uehlein really has a knack for drawing angry cartoon degenerates. DW's zine has more of his current interest: circular designs that resemble mandalas, containing a bird, a lizard or some other creature in its center. He alternates between black & white and color, with the former looking bolder and the latter more visually appealing. They almost look like cave drawings or some kind of ancient image that's been long buried.

Thirty Days of CCS #30: dw

dw is at the most extreme end of mark-makers to emerge from CCS, defying narrative and conventional comics layouts on every page. Which is not to say his comics are abstract, per se. Rather than attempt a straight review, here’s what I’m looking for and looking at when I read one of dw’s comics, and that certainly applies to his book with Fantagraphics Underground, Mountebank.

·        The Title. A mountebank is a snake oil salesman, a charlatan, a fraud, a trickster. Someone who makes big promises and doesn’t deliver on them while still profiting. Is this perhaps a playful self-critique or anticipatory critique of the kinds of comics that he does in relation to other kinds of comics, and how others might perceive him as a cartoonist as a result?

·        Gestalt vs Microimage. The design of this book is meant to resemble a small, personal notebook, complete with lined/graph paper to construct his small blocks. These are meant to resemble 8-bit images on the page and create whorls of black and white cascading across and around the page. Don’t concentrate too much on the individual images, because there are simply too many to take in. I try to take in the gestalt, the larger image that is created by the patterns while still understanding the hermeneutic relationship it has with the smaller images. This isn’t a Seurat painting, where the individual dots only have meaning when seen in the larger context. Instead, it’s more like using a microscope to example a cell sample and understand that the ways in which both views are different and true at the same time.

·        Black vs White, Dark vs Light. dw relies on these contrasts above all else in his comics to create patterns, shapes, paths and interruptions. The stark white boxes that appear on his page almost act as impenetrable borders, but not in the traditional sense of comics borders and gutters. The contrasts rise again and again, as the decorative and narrative aspects of his comics are often one and the same. Not every page is meant to be interpreted; some are simply meant to be seen and enjoyed for what they are.

·        Text vs Image. dw’s go-to image is a simple rendering of an animal of some kind: a cat, a dog, a pig, a stag, a deer or something hard to identify. They live in and on his pages. They are not simply decorative. There are times when there’s some sequential movement with them within each page and across pages. There are also times when dw uses collage to insert found text, which is sometimes used as dialog, and sometimes used as random commentary on the page by himself as author or by an animal. Sometimes the text is upside down, and sometimes it’s not in English. A lot of it concerns sex, which is interesting because I wouldn’t say the rest of his work touches on sex that much in terms of imagery, at least not on a literal level. I wouldn’t be surprised if these references were a textual representation of the id he may be exploring abstractly in the rest of his work.

·        Narrative vs Static Image. Is there a journey that takes place from the first page to the last? To be sure. Does this journey have narrative meaning? I’m not sure that this is an important question to ask, any more than if a walk in the forest has narrative meaning, or a trip on a boat. It just sort of is, and the key is let each page wash over you without thinking about them too hard.

·        I use a different strategy with his little minicomics; I like to look hard at the details of each image, like one mini where each creature is describing a fantastic-looking creature using images alone. 

Thirty-One Days of CCS #30: Rio Aubry Taylor, Kevin Uehlein & DW

For Rio Aubry Taylor (who uses xe/xir pronouns), the urge to express xirself through abstract comics, lively genre comics and autobio are all tightly wound together. In Taylor's abstract comics series Tabe #12: Shed Your Blood For Pleasure, the repeated motif of dozens of vertical lines tightly packed together in a panel is used in some interesting ways. Taylor stops just short of making them hatching as xe adds a wavy quality to the lines that makes them all the more intense to look at. Taylor then modulates the reader's experience by experimenting with page design in terms of how many panels are stacked on each page and in what formation. Eschewing a standard grid, Taylor varies the height and width of the panels such that they alter the reader's experience by slowing them down on a page or speeding them up. By the simple quality of Taylor's hand, the line weight and the spaces between lines varies, creating a whorl effect on some pages. The reader's patience is eventually rewarded when Taylor (I'm guessing) improvises some figures that coalesce into musicians, revealing that the rest of the comic was a visual representation of experiencing sound. That was clever, but Taylor also carries this aesthetic into xir narrative series, Jetty.

Jetty is supported by Taylor's Patreon and appears as both a webcomic and a minicomic, of which five issues have been released. The series looks better as a minicomic than as a webcomic; something about it demands that it be on paper. This is an epic story that's clearly going to last a long time, and as a result, the first five issues are all over the place in terms of content. The first issue establishes the main plot, that "one billion minutes into the future", the sun disappears, causing worldwide chaos. As the series begins, a young girl named Mina is staying at a Buddhist monastery that's under attack by bandits and they have to escape. Along the way, we meet an explorer who's been stuck in the "dark internet" for two millennia, Mina is captured by a voracious shape-changing monster and then strikes it down when she suddenly evinces flame breath as a super-weapon, there's a blood-sucking insect who has intimate knowledge of important things, and meet a monk whose taste for alcohol gets him in trouble.

There is family turmoil and betrayal, physical and emotional trauma and greedy industrialists. Throughout the narrative, Taylor uses those abstract lines as a symbol for knowledge that's obscured or not yet attainable. Images, thoughts and beliefs fade in and out like a radio signal. The most remarkable issue was #4, which was an intensely personal story about Fill, a cyborg sorcerer's apprentice who is desperately looking for xir missing master. Fill was built to change xir appearance constantly and painfully, putting them in constant agony and making xir dangerous to others. Just as Taylor manifested addiction as a monster dragging people across jagged paths, so too did Taylor use Fill as a metaphor for being trans and desperate for human companionship. Taylor's intense and dense linework is at its pinnacle in this issue, as xe redesigns Fill in every panel with an astounding amount of detail each time. Fill's journey is far from complete in this issue, but Taylor's compassionate but unsparing account of xir life up to that point made for one of the best minicomics of the year. Overall, Taylor is really starting to get xir footing on the series, as each issue is more confident than the last as xe is allowing xirself to follow xir instincts on what storytelling instincts to follow. It's obvious that Taylor has truly found xir voice as a cartoonist as a result of creating this series.

Kevin Uehlein is an artist who seems to be on the verge of finding his voice, but is still trying to figure things out. He seems most comfortable working in funny animal style comics ala early Robert Crumb. In other words, anthropomorphic animals in adult situations. At the same time, Uehlein is interested in abstract narratives and psychedelia. Compulse 9 is an astoundingly beautiful collection of his color drawings, balancing that funny animal style with frequently apocalyptic, psychedelic imagery. It's sort of Joe Coleman meets Warner Bros. cartoons, as the images are funny, strange and yield more and more details upon close and long inspection. There's also the feel of a religious element as well, merging nature, death and life with ritual activities, as well as images that seem to bring to mind Hindu drawings. There are also anthropomorphic versions of Japanese samurai drawings from prints that are incredibly intricately drawn, as vivid as a Frank Frazetta drawing. Still, when I look at his drawings of cats in strange and psychedelic settings, I think of underground artists like Crumb or a more recent and perhaps sympathetic artist in Steve Lafler. It looks like he colored this using magic marker, and there's a rich, vivid quality to each page that makes this incredibly beautiful to study and appreciate.

Butt Gusters takes a different approach: black and white gag strips, mixing funny animal style as well as a highly cartoony but more naturalistic style. Uehlein is all over the map here. There's a funny autobio strip about giving up comics as a teen, a political strip about the absurd anti-trans "bathroom bills", and also lots of dark humor as well. There are inside jokes about comics (the "bad duck artist" gag was a good one), jokes about comedy (the stand-up for the elderly riffs on exactly what you would expect, but Uehlein still makes it funny), pop culture rants, joke mashups involving Caesar and pro wrestling, and plenty of visual jokes and puns. Every gag was so different that there wasn't much of a sense of rhythm, as it felt like Uehlein was throwing everything he could think of at the wall to see what would stick. Uehlein and DW teamed up KJC #3, their continuing collaboration comic. It's a nice match of DW's highly immersive use of patterns, collage and figures in a non-narrative manner with Uehlein's recognizable figure work, gags and psychedelia. They really went all-out in this issue, with everything in full color and some of the pages being done on transparencies, which was interesting on its own as well as when interacting with the art on the pages on either side of it. DW also engages in some dada narratives using his simplified figures, incorporating found text in the pieces to create a strange rhythm. This was by far the best of their collaborations: richer, more complex and more beautiful than the other issues. Again, Uelein seems to be on the verge of figuring out exactly what he wants to do, and I'm eager to follow whatever decision he makes.

Thirty Days of CCS #30: Irene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Amelia Onorato and D.W./Kevin Uehlein

Ultima Thule, by Amelia Onorato. Onorato has largely made fantasy her genre of choice as a cartoonist, albeit with a very specific point of view and aesthetic. Onorato has merged dark but fantastical concepts largely from a feminist perspective, all while closely hewing to whatever overriding idea is present in the plot. Ultima Thule is something of a departure in some respects, as a Roman engineer named Marcellinus (of African descent, which I thought was an interesting touch) gets exiled from the mother country and gets shipwrecked. He washes up in Ireland, in a remote village that depends on its sheep and rappelling down cliffs in order to steal birds' eggs. He's viewed as a sort of curiosity, unskilled in any of the activities that kept the tribe alive, until he engineers a plumbing system that drew water down from a mountain stream to the village. Onorato neatly ties together a village custom, Marcellinus' increasing affection for the village and his initial rescuer in particular and a tense moment to bring the short story to a neat close. It's an incredibly effective little story, thanks in large part to Onorato's increasingly confident character design and remarkable efficiency. The mark of a maturing artist is that their work has little in the way of filler or overdrawing, and this exercise certainly shows that Anorato is at that point.

KJC #2, by D.W. and Kevin Uehlein. Written by D.W. and drawn by Uehlein, this is a slick, engaging and wordless anthropomorphic story about a bull-headed male sent off on a mission by an alluring female. Its virtues lie chiefly in Uehlein's dazzling use of blacks and fluid panel-to-panel transitions, speeding up and slowing down the action as the narrative called for at the time. Given no information other than what was on the page, we start out believing this to be a hero's journey, as the bull-headed male has to think and fight his way through all sorts of obstacles. What appears to be an undersea adventure in the wild suddenly turns into a city adventure, where the reader starts to get clued in that not everything is at it seems. Then the story takes an almost Tarantino-esque turn for the violent, as the reader understands that this is a delicately-balanced caper that simply needed one last man for the job--and he and his crew wind up taking their just reward in the end. It's a well-paced, clever and simple story whose twists are eminently satisfying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty Days of CCS #29: Irene 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty Days of CCS #26: Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights 4

Awesome Sound is an anthology published by Sean Knickerbocker. The low-fi cover belies the beautiful contents within, which look like they were printed on a risograph. DW's endpapers, which forcefully push both text and image to the point of violent distortion, are fitting for a comic that's so visceral and unsettling. Dan Rinylo's "Beast" is told with an Ernie Bushmiller-style simplicity, as the young boy's face here is two big black dots for eyes, a black line for a nose and a mouth that goes from black line to black oval, depending on his emotions. Using a nine-panel grid after an initial splash page that establishes the boy at the edge of a forest, each page is interesting because the central panel is almost always a scene of stillness: we see the boy looking, see him smiling, see him in the middle of walking and then see him running from right to left when wild dogs start chasing him. That sets the story from amusing to frenetic, but the final middle panel is an image of an empty street--right before a wild dog who is chasing the boy is run over by a car. It's both dark and comedic, given the x over the dog's eye and the generally cartoony nature of the story, but the bright red blood on a page that's mostly black and white adds a level of terror to the proceedings.

Knickerbocker's "Do You Still Feel Alone?" begins with a brother and sister in the woods, on the run from something unseen. The way he throws the reader right into a chase scene propels the story right along, heightening its tension from the very beginning. That tension is ramped up when they are assaulted by a nude man, who is stabbed to death by the sister. Knickerbocker pulls back further, revealing that this is an island where a plane has crashed, its inhabitants reduced to life-and-death struggle. It's a brutal, unforgiving little tableau that has no pat ending, and the fact that it's drawn in that cartoony style reminiscent of Chuck Forsman and Sammy Harkham makes it all the more unsettling. Indeed, the later story where a young couple sets themselves on fire in a house (revealing a pentagram on the floor) is a sort of cousin to the sort of thing Forsman did in The End Of The Fucking World. Finally, Juan Fernadez's red ink two-pager is a perfect fit, as his scribbled-out faces go through a progression of consumption. This mini is short but every image packs a punch.

Can't Lose is an old-fashioned fanzine dedicated to the TV show Friday Night Lights. It's everything a fanzine should be: in-jokey, craft-conscious, and gently mocking in a reverent manner. "Coached" by superfan Melissa Mendes, this zine has an interesting sprinkling of well-known cartoonists. Popular topics include the Christian speed-metal band that the character Landry starts ("Crucifictorious"), the comically awful Billy, younger brother of lead character Tim (Henry Eudy does a fine job of pointing out just how weaselly he is while Nomi Kane posits a magical night the two share in the desert), and how doubters often come around to becoming obsessed with the show. Jon Shaw's "Friday Nightlife" speaks to this, as a character who mocks a couple mourning the last episode starts to watch it and eventually enters his own weird world of living out other, self-imagined seasons. Sam Spina actually made me laugh out loud in a strip where he and his wife are asked why South Carolinians are buying Texas beer, and they reply in unison "Texas forever". My favorite strips were Dan Zettwoch's hilarious story about Dillon getting routed because Saracen used photocopies from the playbook to hang up Crucifictorious flyers (lovingly designed and drawn by Zettwoch, of course) and Jeff Lok's tale of escalating terrible behavior being excused "They're good kids". Can't Lose even has a cut-out Tim Riggins paper doll. While bits of it might me mystifying to those in the dark, the premise is laid out clearly enough for the jokes to land.

Stranger Knights 4 was published, as always by Bill Volk. This light-hearted fantasy/sci-fi/superhero anthology has always been on the uneven and amateurish side. This issue is the first to look good from cover-to-cover, and each story is funny to boot. Volk's "Brega and Snurrd" sees him use a cleaned-up, simplified version of his line that emphasizes character expressiveness above all else. The story follows familiar Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy tropes, but it's really about the relationship between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Of course, the mother here is a bearded dwarf and her daughter is trying to pass as human at her wizarding school. When the mother demands the presence of her daughter for an adventure (ie, bonding session), tension arises in an amusing manner. This is a crisply-paced story that actually gets across real feelings in its fantasy context. I'd love to see more from these characters and their world. The Volk-written "Thousand Year Grudge" (drawn by Bryan Stone) is a denser, grittier story involving anthropomorphic animals, thievery, romances gone bad and multiple double-crosses. The thickness of Stone's line is coupled with cross-hatching, lots of spotted blacks and other noir visual effects to counter the funny animals and the wonderfully ludicrous character of Maggie, the young bird who decides to be a thief. Ann Lewis' "Headless" is a bit on the cruder side in terms of rendering, but her use of humorous body language in telling a story about an empty but animated suit of armor sells it effectively. Finally, the Volk-Mary Soper continuing collaboration "Incantrix X" continues to be a reliably amusing story with idiosyncratic character design and odd design choices.

CCS-Powered Anthologies: Irene 2 and Sundays 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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