Foxing Reprints #3: Elijah Brubaker

Reich #11, by Elijah Brubaker.  Brubaker is nearing the end of his series about the controversial Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose theories about "orgone radiation" led him to make some radical claims. Brubaker's take on Reich is neither hagiography nor a sensationalist expose'. Indeed, Brubaker tries to be as matter-of-fact as possible regarding the increasingly eccentric nature of Reich's claims, including that aliens were infecting earth with negative orgone energy. The story is told through Reich's eyes and experiences, but this also includes his failings as a human. Brubaker hammers home Reich's hypocrisy regarding his jealousy toward a lover that he accused of cheating on him. His free love ideas didn't seem to apply to those whom he viewed possessively. His absolutist and almost cultish demand for belief from his colleagues led him to alienate many former friends and supporters.

In this issue, the reader is introduced to the beginning of the end for Reich. The Food & Drug Administration was coming down hard on him, a process that would eventually see Reich sent to prison and reams of research destroyed. However, it's hard to have much sympathy for Reich at the beginning of the story, as he once again demands that his ex-lover admit to an affair, and she once again denies it before he hits her. For a man whose position with regard to so many issues was feminist in a manner that was way ahead of its time, Brubaker presents this act as the ultimate form of betrayal and hypocrisy. It's portrayed partly in silhouette, with Reich's arm stretched out almost casually. The brutishness of the act is contrasted with just how easy it was for Reich to descend to that level.

One by one, his friends, followers and family start to leave. There's yet another revealing scene where he meets by chance the widow of the man he thought was having an affair with his ex-lover. When she invites him over for a picnic, they each have different things on their mind. For Reich, he anticipates a sexual encounter. For the widow of modest means, it's a chance to ask Reich for money, which he flatly declines. It's yet another example of the almost casual cruelty of which he was capable. 

The issue ends with Reich in Washington, trying to attach himself romantically to a younger woman. The final scene is with his beloved son Peter in a hotel room, as Reich first engages in orgone-related jargon with his son and then confesses that he might have to take his own life if men come "to take me away in chains". For the first time, he completely breaks down as his son tries to comfort him. It's one of the rare scenes where Reich shows vulnerability as a human being rather than attempt to portray himself as being above others.

Brubaker's shadowy, sketchy and angular style is a deft match for the bizarre world of Reich. There's an almost haunting, static quality in each of the panels, even when there is movement involved. Brubaker wants the reader to focus in on each character's body language in each panel as a counter-point to the dialogue. The sketchiness of the line allows the reader to focus on the expressionistic qualities of the character design, and the extensive use of shadow effects contributes to the downbeat mood of the comic. There will likely be a couple of more issues before Brubaker wraps up the series and likely collects it. Reich is one of the more impressive feats of comics biography that I've read and certainly the most interesting since Chester Brown's Lous Riel, which was obviously a huge influence. 

Mini Round-Up: E.Brubaker, Luce, L.Suburbia

Reich #12, by Elijah Brubaker. Ten years and 260-odd pages after he began this series about psychologist Wilhelm Reich, Elijah Brubaker finally finished it with this twelfth and final issue. It's a tribute to new Sparkplug publisher Virginia Paine that she's found a way to raise the funds to see this project through after the death of former publisher Dylan Williams. The final issue, which covers his eventual imprisonment and death, deals with Reich in much the same way Brubaker did throughout the entire series. Reich was both a moral crusader with ideas about sex and sexuality that were way ahead of his time and a hypocrite consumed by jealousy over imaginary situations and dismissing jealousy from others. Reich was almost always the smartest person in the room but also lost touch with reality, conflating real threats with imagined ones in what resembled a schizophrenic breakdown. His unshakable belief in himself and his discoveries was both his admirable quality and the eventual cause of his downfall. Brubaker treats Reich as a fascinating, brilliant, flawed and damaged person; he is sympathetic to his plight and even-handed with regard to many of Reich's theories, but is interested in the gestalt of Reich's life, both good and bad.

Brubaker's detailing Reich's early sexual experiences in a previous issue is a crucial but understated way of showing how many of his theories originated in encounters he couldn't fully process as a child. Making Reich the narrator of his own story also helped keep Brubaker's explicit opinions out of narrative, giving Reich himself the opportunity to state his own case--for good or ill. The angular, shadowy and cartoony nature of the art allowed Brubaker the flexibility to make this as much an emotional narrative as it was a chronological one. To his credit, Brubaker never shoots for visual or narrative pyrotechnics throughout the story, no matter how bizarre Reich's stories of battling with UFOs with orgone energy became. Indeed, one question left for the reader is that given that many of Reich's theories about sexuality were so progressive, what aspects (if any) of his orgone-related research (including seeding clouds) are valid? Brubaker asks that while Reich may have been delusional and jumped to some incorrect conclusions, it doesn't mean that many of his ideas weren't worth pursuing, albeit using different methods. Reich was a fantastic series about the ways in which ego and personality conflict with seeking the truth, and how those conflicts affect those around us.

Oafanthology, edited by Ed Luce. Luce's Wuvable Oaf is a genuine comics phenomenon, but one underrated aspect of that book is how much Luce loves to collaborate. This "collection of Wuvable Oaf drawings & stories" allowed Luce to work with fans, friends and admirers with his characters. The series (recently collected by Fantagraphics in a superbly well-designed hardcover) has always been part romance comic, part pro wrestling comic and part rock 'n roll comic. The fact that the titular character is a "bear" and that most of the characters are gay somehow manages not to matter much with regard to the above genres, yet the fact that most of the characters are gay is crucial to the series' DNA. It's assumed, uncompromising and direct, as Luce doesn't dilute his content for a crossover audience, yet the wacky but somehow relateable characters clearly appeal to a relatively wide audience. Fantagraphics wouldn't be publishing it if they didn't think so.

Oafanthology takes this crossover appeal and runs with it. For example, Luce's collaboration with Tom Neely, having Oaf meet Neely's "Henry and Glenn" characters, reflects Luce's own contributions to Neely's anthology and their shared aesthetic and cultural touchstones with regard to metal. The same is true for "The Spawn of Goteblud", drawn by Josh Bayer, who has used his scratchy line to write about pro wrestling elsewhere. Edie Fake's comic about Oaf's crazy cat working for the sadistic chef character is hilariously over the top. The Katie Skelly-drawn strip about the character who loves to wear dead cat skins is perfectly in Skelly's wheelhouse in drawing fashionable characters. In the same vein, Vanessa Davis's story about Oaf's grooming is perfectly her. There are a number of interesting pin-ups as well, including a mind-bending Junko Mizuno drawing, an appropriately disgusting one by Johnny Ryan and even one by mainstream artist Stephen Sadowski. None of this will make a lick of sense to non-Oaf fans, but it's a perfect supplement for those who are in the know.

Cyanide Milkshake #6, by Liz Suburbia. Suburbia just had her first book released by Fantagraphics, but this series is a catch-all for her other interests. This is the sort of one-woman anthology that's stuffed with gags, brief vignettes, a running serial, autobiographical notes and more. Suburbia's foice is clear and distinctive, and her line is both clear and expressive. A memory of nearly being kidnapped into a stranger's car and barely outrunning him is chilling, especially in the way she contrasts the terror of the moment with the calm of hiding out in a fenced-in yard with a rabbit staring at her. The post-apocalyptic romance "G.B.A" is exciting, funny and charming, mixing the Gary Panteresque style with a vividly detailed relationship story, one where commitment, choices and killing zombies all go hand-in-hand. Suburbia effortlessly blends fantasy, rock, feminism, punk, autobio, dogs and superhero gags into a surprisingly coherent package, held together by a singular aesthetic. This is the laboratory of a percolating and unique talent and indicative of the ways in which younger creators draw inspiration from a huge variety of sources.

Minis: Alternative Comics #4, Henry and Glenn Forever and Ever #3, Abyss, Reich #10

Alternative Comics #4, edited by Marc Arsenault. In addition to reviving Alternative as a publisher, Marc Arsenault has also revived its flagship comic book anthology. This is a solid entry featuring established and promising cartoonists alike. The Mike Bertino cover is hilarious and weird, giving the book a slightly more underground feel than past issues, while the back cover's collaboration between Craig Thompson and Theo Ellsworth brought the best out of both cartoonists. Even in a relatively short comic, Arsenault's sequencing is carefully considered, as a series of one-pagers by Grant Snider act as detailed palate cleansers at regular intervals. He keeps the reader occupied in these thematically (but not narratively) related strips with multiple panels that lead the eye around the page in interesting ways, be it a meeting of frustrated artists, a checklist for summer or a series of directions on how to make a time machine. The simplicity of his line makes it easy to follow the pages and adds a further palate-cleansing quality to them.

Noah Van Sciver's "It Can Only Get Better" is my vote for best strip in the anthology, as he uses the sort of period detail he became known for in The Hypo and creates a hilarious and vicious send-up of cartoonists and cartooning. It reminded me a bit of the old B.Kliban strip where the caption is "Out of the way, swine-- a cartoonist is coming!", only taken to the next level, as an early 19th century political cartoonist enjoys his life and his ability to kill or fuck with relative impunity--and imagines their status in society will only continue to rise. Other highlights include brief pieces from Sam Alden (still in his drawing phase where his figures look not unlike Nate Powell's), the usual silliness by Sam Henderson (the "Grapes Hawthorne" typically creating an over-the-top version of a typical encounter with a certain kind of annoying person) and a Blobby Boys story by Alex Schubert that cleverly has most of its action take place off-panel. I was happy to see new work by Allison Cole and Andy Ristaino, with the former's thick, blobby figures still packing an emotional punch and the latter's exaggerated satire going to some amusingly dark places. The James Kochalka stories left me cold; his autobio attempts being poetic but feels self-indulgent, and his kids' story is unrelentingly twee. I did enjoy the focus on David Lasky, including a couple of strips and an interview that stripped the questions away and was reformatted to appear as more of an artist's statement. Lasky certainly deserves this kind of exposure as an artist whose mix of formalism and humanism in his drawing style make him a potent storyteller. I hope that Arsenault continues to make the appearance of the anthology an annual event, as there aren't very many anthologies of any quality that have open submission policies.

Henry and Glenn Forever and Ever #3, edited by Tom Neely. This may be my favorite series in all of comics right now, thanks to Neely finding new ways to go to the well in telling jokes about Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig as cohabitating lovers. There are three reasons why the anthology is so consistently entertaining. First, the stories avoid homophobic jokes by design. Indeed, many of the cartoonists involved in the anthology self-identify as being queer, which makes their presence in an alt-comics anthology (unfortunately) a bit of a rarity. Second, the gags, which tend to focus on Henry & Glenn, all come from a place of fandom, as they're very much insider jokes that poke fun at punk and metal from a devotee's perspective. Third, Neely is careful to rotate the roster of guest artists from issue to issue so as to provide as wide a range of styles as possible. This issue features the continuing saga of Henry and Glenn squabbling because of the presence of Glenn's mother, a sweetness and light type who drives everyone crazy with the insistence of her niceness. Neely clearly has a ball drawing Dan DeCarlo-style caricatures of various rock and comics personalities, the best being his send-up of death metal icon Gaahl.

Mari Naomi's story about Henry & Glenn's more quotidian visit to the pharmacist was a nice palate cleanser after Neely's craziness and the in-your-face craziness of Justin Hall's epic of Glenn descending into "Gaydes" in order to search for Henry's soul after he dies. Hall goes after every gay stereotype imaginable in hilarious fashion, from the Cavern of the Catty Drag Queens to the Dungeon of the Leather Daddies ("where there is no safe word!"). The usual array of pin-ups and Michael DeForge's funny take on the relationship problems that might occur if the two tried to collaborate musically, drawn in his uniquely deformed style, makes for a memorable capper. Neely will publish one more issue before trying to collect the material, which I think is wise, since while what started as a cocktail napkin doodle has taken on a life of its own, it will hit the diminishing returns stage at some point.

Abyss, by Saman Bemel-Benrud. This is an interesting little comic published by 2D Cloud. It's reminiscent of the sort of comics that Tom Kaczynski does, wherein critiques of capitalism and the architecture that emerges as a result are engaged. Bemel-Benrud's approach is a whimsical one, wherein "augmented reality ghosts" are included as a feature for a new condo development. The ghost encourages a woman to jump down and visit it after she takes a photo of its image on her phone. Pixellation and fractalization are two running visual themes in this comic, as both ghost and woman cross over into a space that makes them aware of their intersecting with three and four dimensional reality. There's also a sense where technology takes on a new, comforting role, one where the digital becomes visceral. There's an almost cheery openness regarding the woman's attitude toward this kind of neat, compartmentalized side-effect of capitalism, one that focuses on its aesthetic qualities. Her boyfriend is the opposite, decrying the lack of authenticity of such spaces as he is unable to interface with the ghost and the ideas it represents in the same way. Bemel-Benrud is cagey as far as what side he's arguing for as both characters land solid points, but the optimism of the woman is quite persuasive, even as she keeps the details of her ghost encounter to herself. The visuals in this comic are simple, bordering on crude, but Bemel-Benrud is able to make that work by using a pleasing blue color wash and as many iconic images against a blank background as possible.This comic is less interesting to look at than it is to think about, because one wonders if the woman was enlightened or infected by her contact with the digital specter--or perhaps both.

Reich #10, by Elijah Brubaker.The tone that Brubaker set in this biography of psychologist Wilhelm Reich has always been even-handed and fair. Reich is treated neither as a dangerous madman nor a visionary; instead, he's presented as brilliant, innovative, fallible, arrogant and hypocritical. That treatment continues even as Reich's theories grow all the more bizarre and show the limitations of his knowledge of science beyond psychology. He made the leap to consider that radioactive materials like radium react badly to his orgone energy generators without understanding the effects of radioactive materials, for example. In this issue, his theories take another leap into observing what appear to be UFOs (what he called EAs) that appeared to run on orgone energy. He saw them as a threat to the earth, one that could be defeated by his of his cloudbuster gun that acted as a sort of lightning rod for that energy. Brubaker cleverly parallels Reich's own narrative of being a sort of scientist-soldier needing to find and fight energies with his corrosive paranoia regarding his wife and a colleague having an affair, demanding written confessions and pushing away loyal colleagues. This is despite the fact that Reich himself had affairs with dozens of women in the interest of sexual openness and resisting self-oppression. At the same time, Brubaker injects a running note of sadness, as the deluded Reich thinks the president is supporting his research covertly even while the FBI and FDA view him as a dangerous crackpot. This paranoid had real enemies, but he simply wasn't savvy enough to understand how to fend off his real enemies while pushing away his true allies. Brubaker's scratchy but simple line perfectly captures Reich's many emotional states. In one panel, when Reich is furious, Brubaker drops the lines that form his face and just leaves in the eyes and other facial figures that are given weight by densely hatched lines representing his rage. It's an eye-catching panel, one of many in this issue.The way that Brubaker distorts anatomy gives his work a powerfully expressive quality without betraying the verisimilitude of his use of body language and especially gesture.

Clenching and Unclenching: Reich #9

Reich #9 is the first issue of Elijah Brubaker's long-running series for Sparkplug published after the death of Dylan Williams, thanks in part to a Kickstarter campaign that provided needed funds to keep the publishing concern going. This issue reminds me of the old saw, "Even paranoids have real enemies." Reich was kooky and saw enemies everywhere, but the fact is that the FDA and FBI both came after him for his theories and devices, not to mention the way he was treated by the medical and psychiatric fields. At worst, Reich was an eccentric who had some interesting ideas and observations, even if his conclusions made some huge leaps in logic. However, in 1950s America, being a sex radical was dangerous business, especially if one's handiwork moved beyond theory and into practice, as with Reich's therapeutic orgone boxes. Brubaker is quick to point out the hypocrisy of 1950s America with regard to sex, as the brutish head inspector sexually harasses his secretary in the most blunt manner possible.

Reich's downfall came in part because he viewed himself as nothing less than a crusader against forces that spread "emotional plague", fortified by the emergence of atomic energy mixing with orgone radiation to create "deadly orgone radiation". It's a quixotic quest at best, in part because even Reich doesn't comprehend the dangers of nuclear energy, as his playing around with radium suggests. It's even more quixotic when one considers just how alone Reich was in his quest and the considerable might and influence of the forces arrayed against him. That's especially true when the government got some of his friends and helpers to betray him; one of them through romantic means. Reich may have been an egomaniac and difficult to get along with on a personal level, but he certainly didn't deserve the storm that came his way. Indeed, even as the rain at the end of the book signaled a triumph for Reich, the rest of the book saw a lot of darker, metaphorical stormclouds building against him.

As always, Brubaker's character design is eccentric and superb, creating people on the page who are somewhere between caricature, naturalism and dynamic naturalism. With furrowed brows, disheveled hair, loutish double chins and blank stares behind glasses, Brubaker quickly gives the reader everything they need to know about a character without them uttering a word. It was also interesting to see Bill Steig make a surprising guest appearance in this issue as a confidante and friend of Reich's; I had no clue that they were connected. I do wish Brubaker was still doing the Chester Brown-style endnotes that were featured in earlier issues, because I would have loved to have learned more about the backstories of several characters introduced in this issue. This issue marks a turning point in the series, and I sense future issues will quickly delve into the fall of Reich and the way he was persecuted. I admire Sparkplug's continuing devotion to the format of the single-issue continuing series, and Brubaker makes sure that each installment is its own unique entity in terms of both content and form.

Sequart #162: Reich 3-4

This review originally appeared at sequart.com in 2007.

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The first two issues of Reich focused on the basics of notorious psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's early adult life, creating a narrative that tried to navigate between the extremes of opinions regarding his life and work. Issues three and four mostly flash back to his childhood and the roots of his obsession with sexuality and difficulty with intimacy. After the flashbacks end, we begin to see how Reich's work intersected with the culture of Germany between the world wars, and the way it essentially broke down to freedom vs. control.


Artist Elijah Brubaker takes a risk by basing most of these two issues on a short autobiography by Reich about his childhood. Brubaker acknowledges this in his essential endnotes, noting that there's no way to prove certain of Reich's claims, like losing his virginity at age eleven with a family cook. What was obvious was that Reich's obsession with sex and sexuality bloomed from a very early age (which, as he notes, is not unusual for a child who grows up on a farm). The reasons for his obsession with exposing sexuality as an open topic of discussion also became clear, given his mother's affair and the brutal nature of his father's jealousy. Of course, that insight came at a steep price: the development and nurturing of his own emotional intimacy.



By focusing on orgasm and sexual health as an essentialist issue, he blinded himself to the emotional complexity of human relationships. His dogged belief in the liberating power of orgasm took an interesting turn with the rise of fascism in Austria, as communists clashed with Mussolini-funded thugs. Reich saw a clear line between the oppression of patriarchy that plays out both on a state level and within marriages with sexual repression; the latter became an instrument by which the former was able to use fear, terror and violence to snuff out human freedom.

This issue felt like the end of the prelude, and that the action in the story's narrative will soon ramp up. Brubaker is taking his time continuing to establish Reich's complexity as a human being and putting his ideas and experiences into historical context. One thing I like about this series is that it takes advantage of its nature as a periodical. Brubaker ends each issue on a cliffhanger of sorts, and each issue feels like a complete story even as it's part of a larger narrative. That's because Brubaker is able to skillfully end each issue at the end of an emotional story beat. For example, at the end of issue #3, the story ends with Reich's father discovering his mother's infidelity and demanding that young Willhelm tell him everything he knows. Brubaker's highly stylized, expressionistic art wouldn't look out of place with the art in Vienna at the time. His use of sharp angles and shading on faces adds a frequently painful depth to the largely sober and restrained narrative voice. It's exciting to see Sparkplug's willingness to publish periodicals in an age when more publishers eschew the traditional comic book format, and one can sense that Sparkplug's Dylan Williams will let Reich take as long as he needs to finish his story.

Blue Cheer: Reich #8

The eighth issue of Elijah Brubaker's series about the life of Wilhelm Reich, Reich, starts to get at the heart of the concepts that Reich was best known for. After throwing out hints about his more unusual methods, theories and devices by way of exploring his childhood and early clinical career in earlier issues, Brubaker fast-forwards to 1946 and introduces us to Reich's orgone box. If the past two issues established Reich in America as a man with a persecution complex who spread that paranoia to his children and assistants, then this issue reveals that sometimes paranoids have real enemies. Once again, Reich is presented as a tragic hero. He's a visionary with any number of enlightened views about sex, gender and repression. At the same time, the lack of affection he received as a child made him cold, reserved and defensive within his own relationships.



Issue eight sets the beginning of the end into motion for Reich, as a hatchet job interview leads the Food & Drug Administration into action to investigate the potential quackery of Reich's orgone box. Essentially, Reich believed he had discovered a visible form of life energy called orgone. He inadvertently built a box that "accumulated and amplified" this energy, which he believed had "healing effects". In conjunction with "the proper psychological outlook", Reich asserted that orgone therapy could heal anything. As always, Brubaker is sympathetic to Reich's position in some respects while still retaining healthy skepticism. A key scene in the book features Albert Einstein, to whom Reich appealed for support. Einstein flatly rejected the science of the orgone box, and anyone with a scientific background can see that while Reich's methodology was sound in terms of the scientific method, his foundational premise was greatly flawed. Reich's stubbornness didn't allow him to reconsider his premises and simply repeatedly ran him into the same set of flawed results.



Brubaker skillfully plays that scientific rigidity of thinking into Reich's emotional rigidity, as one of his daughters scolds him for rebuffing the visit of another daughter on a day he had a toothache. Reich's view of human relationships is so reductionist that he fails to see just how irrational he can be even as he decries others for being neurotic. As the rain begins to fall at the end of the issue, FDA agents show up at Reich's door. They are clearly looking for someone to rake over the coals, and Reich's lack of flexibility as a researcher and human being make him a perfect target. His hubris and arrogance will wind up being his undoing, and this issue is the calm before the storm. As always, Brubaker's moody and angular drawings throw the character's emotions into sharp relief; his use of shadow in particular evokes despondency and uncertainty, while a careful use of cross-hatching and naturalistic drawing in places and objects anchors his pages and gives them weight. Chester Brown continues to be an inspiration for Brubaker in terms of the slightly detached storytelling style, the heavy research into a controversial historical figure, and the extensive use of end notes. Brubaker is more expressive than Brown's tighter style inspired by classic cartoonists, but makes his idiosyncrasies as an artist into his signature as a storyteller.

Single Issues From Sparkplug

Rob reviews a number of periodicals from Sparkplug Comic Books. Included are THE SHORTEST INTERVAL, by David King; ROCK THAT NEVER SLEEPS, by Olga Volozova & Juliacks; DEPARTMENT OF ART #1, by Dunja Jankovic; the free anthology BIRD HURDLER; and REICH #6, by Elijah Brubaker.

Once again flying in the face of established comics business trends, Dylan Williams trusts his intuition and moreover, trusts his artists, as Sparkplug Comic Books has published a slew of comic books in the past few months. While most of them will never be listed by Diamond, Williams knows that the audience for these books is not necessarily one affected by Diamond's more stringent minimum orders policy. For some books, Williams has also pooled resources with other like-minded small press publishers like Greg Means' Tugboat Press and Tim Goodyear's Teenage Dinosaur. As always, there's a singular vision to be found in each of these comics that reflects more a unity of purpose than a house aesthetic.

THE SHORTEST INTERVAL, by David King. This is a short comic about the Planck Epoch (the first microseconds after the Big Bang) and gravity that's part science comic, part fanciful daydream about the universe's origins. With colorful and amusing schematic diagrams and disarming cartoons, King homes in on an interesting philosophical question. During the briefer-than-brief Planck Epoch, gravity was by far the most dominant force in the universe. As the universe expanded, it became less and less significant a force, since gravity is the attraction between two bodies. When two bodies are no longer in close proximity, gravity becomes less important than electromagnetism or (especially) the subatomic forces. King posits this question as though gravity was sentient, was forced to abdicate its crown and has since tried to find a new purpose. This is an aperitif of a comic, pared down to its most essential parts and no more.

REICH #6, by Elijah Brubaker. Brubaker checks in with an issue that's mostly set-up and what feels like a last look at past events of the 1930s. Here, iconoclastic psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich moves his family around in the face of National Socialist rule, ruminates about his encounters with prostitutes and considers what he thought those encounters meant. I've noted elsewhere how much I like Brubaker's blocky & angular character design--all sharp angles and harsh shadows; in this issue, I liked the way he used gradients of light to imply the fading away of an era. Reich was never afraid to challenge authority, and this issue has a very deliberate dissolve between one of his books attacking fascism being burned by Nazis and his first discovery of a weird energy emanating from a sample on a microscope slide. The latter half of the issue further cements one of Reich's chief faults as interpreted by Brubaker: he's a man who loves humanity but who has trouble expressing his emotions for people. Having his feelings broken by a prostitute and being beaten by his father clouded his ability to feel empathy; while not cruel, it was obvious that his affection for his own children was tempered by an almost clinical distance. That distance was instantly adopted by one of his daughters, mimicking his own dispassionate discussion of sex. I'm eager to see Brubaker start to explore the weirder aspects of Reich's ideas, which I imagine won't be for another couple of issues.

BIRD HURDLER, edited by Dylan Williams, Tim Goodyear and Greg Means. This was this year's Free Comic Book Day entry after last year's NERD BURGLAR, and it's once again a collaboration with Tugboat Press and Teenage Dinosaur. It's a strong lineup, including an excerpt from a Julia Grforer story I reviewed here, a two-page observational piece by Andrice Arp, a typically dense dream-related story by Theo Ellsworth, a funny story about cats by Lisa Eisenberg, and welcome short stories by Zack Soto and Farel Dalrymple (two artists whose own work I haven't seen enough of in recent years).

I don't often see Arp tackle autobiographical incidents, but her strip about the kind of weirdos one can observe on public transportation was appropriately bizarre for her style of art. The creepy guy trying to hit on two random women was hilarious because of just how oblivious he was to the open hostility being thrown in his face by everyone around him. Soto's strip was atypical; it was a relationship strip connecting the tangled skeins of the horrible things we can say to loved ones and how it can batter them. The way the threads wound up leading to two other people was a clever and telling shorthand method for depicting what was left unsaid. Eisenberg's clear line story about cats inheriting both the pluses and minuses of a couple's relationship problems was also quite clever, as a cat given a turkey's gizzard wistfully wishes it could taste that mysterious food again, even as a vegan girlfriend was angry at her boyfriend for doing so. This is still a pretty lightweight and amusing story, but the hidden yet jagged edges Eisenberg implies give it a little bite. Ellsworth's work looks great as the anchor of an anthology, given the density of his work and the fairly straightforward gag found in a cat barely deflecting a sleep-related disaster of its master. Dalrymple contributes a second part of a continuing story, which--while cute--was a bit hard to follow. Still, the way he draws children's hair and facial expressions with so much rubbery detail always draws my eye in. This was a truly impressive free comic with a wide variety of styles and superior production values that nonetheless did not seek to water down its stories so as to true a wider audience. The publishes have achieved a measure of success by publishing artists they believe in and finding ways to expose it to audiences who will be drawn to it.


DEPARTMENT OF ART, by Dunja Jankovic. Describing Jankovic's work is difficult. Perhaps "Kafka-esque" comes closest: a sort of suffocating Mobius strip of frustration, yearning, pain and aimlessness. The opacity of her comics comes in part from the moody, scribbly style she employs. Everything is in shadows, but not the sort of ominous noir shadows that imply danger or excitement, but almost a sense that the light has simply faded away. DEPARTMENT OF ART is a workplace comic that intersects with creating art for a living, a process that Jankovic depicts as literally sucking one's light out of one's body. In this issue, the lumpy, ill-seen protagonist finds herself unable to stay in her cubicle, but learns that things get much worse when she tries to go elsewhere. Indeed, Jankovic draws the workplace as an infinite labyrinth with no beginning or end, just more walls and more cubicles. The question that remains at the end of the issue is just what her inability to find her old cubicle (and job) means as far as her purpose in life. Jankovic, whom I believe has a fine arts background, magnificently illustrates what is otherwise a not unusual set of feelings. Depicting coworkers as chattering snakes, portraying a narrow vent first as a potential avenue of escape and then as a claustrophobic hellhole, and the ill-differentiated blobs that are her other co-workers in a break room are the very structure from which the comic's sense of desperation emanates. This has the potential to be a fascinating long-form work, depending on how she chooses to pick up and continue the story's threads.

ROCK THAT NEVER SLEEPS, by Olga Volozova & Juliacks. I've written in great detail about these artists and the immersive style of comics they champion. It was fascinating to see them collaborate on a story about memory; in particular, a story about a town where lost memories can be recovered. The two each wrote two separate stories that intertwined in interesting ways, with Volozova contributing one of her usual modern fairy tales and Juliacks writing a science fiction story. What both stories share in common are the hallmarks of that immersive style: a minimal use of negative space, reading the page as parts and whole simultaneously, and an integration of text and image as almost interchangeable parts. Words not only have a decorative quality at times, they also occasionally act as visual structures. It's an approach that demands a reader's full investment but also promises an enormously rewarding experience.
The key to reading these comics is by considering the concept of memory as something both always disappearing yet still lingering as a trace. Erasure is a big part of these narratives: words and images (often combined) that are tiny, smashed into corners, written in faded ink or half-erased. You can follow the story without paying attention to them, but they can always be espied in one's peripheral vision, or when one takes in the gestalt of the page. Volozova is all about that gestalt, constructing her pages as units to be apprehended all at once and then slowly broken down into panels. Like most of her stories, this one is about a set of alienated characters in a town whose population started to lose their memory. It focused on a family whose father was a puppeteer, whose mother came from a long line of puppet makers and whose daughter wished to learn the family secret. They lost their most important memories and traveled to a town called Rock That Never Sleeps, a place in the desert where one could regain memories for a price. That price was losing something precious. The genius of this story is the way that Volozova painfully had each character remember the horrible things they did to each other that forced their loss of memory, and the price paid was one of separation. I read it in part as a way of approaching trauma; that is, remembering traumatic events both unblocks certain possibilities but creates scars. It's a difficult choice to make, but it's obvious as to where Volozova's sympathies lie.
Juliacks equates the loss of memory with the end of the world in her story, a point of view that makes sense from a personal standpoint. In her future world, most of the world's population lost their memory, an event that essentially wiped out free will as technology stepped in to make up for this lack of identity. The protagonists of the story were part of a small community that not only retained their memory, they could read memories off of objects. The trio travels to Rock That Never Sleeps, and Juliacks portrays the continuum of cognition as an interconnected if jumbled mess. Nothing is ever erased so much as it's out of order in a set of files. As such, Juliacks' story is heavy on thick, black lines; tons of hatching and images blurring into and merging with each other. In the story's climax , the trio causes the whole structure of the town to collapse in on itself as they burrowed for their memories, with the story's main protagonist eschews the whole practice of memory, content to live in her own head. Ultimately, this is a story about solipsism and how an obsession with one's own identity can obscure the ways in which we relate to others.

Periodical Reviews: Snake Oil, Shirtlifter, Reich, Big Questions, TTTTD

Rob reviews the latest issues of several comics series. Included are SNAKE OIL #3 (Chuck Forsman), REICH #5 (Elijah Brubaker, Sparkplug Comic Books), SHIRTLIFTER #3 (Steve McIsaac, Justin Hall & Fuzzbelly), BIG QUESTIONS #11 (Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly) and TEN THOUSAND THINGS TO DO #1 (Jesse Reklaw, self-published).

Though standard pamphlet-size issues of alt-comics have gone out of vogue for any number of reasons, there are still plenty of holdouts. Some of them publish them as minis, while other publishers still make a point of releasing individual issues of series as opposed to waiting years for a collection.



Elijah Brubaker's ongoing series REICH, a biography of famous outcast psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, is still in the process of building to a slow boil. Anyone who knows about Reich's life is aware that his truly weird theories were yet to come, as was the worst of the abuse he would take from various governments. The fifth issue is a clear turning point, as Reich's outspokenness and utter certitude has alienated him from both the psychoanalytic and communist camps. There's a remarkable page where Reich delineates his vision of a sexual utopia to his mentor, Freud: sexual education, the eradication of venereal disease, diligent contraceptive campaigns, legalizing abortion, protecting children from seduction. It's all too much for Freud, who was so shaken by World War I's violence that his view of humanity became increasingly distopic. Here, Brubaker's use of unusual angles in arranging his figures and the slightly fanciful nature of his drawing was put to good use, as we literally see Freud in his shadow, and then having words put into his head by Reich's enemies.



Brubaker's authorial voice regarding his subject is restrained but unsparing. It's clear that he respects Reich's ability as a thinker, but has little patience for when Reich uses his theories to justify his increasingly questionable actions. He sloughs off his wife's feelings over his many affairs as something only a neurotic would experience and refuses to acknowledge his responsibility to be fully open and honest. The irony is that like many theorists, he hides behind his own dogma at the expense of a broader, humanistic point of view, a fact that's especially piquant given his own utopian quest. Brubaker's heavy emphasis on Reich's personal life spotlights the idea that the personal (and sexual) is political and that Reich's own obsessive nature often deliberately obscured his responsibilities closer to home. One senses that Reich's story, in Brubaker's hands, is very much a tragedy in the truest sense of the term. A hero with vast knowledge and great hubris will be brought down in the most painful way possible, and a great deal of his fate will be his own doing. Reich's inability to be fully honest with himself and his own repression, will wind up taking him down. I'm always eager to see the next issue of this series.



Multi-Ignatz winner Chuck Forsman came out with a new issue of his series SNAKE OIL, and it once again furthers an overall narrative and also features several stand-alone strips. The larger story is a series of shorter vignettes, some of which are clearly connected and others not, about the ways in which daily life are suddenly and nightmarishly ruptured by unexplainable and absurd horror. We follow a man dropped into another world, looking for a friend, only to have his native guide eaten by a hideous creature. The way the man connects this event to his own failings as a person ("If only I was 'more fun'") was amusing and an interesting storytelling device, dropping mundane, navel-gazing musings into a life-or-death situation.

We also see stories of a king who wants Apple Jacks, a teen acting out on the guilt he feels over his friend's overdose, and one of the series' original characters being gutted like a fish in a men's room by one of the many weird creatures inhabiting the "real" world. The back-up features were an interesting mix, with one strip devoted to drawing an approaching rainstorm, and another punning on "breaking up" over a cel phone. Forsman's confidence as a storyteller continues to grow, as he's shedding his influences and developing a style all his own. He's managed to maintain his loose, lively & scratchy line while continuing to bring greater clarity to his figures. Forsman obviously likes to vary his visual approach, working in silhouette on some pages, pure scribbles on others, open grids, closed grids, dense hatching, and the use of lots of white space. While there's clearly an overarching story slowly developing here, this series continues to have an improvisitory feel to it. That sense of improvisation with clarity has grown from issue to issue.



SHIRTLIFTER has to date been Steve McIsaac's one-man anthology, but the third issue also featured Justin Hall and Fuzzbelly with their own entries. Each of the three artists brought a different approach. MacIsaac's approach is "cool", in that there's a great deal of reserve in his characters and his art has a certain stiffness to it. That makes it more like a series of images to be stared at than a sequence of images that flow together. Fuzzbelly used a sketchier approach with a more rubbery line in doing a short story about porn that was in itself porn. Hall's story is the most ambiguous, the least sexually explicit and features the most organic-looking line.

Hall's "The Liar"is an excerpt from a larger story, about a young hitch-hiker with a pattern of using others. This is a story about someone who uses sex as a means of getting what he wants, quickly detaching himself from any dangling relationships and restlessly moving on to repeat his pattern. The main character is an interesting cipher for the reader, his true intentions constantly shifting and hidden. The one common thread is the way he leaves doodles on bathroom walls and stalls at each of his stops. He jokes about drawing an epic story a page at a time on stalls all over America, but it's clear that this form of self-expression tells us something about himself. He leaves no other trace of himself behind but that. Some of Hall's drawings are a bit clumsy (especially the way he draws hands), but his characters are so expressive that the problematic aspects of his draftsmanship tend to fall away.

Fuzzbelly's "F Buds" is a breezy story about the author's frustration with drawing typical gay erotica. He decries the fantasy scenarios of construction workers, truckers etc., saying that they have little to do with "real romance or real sex". He then depicts one of his own encounters as pretty much straight-up porn, only with a punch line at the end. It's a cute idea, but one gets the sense that artist protests a bit too much, especially given that his own entry here was not what I would call "erotica" either.



The bulk of the issue is given over to several chapters of a larger story by MacIsaac called "Unpacking". MacIsaac's comics are often a strange read. They have that static quality that I mentioned of someone used to drawing porn. Porn is all about creating single, powerful images; and MacIsaac excels at depicting sex as that series of images. However, MacIsaac is as concerned with what leads up to making our romantic and erotic choices as he is in detailing the acts. The problem is that his chunky figures don't really seem to move all that well in the spaces he creates; the panel-to-panel flow of his figures and their relationship to each other in space is sometimes stiff and awkward. In other words, I feel a tension in MacIsaac's work between the cartoonist and the illustrator, a tension exacerbated by how much of it is done on computer.

That said, what carries the story is how carefully he pays attention to expression and gesture. Body language is everything in this story. His sex scenes are far from gratuitous; indeed, they wind up carrying a lot of emotional information that becomes key later in the story. "Unpacking" is about a man who's just been dumped after an 8-year relationship and the ways in which he tries to cope. In particular, he starts having random sex with on-line hook-ups while dodging his ex's attempts at "staying friends". The title refers to his disinterest in unpacking his boxes in his new place as well as unpacking in trying to start a new emotional life. What makes the story so interesting is the way MacIsaac explores sexual politics, as the main character, Matt, winds up hooking up with a man married to a woman who also likes having sex with men. That man does not identify as being gay and in fact believes that men can't have real relationships with each other, which leads to some fascinating tension. The reserve of Matt's character, with all sorts of pain simmering underneath the surface, adds to that tension. I'm curious to see where this story will eventually lead.



Reviewing a single issue of Anders Nilsen's series BIG QUESTIONS is difficult without providing context for what has gone before. Nilsen has made a huge splash in recent years doing comics in a number of different styles, all of which tackle any number of philosophical issues. Those who have only read his stick-figure monologues will be surprised to see his feathery, delicate pencils in BIG QUESTIONS, the series that really brought him to prominence. In brief, the title of the book sums things up nicely: a number of events happen to a group of animals, mostly centered around birds, and everyone is trying to figure out what it all means. This series emphasizes gesture, open space and the occasional shocking event that has enormous impact because of the normally languid pace of the story.

Issue #11 is actually much less talky than other recent issues, emphasizing slow and agonizing action. A wounded bird literally crawls on the ground for miles, while another bird dedicated to watching over him flies after him, silently imploring him to go back, to no avail. A dog nudges a sleeping man in the midst of a plane wreck. The pilot of the wreck dreams of a monstrous bird that he has to cut open in order to free dozens of smaller birds inside of it. In the most wrenching scene, a crow sneeringly informs another bird that he's just accidentally eaten animal meat (which has a "sweetness" to it, informing the issue's subtitle of "Sweetness and Light") and can never turn back. The bird returns to his nest and mate, filled with their dead young, and tries to convince her to eat as he consoles her.

One thematic reason for the issue's stillness is when it took place: in the waning hours before dawn. The series had a literally explosive moment a couple of issues ago when a bomb (that many of the birds had been worshiping) went off, and the last few issues have been dedicated to exploring the aftermath of that event. For the birds, it was akin to Zeus throwing a thunderbolt or Jehovah speaking to Moses through a burning bush, only the message was an apocalyptic one. This issue was a literal sort of "dark night of the soul" as each of the characters was trying to make it to daylight. It's fitting that the crawling bird who opened the issue finally reached his destination (the edge of the crater created by the exploding bomb) as dawn arrived. I am wondering, given the cancellation of other D&Q series like CRICKETS and OR ELSE if BIG QUESTIONS will make it to its final issue, or if Nilsen will simply choose to publish the whole series in one collection. Given the individual care given to each issue, I hope he'll stick it out.



TEN THOUSAND THINGS TO DO #1 is Jesse Reklaw's latest project, a daily diary strip inspired by Lynda Barry's example. If 2008 was the year when the comics world suddenly stopped taking Barry for granted and heaped huge amounts of well-deserved praise on her, it was also a year when Reklaw started to finally receive some long overdue accolades of his own. After many years of nominations, he got a big win at the highly competitive Ignatz awards. It's perhaps no coincidence that Reklaw's productivity in comics is at an all-time high, given his weekly SLOW WAVE strip, the new collection of those strips from Dark Horse (and subsequent book tour), his autobiographical COUCH TAG book that he's working on; random & brilliant minis like BLUEFUZZ and now TTTTD.

This new project actually seems to be as much an exercise for developing COUCH TAG as it is a project in its own right, given the way he chooses to flatten certain aspects of his emotional life and emphasize seemingly quotidian details as a way of getting at something deeper. In COUCH TAG #2, Reklaw tells the story of the disintegration of his family by way of talking about all of the cats his family ever owned. In #3, he chronicles the ups and downs of various friendships through their mutual obsessions, pranks and fantasy worlds that they invented. TTTTD seems to be about the tension between his need to be perpetually in motion as a reaction to his depression and constant physical pain (almost of a fibromyalgic nature).

Reklaw is matter-of-fact when he brings up his depression, never offering a context or explanation of its origin, or in fact of anything he's doing. In four panels every day, he in a sense tells us the ways in which he perceives himself succeeding or failing in his own eyes and the ways in which he tries to cope. He's actively engaged with the world and with others, and some of the most fun strips are the ones in which he is goofing around with his fellow artists. That sense of camaraderie is clearly crucial to him, that others share his passion and that they happen to be people he loves spending time with. There's an industriousness to Reklaw that is a reflection of the way he's battling against his own problems; he's always picking up new projects, accepting invitations into gallery shows, organizing comics for festivals, etc. That activity leads to stress, and stress to procrastination and self-flagellation, but Reklaw always fights through it.

That ability to bring himself back to the drawing table despite the stress, worry and pain was one of the most striking repeated events in this dense, 64-page collection covering two months of Reklaw's life. Having a weekly strip in SLOW WAVE is clearly both a burden for Reklaw and an enormous benefit, because his sense of professionalism makes him get back to drawing, which then makes him realize how much he loves it and how it eases his depression. Barry talked about how worrying about the "two questions" ("Is this good?" and "Does this suck?") can paralyze an artist and make them forget that drawing & writing are pleasurable activities--and that artists forget this over and over, every time they have any kind of block. Reklaw found his own ways of getting around the two questions, even if everything else in his life makes him forget his love of drawing. Taking on this daily strip, given Barry's example, always forces him to draw at least the one quick page a day, if nothing else.

At its heart, TTTTD may be a depiction of a struggle, but it's done with Reklaw's light, subtle touch as a humorist. He may not employ "funny drawings" or craft conventional gags, but Reklaw's comics have always had laugh-out-loud moments. That matter-of-factness in his depiction of life, that slight flattening of affect, makes for a perfect set-up for his dry humor. One senses that Reklaw understands his own tendencies as a loner (not unusual for a cartoonist) and balances that with his easygoing relationship with his girlfriend, with high-energy interactions with his friends (including a number of jams in the pages of this comic, along with tours and cons) and even with the way he is always reaching out to animals.

I wish I had thought to include the on-line version of this strip as one of my favorite comics of 2009, because it certainly stacks up with the best diary comics by the likes of Vanessa Davis & Laura Park. I do wonder how many of the strip's repeating motifs have been intentional and how much was subconscious placement of material, and how much Reklaw re-reads his old diary entries to see what he's done. Being a quickly-drawn diary comic, there's not much flash here, but there is plenty of expressiveness and a lively line. Indeed, Reklaw is remarkably adept at getting across emotion with a quickly-drawn likeness; fussing over such drawings endlessly often winds up killing that initial energy. This comic is one man's attempt at channeling his stress into something very positive indeed.