Emma Louthan & Laura Knetzger

PLEASE NOTE (11/12/2017): Due to the revelation of Cody Pickrodt being a individual who has proven to be unsafe, predatory and untrustworthy around women (see: the testimonies of multiple women) in comics, all of his reviews on this site have been redacted. I have chosen to keep the reviews of those who he's published. Be aware that if he is still selling these comics, the artists involved are unlikely to receive any money from it.

Club Queen Rat King, by Emma Louthan. Louthan is quickly becoming one of my favorite young cartoonists. Her combination of a slightly ratty line, distorted character design, dreamy and weird settings, and frank but funny embrace of sexuality and style give her comics a feel all their own. I'd classify what she's doing as her own brand of Immersive comics, meaning that text, line and image blur in such a way that the reader has to carefully and willfully enter the world that Louthan creates on the page. The comic must be read on its own terms or not at all. That said, Louthan provides any number of visual cues and entry points for a reader. The first page appears to simply be a number of lines bifurcated by a solid vertical line in the center of the page. When one turns the page, we see the lines are curtains of a club, and we meet the titular "club queen". This comic is done in gold and blue, and Louthan isn't afraid to cram a lot of detail into very small panels. Sometimes, that creates a blurry mess, but Louthan turns that to her advantage in trying to create a disorienting environment for the reader in the bizarre club that's run by blobby figures. They beg her to work for them as a bartender and to tend to the Rat King in the VIP room. The comic is about rarity, beauty, and the slow acceptance of something horrible as actually something beautiful. It is also about the manipulation of image, aesthetics and fashion. There are a lot of layers to unpack in Louthan's comics, which are dense in more ways than one.

Flowering Vine, by Laura Knetzger. This comic is in two colors: blue and green, as Knetzger essentially takes a look at herself and her own growth through a series of anecdotes, drawings and thoughts all loosely connected as a sort of stream-of-consciousness narrative. The story is one of advancing and retreating, where her ambition is to always move forward and create but occasionally retreat when feeling broken. The loose narrative is frequently beautiful and poetic, with lines like "I made in myself a shining iron heart capable of molten romance" standing out in this back-and-forth series of illustrations. The comic has one serious flaw, and it's that the illustrations in it are superfluous. All of the text in this comic could easily be read as a poem without losing an ounce of meaning if the illustrations were removed. While the illustrations are attractive, they are all rather on the nose in working with the prose, rather than the prose and images working together to create something different. It's an illustrated poem and not comics-as-poetry, making it more of a visual exercise rather than a fully-formed hybrid work.

Two From Yeah Dude: Emma Louthan, Laura Knetzger

Pat Aulisio's tastes as a publisher are so all over the map that it's impossible to predict what one of his books will be like. I'm guessing he wouldn't have it any other way. Case in point with these two minis, Catburglar Cream and Three Fates. The former comic, by Laura Knetzger,  is a cutesy story of a jewelry thief who works with his cat to temporarily "borrow" an enormous gem that happened to be filled with ancient, delicious ice cream. Everything about this comic is clean, cartoony and devoid of sharp edges. It stops just short of being twee thanks to its sense of restraint in terms of both length and stylization. It's a comic that's less about plot or even character than it is a funny idea, that of a catburglar who uses an actual cat to commit his crimes.

It's hard to believe that the same publisher would release Emma Louthan's Three Fates, which is a scratchy, weird, crass, hilarious, pornographic and philosophical narrative. It's a vision quest comic of sorts that starts with a raunchy man and the mystical strippers/prostitutes who happen to adore his rough, weird ways. Louthan, using a dense and crude pencil line that gives the deliberately pornographic nature of her images a completely different meaning, uses the strippers in a mythological fashion, as they are both Fates manipulating the life of the man and a Greek chorus commenting on it. Seeing the women go on in poetic fashion while in a variety of sexual poses and positions but rendered in a distorted and even occasionally grotesque fashion is both disconcerting and funny, adding a layer of sweetness and almost innocence to the proceedings. Nothing is "dirty" in this comic; rather, it's all part of a natural order being observed by others, until they deem that it's time to stop.

That's when the comic stops on a dime and the man is reincarnated as a woman named Nadya who amusingly becomes a stripper in order to get free time to sit around and watch TV (much like she did when she was a man). This part of the comic is a direct commentary on the first half, but it also acts as a distinct, clever and even touching narrative of its own. Louthan's pages have a powerfully immersive quality, wherein text has a decorative quality and is directly integrated into the page's visual impact and images can be read individually or as part of the gestalt of the entire page. The closest referents I can think of are John Brodowski and Juliacks, but Louthan has a different storytelling agenda. There is a stirring purity and a refreshing lack of apology in the way her characters delve into their sexual lives; it's a life stripped of shame that accepts sex and sexualization as part of the natural order. At the same time, Louthan satirizes the actual poses found in porn and stripping, exaggerating them in frequently ridiculous fashions. At its heart, Three Fates is about the possibility of creativity and the ways in which sexuality can be both a help and hindrance in this regard. It's also consistently funny and fascinating to look at.