Top Shelf: Penny Nichols

Slice-of-life fiction is something I see a lot less of in comics these days, especially compared to its heyday in the 90s. A lot of it was perhaps thinly-veiled autobiography, only with a stronger narrative structure and/or more defined character arcs. Most fictional comics these days tend to be genre-inflected, even if the genre elements are in the background and the stories are heavily-character oriented. Tillie Walden and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell are good examples of doing that at a high level. On the other hand, while MK Reed has done her share of genre work, she started her career working on slice-of-life books, and her big breakthrough was her love letter to libraries, Americus.

Her latest book, Penny Nichols, was written with frequent writing partner Greg "Clutch McBastard" Means and drawn by long-time minicomics stalwart Matt Wiegle. It's about a smart but aimless 26-year-old woman (the titular Penny Nichols) who is working a series of pointless temp jobs and going on the occasional horrible date. In reading it, this book is truly aimed at that mid-20s person who hasn't found their purpose in life. They don't have the ambition, ability, or interest to hook into the business world, but they've also faced a lifetime of discouragement in trying to do anything else. Their liberal arts degree seems pointless. They don't just want to hop on the marriage train and start having kids, but they don't know what they want.

In the case of Penny, she gets mixed up with a troupe of horror movie filmmakers who have plenty of vision and creativity, but they are missing the essential element of a single organizational brain. Reed and Means create a vibrant cast of horror geeks, over-acting theater guys, and dreamers who want a taste of something beyond their service or office jobs. Penny soon learns that much of the group, especially the two guys running Satan's Fingers Productions (or is it Killshot Films?) are long on ideas and short on actual follow-through. The spine of the narrative is built around making a horror film in time for a big indy horror-film event called Splatterfest.

Along the way, Reed & Means keep the focus on Penny and her life. That includes her adversarial relationship with her roommate, her dysfunctional relationship with her prim sister, and her own self-esteem as a person. The cover of the book is a neat summary of the narrative: Penny is there making directorial notes, adding make-up touches, holding a boom mic, assisting with blood for special effects, and then mopping up the whole thing. She's in blue while everything else is in yellow, a nice trick that focuses the reader's eye and makes them understand that the same person is in all of these roles. Penny helps write the script and do the storyboards, goes out and looks for costumes, scouts locations, and reads up on how to make a film. More to the point: she was encouraged to do this, and encouragement was all that she ever wanted and needed. She wanted to be part of something creative and to find a community that valued her for her creative instincts. Moreover, Penny Nichols hammers home one specific point: nothing you ever do will ever live up to your own ideal of what you wanted, so the most important thing to do is finish it.

Indeed, the final day of filming is one where Penny has to take over the most significant role: directing itself. The flaky director, whose anxiety always rose directly the closer he got to actually completing any project, didn't show up. Instead, Penny takes the reins and not only gets through it, she even manages to come to an understanding of sorts with her sister. Reed and Means keep the characterizations relatively simple but still allow each character to feel satisfied with themselves for their own contributions to the film. From the young special effects guy to the actress hungry for real structure, the crew manages to find workarounds for everything, both in terms of props, location, and even the story itself.

If all of this sounds like a metaphor for the comics community, that's because it is. Splatterfest itself is a love letter to events like SPX. Indeed, there's a time gap between the last day of filming and the convention, which opens with a young woman flagging down Penny and lavishing praise on the film. We learn that they didn't win the competition, but they did get a lot of attention and interest. Every artist and writer knows that feeling of someone coming up to you and telling them how important their work is to them. It's a sense of validation and belonging that was heretofore missing in the lives of so many. While that validation and camaraderie feels good and can be sustaining, Penny Nichols is firm in asserting the idea that it's the work itself that's most important.

Speaking of collaborations, Wiegle's cartoony, exaggerated style is ideal for a comic about making a horror movie. While a lot of his comics have dealt with fantasy or genre concepts, Wiegle at heart is a gag man. This is a book that has a lot of funny character moments, and Wiegle delivers a host of quirky, bizarre, and amusing character designs. Penny herself is gloriously frumpy, with hair piled on top of her head in somewhat haphazard fashion. Wiegle's varied line weights allow for a lot of precision character details as well as denser, more expressive lines when they film a bunch of the blood-splattering scenes. There is a sense of joy at the heart of this book, as the collaboration of the artist and writers reflects the enthusiasm of the cast of characters. Penny Nichols is about the joy of creation from concept to problem-solving to finished product, and it reflects how this shared passion can unite a disparate group of people in such an ebullient fashion. 

Last Hurrah: Runner Runner #4

After shuttering his excellent and long-running minicomics anthology Papercutter, Greg "Clutch" Means has been doing an annual, free anthology for Free Comic Book Day. Titled Runner Runner, the fourth issue (from 2015) was unfortunately also its last, but it certainly went out with a bang, with the usual mix of ten page stories and single page entries from a wide swath of cartoonists with different styles.

Sam Sharpe's "The Woman From Tuesday" is absolutely top-notch storytelling from a cartoonist who deserves much more recognition. The concept is simple at first: a man talks about him going on dates nearly every night with someone from the internet, interspersed with a memory from an old comic character: Cognito The Super Spy. The latter character essentially recapitulates the history of mysterious, adventurers, from Mandrake to the Shadow to Batman to Rorschach. The theme of the story is shifting identities and disguises, and the ways in which one can forget one's own identity by spending so much time as someone else.

Turns out the guy, named David, classifies each date by type--Deconstructionist (those who talk about the structure of dates on a date), Formalist (asking specific questions in a specific order), etc. Unmentioned but very clearly visible is the fact that David changes his appearance to match that of each date. He wears the same kind of ski hat and scarf as his first date, and puts on a curly wig and glasses to match his second date. The asides to old issues of Cognito perfectly match key moments of his dates in funny ways, especially when he starts thinking about Cognito's boy sidekick, Hypno.
Things get weird when a woman he dates on Thursday turns out to be the woman from Tuesday, in disguise (like he is). From there, the postmodern twists and turns of latter-day Cognito continue to get further wrapped up in the way this man and woman interact and the ouroboros swallows its own tail in a very amusing way. Sharpe's facility for drawing faces and sticking with a steady grid allows him to nimbly go from drawing superheroes to regular folks without jarring the reader once.

Evan Palmer's "The Godins: The Last Meal" is a fantasy story with lots of gray wash used to create mood. It's a flashback to one character's mentor, a hard-as-nails chef who always keeps her eyes on the prize with regard to serving the intimidating masters of the realm, dressed and armed to the teeth. His mentor saves his life when she takes up a sword to help a squadron instead of allowing him to go to certain death. The jarring transition makes the reader think for a moment that it's a reverie that's being interrupted instead of a flashback, which adds to the excitement of the story, until he snaps back in the future. Palmer's figure design is idiosyncratic (especially the odd noses) but smooth, with a clear and crisp line.

If you've ever wondered what one of Joey Alison Sayers' Thingpart strips might look like expanded to full length, then "Silly Town" is for you. It's a fabulously demented tale about a children's music singer named "Jenny Rainbow" who sings the sort of cloying, catchy songs for kids that adults hate. Jenny sings a "concert" for some kids in an alley in a post-apocalyptic city, with her husband reminding her (and filling in the reader) that the government rounded up all the adults, leaving kids to fend for themselves. The bummer-proof Jenny takes that as an opportunity to become the biggest band ever. From there, things get even more absurd, as Paul had actually packed three oboes to take on his survivalist mission. When they get captured, the President himself sentences them to hard labor, but one of their songs has its own revenge on him. The structure of this story is quite clever but the best thing about it was the Jenny character, whose delusional qualities completely took over the strip.

Finally, Andrice Arp has a one-pager making literal the mess in her head when she finishes a project and how sometimes it's best to create in a state of chaos. I've missed her beautiful, detailed line and inventive use of angles and anthropomorphic creatures, bridging naturalism and mythology. Farel Dalrymple does a strip from his Pop Gun War world about a vicious cat, detailing what he's killed while wondering how something so cute can be such a killer. It's effective both as a stand-alone store and a palate cleanser for other Pop Gun War stories. I wish Means had the funding to do a bigger anthology, because he has an uncanny sense of pacing as an editor, knowing just how to create a smooth flow from story to story. Not everything he's published has been great, but it always fit in the context of the anthology at hand, inviting the reader in no matter what its subject matter or style might be.

PNW Anthologies: Runner Runner #2 and On Your Marks

For a number of years, the Pacific Northwest's contribution to Free Comic Book Day was an anthology comic edited by a collaboration of different small publishers. Dylan Williams of Sparkplug, Tim Goodyear of Teenage Dinosaur and Greg Means of Tugboat Press would combine their resources and overlapping but different aesthetics to create some truly weird and memorable comics like Nerd Burglar, Bird Hurdler, Dan Quayl, and Brad Trip. After Dylan Williams' passing in 2011 and Means' decision to stop publishing his memorable minicomics anthology Papercutter, Means instead decided to publish something that was a hybrid of the old anthology and Papercutter, and he called it Runner Runner.

It's exactly what a typical Means anthology looks like: accessible narratives, art that runs from naturalistic to cartoony that's rendered in an appealing and approachable manner, and story topics that run from autobio to quirky genre fiction. It's an entirely agreeable if not especially challenging read, acting as a sort of Minicomics 101 for new readers. Tthe cover and the first story is devoted to a new short story related to the book he did with MK Reed and Joe Flood for First Second (The Cute Girl Network), which fits perfectly into that "appealing but not challenging ethos". It also helps that the story of Jack trying to escape from his locked bathroom so as not to be late to a date with Jane is frequently hilarious, like when he absurdly sends a moth to deliver a message to Jane, only to see it get eaten by a hawk. Like in his days compiling Papercutter, Means alternates between one-page strips and slightly longer narratives. The best of the former include Claire Sanders' turning a diagnosis of cancer into an unrelated punchline, Alexis Frederick-Frost's gag about quarreling flying fish, Sam Sharpe's gag about perspective leading to deadly consequences, Sam Alden's cleverly constructed strip about a future world lived entirely underground in caves, Andrice Arp's full-colore strip about losing her head and Julia Gfroerer's light-hearted "The 39 Ryan Goslings", which is exactly what it sounds like. The rest of the anthology is built around an extended Al Burian/Nate Powell piece about the relationship between two aging friends and a long Carrie McNinch piece about a day in her life. Means is a long-time zinesters, and this issue of Runner Runner is in part a way to include long-time zinesters like Burian and McNinch. Like Papercutter, the success of this mini is due to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, especially sense Means has an uncanny sense of just how to sequence the stories to create a fluid reading experience.

By way of comparison, On Your Marks is a disjointed, messy and anarchic compendium of mostly short comics, seemingly thrown together at random by editor Max Clotfelter. Whereas one always gets the sense from a Means-edited anthology that he wants the reader to enjoy every story, this anthology is very much take-it-or-leave it, in your face storytelling. That anarchic, underground feeling is certainly its greatest strength as an anthology, as the whole thing is awash in a crude energy that makes one wonder what's next.

I'm not sure the across-the-map nature of the anthology was necessarily one of intent; rather, it seemed more a reflection of the weird diversity of Seattle's cartooning scene. At one end of the spectrum, you had the sort of hardcore punk/underground comics that might have appeared in the Tim Goodyear side of things. Bobby Madness' strip was the perfect encapsulation of amusing autobio reminiscence and political statement. Moseley Smith and Reuben Storey's is typically visceral, absurd, violent and panel-filling in its almost obsessive scribbling style. Jason T. Miles' scatological strip seems entirely improvised while sampling a number of different styles, creating something almost Dada in its execution while still being mostly shoving things up one's ass. Darin Schuler's strip about a grotesque figure skinning its cat for shamanic reasons is the most disturbing strip in the entire comic (see below).

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the more narrative-driven strips, perhaps ones that Dylan Williams might have selected. Eroyn Franklin's frank and revealing strip about getting ringworm was as funny as it was gross. The same is true for yet another excellent Julia Gfroerer story, "Spirit Hand". In 35 tiny panels, she compresses an entire story's worth of adolescent ambiguity and utter terror. Asher Craw's strip about a boy being selected as a future sacrifice for the ocean and the delicate nature of his drawings would have fit in perfectly in a Williams-published anthology. There's new blood, like Ben Horak's funny strip about the possibility of some childhood art being misinterpreted in a dirty way and Tom van Deusen's bizarre and slightly unnerving funny animal strip about an unwanted head on a newly-bought house. The intense hatching and cross-hatching in that latter strip added to its disorienting qualities. There are also strips by old hands like Rick Altergott and Pat Moriarity (a cat strip, no less), David Lasky (a meditation on superheroes and identities), and Andrice Arp (the only artist in both anthologies, her strip here uses her strange characters to explore mental illness). Clotfelter closes the anthology with a silly "history" of comics that posits them being discovered by "an enormous idiot" who found "13 jade tablets! Each containing a different prototype of comics!!". What the anthology reveals as much as anything is how stacked Short Run was in terms of its talent and diversity of styles.

Baited Expectations: The Cute Girl Network

Written by MK Reed & Greg Means and drawn by Joe Flood, The Cute Girl Network (First Second) takes on the notion of what it means to be in a bad relationship. It's about going with one's gut and own two eyes rather than the experiences of others. It's actually remarkably devoid of artificial twists and turns thrown in to give the potential lovers a conflict to battle against. Instead, Jack and Jane both have to battle the titular Network: a group of young, single women in the city of Brookport (a Portland/Brooklyn amalgam) who exchange information on their ex-boyfriends and stage interventions if necessary when they see someone going into a situation lacking what they deem to be crucial knowledge.

Jane is a skater who works in a skate shop, while Jack sells soup at a food court. What's interesting about the thrust of the book is that while neither character is very complicated, it's that very lack of complexity that draws them together. Jane faces rampant sexism at her job and at the skating park, a point hammered home in a sharply-written scene where she chews out a guy who first dismissed her ability to skate and then deigned to hit on her when she proved himself. Jack is lazy, spacy and clumsy. He's also kind, devoted and funny.

Jack's roommates include a true sexist pig of a bro and a devout feminist, but they all somehow get along because they all share their views openly and enjoy berating each other in a playing the dozens kind of way. I'm not precisely sure what the division of labor was between Reed and Means, but dialogue is Reed's specialty and a big strength of the book is its verisimilitude. It's that sense of being true to life that gives what would otherwise be cardboard thin characters some depth and heft. Still, one can't help but sense the writers of the book pushing back at the sheer shrillness of Network leader Harriet and her dogged insistence that she knows what's best for Jane. Jane is given an intervention by the Network and is taken around to meet several of Jack's ex-girlfriends, all of whom share hilarious horror stories about atrocious birthday presents, forgetting to show back up at an apartment for an anniversary dinner, talking to a girlfriend's mother about their sex life in excruciating (if oblivious) detail. Jack is aware that Jane is being fed this information and is on pins and needles regarding Jane's decision. Will she listen to the Network's (in the face of scold Harriet and her friend who also disastrously dated Jack) urges to dump him, or will she ignore the facts and take a chance?

Before and after images by Joe Flood. Note the level of detail.

The answer is not in the least surprising to anyone who read and saw that Jane consistently enjoyed being with Jack and that he made her feel good. Means and Reed suggest that in a way, the Network wound up subverting their own attempts to steer Jane away from Jack. First, Jane's stubborn and contrary nature made it unlikely for her to do something just because someone told her it was for the best, even someone she was friends with. Second, finding out someone's worst qualities from the very beginning can ground a relationship if there's a real attraction there and squash the fantasy construction we might have. Jane herself suggests that just because Jack wasn't right for these other women didn't mean he wouldn't be right for her, because she had little in common with the people she met. For his part, Jack gives an honest accounting of his many screw-ups but also provides context lacking in the horror stories; more to the point, he seemed motivated to try as hard as possible. Reed and Means give the book a romantic ending, but they also notably stay away from showing an epilogue, updating the state of the relationship in later times.

Another thing that makes the book work is the slightly scratchy and messy style of Joe Flood. Better known for drawing monsters and the like, the bit of grit he adds to the proceedings is not only appropriate to the characters, it helps steer the book away from the smooth, cutesy and more typical First Second house style. It especially helped that the book was in black and white, in part because Flood was more than happy to fill up his panels with the detritus and other details of a city. He didn't need bright, happy colors to fill in gaps. Reed and Means do throw him a bone by having him draw some pages from the Twilight-type series that's mocked relentlessly by the female members of the cast (yet secretly liked). I definitely sensed Reed's hand here, since she created a hit fantasy series for her book Americus.

Despite occasional foul language, I still see this falling squarely in a slightly upper level of young adult reading, like the sort of thing a 16 or 17 year old might enjoy. Ultimately, it's a well-crafted book that's not quite as interesting as Reed's prior book for First Second (Americus), even though it tries its best to provide a new, meta wrinkle on the romance comic. Indeed, many classic romance comics have plot twists that reveal how scummy an exciting bad boy really is, and end with the heroine tearfully intoning "If only I had known!" The Cute Girl Network shows how inside knowledge often reveals things that aren't as important to some as they are to others.

Another Minicomics Round-Up: Jihanian, Dragons!, Ayo, Robinson, Davis, Burke/Harris

Let's dip into yet another set of minicomics that have come my way:

A.R.R.O., by Alison Burke and Tara Harris. This is clearly an early effort by the artist and writer, but this low-fi sci-fi comic is ambitious in its own way. It's a day in the life of some sort of military/scientific base and the people who work there. The book is full of character interaction and seemingly minor schemes and betrayals, leading into much bigger stakes by the end of this first chapter. Burke has a nice ear for dialogue and adeptly creates an easygoing, relaxed pace for the narrative. Harris has a strong eye for color, making the choice of using subdued tones like olives, browns and mustard yellows to match the languid nature of the story. There are a number of signs that this is beginner's work. The lettering and letter balloon placement are both distractions due to their sloppiness. Harris' character work and overall line isn't confident or fluid; the stiffness of the characters is another distraction for the reader. Depicting motion and how characters relate to each other in space are other problems. One thing that would help is learning to vary her line weights in order to help give her characters more pop on each page. Her style does possess a certain idiosyncratic charm even at this stage of her career, but fixing some of the basics would go a long way in playing up that charm.


Buster Monster and the Roughage of July, by Chris Davis. The artist notes that this comic was inspired by Jesse Reklaw's Ten Thousand Things To Do (which in turn was inspired by Lynda Barry), a daily diary strip. Unlike Reklaw, who uses a strict four-panel grid and provides a scale to measure his energy level, alcohol consumption, pain level, etc, Davis uses a free-form, sketchbook approach. Davis makes the crucial decision to provide as little context as possible regarding his life to the reader, trusting them to figure it out. We learn about his routine working for a cafe/caterer, working a variety of events in the Portland area. We see him deal with waking up with pain, living with his girlfriend, and a variety of crabby co-workers to whom he gives funny aliases (PB&J, The Frog Princess, etc). There are also a number of comics about his dreams, which give him an opportunity to draw more interesting imagery. There are two major factors in his favor: his lettering is distinctive--stylized but legible; and his drawings are full of life. His figure drawing in particular is sharply observed, but he's not afraid to get a bit silly or stylized when the occasion calls for it. There's a lovely image of him shaking the hands of his elderly grandmother that captures both his respect and her grace simply by the way he draws the figures. This looks like it's done mostly in pencils and is slightly smudgy, but Davis makes that work for him. Hopefully his output as an artist will continue to increase.

Vortex #2, by Don Robinson. This is a good old-fashioned underground comic book in the vein of Gilbert Shelton. Robinson uses a dense line and makes his pages busy with tons of detail and eye-pops. While most of his strips are gag-oriented, there are a few fantasy/sex drawings reminiscent of S.Clay Wilson and a story that's a tribute to EC horror stories.. There are also a series of more simply rendered parody strips that are less interesting to look at and certainly to read. Most of his parody strips (like The Flintstones or Catcher In The Rye) revolve around smoking pot; others are weak-sauce pokes at Johnny Ryan and diary comics. There's not much of a gag there beyond "I don't like these things". It's ironic that he makes fun of Ryan's scatological humor, given that much of Johnson's humor revolves around coarse material and that Ryan himself is so much more effective in his own parodies. Ryan may be mean-spirited and unfair, but there's no question that his barbs stick because he is so familiar with his subjects. It's the vagueness of Robinson's jokes that rob them of their effectiveness. I'd love to see Robinson illustrate someone else's stories, because his rubbery, lively line and attention to detail are both solid.



Lizzie's Tail, by Darryl Ayo. Ayo won the Promising New Talent Ignatz award at SPX this year, and this comic is a highly assured sign of his progress as a cartoonist. I've been following his career more-or-less since he first put pen to paper, and it's clear that he's done the hard work of getting better in public. This comic is a flight of fancy that tracks one woman's story about how she got a particular object hanging around her neck. That turns into a borderline absurd fantasy piece wherein she possesses a tail, walks in a stream alongside a forest and battles several opponents with her knife and mermaid ally. Ayo takes some cues from Fusion comics in the way he blends in a certain kind of fantasy character design with a certain roughness and odd pacing common in alt-comics. He spots blacks to create dramatic tension as well as using zip-a-tone effects to create texture in his panels. After a mini full of conflict and dramatic poses, Ayo pops the balloon of this narrative by inserting a gag at the end. This is a minor work but one that illustrates that Ayo is certainly on the right path.

Dragons! (Comics and Activities for Kids!), edited by Greg Means. A Free Comic Book Day mini for kids that's not simply an Archie comic or a superhero comic is a tremendous idea, and leave it to Greg Means (editor of Papercutter) to put such a thing together. Using a number of regular contributors to that minicomics series, Dragons! is chock full of comics, mazes, jokes (by two superior gagsmiths in Karen Sneider & Joey Sayers), detailed drawings, word searches, find the hidden image drawings, connect-the-dot drawings, mad-libs, mythological tidbits and more besides. The "Dragon Maze" is an especially impressive achievement, as Kazimir Strzepek jams every inch of the page with eye-pops and gags. The lead comics feature is by Alec Longstreth, and it's a typically agreeable feature emphasizing the joy of reading and how a dragon finds an optometrist. What was impressive about this comic is that it's clear that no contributor half-assed their offering, which I attribute to Means' strong editorial hand. The overall effect is that of an issue of Highlights For Children with a dragon theme and in minicomics form. As a kid, I'd devour that sort of publication, so I imagine this comic might be appealing to children even now.



Danger Country #1, by Levon Jihanian. This fantasy comic is typical in terms of its set-up but fantastic in terms of its narrative execution and character design. The issue ends with three characters being thrown together for a quest: the apprentice daughter of a wizard, her cat-warrior companion, and the sole survivor of a village that was wiped out at the beginning of the issue. The pacing and Jihanian's sense of detail make this issue stand out. Jihanian stretches the narrative over its first sixteen pages, emphasizing the grief and shock of Evan, the sole survivor of the village. The quest he's given is what the reader expects will take up the rest of the book. Instead, that journey is sped up so that we can see his immediate goal (a wizard city hidden by mists) and the threat to it (a vampire wizard dressed in armor). Jihanian employs a clear-line style with a minimum of hatching or spotting blacks; the level of detail on his faces despite the simplicity is remarkable. That's because of the level of control he clearly has over his line, which is the key to creating a world that's at once strange and accessible.

Slice of Life Minicomics

Rob reviews a variety of slice-of-life comics he found at this year's SPX. Included are works by Liz Baillie, Alec Longstreth, Robyn Chapman, MK Reed, and Greg Means.

Slice-of-life comics are often more revealing of their authors than actual autobiographical comics, especially in terms of what emotions are depicted. SPX is always enormously fertile ground for such comics, and this particular set is mostly by artists whose work is quite familiar to me.

THE SCARF, by Alec Longstreth. Few artists love their craft more than Alec Longstreth, and as such this mini is part formal exercise and part story. It was written by Lindsey Sharp and produced using "printmaking ink on carved styrofoam plates". As a result, each page held a single, round panel that emphasized simple, stark images. The story is about the life cycle of a wool scarf, from being sheared from a sheep to the various people who wore it. I'm amazed that Longstreth was able to get such an expressive set of images using this crude technique. This comic is more interesting to look at than read, but its ambitions are modest and sincerely met.

MY BRAIN HURTS #10 and FREEWHEEL #1, by Liz Baillie. Baillie concluded her MY BRAIN HURTS series with this issue, and it was a perfect send-off for her characters Joey and Kate. The two queer teenagers struggled to come to terms with their identites and the harshness of the world throughout the series, constantly shooting themselves in the foot even when handed golden opportunities. Both characters were trying to find ways to work through the unfocused pain and rage they felt on a daily basis. It was heartbreaking to see Joey's self-absorption and self-flagellation make him incapable of relating to Kate in any way other than another person to use, though heartening to see Kate refuse to be used. The ending of this comic was perfect: no easy resolution of either character's pain or dilemmas, and a parting between the two characters that featured a realization that Joey had to leave town if he was going to live. This series, though it took many years to complete, was a snapshot of a particular time and place. As such, all Baillie wanted us to know about these characters happened on these pages; there is no epilogue, no "where are they now", nor should there have been. MY BRAIN HURTS was about the agony and potential of the eternal present moment, and that moment was preserved forever in the way this issue ended.

FREEWHEEL is a completely different sort of story. The common thread is once again troubled youth, only this time it's from the point of view of a young girl in a foster home who runs away to try to find her foster brother, who has been kicked out. The art here is both cleaner and denser than MY BRAIN HURTS, with a lighter line matched by heavy crosshatching and background detail. The story itself is a quest, jumping back and forth in time as young Jamie is trying to find her brother. The first benevolent figures that she meets are a community of hobos, which is where the issue ends. Jamie doesn't quite have the same level of rage as Baillie's other characters; indeed, she's the most idealistic and hopeful of them. It'll be interesting to see how her journey changes her point of view in future issues.

SOURPUSS #2, byRobyn Chapman. This comic is somewhere between slice-of-life and autobio, as it details the relationship between three teenagers growing up in a hick town in Alaska. The three are best friends, one of them ostensibly based on Chapman, but the fact that she's the girl in the group starts to lead to tension when romantic feelings spring up. In a town where they're the only outsiders, the only people they can relate to, relationships can quickly become incestuous and friendships can dissolve.

The pleasures in this mini are small ones, as it's a familiar kind of story. Chapman is careful not to tell the story from the point of view of any character in particular in terms of an interior monologue or narrative. The reader is given no special knowledge as to what each character is thinking, other than the visual clues that Chapman provides. The reason why the comic works is its restraint; her figures are simply designed but drawn with an appealing line, and the dialogue is similarly spare but packed with subtext. The characters in this book are very much teenagers who are unable to articulate their emotions, not extemporaneous soliloquizers. Structuring the issue around a Fugazi concert was a particularly inspired idea, especially given what Fugazi represented to a particular kind of young person in the 1990s. The issue unfolds at a leisurely pace, a choice that matches the way time slows down for bored, disaffected youth.

YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!, by Greg Means. This is a clever "100 themes" comic, wherein an artist is required to draw a panel of an overarching narrative based on a theme word or phrase for that day. Themes like "Safety First", "Rainbow", and "Pen and Paper" speak to the randomness of ideas, and it's up to the artist to put them all together. Means, known for his "Clutch McBastard" diary comics as well as his publishing concern Tugboat Press, tells the story of a misanthropic woman and goofy guy and their relationship. The tone is light and the narrative spare, as are Means' figures. Essentially, he had to find 100 different ways for two characters to interact using very little in the way of backgrounds while still providing an emotional story arc of sorts. He further took that challenge to craft a gag for every theme, often playing against expectations ("Cat" involves a cat being kicked like a football, for example). The result is a silly, breezy read where the gags, themes and Means' line synch up quite pleasantly.

MYRTLE WILLOUGHBY, by MK Reed. Reed took up the 200 theme challenge, and this mini represents the first 50 themes. Reed's 100 theme challenge comic, I WILL FEAST ON YOUR WHORE HEART, was hilarious and painfully true to life. This is a format that well-suits her gift for dialogue as well as evoking time and place. MYRTLE WILLOUGHBY is an even better effort so far, capturing the lives of young people in hipster-filled Brooklyn in a trenchant and pointed manner. The story follows two friends, Myrtle & Penny, as they move into an apartment in Brooklyn and proceed to struggle through their jobs, make good and bad decisions regarding their love life and interact with the city. There's nothing novel about the set-up, but what makes it work is the amount of space that Reed creates between themes. By focusing on a single idea and image and then forcing the reader to make a connection to the next theme, she's able to tell a story minus extraneous exposition. The reader gets to fill in details instead of being bombarded by them. The comic also works because, like Means, Reed delivers a gag or punchline of sorts on every page. Not all of them are jokes, per se, but the image always interacts with the theme in some unusual way, such as "Anomaly". With a larger cast than in her first "themes" story, this iteration is much more ambitious in scope. Given the way she carefully hand-crafted an elaborate cover for her last collection of themes, it should be interesting to see what Reed will come up with this time.