Minicomics Round-Up: Fulton, R.Jordan, Willems, Van Deusen

Hone, Brothers and We'm, by Andrew Fulton. Fulton loves to work small, and these three minis are very much in the same vein as his other weird, visceral and slightly disgusting but cute work. Brothers is a surprisingly touching comic that starts off with the horror of one's brother turning into a huge, formless blob of a creature, then turns into a matter-of-fact description of living with him and ends on a warm note of familial love. Fulton's cute line and use of effects like spot color and zip-a-tone spice up what is otherwise a sparely-illustrated comic. Hone is a sort of mad scientist break-up comic, wherein a handyman uses a giant phone to send himself across the line to an ex-girlfriend now living with another man. He's scrambled and reduced to thousands of tiny versions of himself, several of whom manage to wind up on her. It's a creepily endearing comic, especially in the way he drew the tiny floating men to look almost like sheep. We'm is another unsettingly cute comic about the last survivor of humanity landing on a far-off planet and discovering that he'd been cloned, and that the clones kept coming--except most of them were defective. It's a story about loneliness, company and doing what is necessary to not only survive, but also to recreate civilization. This one uses a thicker but also more fragile line, reflecting the tenuous nature of that society.

Then What and Progress Reports, by Robyn Jordan. Jordan is a thoughtful memoirist with a line that reminds me a bit of Ellen Forney's appealing and simplistic style, especially with regard to her character design. Then What is in full color, featuring two stories about loss. "Ten Lives" is about grieving and connections, as a beloved cat became attached to Jordan's father-in-law before his death. There's an amazing page where Jordan and her partner take their cat to the vet to put him to sleep, only to see him die precisely when they arrived. The text is straightforward and the page features the two of them drinking wine on a couch, but the backgrounds feature a thunderstorm, the rain on a left-to-right slant that pushes the reader's eye across the page. The expressionist and fanciful use of muted tones provides the emotion absent from the text and only hinted at by the figurework, giving a sense of both restraint and pouring out emotion. "Just The Two Of Us" is about dealing with the grief of a miscarriage, but it's also about one's relationship with one's own physical form. A session of cranial-sacral massage brings the two together in a dramatic, painful but ultimately cathartic manner, and her color scheme of body and self being two different, independent colors comes to a dramatic close.

Progress Reports is another in the burgeoning memoir sub-genre of teacher comics. Along with Aron Nels Steinke and Cara Bean (to name two), That Forney influence is even more evident in the way she draws kids and works in black & white, but her sense of pacing and humor is certainly her own. The comic is a mix of Jordan's own anxiety about teaching and the obvious comedy gold that is interacting with young children. What's interesting about this comic is her focus on special needs-kids and the ways in which schools can let them down, and even well-meaning individuals clash with others on how best to work with them. Her experience with affluent schools as well as inner-city schools provides her a unique perspective.

Scorched Earth #2 and Eat Eat Eat, by Tom Van Deusen. These are hilariously brutal, take-no-prisoners satire that puts a torch to braggadocio and swagger. Van Deusen's comics are nastily self-deprecatory but avoid the "woe-is-me-why-won't-these-mean-girls-have-sex-with-me" templates of other cartoonists, including clear inspiration Robert Crumb. The prior issue of Scorched Earth featured the loathsome "Tom" character having a one-night-stand but revealed the perpetually lonely but highly deluded loser thought he had a girlfriend. This issue showed off Tom's narcissism in increasingly nasty ways, ditching his roommate when he couldn't get into a bar, comically getting thrown out of a bar when he clumsily buys cocaine, and best of all, exploring polyamory. Pretending she was his "primary" while trying to hit on college women at a party was especially squirm-inducing. It's like this character is every worst instinct Van Deusen could think of regarding the "dude-bro" mentality. It all crests when he buys a fedora and snake-skin boots and then realizes he doesn't have enough money to actually take his date to dinner and she breaks up with him. The subsequent chapter, when he wishes cancer on her, is amazingly over the top and awful--but not as bad as the "happy" ending where he learns absolutely nothing.

Eat Eat Eat also features a slightly different version of Tom, one who shares the ridiculous swagger in Scorched Earth but is a tiny bit more human. This Tom has an eating (and of course) a self-image problem, one that he plays for laughs but also for pathos. The art here is a bit rough at first, as Van Deusen notes it was done over a four-year period, but his mature, sparer but grotesque style is in full effect by midway through the comic. When Tom realizes that he's fat, his attempts at working out are mercilessly cruel but also hilarious. Once again, Van Deusen springs a "happy" ending on the reader despite a drunken accident and coma, comically equivocating the wasting away of a coma with actually losing weight in a healthy way. Van Deusen's comics are incredibly mean, but he lands solid and smartly-aimed barbs again and again. The relentlessness of the humor can be overwhelming at times, as he doesn't allow the reader to sympathize with his self-destructive character, only to laugh at his pathetic qualities. The way he sells the acidic nature of his attacks with the exaggeration of his line contributes to the overwhelming nature of the comic: a double-barreled blast of and against narcissism and misogyny.

The Fatal Marksman Act II, by Jaime Willems. The second part of this adaptation is even more sure-footed visually than the first. That's especially true with regard to the craggy, heavily-lined faces that dominate the book. Willems went all-in with regard to her line width creating an almost grotesque effect. That grotesque quality makes it easy for Willems to have her characters wear their hearts on their metaphorical sleeves, as jealousy, delight, rage and fear are etched on their faces. Her lettering is also appropriately unsettling, battering the reader with its textual qualities as well as the actual words spoken. The page compositions are loose and fluid, with the powerful use of blacks creating an overall atmosphere of dread. All of this shows up in the literal text, as the man who made a deal with a demonic figure in order to win his love's hand is now forced to pay up, with disastrous results in this issue. Willems isn't afraid to go big on every page, in terms of both drawing and in terms of doubling down on the fairy tale nature of the story.

The Hunt: A.Meloro, J.Willems, S.Wiedeman, L. Milevski

Let's take a look at some minis that talk about being hunted, hunting after something or experiencing a life of being set up as prey.

Funnies, by Anthony Meloro. The three one-page stories and the accompanying purely decorative pages speak to Meloro's aesthetic: raw and dirty on the one hand, and densely but abstractly beautiful on the other. The stories here are about restless people hunting for relief: a man getting his fortune told, one that indicated he'd never get out of his rut; one where two professionals examining a corpse are struck by its similarity to an old lover; and a man giving into seduction somewhat releuctantly. Meloro's figures are shadowy and even ephemeral, eliciting emotional reactions with a remarkably sparse amount of detail. His narrative captions are similarly terse, yet they work hand-in-hand to create that atmosphere of longing, of things out of our reach--or worse yet, desires fulfilled in a less than satisfactory manner. The strange color of the cardstock used and the texture of that cardstock only add to the comic's strangely appealing qualities.

The Lettuce Girl #4, by Sophia Wiedeman. This is the last chapter in Wiedeman's reworking of the story of Rapunzel. It's a story about bad parenting, absent parenting, selfish parenting and the effects that each have on children. Hazel, the Rapunzel stand-in, has been locked in a tower her whole life by her false mother. The (implied) witch acquired her thanks to Hazel's father cowardly promising her to the witch after stealing lettuce from her garden, lettuce that her pregnant mother demanded. From the very beginning of the series, Hazel is fed a series of lies and simply accepts them because it's all she's ever known. She's kept in the tower for her own "protection", even as she longs to see the world. When Hazel manages to break free, thanks to a talking serpent looking for her mother, she learns that her "mother" was not entirely in the wrong. She winds up being drawn to a gingerbread house, where she's being fattened up to be another witch's dinner. This take on the story about mothers and daughters is more of a feminist version, one where there are no male rescuers who swoop in to save the day. Instead, Hazel has to figure out her own salvation. Meanwhile,her "mother", who has grown another child from magic seeds, finds that controlling the fate and behavior of your children is an impossible task. When Hazel and her "mother" meet again toward the end of the book, Wiedeman's storytelling is excellent. Framing them in the background of each panel, so as to keep them just barely in the sight of the reader, their conversation is private, intimate and clearly ultimately healing for both parties. When they part, they know it's for the last time (there's no longer any place for Hazel in her mother's life), but they parted with a far greater understanding of the other. It's an emotionally powerful moment of forgiveness on the part of Hazel in particular, but also for her "mother", who had previously reacted as though Hazel was a piece of property rather than her child. Humanizing her was Wiedeman's most intriguing innovation in this story, as was having the ocean in front of Hazel and her serpent companion at the end--what better symbol for the unknown? Wiedeman's line is a pleasing mix between loose and dense. The characters all have a loose, expressive quality that gives the entire story a spontaneous feeling. One can sense the energy on each page as the panel-to-panel transitions are smooth and fluid. At the same time, Wiedeman isn't afraid to use dense hatching for her forest scenes or a more delicate and refined line for other key scenes, like the vast tower and finely-rendered forest in the background of an embrace between Hazel and her "mother". The entire story is an understated study in balance, in terms of the visuals, the narrative and the characters themselves.

The Wild One, by Laila Milevski. This is a disturbing, visceral story drenched in dense blacks about a teenage girl lured by a wizened woman into performing a ritual to appease the jungle's jaguar goddess. The only problem is that girl backs out at the last second before the ceremony is over, leading to disastrous consequences. The aftermath of the event forms the latter part of the mini, as the old woman has not only disappeared, but has seemingly slipped out of everyone's memory, leading the girl into the jungle for her own encounter with the jaguar. Milevski crams a lot of panels onto each page, which serves to create a sense of claustrophobia as well as heighten tension and suspsense by forcing the reader to jump from panel to panel. This is a story about alienation, folklore and the consequences of crossing certain lines. The main character, Camilla, essentially had her fate sealed the minute she started talking to the old woman, even if she didn't know it at the time. Of course, her fate is an ambiguous one in the sense that she is now entirely severed from society--it's neither happy nor sad, it's just new and savage. The story is all about rules and rituals, and how fragile they can be. It was interesting that while the backgrounds in the jungle scenes were all drawn in a lush manner, the backgrounds in the other scenes were frequently blank. Part of this was to add clarity to scenes with lots of talking heads, but that lack of background detail in Camilla's daily life was telling in some ways. This was another smart, gritty effort on the part of Milevski, whose other comics have explored the frequently violent and troubled relationship between civilization and nature.

The Fatal Marksman Act I, adapted by Jaime Willems. This is actually Willems' second crack at this story, adapted from the Thomas DeQuincey story "The Fatal Marksman". It's about a young man named Willhelm, who's hoping to earn the hand of Kate, the daughter of a huntsman. Her father refuses the union because his son must be a huntsman in order to keep the land in the family. The reason this was so because his ancestor who originally won the lands as a reward from a nobleman was accused of having used a "devil's shot" to kill his prey--unerring but demonically-rewarded aim. To continue to defend the family's honor, each descendant must prove his own worth. Of course, Willhelm is a writer, not a hunter, but the end of the first act sees him gain aid from a shadowy figure. Willems' adds a bit of depth and richness to the story by starting it off at a carnival, with a carny barker setting theme and adding some potential portents on the first page. The key difference in this version is really in the art. Willems' figures are so dark as to appear to be woodcuts. Eyes are deep and sunken and every line is thick, with hatching looking like dense shadows and the frequent use of spotting blacks creating an atmosphere of dread. The features of the figures are slightly grotesque, appearing almost to be marionettes thanks to their exaggerated cheeks and eyes. Willems' frequently curvy and erratic panel design adds to that sense of distortion and unreality that the book evinces; even the structure of the page itself can't be depended upon by the reader. Even though nothing bad happens in this comic, Willems has created an atmosphere where one expects things to fall apart at any moment.