Comics From the UK and Ireland: Robbins, Short, Moreton, Pomery

Between The Billboards, by O.D. Pomery. These modestly-packaged, short minicomics come in drab cardboard covers that barely hint at the melancholy of the characters within. This comic is about a dramatic and vivid way of withdrawing from society, as a man named James Ebner lives in a small room he crafted between two advertising billboards in a city. The series is essentially several setpieces that get at the heart of why he withdrew, the potential for him to come back to society full time, and how living in total isolation and at a great height influences his thoughts regarding oblivion.  The first issue sets all of this up as a kind of man between the margins, unnoticed by most. The second issue sees an old friend try to talk him out of his solitude, to no avail. The third issue sees James wandering the streets, reminiscing about a particular girl left behind and trading barbed quips with a friend who works at an all-night bowling alley. The fourth sees him confronting death and loneliness after a friend dies, flashing back a bit more to that woman who was so uninhibited where he was so unsure of himself. Pomery's drawings are crisp and precise, making great use of both negative space and geometric patterns, especially when trying to create a vertiginous effect as the reader looks down a sharp drop. This is a somber, reflective comic drawn with skill and intelligence, and I'm curious to see how Ebner's story turns out.

Grand Gestures, by Simon Moreton. Published by Box Brown's Retrofit, this new book by Moreton is absolutely lovely to look at, first and foremost. His evolving style of removing as many lines as possible is similar to what John Porcellino does, but the effect is much different. With John P, there's a sort of simple but firm structure that underlies all of his figures, landscapes and other drawings. They are stripped down to a kind of essence. With Moreton, he goes beyond that essence at times into the realm of figurative abstraction, recognizable only by dint of context. It's a kind of filter that goes beyond removing all but the essentials and into erasing some of them, creating a sense of stirring beauty on page after page. The story, which is told without words, follows a middle-aged man through walks around town and in a sales conference. There's some ambiguity here as to what the reader sees. Are we seeing what the man sees, what he wishes he could see or do, or some ghostly form of the man who is finally free (perhaps after killing himself)? When his body turns into a circle with a couple of loops trailing after it, it's almost as though he's a spirit floating around, but that could be him imagining himself floating freely on the breeze, freed of the dullness of his daily life. It's telling that we don't see the man in the final chapter after he seems to fly off with a flock of geese, and instead we only see busy city streets and people walking before Moreton pans back to an image of a single bird in the sky. Once again, Moreton offers no explanatory details, making the images all the more haunting and yet uplifting, because those images of freedom are peaceful ones, especially for a man who seems to be living a life of "quiet desperation".

Klaus, by Richard Short.The Charles Schulz influence is obvious in these strips, from the introspective nature of many of the characters to its overriding sense of melancholy. With the little rat creatures who otherwise look like humans and the strip's generally earthy and occasionally vulgar sensibility, there's also a bit of the sensibility of Jon Lewis' True Swamp. Finally, the frequent lack of punchlines and drifting nature of the character interactions reminds me of Glenn Dakin's comics. While Short's influences are clear, he quickly transcends them to create beautiful, funny and thoughtful comics about topics like music, dreams, loving and nature. Short's figures are simple, crisp and cartoony, which sets them off nicely from his lovely and more detailed drawings of nature. Indeed, the pastoral quality of these strips adds to that sense of contemplative longing that pervades it. At times, the strip is also wickedly funny, like when a favorite strip is sold, the scandalous nature of insects is eschewed as an example of virtuous living, or when a smoking squirrel flat-out admits that he doesn't like jazz. Even an attempt at suicide has a funny punchline. This is really excellent work and is highly recommended for readers who like their humor mixed with poetry.

Curtains, by John Robbins. Robbins has really refined his pitch-black sense of humor and interest in the ways in which people think about and deal with death. The title story is about a sort of OCD man obsessed with his dead mother's obsession with telling him to close the curtains before turning on the light. The story deals with the way the narratives and voices of others seep into our consciousnesses  Far crazier and his most ambitious story to date is "The Heart Bowed Down By Weight Of Woe". It's drawn in a clear and even cartoony style, which makes it a nice counterpoint to the darkness of the humor within. The story has two narratives: the death of the ailing father of a family and how reluctant his wife is to do anything about it, and the relationship between his son and an odd woman obsessed with a missing child. The mother character flatly states what a relief it is that he's dead, considering his nature as a tyrant, hilariously imagining that his obituary would focus on how long-suffering she was. The increasingly uncomfortable joke in this story is that she keeps making up excuses not to call an ambulance or deal with his dead body in any way.

Of course, his son Tom is a misanthrope who can't be bothered either. As we learn about what a socially inept misfit he really is, the reader can't help but wonder how he managed to get a girlfriend, especially one as sweet-seeming and caring as Wendy, who scours the countryside in an effort to find a missing child named Mary. As the story proceeds and Wendy becomes creepier and creepier, Tom is mostly oblivious to her behavior until being confronted with it in a funny and unsettling scene with a neighbor who tells Tom about Wendy's dark past while trying to get him to agree that pedophilia is something everyone is interested in. The cheerfulness with which Robbins depicts all this is both dissonant and a big source of the humor. Robbins has always been fond of dramatic, horrific twists in his stories, but now he's balancing them with restraint, humor and a real sense of humanity, twisted as it may be.

Dispatches From Ireland

Ireland's small press scene is slowly starting to develop some exciting voices. Let's take a quick look at some work sent by prominent underground cartoonists, starting with an interesting new anthology.

Stray Lines, edited by Paddy Lynch. This is a lean, (64 pages) attractive anthology featuring five long-form  pieces by six artists. The anthology clearly goes out of its way to showcase a number of different storytelling styles. For example, Gus Hughes' "Animals Attacking Their Own Reflections" is rendered like a series of cave drawings: dark, crude and primal. The story is a bit of dark-humored nonsense, as a documentarian looking for a particular kind of tarantula is double-crossed by his native guide. Absurdly, the guide fulfills his desire to judge a dance competition, and the bite of the spider just so happens to induce dance-like spasms. The sequence where the man is dancing is topped only by a disco ball emerging out of nowhere. By contrast, Philip Barrett's "Endless Lap" is downright conventional-looking by way of comparison, as it depicts a man and a woman oddly appearing in each other's nautical dreams, trying to find their way to each other without knowing who they're looking for. It's a beautifully told story that manages to downplay its schamltz by focusing on the everyday.

Andrew & Chris Judge's "The Aviator" is about a young man growing up in America in the 1930s with a talent for drawing and painting signs.That talent led him to design and paint logos and illustrations for the front of US planes. The most famous plane from World War II also bore his art, in a sequence whose outcome was fairly obvious the moment the secretive machinations surrounding it began. The Judges get around that inevitability by starting the story toward the end and then flashing back to the illustrator's beginnings. Chris Judge, who drew the figures, seems strongly influenced by Jason Lutes' detailed and roundish character design, with a hint of Gilbert Hernandez thrown in to soften things up a bit. Lynch's "Friendly, Local" is an excellent slice-of-life story about a shiftless young man on the make with a young woman at a Chinese take-out restaurant who also has to young son and a demanding ex. It's a perfect portrait of someone who is put in a position of responsibility who is desperate to get out of it, or rather, go back in time to when he had no responsibilities as a means of comfort and retarding the march of time. Lynch's scratchy, muddy line is perfectly suited to tell this sort of story, especially the climactic moment when the young man's attempt at seducing the woman fails in an amusingly spectacular fashion. Finally, Barry Hughes' angular and cartoony "The Glass Trampoline" is yet another visual left turn, as it depicts a sort of spirit quest undertaken in order to get a bucket of chicken. Like the first story in the book, its unusual visual approach was in the service of a cheeky, absurd premise. This is certainly a solid intro to the sensibilities of the Irish comics scene: darkly humorous, soulful, and introspective.

Patrick Lynch's In The Aquarium is a meditation on madness, obsession and escape. A man in an aquarium stares at a fish that seems to be talking to him, leading him into a reverie where that conversation follows him around until he goes mad and strikes a co-worker. Then he's led into a reality where it's really him in the fish tank, drowning and on display, until the glass is smashed and his world ends. The jumbled panel arrangement reflects the chaos in the man's mind, as do the wavy and sketchy lines. It's a short, but effective glimpse at the ways in which even the worst of fantastical fates can be better than the grim reality of everyday life.

John Robbins' early comics, Negotiating The Beast and The Monkey-Head Complaint, are dark to the point of nihilism. The former is a series of one-page stories that revolve around the darker aspects of childhood, both in terms of the weird and frequently horrible things children do each other and the ways in which predators lurk. He also adapts some of the stranger and more desperate letters from a local advice column. There's a comical and cynical distance implied in these stories (like certain EC or Vertigo comics), but the problem with them is that they are incredibly overwritten. The narrative captions threaten to drown out the comics entirely, pushing the frequently arresting and spare graphics into the background. Robbins did show an interesting facility for working with negative space, especially with regard to how he used blacks and shadow. to highlight dread. The Monkey-Head Complaint sees Robbins expanding the ideas from that first comic into a single storyline about a bored couple and how they inadvertently get involved with a young man who slowly descends into homicidal madness. There are some odd storytelling choices, like the wife demanding that the husband tell his story about how he met the young man in a sort of Shakespearean cadence, but they tended to add to the slightly fantastical nature of the story. Like his earlier work, Robbins went to the EC Comics twist ending with the most horrible outcome possible, which felt a bit hackneyed. Robbins' later work is far more nuanced and restrained, but one can see how Robbins' strong visual storytelling sense was already in place in his earlier work.

International Mini Round-Up: Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Great Britain

I am always thrilled when I received a minicomic with a foreign stamp on it, be it from a familiar favorite or someone completely new to me. This round-up will feature comics from Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Spain and Great Britain.

Smoo Comics #5, by Simon Moreton.  The British Moreton's increasingly confident voice and line have made his quiet, reflective and poetic comics a rich and rewarding experience. He's not quite at John Porcellino or Warren Craghead levels of refinement of his words and lines down to the sparest possible levels of meaning, but he's getting there. This issue contains a number of short stories and meditations on his time spent in the seaside town of Falmouth, which was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Moreton gets at the intense loneliness he felt in the form of drawings of street lamps, fog-bound coasts obscuring boats and buildings, and the simple quietude of the countryside. When drawing figures, he has a new economy of line that gets across the bare minimum of human details but still does a tremendous job with gesture and body language so as to convey emotion. In other strips, he uses smudges and scribbles to get across that feeling of desperation and of emptiness during what was very much a drifting portion of his life.

Haunted Bowels, by Craig Collins and others. This is a bit of silliness from the Scottish writer/cartoonist, who mostly collaborated with other artists in this collection of short gag strips. Accustomed as I am to seeing cerebral if visceral horror stories from Collins, it was amusing to see him riff on pop culture and lay down some deadly puns. (Example: "Glee Van Cleef", which features the tough-guy cowboy actor gunning down the cast of America's most annoying non-reality TV show.) One of his best running gags was the "Zinder Kurprise", a take-off of the "Kinder Surprise" chocolate eggs that come with toys that are very popular in Europe.As always, his best collaborator is Iain Laurie, whose detailed, intensely-lined style is a perfect match for the density of Collins' work--even his silly work, like the hilarious "Seamus Heaney's Heinous Penis", which features the famous poet's penis singing a techno song while the man himself is trying to do a reading. Collins' evil floating head strip, "Omniscient Zorgo", is perhaps the most reliable generator of laughs, even if the punchline is more-or-less the same every time. Collins is better-suited to horror with slight comedic overtones than comedy with horror flourishes, but there are still some solid pieces in here.

Om, by Piotr Nowacki. Polish artist Nowacki likes to draw almost silent comics, generally using simple onomatopoeia to punctuate his visual gags. The narrative about a sort of all-devouring lizard-creature going about its day with its giant pet is just one funny drawing and gag after another, as Nowacki's feathery but simple line has enough weight to make the reader linger on each image but is fluid enough to push the reader onward to the next panel. Nowacki squeezes a lot of humor out of his characters' eyes; the lizard creature's eyes cross whenever it starts munching on something (alarm clock, toothbrush, chess set, etc)  that sets up a nice visual rhythm for the book. This comic is absurd in a low-key way, as the egg is awakened by the lizard putting it on a frying pan every morning, and the two go to school with varying degrees of success.  The female robot teacher (also with crossed eyes) gives the lizard an "A" for solving a math problem by eating the chalk and eraser, but the egg gets an "F" when it complains that there's no chalk. Nowacki heightens the stakes when a ninja kidnaps the egg, leading to a detective search, an epic rescue, a friendship with a fish-headed prisoner, a showdown with a giant octopus, and other silliness. This is a near-perfect all-ages comic, jam-packed with action and jokes on every page. I could easily picture this upgraded to a hardcover board book by a publisher of children's books.

Silent V #6, by Kyle Baddeley. In some respects, Silent V has been Baddeley's thesis project as a cartoonist. It's fitting that he's ending it with #7, because he's taken the lessons, ideas and absurdity about as far as they could stretch. This issue starts to wrap things up with helpful exposition filling in the blanks of the crazy, inexplicable action of the earlier issues. There are aliens disguised as bears, monsters disguised as robots, time-traveling gods affecting the lives of their adversaries so as to turn the tide of war, and the driest of gags being trotted out at odd times (like a giant button that says "Escapees Please Press Here"). Baddeley's figures are big, broad and lumpy, possessing a cartoony presence that chews up the page. His backup story, "Maggot Lump", featuring a heroic maggot foiling a candy-store robbery, is as silly, weird and gross as it sounds. I'd love to see Baddeley continue to explore that short story urge, as it seems to be a more coherent and easy fit for his silly and occasionally terrifying sense of humor.

The Well Below, by John Robbins. This mini by Robbins, aka Sean MacRoibin, was one of four the Irish artist sent to me after I review an anthology of Irish artists at the tcj.com version of High-Low. Robbins' line is spare and sketchy (a trait he shares with the other Irish artists in the batch he sent me), but also expressive and attractive. Robbins seems most interested in time, memory, and the irrevocable break between childhood and adulthood. The first story, "Find The River", is a simple slice-of-life story about two men on their annual fishing trip on a nearby river, as they try to reconnect while dealing with their own dysfunctions as adults.  The catch: Robbins draws them as children throughout the story, a tactic that starts off as confusing, then clever and finally more than a little sad. The art reveals that the men only relate to each other as boys, taking on old roles, while also simultaneously wishing for simpler times. "Man From The Past" and the prose story "The Time Machine" both have to do with the ways in which outcasts are effectively out of synch in a world with highly developed rituals and social roles. After a mini's worth of downbeat stories, Robbins caps things off with the title story, and the reader is tipped off that things will be a little different with the more solid but cartoony line that Robbins uses.  This story follows a man whose only emotional connections are ones that are superficial and from years in the past, resulting in a string of completely outrageous (yet somehow low-key) series of acts. Meeting up with a girl he had a crush on in grade school by coincidence, the middle-aged protagonist Tom tells her of his love for her in the past, which results in a highly unusual and gross sexual encounter that gives the phrase "a brown trout, a pine cone and a couple of maltesers" an especially hilarious and disgusting context. Tom is a fascinating character, one who is entirely unapologetic for his near-sociopathic inability to make connections with those who should be his loved ones. This was my favorite of the four minis, revealing an artist equally adept at depicting sadness and absurdity.

Matter #1, by Philip Barrett. Barrett is well known to alt-comics fans, thanks to having some of his comics published and distributed early on by Dylan Williams' Sparkplug Comic Books. The story in this comic, "A Stagnant Pool", is the quintessential pub/club story. Barrett uses a loose, sketchy line, strategic scribblings, and a slightly reserved, almost detached narrative style to tell this story of a young man who goes to see a band at a bar, the women he encounters, and the large part of his own story he forgets after drinking too much. Barrett's use of restraint is what I loved best about this comic, as a clearly turbulent and upsetting time for the lead is kept at arm's length from the reader, even as his actions are more and more unstable. Visually, Barrett cleverly uses the repeating motif scene above, substituting the lips or the lips, eyes and nose of a woman for the actual woman herself, as though that was the only thing he could see or focus on at that given moment in time. Those lips later took on different meanings depending on the situation: lust, desperation and even bewitching. The comic focuses on how he got lost with one woman but it was her best friend that he was really after, and this is repeated as a motif through the use of her star tattoo turning into a maze, the maze he felt he was running when he left the house of the first woman the next morning after a night of sex that he had blacked out. This is also a story about connections, secrets and mysteries and the ways in which all three can elude us. The artist whose work is most similar to Barrett's is perhaps Sacha Mardou in terms of its verisimilitude, along with the spareness of John Porcellino.

Other Days, by Patrick Lynch. Lynch isn't quite as accomplished a draftsman as the other artists from Ireland, as both his drawings and lettering are a bit on the rough side. However, Lynch certainly shows plenty of formal daring, like in one story where his big-headed figure delights at getting to go to his job, where he is bullied by an unseen boss who bludgeons him with huge, blocky letters. Lynch is more interested in depicting quiet but significant moments, like a boy playing with his best friend, only to show that it's the boy's last day in town as he and his mom are moving away. Lynch also does work on the fantastic end of things, like one story about a man being visited by a dead friend who urges him to live his life. There's also a strip about firefighters encountering all sorts of silly, weird people on nights of the full moon. Most of these stories were done for anthologies, accounting for the disjointed nature of the collection, but the collective weight of Lynch's work has a smudgy, scrawled and fiercely intelligent appeal.

Absence, by Andy Luke & Stephen Downey. This is part-autobio, part public service announcement on the part of Luke, and the entire comic is available at the link above. It's a nice companion piece to David B's Epileptic, this time from a person who actually has this condition. It actually reminds me a bit more of recent comics about their own disease from Nomi Kane and Sam Gaskin, in that it focuses in part on how this affected their childhoods and how they gained control of their own narratives as adults. Downey does a remarkable job in telling Luke's story with expressive art that focuses on gesture and faces. What's most interesting about this comic is how Luke has managed to go nearly a dozen years without a violent grand mal seizure. Part of that was accomplished by letting go and allowing smaller seizures or moments of freezing up to happen without resisting them, which in turn allowed him to learn things at an accelerated rate, which in turn builds neural bridges that help prevent seizures. Narrative is a powerful theme in this comic, as Luke advocates "owning the experience" as "gatekeepers of this exclusive knowledge" of what it is like to experience these sorts of neural disruptions.

Switching gears, let's take a look at the work of Danish cartoonist Allan Haverholm. Like Derek Badman, he's a formalist interested in comics-as-poetry. The comic that best sums up his work is Koan,which is a series of pages with roughly four panels per page whose images are not explicitly linked, but their juxtaposition creates a kind of narrative of rhythm. Divided into "travel", "home" and "surveys", the first section is marked by speed lines and propulsion, the second by a kind of stillness, and the third by more abstract patterns often coalescing into forms that suggest water, air, movement and sometimes stillness. 30 Days of Comics is a more ambitious comic, as it was part of a month-long challenge to do a new strip every day. This comic is a mix of standard cartooning, more abstract work (including his attempts at graphically illustrating music), gag work with unusual self-restrictions (like "What Telekinetics Do To Show Off", where the titular character never moves while opening up a can), color experiments, strips where key panels are left out so as to make the reader fill in the narrative blanks, and scenes inspired from TV and Twitter. His comic Lots is a collection of strips done while watching the show Lost, minus all of the characters. It adeptly picks up on the way the show established mood with its island backdrop and ominous use of stillness. Finally, Sex and Violence is a flip book whose Sex section is a series of orgasmic drawings of his girlfriend, the presentation of which is more warm and tender than erotic and certainly not exploitative. The flipside, drawn by Mattias Elftorp, simply details an onrush of riot-garbed policemen armed with truncheons and shields bearing down on the reader's perspective, eventually blotting it out altogether. Haverholm brings a lighter touch than many to this sort of experimentation, injecting even the most abstract of his comics with a sense of whimsy.

Finally, there's the El Monstruo De Colores No Tiene Boca ("the color monster has no mouth") project from Spain. This is a series of double-sided, folding cardstock illustrations of children's dreams. Each "issue" is devoted to a single artist, who attempts to capture key images from these very brief dreams. It's not quite what Jesse Reklaw does in Slow Wave, because there's no attempt at narrative here.  Instead, each illustrator chooses a different method to create a striking image. Roger Omar collected the dreams and handed out the assignments, and deliberately chose a number of different styles for the project. There's Javier Saez's intensely hatched pen-and-ink drawings, Takeuma's beautiful, stark and simple black & white drawings, Max's typically funny and surreal gag panels, Thomas Wellman's energetic and muscular action-oriented strips, Mitch Blunt's approach that used the faces of the children with a single image on their forehead from their dream, and Pedro Lourenco's frightening, psychedelic drawings. While it's not quite comics, it's still a fascinating project that's producing some intriguing art objects.