31 Days Of CCS, #36: Rust Belt Review Vol 1

Rust Belt Review is an anthology edited and published by CCS grad Sean Knickerbocker, an artist whose work I greatly admire. The first volume opens with a story by his collaborator Andrew Greenstone. kicked it off with a bizarre mix of a cult exit interview and Squid Game with "Prof. Livingston's Labyrinthine Trivia Trials." It kicks off with an FBI raid and an ensuing shootout of a bizarre underground complex. It then segues into a Wikipedia entry on the cult, founded by the titular Professor with the best of ideals. Like most cults, it devolved into a violent, perverted group of extremists that worshipped its leader. Unlike most cults, they started kidnapping people to put them through a series of grueling physical and mental tests involving trivia and physical feats. The story centers around its sole survivor, leaving it on a cliffhanger as it seems the cult has caught up with her after their setback. Greenstone's linework is grotesque and distorted, with a heavy use of effects like zip-a-tone and spotting blocks. They both give the story an especially gritty quality, like watching a fuzzy black-and-white surveillance video. 

Caleb Orecchio's "Kids Playing Outside" reminds me a lot of Steven Weissman's work. The scratchy art and the wiseass kids who are getting up to shenanigans, including a couple of different alpha characters who inevitably come into contact. The drawing is the main attraction here, as the story meanders in ways that aren't especially interesting. Some of the characters feel underwritten, like they're background characters in an animated series. The final, horrifying sequence is jarring, though there's a sense throughout of reality being bent in different directions. 

M.S. Harkness' "The Uncut Gem" takes off from her comics about her sexual encounters with assorted losers to make a comedic detour into a fantasy sequence. When a guy tells her he's uncircumcised and asks if she can "handle" him, she imagines them robbing a bank together and getting trapped on the roof. They're forced to blow up the uncircumcised tip of his penis like a balloon to float away, but a one-eyed police marksman named "Ellen Rage" shoots him down. That pops the fantasy but not before she asks him about banks. Harkness never shies away from hilariously cartoony and explicit images, and she certainly goes all out to get this joke across. 

"The Wind Cries Maria" is an experimental comic by Juan Jose Fernandez, a CCS grad who spends a lot of time in comics education. This comic was done in a 12-panel grid with what looks like ASCII art, interpolated with the lyrics of a song. It's a rumination on life, death, and existence, with each panel acting as its own complex space, frequently with multiple actions occurring. 

Knickerbocker's "Best Of Three" continues his streak of superb writing about scumbags and losers in small-town America. He just has a knack for the kind of guys who go out in the forest and drink beer on discarded furniture. The central character is David Kelly, a mean lowlife who is about to be kicked out of his old friend's house after he decides to move back to town, after years of "almost" getting a landscaping business off the ground. He's a leech and a mooch who happens to inherit a great deal of money after his father died. His father more-or-less abandoned him after he got rich playing the card game Magic: The Gathering. The lawyer who informed him of this seems to have some hidden agenda, as he follows him to the forest in the story's cliffhanger. Knickerbocker's character design speaks volumes for his characters: the stubble, the ratty haircuts, the unkempt beards, and other touches get across a real sense of how morally repulsive his characters are. At the same time, he makes the reader feel a tinge of sympathy for them as well, as so many of them seem to have been doomed from the start. 

Audra Stang's "Tunnel Vision" is part of her Star Valley stories, featuring teen-age girls Bernie and Adelaide. Bernie is trying to find out more about the sea-themed amusement park in town that fell into disuse from a boy whose great-grandfather built them. Stang's portrayal of teen-age dialogue is painfully raw and often hilarious. Jokes about autoerotic asphyxiation, inappropriate sandbox behavior, and teenage boys scheming to get laid all make sense in the context of this larger story. The way Stang writes about kids reminds me of the Hernandez Brothers. There's Gilbert's willingness to get gross in the way that kids get gross, and Jaime's uncanny ability to depict tension in teen relationships. Her cartooning is lively and expressive, skirting the line between naturalism and caricature. Like many of the other features in this volume, it's part one of a longer story. 

I like the idea of this anthology as mixing a steady line-up of contributors with continuing stories with rotating guest-stars in each issue. The CCS feel is welcome, but giving bright young cartoonists like Stang a steady outlet is certainly also a good thing. Knickerbocker has had an interesting career as a working cartoonist, an editor, and a publisher--and he's good at all three things. 

Thirty Days of CCS #28: Simon Reinhardt

It’s no surprise that some of the material in the new issue of Aaron Cockle’s Annotated first appeared in Simon Reinhardt’s grab-bag comic series Mystery Town. This anthology (sometimes one-man, sometimes with several contributors) is a pure expression of Reinhardt’s aesthetic vision, which reflects Cockle’s understanding of our senses being completely mediated by our cultural influences (or as he might put it, cultural viruses). Where they differ is in the sharpness and direction of their commentary; for Cockle, it’s a critique told in the language of the oppressors. For Reinhardt, it’s simply new grist for a mill of feelings and fears that go back way before capitalism.

Both cartoonists are not at their best when they attempt typical, narrative rendering. Collage, abstraction, erasure and hints at drawings best convey what they’re trying to express anyway, and it so happens that it’s their best fit as cartoonists with a limited toolbox. The conceit of the anthology is that it’s the official municipal newsletter of a place called Mystery Town in the USA, with the mayor (Herman T. Billfolde, a name worthy of Groucho Marx), where all sorts of strange things happen. So there’s a bit of Twin Peaks and every other form of media featuring a quirky, eccentric town. That said, that’s not really the focus in most of the stories. Instead, the stories are often intensely personal and elliptical. Issue 3 has two recurring features: “Nite Time Music” and “Endless Hallway”. The former is a series of mood pieces about music at night: in the desert, on the highway, in the forest, in the city. It’s music as something haunting, something the lingers and evokes deep feelings and memories. These pieces almost read as fragments of something that Tim Lane might do.

The latter feature speaks to Reinhardt’s other fascination, which is the ways in which horror works on a psychological level. Disorientation, both of the audience and the protagonist, is one way to evoke anxiety and panic, as not being oriented toward space (and eventually, time) takes away one’s epistemological foundation. Each of these strips has a different character in a different hallway, trying to make their way as best they can but sensing that they are doomed.

Issue #3 is the “Art Issue”, featuring a story where a show about volcanoes is held in what turns out to be an active volcano that erupts and wipes out the show and everything in it. It’s a funny send-up of art that cares less about its target than it does riffing on what kind of hubris would lead an artist to stage a show in such a place. The citizens of Mystery Town that we meet are often lonely, sad, scared or some combination thereof. Luke Healy’s contribution in #4 is a series of drawings on post-it notes that resemble Seth’s more spontaneous, cartoony style. The fifth issue chases down memories, ghosts, love and Drone Gang life.

In the sixth issue, Juan Fernandez contributed “Wired”, a sketchily drawn story about power lines (and cutting them) that has a narration detailing what happens when one stays awake for too many days in a row. It’s chilling, especially in how impersonal the imagery is. One of Reinhardt’s best stories, “The War Years”, is in this issue, about a sojourner in the wasteland who finds respite in the arms of a woman whose house he comes upon and later steals a device from her. The terrifying thing about this story is that the man who’s trekking is completely cut off from communication; he doesn’t know whether his actions even have meaning anymore. The unknown, Reinhardt suggests, is much more terrifying than a known horror, even if it’s awful.

Eventually, Reinhardt starts to stray away from straight narrative and begins to experiment with collage and mixed media, redrawing a page from an old Adam Strange comic and emphasizing the alienating quality of the shadow ray shot at him. Mystery Town #9 sees a reversal, as it’s a single story by Reinhardt that works in thick black lines. It examines the theme of what crime means during wartime, as a Cyclopean woman lives to steal, until she’s caught and rehabilitated…for a little while. This is really a story about addiction and the way one attempts to replace something that’s missing in one’s life with the object of that addiction. #10 has a lot of guest content from Drake, Nik James and Dean Sudarsky, and it’s epic in a way that other issues are quiet (it includes surfing in a fiery ocean, for example), yet it fits into Reinhardt’s overall aesthetic. 

Reinhardt snaps back full force in #11 with a hilarious send-up of navel-gazing autobio, except that in this case he’s still going to his boring job even though he just won the lottery. #12 juxtaposes a blank form against a series of clocks, as the narrator feels like he’s fallen behind time and doesn’t catch up with it again until his moment of death. It’s an elegantly-constructed story that still has Reinhardt’s hand in it prominently, despite its levels of abstraction. #15 has fragments (some dream, some excerpts from other authors, some autobio), but #16 seems to sum things up with an issue set at the Mystery Town Awards, an event that in itself is odd and mysterious as diamonds appear to rain down from the ceiling. It is, as a series, about fragments and pieces that make up a community and mind.

Reinhardt’s next project was October Movie Diary, a fascinating account of 31 horror movies watched during October. Each movie got four panels, and in many ways this is the first time I’ve seen Reinhardt in control of his line. It’s tough business selecting a few representative images from each film, yet he was up to the task as he used colored pencil both to create a wash effect and to color key elements in each panel (like blood). I think it would be accurate to say that Reinhardt has a cinematic eye when it comes to drawing comics, but not in any traditional sense. He’s obsessed with the single image that represents so much more. It’s not just a matter of shock, but a fascination with the sheer beauty and fascination with something horrible. Reinhardt is also an excellent critic, humorously and mercilessly reducing each movie to a few words, for good and ill.

With Reinhardt’s latest comic, Slow Theft, he moved into a comic book-sized format and full color. The comic reprints some of the best “Nite Time Music” strips (now in color and it features several new stories by Reinhardt. Without the Mystery Town scaffolding, these strips feel like they’re depicting a world that’s desolate and threatening, be they “inside stories” or “outside stories”, as noted on the back cover. “Maze” is about a world where death can come up from the ground in the form of a branching lightning bolt. What’s scariest about this story is that the protagonist’s rules for survival simply stopped working at a certain point.

The title story is about three people who break into a huge home, aiming to do a quick smash and grab and then get out. Slowly but surely, they find the house irresistible, despite multiple attempts by the house itself to warn them away from there. After months of laying around, they realize that they can never leave. The “theft” here is not of valuables, but of lives. Reinhardt’s character design here is clever, and the ratty use of mark-making adds to the sleazy intentions of the thieves. “The White Woods” is interesting less than the story than its bleak tone, as a couple in the woods tries to rely on their physical intimacy as a way of keeping out the desolation of the woods they’re in, with one character unable to maintain that connection after he’s been outside for too long. It’s the color contrasts that make this story work, especially the unsettling white woods themselves. Reinhardt continues to challenge himself as an artist, and the result is a series of ever-more-challenging comics. 

Thirty Days of CCS #33: Dog City

The latest edition of another significant CCS anthology series, Dog City, went in a different direction than the first three volumes and took some interesting risks in doing so. While the first three volumes used clever packaging and design in order to celebrate the minicomic, Dog City #4 is a book that celebrates collaboration. Unlike what we might think of as collaboration in comics, this isn't really one person handling the script and one person handling the pencils. Instead, each of the seven stories features a far more involved level of collaboration, with each pair of artists deciding on methodology and division of labor in a different manner. The results were highly uneven but still quite interesting.

A lot of the matches were between cartoonists in different countries, and also between men and women. I'm not sure if this was by design or a natural consequence of how the editors (Juan Fernandez, Luke Healy and Simon Reinhardt) sought out talent, but there's no question that this diversity made for a more interesting comic. The first story, "Untitled Correspondence", was in many ways the most intimate collaboration, in that Swedish cartoonist Disa Wallender and American cartoonist Matt Davis literally mailed pages of drawings and scraps of drawings to each other, cannibalizing and reusing the other's images in photocopies and montages. The story itself was about consumption, criticism and creativity, as well as the diferences between virtual and real-life experience of art and experience itself.

American Sasha Steinberg and Irishman Luke Healy collaborated on the best story in the book, "Berghain Berlin". This is about identity on a literal level, as we meet a dull cubicle worker named Karl in Berlin and quickly understand that he has a queer alter-ego named X. With Healy drawing the story from Karl's perspective and Steinberg from that of X, we quickly start to question who is real and who is in fact the alter-ego. The dizzying scenes in an underground club and the dissonance between Karl and X are sharply portrayed, as X eventually must learn to integrate aspects of both people into his life. The different styles of each artist clash in a manner that makes complete sense given the context of the story, but that clash is an organic one and in no ways feels contrived.

Brazil's (but now in Taiwan) Iris Yan and Ireland's Sarah Bowie collaborated on "Crossed Memories", and their approach to this memoir comic was to react to something from the prior artist's page. The chemistry between the two was remarkable, as a page by Bowie that evoked memories of growing up in a rural area is matched by Yan recalling the details of her father telling her about growing up in the countryside and making "cow pies" to use as fuel. That led to Bowie recalling a story about burning coal (using the last image from Yan as a visual seque), which led to Yan thinking about barbecues, and so on. There are interesting coincidences, like Yan and Bowie they were both tall for girls their age, which led to both considering the social implications of their height. Bowie's gritty style is a nice contrast to Yan's simpler, cleaner line.

Britain's Ed Cheverton and America's Dan Rinylo did a trippy strip that looked and felt a lot like the sort of thing that Marc Bell does. I found that distracting in reading it, though I imagine the inspiration might have come from any number of artists who have made Bell's unique style a key influence, especially the Adventure Time and other Nickelodeon artists. I'm familiar with Rinylo's other work and it hasn't looked quite like this, and one gets the sense that this collaboration came about quite organically, but it's not especially strong work overall.

Reinhardt teamed with Whit Taylor to create a series of small moments in "Gestures", where they switched writing and drawing responsibilities depending on the titular gesture. I thought the first two mini-stories, involving a failed attempt at breaking a pinata and a woman alone at her apartment brushing her teeth, were interesting because they hinted at deeper emotional subtext, whereas the next two didn't have much to offer beyond the surface facts. Taylor's increasingly stripped-down and refined line and open-page layout made the strips she illustrated more visually appealing than those of Reinhardt's whose occasional over-rendering was distracting.

Aaron Cockle and Fernandez sent each other drawings, and each would work over the drawings of the other. This was the most intensely integrated collaboration of the book, as the outcome didn't strong resemble the styles of either artist but ceretainly had elements of each. The blotches, scribbles, splatters and stabs were given context by text later added by Cockle, grounding the images with musings about wandering, the possibility of integrity and the reality of heartbreak.

Finally, Jennifer Lisa and Caitlyn Rose Boyle's collaboration is at once seamless in the sense that it wasn't clear who did what, but the line weight and line quality varies so much that it looks like a hastily constructed 24-hour comic rather than a carefully considered work. That's too bad, because they touched on some interesting issues regarding the ways in which teenage girls relate to each other as friends.

Overall, there are a couple of excellent stories in here as well as some lesser efforts, but the process of collaboration was clearly a reward in and of itself for the artists. I'm not sure all of it merited publication, but I admire the chances that were taken here and how difficult it must have been for the cartoonists to move out of their comfort zones.

Thirty Days of CCS #26: Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights 4

Awesome Sound is an anthology published by Sean Knickerbocker. The low-fi cover belies the beautiful contents within, which look like they were printed on a risograph. DW's endpapers, which forcefully push both text and image to the point of violent distortion, are fitting for a comic that's so visceral and unsettling. Dan Rinylo's "Beast" is told with an Ernie Bushmiller-style simplicity, as the young boy's face here is two big black dots for eyes, a black line for a nose and a mouth that goes from black line to black oval, depending on his emotions. Using a nine-panel grid after an initial splash page that establishes the boy at the edge of a forest, each page is interesting because the central panel is almost always a scene of stillness: we see the boy looking, see him smiling, see him in the middle of walking and then see him running from right to left when wild dogs start chasing him. That sets the story from amusing to frenetic, but the final middle panel is an image of an empty street--right before a wild dog who is chasing the boy is run over by a car. It's both dark and comedic, given the x over the dog's eye and the generally cartoony nature of the story, but the bright red blood on a page that's mostly black and white adds a level of terror to the proceedings.

Knickerbocker's "Do You Still Feel Alone?" begins with a brother and sister in the woods, on the run from something unseen. The way he throws the reader right into a chase scene propels the story right along, heightening its tension from the very beginning. That tension is ramped up when they are assaulted by a nude man, who is stabbed to death by the sister. Knickerbocker pulls back further, revealing that this is an island where a plane has crashed, its inhabitants reduced to life-and-death struggle. It's a brutal, unforgiving little tableau that has no pat ending, and the fact that it's drawn in that cartoony style reminiscent of Chuck Forsman and Sammy Harkham makes it all the more unsettling. Indeed, the later story where a young couple sets themselves on fire in a house (revealing a pentagram on the floor) is a sort of cousin to the sort of thing Forsman did in The End Of The Fucking World. Finally, Juan Fernadez's red ink two-pager is a perfect fit, as his scribbled-out faces go through a progression of consumption. This mini is short but every image packs a punch.

Can't Lose is an old-fashioned fanzine dedicated to the TV show Friday Night Lights. It's everything a fanzine should be: in-jokey, craft-conscious, and gently mocking in a reverent manner. "Coached" by superfan Melissa Mendes, this zine has an interesting sprinkling of well-known cartoonists. Popular topics include the Christian speed-metal band that the character Landry starts ("Crucifictorious"), the comically awful Billy, younger brother of lead character Tim (Henry Eudy does a fine job of pointing out just how weaselly he is while Nomi Kane posits a magical night the two share in the desert), and how doubters often come around to becoming obsessed with the show. Jon Shaw's "Friday Nightlife" speaks to this, as a character who mocks a couple mourning the last episode starts to watch it and eventually enters his own weird world of living out other, self-imagined seasons. Sam Spina actually made me laugh out loud in a strip where he and his wife are asked why South Carolinians are buying Texas beer, and they reply in unison "Texas forever". My favorite strips were Dan Zettwoch's hilarious story about Dillon getting routed because Saracen used photocopies from the playbook to hang up Crucifictorious flyers (lovingly designed and drawn by Zettwoch, of course) and Jeff Lok's tale of escalating terrible behavior being excused "They're good kids". Can't Lose even has a cut-out Tim Riggins paper doll. While bits of it might me mystifying to those in the dark, the premise is laid out clearly enough for the jokes to land.

Stranger Knights 4 was published, as always by Bill Volk. This light-hearted fantasy/sci-fi/superhero anthology has always been on the uneven and amateurish side. This issue is the first to look good from cover-to-cover, and each story is funny to boot. Volk's "Brega and Snurrd" sees him use a cleaned-up, simplified version of his line that emphasizes character expressiveness above all else. The story follows familiar Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy tropes, but it's really about the relationship between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Of course, the mother here is a bearded dwarf and her daughter is trying to pass as human at her wizarding school. When the mother demands the presence of her daughter for an adventure (ie, bonding session), tension arises in an amusing manner. This is a crisply-paced story that actually gets across real feelings in its fantasy context. I'd love to see more from these characters and their world. The Volk-written "Thousand Year Grudge" (drawn by Bryan Stone) is a denser, grittier story involving anthropomorphic animals, thievery, romances gone bad and multiple double-crosses. The thickness of Stone's line is coupled with cross-hatching, lots of spotted blacks and other noir visual effects to counter the funny animals and the wonderfully ludicrous character of Maggie, the young bird who decides to be a thief. Ann Lewis' "Headless" is a bit on the cruder side in terms of rendering, but her use of humorous body language in telling a story about an empty but animated suit of armor sells it effectively. Finally, the Volk-Mary Soper continuing collaboration "Incantrix X" continues to be a reliably amusing story with idiosyncratic character design and odd design choices.