Mini-Comics: Pyle, Meuse, King/Vayda, Kerschbaum

Boatfire #1, by Kevin C. Pyle. When you read a comic by Pyle, one can be assured of two things: that it will be thoroughly and impeccably researched, and that it will have a powerfully argued point of view. This one is about death, and in particular its fetishization and cultural impact during certain critical periods during history. Pyle fixates on the idea of the momento mori in art, and how during the Black Plague era in Europe in the 16th century, this kind of imagery became highly prevalent. In essence, the images were reminders that in all aspects of life, death was lurking. Pyle then makes the connection between art created during the plague and how punk rose during an era in the late 70s and early 80s when nuclear annihilation was still considered a real possibility. He also connects punk to 1950s-era nuclear paranoia and how the cultural reaction in the 80s was in many ways a recapitulation of the 50s. By way of fascinating anecdote, he recounts living in Lawrence, KS, during the filming of the landmark TV movie The Day After, which depicts life after nuclear war. Pyle later posits that it was punk's very denial of death through nihilism that allowed him and many others to process the unthinkable and come out the other side. He then connects that to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, two works of art that look squarely into the void and acknowledge what it means. In an incredibly clever panel, he has a group of kids blasting out a loud song on a road trip, only it's the words to The Wasteland ("This is the way the world ends..."). By embracing the idea that the fragile structure of society might one day end, it reduces the anxiety of losing one's hold on that as the foundation of sanity. Pyle is a smart, clever cartoonist in terms of his visuals, depicting himself as an anthropomorphic vulture throughout the comic, because what better animal could there be in terms of circling around death.

Drawing Is Hard, by Adam Meuse. This talented artist from Cary is one I've always thought was deserving of wider recognition. His latest mini is the best distillation of Lynda Barry's "two questions" I've seen with regard to the creative process. The two questions are asked by the artist regarding their work: "Is this good? Does this suck?". In this mini, we see the artist in front of an empty sheet of paper as their brain pulls up a seat beside him. The design of the brain is both cute and grotesque, with eye stalks sticking out of its brain-body and tiny arms and legs. The brain used a subtle but powerfully manipulative and persuasive line of argument that would make Socrates proud, in which he tries to make the artist quit drawing. He even got the heart to come over and tell him he didn't "deserve to make anything good. You're not really a good person." Any doubt that the artist expresses as to what ideas to follow are seized upon by the brain as more reasons why he should quit. The mini ends with the brain going to bed and the heart furtively whispering encouragement. Meuse here gets at the essence of the struggle of the artist, because no one can argue themselves into being creative or feeling their art is worthwhile. While cognition is involved in making art, it's not a cognitive process per se. Instead, it's something more akin to a mystical or subconscious experience, just as experiencing art is. It requires a deliberate choice to make, but once the pen hits the paper and the tactile, visceral experience of drawing begins once again, that's when suspension of judgment (a purely cognitive process) ebbs. As Meuse hints at, the brain can manipulate emotions to trick the artist into not creating, often using the act of creation as a referendum on one's very worthiness as a human being. Meuse notes that this is only a trick, however, and when one can separate feelings from judgment, it's possible to pry oneself away from the two questions. For a simple, cute comic done with an open page format with four panels a page, there's a remarkable amount of complexity to be found here.

Next Week In New York City!, by John Kerschbaum. Kerschbaum is one of my favorite humorists, combining dense hatching with a goofy, cartoony approach to figure design. He uses satire, gross-out humor, wordplay and occasionally oblique imagery in telling his jokes, but it's fair to city that he loves jokes involving city life, and New York City in particular. This mini is a collection of four-panel strips that "predict" upcoming life in NYC, with most of the gags being specific and provincial. So there are jokes about local politicians (the Anthony Weiner joke is pretty clever), alternate side of the street parking and the cicada invasion that require some knowledge of the city, but there are also plenty of gags about social media, pollen and art--along with scatological jokes. Kerschbaum is not at his funniest when given these kinds of constrictions, but he still manages to craft some truly excellent pages, like the gag about sneakers hanging from electrical worries (a familiar image), then an umbrella hanging, then a plastic bag--and closes with a barefoot guy with an armful of groceries getting rained on. Most of the jokes in this mini aren't as good as that, though Kerschbaum compensates by hammering the reader with gags in every panel and even employing some running gags.

Left Empty Book One, by Alan King and Jamie Vayda. The King/Vayda team usually write stories about King's wild days and crazy anecdotes about sex, drugs, drinking and rock 'n roll. Vayda's dense and cartoony line combines heavy stylization (often verging on the grotesque and/or absurd) with thick hatching and cross-hatching that creates a moody but rubbery atmosphere. Usually, this is used to depict scenes of debauchery. In this comic, we follow a clearly upset man coming home and drinking til he blacks out and Th breaking down in tears. The first half of the story follows him dealing with loss and trying to self medicate, and the second half goes a bit further back in time when we learn it's the writer himself, and that his wife suddenly grew ill and died. The exaggerated and even trippy imagery that Vayda uses was put to use illustrating nightmares and emotional breakdowns, and it worked surprisingly well. Beyond a simple expression of loss, this series promises to be about the ways in which grief and even mourning are not one-time experiences, but rather are experienced over and over again--with the pain being fresh each time. Medical bills and old greeting cards are artifacts of that grief, transporting the mourning individual back to the original time and feeling of sadness that is so profound that it is somatic in nature--tremors, wracking sobs, etc.

Activist Week: Ethan Heitner and Kevin C. Pyle

Ethan Heitner and Kevin Pyle have long been mainstays at the seminal political comics anthology World War III Illustrated. Each has also done their share of solo work, much of which is in the category of direct action literature.

Pyle's Wage Theft, co-written by Jeffry Odell Korgen and flip-booked with a Spanish-translated version, is a deft, fast-moving and highly persuasive tract aimed at workers who have suffered from the title phenomenon. The comic, drawn in Pyle's scratchy line with a huge emphasis on greyscaling to add tone and depth to each page, focuses primarily on undocumented/illegal workers in service industries like cleaning. The practice of wage theft can involve being paid less than minimum wage, of failing to pay wages or paying them on a consistently late basis, ignoring overtime, making illegal deductions, etc. Some employers feel they can get away with this by threatening to report their employees to immigration, threatening to fire them or using some other form of illegal intimidation. This comic is full of cases of workers who fought back, the resources they used and the outcomes they achieved. Pyle and Korgen aren't practicing pie-in-the-sky activism here, as they acknowledge that there's a risk of businesses going bankrupt as a way of dodging their debt obligations and of course the difficulty of losing time and wages. That said, by giving a clear idea of what resources do exist and how people have used them, this comic is meant to be a seed that provides support and a means of resistance to exploited workers across the country.

Heitner's comics focus on Palestinian rights and divestment away from Israel. Nothing "Normal About It was written by Tanya Keilani and speaks to the idea of false equivalency of "dialogue" between Palestinians and Israelis, given the idea that the Israelis booted out the Palestinians in 1948 and currently practice what is roughly the equivalent of apartheid. Keilani's comic details some Palestinian students being invited to dialogue and eventually walking away after realizing that for groups to come together as equals, the two groups actually have to be equal. The writing is strident and without the faintest sense of subtlety, and the Israeli supporters here are portrayed as little more than straw men (curiously illustrated to look like stuffy Archie-adults). Tara Tabassi's writing is similarly one-note in There Is A Checkpoint Around This Center!, which is about a protest about the clash between Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) in New York being denied space at the NY LGBT Community Center. The central idea that oppression of Palestinians is not something separate from queer issues is one that makes sense, but this is less a story than a series of shouted slogans. That has its place, and documenting this issue makes sense, but comics like these are merely preaching to the converted.

More effective are Heitner's own comics. Old Abdullah Had A Farm, for example, is a perfect example of effective and memorable political comics. Drawing his characters as anthropomorphic mice, he detailed the ways in which settlers, soldiers and the Wall pushed out farmers from their land, and how this has led to a movement. With a scratchy, cross-hatching heavy line, the comic has the proper amount of pitch-black humor and serious commentary. The Power of Our Voices uses Joe Sacco-style interviews with Palestinians and tells their stories, building a powerful case for the cultural boycott of Israel. Interviewing artist Samia Halaby, for example, she makes the point that art cannot transcend politics, that it either passively or actively supports oppression even if it claims to have nothing to do with it. That's the crux of the argument in favor of the cultural boycott, especially since an argument is made that Israel's cultural exports are very much a propaganda exercise in improving their image around the world. If Halaby is perhaps too much of a firebrand for one's tastes (she comes out in favor of violence as one means of resistance, which is unusual in these comics that call for protests, boycotts and divestments), then AnneMarie Jacir's story of not being allowed to film a documentary in Palestine, nor being allowed in is even more powerful. Trying to navigate a brutal, impersonal and frequently nonsensical bureaucracy frustrated the filmmaker. When told she'd be invited into a festival in Haifa, she refused because her own father wouldn't be allowed access. Another artist, Larissa Sansour, had her work censored in France because it was too "pro-Palestinian". Letting people tell their stories is the most effective way of getting a greater point across, and Heitner then takes that opportunity to lay out the specifics of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement.

Heitner's own Empire State of Mind has two stories: an adaptation of a Kafka story that touches on jackals and Arabs, and the sticky relationship between the Middle East and the West. "Stick and Stay, "They're Bound To Pay" is about the big union strike in Flint, Michigan that led to the rise of United Auto Workers. They struck for better working conditions and fair wages, and their commitment and togetherness--especially with the quick-witted support of their wives--won the day for them. Like Pyle, Heitner is skilled at creating a narrative out of primary sources. He adds a sense of suspense and drama to events that certainly didn't lack it and is careful to let his pages breathe with the occasional silent panel that is worth the proverbial thousand words. Heitner is careful not to write this with a sense of starry-eyed nostalgia of triumphs past, but rather as a call to arms for protesters and occupiers everywhere. That mix of fact, reasoning and passion is what makes his narratives so compelling. It's not just relating that the personal is political, but trying to explain precisely how and why this is so in such a way that anyone can understand it.

War On Fun: Bad For You

Kevin Pyle and Scott Cunningham's Bad For You (Henry Holt) is a compelling and slow burning case against the over-regulation of and fear-mongering regarding activities that children have historically enjoyed: comics, video games, television, skateboarding, etc. While aimed at a young-adult audience (complete with a glossary of terms in the back to help younger readers understand certain historical, legal and philosophical terms), there's no mistaking this book's bold, anti-authoritarian stance. That should be no surprise given Cunningham and Pyle's close connection to radical comics anthology World War III Illustrated, but this book is far from a heated polemic. Instead, it's an intensively-researched and well-sourced book that is careful to link up historical, social and cultural contexts with regard to larger institutions like education, parks & recreation and various gaming and toy industries. At its heart, the book's biggest and last target is the war on free and critical thinking.

Of course, given that this is aimed at young adult readers, Pyle and Cunningham take a certain amount of sheer glee in revealing both how intellectually bankrupt bans on fun tend to be and how historically cyclical they are. They note, for example, historical outrage over the institution of things like the written word, the printing press, and the novel as contributing to moral decay and a decreasing work ethic. Pyle and Cunningham make an interesting case throughout the book regarding why children find moderately scary or dangerous activities to be so appealing. For example, gruesome and visceral fairy tales are important for a child's psyche not to scare them, but rather to let them play out their own natural fears of the unknown, death, darkness, abuse and even adults in general. It's a safe way to express these fears, much as playing violent video games or watching horror moviesgenerally tends to lead to a decrease in violence by providing a steam valve for kids. The same is true for adventurous play on playgrounds, which not only gives kids a chance to blow off steam, but it also provides mental stimulation.

The authors discuss research methods and reasoning at length in the book. In general, they take aim at argument by anecdote, where bans are created because of statistically rare instances of something happening. Sometimes, bans arise due to simple urban legends, like the classic "razor blade in the candy" trope surrounding Halloween. They also argue against studies that infer causality from correlation, which generally tend to arise from studies that have a firm goal in mind and manipulate the subjects to confirm a previously-formed hypothesis. The study of juvenile delinquents and comic book reading by Dr Frederick Wertham is a classic example of this, because he didn't bother to create a control group of non-delinquents and comic book reading, as the authors point out. Bad For You patiently counters myths and bad studies with facts, statistics and better-constructed studies that pointed out violent media, comics, etc have no statistically significant effect on behavior. The authors note with an air of resignation the ways in which video games and whatever the newest form of technology favored by children come under attack again and again when the newest round of gun violence flares up, an attack proliferated and perpetuated by anyone with a media outlet. In the expanding media universe of the internet, it's incredibly easy to proliferate bad science, pseudoscience, and arguments by anecdote and difficult to get True Believers to back down.

One thing the authors don't do is extrapolate a child's need to understand and explore their fears to adults, and how this historical drive to decry youth culture is really the adult response to these fears. That cycle occurs in part because when they don't understand a new technology or culture, there is first the fear of being replaced by their children--a fear of their own mortality. The responses to argument-by-anecdote also reveal a parent's own understandable fear of outliving their children. At the same time, this urge to "protect" children is really an urge to protect their own egos and understanding of a constantly changing world. Anything embraced by their children but not understood by adults is automatically feared. As such, it creates an unwarranted nostalgia for old days that did not actually exist.

The authors build on their arguments for their real target: the educational system that increasingly relies on standardized testing and increasingly phases out recess, the arts and even history. Once again, their exploration of the history of the educational system in the US gets to the root of certain issues, like school once being developed to create students who would respond well to the rigidity and repetitiveness of factory work. While one can criticize such a method in its own right, the additional problem is that such a system is now obsolete thanks to the increasing mechanization of factory work as well as it being shipped overseas in so many instances. What Pyle and Cunningham stump for, again and again, is play. A school environment centered around play and exploration instead of rote memorization and standardized testing, they argue, would lead to students better suited to deal with a rapidly changing society. Technology should be fully embraced instead of shunned, especially if there's a chance to use it in creative ways.

The book falls short of illustrating every one of their points, but Pyle is careful to make sure the historical scenes are depicted by way of comics as a way of getting them to go down smoother. He uses a wonderfully fuzzy style on some pages and a clearer, crisper line on others. It reminds me a bit of the fuzzy, slightly grotesque naturalism of Lauren Weinstein, where it's more important to capture the essential emotional characteristics of a person or scene than it is to recreate the thing precisely. That slightly grotesque style is also a nod to EC Comics, for whom this book is a sort of extended love letter. The pages consisting of just text come at the end of each section, sort of as a way of piling on additional data and synthesizing the ideas that the reader was just exposed to. There are also a number of clever graphs and a scathing feature on standardized testing done in the form of a standardized test. Bad For You's arguments are well-built, the content is well-organized, and the book has a sense of humor about itself while being utterly serious in its goals to demolish a fear-mongering culture of rigidity and give kids the ammunition with which to do so.

Sequart Reprints: Kid Lit

This article as originally published at sequart.com in 2006.
***
The three comics I'm reviewing in this space are all for children, but the contexts for each are radically different. Kevin Pyle's Blindspot is a lush, imaginative graphic novel aimed at kids 9 and up. Sardine In Outer Space 2 is a collection of stories featuring the wacky adventures of Sardine, a young girl who happens to be a space pirate. The latest Nick Mag Presents is an all-comics special aimed squarely at Nickelodeon's target audience, roughly kids 10 and under.

Going in reverse order, the new Nick Mag can be found on any magazine rack. While it features comics versions of their most popular cartoon characters (Spongebob Squarepants & Fairly OddParents), it also features an array of strips from some of alt-comics' most interesting artists. Comics editors Chris Duffy & Dave Roman (the latter a cartoonist in his own right) have been providing a steady outlet for cartoonists for quite some time. It's odd to see someone like Johnny Ryan in here, considering that most of his regular work is so filthy, but his strips still work because kids like fart jokes more than anyone. It's a particular delight to see folks like Jason Shiga do his thing in here. Shiga loves embedding comics in choose-your-own-adventure frameworks, and so it was a natural for him to do a maze where he's trying to get the Fairly OddParents to grant him wishes to get a girl to fall in love with him. Even better is an algorithm he designed later in the book to determine your perfect mate--with the determining factors being things like "lots of hair vs the color green".

That's just one example of a strip that doesn't feel at all watered-down, even if it's not exactly what the artist would do with their own work. Brian Ralph's gorgeous "Twiggy Stumps" strip, about a boy trying to find a place to stay during the winter, has exactly the same look and feel as his Cave-In or Climbing Out strips. He's not the only ex-Highwater Books cartoonist in this issue. Jordan Crane (with the nom-de-plume Jane D'Rancor) did a strip called "Shortcut", which is in a style very similar to his recent children's book The Clouds Above. Underground legend Justin Green offers a strip about humanitarian ways to kill flies, done in the same washed-out style as his regular comics. The imagination and wit that pervades the personal work of the indy cartoonists here makes the issue a pleasure to read as an adult. I especially liked the humor in Craig Thompson's comics here; he had one page with four completely separate strips, all of which impact the other somehow. Ellen Forney's comic on how to make your own autobio strip is enormously clever, as is her smaller strip that ran along the bottom of several pages.

The best thing this issue does is give a nice outlet for gag strip experts and humorists. Along with Ryan, there's the highly-underrated Karen Sneider, Sam Henderson (with his regular "Scene But Not Heard" strip), Mark Martin, Evan Dorkin & Sara Dyer, Terry LaBan, Gahan Wilson and Michael Kupperman. The latter 's strip, "The Worst Comic Book Villains That Never Existed" could have been out of an issue of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle comic, including characters like Doctor Buckethead, Pants-On-His-Head-Man (the archenemy of Underpants-On-His-Head-Man), and the Crayoniacs. I've long felt that there was a need for a comics anthology that had nothing but humor strips in it, and Nick Mag is the closest thing we have to that at the moment. I honestly can't thing of a better way of getting kids to love comics than this magazine: it's appealing to both genders, it's funny, it's attractive to look at (they don't skimp on production values), there's a variety of styles & stories, and it can be enjoyed without having to understand a lot of backstory.

Sardine is what I would call minor work from two excellent cartoonists, Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. . Sfar in particular is a huge favorite of mine. This collection of strips is aimed squarely at kids (even the flap on the front cover says "No Grown-Ups Allowed! (Unless they're pirates or space adventurers)"). In these stories, Sardine the space pirate travels with Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie, having all sorts of adventures. They're in constant combat with the villainous Supermuscleman and mad scientist Doc Krok, always foiling their schemes. Each story is 10 pages long, just long enough to establish a conflict and resolution.

What makes the stories fun are the absurd set-ups: a comet covered in carpet, with a ruler that tries to force its visitors to buy some; a planet filled with flies that put bad dance tunes into its victims ears, the kind you can't get out of your head; a giant with video cameras inside its body; a lonely worm that creates a spaceship in a bid to make friends that only scares them off instead. When the stories move away from the oafish Supermuscleman (who gets outsmarted by Sardine so easily that he doesn't make for much of a villain), they're much funnier and weirder. For example, Sardine and Louie are able to save their friends in a flea circus from that video giant by going inside his body and playing soccer--that's because "wherever there's soccer, there's cameras".

The comics are more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. They're in the tradition of a Carl Barks, mixing adventure and silliness. The real highlight of these stories is Sfar's loose, vibrant style. While the character designs are simple and iconic, he still manages to pack an enormous amount of detail in a given panel. This makes his pages easy to follow (some of them have only two panels) but rewarding to look at. The use of color is another major component of the overall visual impact; they're kept bright, basic and even a bit garish. These stories occur in a fantastic world, and their non-naturalistic look and feel adds to the effect.

The main criticism I'd have of this collection is that there's a certain repetitiveness to the stories. Every story details some adventure or misadventure of Sardine and her friends, often against the same set of opponents. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's formulaic, but there's a sense of diminishing returns the further one gets into the book, even if each individual story is enjoyable on its own. From a child's standpoint, this probably isn't a big deal--if they like the stories to begin with. Unlike the Nick Mag, with its wide range of styles, this Sardine volume is best given to children who are already inclined to enjoy this sort of story.

The audience for Blindspot is entirely different, and not just because of the 9-and-over target group. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Dean, who retreats into army fantasies as a way of dealing with the alienation he feels in relating with other kids, his family's constant moving around, and the difficulty he has in dealing with authority. The irony is that he chose war and army scenarios as a symbol of rugged freedom, when the military is the ultimate form of regimentation. The key is that his understanding of war is what he reads in comic books, and these fantasies inform his playtime with his friends. Eventually, a frightening encounter with a homeless man snaps him out of his war fantasies.

What makes the book more than a routine exploration of pre-adolescent problems is the masterful use of color. Pyle employed single-color palettes during every real-life sequence, but his use of color was non-naturalistic. He used green (army soldier green) during every sequence where Dean and his friends were playing army in the forest, and used it once again towards the end to reflect a significant change for Dean. He used a light lilac to depict winter, but more importantly, a time of reflection and an attempt at understanding. An aqua-green represented times of crisis in school, or a sequence where he had to go to a child psychologist. Light blue represented both night and the sense of elation that turned into panic when he was faced with a homeless man angry at him and his friends for destroying his hovel--but really wanting someone to unload the story of his own life's misery on. Brown seemed to represent the times when Dean was most grounded in reality. Sometimes this was because of family difficulties, and other times because he was finally able to exult a bit in enjoying himself as a kid in the here and now. There are other shades for other encounters as well, but these were the ones that stood out.

The stand-out stylization that Pyle used came when Dean was deep in his army fantasies in his friends. The art would shift from the simple palette to one resembling old war comics--flat and four-colored, looking a bit like Joe Kubert or Dick Ayers 60's war comics. It was no accident that these sequences (meshing the kids' "play" dialogue into something resembling the dialogue from such comics) had color that was comparatively more vibrant, but in no sense was it meant to be realistic. In a later scene where Dean is at the psychologist's office, he slips into fantasy mode, with the page drawn like Dean's a soldier being interrogated. As Dean relaxes and realizes that there's no threat here, the fantasy fades and we him going back to a more realistic view of the situation.

Dean felt trapped as a child, and the forest where he played represented freedom. The life of a soldier as he saw it in the forest was the ultimate form of liberation: living on your own wits and toughness, righting wrongs, performing tasks that meant something. Being punished for doing poorly in school didn't mean anything to him. What slowly started to change him was seeing images of the Holocaust in a library book; the images of dead bodies started to interfere even with his war fantasies. While that shifted his fantasies, it didn't change his desire for solitude and self-determination. That didn't change until the homeless man (who boasted about his freedom) revealed the devastating details of his miserable life. Dean was finally able to leave that fantasy behind after that as his parents rescued him from the forest and he came to see them, and his life, in a very different light. He understood that there was a thin line between freedom and alienation, and how easy it was to cross that line.

The whole sequence with the homeless man is heralded by a typically clever use of color. Right before that, Dean was out with his friends, having fun on Halloween. He was just a normal kid, and it felt good. This was highlighted by the use of brown in this scene. After he says goodbye to his friends, we suddenly shift to light blue, with only a slight red-brown in the sky as the sun sets. It's the only time in the book that colors are mixed on a non-fantasy page, and here we see the warm feelings represented by brown start to fade into the ominous blue of the night, panel by panel. It's a transition significant enough to make up the bulk of the book's cover.

The understanding that Dean's change in his self was apparent when we see him playing baseball and the color is back to that army-green. Chasing a long fly ball, Dean is faced with his fantasy forest again, probably for the first time. He's finally come to terms with what it represented to him, and he was literally able to turn his back to it and move on. This point is hammered home in the book's final sequence, where Dean's family has moved again. In brown tones, he meets some new kids and befriends them, telling them that army play is "kid's stuff". It's perhaps a bit too obvious a cue after so much subtlety in this book, the only wrong turn in a comic filled with so many right choices.

Blindspot rewards multiple readings as one begins to absorb and understand Pyle's use of color and the subtle shifts in the story's tone as a result. Rite-of-passage fiction is a genre that's been mined quite deeply, but Pyle's sensitivity, skill and cleverness make this book a uniquely rewarding experience. I would recommend it in particular to junior high school students, especially boys.

To Do Is To Be: Katman

Rob reviews the new teen-aimed comic by Kevin C. Pyle, KATMAN (Henry Holt).

Kevin C. Pyle's career has seen him split time between political comics (most notably WORLD WAR III ILLUSTRATED) and comics aimed at teens. His particular skill in the latter area is homing in on a particular crisis moment and playing it out past the point of comfort. BLINDSPOT dealt with the intersection of fantasy life and reality and the ways the former could prove destructive to the latter. His newest book, KATMAN, is about the ways fantasy can be redemptive, along with providing a stark (if simple) example of the existentialist's dilemma. What is identity? What is meaning? What does it entail to live a meaningful life? What role do others have in this dilemma? Pyle does this with a surprising amount of restraint, avoiding too much angst or melodrama. He accomplishes this with his washed-out, scribbly art depicting real-life events (a bit reminiscent of Frank Stack in places) and a decent amount of verisimilitude with regard to dialogue. There's very little humor to be found here, nor is there really meant to be. The one way in which Pyle visually spices up the book is a device where one character is drawing an over-the-top manga about the protagonist; those segments are all in red and pop off the page, providing an obvious contrast to the relatively dreary lives of everyone else.

The cover is actually a bit misleading. The huge Katman image and electric logo dominates the page, with the duller aspects of real life blending together toward the bottom of the page. It looks as though the cover was meant to grab manga fans' attention, even though though this comic is not manga. Indeed, a reader expecting that sort of comic would likely be baffled for most of the early portion of the book, as we meet Kit and are introduced to his rather aimless existence. The book initially focuses on categories and identity, as Kit notes that he lives in a low-income neighborhood, that his single mom works incredibly hard, and that his brother is a slightly socially awkward academic overachiever. His brother is perfectly happy with that role and pushes Kit to find his own meaning (mostly as a way to get him out of the house).

Kit is observed by a group of outsiders, which included a headbanging satanist type, an Asperger's-esque video game addict, a manga-loving artsy girl, and a generic aloof guy. Kit decides to follow stray cats around as he wandered around the neighborhood, and then made it his mission to feed them. He became so single-minded in his pursuit that he defied his mother, stole from a local store and even befriended the local "crazy cat lady" to make sure the cats were fed. He eventually came to an agreement with the store owner, who sympathized with his concern, and approached the cat lady when he learned some of his neighbors wanted the stray cats gone. Throughout all this, the outsiders approached him and tried to size him up, with the artist (named Jess) taking an interest in Kit's weirdly obsessive nature.

More to the point, she admired his willingness to embrace being a true outsider without feeling a need to construct an identity for himself other than one who found it important to do something for other living beings. That brought a tension between herself and the others in her group, especially the aloof guy Rip. Her conflict in the book was trying to resolve her unspoken attraction to Rip (which was not reciprocated beyond a juvenile attempt to control her behavior) and her growing attraction to Kit (which played itself out in the manga avatar she created for him called Katman).

The low-key drama of the main story is expanded and exploded on the page when we see her artistic output, as she imagines the unassuming Kit becoming a fierce hero in the face of all sorts of adversity thanks to the steadfastness of his ideals. Her choice became a simple one: tearing down vs building up, or nihilism vs trying to create one's own set of meanings. For a teenager, these choices are, by their very nature, melodramatic and seem larger than life. In that sense, the manga pages made sense in how much they assaulted the senses. That said, they were nowhere near as effective in getting across the fantasy life of a character as in BLINDSPOT, for the simple reason that many of the pages were busy to the point of being difficult to read. Part of it was the choice of color: making everything red on red was confusing. I found myself flipping through these pages quickly so as to get back to the main narrative. This left the character of Jess feeling a little undercooked as a result: the pages that were supposed to provide emotional resonance for her wound up being distractions.

Still, the character of Kit wound up being enormously compelling, precisely because he was so difficult to pigeonhole. He simply woke up one day and figured out that this was what he was going to do, and that nothing would change his mind. The denouement of the book, featuring his immediate plans going to pieces but the courage of his convictions eventually leading to a happy ending, was perhaps a bit more pat than expected. Pyle pulls it off because he did such a fine job in establishing Kit's sheer willpower and devotion; there was no doubt as a reader that he would find a way to get what he wanted in the end. I liked the way that Pyle depicted the interactions between Kit and his brother, an easy and brutally honest form of mutual aggravation and affection. The interactions among the outsiders are a little less interesting, but they're more devices to play off the leads than fully-formed characters. All told, the way Pyle modulated emotion through subtle manipulation of color (in the main narrative) and the looseness of his line made for a memorable character study.

The Personal Is Polemic: The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

Rob reviews a collection of comics drawn by artists from WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED about certain injustices in the US prison system called THE REAL COST OF PRISONS COMIX (PM Press).



The philosopher & historian Michel Foucault wrote a number of books that tended to have the same core idea: that the nature of human relations, stripped bare of idealistic constructs, is one of power relationships. In HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, Foucault makes a case that sexual relationships are entirely based on power and hierarchy. In DISCIPLINE & PUNISH, he gives us a history of prisons and pushes the idea that the Enlightenment Project did nothing to make the concept of the prison more humane, and in fact made it less so in certain ways. In MADNESS & CIVILIZATION, he lays out the history of the treatment of mental illness. He exposes the curious phenomenon of madness "rising" in certain areas during certain eras, which he posits is again a rationalist position of defining certain behaviors or groups of people as insane. The writers and artists behind THE REAL COST OF PRISONS COMIX use aspects of all three of these arguments to aggressively push for a total reform of not just the prison system, but the entire justice system that surrounds it.

The marriage of art and polemics is often a tenuous one. The history of that marriage finds art usually getting short shrift, or downright exploited, for a particular political end. The more dogmatic a point of view, the more likely artists are to be exploited. The relationship between Communists and Surrealists is a telling example, as the former eventually declared the latter to be decadent despite having similar sympathies. The genesis of the comics in this collection came from the director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, Lois Ahrens, who was seeking a way of quickly and easily disseminating information about the injustices she saw. She was inspired by ubiquitous fotonovellas in Mexico, by trade unions putting out information in comics form and by a couple of economists trying to explain complex information in simple pictorial form. Comics were an especially compelling way of putting a human face on a systematic and institutional set of exploitative structures; tugging on emotions became much easier in comics form that with a dry set of statistics or charts.

Ahrens didn't mention a couple of other sources that seemed every bit as inspirational: the way Mao Zedong used comics for propaganda and the manner in which fundamentalist Christian cartoonist Jack Chick creates his cartoon tracts. There's no question that these comics, and the "reader's responses" that go with them, are nothing short of propaganda. But that, I mean that they are carefully crafted to forcefully articulate a particular point of view and set up opposing viewpoints as easily disposed straw men.

The good news for these comics is that they were illustrated by cartoonists well-versed in balancing polemics and art. The magazine WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED has been relentlessly bombing away with its progressive agenda for nearly thirty years. Artists like Peter Kuper and Eric Drooker have been balancing art and politics for a long time; for them, the political is also personal, and has led to some striking art. In THE REAL COST OF PRISONS COMIX, cartoonists Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones and Susan Willmarth collaborated with various personnel associated with the project to illustrate the ways that prisons exploit the small towns they're built in, the way that the so-called War on Drugs has destroyed lives, and the ways in which the justice system affects poor women and children in particular.

The collaborations are not always entirely successful as works of art or propaganda. I think that owes much to the fact that the artists had to adapt a lot of dry information in a way that was interesting. Kevin Pyle, the artist behind the excellent book BLINDSPOT, particularly struggled in adapting the most abstract of the three stories, "Prison Town". Part of this was in the visuals: Pyle's work takes on a different life in color, and the greyscale art here looked muddy. His collaborator, Craig Gilmore, is clearly an information man, not a storyteller.

The overarching argument of this book is that there is money to be made in building prisons; in order to justify them being built, there have to be prisoners to put in them. This became easy with the War on Drugs, criminalizing behavior that is essentially a victimless crime to an absurd degree. Increasing police presence in high-risk blocks served to also add to the pool of prisoners. The problem with "Prison Town" is that I would have liked to have heard a bit more information from other prison towns on what effect having a penitentiary institution had on their communities. This starts with a conclusion and works its way back with some supporting details, rather than building an argument in the opposite way.

More successful is "Prisoners of the War On Drugs", which talks about not only the ways in which a young and naive person can wind up in prison but also the ways in which race affect sentencing (most famously, possessing crack cocaine inexplicably leads to harsher sentences than possessing powder cocaine) and the ways in which the system stacks things against those who get out of prison in terms of being denied public assistance. This section is more successful because it's more episodic and Sabrina Jones' thick black lines expressively get points across. It is still pretty text-heavy, with some pages looking more like illustrated text than comics.

The best of the three stories is "Prisoners of a Hard Life", which is the most focused and expressive of the bunch. Willmarth integrates text and image on the page that makes the lettering look like part of the art, making this possible with a heavy black & white set of contrasts. This story is the best mix of emotional and statistical appeal, bombarding the reader with example after example of lives being shattered--both of women and their children. The way that the prison-industrial complex exploits the poor, the disadvantaged and the desperate is presented in such a way that one's reaction to these stories is visceral. The creators (Susan Willmarth, along with Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens) are careful to buttress their anecdotal (and emotional) argument with carefully placed statistics and even provide alternatives to what's being done now.

The creators of this book are careful not to condemn prisons per se, nor do they call for the abolition of prisons. They instead focus on victimless crimes, non-violent crimes and institutional poverty, and especially how the latter is informed by the former. Incarceration (and the death penalty) is an extremely emotional issue for many when it comes to violent crimes. The creators tacitly acknowledge that there probably are some people who need to be locked up, but that the number of dangerous individuals didn't exponentially increase in a short period of time, any more than "hysteria" became an epidemic for women in the latter half of the 19th century. Just as certain behaviors were labeled as insane during that time, it was easy to criminalize certain other behaviors now. The Real Cost emphasis on how economics drives this process makes it seem all the more insidious and cold-blooded; in the end, all we have to do is follow the money to understand why it's being done. I only wish that the approach of the book was slightly less sledgehammer, since it really does bring to mind Jack Chick's methodology.