Youth In Decline: Lauren Weinstein's Frontier #17

This week on High-Low, I'm going to talk about three of the best books of the year. We'll begin with Frontier #17: Mother's Walk, by Lauren Weinstein. Weinstein has long been a favorite of mine, thanks in part to what can be perceived as a lack of any kind of filter. She has a frequently raunchy, vulgar sense of humor that is mixed with a healthy dollop of absurdism. Her autobiographical work finds her exposing things about her past and present with no hesitation whatsoever. Her mixture of painting, scribbles and cartooning gives her work a unique look. Her comics about her marriage and children are raw and open, omitting most details related to conflict while keeping the emotional content and context of that conflict. There are more memoirs from a woman's perspective these days than ever before, but the way Weinstein found a way to be intellectually present for the events of this comic was astonishing.

This comic is the birthing story of her second child with her husband Tim. Weinstein was devoted to the idea of recording the experience before it faded from memory, and her willingness to spill ink (and paint) in every panel on every page made me feel privileged as a reader. It read like she was taking the entire reading public into her confidence, telling them secrets and trusting them with them. The comic is in equal parts beautiful, harrowing, funny, and absurd. Her scrawled pencils feel like they're being quickly scribbled on the page as though I was watching her try to tell this story as quickly as she could, before it all faded away.

What ultimately makes the story so effective is Weinstein's ability to detach herself from the narrative enough to make it coherent. Her sensibilities as a storyteller couldn't help but form a narrative around the experience and shape it into something that flowed in a way that made sense. This is also Weinstein's presence as someone churning over their own story, offering herself commentary and reflection. She's the type who mulls over everything, but the effect here is useful and steadying when compared to the chaos of the visual presentation. While there is some detachment, she turns that critical eye on the events and feelings as they happened and held very little back. She pulls away and pulls the reader in at the same time.

The baby's due date had passed but her parents were there visiting, and there's a hilarious sequence where she sends them back home so that she and Tim could have sex in an effort to induce labor. There's an astounding two-page sequence where they are both reaching orgasm accompanied by six floating, circular panels showing a close-up of ejaculation on one side and "the cosmic door of life and death" opening on the other. It's Weinstein's fascination with the recapitulation of larger cosmic mysteries by way of the mystery of sex (or as Elvis Costello would say, the "Mystery Dance"). It's the convergence of psychedelic transcendence with intimate physicality, and this is the heart of her work. The tiniest details of life recapitulate the most glorious mysteries. The most absurd daily events represent existential meaninglessness. As above, so below.

Weinstein then rewinds to the decision whether or not to have another baby and the time that went by while considering it, until she unintentionally got pregnant. Weinstein's willingness to share her emotions by way of showing them in panels rather than talking about them abstractly is another thing that gave the comic such an intimate feel. For example, she talks about about a long walk with her husband helping to clear the air between the two, but she also provides a couple of snippets of dialogue that reinforced this point. Speaking of which, there's no more effusive character in the book than her older daughter Ramona. Her sheer delight in knowing that she would have a sibling is fascinating when compared to her mother and grandmother's joyful embrace of life. Weinstein's mother is a political activist; Weinstein herself is a prolific artist and writer; and Ramona's saying "Now I will have responsibilities! And that will make me not lonely!" is a fascinating recapitulation of both her mother and grandmother. For Weinstein, an only child, giving her daughter this experience was not only important to her, but she revealed it was interesting as something to observe while it was happening, since she didn't experience it herself.

The birth experience as Weinstein described it was fascinating--inbetween and out of time, where breathing and waves of pain intermingled with musings on god. Weinstein notes that "if god exists, god is a creator and a destroyer". She's on the verge of needing an epidural when she talks to Ramona on the phone, and that allows her to let go. There's a merging of the mystical and the scatological as she imagines life about to be born while needing to take a shit (a part of childbirth that doesn't tend to wind up being highlighted). There are so many unforgettable drawings here. There's the rough and intense drawing of happiness on Weinstein's face as she holds her baby for the first time--her eyes and mouth just black strokes of pencil. There's the brief, touching moment of Tim holding the baby and giving her a kiss before he leaves to go take care of the dog and bring over Ramona. There's the simple grin of baby Sylvia. Best of all is the drawing of Ramona holding her sister, a beatific image that Weinstein refers to as "the best moment of my life". Ramona holding her sister saying, "My prayers have been answered" was unforgettable: a moment of pure, innocent joy and caring.

There's a lot of other stuff at work here, including talking about the life and death of their dog, to whom Ramona had grown close. There's the very different experience of Weinstein's friend Rami, who did not receive the same kind of support she did. There are small gestures and expressions, like the simply-drawn smile on Ramona's face walking out of the hospital. The shifting color scheme takes the reader on different phases of the experience. While Weinstein does create a story here, I never felt emotionally manipulated as a reader. It's the difference between art and artifice, as Weinstein's commitment to being present with her fears and dreams in the moment was a constant on every page, anchoring its flights of fancy with almost painfully visceral images.

Minis: L.Weinstein, G.Galligan, S. Mannheim

Perfect Maine Vacation and Normel Person, by Lauren R. Weinstein. These are minicomics collections from strips Weinstein had online at Mutha Magazine and in print in the Village Voice. There's always been a humorous, unapologetic bluntness to Weinstein's work that gives it a raw power, matched by her line that ranges between exquisitely naturalistic and cartoonishly ratty and grotesque. Weinstein takes her trenchant sense of humor and turns it on herself as she struggles to cope with the onslaught of emotions she feels after giving birth, especially with regard to her status as an artist. It includes self-recriminations as her teenage self vowed never to become a mother since it would interfere with her desire to be an artist. Weinstein even teases herself at the end by admitting that she hoped doing this strip would give her an epiphany between motherhood and her art, between being present and drifting into fantasy. Each page is framed by a large upper panel, but the rest of the page is a six-panel grid without panel borders. That pull between tight and loose is not only a theme, it's also the very structure of the comic itself.

"Perfect Maine Vacation" picks up a few years later, as her is growing older and Weinstein realizes that so many memories she holds dear with regard to her daughter are things her daughter is about to forget. It's a remarkable story (Ignatz-nominated) that plays on memory itself and why the fragments we retain from childhood stay with us and why other memories don't. It's a much more straightforward story done in a 2 x 3 grid with a blue wash that gives the sense of memories fading away. Once again, her style is blunt, self-deprecating and unashamed to share very personal details. Also once again, Weinstein struggles with being present and starts to acknowledge that these moments are slipping away, and it hurts. "Flower Voyeur" is a great example of her watercolor skill as she recounts recovering from fusion neck surgery, laying around her garden. Speaking of the pollination, she says, "All around me is sex. Which I miss, not being in my 20's in Brooklyn anymore." It's a perfect example of her almost blase' frankness; she's writing it because it's an amusing truth, not to get a rise out of the reader.

Normel Person is a single-page strip that reminds me a lot of her old alt-weekly strip from The Stranger, Inside Vineyland. It's a similar format, only this time around Weinstein is stressing about Donald Trump and sharing stories of getting pregnant again (by accident) at 41. It's a full-color strip, which gives many of the strips a particularly visceral and unpleasant quality. For example, in her strip "Extreme Comfort Food", the creamed cat casserole wouldn't have been quite right without the nauseating yellow-orange she chose for it. There's one strip where she's crying because her uncle was going on a bigoted rant with regard to Trump winning and she's off buying cranberry sauce for the family Thanksgiving dinner. The can of sauce urges her to run away with it, and as the sun sets in this happy ending, Lauren asks, "What do we do now?" The next strip is an absurd diagram of her parents' fridge. It's an easy juxtaposition regarding the kinds of things she tackles on a week-by-week basis, with strips like "Feel Good Lefty Valentines", "Time Loop" (about a relationship with an expiration date), "How To Think (First World Edition)", "Parent Zone!", and "Tainted Hoods, Blocked Blocks: The Streets I Avoid" giving you a taste of her bouncing between the political, the personal and the completely absurd. Sometimes she mixed all three in one strip. This is truly the best work of her career, and I get the sense that the deadline prevents her from getting too precious with regard to the art. Weinstein's skill makes even he scrawls and scribbles expressive and funny, and her willingness to be vulnerable and real only fuels her more pointed political and humorous asides.

Weeb 1 & 2, by Gale Galligan. Galligan is known now as the artist who took over the Baby Sitters Club series from Raina Telgemeier, but her autobio work is sharp and funny. It's got a heavy manga influence put through an American blender, with a look not unlike the sort of thing Bryan Lee O'Malley does. Galligan's strips are much different, however, and they use the exaggerated character of manga style to emphasize heightened emotions. There's a great strip where she gets her first boyfriend as a teen and her eyes turn huge and the facsimile of the One Ring he gave her to put around her neck glows. Galligan's stock-in-trade is exaggeration, like when her boyfriend mentions kissing, her face first shrinks up like a prune, then she fades into an endless field of flowers until the actual kiss, and....CLUNK. It's a great punchline, since when she "learned the power of storytelling", it came at the price of hissing "lies" to a wall of manga books she saw. The second issue is a series of one-page vignettes about gaming and Yu-Gi-Oh in particular. It's really about the kind of friendships that can develop with a shared interest. Galligan's work is never anything short of charming, mixing the bitter and the sweet in a way that makes her an obvious choice to take over Baby Sitters Club. It's a mix of funny drawings and sharp set-ups that never stray too far from reality.

"No Time For Coffee", by Stephanie Mannheim. This little mini highlights Mannheim's ability to draw herself looking unbelievably stressed out, mouth agog and eyes bulging, as she thinks she's late to class. Each page a single panel, Mannheim hilariously was so disoriented by being an hour early to her class that she thought she was dreaming, because she was encountering an entirely different teacher and set of students! It's a good story that doesn't outstay its welcome.

On Parenting: Weinstein, Ayuyang and Hart

As the parent of a toddler, I've taken an increasing interest in comics regarding parenthood, which in itself is a relatively new phenomenon in alt-comics. Carol Tyler and Joe Chiappetta were two of the first to do so, but there are quite a few more cartoonists close to my age who are exploring the full range of emotions regarding parenthood: joy, grief, terror, frustration, etc.

Lauren Weinstein's "If This Is All You Get" is a four-page minicomic drawn from the upcoming anthology, The Big Feminist But. It's a hilarious take on the ways in which she internalized her mother's own urge to be perfect and save the world, mixed with the push-and-pull of her youthful pledge to avoid motherhood in favor of being a "real" artist and the realities that a loving relationship offer later in life. Weinstein confronts head-on the anxiety that women who have children often express about having children: the possibility that they may never be able to create again, especially during the demanding early years of motherhood. This comic is both an attempt to grapple with these issues and the product of that very struggle with the creative process and the guilt felt for carving out time to create. Weinstein amusingly gets at that feeling as she hears her daughter say "I love you, babysitter" as she walks away to her studio. At the same time, I admire and identify with her total sincerity in the statement "The baby is the product of your undying faith and hope that your husband and you have in each other." It gets at the way that having a child is a gift.

Rina Ayuyang's comic Outta This Comes The Crazy is a sketchbook diary surrounding her pregnancy and the next few months after the birth of her son. Ayuyang, like Weinstein, is a witty and upbeat artist who chooses to draw in a style that's a series of quick, simple smudges and lines that retain the spontaneity and vitality of the moment. Ayuyang's comics mix excitement and anxiety as she details trying to finish her first book before she gives birth; that metaphor of twin births quickly gives way when the real birth happens. There's an amazing page where Ayuyang captures the push-and-pull of emotions with great precision: sadness that her husband will have to go back to work soon after the baby was born, despair over ever getting her life back, confusion over whether the feeling that "this kid is kicking my ass" is due to hormones or "because I'm not cut out for this?" There's a scene where she's in bed trying to catch up on some much-needed sleep but worries that her baby's been asleep for five hours. She fears the worst until she hears her baby pass gas--a fitting gag to defuse that horrid feeling. The book ends on a note of uncertainty, the final page a drawing of three blank-faced individuals, with Ayuyang saying "Now what?"

That sense of uncertainty and occasional terror is encapsulated perfectly in Tom Hart's fantasy tale Daddy Lightning (Retrofit Comics). It's about a father traveling with his baby in a forest with limited resources. Hart gets at the mania one feels when trying to soothe a crying baby while trying to answer one's own biological needs, that visceral sense of permanent emergency that accompanies having a baby. The setting of the story places the real basics of childcare into sharp relief, as he has a limited supply of milk, diapers and money as the titular character is trying to create a new life for himself and his baby. As the main character picks up new skills like swaddling (an absolutely crucial technique that was utterly mysterious to me as someone who had no prior experience with children), he's faced with obstacles like trying to think of inspiring fathers in literature and history (Chronos? Oedipus? Abraham?), hiccups, making money to buy food and milk, winning a contest, facing off against a warrior trying to get his shopping cart and desperately trying to get a waffle.

This rollicking, scatological story has the cadence of a folk tale, one that belied the grim reality of Hart's actual daughter dying at the age of two. He had written but not drawn the story before her death, and the comic became a sort of invocation for her return, a way to make her come to life on the page. The comic is beautiful and funny because that's how Hart thought of his daughter. The sense of presentness in this comic is remarkable. It's a story that's about nothing but the present moment, and Hart never deviates from being in the moment of the rush of exciting terror that is fatherhood. My wife was hospitalized a few days after our daughter came back from the hospital and I was forced to fly solo with a preemie for several days. I didn't allow myself to feel terror in that moment because I knew I couldn't afford to feel it, and I instead just focused on the next task: feed, change, burp, sleep, repeat. In reading Hart's comic, that sense of terror came flooding out for the first time as I felt so closely connected to Daddy Lightning, and doubly so for knowing just what's at stake. I'm in awe of Hart's willingness to grapple with that grief and share it so publicly.

Sequart Reprints: Hotwire

This article was originally published in 2006 for sequart.com
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With Mome, Fantagraphics tried to put together an anthology that would appeal to sophisticated readers who were open to reading comics but didn't necessarily know what to buy. A book for those who read Ghost World or American Splendor and wanted to know where to go next. Understandably, the focus of that anthology had to be on somewhat straightforward narratives. One doesn't find a lot of funny comics in there, even if some strips have a somewhat humorous bent (Tim Hensley is a notable exception). There also weren't a lot of comics in the id-fueled underground tradition, and what comics there were in that style were somewhat restrained. This is not a criticism, but rather a simple observation: Mome has its own aims and certainly can't be all things to all people. Hotwire steps in and picks up the threads missing from Mome, all in a delightfully lurid package.

Editor Glenn Head is quite clear about his goals for the anthology in his introduction. While acknowledging that it was all well and good that comics were now respectable, he missed comics that "felt unsafe, undomesticated, unhinged, even!" Hotwire is his expression of the feeling that "comics with great style and cool stories are already art, and no critic, museum or journal can change that..." Of course, Head breaks his own rules throughout the book. There are plenty of pages that aren't comics, like David Paleo's revolting pin-ups, Sam Henderson's sketches, Craig Yoe's centerfold or Judith McNicol's scribbles. While not stories per se, they contribute to the carny freakshow nature of the book. A book filled with nothing but this sort of thing would have been unreadable, but interspersed throughout they're a nice sideshow of sorts. Hotwire isn't a book likely to win new converts. Most of the artists within are take-it-or-leave-it in terms of their stories, and they don't apologize for it. It's a book meant for people who already love comics without reservation, in all of their cheap and occasionally debased glory.

As a result, there are a number of stories in Hotwire that aren't personally appealing. As a reader, I've never been drawn to a lot of the traditional underground artists. I can admire their nerve and the trails they blazed, but my eyes fall off the page of stories in the S.Clay Wilson tradition. The unleashed id and broken taboos are simply no longer as shocking or interesting in their own right. Thus, the stories by Head and Doug Allen didn't do much for me. My eye tends to fall off the page when reading these sorts of stories, and that was true here. The true highlights of this anthology are stories by the formidable array of humorists. Not all of them are personal favorites, but that just fits in with the rest of the book: there's something for every true fan of comics to either love or despise.

There are four comics in particular that stood out. Michael Kupperman's "The Scaredy Kids", Lauren Weinstein's "The Call", R.Sikoryak's "Mephistofield" and Mack White's "My Gun Is Long". The first is a tour-de-force of absurdity, as the title characters encounter The Bittern, Jungle Princess and other characters who introduce themselves by crashing through windows. Lines like "Nearby, an ant makes love to a paperclip" are thrown into the narrative as part of Kupperman's all-out assault on conventional storytelling. Every panel is packed with visual humor, wordplay, dada asides and/or over-the-top colors. Kupperman's sheer relentlessness is what makes his work stand out, and is perfect in this venue.
Weinstein's story would have fit nicely in her Inside Vineyland collection. It's a nightmarish tale of a young girl listening to a record of her favorite story, but the needle skips on an evil queen screaming. The scream takes on its own reality and draws the girl in, as she meets a sort of angelic figure who shows her the universe. She eventually returns back to her own world, but a later encounter with that same note leaves a permanent impression. Weinstein's loose, almost vibratory line adds to the story's hallucinatory quality.
Sikoryak is known as an astonishingly skilled style mimic, and his particular shtick is retelling works of classic literature by merging them with well-known comics characters. This time around, he combines Dr Faustus with Garfield to get "Mephistofield". He tells the story just like Jim Davis does a daily strip: three panels, with the third containing a punchline. The colors are appropriately flat and Sikoryak's perfect use of every Davis tic and style choice is a hilarious pairing with the grim cautionary tale of Dr Faustus. And of course, Garfield as the personification of evil is more than appropriate...

Mack White's "My Gun Is Long" is the amusing marriage of hard-boiled noir and conspiracy theory. It stars the real Lee Harvey Oswald, his double Alex Hidell, strippers, Jack Ruby, and a desperate attempt to dodge killers. The stark black & white imagery and unadorned figure work match the paranoia and claustrophobia in this story, but it's White's skill in channeling Phillip Marlowe that propels the story along.
There are plenty of other delights in here: a David Lasky-drawn biography of the Clash; a creepy Carol Swain story about a circus; a stripped-down Ivan Brunetti story; and Onsmith's demented tales of rural Oklahoma. This anthology didn't get a lot of notice when it was released, which is unfortunate because there's so much strong work in here. In particular, having a regular anthology that features humorists so prominently is something that the comics world has needed for quite some time. It'll be interesting to see if Head can produce future volumes that are as fresh and compelling as this.

Sequart Reprints: 12 Great Minis From SPX 2006

This article was originally published in 2006.
*****
One of the highlights of any alt-comics events is the opportunity to take a look at a new crop of mini-comics. Some of them are by established artists who have regular, professional publishing outlets. They often make minis just to have something new to show at conventions, or do it as a way of publishing chapters of new, long-form works. Other minis are by young artists looking to establish themselves, and yet others do minis purely as an end unto themselves. Some are elaborate, with die-cut or silk-screened covers; while others are humble Xeroxed efforts. The minis I included in this article were those that were my favorites. There were a number of other minis that I enjoyed as well, but the minis I wanted to include here were a bit more substantive -- both in terms of content and page length. Without further ado...

1. My Affliction, by Gabrielle Bell. Bell was giving out copies of this mini, a return to the weirder, magical realist stories of her earlier work. The title affliction is actually summed up by Gabrielle's stand-in character: "I'm always falling in love with guys who aren't good for me." One would expect a story built around that statement to be a typical melodrama. Instead, Bell starts off the story being picked up by a giant and finding herself stopping in mid-air when he dropped her. Things get stranger from there, as she finds herself in a neurologist's office after getting attacked by a gang of dogs. He tells her that that she must transfer her feelings of love to someone safer, and gives her a wooden token named Charlie. After she drops it into a river, he comes to life and they live together on a houseboat. Gabrielle finds herself unable to fall in love with him, and in fact fell in love with everyone but him. A panel where a UPS delivery man asking for her name for a signature is hilarious, as she suggestively replies "What's your name?"

Things get even weirder from there, as she winds up with a brutish thug who was the original owner of her foul-mouthed parrot. She gets abandoned by her new boyfriend and winds up getting a ride from a suicidal man and careens off a cliff. Winding up in a cage in the home of the original behemoth, she manages an escape attempt with her new cagemate and her rescuing boyfriend, and must worry about her dog winding up in a giant rat trap. As always, Bell plays all of this wackiness with a straight face. Her deadpan narration provides a bit of distance, but its flatness actually draws out the absurdity of the scenarios Gabrielle winds up in. That craziness is given warmth by Bell's loose and lively line. This mini is the latest in a series of triumphs by Bell and an interesting change of pace from her autobiographical work in her new book Lucky, as well as the conventional stories in Mome. While we've seen some fantasy elements creep back into her work recently, it's been awhile since we saw an all-out flight of fancy from Bell. It's a welcome return and makes me wonder if we'll see a long-form work of this nature from her in the future.

2. Becky and Friend, by Lauren R. Weinstein. This mini includes the story "Horse Camp", which was  published in the Viking anthology Stuck in the Middle.. A story much like her work in Girl Stories, this is a hilarious but awful account of Becky and her summer at what is supposed to be a horseback riding camp. Weinstein possesses the uncanny ability to depict the narcissism, self-loathing, giddiness and melodrama of the teenaged years. The funniest bits in the story are the over-the-top letters of woe Becky writes to her parents, despite the fact that she does finally manage to spend a few rapturous hours riding a horse. As always, Weinstein's style is an exaggerated one, to the point where some of the figures are almost grotesque. Her teenaged stand-in is memorably goofy--the scene where she tries to start dancing with her horse (singing Salt 'n Pepa's "Push It") is ridiculous, especially when some other girls catch her, mortified. Despite these exaggerated touches throughout the story, what makes it so effective is how remarkably (and embarrassingly) true she makes the episode seem. The distortions are played straight, which makes them both funny and real. A nice addition for the mini was the presence of grade school poetry about a similar experience, which was as over-the-top as one might expect for a child.

3. Couch Tag #3, by Jesse Reklaw. Reklaw's previous issue was one of the more compelling comics of 2005, and I was happy to see it included in The Best American Comics, 2005. Reklaw's skill as an autobiographical artist is to relay one series of anecdotes that are of interest to a general audience, but doing so in a manner that subtly reveals more profound emotional truths. In Couch Tag #2, Reklaw discussed the cats he had as childhood pets, but he was really telling the story of how his family disintegrated. In #3, the hook is the series of pranks and artistic projects he and his friend collaborated on over the years, but the underlying story is about different kinds of communication and the ways they can break down.

The best comparison I can think of is the relationship between Becky & Enid in Ghost World. Jesse and his friend Brandon went through ups and downs as friends, but when they were close, that friendship was expressed through a series of artistic collaborations and pranks. That culminated in a comic they did together about a man named Fred Robinson. He was someone random they picked to make into sort of their own everyman character--except that they'd leave him weird objects, set up stolen traffic signs repainted to say "Fred Robinson Crossing" across from his house and even send him comics they did about him. This communication through activity and in-jokes is not unusual for many men, especially those who have trouble expressing their feelings otherwise.

A telling scene in the story is when Jesse gets a letter from Brandon, who is living in Norway at the time. All of the things that had never been said between the two of them as friends just spilled out--and were never said again in the same way when they reunited. That letter became especially poignant when we see their friendship splintering apart because they aren't capable of talking about it. That poignancy is prevented from becoming schmaltz by the shenanigans depicted throughout the rest of the issue. My favorite sequence is when they make up a stencil template and use spraypaint to turn street signs that look like this <- -> into the Batman signal. Reklaw is becoming an increasingly skilled and versatile artist, capable of doing straight-up humor pieces, dream interpretation strips, autobio and much more.

4. Krayon's Ego, by various. In the tradition of Low-Jinx and Johnny Ryan's nasty parodies, a variety of artists take on comics in the Kramer's Ergot vein. Parodies of Craig Thompson and James Kochalka, while both funny, don't really have much to do with the Kramer's aesthetic. Still, the hilarious parody of Blankets (involving an extremely inappropriate use of a crucifix) was a hoot, and the mimicking of Thompson's angular style was uncanny. Spoofing Kochalka's cloying sweetness is like shooting fish in a barrel, but the "American Elf 2030" strips here were extremely clever. The thought of Kochalka continuing his strip into old age, while visiting his son in prison and selling his song "It's My Dink" for a Viagra ad were all good gags. However, the Tom Gauld-esque looking strips satirizing Sammy Harkham, Souther Salazar, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones and Gabrielle Bell were nasty fun. The fifth strip, involving Harkham finding a discarded strip by Mr T and Harkham declaring him "another naïve master of sequential art!" The other strips poke fun at the creators by portraying them as their opposites: Jones as a wheeler-dealer businessman, Bell as a superhero, Harkham as a junkie who pretends to bow out of activities for religious reasons, etc. My favorite strip was probably "Why Johnny Can't Satirize", a send-up of Johnny Ryan's crude parodies: "It's like he takes a great comic and then puts a dick or fart joke at the end." "Brilliant!" This mini is clearly a series of inside jokes for the alt-comics crowd, but it's still quite amusing. Contributors include Karen Sneider, Marc Campos, Clutch, Josh Frankel, Tom Neely, Jesse Reklaw and Sara Oleksyk.

5. Morbus, by Star St. Germain. St. Germain is primarily an illustrator whose style is somewhat reminiscent of Phoebe Gloeckner. Both have an astonishing facility with anatomical drawings put to new purposes. This short mini is a stylized catalogue of "various diseases, illnesses, and syndromes that my body has collected over the years". Each page's design is beautiful, with an illustration of conditions like scoliosis and carpal tunnel paired with medical descriptions that have been mostly erased. The final image of the mini, where she opens up her dress to reveal an anatomical diagram perfectly captures the evocative nature of her work. The disappearing text evokes the imperfection of how medical lingo captures the effect that pain and sickness can inflict--theimage, combining her normal features and the anatomical dialogues, perfectly conveys these feelings.

6. Various minis by Drew Weing & Eleanor Davis. Both are graduates of the Savannah College of Art & Design and are two of the most promising talents in comics. All four of the minis reviewed here are beautiful art objects on their own, with die-cut covers, innovative cover designs and beautiful uses of color.

Weing is best known for his Journal Comic and Pup, both of which drew a lot of attention when they were originally published on the web. Weing is an amazing draftsman and designer, merging a light cartoony sensibility with lush backgrounds. His solo effort here, Blar, is a straight-ahead tale of a barbarian who kills everything in his path. Feeling a bit like Trondheim & Sfar's Dungeon, Weing plays the action straight but ups the ante with ever-more ridiculous opponents and situations. Each story ends with an unexpected punchline, as Weing paces each strip with great skill. This is a modest but delightful comic.

Davis is a bit more under the radar at the moment, but not for long. Her comics often have fantastic themes but a melancholy tone; she reminds me a bit of Megan Kelso in that regard. The Beast Mother is a masterpiece in the use of negative space as Davis details the life of a female monster with dozens of children. When a hunter starts stalking her, our assumptions and expectations are quickly challenged. Even after the big reveal, there's a sadness to the story that lingers. Mattie and Dodi is a very different sort of strip that evokes the same kind of feelings. It concerns a pair of sisters, the older of whom is taking care of both her dying grandfather and her younger sister, an extremely shy girl. This story is all about roles and responsibilities, as Mattie struggles to deal with her grandfather, her boyfriend (who wants her to sell the house), and Dodi, who is enormously uncomfortable with the outside world. While not as visually striking as The Beast Mother, it's every bit as powerful. The final two panels, as we see the sister in very different places emotionally, gives the reader a number of clues as to where their stories might go next.

Davis and Weing collected several of their short stories in a mini called Bugbear. Life and death are the overriding themes in this mini. Weing does an odd story based on a dream he had after his father died, where his father comes back to life in a "soy-based" body. In the dream, Drew realizes that he can bring Eleanor back to life in the same manner. Davis has a story in which a young girl screams that there's been a mistake and ventures with a creature to the local graveyard, where her dead grandfather is revived. The themes are similar, but there's always an added distance present in Davis' stories.

Both artists are self-publishing, but don't look for that to last much longer. The only question is what kind of stories they'll want to tell given the resources of a publisher. I sense that Weing has several big stories that he wants to tell, but Davis' future might lie in being a short story specialist like Bell or Kelso. 

7. Husky #1 & #2, by Alex Robinson & Tony Consiglio. Two of my favorite "new-mainstream" creators are serializing their new long-form stories. Consiglio (whose  110PerCent was quite enjoyable) contributes "Titanius", a surprisingly hard-boiled, straight-laced noir involving a guy in a metal suit and his quest to get his son back. The humor here is told with a straight face as Consiglio conforms to certain genre conventions. However, the increasingly-convoluted plot (involving cures for herpes, evil pharmaceutical companies, killing enemies with lamps and more) reveals that Consiglio is winking at the whole story with his cartoony art style and over-the-top scenarios.

Meanwhile, Robinson's new story is called "2 Cool 2B 4gotten". The high concept is quite simple: a 40-year old man undergoing hypnosis to cure him of smoking is somehow sent back in time to high school--and in his 16 year old body. While he initially thinks he has an opportunity to ask that girl out he always wanted to and perhaps never start smoking as a youngster, it's clear that there's some deeper problem that he's repressed and has only started to bubble up. As always, Robinson's grasp on relationships and facility with dialogue makes him a pleasure to read. I like his work best when it deals with the most painful of human emotions; he has a way of evoking desperation that's almost visceral. While there's plenty of 80's name-checking here, Robinson keeps the nostalgia to a minimum and in service to the story. Robinson in the past has tended to write huge, sprawling stories; in Box Office Poison, they sometimes lost focus. That was due in part to the periodical nature of that story, but I think he was also perhaps a bit overambitious. The tighter focus in this story bodes well for this new project's development.

8. The Egoists, by Kelli Nelson. Another SCAD grad, Nelson's blocky computer-designed line provides the right amount of emotional distance needed for this story of her trip back to her hometown for her parents' divorce. The story itself has enough lurid and painful moments to be interesting without any further elaboration by Nelson, but she makes a number of clever formal and narrative choices that lead to some unexpected results. First off, the emotional distance created by her line is reflected in other choices. Nelson begins the story by introducing us to her hometown, leading us at last to the courthouse where her parents are divorcing. While the story is told in real time, Nelson tells us the story from a first-person future perspective. This choice again filters out the emotions she felt at the time; even as she tries to describe how she felt, it's all through her present perspective. The obvious absurdity of the moment and the meaninglessness of many of her interactions are emphasized by her choosing to put so much of the dialogue in empty word balloons--including all of her non-narrative, real-time dialogue. The most interesting question that Nelson asks is of herself: why did she attend? To support her mother, or get back at her father? Or worse--was it to get material for another comic? None of these questions are answered, but this isn't a story about answers. It's a story about a process, one that didn't make sense at the time of the events and clearly still didn't make much sense when Nelson wrote it. The irony is that only Nelson herself seems capable of asking questions, self-doubt and seeing perspectives other than her own.

9. Hey, 4-Eyes! #2, edited by Robyn Chapman. A delightful combination of zine and comics, this new paean to eyeglasses is a stylishly quirky read. This is the sort of esoteric zine that's clearly a labor of love and unapologetic about its obsession. What makes it so enjoyable is Chapman's sense of style and the variety of material she presents. From articles on how to purchase vintage glasses, to profiles on fellow zinesters and photo features on the "Miss (and Mister) Specs Appeal", Chapman gets down to the nuts and bolts of why she finds glasses so appealing. The best bit was "Eyeglasses Trading Cards" featuring profiles and D&D-style characteristics of the likes of Harry Potter, Lisa Loeb, Enid Coleslaw and Woody Allen, among others. Of course, there are also a number of top-notch comics in here as well. Chapman herself contributes a strip where she hits on these two guys who look like personal crush Harry Potter but instead gets shot down. The Icecreamlandia duo of Eve Engelos & Josh Moutray have their usual painfully gorgeous linework combined with bizarre one-page monologues, all centering around characters with glasses, goggles, monocles, etc. Also enjoyable is Damien Jay's take on being forced to wear glasses. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in the topic or just frothy fun.

10. Phase 7 #006 & 010, by Alec Longstreth. Longstreth is a hurricane of comics enthusiasm. These two minis tell very different kinds of stories, one the next chapter of his serial "Basewood" and the other an autobiographical account of his obsession with comics. "Basewood" is a story simply told, about a young man who wakes up in the middle of a mysterious, dangerous forest with no memory of how he got there. In this chapter, he becomes friends with Argus, an older man who had lived in a forest treehouse for years. We learn that Argus moved there with his wife, who was killed by a monster. The two become friends, but our amnesiac protagonist is haunted by dreams of monsters devouring him. The issue ends on a cliffhanger.

While the story itself is not especially ground-breaking, it's told simply and beautifully. Longstreth keeps his figures simple and iconic but provides lavishly cross-hatched backgrounds. He almost completely eschews the use of blank space, and the imbues each panel with a sort of nervous energy. Despite the heavy uses of blacks and shading, none of his pages feel claustrophobic or overstuffed. Instead there's a richness to his art that draws the eye in, aided by his fine storytelling skills and page design.

PHASE 007 #010 is something completely different. The story starts by Alec going to a therapist of some kind to tell him that "my comic book is really stressing me out!" That leads into Longstreth discussing how he became so devoted to comics. While Disney comics and Bone were huge early influences (there are touches of both in "Basewood"), it was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics that blew his mind. Combined with Dave Sim's preachings on self-publishing, Longstreth knew that he wanted to make, teach and think about comics for the rest of his life.

One gets the sense when reading some of his comics that he wishes some of his stories could just come pouring out of him. We don't actually get to the root of his frustration in this issue, but I would suspect that he hates that he can't get his ideas down on paper fast enough. Longstreth's story is notable for his reaction when introduced to new concepts and ideas--he becomes so absorbed by them that he forgoes everything else to fulfill them. After being exposed to art comics, he read everything his libraries had in stock within a couple of weeks. Sim's writing encouraged him to draw some form of comics every day of his life. When he compares this to "a commitment on the same level as marriage", it's clear that this intensity is going to bring a lot of highs and lows as an artist. There's a total lack of cynicism in his approach, a purity and naivete that comes through clearly on the page. Longstreth is not only obsessed with the form, but he's also trying to figure out why he is obsessed. That mania, as Longstreth struggles with his own personal blind spots, is almost as interesting to follow as his actual comics.

11. How To Start Thinking About Learning How to Draw Comics, by Kevin Huizenga. This mini, designed as a guidebook for the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, offers rewards on every page both as promotional material and as a comics-reading experience. I can't think of someone more suited to do this sort of comic than Huizenga, other than perhaps fellow USS Catastrophe stablemate Dan Zettwoch. Huizenga's fascination with structure and patterns meshed perfectly with the flights of fancy that inform his best work in this catalog-as-comic. My favorite bits are the how-to tips and "secrets" of comics, like the absurd series of visual cues for mood that he came up with, like "Fiery Shoulder" for a "feeling of regret", or "Waltzing Duck" as "The ghost of carefree days".

What Huizenga captures best here are the joys and frustrations of a cartoonist's life. In a strip called "Vermont Winter: Cartooning Season", we see the CCS student hole up in his room for four months working on his comic as snow piles up outside his window. Upon emerging, he proudly hands a completed comic to a friend. Twenty minutes later, the friend completely finishes reading it. That's the struggle of the cartoonist in a nutshell: months of tedious labor that is consumed in mere minutes.

The booklet is also just plain funny and knowing about comics. Lesson 113: "The Types of Cartoonists" is an accurate bit of smart-assery, as Huizenga tels us about the "Retro Retentive (Motto: 'Sigh')", the "Mad Comedian (Motto: 'F*** all this boring artsy s***')", and "Autobiographical (Motto: 'That would make a good comic')". There are also plenty of Huizenga's diagrams--some useful (like neck & back exercises for cartoonists) and some whimsical (such as deliberately over-complicated model of approaches to comics, an amusing job at Scott McCloud's attempts to reduce comics down to easily categorizable forms). 

12. Pony Up, by Karen Sneider. Sneider is a stand-up comedian whose comics come all-too-infrequently. This comic appears to be an autobiographical tale from her youth, somewhat in the vein of Lauren Weinstein. Only wanting to ride her friend's horse, our heroine instead talks herself into drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. Desperate to look cool for her fashionable friend (I love the touch of her friend wearing an off-the-shoulder Flashdance-style shirt), our heroine can only ask "Is this what adults do all the time?" The bonus story, where our heroine learns how to pop a pimple, is a bit more light-hearted. I like the way Sneider deals with the melodrama of her teenage years with a lighthearted illustration style. I'm used to stories from Sneider that are purely comedic, but I enjoyed this change of pace and style.

Sequart Reprints: The Goddess Of War

Some comics creators have a style that's naturally appealing to a wide audience. Others have a voice that's so quirky and idiosyncratic that the reader is forced to take or leave it on its own terms. Lauren R. Weinstein falls into the latter category. Even her major publishing effort Girl Stories, aimed at a fairly wide teen audience, has expressionistic art that borders on the grotesque. Weinstein was literally changing the definition of "mass-market" with that remarkable release. What makes Weinstein's work so engrossing is that there's nothing affected about the slightly off-putting nature of her stories. That especially shines in her dialogue, which is at once naturalistic, awkward and hilarious.

For all of its eccentric qualities, Girl Stories saw Weinstein at her most restrained. Having come to her work through her Xeric-winning work Inside Vineyland, I was aware of just how weird Weinstein could get, and I missed seeing her imagination fully unleashed. In the first volume of her new series, The Goddess of War, Weinstein truly outdoes herself. The only artist I've come across who shares a somewhat similar sensibility to Weinstein is Michael Kupperman. While the sort of comics they do is very different, their work shares two things in common. First, both artists love to make unusual connections and juxtapositions for various effects. For Weinstein, those connections are often both means to make the reader flinch as well as laugh. Second, the work of both artists has a remarkable density to it. You can read their pages several times in a row and get different effects from them each time.

The Goddess Of War is based in part on the character Weinstein plays in her band, Flaming Fire. The idea of a blonde, glamorous war goddess is clever in and of itself, but Weinstein takes this idea in some unusual directions. First, the comic itself is unusually large: 10 x 15 inches. That allows her to create some impressive visual effects, including several huge splash panels that are etchings. These moody pieces have the effect of freeze-framing the action, as though one saw them in a museum. The large page size also allows her to cram a ton of panels into some pages, and Weinstein takes advantage of this with a dizzying array of approaches to panel design and layout. Each page in this book really acts as its own entity.

The story is a mash-up of all sorts of ideas. Essentially, the Goddess of War (a valkyrie named Valerie who was later promoted to this position) is sick of her job and wants a day off. She gets drunk (on the blood of 150 Mayan virgins that were once offered to her), goes back in time to recall her pettily punishing the Apache chief Cochise, and then leaves her post to try to make it up to him at the end. She calls up one of her friends to complain about how unhappy she is (of course, that friend is Nebulon the Universe-Eater). Weinstein crams in superhero tropes, mythological figures, psychedelia, historical fiction, absurdist humor and slice-of-life angst. Valerie may be a goddess, but she also acts like a bitchy teenager. She's petty, cruel, lonely, selfish and sad. Of course, she's been put in a position of being worshiped for thousands of years.

Weinstein immediately immerses the reader in Valerie's world, showing us a cutaway of the Head-Cave, her home. It's something that could have come straight out of a Batman comic. Weinstein uses an almost sickly green tint for most of her images, a perfect match for the often ghastly imagery she employs. Weinstein goes back and forth from the gruesome to the hilarious (often in the same panel), as in the panel where she recalls the adoration the war dead gave her: "Some died just to see me! Stupid bitches!" The conversation between Valerie and Nebulon may have been my favorite part of the comic, as Nebulon tries to give her advice and support but thinks to himself "Has she no other friends?", "Why does she always need a cheerleader?" and "Why does she always flirt with me? Does she really like me?".

The second half of the book takes a left turn into the story of Cochise, an earthy bit of historical fiction as Valerie drifts back to her forbidden affair with the legendary Apache leader. As Cochise has to deal with betrayal at the hands of American soldiers, he calls upon his one-time lover for help. Instead, Valerie betrays him as his brother dies and his people are forced to go to war. One senses that Valerie's betrayal was born out of her desire to foment war as it was her desire to run away with Cochise and leave her world behind. Waking up out of her drunken reverie, Valerie realizes her mistake and leaves, just missing the array of intrigue lined up against her. Weinstein packs in a ton of subplots in this issue that actually give the crazy events some structure; there really is a fairly standard adventure narrative that's holding the whole issue together. The Goddess Of War is an adventure narrative filtered through the uniquely skewed perspective of Lauren Weinstein, and while I can scarcely predict what's coming next, I can't wait to see how it will happen.

Sequart Reprints: Girl Stories

Lauren R Weinstein's Girl Stories (Henry Holt)  is a marvelously all-over-the-place collection of stories done over a seven-year period that somehow manages to cohere into one hilariously painful whole. Weinstein accomplishes something remarkable here: writing a book as though it were written by a typically self-centered 14-year old girl but with the wit and self-awareness of an adult. Weinstein makes sure that the point of view of young Lauren is not infringed upon by her current experiences. There's also no nostalgia or lessons learned in each episode; Weinstein lets them speak for themselves. The result is an unflinching, laugh-out-loud, and above all, honest look at one's teen years in all their immediacy.

The book reads a bit like a cross between a diary and an art project. Weinstein reveals at the beginning that the book reflects her experiences as a growing artist, experimenting with different styles. Some pages are heavily cross-hatched, while others reflect her ventures with digital coloring. The end result, consisting of exaggerated and slightly grotesque figure work and sometimes garish colors, somehow fits together so seamlessly that one would think that it poured out of her in a brief period of time. There's no question that it's a strong candidate for best comic of the year.

Anyone can write about the melodrama of one's teenage years. Indeed, Girl Stories makes an interesting companion piece to Ariel Schrag's comic book accounts of her teenaged years. The difference is that Scrhrag actually wrote them while still in high school, and while her self-awareness is far greater than the average person, there's still a certain melodramatic resonance present in her work. The temporal distance in Weinstein's comics allow her to mine the most laughs possible from any given situation, while still letting the pain and awkwardness take center stage. Still, the fact that Weinstein has one of the most warped and delightful senses of humor in comics (do yourself a favor and get your hands on her first collection of strips, Inside Vineyland) is what makes this book so successful. Weinstein encourages the reader to laugh both at her own teenage foibles and with her at those around her.

The collection gets off to a bizarre bang with "Barbies", Weinstein's story of her stockpiling a huge number of the famous dolls. Of course, the slightly askew Lauren would "recondition" her Barbies, repainting each one and altering their hair to create a whole host of different characters: cave girl, android, "fabulous vampire superstar", etc. It's topped off by her writing a letter of complaint to the "makers of Barbie", and then a letter of complaint to herself for writing about something so superficial when there's so much suffering in the world. The story perfectly encapsulates a teenager's sense of righteous indignation over tiny details coupled with crippling guilt and feelings of worthlessness. In "The Tub", the use of almost nauseating greens and yellows highlight Weinstein's feelings of alienation.

Weinstein then pricks the balloon of her own melodrama with perhaps my favorite story in the whole collection: "Morrissey and Me". There's something about certain teenagers and Morrissey (former lead singer of the Smiths): his tortured singing and lyrics have inspired a couple of generations to think that he's singing Just For Them, and Weinstein takes this idea to its logical end. In a hilarious "dialogue", Lauren reveals her special and mutual bond with him, and he agrees, saying "...even though I am really busy and having many other fans, Lauren means the most to me." As we see Morrissey "saying" this, we see that he has a photo of Lauren hanging up in his room! When a boy who is torturing Lauren is cursing at her, a horrified Morrissey looks on, saying "He's more of a tyrant than Margaret Thatcher!" The strip ends with Lauren proclaiming that she'd be celibate like her hero forever, as she wishes he would kiss her...and our boy nervously thinking "Uh-oh".

Weinstein in no way presents herself as noble or heroic. She wants to be popular and cool, and is cruel to a lower-caste friend of hers named Genine. When she finally finds a boyfriend, she realizes they have nothing in common and dumps him unceremoniously (after having given him a bag of dirt as a present) and doesn't really feel bad about it. Indeed, the idea of breaking up with him is almost exciting, as she starts to wonder what people wear to break-ups. When a former best friend starts to date him shortly thereafter, this leads to a hilarious story where she imagines her friend as successful and saving starving African children while Lauren is working in a tollbooth and living at home. At the same time, she wants to be bad-ass and punk, as when she goes egging on Halloween. Of course, that plan blows up in her face when she and her friend are caught by tougher kids, and when they douse her in shaving cream, she screams "We're just two little girls!"

The exaggerated and heightened drama of being a teenager is matched by Weinstein's exaggerated figures. She frequently has eyes bugging out, distorted faces and those dominant colors that dictate so much of the meaning in her strips. And of course, the absurdity of everyday events propels everything along. My single favorite sequence in the book finds Lauren with her first boyfriend. Making out in front of a movie theatre, they realize that her dad is standing there waiting to pick her up. He doesn't say a word to her about what he say until he asks her "So...is he your hero?" Lauren (and all of those reading) thinks: "What the hell is that supposed to mean? Poor Dad."

Weinstein's bonus strips about such subjects as fat, building a robot boyfriend, Valentine's Day and how to "really" get a boyfriend are also quite amusing. While they don't strictly fit into the narrative timeline of the rest of the book, they certainly fit in with the book's feel. Weinstein manages to be simultaneously cruel to her past self and feel a tremendous amount of compassion for those experiences, not just for herself but for all young people. Teenagers in particular tend to have a heightened feeling of alienation, as though they are the only ones who feel such a strong sense of worthlessness, that their problems are unique and insolvable. Weinstein's genius is that she not only recognizes this tendency in herself, but also understands the irony and ridiculousness of this stance and finds ways to make her audience revel in this realization as well.