The Full Hanawalt: I Want You

I've been comparing each of Lisa Hanawalt's books to her minicomics series I Want You with regard to how far they go with regard to their gags, sheer weirdness, and overall filth. While My Dirty Dumb Eyes, Hot Dog Taste Test, and Coyote Doggirl all have their merits, none of them had quite the same unhinged energy as I Want You. It was with delight and surprise that I learned that D&Q was going to reprint this material, in part because so much of it informs her later design work on BoJack Horseman and her own series, Tuca and Bertie. Sure, it's a shameless cash-in (and the promotion reflects that), but this will be a real eye-opener for Hanawalt fans who never got a chance to read her minis. 

As a bonus, Hanawalt drew a hilarious six-page introduction that also serves as one of the better artist meditations I've read about the relationship an author has with old work. Hanawalt revealing that the work's connection with her relationships and life circumstances at that time sheds a great deal of light on why certain gags may be uncomfortable to revisit, even if a reader has no connection to this information. Hanawalt also praises her younger self for a lot of the material while chastising jokes that feel shallow or easy (like lots of dick jokes). What I've always found interesting about Hanawalt's work is the clear intellect at work in crafting her gags and thinking about the world, but her willingness to go deep into her id in a way that's gross, revealing, frequently unflattering, hilarious, and perverted is fascinating. That's especially true because her process feels so intuitive at times; when she grabs onto an idea, she runs with it and keeps going, well past a point where one expects but never losing the energy of the gag.

Hanawalt opened with a list gag, this time of "Mistakes We Made At The Grocery Store." It's mildly funny and absurd, but other iterations of this form would be more effective later. The real first shot across the bow in this book is "One Day At Work." In a highly naturalistic style, Hanawalt draws herself typing at a keyboard, only to find some of the keys are sticking. The culprits: sex bugs, gumming up the works with their fucking and semen. One of them ejaculates onto her face, which a coworker mistakes for mayonnaise and proceeds to wipe it of her face and eat it (!), which makes Hanawalt puke on the keyboard, which leads to the bugs thanking her for the lube. The rhythm of outrageous calamities at play here and the escalation of events, along with his taboo-busting power, gives this strip its gross power. It is sex, and filth, and gross, hidden things, and violating boundaries. It's a bizarre fantasy of the id, yet one that doesn't seek any victims; it's content in turning that fantasy inward. As I've said before with regard to humor, punching down is simply cruel, punching up can feel like hectoring, but punching yourself is always funny. 

It's not even self-deprecatory humor, either. Just an acknowledgment and celebration of one's own deep weirdness. Not all of it is gross or even internal, as Hanawalt just really likes drawing anthropomorphic characters in a naturalistic style, with particular attention paid to their clothing. The results are bizarre and endearing, and it's this aesthetic which drives much of her animation work. Sex is never far from her mind in these strips, although in the least erotic ways possible. For example, another list strip, "Common Dirty Talk and the Questions It Raises" dives right into that rawest of sexual raw materials, dirty talk meant to inflame desire. Hanawalt instead gets into the gears of it with deliberate reversals, like "You are filthy and your man meat is saltier than anything. Q: Is this really the best time to be criticizing my restaurant?" This is all accompanied by a drawing of a meal. Hanawalt can't help but subvert not just desire, but reality itself.

The ultimate Hanawalt list comic is "Things We Are Sorry We Did Last Night," which includes an item about murdering other Lisa Hanawalts and an extended section about shitty dances she came up with. It's a subversion of "bad decisions" type stories that features top-notch drawings that are inextricably bound with each gag. Even weaker material is boosted by her total commitment to the gag through her drawings, but her mastery of callback humor really comes into play here as well. Overall, there's no separation between writing and drawing for Hanawalt; they are just two complementary aspects of the same form of expression. 

Hanwalt's "Worst Sandwiches" feature really emphasizes her drawing in setting up gags like "Sandwich That Can't Hold You Close At Night" and "Peanut Butter Sandwich That Doesn't Taste Right" (because it's full of maggots). "How To Get A Haircut" presages the sort of work she'd start to do later when she was getting paid to do features like movie reviews. So much of the book isn't even directly gag-related; they are just drawings of things that Hanawalt likes, or the adventures of her BoJack-presaging He-Horse and She-Moose, who are always endeavoring to get laid. In retrospect, the gags in the book represented Hanawalt cycling through comedic interests and laying the groundwork for further refinement. The almostly palpably nervous energy present in these books, the sheer weird horniness and desire to follow her id on the page, was refined and redirected in future work. Rather than go to the id well one too many times, she instead found other ways to follow her funny obsessions, especially as her storytelling became more sophisticated. That said, fans of Hanawalt's work will find this book to be absolutely essential, both because it's as funny as any comics I've ever read and because of the roads she continued to pursue and the avenues she chose to abandon. 

D&Q: Tom Gauld's Mooncop and Lisa Hanawalt's Hot Dog Taste Test

Mooncop, by Tom Gauld. Gauld's long-form comics tend to be variations on an individual being manipulated by forces beyond his control, often resulting in a kind of tragic obsolescence. That's the case in the silent The Gigantic Robot (the robot eventually just erodes away) and Goliath (a nice guy who's manipulated by bureaucracy and circumstance into becoming the victim of legend), and it's true in a less dramatic way in Mooncop as well. In many ways, Mooncop is even sadder than the other two books, because they're both about wars and conquest, where history is written by the winner and then later forgotten. In this book, we're presented with a glimpse of what was once a noble attempt at something glorious that's fallen into disrepair and disinterest. The titular character patrols the moon, earning perfect marks on his quarterly crime-solving reports because there's no crime to report. In the beautiful domed buildings on the starkly gorgeous surface of the moon (which Gauld emphasizes with heavy hatching and cross-hatching and a light blue-grey wash), the cop starts off the story by reluctantly dealing with the fact that he barely serves any purpose and starts to sink deeper into despair when he realizes that everyone is starting to leave.

Gauld mixes the melancholy quality of the cop's life on the moon with some hilarious technology-related gags that ultimately only serve to make him feel even worse. This is a future where technology rules over everything, only it's constantly breaking down or is lacking the right adapter. There's a bit where the cop is denied a transfer back to earth but is assigned a therapy robot. The robot promptly falls on its face when it tries to move, since it wasn't designed for rough terrain. When it finally manages to charge itself, it explodes. The moon bureaucracy takes away his frequently-malfunctioning coffee and donuts machine and inexplicably puts in a cafe, a funny reflection of how out of touch leadership and technology is with reality in the book. The cop and the young woman hired for the cafe trade quips and then share some poignant moments when they realize they're the last two people on the moon. The cop and the other characters are drawn in Gauld's typical simplified style, which aids in him maintaining the deadpan atmosphere of the book. That deadpan style blends perfectly with the sense of not just frustration, but resignation, that the characters share. Not only did the cop (who confesses that all he wanted to do as a kid was be a cop and live on the moon) come to understand that he joined this moon utopia too late and that the party was over, he came to understand that it was never that great to begin with. The moon was dotted with convenience stores and drive-throughs, just like any dull suburb on earth. He had to be reminded from time to time that the moon and its views were beautiful, but even those moments of aesthetic bliss were simply not enough to counter the banality and bureaucracy of everyday life.

Hot Dog Taste Test, by Lisa Hanawalt. Hanawalt's minicomics series, I Want You, was a thunderbolt of over-the-top grossness and absurdity. In a strange way, it also felt deeply personal precisely because of the specificity of its eccentricities. Her first book, a collection of assorted short stories and other ephemera titled My Dirty Dumb Eyes, was not quite the Full Hanawalt experience that I had hoped for. It was still really out there and funny, to be sure, but it felt a little safer and a little more measured & restrained. That's understandable, given that many of those pieces were assignments, rather than directly personal work. I was worried that her new book, Hot Dog Taste Test, might be similarly muted in content. Instead, despite the fact that most of it is a collection of work published in a food magazine, I found much of it to be not only Hanawalt's sensibilities fully unleashed, but also to be remarkably personal and even poignant at times.

The fact that the book centers around food is precisely what makes it so personal. Hanawalt loves food, loves talking about it and isn't afraid to remind the reader that we are absurd animals. Hanawalt has a knack for using mundane images to make fun of pretentious ones, like substituting hot dogs for actual dogs at a dog show-style event. She also constantly subverts the kind of food-related advice people seek from the internet or magazines with absurd add-ons. In a hand-written list of baking tips, it starts off with "whisk drys" and "parchment paper will save you" (two sensible things) and ends with "yogurt makes promises it can't keep." She reduces shopping to furniture ("stuff to fart on") and clothing ("stuff to fart in"). This, and wine advice like an arrow pointing to a shiraz that says "makes your tits itchy") establishes the baseline for her humor in this book: coarse, silly, vaguely familiar and very brightly colored.

That use of color is in prominent display in her "Holiday Food Diary", which abandons anything resembling reality to delve into eating "a box of meat", fresh egg nog with eggs squeezed straight from the bird, and an apocalyptic and orgiastic two page spread of "The Holiday Feast". Hanawalt alternates a fairly straight-ahead profile of celebrity chef Wylie Dufresne with a long series of cartoons about toilets and toileting issues. Yes, she literally indulges in potty humor in a series of hilarious strips that work because she treats them with an eager sense of curiosity about our toileting habits as humans. That's followed by her drawings of human-type breasts and genitalia on birds, including a statue of one in an art museum. By the time she finishes up her strip on "menstrual huts" (including the "menstrual barcycle"--one of those pedi-cab bars), Hanawalt has undoubtedly cleared the room of those who simply wanted to read some funny comics about being a foodie--and more power to her.

Most of the rest of the book is dedicated to longer pieces, like one talking about leaving New York City for good and indulging in all the "Sugar, Spice, and Fat" she can get her hands on. There's an interlude featuring one of her anthropomorphic characters that were a staple of her earlier work and are now mostly seen on her TV show that she designs, BoJack Horseman. Tuca the Toucan is hilarious, reminding me a little of the old R.Crumb character Mode O'Day as she has an intensely awkward encounter with a guy at the deli counter. The strip where she's desperately trying to get a Cathy ("Aack!") swimsuit on is a bit of hilarious metahumor. "Planting" features an anthropomorphic bird couple moving into a new house in another brightly-colored story (watercolors, I believe) that introduces plants as a fun hobby and then reveals that the wife starts becoming obsessed with them to the point of starting to sleep curled up in pots.

"Otters!" works as both a guide to something interesting (a sanctuary where you get to swim around with baby otters) and something that could not have been more in Hanawalt's wheelhouse. "I can't get over how good it feels to have otters all over me", she says, in a paragraph next to a self-portrait of her with a shirt that reads "Every Day I'm Not Covered In Otters Is A Piece Of Shit." It's a perfect Hanawalt piece, as its illustrations range from cute to absurd to gross, and there's a kind of sweet inquisitiveness that marks the way she looks at the world. The same is true, in a far different environment, in "Lisaaa Las Vegas", in which she is asked to eat at some opulent Vegas buffets. Hanawalt jumps into the experience wholeheartedly while acknowledging the ways in which Vegas is a sort of bacchanalian con. It's not unlike if a magazine had managed to send her back in time to some Roman feast; it's something that's kind of ugly and conspicuous in its consumption, yet the actual experience of eating that food is one so visceral that that aspect of it is interesting to consider. Hanawalt nails that visceral quality with her absurd, almost hallucinatory ideas about food as well as the effects it has on her body.

The true stand-out piece in the book is her "Argentina Travel Diary". I had no idea that her mother was from Argentina, and the story features Hanawalt traveling there with her parents, her brother and her boyfriend. It's among the very best travel diaries I've ever read, as it's bracingly honest and funny about the experience of travel and the confusing & conflicting emotions that often come with it. Her observations about South American food are dead on: it's not spicy, it's European. (My own Chilean relatives acted like they were eating five-alarm chili when they had a stew with a dash of paprika in it. "Calor!"). Her blunt assessments ("Truche Roqueforte" as "Cheese Fish") and Noquis (Gnocchi) as "Bliss pillows" made me laugh out loud. Hanawalt talks about the feelings she gets when she rides a horse, how riding around with her brother made her think about how his girlfriend had died just a year ago, and the sensation after riding of eating some stew that her mother had made ("Nothing has ever tasted better.") Hanawalt's work, in its purest essence, is embracing what it is like to be embodied. To feel the adrenaline of being on top of a horse, with all the risk that entails. To eat nothing but comfort with family and to feel safe and loved. To accept one's body and bodily functions, acknowledging the fears of what other people might perceive if they saw her on the toilet (the image accompanying that made me howl). To savor those moments of beauty that come through meaningful interaction in an existence that is "mostly meaningless", as she put it. This wasn't just wisdom on top of toilet humor, but rather, an acknowledgment that the toilet humor is part of the wisdom.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2011; High-Low @SPX

I will be at SPX 2011 this year. I'll be hosting a panel on 9/10 at 3:30 in the Brookside Conference Room on "Stories Of Cultural Identity". I'll quote the blurb from the website: "America’s own culture wars are only part of a global struggle with identity, as nations the world over attempt to address the challenges of assimilating multiple cultures within a stable society. Moderator Rob Clough will talk to Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Marguerite Dabaie (The Hookah Girl), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) and G. B. Tran (Vietnamerica) about comics that deal with issues of cultural identity." I'm looking forward to it.

As always, I'm happy to review whatever comics cartoonists choose to give me.

Here are ten young artists to seek out at SPX, on the basis of their potential and/or significant debuts at the show. A number of them are up for Ignatz awards. In alphabetical order:

1. Darryl Ayo. Ayo is an Ignatz nominee for Promising New Talent and is someone who has been steeped in comics and comics culture for a long time, even for a cartoonist as young as he. He's become a sharp observer of social mores as well as a mark-maker whose style has begun to coalesce.

2. Pat Barrett. This graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies is one of its best draftsmen and stylists. His Oak & Linden minicomics are well-crafted one-man anthologies, and the actual anthologies he's been a part of (Nymphonomena and Tag Team in particular) are rather good.

3. Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie is on my panel and has proven to be an interesting young voice with her Hookah Girl comics, which are autobiographical stories about growing up as a Palestinian-American. Dabaie is a fine draftsman with an eye for intricate detail.

4. Mike Dawson. Dawson is one of the more established cartoonists on this list, but his new book Troop 142 debuts at the show and it's his strongest work to date. He'll also be hosting a panel on his Ink Panthers co-host (on ten years since the publication of his first major work, Box Office Poison) that will likely be hilarious. Look for an extensive interview with him (by me) at tcj.com very soon.

5. Lisa Hanawalt. She's one of the top humorists in comics, full stop. I don't know if she'll have anything new, but now is your chance to pick up both issues of her awesomely gross and hilarious series I Want You.

6. Melissa Mendes. This CCS grad has a bright future ahead of her and will get a bit of spotlight with the release of her collected Freddy stories. Mendes' scratchy line and ear for children's dialogue make her comics a wistful pleasure.

7. L.Nichols. Nichols is a talented artist still restlessly searching for her ideal style. Her Jumbly Junkery one-woman anthology comics feature an assortment of diary strips, longer autobio stories, fiction, comics-as-poetry and other experiments. Like the other young cartoonists on this list, she has a relentless work ethic and it shows in her improvement.

8. Laura Terry. Terry's up for an Outstanding Minicomic Ignatz award for Morning Song, a comic I greatly enjoyed. Terry's work has a lyrical quality that complements her interest in formal experimentation quite snugly.

9. Matthew Thurber. Thurber is the genius behind the 1-800-MICE series, which is now done and will debut in its collected form from PictureBox. He'll be on a panel at 1pm on Saturday titled "Drawing The Grotesque".

10. Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is another hard-working cartoonist who's gotten better thanks to his willingness to publish everywhere possible. His recent mini The Death of Elijah Lovejoy will likely be one of my top 25 minis of the year. He has a book coming out with Fantagraphics next year, but until then I'd buy up copies of his one-man anthology comic book Blammo.

Three From Buenaventura: I Want You #1, Injury #3, The Aviatrix #1

Rob reviews the upcoming three-pack of single issues from Buenaventura Press. Included are I WANT YOU #1 by Lisa Hanawalt; INJURY #3 by Ted May, Mike Reddy, & Jeff Wilson; and THE AVIATRIX #1, by Eric Haven.

As I've noted in other columns, Buenaventura Press has found a clever way around Diamond's more demanding minimum order mandate that has led to several cancellations of well-regarded alt-comics series. By bundling the publication of three single-issue comics into one package, Buenaventura was able to raise both price point and ordering interest, given that a fan of one of these comics was likely to be a fan of the other two as well. It's great news for the comics community, given that all three of the comics in the bundle are best-of-the-year candidates.

Let's start with Eric Haven's THE AVIATRIX #1. Haven's TALES TO DEMOLISH series with Sparkplug highlighted his impeccable sense of absurdity and merged it with a fondness for Kirby/Ditko era monster comics. In the tradition of Lewis Trondheim, Haven tells a straightforward adventure story filled with ridiculous concepts, trappings and asides. His nameless protagonist (a stand-in for the artist) is a wonderfully blank canvas, attempting to negotiate situations that soon spin out of his control. After insulting an anteater at a zoo, he is horrified to find the beast attack him and suck out his brains. On a date with a 6-inch high woman dressed in some sort of jungle queen outfit, he suffers extreme gastrointestinal distress (which nearly kills her due to the odor) and leaves. He isn't worried because he's wearing a tie, which was supposed to bestow some sort of immunity that he kept repeating up to and including the time he is eaten by a shark.

Haven eschews any sort of explanatory exposition, knowing better than to overwrite his gags. He lets the images speak for themselves, and his steady refinement as an artist has only served to add even more of a deadpan quality to his pages. That was certainly highlighted in "Confluence", the long story that featured the comic's title character. This is Haven's best story, highlighted by the many wordless panels at the beginning that make it feel like an ambling, quotidian autobio story of some kind. Our protagonist looks at porn on his computer (his drawing board noticeably unused), drinks a beer, gets high and then takes a walk around his neighborhood in four slowly-paced pages. Only a bizarre panel of him popping up on some sort of sci-fi device on the second page of the story gives any indication that something odd is going on here.

The protagonist then sees a mountainous monster and a World War I style biplane engage in battle, as he is saved by the Aviatrix. In a hilariously impassive series of pages, she rescues him from being stomped, leaps onto the beast and finds a convoluted way to kill it--complete with heroically expository dialogue. When he asks her who she is, she flashes back in her mind's eye to her "Secret Origins", a ridiculous story of invisible avian beasts taking away her parents and secrets revealed by a weird mountain mentor on how to fight them. A scene where she told an over-eager government agent keen to gain access to the secrets of her craft to "suck my dick" speaks to the way Haven builds up one set of expectations in the reader and then gleefully bludgeons them. Haven wrapped up the issue in roughly the same way he began it: with a bathroom emergency and a longing for love. When we realize the Aviatrix has been spying on him all along, it adds an amusing level of creepiness to the whole story.

Haven's art is genuinely thrilling and his character design enormously clever--especially the monsters, of course. The Aviatrix's goggles give her a marvelously inscrutable expression; Haven is careful to never show the reader her eyes without them, even in the account of her origin. All that we know about her came from the out-of-nowhere narrative captions that told us of her motivations, and which promptly disappeared as that story ended. There's a rock-solid structure to this very silly comic, one that allows the artist to insert awkward pauses, weird images and explosions from the id without it becoming incomprehensible or self-indulgent. Haven's comics have always seemed to me to be about repression and the way that repressed desires inevitably surface. There's a flatness of affect to be found in his characters, even in the weirdest of situations, that speaks to a total disconnect between consciousness and repressed needs. That played out with the weird voyeurism of the Aviatrix countering her bad-ass persona, and the protagonist's ongoing battles with his own digestive system whenever potential romance reared its head. It's exciting to see Haven's chops catch up with his ambition as an absurdist; like Michael Kupperman, being able to draw something blandly but precisely only helps to heighten the humor of a deadpan story.

All three of these comics are funny in their own way, with Lisa Hanawalt's I WANT YOU #1 spotlighting a similar sense of absurdity, this time fused with autobio anecdotes and a touch of the grotesque. Hanawalt follows Laura Park as an artist who came from seemingly out of the blue to become an artist everyone was talking about. This comic felt like a mix between Lauren Weinstein, Renee French and Phoebe Gloeckner, yet that only scratches the surface of the compelling weirdness found between its covers. This comic is a loosely-related collection of personal hygiene anecdotes, bodily fluids, anthropomorphic animals (drawn in disturbingly exact detail), raunchy sex talk and off-the-wall concepts. The absurdity reminds me a bit of early Weinstein, especially the first page where Hanawalt rattles off lists of things like "Things I Should Probably Hide Before A Date Comes Over For The First Time" and "What Did We See Today". That page encapsulated the issue as a whole: dada observations, gross anatomical drawings (in the tradition of French and Gloeckner), and frank but decidedly unerotic sex talk.

That strip acts as a table of contents and answer key of sorts for the rest of the issue, as Hanawalt veers from a laundry list of "Mistakes We Made At The Grocery Store" (including "We were too sexual when we checked our eggs for cracks") to a story about sex bugs inhabiting her keyboard at work. In highly naturalistic detail, we see a cute little sex bug ejaculate on her face, setting off a chain of events both disgusting and hilarious. What I liked about this piece is how low-key it was drawn, despite the subject matter. The flatness of affect of the characters made the various bodily fluids spewed all the more shocking. Hanawalt purposely avoided using funny drawings or grotesque figures, which heightened the eventual punchline.

In some of the strips, Hanawalt the artist drives the humor. In "Love Letter", "Lunch Break" and "I Love She-Moose", the heads of her anthropomorphic animals are drawn so much like animals that they are unsettling to look at. There's no cuteness to be found in those stories (despite the trappings of same), only a weird sort of neurotic energy. That's heightened by the intense detail of the backgrounds--finely rendered patterns in wallpaper and carpets, checkerboard patterns in clothing, and tons of cleanly rendered bric-a-brac. With the reader already disoriented, Hanawalt drops the hammer with She-Moose getting her "scent" across a computer screen, He-Horse's losing his nerve and his erection, and the moose and cat getting their minds blown by irrational numbers.

In other strips, Hanawalt the conceptual gag writer is dominant. Her laundry list comics start from great concepts (like "Common Dirty Talk And The Questions It Raises") and go in some truly deranged directions ("8. I want to be your little slut. Q: How little?"). "Top Causes Of Freeway Accidents" all somehow involve horses, including "Pretending to be a horse". "Menstrual Terminology" is ruthless in the detail it immediately goes into regarding tampon use, including "Bento Box: inserting tampon while traveling by car or train" and "The Death Valley Stuffer: Trying to insert applicator-less tampon into dry orifice"--complete with the skull of a buffalo. Hanawalt is quite aware of what she's doing here, ending this strip with a list of ways people use to avoid hearing about menstrual terminology. "The Faux Jack-Off" is "a thing you can do while driving" that warns the reader to be careful not to think sexy thoughts while doing it, lest they actually jack-off while driving. Why someone would want to do this in the first place is a question that is not considered.

This comic has a relentless quality reminiscent of the first time I read Ivan Brunetti's SCHIZO. On page after page, there's an assault straight from the artist's id. In that respect, it doesn't seem like Hanawalt is out to shock readers deliberately, but that these are simply the topics she finds funny. Despite the unflinching nature of I WANT YOU, there's also a sense of restraint as well. The blandness of some images play off of the outrageousness of the concepts, while the funny drawings all have an unnerving quality to them. Hanawalt instantly became one of my favorite humorists after reading this comic, and I can't wait to see what's next from her.

I've long been a fan of Ted May's anthology comic INJURY, especially the ways in which he works with collaborators. My favorite ongoing feature in the comic may be Jeff Wilson's 80s high school metal saga. It strikes a chord initially because I went to high school during this era and knew lots of kids like those featured in the story. The way May & Wilson depict overwrought teen emotions is both hilarious and true to life, giving these stories a self-inflated but epic sense of importance for the principal members. This issue featured young Jeff going through in-school suspension (an especially humiliating process) after tussling with a brutal bully. As always, May excels at fight scenes both visceral and comic, and he expertly captures the sense of excitement and malaise of their fellow students when the fight spills into a classroom. The scene where his eager counselor gets him to come up with a list of three things he felt thankful for, and that the exercise not only helped with his depression but proved to be a useful resource throughout his life, was funny for a different reason. It was almost heartbreaking to see a teen try to come up with the cognitive and emotional tools needed to recognize depression, and while his answers "metal, squid, Sagan" were those of a juvenile, they also proved to be keys to unlocking his imagination. The extended fantasy sequence he has with Carl Sagan telling him about the potential for glorious heavy metal played by squid creatures on other worlds was a sweet one, helping his hopes trump his fears.

The other major story of the issue was written and laid out by May, but drawn by illustrator Mike Reddy. He hasn't done a lot of comics (mostly doing art for CD releases), but he reminds me a bit of Kaz Strzepek in terms of his character design (especially the eyes). The "Beast Biplane" is a typically ridiculous May character--a furry Bigfoot character known for his skywriting prowess from his souped-up biplane. (What are the odds of two biplane-related comics from the same publisher at the same time?) May just keeps upping the deadpan weirdness factor of this story as it proceeds, mixing up the titular hero with aggressive drag queen drug pushers forming a human pyramid, hippies selling hemp-based soap products, and turning his biplane into a giant bat. It's a hilarious bit of nonsense, and the greyscaling that Reddy uses adds to the overall density of the strip.

What these three comics share in common is a total commitment to concept. That deadpan nature, where the author never winks at the reader so to tell them that it's all a joke, is a crucial element to the success of all three comics. The reader is never told when to laugh in any sort of obvious way, in part because each comic is meant to work on multiple levels. All three of these comics are also very much from the id. Sex, an obsession with bodily functions, food and simple desire drive the characters in every story--and in a more direct way than most stories. These are all incredibly dense comics, inviting multiple readings and perusals of art. Hopefully all three books will find audiences, but there's no doubt that Alvin Buenaventura's strategy in this regard was enormously clever.