Liz Valasco's The Seeker

I reviewed an earlier minicomics version of Liz Valasco's The Seeker a while back, and the finished version (from Tinto Press) fulfills the creepy, unsettling vision of those early pages. As alluded to in Aaron Lange's back-cover blurb for the book, the things that are unspoken in this disturbing story are every bit as important as the parts of the narrative that are made crystal-clear. It's a story about innocence, exploitation, and ultimately trauma.

The story follows a pre-teen girl who is never named. She's the titular seeker and also referred to as a necromancer. Omitting her name feels deliberate; she's someone who's been erased and feels alienated. That omission feels even more deliberate given that the rest of the cast, the older teens, are not only named, but frequently call each other by their names. They are signified. Rob, the hero of the story, refers to the younger girl as "weirdo" and "crazy," but never by her actual name.

The story opens with the seeker completing a ritual on Halloween. There are a lot of unanswered questions at work here. She uses a book of incantations with a big X on the cover; where did she get it from? The innocent-seeming shenanigans of retrieving a particular box gives way to bone-chilling horror when the plastic pumpkin she uses as part of her ritual starts talking to her after she finishes the spell. Opening that box sends a bunch of roaches scurrying into the pumpkin, providing the final key for its animation.

The story then turns to Rob and efficiently reveals that his dead grandfather wasn't what he seemed. His "class-ring" is a weird artifact, and the seeker demands it from Rob when she runs into him on the street. Rob is getting up to older-teen activities with his friend Brian, who brings beer to the forest for their rendevous with two girls, Ariel and Lana (Rob's crush). When the seeker finds them, gets the ring, and throws it in the pumpkin, the story takes a horrific turn.

The seeker is clearly being manipulated by forces beyond her control (she wants to scare Rob and his friends, and the creature wants to eat their souls), and Valasco turns this into a tightly-plotted monster story. The horrifying thing is not the fight with the monsters itself, but rather the final fate of the seeker herself, devoured by the very forces that she sought solace in.

The layers in the story unravel a bit when we learn that the seeker's father left for unstated reasons. We never meet her mother, other than knowing that she wasn't at home on Halloween. How often was the seeker simply left alone? Her interest in scaring Rob felt like a tween crush that she couldn't otherwise articulate. She wanted to be seen and validated by Rob and take back some of the power she had ceded him with her crush. She wanted to "scare them all," taking power back against a world that ignored her and left her alone. If she scared them, they had to pay attention to her. One wonders if she got the book from Rob's garage when he wasn't paying attention; it's clear that she was familiar enough to him that perhaps she came by to annoy him.

Meanwhile, Rob is far from a spotless protagonist. He's not evil, but he's a bit uncaring and selfish. He's a typical teen. He's annoyed by the seeker and doesn't treat her kindly, but he doesn't bully her either. He's annoyed by his mom but later tries to do the right thing. He's freaked out by the whole event but none of the teens seem especially interested in mourning the seeker. He has a bit of imperiousness to him that makes him just a bit off as a hero. Everyone in this story has flaws; it's just that some of them have major narrative consequences.

Valasco's drawings sell the story. She draws the seeker with a simplified face, giving her a sense of fragile innocence with her fine line. At times, she almost looks like a Peanuts character. At the same time, Valasco creates mood and atmosphere with dense hatching and cross-hatching, especially of the backgrounds. The wispiness of her line and that constant sense of impending erasure is made manifest in the frequent thinness of her line, especially with regard to characters like Rob's mother. It also gives an initial sense of cuteness to the horror story that unfolds, creating cognitive dissonance for readers and characters alike. This comic is a small triumph, leaving many questions unanswered as it asks the reader to consider the motivations and circumstances of its characters.       

Liz Valasco's The Adventures Of Moon Pie

Sweetness and existential despair mark Liz Valasco's continuing stories of her character Moon Pie. Her most recent mini, The Adventures Of Moon Pie, see this character with a moon-shaped head wander about a forest with his little robot companion that he built. Valasco blends a fine line, dense cross-hatching, and cartoony character design to create a lived-in world inhabited by these two odd creatures. Moon Pie, as the introduction explains, is an alien sent from space to complete a quest of some kind, but it's taking a long time. Like many vast undertakings, there's a lot of boring downtime, and this comic is an example of what he does on his downtime.

The first page sets up the itinerant character of Moon Pie, as the six panel grid winds up forming a single, beautiful image. Moon Pie's robot is clever and relentlessly curious, and they make a funny duo as they navigate the landscape, looking for mushrooms. Moon Pie finds a "friend" (a skeleton at the bottom of a well) and doesn't understand that it's dead and unresponsive, so desperate is he to find any kind of connections with other. There's also a profound sense of understanding his extremely long life span and wishing it was over until his philosophical robot reminds him of his responsibilities.  Everything from the lettering to the cross-hatching to the actual dialogue is strikingly thoughtful, as Valasco aims to create not so much a story as convey a mood. This is ultimately a story about loneliness, to be sure, but it's also a story about duty and understanding one's place in the world. There's a dull ache one feels when reading it; it's a mixture of melancholy and deep understanding.

Foxing Reprints #8: Sophia McMahan, MariNaomi, Liz Valasco

You Were Swell #2, by Sophia McMahan. This comic reflects McMahan's interest in exploring alternative meanings in 1950s-style advertising art and romance comics. In particular, she's interested in the dichotomy between beauty as a social construction and the feelings of self-loathing that undermine one's own self-image. She also takes dead aim at the ways in which men are more frequently exempt from this self-destructive cycle and help perpetuate it, like in strips such as "Lothario From The Black Lagoon". This is a hilarious bit of satire featuring the sea monster from the titular Black Lagoon schmoozing and seducing woman after woman with cheesy pick-up lines like "Do you believe in love at first sight?" "Escape" talks about McMahan's own attempts to distance herself from her need to compare herself to others, in order to avoid plunging into the inevitable depression that this creates. It's accompanied by trippy images of blank-eyed women with a third eye, a four-armed devil woman, and other externalizations of her negative feelings.

Speaking of which, "Good To See You' is a devastating story that initially consists of blandly pleasant-looking people sharing inane conversational pleasantries. ("Wow you look great! It's been so long", "Thank you, how are you?" accompanied by cheerful if slightly blank faces. The last page of the story consists of one of the characters rearranging her face until it distorts into unrecognizable, inchoate flesh. McMahan specializes in this kind of body horror, the sort that gives an image to the sort of silent scream one can never unleash in such situations when one is expected to act in certain ways. 

"Slip Away" and "Please" talk about fears regarding being hurt, being exposed and even fearing the experience of happiness, given that it will inevitably will slip away. It's less a sense of catastrophising one's negative feelings and instead being a realistic barometer of the way things are. Vulnerability is hard, and being rejected is painful. "Please" depicts two boxers sparring with text like "Please don't be mean to me" floating inbetween punches. It's a visceral way of getting at those feelings, both in terms of receiving punishment but also dishing it out because of a fear of being hurt. McMahan then turns around in "Are You Lonesome" and draws cheesecake beauty pin-ups with scales and webbed hands, challenging the male gaze and just what it is we mean when we say that we're lonely. Her subversion of the concept of beauty and what it entails emotionally, her depiction of the difficulty of communicating in a meaningful way, and her own willingness to graphically grapple with her own self-loathing make her comics quite a powerful experience.

The Seeker, by Liz Valasco. This is a delightfully creepy piece about a tween girl who slinks around her neighborhood, looking for a mysterious box and hiding it from a neighborhood boy. It has all the elements of being a cute Halloween story until shit gets real in its climax. What's interesting about this surprising culmination of ritual and belief is that things don't backfire on the protagonist. Indeed, the end of this comic promises more of a quest for truth and meaning than the typical reasons people try rituals, though the girl is not above scaring the boy she encountered earlier. Valasco's think line, cute but naturalistic drawing style and use of a strategically-applied blue wash make this a an intriguing comic to look at as well as read. The page where the contents of the box come out is made all the more effective thanks to the use of dense hatching and cross-hatching, creating a genuinely unsettling atmosphere. 

Great Heights, by MariNaomi (2D Cloud). This small mini came as a reward for those who subscribed to 2D Cloud's yearlong book subscription service or who ordered her book Dragon's Breath.. The window for joining that subscription has now passed, but I wanted to note that this little eight-page comic has an eerie charm. It's about a visit to the World Trade Center that MariNaomi made in 1998, where she and a friend went to the top of Tower 2. She notes that pressing up against the glass made it feel like she was falling, which was a secret fantasy of hers. The final image of the mini is that of a tiny airplane. It goes without saying that this fantasy could not encompass the horror of the events of 9/11, which makes that flashback juxtaposition so interesting, especially as rendered in MariNaomi's minimalist style.

Going Underground Again: Lange, Schubert, Valasco

Misc., by Liz Valasco. This is a mysterious little six-page mini about a bullying incident on a bus involving a kid with a Moon Pie for a head. Valasco's cramped, scribbly style is a good match for the story that begins with the absurd, moves into the tragic and ends on a mystical note. The Moon Pie kid, it is hinted, is some kind of immortal being who nonetheless appears to be a child and who goes to school with other children. Valasco's dialogue is pitch-perfect in the way that she depicts a particular kind of cruelty, one that's almost inquisitive and inviting, and then turns on a dime into fantasy material. It's solid work.

Blobby Boys, by Alex Schubert (Koyama Press). I've been seeing dribs and drabs of this comic in anthologies, minicomics and various other places for quite some time. Even this slim, collected edition feels like yet more prologue to a larger, denser work. I'll repeat what I said in an earlier review: "Schubert is a funny cartoonist whose work seems heavily influenced by Dan Clowes' early Eightball work. There's a large array of gag-oriented strips that take on cultural detritus that feature cartoony, grotesque characters. Schubert also touches on true absurdity in his takedowns of tough post-modernist posing with his title characters, who are literally slime-shaped people who get into all sorts of mischief, including killing members of a rival band after a gig at a club. With characters like Aging Hipster ("Have you heard the new Arcade Fire?") and Punk Dad as well as Schubert's own observations like Paper Blog and a review of a bizarre musician called The Spoiler, there's a tremendous amount of skill and polish on display here for such a young cartoonist." There's additional material in here involving Cyber Surfer and Killer Driller, wherein Schubert invokes some Michael DeForge style "drippy drawing" in a more overtly humorous and deliberately stiff style. There's also an extended strip featuring Art Critic, another Clowesian send-up that aims to generate more laughs than particular satirical points. Indeed, even if many of Schubert's comics have an aesthetic or cultural point of view and make that point in a forceful manner, the joke is still the thing. His peculiar drawing style transcends his influences as they mesh together computer drawings, graffiti, video games, album cover art and other cultural touchstones outside of but related to comics. I could read another 200 pages of gags set in this particular visual world.

Trim #1, by Aaron Lange. Speaking of Clowes, Lange draws his visual inspiration not so much directly from Clowes but from the sort of art that inspired him: advertising art, romance comics, and junk culture. Lange is a smart storyteller and observer whose work is a sort of second cousin to that of Tim Lane's, as he documents and interacts with people who are outsiders, cast out of and away from society. Take "Vietnam Tom", a story wherein Lange listens to the rantings of a Viet Nam veteran that show moments of clarity and sensitivity in-between moments of sheer, ridiculous madness. Lange keeps it light in this story, setting up the anecdotes as a series of gags.What I like best about Lange's comics is that he has an interest in underground culture without necessarily revering it. For example, "When I Grow Up I Wanna Be Like...William S. Burroughs" takes a wrecking ball to the legendary writer's mystique and hilariously catalogs all of the awful things the writer did and had happen to him. Worst of all: "be read by idiots".

There's no question that the highlight of the issue is "Dog and Kitty", an epic autobio story that reads sort of like a Denny Eichhorn story (or maybe Peter Bagge's Stinky Brown), only one where he makes nothing but bad decisions. It's a story too ludicrous to be faked, as it involves Lange and his burgeoning heroin addiction some time back, and the violent, psychopath dealer he hung out with from time to time ("Dog") as well as his crazed, bestiality-loving girlfriend ("Kitty"). It's a story that involves guns, Nazi fetish porn, accepting an offer to let Dog grow pot in Lange's basement, and the horrible numbness to everything that comes along with being a junkie. Trim has the feel of being an exploitation comic, only Lange is exploiting himself and his own observations and experiences for maximum comic effect.