Mathew New's Billy Johnson And His Duck Are Explorers

I read Mathew New's YA book Billy Johnson And His Duck Are Explorers in minicomics form. The book, published by Capstone, expertly tightens up the original stories without losing a bit of its absurd energy. The title alone betrays the total ridiculousness of its concept as a kind of send-up of Tintin and Indiana Jones. However, like Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar's Donjon, all of that silliness is rooted in a plot that is rock-solid and deadly serious. All of this is aided by New's unfussy and cartoony line along with a clear, distinct color palette. 

From time to time, I like to show YA books to my 12-year-old, Pen. They really took to this book for a number of reasons. They liked its humor and propulsive action sequences that seemed to look to Carl Barks for inspiration. What they liked about all else were the mysteries that New set up. Indeed, the mysteries are the backbone for the otherwise completely silly stories, as they lend weight and depth to the adventures.

In this book, Billy is a teen explorer ala Tintin, and his companion is a talking duck named Barrace who happens to be a professor. They go on various adventures, and we learn that Billy's parents were famous adventurers. Their actual fate was never revealed, but Billy's inability to bring back proof of his adventures prevents him from joining the Explorer's League that his parents were part of. Indeed, Billy has to settle for being a janitor. Barrace is a college professor, and if a talking duck professor seems weird, the book fully acknowledges this without actually explaining it. Indeed, the book strongly hints that Barrace isn't really a duck at all. 

In a book filled with spoofs and self-aware humor, New also establishes that there are no throwaway lines or situations. In the first adventure, where they find the lost city of the Monkey People, the book's whole mystery is established when a mysterious blue spirit entity helps them and reappears throughout the book. In a hilarious take on the magic item quest, Billy and Barrace encounter a Lara Croft-style adventurer-thief as they have to take back a ring because it turned out to be cursed. A desert quest for an apparently-extinct type of bear once again brings Billy to disappointment, even as he manages to bungle a wish-giving magic lamp. A heroic quest that's Heroes Journey 101 reveals Billy's own desperation for fame and his insecurity. Billy has an overpowering retractable sword that he calls "Mr. Jabbers," an absurd name for such a relic.

Indeed, New rejects macho, toxic representations of heroism and instead focuses on the friendship between Billy and Barrace. Despite his impulsiveness and glory-seeking, Billy grows as a character throughout the book. He doesn't get what he wants (fame, glory, and entrance into the Explorer's Club as a member), but he gets what he needs (love and support from his best friend). 

My kid was angry that the book ended on a cliffhanger, as the blue spirit confronts the mysterious hooded figure who was trying to steal the cursed ring. The hooded figure refers to him as Spirit Eater, and had feared his arrival, as evidenced by his dialog and warning systems. That spurred an hour's worth of discussion from Pen, who came up with elaborate theories about the blue spirit/alien, the identities of the red and yellow figures we saw in etchings in the Monkey People temple, what happened to Billy's parents, what Barrace is exactly, who the hooded person is, etc. 

Ultimately, while New has a number of inspirations, it's clear that that he's created here is entirely his own thing. Far from being just a spoof, it trades on jokes about familiar ideas and subverts them. He always tells the story with a straight face (there are no narrative captions that indicate how the audience should feel), even (and especially) when it degenerates into total nonsense. Even the nonsense has surprising repercussions, like the cursed ring disappearing from view. New also adds just enough interstitital material to tie together disparate stories, and introduces the book with a two-page performance by Billy as he creates a theme song for himself and the professor. The funny things in the book have a tender quality to them, and the exciting parts of the story all have funny barriers thrown in the way of the protagonists. There's very little in the way of violence in this story, as it favors the sort of Barksian hijinks of a Donald Duck story to more visceral storytelling. This shouldn't work as well as it does, and yet New has a way of anticipating story problems and anticipating solutions, all while balancing a surprisingly complex web of plots and interpersonal relationships. 

Thirty One Days Of CCS #20: Anna Sellheim and Matthew New

Art Model, by Mathew New. This webcomic is a fascinating mix of media in an autobio context. Using the cartoonish style he's best known for, New discusses his career as a nude art model, telling a story both about the process of the experience as well as the way he relates it to his feelings about his own body. New really spills some ink here, talking about a lifetime of negative body image that was only compounded when the only thing he liked (his thinness) started to manifest as an eating disorder. The story is interspersed with different friends of his and their drawings/paintings of him, done in a myriad of styles. New talks about how becoming an art model both required and helped him gain self-confidence. The essential point he makes is that the things one might hate most about themselves are the things that are most interesting to draw, which is a fascinating way of turning self-hatred into not just utility, but the potential for art.

Mindfulness and meditation are often discussed as important therapeutic tools, and New discusses how the reality of being a model means long periods of time where you have to find ways to do nothing but sit or stand there. That means being alone with one's own thoughts and learning how to be still with one's own naked body in that space. New also discusses some of the smaller steps that allowed him to take this big step to become comfortable in his own skin, the thought he puts into particular poses and how it might help artists, and other related information. Being an artist who's worked with live models also instructed his approach and allows him to understand both sides of the equation. That's why the many different artists whose takes on him he reproduced here are so important, because it's active proof of how he was able to inspire each of them to draw something interesting. It's not just the form an artist is drawing, but also a way of approaching a different visual problem and figuring out ways to solve it. It's an active way for artists to develop new ways of thinking, even if their actual work is abstract, cartoonish or otherwise not directly related to figure drawing. New's own hard-won sense of self-validation allowed him to gain further validation in the way his job inspires others.

Moments and various short stories by Anna Sellheim. Sellheim quickly became one of my favorite CCS cartoonists on the strength of the rawness of her work. Her autobio material in particular is no-holds-barred with regard to her own feelings and experiences, and I love the jagged, jarring quality of her line and her self-caricature. Sellheim shared a number of her stories from anthologies. First off are stories from a few volumes of the Square City Comics anthology, which she helped start. "The Best Laid Plans", in volume 1, is a work of slice-of-life fiction. It's a romance story, about a bartender who refuses to date her customers falling for a woman who's part of a group of friends who are regulars at the bar. What makes the story work so well is the way Sellheim makes the reader feel the desperation of Ivy the bartender in keeping her life on track as a recovering addict and how hard she clings to this rigidity. In the end, when her life plan goes off track, she realizes that losing control of this rigidity can be a good thing. Sellheim keeps the grid and the art simple, playing up her use of gesture and characters relating in space. This does everything to sell the emotion on the page.

"Expanding My Horizons" in volume 2 is an autobio story that focuses on her newfound love of superhero comics. There's an almost frantic energy in virtually everything Sellheim does or thinks about, and this history of her relationship with comics is no different. Starting with manga as a ten year old, segueing into art comics in high school and finally trying to find something more lighthearted after the death of her father, she started to become interested in some superhero work. The comic explains what she liked and didn't like and why. Two things stand out here: first, the grotesque quality of her art (her self-caricature here is intentionally self-deprecating) and the sheer importance of her pursuit. Comics matter to her as a way of experiencing the world and focusing her attention and emotions, and it was obvious that finding the right titles at the right time was the most profound of pursuits.

Moments is a profound departure for Sellheim. This mini features her working in color, using a four-color grid to not just depict quiet, quotidian moments in the lives of ordinary people, but to show small but profound changes in expression. In the examples above, we see a person end a phone call, pause and put their head up to their temple. Sellheim here goes after the small moments and the beats between moments, as the pose here went from contemplative to despondent. The scene with the woman on the subway is even subtler, as she's so absorbed in her book that she barely notices the world going by around her. Sellheim here uses color to reinforce line and push the reader's attention to the figure. Color framed that, considering that most of her figures themselves are not colored, drawing the reader to the line art. For an artist who usually depends so heavily on dialogue, it was an interesting and useful exercise.

The same is true for her entry in Square City Comics volume 4, "Rame". That's a word that means "chaotic and joyful", and it's entirely silent. It's about a woman attending a house party/concert. She's timid at first as she negotiates the chaos of so many people and their intense energy, including the unwelcome event of someone flirting with her. There's a panic attack as a result, which leads to her fleeing to another room, but the sheer, raw energy of the band not only helps with that, it encourages her to get right up front and mosh. The character design reminds me a little of Liz Suburbia here; there were points where it seemed like Sellheim struggled a bit in coming up with a large number of different character types, but her tight focus on the main character helped with that problem.

Finally, there are two autobio comics in Sellheim's more typical style, though the second one uses regular figures instead of her stripped-down image. One was in a comics newspaper called Magic Bullet, and it's a funny strip that makes great use of its full-page layout by using a great deal of negative space. It's about her trying to meditate for the first time, with her caricature mostly being white space juxtaposed against the gray scale shading containing every negative thought imaginable about herself. The punchline is both funny and bracing, as the last thing she's achieved is a "new sense of calm" after dealing with those relentless feelings. The second is a strip about how hard depression hit her, to the point where she didn't feel like she was living her life until the age of 25. It gets at the heart of depression: the mental pain that comes with it, and the desire for the pain to just go away. The jagged quality of her line once again serves to give the comic a certain uncomfortable quality, which is a hallmark of her comics. More than any other cartoonist I can think of, Sellheim is figuring out what she wants to do with comics in parallel with what she wants to be as a person. The struggles she feels seem to be working in concert with each other in terms of both life and art, as do the solutions. That she chooses to share both with her readers is our privilege.

Thirty Days of CCS #27: Aaron Cockle, Mathew New, Steve Thueson

Aaron Cockle’s project can be difficult to summarize, but after reading issue #20 of his grab-bag series Annotated and another mini titled Over Time, Every Section Had Been Allowed To Grow Accordingly, it occurred to me that it can actually be explained in a sentence or two. Cockle’s comics are a critique of capitalism (and its tendrils in the state, the sciences and the worldwide information apparatus) and its effect on ontological, epistemological, ethical and even aesthetic systems. The critique is that capitalism distorts, obfuscates and all but undermines these systems, and the critique itself is written in that same distorted language. It’s a smart technique because in the same way that the description of an experience of beauty is not the same thing as beauty, or a description of drowning is not the same thing as drowning, so too would an outside critique of capitalism be impossible. There is no “outside” of capitalism on a global basis anymore. Cockle strips away the illusions and gets to the phenomenological heart of the dehumanizing effect of capitalism in a manner that’s poetic and elusive.

As Cockle has evolved as a cartoonist, he’s gotten further and further away from conventional figure work (never his strength as a draftsman) and has instead moved toward abstraction, collage and fragmentation. Over Time… starts with a chapter about a worker who learns that even dying doesn’t free him from his job; he winds up haunting everything in his office (including voicemail, which I thought was amusing) and working in the position for another three years. The second chapter imagines an entire office being sent to a retirement home together, struggling against dementia while creating artificial structures and obsessions with receipts. The third chapter uses found documents as part of a story of someone using found documents to draw the location of all scaffolded buildings in the city as a way of cheating death. The fourth chapter (which signals the end of part one of this title) instructs the entire world as to their jobs, imagining people with multimedia accounts as all part of a united structure.

Annotated #20 is actually split into five separate minis, each with their own beautifully designed and/or selected cover to provide a maximum of decorative gloss. “The Circular Of Ruins” is styled such that it looks like it was drawn straight into a pocket notebook with lined paper. Each page contradicts the next in this story about a consulting firm that may also perform scientific experiments. The contradictions are not deliberate; instead, they are products of the critique I discussed above. An inability to trust in memory and observation, as the story suggests, is a direct attack on our understanding of epistemology, or the philosophy of knowledge. An ability to articulate the purpose of the company (and company = person in this example) is an attack on ontology, the philosophy of being. Not understanding how to treat others in the company is an attack on ethics. They are rendered senseless.

In a series of geometric shapes, “Anti-Pode” posits comparisons of a Wall, a Tower and a Pit. In the series of juxtaposed shapes (with different colors and gradients as rendered using zip-a-tone effects), the descriptions make each of the terms increasingly circular and meaningless. There’s no foundation to lay one’s understanding in. “Outsized Computer, Reporting Structure” is written as a kind of company report that reflect the ways in which everything is broken. Everything is structured, but nothing works, as the images of obsolete computers in the background tell us. All that’s left when resources have been stripped to their core are the artifacts of hierarchical thought. “Word Cage” breaks this down in another way, breaking down mission vs human cost; the “Affect Effect Infect” ethos describes perfectly the bare-bones mission of every corporate structure. The mini gets at the temporal and spatial effects of working in an office and how both are warped in this structure. Finally, “Cones Of Uncertainty, Cones of Resolution” is a savage takedown of public relations, noting that one must always apologize, even (and especially) if you don’t mean it. The way that this package is fractured, that it can be read in any order, speaks directly to Cockle’s critique more than any more traditional narrative could.

Mathew New’s loony, extended riff on Indiana Jones-style adventuring continues to grow simultaneously sillier and weirder with the fourth issue of Billy Johnson And His Duck Are Explorers. The basic set-up of each issue finds Billy, a kid given a remarkable amount of free reign to explore, investigating a new ruin, pyramid or other such site for adventure. Along with him is Professor Barrace Wilcox, a talking duck with a great deal of education (this issue reveals that he’s written three books!) and his sword, Mr. Jabbers. It is at once not just a send-up of explorer stories and Indiana Jones in general, but also of the seemingly endless epic quest graphic novels that litter the Young Adult landscape. At the same time, it’s excellent, clear-lined entertainment on its own.

This issue finds the duo having packed some lunches in order to go explore the ancient Hero Trials of myth; a sort of combination of Heracles and Theseus with some other twists thrown in. The theme of the issue is immortality: Billy wants to be remembered as a great hero. The duo is then zapped from the entrance to the first trial: defeating giant birds that already have them up in the air. A magic spear appears to help him win the trial, and they’re then zapped to the next trial where he’s been given a magical flying cape. All along, a voice offers him advice on how to beat his opponents using the new items. New is terrific at pacing and panel-to-panel transitions in particular, and his use of color is tasteful and adds the right decorative touch while aiding the narrative in subtle ways.

Eventually, the whole thing is revealed to be a trap, but Barrace’s bizarre nature isn’t simply a throwaway gag. Indeed, when the villain of the piece deduces the duck’s true nature, it causes her to scream, giving Billy just enough time to win the fight. Meanwhile, a blue alien that may or may not be related to Barrace is looking for them both. New pulls off the neat trick of writing a satisfying adventure short story and creating just enough subplots to give the book a bit of weight and depth. A back-up story by Luke Healy fits nicely into the book’s tone, and Healy’s adopts New’s style to create a new look altogether. Pin-ups by Bridget Comeau and Megan Brennan are all part of the value added qualities of this release, as do postcards written by Billy and Barrace.

I also wanted to add a review of Steve Thueson’s landscape mini Hell Fight #1. It’s a silent, continuing series of four panel strips detailing a vicious, knock-down fight between a woman coming home from work and a skeleton dude that steals her beloved jacket. This one is bone-crunching (literally!) violence on a visceral level that is carefully established in panel after panel. The woman really does not want to lose that jacket, which leads to the use of all sorts of magic in an effort to fight each other off. If Billy Johnson represents a more polished, YA approach in terms of action, then Thueson’s work remains raw and spontaneous: punk rock adventure comics.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #14: Mathew New

Mathew New accomplishes a neat trick in his second and third issues of Billy Johnson And His Duck Are Explorers: he actually manages to successfully attach an interesting back-story and develops sub-plots to this bit of total nonsense. New's storytelling remains as clear and simple as ever, and he makes judicious use of color in these stories that are part Tintin, part Indiana Jones. The titular character is a janitor who also goes off on adventures, only he's terrible at it, relying on a Let's Go... style guide to give him advice on how to navigate deadly traps and tombs. The titular talking duck, Professor Barrace Wilcox, is a teacher at the university. That he is a duck is rarely remarked upon, a bit of absurdity that is in itself a running gag.

New also has a Lara Croft-type character whom the duo encounter at the beginning of issue #2, which begins with an elegant heist that is later loudly interrupted by the bumbling Billy. This is a classic tomb raider type of adventure that not only involves a cursed ring, it involves Barrace having to deal with the fact that he put on the cursed ring when he and Billy were there before. They were only returning in an effort to perhaps get the curse removed. There's a lich-like creature waiting to be freed, the desperate gambit of Barrace using Billy's sword (apparently a magical blade that he has named Mr. Jabbers), and a handy bus running over a haunted suit of armor. Underneath all of the silliness is a rock-solid plot and an internal logic that runs flawlessly. At the end of the story, we are introduced to a mysterious, shadowy figure who has a special interest in Billy and Barrace. New's use of color is not merely functional; the way he switches from red to grey in one sequence creates a beautiful contrast that makes the story more exciting. Jon Chad and Caitlin Rose Boyle both contribute backups which are amusing, but Chad's greater use of detail and Boyle's greater stylization are both jarring in their own way. It points to how perfect New's approach is with regard to this particular story as he balances the expected action-adventure tropes as well as the story's comedic elements.

Issue three is a classic desert adventure that's not quite as wacky as issue two, but it actually does a bit to add depth to the characters--especially Barrace the duck. On a search for a supposedly extinct bear, the duo have to deal with their own incompetence in preparing for the desert, famous explorer Hal Hardwick and his mummy assistant, sand storms and what might be magical intervention. This issue isn't as crisply paced as the previous one and goes on just a bit too long, but I enjoyed the fact that there were no pointless fights and everyone involved parted on good terms. Once again, his palette is tasteful and assists the narrative. New seems intent on portraying action without indulging in actual violence, which makes this unusual for an action-adventure comic, even one aimed at a YA audience. While we got indications of this in past issues, this seems to have been the first one where New firmly decided that he wasn't going to double down on absurdity at all times, but would rather start to flesh out his characters and their world. That's both from a narrative perspective as well as an emotional one. That focus on feelings isn't just tacked-on; it's earned through the narrative and the interactions between the main characters. At this point, and to my surprise, New has found himself with a potential book on his hands, as he's managed to organically open up some surprising narrative avenues as well as have his cake and eat it to with regard to silly but still fully-formed protagonists.

Thirty Days of CCS #21: Luke Healy, Max Riffner, Mathew New, Simon Reinhardt

This time around, I'll be discussing the work of three current students, set to graduate in 2014, as well as one graduate from the class of 2013.

Luke Healy's Of The Monstrous Pictures of Whales is one of the more fully-realized comics I've read from a student. Starting with the beautiful, silkscreened cover, continuing with the whale-themed endpapers and into the confidently rendered, simple clear-line style, Healy creates memorable and distinctive characters as well. Healy's watchword is restraint, as he slowly reveals the reason why two Irish sisters and their mother go on an ocean voyage taking off from Iceland while quickly establishing their fractious interpersonal dynamics. The ship is a whale-watching voyage, and one of the daughters, Liz, is an acerbic young woman who winds up being a sort of object of affection both for a whale (it only surfaces when she's out on a particular deck, soaking her every time) and the slightly buffoonish son of the ship's captain. Moby Dick and Herman Melville are name-checked a number of times, as the comic is indeed about a kind of obsession. In this case, it's about Liz's troubled relationship with her father. The end sequence, which uses larger panels at the bottom of the page to slowly relate in real time Liz's emotional reaction to having pitched something valuable at the whale "following" her and smaller panels on top to flash back to the history of the relationship with her father, is emotionally powerful. Indeed, Healy seamlessly incorporates humor (both absurd and sarcastic) into a comic that at its essence is about grief. I haven't read much else by Healy, but this comic establishes him as part of the very top rank of CCS artists.

Mathew New's Billy Johnson and His Duck Explorers is a Tintin-inspired bit of nonsense. Borrowing a bit of Herge's character design, the story mixes in aspects of Indiana Jones as well as Bill and his talking duck Barrace Wilcox open the comic with absurd dance moves that's a result of a competition performed at random for someone who came to deliver a package. New's sense of silliness goes from there, as they must deliver a trident to the middle of the ocean, Billy angers the statue heads on Easter Island by picking their noses, causing them to get up and walk into the ocean, and the intrepid duo encounters a Lara Croft-style explorer when looking for a valuable artifact. New's line is decidedly unfussy and utilitarian, aiding the gags in the simplest manner possible. The mini itself is an amusing trifle of perfect length, as I'm not sure the concept could sustain a narrative that was much longer than a few pages.

Simon Reinhardt's comic, Crime Planet, is a graphically bold, if extremely silly, comic about the rise and fall of a gangster that brings to mind classic crime series like Crime Does Not Pay. Reinhardt makes up for limited rendering skill with a bold, dynamic sense of page composition, employing dense blacks on some pages to draw in the reader's eye and carefully spotting blacks on other pages so as to move the eye around the page. Starting with a boy who declares that "Crude entertainment has eroded all my moral fiber", Eddie Ford "turns to a life of crime" as a result, He gets recruited to a mysterious criminal organization called Crime Planet, and his subsequent success and eventual downfall are documented in a manner that slips between deadpan and directly comedic. Inbetween, there are various "public service announcements" for neighborhood watch announcements with secret codes and a corpse protection service. Like New's comic, it's all good dumb fun. Reinhardt doesn't quite have the chops to pull off every visual gag he attempts, and that's a strain on the reader at times, but the boldness of his storytelling does offset this difficulty.

Max Riffner graduated in 2013 from CCS, but he's had a long career as a webcartoonist. He did a strip called Lydia that I quite enjoyed. The comics I'm reviewing here were part of this CCS thesis packet and include the minicomic Doomsday Democracy and the book The Crippler's Son. Using a sketchy, expressive style that reminds me a bit of a slightly less scribbly Jeff Lemire, The Crippler's Son is about a professional wrestler nicknamed "The Crippler" (a name he took from his wrestler father) and his much younger brother, James. James is an ER resident whose entire education was paid for by Jack ("The Crippler") and the success that his wrestling career brought him. The Lemire comparisons extend to his Essex County trilogy, which is a story about familial relationships and misdirection regarding same. It's also about James seeking an identity as a gay man who grew up without real family relationships or close bonds. It's also impeccably researched, as Riffner did a fantastic job researching the back story behind wrestling and the kind of terms that only insiders tend to use, and made it part of the book's vernacular. Whether or not someone knows what a "shoot" or "kayfabe" are isn't important, because the technical aspects of the sport are akin to the behind-the-scenes nature of being an ER doctor. Indeed, Riffner makes pointed comparisions between the ER doctor locker room and the wrestling locker room, even if what happens afterward is obviously different. The point Riffner makes is that James learns only too late just how much he means to Jack, and why, even as he tries to open himself up. While the relationship between the two becomes obvious at a certain point, the way Riffner ends the story gives it a powerful sense of emotional ambiguity.

The mini Democracy Doomsday is a far more labored (and labored-looking) comic using zip-a-tone and other visual effects, printed in blue ink. It's about a Nazi-smashing robot that wakes up in a world where the Nazis won World War II, and finds a way to wipe out every Nazi and everyone under Nazi occupation. While nicely drawn and designed (the tall, angular and slightly goofy robot is an especially great character design), the end of the story is a bit heavy-handed. Riffner's use of restraint in The Crippler's Son is what made it such an effective story.