Catching Up With Matt Madden

Matt Madden was a mainstay of the comics scene up until a decade ago, when his teaching and experimental comics interests took over actually making new comics. After co-writing two books with his wife, Jessica Abel (Drawing Words and Writing Pictures), and doing another book on his own about comics formalism (99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercises In Style), I was happy to see a bunch of new comics arrive in the mail. Working in France, Madden is finally taking the time to put his comics theories to practical use, both on his own and in collaborations with others. Let's take a look at each comic.

Cavalcade Surprise. This is a collaboration with Lewis Trondheim and Abel. When visiting Trondheim with their young children, Trondheim pulled out some old boxes of toys for them. The trio decided to draw seven scenes in different parts of the house with the toys on their own, adding a bit of text, and then came together to try to order them in such a way as to create a narrative. While the comic is quite pleasant to look at thanks to the loose and spontaneous pencils of each artist, it doesn't really cohere. Trondheim's captions pointed to a more realistic depiction of what was happening. Abel made up a fictional story following each toy, while Madden just added a word or two in description of the toys. Unsurprisingly, the three approaches didn't mix all that well, but it was fascinating to see how the artists nonetheless tried to get things to hang together.

Tic Tac Toe Comics: This is a crazy collaboration comic in which two artists take turns filling in a panel on a 3 x 3 grid. How they proceed is based on the game tic-tac-toe, so the artist assigned "O" drew and write something that incorporated the letter O and likewise for the other artist and X. As one would imagine, the results were mixed. Some of them didn't work at all as narratives, while others tried way too hard to incorporate the X and O into the panel. Unsurprisingly, collaborations between Matt Madden and Tom Hart were among the best, if silliest in the comic. I also quite enjoyed the mix and text and image that Rina Piccolo and Tea Fougner put together, detailing a young man looking for fun at a peep show and instead getting rent to shreds by demons. The second Madden/Hart collaboration, involving an anthropomorphic couple trying to get pregnant, was especially cohesive and visually striking. Constraint-based comics can help a cartoonist think about structure and narrative in different ways, and this comic is less an attempt at a cohesive story than an exercise in thinking. What makes Madden interesting is how he can apply constraints to more complex stories on his own, like in the other three comics here.

Bridge: This is a 24-hour comic finished in 31 hours, and the constraint chosen at the beginning of the exercise was that each page would represent a single unit of time. In this case, each page was to represent a decade. Madden loves recursive narrative structures and mirror stories and he creates a compelling, emotional narrative in this short comic. Starting with a boy chasing his childhood memories of meeting an old woman who told him about a special bridge, the story follows a man, then his heir and then a young woman who finds their notes across the decades as they struggled with the meaning and construction of the bridge. The end of the story loops around to the beginning in a clever fashion, but the comic works because of the genuine pathos he draws out of following each character for a decade per page. Visually, Madden greatly varies the composition of each pages, as some have a big 2x2 grid, others have 2 panels stacked on top of each other, one page has no panels, etc. It's a nice shorthand for showing the reader that things are quite different after having moved on to a new decade. Madden's brushy style is at its loosest and most spontaneous here; even on some of the rougher pages, there's still something lovely to look at on nearly every page. His spotting of blacks was also quite effective, and I imagine it was a timesaver on the pages where there were black panels with text.

Sayonara. This is a comic published by Burlesquitas that reprints a 1999 comic by Madden. It's a handsome little minicomic that was done when Madden was living abroad in Mexico. The story of a man missing his native Japan but ultimately finding that he can't quite yet escape the pleasant pull of living in Mexico is entirely wordless, befitting a comic aimed at English speaking audiences but featuring characters who aren't speaking either Spanish or Japanese. It's almost sentimental in its depiction of character, lacking the usual dark edge one finds in Madden's comics. It's also rather conventional in its structure, as Madden hadn't yet gone full bore into his experimental phase.

Drawn Onward. This is the true jewel of this collection of minicomics, and it's one of Madden's best-ever efforts. This is a mirror comic, told in retrospect from the point of view of a woman who keeps encountering a man on the subway.The strange thing is that when she met him, he seemed to act as if he knew her and was desperate to see her. The first half of the comic finds her initially alarmed by the attentions of this strange man, who confuses and alarms her by asking why she's avoiding him. At the same time, she starts to become fascinated by the idea of him, until they meet on a train platform and kiss. Then, in a virtuoso display of storytelling, Madden mirrors the narrative, reversing it while still moving time forward. This time around, the woman comes to meet the man the next day, excited to see him--only he's standoffish. Mirroring each panel from the first time around, Madden changes the story simply by flipping the characters around, subtly altering dialog here and there. Even the last page mirrors the first, as the woman (a cartoonist) has drawn the story in an effort to figure things out but is despondent at her drawing table. Madden even mirrors the different line weights he chose for different parts of the story. On some pages, he uses a delicate clear line style. On others, he uses his more typical, brushy and black-heavy style. There are witty storytelling clues along the way, like palindrome streets such as Rorschach Avenue and Nogegon Street, as well as the woman reading a book called Le Debut De La Fin (The Beginning of the End). The second half details her mounting despair as she faces precisely the same dilemma as the man did in the first half of the book, only it's from her point of view. It's a perfect meshing of Madden's storytelling pyrotechnics and a genuinely affecting, emotional story. Clearly, living in Angouleme is agreeing with him, because he's basically picked right up at the same level of innovation and storytelling clarity he was enjoying in his old Alternative Comics series A Fine Mess.

Deepening The Field: Drawing Comics and Mastering Comics

One of the biggest changes in comics in the last decade is the increasing commitment to providing a pedagogical foundation for both serious students and enthusiastic amateurs alike. Lynda Barry's texts are more about writing and drawing in general than about the specifics of how to make a comic, but they are still invaluable works for any creative person. Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning is still the most valuable single text out there in terms of really getting to the heart of what it is to make comics. Scott McCloud's texts seem to be fading a bit in importance as more authors who have actual experience teaching comics have entered the publishing picture, but Understanding Comics remains an interesting philosophical entry point for a newcomer.

The gold standard for comics pedagogy, however, is Jessica Abel & Matt Madden's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, as discussed in my reprint column from yesterday. When writing that text, the authors had to cut out a lot of material. So much so, in fact, that they had another book's worth of material to publish. So their Mastering Comics should be seen less as a sequel than a continuation and fleshing out of DWWP, while recapitulating certain points in a different way. It should be noted upfront that this is a textbook and is written as such: units, homework assignments, diagrams, tons of examples, etc. It's not a book that one reads, it's a book that one uses. One could easily jump right into this textbook without having used the first one, especially if one is looking more for tips and less for the basics.

The first three chapters actually touch on Barry-style writing and drawing exercises to help generate ideas and keep up a love of making marks on paper. The fourth chapter goes into hardcore instruction on how to use perspective on the comics page. The fifth chapter begins to address a major items missing from the first book: how and when to do webcomics. This chapter talks a little behind the possibilities and theory behind webcomics. The sixthis all about style; it's a dazzling chapter that provides example after example of how cartoonists break rules to create their own style. The seventh, eighth and ninth chapters go into inking, lettering and greyscale effects. They talk about digital and hand-crafted effects for both, once again going into painstaking detail. This is the good stuff for those looking for specific craft tips with little formal training. The tenth and eleventh chapters go into detail about another deficit from the first volume: color. Chapter ten mostly talks about color principles and digital coloring, while eleven is mostly about hand-coloring. The last chapters are mostly about publishing and hand-making comics. It's unfortunate that both of the minicomics distros referenced in the book are both defunct, but that's the nature of the game. The authors frequently reference the book's blog,which continues and expands upon what's taught in the text. I imagine there will be comics texts that teach certain aspects of the craft better than Abel and Madden, and there are already better books about the creative process. However, I can't imagine better, more thorough yet approachable texts than DWWP and Mastering Comics.

Robyn Chapman's Drawing Comics Lab is in many ways, a distillation of the Abel/Madden textbooks. Combining the emphasis on exercises from those books as well as the philosophy and inspiration from several other books (including Brunetti's Cartooning and McCloud's Understanding Comics) as well as her extensive experience teaching and workshopping, Chapman synthesized her own approach in this book. It's two pages per exercise, zipping the aspiring artist through character building, creativity exercises, panel and page design, pacing, "camera" placement, storytelling tips and tricks, jam comics and other creative exercises, storytelling choices, materials (including ink, paper, pens, and pencils), minicomics publishing, screenprinting and other related aspects of making a comic.

Chapman's book is heavily illustrated and is designed to get the artist's pen moving right away in order to get them to make a minicomic. Its exercises are absolutely perfect for short comics-making courses (like one or two hour workshops) or drink 'n draw events. The chapters on materials are a perfect crash course for an aspiring artist. She seeks out the advice of dozens of other cartoonists for many of the labs; Tom Hart's character exercise is a great example. Her descriptions of the many different ways one can fold paper to produce a minicomic are more thorough than any text I've ever seen; Chapman is a veteran mini-maker and has seen a lot of people try different methods during her time working at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Overall, Drawing Comics Lab creates a unique balance between theory, practice and readability. There's enough attention to detail to impart real and useful information to aspiring cartoonists, but it keeps moving along quickly enough to encourage its students to keep going no matter what. What I like about all of these texts is that Abel, Madden and Chapman worked very hard to become the artists they are today. None of them are the sort of whiz-kid drawers who dazzled everyone from a very young age. The lessons in these books were hard-earned through trial and error and battle-tested by these veteran cartoonists and perfected through years of teaching their students.

Sequart Reprints: Cartooning, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

For years, there was a dearth of educational resources available for those who wanted to learn how to create comics. Sure, there were piecemeal options available: textbooks on drawing anatomy, life-drawing courses, creative writing workshops, etc. But when one of the few books that actually addressed comics creation for many years was "How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way", it was obvious that this badly needed to be addressed. In the past few years, there's been a greater demand for comics-related pedagogy and the result has been the creation of schools like the Center for Cartoon Studies and expanded programs at the Savannah College of Art & Design, the School for Visual Arts (SVA), etc.

Many professional cartoonists find themselves winding up as teachers either at places like SVA or at other colleges trying to teach the medium. For Ivan Brunetti, he created a comics course from trial and error, but the result was that he developed a syllabus and curriculum that worked for him. He codified these results in a brisk 80-page booklet titled Cartooning: Philosophy And Practice, and it was included along with Comic Art #8. Brunetti is one of the great thinking cartoonists, and it's obvious that the teaching methods he employed were as much about his own ways of getting around his own writer's block and fear of the page as they were to teach others how to do so. In that respect, it's very much a worthy companion to Linda Barry's astonishing What It Is. The emphasis is on the pure pleasure of cartooning, with no other specific end in mind.

Brunetti's Cartooning is less a detailed textbook and more an annotated, detailed course syllabus or guide. It's sparsely illustrated and has an informal, conversational style in its instruction. It reminds me a bit of Aristotle's writings, which were designed as notes for lectures, conversational in tone. The genius of this book is the way Brunetti builds from week to week. In a fifteen-week course, Brunetti moves from the sort of spontaneous drawing (doodling) that anyone can understand and works his way up to single-panel cartoons, four-panel strips, using different grid styles, learning to use different tools and onward to creating a four-page story. Brunetti is a demanding teacher and accepts no shortcuts, but he also has remarkable patience for beginners. The assignments and exercises he hands out are incredibly clever and cut through potential writer's block in ingenious ways.

While I would have preferred more figures and examples, the illustrations he does employ add a high degree of clarity to this book. It should be noted that Brunetti makes a careful distinction that this book is not designed to instruct one on how to draw, but rather on how to cartoon. He teaches principles based on intuitive ideas about how to look at an image and doesn't spend much time indexing a lot of formal terminology regarding panel-to-panel transitions, for example. This is a manual for a lab-only course, in a sense; he's teaching principles but immediately instructs the student to work out these principles on a page. He also spends a little time discussing some of the tools and equipment needed for comics but doesn't dwell on it. His driving point is cartooning fundamentals, and he emphasizes that this can be taught using a standard sketchbook and a pencil. That said, he later does give some practical advice and exercises related to the use of tools, becoming comfortable with them and mastering them. Brunetti's voice speaks loudly in this book, and he doesn't hide his many strongly-held opinions and theories on cartooning. That idiosyncratic approach is one of Cartooning's greatest strengths.

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, in their text Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, seemed to pick and choose from a number of different sources in their approach. Both instructors at SVA (and of course, veteran cartoonists in their own right), they set out to create a definitive, step-by-step, heavily-illustrated book that covered virtually every aspect of comics creation. There's a lot of Scott McCloud in this book in terms of the way they used categories and labels to explain concepts like representation and transitions, but they were careful to avoid McCloud's more dogmatic, essentialist positions on how to define comics. The structure of this book is much like Brunetti's, down to the 15-week, college-semester length of the course to building up from crude images to more complex structures. The book very much has a "big-tent" approach, encouraging its use for artists interested in a variety of styles, from super-heroes to manga to art comics. That's certainly a matter of practicality as much as anything, given the nature of the student body at SVA.

There's a lot to like about this book. Like Brunetti, they quickly cut to the chase and have their students drawing. They also find ways to make distinctions between students in the classroom, independent drawing clubs, and individual artists, letting them know how they should approach the assignments. Given the scope of their nearly 300-page textbook, Abel & Madden spend a lot of time defining and illustrating a number of concepts, terms and tools used in creating comics, going into a lot of detail. They spend two different chapters on inking techniques, talk about lettering for a chapter (including how to use an Ames guide), and discuss reproduction techniques in another.

For any assignments that involve new techniques, it's laid out in a step-by-step, illustrated series of diagrams. Abel and Madden spend time on approaches to panel composition, tricky bits of anatomy like heads and hands, story structure, 24-hour comics and how to make a mini-comic. The chapter on story structure felt like something right out of a screenwriter's manual, given its emphasis on conflict, protagonists, story sparks, etc. As noted earlier, Abel & Madden pick and choose from a number of sources to throw as much information as possible at the aspiring cartoonist, within reason. They actually don't get into fine-art concepts like perspective as much as one would think, for example.

The book is at its best when Abel and Madden use panels, strips and pages from other cartoonists. The way they break down structure, design and composition of classic strips or illustrate the way artists use certain tools are used is positively illuminating. That was especially true in their chapters on inking and the effects one can achieve with it. One thing I was very surprised not to see in this book was a chapter on color and coloring. I was also a bit surprised that they didn't devote at least an appendix to webcomics and what one needs to vary when putting one's work online. That said, I did appreciate that like Brunetti, they found it important to emphasize the handcrafted origins of cartooning. Before one fools around with a computer, they need to understand the fundamentals.

While both books share a lot in common philosophically, the main difference between the two lies in focus. Brunetti's book is about teaching cartooning for its own sake, while Abel & Madden aim their work at artists aspiring to publish. It's an important distinction. Brunetti tries to encourage non-cartoonists to relax on the page and enjoy the physical, visceral experience of drawing, all while teaching them discipline and fundamentals. Abel and Madden aim to slow down aspiring cartoonists from plotting out their epics or graphic novels and get them to focus that enthusiasm on the fundamentals. If their approach is a bit more prosaic and process-oriented, it's because the book is aimed at artists who want tips and helpful hints as much or more than theory. If I was designing a comics class, I'd assign both books, using Brunetti's as a template but referring constantly to Abel & Madden's for specific examples and solutions to problems.

Sequart Reprints: Yet More MoCCA minis

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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There's always been a strong relationship between minicomics culture and zine culture. Indeed, one could make the argument that minicomics are one of the most vibrant subtypes of zines these days. Beyond the fact that they're relatively cheap and easy to make, minis also allow cartoonists to turn comics into art objects if they so desire. Another connection is that many personal zines tend to be autobiographical musings of the author, and that tradition is certainly prevalent in the minicomics scene. This article will examine a number of minis that are either autobiographical or deal with slice-of-life narratives. I'm going to try to resist giving detailed plot descriptions and instead focus on character and characterization, along with the specific look of the comic and what kind of impact it makes on characterization.

CROSS-COUNTRY, by MK Reed. MK Reed's newest feels like a screenplay, but she puts in enough comics-only flourishes to give the comic weight and substance. This one's about a cross-country road trip with a young guy who's part of a family of Wal-Mart-like stores, and an employee. Greg, the boss, is a boorish frat boy type whom Ben, the employee, despises. Greg is a vacant sleazeball and Ben is conflicted about being there--it's a summer job and he needs the money. Greg loves to sleep with young girls, and this first issue ends with Ben being forced to drive home a waitress that Greg slept with--to school, because she's only 15 years old.

Greg is actually the more interesting of the two lead characters, because he's so unrepentently awful and banal. Ben clearly hates himself in more ways than one, and is stewing over an old girlfriend. He obviously thinks he's morally superior to Greg, but the fact that he's enabling his boss' bad behavior makes him worse in some ways. I like this ambiguity in Reed's characters here, as well as the unusual page and panel composition she uses. That includes panels at odd angles like diagonals, eschewing a grid on certain pages, using diary-style narration in print outside the panels, and going to unusual close-ups. Reed's figure-work is crude but she continues to play to her strengths, focusing on gesture, body language and facial expressions. Reed's definitely one of my favorite mini-comics artists who specializes in the lives of young people; I'm glad that she's moved on to a slightly older age demographic after mostly writing about teenagers.

MATCHING JACKETS and SOURPUSS 1 by Robyn Chapman. Chapman is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design whose work I've been following for many years. She's one of the co-editors of the fascinating TRUE PORN anthologies as well as the driving force behind the enormously entertaining HEY, FOUR-EYES! zine. This pair of minis are obviously very personal and intimate; one is explicitly autobiographical and the other inspired by autobiographical events.

MATCHING JACKETS is a compilation of stories about old boyfriends. "Something's Wrong" is from TRUE PORN, and is a devastatingly personal account of her problems with sex with one particular boyfriend, and how this turned into an irreparable barrier. What I liked most about this story was the disconnect between "Robyn's" emotions and her physical reactions as a sexual being. When she reveals that it may be related to her evolving sexuality (being attracted to women), it's a painful moment, one where all further communication is impossible. A cheerier story is "Comfortable", a John Porcellino-style story where Chapman merges text and image in a free-flowing manner, abandoning panel gridlines altogether. This one retells a clearly-doomed but still-pleasant relationship from college, and is told in Chapman's sparer, cleaner line from her recent works. The nature of the narrative will feel familiar to anyone who recalls their first love from college, but it's her compositon that makes this the best story in the book. There's one page where she describes the first time she and her boyfriend told each other that they loved each other. The way she makes the eye follow her boyfriend laying in the grass, to the narrative, to an overhead view of a park, to Chapman in the bottom right hand corner, is a perfect example of assured and creative storytelling, neatly solving several visual problems.

SOURPUSS is the first chapter of a high school story, and it takes place in Chapman's native rural Alaska. There's a Chapman stand-in in Doris, an artist who hangs around with some nerd friends and can't relate to anyone else around in her redneck town. This comic is a well done but quite familiar account of teen alienation. In the first chapter, the dynamic between Doris and her friends is fairly predictable, down to her jealousy over one of them getting a girlfriend. Chapman's character design is the main attraction of this mini, along with her understanding of expression. I'll be curious to see where the story winds up going.

JAM IN THE BAND and PARTY @ HORROR BEACH, by Robin Enrico. Enrico's specialty is conjuring up atmospheres of particular youth scenes, and he creates that verisimilitude thanks to witty dialogue. JAM IN THE BAND is a short preview of a much longer work, and it had echoes of Brian Lee O'Malley's SCOTT PILGRIM and Jaime Hernandez' LOVE AND ROCKETS. It's about a music writer in New York who's about to see a well-known, all-female indy rock band--one that he knew quite well in the small college town they came out of. It's got that same indy rock vibe as SCOTT PILGRIM but uses the time-jumping techniques in those Locas stories. Despite those influences, Enrico has his own voice. His cartooning is simple, iconic and stylized, with a number of decorative flourishes. He's careful to keep his panels uncluttered, even when he's trying to get across a lot of information through visual cues. The small taste we get of the characters in this issue wasn't quite enough to get lost in their stories quite yet, but it does lay out the tensions nicely. I look forward to the larger work that's yet to come.

PARTY @ HORROR BEACH has several semi-auto-bio stories, some of which read like inside jokes. "Trapped In The Closet", however, put together a string of ridiculous situations and sustained them nicely as one coherent, funny narrative. It's about a Halloween party that Enrico's stand-in character attends, where he comes as a "Big Stupid Box" on a dare. There's a funny aside where two women note that since it's Halloween, they're required to dress in something Sexy--so one chooses to be Sexy Abe Lincoln and the other comes as Sexy John Wilkes Booth. He winds up fooling around with a woman (with a boyfriend) whom he had slept with before (at a drunken party) in a closet. When he's told that the woman is now engaged, and that her fiance was at this very party, he finds himself stuck in a closet for the night, hiding out. Enrico manages to play a sordid encounter for laughs, mostly at his own expense. What I like about this is the extreme short-sightedness of every character; the woman he sleeps with has no problem cheating on her fiance, until he gets wise and takes away their engagement ring, while Robin knows it isn't a good idea but does it anyway. Enrico's skill at humor is what distinguishes this autobio mini from others of its kind, along with that amusingly cartoony art (which greatly aides in evoking laughs).

DISCO MAXX by Katie Skelly  This brief mini has a mylar cover with a different design on every copy. While this is an autobiographical story, it's not really a narrative or even an anecodote, really. Instead, it's a series of memories as images, flowing together on a night when Skelly and a friend DJ'd a party at Syracuse. Skelly's style is spare and simplistic, emphasizing expression over form. It's a sweet, unambiguous account of a night where everything went magically right. It was the sort of night where one could sense great things happening as they unfolded, and the result is a series of memories that burned themselves into one's mind's eye quite vividly. Skelly's panel composition can be slightly cluttered; if anything, I'd like to see her simplify things even further. Still, I enjoy the way she presents memories and encounters on a page, especially how she constructs dialogue. Though this story was very sweet, she actually has a tart and witty voice, and I'd like to continue to see that fleshed out in longer narratives.

MY BRAIN HURTS #6, by Liz Baillie  Enrico and Skelly distance the reader from the emotional content of the material, either through humor (Enrico), narrative ambiguity (Skelly) or a cartoony drawing style. Liz Baillie, whose work I've reviewed here previously, goes in a different direction. She plunges us head-first into her characters' tumultuous emotional lives, and does so with dense, detail-packed panels. Her actual line is fairly thin, which lessens the punch of each particular panel (different from Robyn Chapman, who uses fairly thick blacks for her lines), but she adds mood to her panels with the heavy use of shadow, cross-hatching, blacks in a panel, etc.

All of this is in service to her story, and this particular issue deals with some unusual difficulties regarding young love for a teenaged lesbian. Baillie perfectly captures the awkwardness of an attempted sexual encounter, especially when her girlfriend paradoxically clings to her Catholic upbringing. Baillie gets this across in a page where the panels sit at odd angles to each other, overlapping and zooming in and out of intimate close-ups. It's a great page, one of several in the book where the page design has a direct influence on the book's emotional content. By the end of the issue, we have a real sense of the main character feeling as though she's hit rock bottom, with nowhere to belong. Baillie's become more adventurous as an artist as the series has proceeded, and the interesting choices she's made have deepened the book's emotional impact.

NO IN-BETWEEN #1-6, by Marion Vitus  I remember buying the first issue of this series at SPX several years ago, and was struck at how ambitious it seemed for a young artist to undertake a sprawling travelogue as their first work. It's obvious that this story, described as "fiction with autobiographical inspiration" (what Dean Haspiel calls "semi-auto-bio"), was a life-changing and enormously meaningful event for Vitus. The plot can be described simply: an aspiring artist is stuck in a dead-end job, awaiting a backpacking trip to Europe with her long-distance boyfriend as the catalyst needed to get her out of a rut. When he unexpectedly dumps her, she decides to go anyway--by herself. I like that Vitus took a sharp turn away from standard 20-something romance drama and went in a very different direction. It's clear that this isn't just a series of observations on travel, but rather an attempt at using travel as a means of finding out what she really wants in life, and how to get it.

The fact that it took Vitus nearly four years to produce six 8-page minis just points to how much of a struggle it can be for a working artist to find the time to concentrate on their personal projects. Among other things, this mini is obviously Vitus' laboratory in attempting to grow as an artist. She changed her rendering style twice before settling on a look that seems to be a good fit. The first issue was a pretty clear-line affair; there weren't many blacks used, and she kept her figures fairly simple. I also noticed that Vitus loves to play with gesture, posture and expression as emotional cues; there's a squirminess to her stand-in character that reflects her own discomfort with the world, and at times, herself.

The second issue, which takes place in Italy, was much more heavily rendered than the first. At times, it was over-rendered. That killed a lot of the spontaneity on the page and made her figures look stiff. By the end of the third issue, she loosened up a bit, especially on a page where she gets goosed on a subway. In the sixth issue, Vitus does a nice job of keeping that spontaneity going while still getting across the beauty of the surrounding countryside. It's fitting that in a story about transformation, growth and becoming comfortable with oneself, Vitus the artist continues to grow and struggle with the lessons she learned as Vitus the character. The difference is that the story crystalized that moment into a series of epiphanies. The struggle to hold onto those feelings of self-discovery and relay it on paper continues to inform the way Vitus is slowly unfolding the story.

THE ROSIE STORIES, by Diana Tamblyn  As a storyteller, Tamblyn is clear, restrained, matter-of-fact and has an assured, bold line. After reading a number of stories involving teens or young adults, it was an interesting change of pace to read stories about becoming a mother. Tamblyn's tone is gushingly emotional and joyful; there's no attempt or thought of an attempt to put any distance between her plain feelings and the reader. She ameliorates that bluntness by using a couple of different techniques in these stories about her daughter. Tamblyn either tenderly narrates her stories in a realistic style, or else simplifies her line for stories told from her daughter's point of view. It's a more cartoony, John Stanley-esque style that's very appealing. Throughout the comic, there's a genuine warmth that comes across on each page. At times, it's a bit overwhelming for a reader.

While I can certainly appreciate how much a new mother loves her child, there's not much going on in the first story other than an expression of that love, along with trying to capture perfect moments. It felt more like something you'd send out to your relatives than work for the general public. The Rosie-as-narrator stories work a bit better, especially when Tamblyn introduces some light elements of conflict. The last story, where Tamblyn relates her paranoia regarding her child's safety and her own desire to become a better person, is the most interesting by far. There's a lot of skill and sincerity in this comic, but one senses that Tamblyn isn't sufficiently distanced from the initial event to write a compelling narrative about her experiences. I'd like to see her take cues from the last story in the mini and add a bit of perspective to what is obviously an amazing, life-changing odyssey.

DUMB JERSEY WHITE BOY #3, by Mark McMurray McMurray is a very strong storyteller, using a variety of approaches to give a powerful sense of time and place. His stories usually mix comic and horrific real-life events, and this issue is no exception. It's a collection of short stories about his father from various points in his life. The most accomplished is a short story he submitted to the SPX anthology some years back, and it's a beautifully-illustrated memory of his childhood. Young Mark is obsessed with the new Fantastic Four cartoon, which his father interrupts by talking about his failing marriage. While he weeps and holds his son, young Mark can only think that Jack Kirby was definitely involved in the cartoon! The stage is set for the other stories in the book, where McMurray displays a combination of ambivalence and bemused affection for his father. The latter stories were originally done as correspondence, and have the vibrancy that a quick sketchbook drawing possesses. McMurray has a very assured line and an excellent eye, and augments these skills with a keen sense of when to exaggerate and when to reel things in. As a writer, McMurray keeps a layer of humorous distance up when discussing his father--he talks about what his father has done or said, but never spells out his own feelings. He prefers to let the anecdotes speak for themselves, a tactic that works to his advantage.

PHASE 7 #11, by Alec Longstreth. This is a follow-up to PHASE 7 #10, wherein Longstreth starts to lay out his entire history of comics involvement. This issue picks up with Longstreth deciding to make creating comic books his life. The last issue was all about how he became immersed in comics and came to start drawing them, but this one focuses on how he developed his working method, the ways in which he started interacting (and drawing strength from) fellow cartoonists, and how he came to terms with his own publishing schedule. Longstreth uses a cute framing device to explain why he published issues out of order, giving a long and very specific autobiographical story some structure. What I find interesting about Longstreth is that while he acknowledges the huge debt he owes to those cartoonists who inspired him over the years, he doesn't seem to be quite aware yet of his own role in inspiring his peers. Simply put, it's rare to see an artist this completely devoted to his art, who thinks about it in terms of the years that are ahead of him, and who provides such a steadfast example of hard work being its own reward. The fact that he has such an enormous appetite for different kinds of storytelling and doesn't seem to favor one over another is also interesting; he's very much an "in-between" sort of artist. He lists BONE as his favorite comic ever, but is also a big fan of Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. Likewise, his comics go from gags to autobio to adventure, and his art ranges from stick-figure (inspired by Matt Feazell) to intensely cross-hatched and detailed; he refuses to impose limits on what he can do.

Even though he's already published quite a few comics, I get the sense that he's still working through his influences. As solid a craftsman and storyteller as he is, Longstreth is not yet an innovator or visionary as an artist. He's an artist that I think will plow through a series of "steady-states", wherein he will master a storytelling or artistic technique, and then face either a new problem to solve or influence to absorb and then adapt that into his routine. Eventually, these years of internalizing these adaptations through sheer hard work will coalesce into something we've never seen before. Until that time, his audience will have a great many unusual, enjoyable comics to read.

ANTELOPE EATER, by Juliacks. This is an intensely stylized, painful story of a young boy struggling with his mother's illness and her resentment towards him. What's most striking about this is the sophistication of the page design, coupled with raw, primitive art. The way Juliacks combines text and image on a page, such that the text should be seen both as part of the image and as a separate message, makes for an intimate, almost suffocating experience as a reader. The images are not pleasant, because the experience of watching one's mother die as she wishes you had never been born is certainly not pleasant. The boy retreats into fantasy, becoming a superhero who can save her. The images switch from purely grotesque to fanciful, though the tiny text reminds us of the painfulness of the experience. The last page, with a number of small panels that intersperse her vitals with images of a heart (acting as both literal and metaphorical agent), is shattering--especially, once again, with the way she integrates text into the image. Juliacks has a powerful voice, and the multitude of influences on her art (see her website) point to someone who can do some very interesting things in the world of comics.

THE OTHERS, by Matt Madden. Madden is well-known for his formalist experiments, devising whole stories around clever storytelling constructions. He seems endlessly interested in taking the basic format of comics--panel, page, images, letters, panel-to-panel transitions, point of view--and scrambling them so as to force the audience to see what's happening "backstage", so to speak. At the same time, he's able to imbue this interest with enough humanity to make these more than mere technical exercises. THE OTHERS is a brief, circular exercise in switching points-of-view. It reminds me a bit of the Richard Linklater film SLACKER in that we are privy to a character's narrative for a few moments, and then we sail off into another character's narrative when their paths cross. The difference is that as a comics audience, Madden gives us access to their interior, running monologue. Each character happens to be studying the next character, wondering about their histories and motivations. Starting with one young man in a cafe, we zip from character to character until we arrive back at the original character--and an attempt to make contact. "Other" here refers to our essential isolation as human beings, and how difficult (and often startling) it can be to try to genuinely break through that layer of alienation. Madden's line is as loose and sketchy as ever; I sense that he prefers that his work should look a bit fuzzy so as to provide less of a shock to the reader when he starts shuffling his formalist deck. Madden really found his voice doing these sorts of comics, and they're always satisfying to read--though they'll never have the emotional impact of more personal work.

THE OTHER SIDE and DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES, by JP Coovert and Hope Larson. These comics have modest ambitions, but the ambiguity in both made them linger a bit. THE OTHER SIDE is a seemingly simple look at a sleepover with two boys who are best friends. They scamper around their neighborhood at night in a carefree manner, peeking into the windows of various people. Until one of them spies a couple having sex--one of the boys is fixated, and the other gets nervous and wants to leave. This leads to an argument, accusations of being gay, and then an attempt to pretend the whole thing didn't happen. While never apologizing, I liked the way Coovert found ways for the characters to nonetheless reconnect without language--especially through the use of physical contact.

DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES is a beautifully-designed mini (black cover, black-embossed lettering, and 2 yellow lines to represent the highway) where Coovert and Hope Larson collaborated. Both stories reflect on each other, as they're both about the briefness of life and the painful awareness that it can be taken away at any time. Larson's story has her coming upon a rabbit that had been struck by a car . As she tried to comfort it, she noticed that the rabbit's mate saw them near the edge of the highway. The rabbit she held died, but the other was shooed away to safety, despite the obvious urge to search for his mate. Not for long, however--the rabbit returned, only to meet his own death on the highway, joining his mate. "Driving In The Rain" is about Coovert wondering where his better half is and getting a phone call from her that she'd been in a wreck. He raced to get her, worst-case scenarios burning through his thoughts, until he found her OK--and presented him with a touching romantic gesture. The sentiment of the story is a nice balance to the downbeat ending of Larson's half of the mini. It's the nature of mortality, that we're all essentially living on borrowed time, and this mini eloquently gets at that truth in just ten pages. Visually, Larson punctuates her bold black line with all sorts of decorative touches that act as narrative clues, while Coovert keeps things clear and simple. His art is all about economy of line and advancing the emotional narrative of his story with a minimum of fuss.

NEW CONSTRUCTION #1, by Kevin Huizenga Huizenga is a fast-rising star in the world of comics, with an Ignatz book (GANGES) from Fantagraphics and his own series (OR ELSE) and a collection (CURSES) from Drawn & Quarterly. However, he got his start with his minicomics series SUPERMONSTER, and he continues to make minis to work out ideas, provide anecdotes, and show off some interesting work from his sketchbook. There's a sense that this is autobiographical, because it's displaying ephemera and sketches straight from the cartoonists' pen, and a number of the pages are about his working methods.

A number of the strips here were "deleted scenes" from GANGES #1. I have no idea if he actually meant to include these scenes but didn't have room, drew them but decided they didn't fit, or did them after the fact as a lark, but they're all a hoot. That issue depicts the life of a couple at home, focusing on minutiae and moment-to-moment beats & rhythms. Both of the scenes depicted here were a lot more light-hearted than what we saw in the actual comic, and I can see why they weren't included. Still, it was fun to see Wendy Ganges tell Glenn to stop thinking sexualized thoughts about her, or see her fall on the floor laughing because of a trick Glenn was pulling with snacks. I also rather enjoyed the very odd "The Hundred Most People In America", a riff on celebrity and other such lists featuring a number of oddball characters and descriptions. Any fan of Huizenga should track down a copy.

ECLIPSE and THE ANATOMY OF US, by Karla Krupala. Krupala has serious chops as an artist. ANATOMY OF US is less a story than a self-described "work in progress", where she "sketched various relationships in states of disorder". The results are very interesting in this mini, but they've obviously not resulted in a coherent whole as of yet. Krupala likes static images and using them in unexpected ways. On one page, we see the back of a skeleton as a means of conveying a conveying a dialogue, doubling as an anatomical chart. On another page, we see a woman's legs, and her shadow is formed out of the word "take" repeated multiple times. Krupala seems to be emphasizing our essential aloneness and the near-impossibility of communication. In particular, words not only fail in trying to connect people together, they inevitably serve as weapons. ECLIPSE is a story set in outer space, but the themes are similar: loneliness, the possibility of connection, and the nature of that connection. I felt tantalized by these two minis, wanting to see more by the artist. I especially wanted to see her themes fleshed out a bit more in longer stories. Her development as an artist over the span of a year was remarkable, especially in terms of her figures. They became more assured and bolder in ANATOMY, though her composition in both comics was striking.

ALICE IN NEW YORK #4, by Henry Chamberlain. I reviewed the first two issues of this series in entry #10 of this column, and was happy to see this issue pop up in my mailbox. I missed #3, but it was easy to catch up with what happened. This is the conclusion of Chamberlain's love letter to New York and Lewis Carroll, and it's interesting to see how his art has matured. He uses a thick line but is nice and loose with his figures. There's a pleasing, sketchy quality to them that meshes well for the slightly dreamy quality he embues in his story. The theme of the story is allowing oneself to become open to an awakening of imagination and the possibilities therein. The Henry character is guarded and uncertain, but clearly wants to find ways to break out. This issue is essentially one long battle of wits with the object of his affection, a woman who challenges him to break free of his self-imposed, over-intellectualized restraints and assumptions. This issue is very talk-heavy, but Chamberlain counters that with big panels that are well-composed. The central conceit of the series, that characters from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND are secretly aiding Henry in opening himself up to a new world, is kept mostly to the edges of the story, allowing the issue's central dialogue to take precedence. It's a smart decision, because there was definitely a danger in those fantasy elements overwhelming the emotional thrust of the story. Instead, Chamberlain was able to present the story of a character who overthinks things a little too much, who was able to find a way to lose himself to the immediacy of experience.

THE HOOKAH GIRL VOLUME 1, by Marguerite Dabaie. The subtitle of this comic is "Growing Up Christian Palestinian In America", and Dabaie wastes little time in addressing some very sticky points about this subject. She cleverly begins this collection of brief stories and anecdotes with "Should/Am", which is a series of paper-doll cutouts. Dabaie goes from stereotype to stereotype, boldly drawing humor out of a cut-out of "Martyr" ("NOT in Israel To Sight-See!"), alongside "Muslim", "Seductress" (a harem girl costume), "Revolutionary" and finally "Hungry Artist". It's a direct shot across the bow to start a collection, and Dabaie makes her bluntness work by using dark humor and the convention of a child's activity.

The rest of the stories in the book range from light-hearted memories as a child to pointed observations on today's political climate. A story about her family stealing grape leaves from wine orchards (prefaced by the technique on how to roll a grape-leaf) was funny, as was a story about the ways in which Palestinian-Americans go to extremes in connecting with their culture. It's clear that Dabaie is conflicted on a number of matters relating to the Palestinian cause. In a story about hijacker Leila Khaled, it's obvious that Dabaie is drawn to her because she was a woman who acted boldly in the Arab world, and not just because she drew media attention to the Palestinian cause. There's another story called "The BestEST Joke" where someone tells her a Palestinian joke (not knowing that she was half-Palestinian), and she doesn't know how to react.
My favorite story in the collection was "NOW", an acidic critique of Americans using the kaffiyeh, a traditional piece of cloth, as a fashion statement. ("Go against 'the man' Now. In style!") I think Dabaie is currently most skilled as a satirist; she has an elegant thin-line in those drawings that really brings out the cutting humor in her concepts. I also admire her simplified, stripped-down style that she used in "The BestEST Joke" and the grape leaf story. The stories using thicker blacks are somewhat less successful visually, feeling slightly over-rendered and drawn with a less confident hand. Still, Dabaie was bold in trying so many different styles for her first collection of work, and she has a strong storytelling voice. Her point of view and experiences are also obviously unusual in the world of comics, but it's not just that point of view that makes her distinctive as an artist. Her brains, sense of humor, and graphic design sense are the engine that manages to link her memories and opinions in such a bold presentation. I'm eager to see how she grows as an artist.

STABBED! and BERNIE, by Cheryl Gladstone. These autobiographical comics score major points for being really funny. Gladstone uses her background to generate laughs out of family drama, thanks mostly to the outsized personality that is her mom, Bernie. She's a "Jewlipino", a rare person who is both Jewish and Filipino. In BERNIE, Gladstone does a series of one-page gag strips with Bernie's point of view on all sorts of things. My favorite is Bernie telling young Cheryl that she was adopted, even though she wasn't. Another strip, "Motherly Advice" has Bernie offering dating advice to Cheryl's sister: "No blowjobs!" STABBED! relates another crazy anecodte: Cheryl's brother and mother both threaten to kill themselves as a means of trying to one-up each other. Her brother finally tops her by impulsively stabbing himself in the leg, which is a cold dose of reality for everyone. That bit of insanity leads everyone to cope the best they can: Bernie starts organizing her shoe closet, Cheryl starts writing in her livejournal, and her sister goes shopping. BERNIE is the later mini, and it shows. Gladstone's line is both bolder and simpler. It's much more assured, with better panel composition. STABBED! loses some of its comedic impact simply because the figures are shakier, and Gladstone tries to compensate by overrendering the backgrounds. BERNIE is more successful on a visual level simply because Gladstone makes sure to emphasize her characters above all else. She has a strong comedic voice and manages to evoke humor from a situation without relying on distancing herself from the reader. Reading these two comics made me want to see more from her.

KING-CAT #66, by John Porcellino. To say that John Porcellino is a revered figure in minicomics circles is an understatement. He long ago mastered an economy of line that strips away everything but what is essential, especially in terms of emotional content. His stories range from standard narratives to wisps of memory to story poems, all grasping at getting across the sublime on paper. "Football Weather" is a lighthearted story about playing football with the neighborhood kids, with more funny moments than the usual Porcellino story. I especially liked the revulsion he felt at the possibility of having to play on a team called "The Packers", given his status as a life-long Bears fan. I love the way this story looks--the stripped-down lines still depicting action and motion so well, various emotions shown with just a line or squiggle, and the way he creates a rainy fall atmosphere. It's beautiful and evocative. This issue is like a Porcellino primer, because he goes from a straight-ahead story like "Football Weather" to an illustrated poem in "Blue Light" to an almost wordless meditation on scenery in "Freeman Kame". Porcellino writes many of his stories on a small scale--a memory here, an anecdote or observation there. It's that very scale that creates an intimacy and warmth for a reader, that slowly lets us understand Porcellino's point of view instead of him jamming it into our faces. The urge to create autobiographical work is often a narcissistic one, wherein the creator is the most important "character" in their story. Porcellino manages to side-step that tendency by neither overselling nor underselling himself, but rather by revealing himself to be a small but not insignificant part of the world--just like everyone and everything else.

Start Anywhere: Best American Comics 2008

Rob reviews the latest volume in the Best American Comics series, edited by Lynda Barry, Matt Madden and Jessica Abel (Houghton Mifflin). (This review originally appeared at sequart.com)



As I've noted in my reviews of prior volumes of the Best American Comics series, the choices selected for inclusion reflect not only the tastes but the editorial missions of its guest editor. For Harvey Pekar in 2006, many of his choices leaned towards naturalistic stories and representations. For Chris Ware in 2007, he was interested in stories that showed its characters expressing the truth of their desires. He cleverly and painstakingly edited it such that each story in some way connected to or commented on the stories around it. The experience started with the ways children looked at the world and went from teens to adults, then switched from the ways we communicate to the ways in which we try to obtain our desires. In each (unlabeled) subsection of the anthology, he would be careful to juxtapose stories with similar themes that had wildly different graphic approaches. It was a formalist editing experiment from comics' supreme formalist that was very much a love letter to comics and its capacity to express emotion, a capacity that obviously means everything to Ware as both cartoonist and editor.

The series' permanent editorship has passed from Anne Elizabeth Moore to the cartoonists Jessica Abel & Matt Madden. It's an interesting and inspired choice, given their roots as DIY minicomics artists to their current station as having published several books. It also fits their side career as educators, with every one of these volumes a potential text. Still, the most important component of this series is the guest editor, and it was thrilling to hear that Lynda Barry was this year's editor. A longtime fixture in the alt-weekly world, she's made a huge career comeback of sorts in 2008. After being unable to land a book deal, she found a perfect home with Drawn & Quarterly and published WHAT IT IS, my current pick for book of the year. She'll also have a new collection of her ERNIE POOK strips published by D&Q.

It's interesting to compare Barry's role as editor to her role as an educator. WHAT IT IS is an extension of her creativity workshops, where she helps people avoid the Two Questions: "Is this good?" and "Does this suck?" As editor, she gets to spend time picking out nothing but what seems "good" to her. In her introduction, presented in a comic strip/collage format not unlike WHAT IT IS, she talks about the phenomenology of looking at comics. She discusses looking at a "dirty" strip as a child and not understanding the "real" punchline, but instead taking a different meaning from it. Barry also talks about how much Bil Keane's THE FAMILY CIRCUS meant to her as a child, as a gateway into this ordered world she wished she could live in. Sometimes we don't understand why we make certain connections to certain kinds of art; we only know that it is important to us. Barry chose the selections in much the same way: she thought they were Good, and encouraged each reader to create their own experience reading the book. She encouraged them to start reading anywhere.

Obviously, this was a vastly different tact than Ware's, and yet this volume is not entirely dissimilar in terms of the way works are arranged and the ways in which they comment on each other. There are some more jarring transition points, to be sure, but one can see Barry reacting to certain aspects of excerpted work and reprinting those key pages. She'd then follow that up with a completely different kind of story that shared some aspect of the same theme. Of course, these connections are entirely accidental, given that the stories are printed in alphabetical order by author. As Barry suggested, the reader makes connections that aren't necessarily really there, but the mere act of putting one comic next to another and the parts of them that are excerpted creates new connections that must be sorted out.

As one might expect, the choices here are rather eclectic, and are taken from a number of different sources. As befits an artist with such a long history in independent/alternative weeklies, there are strips here from Derf, Kaz, Matt Groening, and Alison Bechdel. A number of stories are reprinted straight from minicomics. Barry also had a way of rooting out interesting stories that weren't widely seen by many comics fans. Chris Ware's Thanksgiving covers for the New Yorker is one example, David Axe & Steve Olexa's WAR FIX excerpt is another, and Kevin Pyle's BLINDSPOT excerpt is a third.

Barry avoided a lot of obvious names and included a lot of cartoonists who have not been widely printed to date. Barry did operate under the constraint that the stories must have been printed from August 31, 2006 to September 1st, 2007. They also had to be North American (USA, Canada or Mexico). Of course, the last constraint involved the willingness of the artist and/or publisher to have their work reprinted. DC forbade the anthology from using a Paul Pope Batman story, which sort of douses complaints from some sectors of comics fandom that superhero stories were being deliberately ignored.

The first few stories center around forms of obsession and inspiration. Graham Annable's "Burden" sees a man who commits a horrible act as a way of making up for the horrible acts of his brother. The excerpt from WAR FIX is about one man's obsession with Iraq and the ways in which the reality of the situation is a shattering experience. That dance between abstract desire and reality is examined from a different angle in T. Edward Bak's "Trouble", about two teenaged girls, the possibility of their sexuality, and feelings of abandonment. A series of DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR strips by Alison Bechdel focuses on the ways in which personal and political obsessions cross over, while an excerpt from Nick Bertozzi's THE SALON details obsession and inspiration, as Braque and Picasso struggle to find the right way to express their vision. Visually, we move from Annable's cartoony line to Olexa's dense, heavy naturalism to Bak, Bechdel and Bertozzi's focus on character design.

The next several strips, in their own way, are different kinds of fables. Lilli Carre's "The Thing About Madeleine" is about a woman coming home to find herself asleep in bed, and how this one fantastic element leads to a total loss of identity. Martin Cendreda's "Hopscotch" imagines little orphan children coming out at night to play games and then disappearing when morning comes. Both "The Monkey and the Crab" (by Shawn Cheng & Sara Edward-Corbett) and "The Seven Sacks" have a classic fairy tale set-up, with talking animals and monsters being used to construct ethical dilemmas and the ways in which revenge is pointless.

Seeing the grotesques in Derf's syndicated strip THE CITY next to a Rick Geary strip about a family of murderers was an appropriate transition. Going from a family of murderers to Matt Groening's LIFE IN HELL strips starring his young sons was an unintentionally funny segue. Groening is sort of forgotten in art-comics circles these days, but he's still very much a part of that community. From kids talking about monsters we move to Eric Haven's strip about the war between reptilian monsters and mammals, "Mammalogy". From there, the reader is given a left turn as we see a Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets strip featuring Maggie as a young girl, establishing connections of her own with the outside world.

Kaz and Michael Kupperman are next with their own brands of absurdist humor. Joseph Lambert and Evan Larson, going back to the fabulist theme, give updated versions of The Tortoise and the Hare and Cupid's Arrows, respectively. Lambert sees the race as a battle of drummers, while the world goes haywire when Cupid takes a day off. A running theme in the pieces Barry selected is obsession vs. inspiration. We see the latter running rampant in the excerpt from Jason Lutes' BERLIN and Cathy Malkasian's PERCY GLOOM, while John Mejias' "Teacher's Edition" seeks to tease out the latter in the form of an art teacher's diary comics. Sarah Oleksyk's "Graveyard" and the excerpt from BLINDSPOT both deal with significant encounters that change our protagonist's lives. The pieces from Seth, Ware and Gene Yang all discuss identity and how we measure ourselves as humans.

As a reader, I was delighted to see so many stories I hadn't read but had heard about. There are a lot of surprises in here and a lot of delights that I'm glad are being seen by a wider audience. The book is handsomely designed, with a wrap-around Eleanor Davis cover and endpapers designed by Joseph Lambert. Barry really is right that it doesn't really matter where one started in this book. That said, it's interesting to see how many of the stories had some kind of fantastic element, some sense of conveying the reader elsewhere (something obviously important to Barry). There's very little in the way of autobiographical stories in this volume (just Axe, and even that's mediated by having an illustrator). Every strip is very much a story, with an emphasis on narrative. That makes sense, given Barry's style as someone who in her creativity workshops emphasizes creating connections between objects and memories to create stories.

The kind of stories she selected are unusual, varied and challenging, but they are stories or jokes nonetheless; there's no interest in formalist experimentation. In a sense, the vagueness of her own directive ("good") made her selection process all the more clear. No matter where we start, we are getting a peak into Barry's point of view both as artist and reader. And so, we have a third volume in this series that is quite dissimilar from the first two, illuminating what is important to Barry. In the case of each volume, it's up to the reader to make their own interpretation of what was selected for them. Like Chris Ware's volume, this is Linda Barry's own love letter to comics and its readers.