Thirty Days of CCS #18: Max Mose

Max Mose's EC-throwback comic Terror Terror Terror Terror (the fourth "terror" makes it funny) is his typical blend of political commentary cloaked in over-the-top horror. "Where Do They Come From" starts with a skeleton rising from the grave, going to a hardware store to get some duct tape, and then taping on a bunch of steaks to his frame to restore his "meat" form. The horror in this case is the skeleton being a former CEO who exacts his revenge, then takes his seat back at the head of the company. The story's climax comes when the bloodthirsty monster feeds by firing all of his employees after their hard work resulted in record-breaking profits. He then goes on to write a best-selling book about what he did, a hilarious and entirely accurate satire on the vampiric relationship that executives have with their companies.

"Contempt of Congress" lays on the satire thick, as the real and monstrous Congress meets to discuss how best to exploit their war dead, how to keep firing up the war machine (as Senator WarEagle, an eagle with a medal around his neck featuring a bomb, explains), and inventing new techniques like "terror drones". The coloring here is especially lurid, with sickening greens and oranges, and the proceedings get increasingly and darkly absurd, like a senator who was hollowed out by a colony of termites who "funded his candidacy and bought him a private jet". It wraps up with legislating, which occurs when the Dark Gods are summoned and laws are dumped into its mouth--which are then enacted "when it makes its out of the backend of that beast". That's as good a metaphor for Congress as I've ever seen.

"The End Is Really The Beginning, Only Seen With A Slanted View" was my favorite of the three stories, as it expertly apes the tone of a typical EC science-fiction story. There's a know-it-all explorer in his spaceship, trying to get to a new planet ahead of a hunter, a braggart who uses discoveries to further his own ego and a developer that wipes out life on a planet in order to terraform it. What's the explorer's angle? Why he's a photographer trying to record life (and sell photos to collectors with "discerning" tastes), whose process causes all life on the planet to be burnt to a crisp. The hilariously ironic way he meets his end really captures that EC feeling, but it's not exactly a happy ending, either, as the creatures on the planet are still colonized. Mose's pencils are on the rough side, but experience has taught him to draw with fewer lines and lean on his use of color to create more coherent narratives. His writing is wickedly funny, and the EC device allows him to hammer home ideas within a parodic framework that doesn't feel like he's overstating the obvious.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 17: Max Mose and Dakota McFadzean

Max Mose is one of the few CCS grads to specialize in horror comics. He is unique in that his take on horror and genre in general is brutally and pointedly satirical, creating comics that are frequently as funny as they are disturbing. His adaptation of Bram Stoker's short story The Judge's House is actually more straightforward than usual from Mose in terms of subject matter, though his own attitude towards elites is still plain as day. The story follows an arrogant young student who takes up residence in a decrepit, creepy house in order to have the proper amount of time and space to study philosophy. With a gloomy, slightly vibrating line and droopily-drawn characters, the story resembles something Edward Gorey might have drawn. The young man soon learns that a particularly vicious judge lived in the house and that he is not entirely departed from the premises, initially emerging as a huge, vicious rat. From there, there are all sorts of spills and chills that lead to our protagonist's untimely and mildly ironic end. Mose milks that drama for all it's worth while playing up the general arrogance and cluelessness of the young man; it's not so much that he deserves to die, but he's not an especially likable character. He's oblivious, arrogant and out of touch, and those qualities are what ensures his doom. Mose's figure drawing has never been better than in this comic, but his lettering was shaky. No doubt that was a function of adapting someone else's prose, but there were spots where the lettering being crammed into a too-small panel was a genuine distraction.

Dakota McFadzean, on the other hand, doesn't write explicitly about horror, yet his comics frequently have a quietly horrific quality to them. As opposed to Mose's critiques of modern, urban society, McFadzean's comics are meditations on the desolate loneliness of the country. In particular, he's interested in telling the stories of outsiders and the ways in which they seek to transcend their surroundings. He doesn't lionize them, however; the lead character here, Mary, is selfish, insensitive and immature. This pre-teen takes her best friend, Arnold (a fellow outsider), for granted. Mary struggles to come to terms with the excitement that her imagination brings her, especially with regard to play. This story nails that weird time when children start to become self-conscious about play and make-believe lest they be considered weird, and it's Mary's dedication to the idea of their being a guardian spirit in the woods that's been silenced by evil ("the Dark Empty") that shines through despite her own disbelief. That spirit is represented by an animal skull she finds in the forest; there's an especially arresting image where she tries the skull on as a mask and then goes to school late to find all of her classmates and teacher wearing animal masks as part of an art project. It's an image both jarring and amusing, which is precisely the tone McFadzean aims for in many of his stories. If the ending is a bit on the pat side, it's at least an emotional connection that feels entirely earned through Mary's attempt to redeem herself for her callousness with regard to her friend.

Brit Comics: Rob Jackson's Assorted Projects

Rob Jackson's comics generally take on a skewed or absurd version of whatever genre they happen to be occupying, be it autobio comics, fantasy, horror, suspense, etc. This is not to say that he's not concerned with plot and developing a serious story; indeed, his plots are all rock-solid and entirely respectful of genre and genre tropes. It's just that his storytelling voice is so eccentric that he can't help but make them weird and funny. These stories are not really parodies and don't go for those kinds of easy jokes. Instead, Jackson has a knack for inhabiting the setting of a genre so intently that minor details are often blown up into become huge, ridiculous plot points.

For example, in A Handful of Groats, Jackson weaves a story of a mercenary knight who comes into a village looking to make money. We eventually learn that the knight is a woman who's escaped being branded as a witch and thus keeps her helmet on at all times. There's nothing noble about this medieval world, as it's grimy, disease-ridden and generally unpleasant. The lords of the land and their enemy, a land-grubbing bishop, are all depicted as being stupid and vicious. The inn-keeper who helps the knight is a realist just trying to survive but also fully cognizant that his rulers will never stop fleecing him. From there, Jackson throws in interesting twists and turns, including another hyper-competent mercenary who opposes the protagonist, kidnapping plots, clever disguises and traps. The bishop has sharp, curved blades instead of hands, which is one of many funny details that Jackson drops into the story. Jackson rarely gives much thought to the inner lives of his protagonists except as far it will resolve the plot, yet the action is colorful enough for the reader to find out what happens to all of the characters. In his highly simplified style, he's able to get across a great deal of brutality and action in a manner that is frequently funny, thanks to this slight abstraction of ideas and images. It seems like Jackson was directly influenced by Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns like For A Fistful of Dollars, in terms of tone and the dryness of humor.

Jackson gets far wackier in his send-up of heist movies, Bradley The Tree Leaf. Available only on his blog, this is an account of a leaf that plans a heist of the Forest King's treasure from his highly secure juice factory. The leaf puts together a team that includes a safe-cracking wrapper, a blueberry, some rubber cement, a pair of mittens, etc. While the characters are all totally ridiculous, the action itself is once again  quite serious in execution, as the various stages of the heist were clearly carefully thought-out and even suspenseful. Jackson's use of color adds a lot to the story, especially since there are a lot of details dependent on making references to color. Somewhere along the way, the comic becomes a political struggle thread, as the revolting fruit are led by a blueberry named Lenin Berry, complete with a little goatee. This one feels more improvised than Jackson's other stories, which takes away from the usual tightly-plotted nature of his stories but adds to this particular effort's fanciful absurdity. In flipping from children's story to heist to political uprising, Jackson is all over the map, but the deadpan nature of his humor somehow makes it all work.

Jackson and another up-and-coming, uncategorizable artist from the UK, Kyle Baddeley-Read have started a new anthology called Rhizome, a science-fiction/fantasy themed work with some artists who make interesting use of their tropes. Max Mose's story about a group of aliens (ie, humans) going to a world run by intelligent dogs at war was both hilarious and typically thought-provoking. The hypocrisy of the people who were trying to steal the dogs' nuclear arsenal in the guise of trying to mediate their conflict was heightened when their theft was discovered and they wound up decimating them with a "hot lift-off". Mose's figure drawings are starting to become more economical even as he continues to mine EC comics narrative techniques. Jackson's "Corporation Pop" is a funny story about identity when a company hires two nearly identical looking men named Dan Smith. When one starts to have bad dreams and discovers a tiny camera in the empty next-door apartment, things start to get weird. The last panel reveals yet another Dan Smith, whose intentions seem sinister. Baddeley-Read's "Fingers" is his best-looking story to date. He loves to draw strange-looking children, and in this case, the children are toddling about, drinking something called Liquitin and living in fear of despotic robots who want to chop off their hands. This one gets its own EC-style shock ending after several pages of wonderful and awkward strangeness. Baddeley-Read's character design and screwy use of perspective make the action in this story especially weird.

Irish cartoonist John Robbins is no stranger to dark, nihilistic fantasy-related fiction. In "Swallow Me Hole", we see a woman named Aileen talking to her therapist over time about a man she knew who had a small, black hole on his stomach. It looked like it was drawn on with a marker, but something about him and her future sightings of him made her extremely anxious--especially when the hole got bigger and he started babbling about "something coming". Aileen's therapist said all the right things about setting up boundaries, stigmata, Munchausen syndrome, a desire to change circumstances and other bits of sound advice--until Aileen reveals that she now has a hole of her own. The final panel, brilliantly set up by the seemingly-bland actions of the therapist during the session, reveals that not all paranoids are wrong. Robbins' sketchy approach and use of zip-a-tone contrasts the thicker and bolder lines of the other artists in the book, but it's a perfect fit thematically. Pete Batchelor's strip about waking up in the future only to encounter a nightmare has its own twist ending, but this one's just for laughs. Jackson continues to be an exemplar in publishing genre stories that are funny without resorting to parody, and his fellow contributors snugly fit into the satirical space pioneered by EC Comics as well. The biggest difference is that the art in this book is considerably rougher, more personal and idiosyncratic.

Thirty Days of CCS #25: Max Mose, Rio Aubry Taylor, Casey Bohn, Bill Bedard

Max Mose's recent comic The Grove is another of his sci-fi/horror commentaries on capitalism and culture at large. With a beautiful and disturbing silkscreened cover, this full-color piece (printed on a risograph, perhaps?) is one of his most striking works. Working in similar waters as Matthew Thurber, the story concerns a rapacious city literally draining the inspiration out of its artists for the benefit of its corporate classes, overseen by a sort of magical deity of capitalism. When one of the city's citizens rebels, he's shot out of a cannon into the nearby forest. Of course, when he messes with the "unnatural" order of things, a reprisal is ordered and the book's final conflict occurs. Mose leavens this critique with absurd imagery, jokes, self-aware critiques of his critiques and a general sense of awareness that the state of nature is no more welcoming or just than humanity's need to construct and eventually exploit its resources and then each other. Mose's pencils have become much sharper and cleaner while still retaining the grotesque and frequently bug-eyed quality that makes his pages pop. His use of color has been a big boost in getting him to make his pages cleaner and simpler, but he also seems to have found just the right groove and sense of confidence in letting go of clutter and over-rendering. That new simplicity only makes the images we do see all the more powerful, weird and funny.

Bill "Billage" Bedard is another CCS cartoonist whose work I only saw for the first time at SPX. Coffee Hunters represents the silly, sketchy side of the artist. With cartoony characters and stick figure warriors that are heavy on gesture and body language in telling their story, this mythological spoof features a tribe hunting for wild coffee. Rife with coffee and bean puns, this scratchy little mini is packed with eye pops and other visual jokes as well. It's dopey and good-natured, understanding that this is a bit of entertaining fluff that's nonetheless prepared with care and affection. On the other hand, his full adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic lyrical poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner represents the serious, delicate side of the artist. Bedard truly engages the poem, using a thin line but a lot of grey-scale shading to add a bit of depth. Still, the whole story conveys the ethereal, monstrous, fantastic and spiritual aspects of the poem, with the Mariner's spectacles giving him a further sense of removal from his crew and the reader as well. The nightmarish qualities of the poem translate quite well to comics, with a number of lines leaving Bedard plenty of room for visual interpretation regarding violence, spirits and storms. In other, more still scenes, Bedard captures that deathly tranquility as well, his illustrations a fine counter-point to Taylor's rich and evocative language. Bedard's natural sketchy, grungy style eventually takes over the story, which is all for the better for this comic, as it's not a neat or comforting tale.

Rio Aubry Taylor's first issue of the moving and unsettling Love, Currently sees him break new ground as an artist.Told in a distinctive white-on-black page with various color fields and patterns popping into panels, it's a story of a man named Lan who fails to come to terms with his own anger and fear after the death of his daughter. First his marriage disintegrates, and then his life in general goes to hell. This is a first-person account of his own attempt at self-destruction and abandonment of his faith in the world, god and humanity. Taylor's art is haunting and evocative, as the way he often likes to use abstract patterns, light fields and dense cross-hatching serves a narrative purpose as a reflection of Lan's consciousness and emotional state. At just eight pages, it's Taylor's most coherent, dense and emotional work; I am eager to see where he will be going with this series.

Casey Bohn is one of the more distinctive stylists I've seen from CCS. His comics have tended toward loopy science-fiction that is conversant in all of the genre's tropes yet subtly commenting on its cliches and tendency toward obvious metaphors. It's a gentle nudging to be sure, as Bohn's art both celebrates its Jack Kirby influence with its bold, almost abstract use of thick lines and odd angles and is well aware of the silliness of its imagery. President X concerns an astronaut who becomes aware that aliens are about to invade Earth and establish a puppet president (the titular President X, who barely appears in this comic despite his distinctive appearance--it's a sort of shaggy dog element). It takes him years to get back, and no one believes him but a hilariously depicted group of hippies. Of course, they prove to be crucial allies, but Bohn plays up the violence vs non-violence angle in an amusing, heightened manner. The climactic fight is absolutely hilarious, as the eyeball-shaped alien is thwarted by its own digestive juices ("I'm eating myself! I...I'm delicious!"). Bohn represents the sort of humorist whose knowledge of and ability to work within a genre sharpens the humor within the piece while providing a credible, enjoyable story.

Autoptic and Everything Before in Minneapolis

From Friday 8/16 to Sunday 8/18, Minneapolis was the alt-comics capital of the US. Combining the resources of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), the minds behind PFC and the organizing committee behind Autoptic, comics fans were treated with a true comics arts festival. The focus was on guest of honor Jaime Hernandez, who gave a talk on Friday at MCAD in support of the closing of his exhibit in the MCAD gallery. However, collaboration was the theme of the weekend, as a week's worth of collaborations between North American and European artists was on display on Saturday. All of these artists attended the inaugural Autoptic show. Let's take a closer look at each event.

1. Jaime Hernandez exhibit and talk at MCAD. Friday night was the closing of the Zak Sally-curated exhibition of Jaime Hernandez' work, with the artist himself giving a talk in a packed auditorium. I had an opportunity to go through the show slowly before the crowds arrived. While I've never been a big proponent of comics in galleries, I thought Sally did a fine job in giving interested parties a good reason to study the show closely. Before one entered the main exhibition room, there was a wall dedicated to media coverage about "Los Bros" as well as posters and other ephemera. Sally sensibly arranged the art to reflect Hernandez's evolution as an artist over the years, dividing it into a variety of eras. He was careful to select a few stories here and there and display several pages in sequence, a decision that helped preserve the sequential nature of the work. There were also displays of the original, self-published Love and Rockets #1 and dozens of issues and collections under glass.

The top two pages were cut up and combined into the bottom page for "Spring 1982".

Hernandez is known as one of the greatest comics draftsmen in the world, so getting to see original art was fascinating. In the early days, he actually used quite a bit of whiteout. In the pages I saw from the recent story "The Love Bunglers", there was almost none. The real discovery of this exhibit is that Hernandez had a few out-take pages from several stories, including the only extant original art from "Flies On The Ceiling" (the originals were "lost" after being displayed in a gallery). Another outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets" was thrown out because it depicts Hopey writing a letter to Maggie while she's touring; Jaime realized that Hopey simply wasn't the kind of person who writes letters and scrapped the idea. Other pages were simply abandoned after a panel or two. It was also interesting to see him draw a couple of pages and later cannibalize them, combining them into a single page as he switched around or threw away panels. Also on display were a few pages from his scripts, which he continues to write on yellow legal pads. He used to throw them away until someone urged him to keep them. He told me he now has a huge stack of them and doesn't know what to do with them. I suggested he donate them to one of the many universities now collecting comics-related work. He said he's thought about that, but that he's also thought about selling them (he's selling some of his art now).

Outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets".

Stories highlighted in the exhibition include the aforementioned, "Spring 1982", "Home School"; and "The Death of Speedy"; Sally hit the highlights hard. At the end of the exhibition, there were two couches and a bookshelf with various volumes of L&R for readers to peruse. The crowd then streamed into the building's big auditorium on the campus of MCAD. It was standing room only in the hall, with a video feed being piped into the overflow room next door. Sally interviewed Hernandez in his heartfelt, passionate style, and it was clear that the artists had established a clear connection in working together on this project. As Sally enthused later, Hernandez indeed told stories he hadn't heard before. A big focus was on the role of his family in becoming a cartoonist. Jaime talked at length about his mother, who used to collect comics in the 40s and 50s but had to hide them from her own mother. He talked about drawing with his brothers one day, and his mom brought out a stack of drawings she had made of various comic book and comic strip characters. He and his brothers were awed by the fact that she had done this and it became something very cool to them.

The author in the reading section of the exhibition.

He noted that he and his brothers had simply always drawn comics. "It was just what we did. Get up, eat breakfast, draw comics". It was a cheap way to get a bunch of little kids to quiet down for a while. His older brothers did it, so he had to do it too. Sally made a joke about wanting to have introduced the Crumb brothers to the Hernandez brothers. I ran with that idea and asked Jaime about the hierarchy in the family, noting that Charles Crumb was the comics boss of the family and the other two brothers followed along. I wondered if he was ever told to draw a certain way, or if he was told he was doing something wrong. Jaime replied that it was never like that. Instead, it was just a constant sense of excitement from his brothers, but especially Gilbert:. "Hey, let's draw!" There were suggestions about fun things they could draw together but never orders.

An outtake from "Flies on the Ceiling".

Jaime said that during the academic year, comics were frequently forbidden until they got their grades up. When summer rolled around, his mom would take out a huge bag of Archies, Dells, Gold Keys, etc. (Mario's Marvel collection was considered to be "the good stuff" and off-limits for rough re-readings.) Those frequent re-readings refined Jaime's eye and made him realize what excited him. He remembered an issue of Dennis The Menace (most likely drawn by Al Wiseman) where Dennis and Joey walk down a street, having a conversation. This excited young Jaime for reasons he didn't understand, but he started to love the scenes in super-hero comics were they were in civilian clothes instead of the fight scenes. That launched him on his way.

Zak Sally and Jaime Hernandez. Photo by June Julien Morrisey.

There were any number of other interesting anecdotes as Sally and Hernandez got to the heart of how comics and music were meaningful to them. One common theme to Hernandez talking about his own comics is authenticity; he wants to depict things accurately and honestly. That extends to growing up Mexican-American in Texas and California, to the punk scene in early 80s Los Angeles, to how women think and act, to writing gay and lesbian characters. When I mentioned to him that a mutual cartoonist friend was working as an apartment manager in LA like Maggie, he said that he had run into her and she had told him that story. His main concern: "Did I get it right?" The other interesting theme that emerged about him over the weekend is how important it is to him to be part of the current comics scene. There was a long period where "the phones stopped ringing" and he and Gilbert stopped being hot cartoonists. The show and the reception he got the entire weekend spoke to just how important he is to young fans and cartoonists alike.

2. PFC Exhibition. Coinciding with the Jaime Hernandez show and the Autoptic festival was Pierre Feuille Ciseaux #4, or "Rock Paper Scissors". Organized by the ebullient June Julien Misserey and brought to the US by way of Zak Sally's suggestion, this was a weeklong experimental comics camp that brought together artists from North America and Europe. PFC is all about constraint comics, wherein artists are asked to draw stories given time limits and particular limitations. In one "game", an artist would draw a panel. The next artist would continue the story by drawing a panel above that panel, to the right of the panel and under that panel. The next artist would have to draw five panels, and so on, all the while keeping up the narrative. Another game saw the artists have to draw themselves captured by Wonder Woman's lasso and forced to tell the truth about something. Another game, called "Fuck This Thing" (printed as a free mini) forced each artist to draw the the thing they hated drawing the most until they got sick of it; they got to write "Fuck drawing thing x" as a sort of reward.

The roster of artists included Kevin Huizenga, John Porcellino, Eleanor Davis, Lisa Hanawalt, Genevieve Castree, Jim Rugg, Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carre', Marc Bell, and Tom Kaczynski from the US and Canada. Representing France and Belgium were J.C. Menu, Misserey, David Libens, Max de Radigues, Benoit Pretesille, Domitille Collardey, Eugene Riousse, Sandrine Martin, and Pierre Ferrero. All of these cartoonists have reached their mature style, but all of them are still in their primes. There was a careful balance of styles, from naturalistic to cartoony to minimalist. The artists also collaborated with a group of MCAD students on a number of projects, and the students came up with their own games as well. Something remarkable about this assemblage is that even by Saturday, the last day of PFC, the artists still couldn't stop drawing. A number of professional cartoonists sat in with those stopping by for a public zine/mini making workshop. Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis made a last-second mini for Autoptic. When I stopped by the main studio on Saturday, the artists were hanging around, helping each spot blacks and make beautiful, accordion-style minicomics.

The Saturday Comics Workshop at MCAD. The author's wife is in the lower left-hand corner. Photo taken from PFC website (presumably by June Misserey).

In speaking to the participating artists, most of them were apprehensive to begin the week. The joke of the situation was that every artist felt like they weren't as good as their neighbor--they couldn't draw as well or as seemingly effortlessly as everyone else. That was true from John Porcellino to Jim Rugg, representing a beautiful and minimalist style to a highly elaborate, detailed line, respectively. Critic Xavier Guilbert  discussed how being forced to work with another cartoonist, especially a stranger, was a way of breaking the ice for you. You each had a project to do and had to find solutions together, which naturally led to talking about everything else. Menu noted that artists from both Europe and North America not only have drawing in common, but the common language of storytelling. Even someone like Marc Bell, who works in a kind of dream logic, is working in that common language of narrative. Being forced to engage in these games forced the artists to work in their most spontaneous and natural styles, putting down their purest line before doubt and the need to clean up lines or the urge to choke a drawing to death took over.

The assignment board for "Break Something".

The ostensible goal of the week was to create a screenprinted comic. Each artist was asked to pick a character from a list. A North American artist was randomly paired up with a European artist (in most cases), combining their two characters with the theme "Break Something".  The screenprinting studio Aesthetic Apparatus printed them and they were cut on site as the artists pitched in with folding and cutting. There are a lot of great collaborations, but the Kevin Huizenga ("The Devil") and Sandrine Martin ("God") was the best, as God was a cartoonist and the Devil kept burning up his work. I also quite enjoyed Eleanor Davis & Max de Radigues doing a Soldier and a Corpse. All of the cartoonists used the sort of rich color screen that popped when screenprinted on thick paper stock.

Another highlight of the day was getting a guided tour to the students' exhibition of their PFC challenges by Barb Schulz, a professor in the comics program at MCAD (I should note that Sally is also a professor there). She talked a bit about particular students and the curriculum for undergraduates. MCAD has offered cartooning as a major since 1997 and they're now up to fifty or so cartooning majors in a school that has about 700 undergraduates. A number of the cartoonists wound up tabling at Autoptic. Mandie Brasington was one interesting artist who runs the Dead Cartoonist's Society, which published an anthology. Dawson Walker is a senior who has serious cartooning chops. Frosh Rosemary Vallero-O'Connell's cartoons for PFC really stood out; despite her lack of publishing experience, it's clear that she has real talent and ambition. I'll have a more detailed MCAD artist report for my High-Low column over at tcj.com soon, once I plow through the pile of minis I got from the cartoonists who tabled at Autoptic.

L to R: Genevieve Castree, Zak Sally, John Porcellino, Jaime Hernandez, Max de Radigues. Photo by June Julien Misserey.

There was an interesting lightness I observed in the PFC artists as I saw them working. Combining the social aspects of a convention with an environment that demanded actual productivity led to work that was mostly light-hearted and even crude in nature, but there was also a lot of cleverness and truth-telling to be found in the PFC exhibition. The sheer amount of comics they produced was staggering. Even Jaime Hernandez got into the act on Friday night, drawing a couple of images for a Nancy animation and getting in on a couple of games. Lisa Hanawalt naturally started a comic involving a woman's ass, knowing that Jaime was taking part and knowing that he'd "knock it out of the park" when he got to it. (Needless to say, he did.) Porcellino and Misserey both described the week as one of the best of their lives. I imagine a number of the other artists concurred. The lingering memory I'll carry of the day is Porcellino flitting from table to table and room to room, cracking jokes, spotting blacks and whistling Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy".

I'll be curious to see what the future of PFC might be. The last event in France had all sorts of logistical problems, and there was talk that that might have been the last one. Bringing it to the US was a logical move that obviously bore great fruit. I could see the event moving to England for a year, given the now-high concentration of interesting cartoonists there. I could also see it coming back to the US. The Center for Cartoon Studies would be a logical home. SCAD in Savannah might work as well, or perhaps Columbia College in Chicago (Ivan Brunetti would be a total natural in this scenario!). Those institutions might have the money to make this possible. A longshot but interesting possibility might be SAW in Gainesville, which would be fitting because Tom Hart is a longtime OuBaPo participant. This is a worthwhile experiment that foments enthusiasm and productivity, and I hope to see it continue on an annual basis.

The funkiness of the Aria Building.

3. Autoptic. The show itself was a one-day affair held at the Aria Building, a renovated former warehouse and theater that's now an all-purpose event space. Others have raved about the space for the purposes of this show and I have to agree. The exposed brick, the quirky accents and the airy feel of the place reminded me a bit of the Puck Building in the MOCCA festival's early days. The fact that the show was free combined with a sunny day meant a number of curious passers-by came to take a look, given that the building is in a walkable part of downtown near the Mississippi River. The organizers of the show smartly had a hot dog stand and a food truck set up outside the show, and there were raves about both. There was clearly a great deal of thought that went into any number of decisions related to the show, even as they ran into some last-minute snafus.For example, the programming for the show was supposed to be at Alliance Francaise next door, but there was a mix-up in scheduling on their part that froze out Autoptic after 4pm. So the organizers quickly made a room in the back of Aria into a makeshift programming area. This had mixed results, as the microphones were all hand-held and the ambient noise out in the hall muffled a number of panel members. Luckily, the room was small enough that most information got across.

The show itself was just the right size for a one-day event, with just over a hundred exhibitors. Some of them were printmakers, local radio stations and local independent music labels. A few artists noted that prints seemed to be the biggest sellers in the room. For the most part, the room was still dominated by cartoonists. What I found interesting about the character of this show was that it drew a number of west coast cartoonists who I'd never met who were able to afford a ticket to Minneapolis (and in the case of some, drive there). This show was also a chance for the thriving Minneapolis comics scene to make itself known, especially students and graduates of MCAD. Of course, the American and French PFC artists also tabled at this show and made a big splash. West coast artists on hand included Elijah Brubaker, Rusty Jordan, David King, Greg Means, Tom Neely, and Virginia Paine. There were a number of Chicago artists who made the short trip up, including Sam Sharpe, Laura Park, Keiler Roberts and Marnie Galloway. The locals filled out many of the other spots, including Anna Bongiovanni, Kevin Cannon, Zander Cannon, JP Coovert, Max Mose, Will Dinski, 2D Cloud, Tom Kaczynski, and MCAD students and alumni like Dawson Walker, Leigh Luna, Mandie Brasington, Danielle Chenette, Alexis Cooke, Amara Leipzig, Jay Ragorshek and many others. There were any number of other familiar faces and micropublishers, but seeing that local color in a juried show gave the show an unusually high level of overall quality.

The Dead Cartoonist Society table from MCAD. L to R: Jen Silverman, Joel McKeen, Kitty Berry

Sales ranged from low to solid. John Porcellino said he did quite well and sold a lot of comics to non-comics readers who were curious, including plenty of his own King Cat series. Annie Koyama also reported good sales despite having nothing new for the show. Having Jaime Hernandez on hand certainly helped Fantagraphics (repped by the tireless Jen Vaughn) move a decent number of books. The total attendance for the day neared 1500, which is about what the defunct Minneapolis Indie Expo (MIX) did in its second year. The low sales were perhaps not surprising give the fact that the show drew in lots of local fans who weren't necessarily sophisticated comics readers. However, even a publisher like Secret Acres, which pretty much took a bath at the show, said that they want to come back if possible when the show is held again in two years because of the show's many other attractive aspects.

I had a strong hand in programming the show's panels after volunteering in the early going. Bill Kartalopoulos suggested doing a Q&A with Menu. I didn't get a chance to see it, but Bill said that the Alliance Francaise had a bottle of white wine on the table and the two of them drained it over the course of an hour, leading to a very relaxed panel. I put together the "Impact and Future of Micropublishing" panel and handed it over to the very capable hands of local writer Greg Hunter, who was also a big help in the A/V department during one of my panels. That panel included Justin Skarhus (2D Cloud), Virginia Paine (Sparkplug), Kartalopoulos (Rebus Books), and Barry Matthews (Secret Acres). Zak Sally moderated a panel on "Independent Culture" that included Koyama, a printmaker and a indy record label producer, while Isaac Cates' "Animals as People" panel had Lisa Hanawalt, Anders Nilsen and Sally.

L to R: Max Mose, Anna Bongiovanni, Eamon Espey, Eleanor Davis.

I moderated two panels. The first, "The Dark Roots of Myth" took an unexpected and personal turn in the early going. Featuring Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, Eamon Espey, Max Mose and Anna Bongiovanni, each artist noted that their frequently dark and fictional comics are rooted in autobiographical concerns. For example, Davis said that she is every one of the characters in her stories, and so conflicts presented are really internal conflicts. Espey said that some of his violent, meat-grinding imagery reflects an unpleasant job he was working at the time. Skaalrud and Bongiovanni both said that comics are a way of working through their own personal issues without having to talk about it at a conscious level. Bongiovanni said that she depicts motherhood and babies in the unusual way that she does as a way of working through her own childhood trauma. Mose works through political issues that burn at him (like the Louisiana oil spill) using monsters and horror so as not to be didactic. All of them mentioned using primal imagery as something direct and easy to understand by a reader and easy to translate as a creator.

L to R: Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, the author.

The second panel was a conversation with Jaime Hernandez and Lisa Hanawalt. I was well-prepared for my first panel, but I was mostly winging it here, counting on Lisa to make Jaime laugh for an hour. This is more or less what happened, to my great delight. I had a few questions prepped for them, mostly along the lines of when they first encountered the other's work, what you saw in their work that you wish you could do, etc. Right before the panel, Lisa brought Domitille Collardey up to the panel to participate, to my great delight. Jaime recalled meeting Lisa in a van at Comicon in San Diego, getting a ride with Matt Groening and Lisa to some location. He remembered being thrilled to actually hang out with some of the younger cartoonists. Then he said that he signed up as "an old man" on twitter, stalking his favorite young cartoonists. Domitille said that one of her crowning achievements in life was getting Jaime to favorite a fart joke that she made, but he replied that he favorites all fart jokes on twitter.

 L to R: Domitille Collardey, Lisa Hanawalt, Jaime Hernandez, the author.

The panel was an interesting mix of frivolity and sincerity. After taking up about half the panel with my questions (mostly of the explanatory nature mentioned earlier), I turned it over to Lisa, who had told me she had taken some notes during Jaime's lecture on Friday night. Jaime talked a bit about how embarrassing but true it is that he has a crush on a number of his characters, but especially Maggie, because he "knows" her best. Paradoxically, he puts her through the emotional wringer because he's interested in seeing her display a range of emotions in different situations, but he exclaimed that when he does it, he wants to yell, "I'm with you, Maggie!" He also revealed a couple of simple narrative tricks that were head-slappingly obvious when he talked about them but were things that I had never noticed. Because he knows Maggie, we the reader get full access to her thoughts and feelings, but from the point of view of an outsider. Hopey is a character who is a little more unknowable, and so the reader never gets to see her thought balloons. Ray is a sort of reader substitute so his comics feature first-person narration in captions.

The artists also talked about process, with both Lisa and Domitille both being relieved to hear that Jaime encounters problems he sometimes can't fix when trying to tell a story. Jaime mentioned putting some stories in a drawer and coming back a few months later to see if the problems magically worked themselves out. If not, back in the drawer they go. Lisa described her version of this process as putting her pages in a drawer in order to "let them think about what they did." Lisa and Domitille also talked a bit about Pizza Island, their old studio were all the artists were women, which received some funny publicity as a result. I noted that Pizza Island is the sort of concept that Jaime would have done twenty years ago.

At one point, Jaime suggested that Lisa aim some of the questions meant for him over to Domitille. On cue, Lisa said, "So Domitille, what was it like to grow up as a Mexican-American?" Jaime ended the panel by saying that he was happy to do it to tell the artists how much of a crush he had on their work and to let them know it. Lisa elaborated on a point I made toward the end, in that Jaime is drawing packed rooms and has a lot of younger fans: "Deal with it!"

The Autoptic organizers spelling out "Thanks!!" at the end of the show.

Regarding Autoptic as a whole: as others have noted, the lighting was too low in some parts of the room, there was no easy access to an ATM, and while the crowd was decent, many of them weren't interested in buying comics. Still, there was a tremendous amount of goodwill in the crowd and affection toward the organizers and volunteers (mostly MCAD students) who tried to solve problems and offer help as quickly as they could. Like the city of Minneapolis itself, the home team wanted the out-of-towners to have a great time and love their city and scene as much as they did. The show and the city certainly made a believer out of me.

Critic Xavier Guilbert and the author, both in black, at the kick-off party on Friday night. Photo by June Julien Misserey.

4. The Social Scene. I generally tend not to focus on this sort of thing very much in my convention reports, because it's not generally relevant to the show, and no one really cares unless you were there. That said, the kick-off party, held at the CO Exhibitions building that was housing an Anders Nilsen-curated exhibit of the PFC artists, featured cheap PBR and a number of interesting musical/performance art pieces. This is when guests of the show started showing up en masse, and the place was packed and full of nervous energy. After Autoptic, there was an afterparty at a restaurant/bar called the Red Stag Supper Club. While the ambiance and weather were both absolutely perfect, the restaurant was a bit overwhelmed by the crowds of cartoonists and service was spotty as a result. When the hour grew later, the place emptied out of non-cartoonists patrons and a great time was had by all. The evening benefited from the general good vibes of the show, as crowds ebbed and flowed together and artists of multiple generations entertained each other. Goodbyes were long and lingering, and the conversations ranged from serious discussions of art to fall-down laughing anecdotes. I know of at least one editor who got a cartoonist to quickly sign on to his anthology as a result of their conversation. Even though some cartoonists and publishers didn't make a lot of money, the low-key vibe and relatively small size of the show (the juried guest list was top notch) made for an intimate and pleasant weekend for all and struck a powerful claim for the Minneapolis comics scene as one of the most exciting in North America.

Special thanks to the ever-amazing Laura Jent-Clough for taking photographs (all photos taken by her unless otherwise credited). and to Annie Koyama for being Annie Koyama.

Recent CCS Work: Sophie Goldstein, Beth Hetland, Max Mose

Let's look at some recent work by grads and students from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS):

Fugue #3, by Beth Hetland. This is the third and final chapter of "a family in three parts" and the ways in which creativity and performance intersect in the lives of many of them. The first chapter focused on Hetland's mother, an aspiring concert pianist who freezes up before a big show and abandons performance. The second chapter focuses on her having children and how each of them related to music. Beth and her older sister never quite had the skill, but the youngest daughter, Rachel, was every bit as talented as her mother. She unfortunately suffered the same fate: freezing up before a big show and abandoning the piano. Both comics were heartbreaking in their own way, and the third chapter is both epilogue and a chance for healing. This chapter circles around to Hetland herself and her younger sister's graduation, dancing around her recent reticence to play. One thing I love about these comics is how saturated they are in music; for this family, it is very much a second language, a way of communicating. Even non-experts like Beth can't help but know and truly appreciate so many complex pieces, something that she cleverly weaves in and out of the comic by using a sort of erasure technique on musical notes. Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" is the piece most often always in the background like this, which is fitting considering its highs and lows. There are two killer pages in this comic. The first is a 3 x 3 grid where each row sees each child at the piano in the left panel, an empty piano in the middle panel and each child as an adult sitting upright doing what it is they really have grown to love as adults. It's a beautiful, succinct way of summing up the family's relationship to music and the ways in which their individual passions were nurtured and encouraged. That's recapitulated on the last page, when watching the film Little Women with her mother, and transforms the line "Now it [a piano] will make music again" into "you will make your own music." What is life but finding one's own rhythm? Hetland's character designs are simple, which helps make her occasionally complicated page designs all the more easy to immediately apprehend. Her anatomy is a bit wonky at times (a number of drawings needed to be tightened up), but never to the detriment of the story's flow. This is a fine first major solo work for a talented and emotionally perceptive artist.

Betsy and Mothership Blues, by Sophie Goldstein. Despite using sci-fi trappings, these comics by Goldstein are really about deep and abiding loneliness and alienation. Mothership Blues is about a couple of glorified space janitors aboard a sort of living slug spaceship, going about their day. One of them is in love with the captain, while another makes friends with these ghostly mold creatures. Goldstein uses a clear, bold and cartoony line to propel this story of an unrequited crush and an unfulfilled desire to create family. She even uses a seemingly throwaway plot element to good use in the book's final act, adding a sense of doomed poignancy for one of the two janitors who realizes the other is his only friend.

Betsy packs an even stronger punch. Skimping on details, Goldstein slowly reveals a young woman living in a futuristic society where she has to wear an atmosphere-tight suit just to go outside who works at something called "Future Inc." She cheerfully greats a lumpen creature (one of many) called Betsy. It's clear that this is a child and the woman is trying to train her. Goldstein's understanding of body language carries this story powerfully, Details like the way little Betsy reaches up to the woman to be picked up, the way she clings to her, the way she smiles when praised and the way she ambles along indicate an artist who has a real understanding of what children are like. These scenes of tenderness make the end of the story all the more gut-wrenching, as the real purpose of the creature-children is made clear. In just twelve pages, Goldstein gets at the heart of an ethical debate that rages today, regarding bio-engineering our children and what we would do if we knew a special-needs child was going to be the result. The story just makes that debate all the more pointed. Goldstein's work reminds me a bit of Eleanor Davis or Dash Shaw in terms of the way they use sci-fi trappings to express complex emotional truths.

Terror Terror Terror, by Max Mose. Channeling his inner Rory Hayes (not to mention Al Feldstein), Mose does off-kilter horror stories with a touch of the ridiculous.His balance of genuinely scary ideas with grotesque art and a touch of parody reminds me a great deal of Rob Jackson's genre work. The opening story features death being pissed off at a bunch of people permanently on life-preserving machines, musing that he was going to reincarnate one of them as a scorpion. Like a Lewis Trondheim story, there's a lot of ridiculous dialogue surrounding a very sound idea. The same goes for "Welcome to Castle Gorgon", a Gothic potboiler about a marriage doomed to a snake-bitten end. "The Cap of the Wolf" is a fantasy story about a top-notch archer who kills a tribe of marauding wolf-skin clad men, including its lyncanthropic leader. When he kills the leader and takes the titular wolfskin cap, he naturally goes crazy and unleashes a greater evil -- only to be exploited in an ironic fashion at the end of the story. Finally, "Space Terror Maggots" is exactly what it sounds like: a grotesque story with wooden leads and stilted dialogue (not unlike a 50s sci-fi flick) who discover a series of asteroids inhabited by brain-eating maggots. The revelation in this comic is the way Mose is using color to create a sort of queasy, over-the-top and non-intuitive series of effects that really drive the emotional core of the action.

More From Max Mose: Basalt Idol #1

There are a surprising number of artists who have graduated from the Center for Cartoon Studies whose primary interest is genre work. Of course, with artists like Denis St. John and Max Mose, genre in this case specifically refers to horror and science-fiction. Mose's new series is a big step up for him, both conceptually and in terms of execution. Like most of the increasingly large wave of alt-cartoonists who make horror comics, it seems like there's a significant influence from Fort Thunder as well as the godfather of alt/genre mash-ups, Gary Panter. Mose doesn't simply impose an insane sci-fi horror template on the world as he knows; instead, his version of reality contains the kind of brutal satire that Panter does so well. Mose's sly commentary on consumer culture and our own complicity in its dominance is a running theme, as the monsters often spring forward as a sort of cosmic, impersonal way to punish humanity. For Mose, coming up with ideas has never been a problem; instead, his earlier comics frequently lacked clarity.

With the first issue of his new series, Basalt Idol, Mose manages to touch on any number of horror and sci-fi tropes in his quirky, slight stiff and off-kilter style with much greater clarity and flow. Considering that this story is twice as complicated as his earlier works, this greater clarity is crucial to the success of the book. Subtitled "Monster Movie", the issue essentially boils down to a fight between a giant monster and a giant robot. Which is good and which is evil shifts as the issue unfolds, but Mose doesn't skimp on ridiculous, full-page shots of mayhem and destruction. What's more interesting about the comic is the commentary on the division in society between those living up in the clouds (complete with a sticky cocoon like substance that envelops homeowners in times of extreme crisis) and those on the ground.  While the monsters are fighting, a revolutionary group (led by an anthropomorphic dog, cat and turtle) sneaks around, waiting to take advantage of the carnage.

The monster itself is a wonderfully bizarre mishmash of multiple heads, stinger arms, lamprey sucker-mouth projections and tree trunk limbs. In typical monster movie fashion, he's unearthed from a deep slumber by greedy industrialists after an opening page featuring a fuzzy creature searching for his perfect mate, only to be captured and eaten by the monster. The reader learns that his monstrous form was the product of a curse from a different planet, forced to consume souls after being taken prisoner. While Mose uses plenty of dense hatching and cross-hatching, he opens up the page for the action scenes, wildly varying his panel formatting from page to page in order to keep the reader off-balance while retaining clarity by allowing for more white space. Simply by resisting the urge to fill up every panel with detail, Mose made this crazy comic far easier to parse. That said, Mose's lettering is still a bit wonky, and his word balloon placement and design can sometimes be distracting. His actual handwriting works quite well as a lettering style, but he has problems keeping it under control and consistently readable, especially when he vacillates in how big he makes his letters. Tightening that up a bit will allow the reader to focus more on his delightfully ragged and weird line as well as the multilayered nature of his narratives.

The Strange World of Max Mose

Max Mose is unusual for a graduate of the Center For Cartoon Studies in that his work is quirkier and darker than most of his fellow alums, yet still sits squarely in the genre camp. The closest comparison I can make is it's a bit like alum Dennis St. John but also a lot like the sort of thing that Matthew Thurber does, only not as polished. Beyond the brushy and scratchy nature of his line and the air of gloom & dread he applies to the page's atmosphere with his use of grey, Mose's dialogue is deliberately ornate in an almost stilted manner. The dialogue is anti-naturalistic and even bombastic at times, as characters speak in a patois that seems to belong to a bygone era. He's crazily ambitious, with ideas, jokes, weird asides and other strangeness just spilling off the page. There's going to be a seasoning period for him where he refines his technique and ideas (both are a little on the sloppy side), learning how to stay loose while staying in control, but he's an artist whose next comic will be an exciting event.

Tenebrous feels like an early attempt; it's an 8 page mini at roughly 8.5 x 11". There's a lot of interesting imagery and weird ideas to be found in this literally-titled comic: a hall filled with columns wherein a king looks away from an idol painted red; a toy chest that opens to reveal a scene being performed for children; and an entity trapped by "links and waves". In order to work, the comic demanded a level of precision and balance that just wasn't there; several figures are drawn awkwardly in terms of anatomy and how they relate to others in space, for example. This comic was interesting as a visual exercise, but not much else.




On the other hand, (Agent of the) Counter-Revolution plays with genre conventions and dream-logic comics, making interesting connections between the two. This was the most Thurberesque of his comics, following a mad scientist in a jungle, his greatest creation (a sort of robot Frankenstein monster) and an immortal space goddess in their various quests. There's an actual narrative to be found here, crazy as it is, but Mose is never afraid to stop on a dime and twist around the reader's understanding of reality as the focus unexpectedly shifts from character to character. The design of the comic is interesting, with a cover dominated by lurid pinks and greens and a strange shape (6 x 8", printed landscape). The dialogue is so deliberately weird that it almost feels like a lost Fletcher Hanks comic; consider lines like "Now look at that thing like it's the ugly truth on a chalky ball of dung" and "Reassuringly, the sound coming from this hollow and the whir of my atomic heart a very similar" give one a flavor of how the entire story reads.



All Aboard is the longest of the three minis, a 50-page maritime horror extravaganza that goes over the top ten pages into the story and then continues to pile on from there. In terms of concept, story and tone, Mose crafted a story that is part period-piece romance drama, part horror story, part monster story and a sly parody of all three. Mose doesn't quite pull it off in terms of visuals; his line is frequently wobbly in a way that's distracting. He vacillates between too much detail and too little; backgrounds drop in and out of panels with no warning. There's an occasional awkwardness in the way his characters pose, creating stiffness where there should be fluidity.


That said, there are some amazing images in this book. The close-ups on various characters' faces are a constant source of amusement, thanks in part to the strange angles Mose employs. The way the eyes bug out are especially interesting to look at, and they remind me both of St. John's work as well as Lauren Weinstein's drawings. Of course, the real gems are the drawings of various sea creatures storming a yacht, intent on murdering everyone therein. It's not enough for flying fish to bite crew members; an octopus slithers down a hall and shoots a man with a gun it's pried away from him. A monstrous creature in a kitchen sink slices open a man's skull and sucks his brain out, shouting "The ocean of the soul is where I MARAUD". A giant octopus drags a helicopter underwater. All the while, the family drama plays out, revolving around the daughter of the heir of an oil corporation wanting to marry a business rival.

One gets the sense that All Aboard was produced with some deadline pressure involved, given that it was likely a comic he was doing as an end-of-semester project at CCS. This accounts for some of the sloppiness as well as some of the shortcuts he takes. When I speak of sloppiness, I don't mean that Mose should try to use a clear line or "draw prettier" for lack of a better phrase. Instead, he needs to make every line feel like it's in the right place. Thurber and Weinstein draw using a deliberately grotesque style, but their control over their lines makes it work for them. Mose seems like he's bursting with ideas and simply needs to corral his imagination and be a little more patient in how he depicts it. I am eager to see what he will do with his next long-form work.