Getting Real With GIving Birth: Minis From Meghan Turbitt

Some of the best comics of the past year or so have been about pregnancy and giving birth in particular. Meghan Turbitt adds to this list with two of the best and funniest minis of the year: Meghan Turbitt's Pregnant & Fired and Laughter Birth. Now, Turbitt's stock-in-trade has always been cultural and social satire, with a heavy emphasis on interacting with cultural consumption as well as frank and disarming discussions about her sexuality. All of that is still here in her raw, subversive takes on being pregnant, giving birth, and the terrifying things she experienced in the aftermath of that experience. Indeed, Turbitt's flip, bawdy, and unapologetically scatological point of view is simply aimed at what is usually depicted in gauzy, saccharine terms.

Meghan Turbitt's Pregnant & Fired begins with a letter from her old job firing her. To literally add insult to injury, they note that they don't have to legally tell her why they're firing her, but they do anyway. Stuff about not "maintaining a positive, collaborative work environment" and an "inability to function as a team member" would be hilarious in terms of their insufferable language, if it hadn't meant that she lost her job while she was pregnant. The rest of the mini has one to two-page anecdotes about everything running through her mind. That includes learning to twerk while pregnant, looking for loose change, drawing baby clothes, and being bored enough to try Coconut La Croix. (As always with Turbitt, it's the specificity that is the essence of her wit.) Throughout the comic, Turbitt amusingly uses the tooth-set mascot of her old company as a sort of Greek chorus.

After trying to convince her mom that it was OK to put a soda stream on a baby shower gift registry, Turbitt turns to sex. She wonders if people constantly think of her having sex with her boyfriend now that she's pregnant. She writes about a photo where no one can tell that she peed her pants and notes that she can smell her own vagina all the time now that she's pregnant. Beyond adding several levels of gravity to her usually more flippant satirical critiques, Turbitt's work is different here. Her comics have often had a frenetic quality to them, but in this mini, she's almost nonchalant in how she relates these major, life-changing events. There are subtle call-backs, subversions of what would otherwise be hacky jokes (like with regard to food cravings), and funny visual punchlines that subvert the text. Despite everything, the page of hopes with regard to her future daughter is heartfelt and funny.

If that mini was laid back, then Laughter Birth is intense. It's a loose journal of the last few weeks of her pregnancy and birth story, and it immediately immolates any kind of Hallmark sentimentality with the opening page. That's where Turbitt, with great sincerity and affection, states "The moment I recognized that I wanted to become a mom, is the moment I realized I love the way my cat's asshole smells." Things proceed from there, as Turbitt realizes that as a future mom, she is now the subject of most of internet porn these days. She commiserates with an aunt when she discovers her first hemorrhoid, drawing an image of the "bag of grapes back there" that her aunt so vividly described.

This comic is a fascinating companion piece to Lauren Weinstein's Mother's Walk (from Frontier) and Marnie Galloway's Slightly Plural because all three women have extremely distinct memories of the childbirth process. While Turbitt goes into less detail about that particular aspect of pushing, she does slightly breeze over how difficult it was--requiring oxygen and wet paper towels for her forehead. From the very beginning, she tells the truth about the nature of giving birth, as her daughter Billie "was born along with an explosion of poop." Not only were Turbitt's immediate post-birth thoughts about when she could have sex again, she actually expressed them to her "horrified" mid-wife, who told her to wait six weeks.

While that was all fun, Turbitt then chronicles the frightening realization that she couldn't walk. It took a while for the staff to figure out why, until they realized that she had compressed some nerves during labor. While it was serious and scary, Turbitt always finds a way to subvert the gravity of the situation. For example, her nipples were sore from nursing, so she requested to be topless in the hospital on a near-constant basis. There's a scene where she wants to hug the doctor who tells her that she's going to recover and she demands a hug--but as she's topless, he flinches and says, "That's quite alright." Turbitt then details the assorted indignities involved when one can't stand: having to have nurses pick out bits of toilet paper from your ass, having your mom and boyfriend shower you, and realizing that that horrible smell is your own ass.

The rest of the comic details her recovery, with plenty of light-hearted but sincerely grateful moments regarding her own health. There are plenty of callbacks as well, as when she finally has sex again, as she peppers her boyfriend with all sorts of mood-killing questions until he tells her to "stop talking." When she's getting physical therapy, she asks if she has to wear clothes for it, and the therapist emphatically says yes.  There's a level of specificity and detail in both Turbitt's art (which she has refined and stripped down to its essence over the years) and her writing that gives these short vignettes a surprising level of complexity. This is an epic narrative disguised as a breezy bit of comedy, one fraught with many traumatic moments and uncertainty. It's that breezy veneer and narrative restraint that powers both the comedic and dramatic aspects of Turbitt's story. Drama and comedy complement each other, each making the other kind of moments all the more meaningful.

Minis: Kaczynski/Jetsmark, Turbitt

Some minicomics, fresh out of the oven...

Cartoon Dialectics 3, by Tom Kaczynski & Clara Jetsmark. This is a grab-bag of Tom K. stories from various places. "Skyway Sleepless" was originally published in a book of Minneapolis-related noir stories, and Kaczynski's take on the genre was at once clever, funny and part of his overall project of critiquing the effects of capitalism. It also incorporated a part of downtown Minneapolis that I found fascinating: the skyways between buildings, offering a walking path that's an alternative to traversing the winter hellscape. Of course, Kaczynski couldn't help but notice the ways in which they resemble the sort of pathways that gerbils might use in what is really a closed environment that cannot be escaped. This was dressed up as an art exhibit of the future, and a security guard (our protagonist) found chalk outlines that were part of an art exhibit titled "Future Crime Scene". 

From there, the story becomes a whodunnit: what's putting people to sleep? Is the professor who imagines a future based on skyways complicit? What about his femme fatale assistant? Is the whole thing a put-on, and how does life imitate art? While the story winds up being a series of gags and playful engagement with detective tropes, there's something clever about the way Kaczynski repeatedly pulls the rug from under the detective (and the reader), even as he satirizes the cold utopian nightmare of the skyway empire. It's an artificial (r)evolution, one predicated on the idea of One Great Man, technology over humanity, and a reliance on the kind of consumption of resources that capitalism is predicated upon.

The other stories are more directly political. A story he did for The Nib prior to Trump's election made a number of predictions that have all come true. "Trump And Nostalgia" (drawn with scratchy warmth by Jetsmark) is a typical bit of critical thinking on his part, as he positions the phrase "Make America Great Again" as a piece of Reagan-era nostalgia. Quoting the writer Svetlana Boym, he breaks down personal nostalgia vs political nostalgia. The latter is a feeling of rejection of everything that is new, couched in the language of law and order so as to obliterate the threat to the steady-state of nationalist identity. Kaczysnki doesn't take the next step, but this kind of nostalgia is often explicitly racist, xenophobic and homophobic. Nostalgia is a zero-sum game in the eyes of those who embrace it; if the Other's life is getting better, it automatically means that their own life is going to get worse. Othering the opponents is the key piece of weaponizing this feeling that then privileges law and order over the humanity of the othered class. 

In "Nostalgic", Kaczynski picks up those ideas again and explores personal nostalgia. There is a trigger we feel for old pieces of culture and product (and often, culture and product are one and the same) that is a longing for an earlier (and as we always perceive, simpler) portion of our personal narrative. It's a pacifier that creates a false sense of accomplishment in acquiring old things, old memories; the act of wanting these objects starts to supplant any joy that the objects themselves might bring. There is no critical element in our relationship to these things or bits of old culture; the endorphin rush is that of connecting it to fragments of memory. In other words, shows like Happy Days or old comic books provide a kind of comfort because they made a younger, simpler version of yourself happy for a moment. 

Kaczynski quotes the pulpy but prescient Alvin Toffler book Future Shock in its observance that the faster that technology develops and directs our lives, the more that nostalgia becomes a powerful force. It's the triumph of feeling over reason (witness the increasing hostility toward science), or even worse, the triumph of "alternative facts". Feelings become facts, and actual facts that cause cognitive dissonance become fake news. As with everything else in life, always follow the money. When there's a national feeling toward embracing nostalgia, there will be people ready to sell it to you, further creating a nostalgia feedback loop. 

Kaczysnki does offer an interesting corrective to personal nostalgia. Given the future shock we are experiencing (propelled by new technology being pushed just as hard as nostalgia), it's only natural to feel that tug of nostalgia when we see an old toy that brought us joy. He suggests that rather than buy that toy in an effort to chase the past, we should instead think about our feelings surrounding the experience of playing with the toy. Play is an essential and very serious element of childhood that incorporates objects and breathes life into them as part of expanding and exercising imagination. Tapping into that feeling of experiencing the joy of imagination is what we should be aspiring to, using it to create something new. In a world where everyone is creating something, the need for relentless consumption is greatly reduced.

Galactic Friends, by Meghan Turbitt. On the surface, this comic about experiencing the Star Wars movies for the first time as an adult seems to have little to do with Kaczynski's comic. In fact, Turbitt's hilarious examination of Star Wars is a hilarious but incisive critique of a set of nostalgic tropes that hardened in the imaginations of several generations of children. Star Wars is a kind of perpetual motion nostalgia-generating machine, drawing on pulpy sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and telling a story that's a wish-fulfilling (space) fantasy. It marked a hard turn away from the kind of science-fiction that had dominated film for over a decade: grim takes on how the events of these frequently dystopian futures were really just reflections of the present. Star Wars even fits into Future Shock in the sense that trusting your feelings is more important than science or reason--another key element of nostalgia. 

The back cover features Turbitt's face replacing those of the Star Wars characters, which is both a funny visual (especially Darth Turbitt) and an interesting piece of commentary. Star Wars at its essence is wish fulfillment: it wants the viewer to identify with Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia AND Han Solo. Turbitt then spends much of the mini asking perfectly reasonable questions that prick that fantasy balloon. It starts off by wondering if a variety of characters (including C-3PO) have a penis, which is both an infantile reaction and a sensible reaction to the ways in which the movies neuter sexuality so thoroughly. In depicting the Slave Leia scene in Return Of The Jedi, where Carrie Fisher is in a metallic bikini surrounded by puppets, she simply remarks "It is my understanding that some people jerk off to this scene?" It's a strangely incongruous scene in the film that was a burst of sexuality (entirely in the province of the male gaze) in a narrative that's otherwise devoid of sex; no wonder it launched a thousand fetishes. 

Turbitt calls out Luke for being boring, Han for being a dick to Leia, the privileging of human-looking beings as the protagonists, and the fact that Darth Vader and Kylo Ren are angsty teens who never had to grow up. She actually likes that aspect of the films, that the villains are just big overgrown babies who shop at Hot Topic. Turbitt's drawings capture a lot of the fun of the films, and it's clear that she enjoyed watching them. She simply enjoyed them for what they were: silly pulp with actors who chewed the scenery, and not products with so much nostalgic power that they create cultlike devotion. Tubitt's whole project seems to be reacting to cultural phenomenon in a raw, direct way, stripping them of their identity as product and reveling in their absurdity. 

Minis: M.Turbitt, J.Baylis, J.Porcellino

That blissful comics avalanche feel is upon me after SPX. All I can do is sift through and start reviewing.

How To Eat Chips, by Meghan Turbitt. Turbitt continues her hilarious, over-the-top social satire by way of exploring advertising and imagery surrounding food in this mini. From the cover that's a parody of the Utz brand of potato chips to the "nutritional facts" on the back that indicates that it provides 200% of daily laughs, 100% of advice and 50% each of fashion, fine art & literature, this mini even has a single-page inset "Guide To Eating Potato Chips". What makes this mini so successful is Turbitt's genuine enthusiasm for food and snack foods in particular. The manic energy that Turbitt provides for her drawings is inherently funny in drawings of potato chips and people eating them; the dissonance between what we expect in a work of advertising and promotion and what she does on the page is amusingly diverting. The further the mini goes on, the sillier it gets, like listing the "best songs to listen to while eating Rap Snacks", positing pretzels as the enemy of chips, creating a "chips dream team" and imagining future chip flavors like oyster, pho, and lobster roll. At the same time, while the mini becomes silly, it never becomes absurd, and stays in the gravity of its central premise: a guide to something that needs no guide at all.

So Buttons #8, by Jonathan Baylis, et al. Baylis continues to get better with every issue of his collaborative autobio comic. His writing is sharper, more concise, funnier and just has a greater overall crispness and purpose. In terms of style, he's never been lacking for ideas, and the cover for this issue was just killer: a parody of the cover of American Splendor #4, as drawn by Robert Crumb. This was the one where noted record fiends Harvey Pekar & Crumb were doing an aw-shucks trade on records they really wanted, each thinking they ripped the other off. This time around, it's a drawing of Baylis and cover artist Noah Van Sciver, doing the same thing with comics. It's hilariously on point and evocative of the original while very much being in Van Sciver's mature style.

Baylis has learned to find good matches for story subjects. "So...Porky" is about his rejection of his Jewish religious roots in terms of dogma around diet and how he embraced pork. This was a light-hearted story, so a cartoony and light line like Corrine Mucha's was a solid pairing. I especially enjoyed how he went into so much detail about something called a Shanghai soup dumpling, which amusingly has a set of rituals surrounding it that one might almost call religious. Rick Parker's versatility and ability to draw horror images made him the right partner for "So...Hallow", which is a history of his love of Halloween make-up. It includes an interlude by Van Sciver where extremely gory make-up one Halloween stopped an angry motorist he'd just gotten into a fender-bender with in his tracks. Baylis always has a way of bringing these anecdotes around to more significant events, and in this case it was his initial interest in doing movie effects make-up for a living that waned when he started doing it for others, along with a general disinterest in Halloween that started after 9/11. The happy ending is that he started finding ways to dress up his dog. "So...Bejeweled" (with one of the best artists with regard to drawing animals in Rachel Dukes) is about his first dog as an adult who died not long after they got her, while "So...Close" is an amusing short with long-time collaborator T.J. Kirsch wherein he tells his wife that the feels like their life is settling down for the better...only to run out of gas. This issue is a solid, satisfying piece of storytelling.

South Beloit Journal, by John Porcellino. This mini from Uncivilized Books has an interesting origin. After finishing drawing a book about suicide, he found himself with 91 2x6" scraps of Bristol board after he trimmed the pages to size. He was inspired to do a daily, three panel journal strip that was very different from the sort of thing he does in King-Cat Comics & Stories. There's a level of precision, even in a minimalist sense, in those comics. Those comics are poetic, and the anecdotes carefully chosen. With a daily strip, John P simply unloaded what was on his mind in the fastest, rawest manner possible. The fact that he was going through an especially low, lonely period of his life and that he did this anyway is just part and parcel of Porcellino and his approach to life. Even at his most depressed, he finds a way to keep going, keep working, keep drawing, keep connecting and keep trying. The bright moments in this comic come when he's connecting with someone else, or talking to cartoonist friends of his at shows, or getting up and drawing/working when he would rather sleep all day. He's a sort of living example of the positive effects of what is known in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) as "opposite action"--doing the opposite of what you want to do in a depressed state, in order to change mood. The journal is also proof that no matter how awful today is, tomorrow has a chance to be better. That's borne out in the back half of the journal, when he goes on an extended trip to Canada for various shows and readings, and also starts dating someone new. Porcellino is not one to overromanticize anything, so reading about him watching the hockey playoffs with his new girlfriend is a kind of shorthand for that sense of new romantic energy. Making those connections and soldiering on with his creative work doesn't make everything perfect, but in these raw, ragged and emotionally vulnerable strips, Porcellino shows that it can at least help.

Minis: S.Spina, N.Garcia, B.Berry, M.Turbitt

Supercar 1, by Brandon Berry. This short comic, designed to briefly introduce a setting and its main character, reminds me a lot of the sort of thing that Brandon Graham and Malachi Ward are doing: thoughtful, off-beat and highly stylized science fiction. In this comic, we're introduced to a driver who's getting their car upgraded by an anthropomorphic rabbit creature. After dropping in a component that seems to work on magic as much as it does science, the driver gives the rabbit an old Mac laptop, establishing the timeline as some post-apocalyptic future. The last scene finds a cop on a motorcycle (with perhaps dubious authority) chasing after the driver. Along the way, Berry's wobbly and wonky line adds a tremendous amount of atmosphere and texture to the story. Some panels are missteps (one panel with just the driver has too much negative space), but overall, Berry's chunky line width and the fluidity of his figures makes this a striking little comic to look at.

Malarkey, by November Garcia. Matt Moses of Hic & Hoc handed me this mini at SPX, and he said he plans to publish a longer collection of her work. He noted the obvious comparison between Garcia and the work of Julia Wertz, and it's certainly there on the surface. Their figure composition, line, sense of humor and even personal struggles are much alike. That said, Garcia has her own unique voice, and that's not just because she lives in the Philippines. Her sense of comic timing, her willingness to use aspects of her life (as well as the lives of others) as a rich vein for her comic material, and her skill with regard to body language, expressiveness and page layouts made every story a delight to read. Garcia also exploits the differences between she and her mother, who on the one hand is scandalized by her daughters openly displaying the tampons they bought but on the other grew up playing with spiders and tadpoles. Lighthearted stuff like teasing her mom about her phone screensaver is interspersed with much darker material, like a funny strip about a dilation & curettage procedure she had to get after a miscarriage.

Garcia isn't afraid to shove the reader head-on into some pretty intimate material while at the same time distancing herself from it just enough to extract a punchline. The same is true about her struggles with drinking, the behavior of certain ex-boyfriends, pondering the reasons why she's put off having a baby and juxtaposing the text of a funny story from a beloved aunt with the reality of her life in hospice. What also struck me about this comic is just how important comics are to her. In "The Story Of You", a take-off on the sort of story one tells your young child about how they were born, she goes into detail about how much time, energy and thought she put into each strip. The final panel, where both Garcia and her anthropomorphic comic are homeless, is both tender and hilariously self-deprecating at the same time. There's another strip where she's over the moon about John Porcellino following her on Tumblr and she punches a scoffing friend ("Who the hell is John Porceloono?") in the breast while never taking her eyes off the phone. That sums up Garcia's work in a nutshell: committed to her craft, highly expressive, generally inappropriate in all the best ways. and possessing great comic timing.

Being Myself Is A Treasure and Having A Time, by Sam Spina. These are the collections of years six and seven of Spina drawing diary comics. He abandoned printing or even attempting a daily strip a little while back, preferring to focus in on days where he had a gag, a life event to report or simply something interesting to say. That was a wise move, because while doing a daily diary strip can help a cartoonist improve drastically, they aren't necessarily great reads, nor are they always well-drawn. In recent years, however, Spina's skill as both a cartoonist and a storyteller has been steadily honed through sheer, hard work. At the same time, these strips still retain that same boundless, goofy energy that permeated his early work. He also retains a willingness to put himself out there in terms of things he thinks and says, but is also willing to give his wife, Samantha, her own say in how events played out. Their sweet and occasionally pugnacious relationship is a highlight of the strip, as both are strongly attached to their very different points of view and are willing to defend them, but their ultimately loving foundation grounds the strip.

Being Myself Is A Treasure (volume 6 of the Spinadoodles diary series) is a major turning point, as Spina is suddenly offered a job doing storyboards for the Cartoon Network series The Regular Show. It's reminiscent of Mike Doonesbury being taken out of a dead-end job and suddenly being plopped into a new life, as Sam & Sam leave Atlanta and move to Los Angeles. Spina mixes in some fantastic sketchbook pages (in color) among the diary strips, which I especially enjoyed because they're more characteristic of his other work. There's still an utter lack of pretension to be found in these comics, as he still writes a lot about his job. It's just a job he's always dreamed of, instead of being a waiter. Volume 7 (Having A Time) is even more successful, as Spina's able to devote more time to his diary as it's clear he started to get the hang of his new life. Spina started to expand his autobio stories out to more than a single page on a more regular basis, resulting in richer, funnier stories. Many autobio cartoonists have done a strip about going to the San Diego Comicon, but Spina's focus on details like being unable to sleep, spending time with a friend and being frustrated when his wife wasn't there to pick him up at the station in the middle of the night provided a funny contrast to the usual business-oriented con experiences. There's an Hourly Comics Day experiment that's by far his most successful, a funny account of a trip to Iceland with his wife. more sketchbook comics, and the realization that while his life was great in many ways, he desperately missed the cartooning camaraderie he had in Denver. The highlight of the book is a day-by-day account of precisely how being a storyboard artist works for his show, which was fascinating in terms of the details but hilarious in just how honest he is about how much time he wastes along the way. There's even a point where he's bummed that drawing storyboards has altered his own drawing style. Whatever his concerns, it's clear that Spina is hitting his stride as a creator, as Having A Time is just the right length and has just the right balance of material.

Self, by Meghan Turbitt. Turbitt's parody of trashy women's magazines isn't simply a satirical takedown of such publications, though that's part of it. Self is no less than a total reimagining and warping of women's magazines around Turbitt's own particular aesthetic obsessions. An article about sex tips is an interview with someone that Turbitt has had sex with turns into a consumer goods survey, as she asks questions like "In what ways could I improve the experience for people wanting to have sex with me?" A fashion article titled "How To Wear A $3 Bra" is a hilarious series of drawings where Turbitt is unable to get her breasts to behave when she moves or runs, leading to an encounter with friends where she screams at them not to "look at my boobs jiggle". It's a real exploration of the concept of clothing that's affordable and functional, that at the very least doesn't embarrass the person wearing them. "Bros Who Brunch" is a hilarious but almost loving takedown of an Instagram account featuring guys eating ridiculous foods and absurd drinks in a show of conspicuous consumption. All elements of Turbitt's satire, no matter how mean, are turned at least in part on herself, as she always reveals that there's an aspect of her that loves and wishes she could be a part of that vapid, shallow wallowing in excess wealth. "2016 Best Beverages" is essentially whatever Turbitt found most satisfying at a particular point in time, so it includes things like "Diet Coke from McDonald's" as well as "Coffee in French Press". Turbitt throws in a couple of dirty strips involving men exposing themselves to her, which makes sense since the kind of magazine this satirizes is a reflection on the standards for beauty, grace and culture that are imposed on women by outside sources. One strip features a hilarious punchline where Turbitt uses an exposed penis to open a bottle of wine, and the other is an expose' of what dog owners who don't restrain their pets from jumping all over others are really thinking. There's plenty of familiar, furious Turbitt lines as she's frantically in motion at various points, but the success of this comic is largely conceptual.

Minis: Bowie, Turbitt, Scully

Bowie and Fourteen Euros In Primark, by Sarah Bowie. The Irish cartoonist self-published two very different comics in terms of tone. Bowie immediately addresses the question if she's related to David Bowie (no), but she turns that into an amusing fantasy where he's her eccentric uncle who sends her birthday cards and invites her over to his flat. On an expansive flip page, Sarah's visit is hilarious, as they're both dressed as Ziggy Stardust and grooving out. Sarah's art here is exuberant and silly, adding in all sorts of visual humor to go along with all of the expected Bowie jokes. Fourteen Euros in Primark is much different, as it tells in an emotionally detached but still devastating manner the story of a dysfunctional relationship. Point of view is Bowie's key storytelling trick here, as she juxtaposes images that often work against her narrative, or present that narrative from an unsettling point of view. For example, in a two page section of the story where she describes being unnerved by her boyfriend keeping his eyes opened while they kissed because he "liked to watch her", we see Bowie undress bit by bit--with the zeroed-in focus of a leering male gaze uncomfortably present in each panel.

Bowie sharply addresses the conflict between how she thinks she should feel about having a boyfriend (and much to her dismay and seemingly out of her control, a fiancee) and her actual feelings of being simultaneously controlled and ignored. The reaction of her mother, presented in a series of panels depicting the housework her mother was doing, is dead-on in terms of detaching the narrative from any sense of romance. One almost gets the sense that her mother wasn't starry-eyed for her daughter not because she sensed that her boyfriend was awful, but because she knew he was awful and felt that this kind of relationship was inevitable for her daughter, just as it was likely inevitable for her. Bowie gets at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways he emotionally abused, like leaving her alone at a bar while he went to hang out with her friends and the comments he made about her appearance, but the ever-present push of societal acceptance pressured her to stay in it--and he knew it. When she hinted at a break-up, he threw a noose of a wedding proposal at her, with the expectation of happiness reining her in. The proof of how good a decision she made to finally end it came when she illustrated the saucepan he came by to take, without warning or even asking, after they broke up. Bowie's restraint in her storytelling decisions just barely holds back her fury, frustration and indignation; she keeps them simmering by continually and purposefully avoiding drawing faces, and the result is a tense, harrowing story of escape.

Philadelphia Sketch Book and WaWa, by Meghan Turbitt. An underrated quality of Turbitt as an artist is that she's a keen observer of her environment. While her comics have an exaggerated, grotesque and hyperactive veneer, the fun stuff is built on a spine of drawing from life and nailing key details. It's the details that allow the reader to see just how exaggerated her stories can get. The mini sketchbook is mostly in color, detailing people she sees on public transportation and other public arenas. She's especially intent on drawing African-American people, drawing what she actually she sees instead of racial cliches. WaWa is her tribute to the convenience store chain and the surprisingly good food available there. Anyone who's read any of Turbitt's comics is well aware of her food obsession, so the fact that this mini reads like a love letter to someone who's surprisingly good in bed should be no surprise. Turbitt's greatest asset as an artist is the spontaneity and energy of her drawings, and what's changed is that her draftsmanship has improved dramatically over the past couple of years without sacrificing the speed or energy that's her trademark.

Internal Wilderness, by Claire Scully. Published by Avery Hill, this blue-toned comic beautifully illustrates the understood relationship between nature in the form of forests & mountains and the small towns one can find nestled in them. This is a point of view comic where the reader sees no characters, only someone's point of view. Scully lovingly draws foliage, streams, and mountains in a manner that's naturalistic but almost romanticized, as though contemplating them is restorative and meditative. The buildings look like drawings of buildings, very deliberately rendered in a cartoony fashion by someone's hand, which at first gives them a jarring quality. As noted in the end notes but as it's also made clear in the story's point of view, this comic is as much about consciousness as it is about a particular place. Indeed, the lack of specificity in the drawings (there are no signs or landmarks that would notate a specific place or time) points to that sense of this being the cartoonist's "happy place": a serene, natural environment. The comic is a tour of that happy place and feeling about nature instead of being a narrative, That joy comes across on every page, as though Scully's mind's eye flips from image to image.

Mini-Comics: Turbitt Power!

There's no cartoonist quite like Meghan Turbitt, as she balances self-effacing humor, frank talk about sexuality, trenchant social commentary and a furiously visceral drawing style that pummels the reader on every page. Let's take a look at her output over the last couple of years.

Imagine Caring About This. This is a succession of drawings based on inane facts about celebrities posted as tweets, ads and actual content, with each page featuring a single image. Turbitt has a photo of herself on the cover, and that juxtaposition is key, as she asks the reader why they should care about her or any bite-size bit of celebrity news. The cumulative effect is exhausting and frequently hilarious, like "Tori Spelling was hospitalized after falling onto a hibachi grill at Benihana", with Turbitt drawing her face down and skirt up.

Kim K is about a dumb guy asking Turbitt if she likes celebrity Kim Kardashian's ass, and Turbitt repeatedly says no (almost Green Eggs and Ham style) until she tears up Kardashian's photos, which magically makes her own ass grow in size (not unlike How The Grinch Stole Christmas). Turbitt's penchant for drawing the grotesque and the exaggerated makes her excess of lines a feature rather than a detriment. The distorted figures and scribbled lines all work, because her figure work is ultimately expressive and hilarious.

Conan is one of Turbitt's earlier comics, and it truly served as statement comic. She takes the suggestion that her face looks a bit like comedian Conan O'Brien and runs with it, as she imagines appearing on his show and then running through a series of highly graphic sexual positions with him, with a hilarious punchline. Only Turbitt would turn sex scenes into a sort of shaggy dog joke. Turbitt's line here is much sparer and thinner than in later years, and it lacks the visceral quality that marks her work now. It's still hilarious, and the eventual gag was well-served by her line by making it easier to parse than her more dense current style.

Teach Me How To Be A God, is another shaggy dog joke, this time involving rapper Kanye West. Visiting his "castle" the day after seeing him in concert, the comic has all the earmarks of Turbitt's current style: furious action on each page, a flurry of arms and legs in motion, exaggerated expressions, and unusual page design and a smart use of spotting blacks. The final gag, involving genitalia, is absolutely hilarious in its absurdity, but it's also a remarkably effective piece of composition. As Turbitt has matured, she manages to hide her solid fundamentals in the humorous shock value of her jokes, but it's her eye for composition and page design that make the jokes work.

Meghan Goes To McDonald's is a collaboration between Turbitt and her students. Many of these strips are hilarious, like one where a student imagines Turbitt throwing Ronald McDonald in a deep fryer, or another where McDonald is hitting on Turbitt, or another where Grimace is depicted as having huge, purple breasts. While most of the strips are crude (with the exception of one highly detailed drawing that's clearly done by someone who specializes in horror), they are bursting with the kind of unrestrained energy that marks Turbitt's own work. It's fitting that Turbitt chose a highly visible, commercial enterprise for her students to focus on, as it's precisely the kind of target she prefers to mock.

Untitled Gags 2 is as described, and there's a lot of tremendous work in here. My favorite story was "Free Samples", where Turbitt unintentionally said something that could be construed as racist to an Asian woman, and then Turbitt turns that awkward shame into a strip where the woman chops her up and turns her into dumplings. It's the details that make this strip work so well, like the drawings of the specific ingredients and methodology that went into making the dumplings. Most of the gags here are in the self-effacing mold, but Turbitt does the humor of awkwardness differently than most. A situation where a woman asked her if she was waiting for the men's or women's room ended with Turbitt sprouting a huge, erect penis that blasted through her cocktail dress. In "The Perfect Match", Turbitt eats an entire tub of chocolate frosting and weeps over her indulgence until she spots a guy on a park bench eating matches. It's a simple gag, but once again, it's Turbitt's over-the-top stylizations that make it funny: her legs contorting as she eats the frosting, her eyes bulging out after she finishes the frosting, and her exaggerated expression when she sees the match-eater. The strip where she screams at her students to be nice to each other feature those trademark zig-zag lines that indicate conflict or excitement.

RIP Meghan is another collection of gags and drawings. Here, it's evident that Turbitt was perhaps influenced by Lisa Hanawalt's early work, in that it's in turns absurd, deeply personal and frequently grotesque. The scene where Turbitt pulls out an absurdly huge breast and jumps on it to squirt milk into her coffee is a great example of that grotesque absurdity. The strip where she talks about dating someone much older than she was for eight years making her feel like an old person is remarkably self-revealing, and not just because she draws her old self with ridiculously drooping breasts. A strip where she's weeping on the floor, only to get relief when she gets a "like" on Instagram. My favorite strip came from a guy she was having sex with tell her that he read Conan and told her to call him that. In that moment astoundingly inappropriate moment, Turbitt depicts herself dying with hilarious facial contortions and coming back as a vengeful ghost. Most of these comics have short stories or story fragments, and I'd love to see a larger collection of the best of them as well as more recent work.

Meghan Turbitt's Sick, Beautiful World

Meghan Turbitt is an artist specializing in the hilariously grotesque as she isn't afraid to get graphic, gross and intimate in satirizing celebrity culture, popular aesthetics and social media tropes. Her work reminds me a lot of Lauren Weinstein's early comics in the crude but powerful energy of her drawings, her willingness to get as gross as possible in service of a gag, and the anarchic sense that anything can happen in her stories. Not surprisingly, Weinstein was one of her teachers at the New School. In Lady Turbo and the Terrible Cox Sucker, Turbitt starts off with her comics namesake and Brent, a transgender geisha (don't ask) going to a club to drink and dance. It winds up with a priest kidnapping Brent for his own demented pleasures, the priest (Cardinal Cox) trying to become Pope (by means of a biggest dick contest, of course), and the musician Prince acting as Lady Turbo's fairy godfather. It's all totally ludicrous and wonderful, as Turbitt slips between very simple drawings and close-ups to emphasize lurid, silly and weird gags.

In the follow-up, Lady Turbo's The Biggest #Loser, Turbitt takes her character to Hollywood after Pope Brent refuses to take her calls. Turbitt utilizes more extreme close-ups and makes more of an attempt to use naturalistic drawings (or at least recognizable caricatures) in this comic, as the likes of Mel Gibson and OJ Simpson show up as key characters. Turbo dubs herself "the biggest loser" for not being able to talk to her friend, turns to twitter for advice (with the likes of @slutdummy and @69mycat sound off, along with an ad for "The Biggest Loser" TV show that Turbo thanks is a statement aimed at her. After she lands in Hollywood, her character meets Gibson ("Shalom!") and is drawn in ever-increasing states of mouth-agape shock, with each drawing getting more exaggerated and funnier. The issue ends with her meeting OJ Simpson, going off to a bar with him and kissing him. Turbitt's comics are loud--her lettering gets huge when someone is shouting something, which is often. Most every page has a weird revelation that involves eyes bugging out or hair standing up straight.

In her most recent comic #FoodPorn, Turbitt combines the obnoxious tendency of people to take photos of their food at trendy restaurants, a number of gross drawings, and the quite literal interpretation of the comic's title to relate a series of scenes wherein a gross person makes delicious food, causing her to be filled with desire so overwhelming that it causes her to do engage in a variety of sexual acts. A gross-looking pizza parlor chef suddenly transforms into a hunk in her eyes when he makes the pizza, cradling her as he feeds her a slice of pepperoni. This is where Turbitt's exaggerations take central stage, especially when drawing her tongue.It either rolls out of her mouth like a carpet or whips out of her mouth like a weed-whacker, scooping up toppings from a taco maker. Every chapter is presaged by realistic drawings of the food to be seen, giving the reader ample warning as to what might come next: sushi placed strategically on her body for the sushi chef, ranch dressing on her face from Buffalo wings, a rendezvous with a toilet seat thanks to a bartender (in a truly disgusting, hilarious scene) and the one scene that leads to true love--getting a decent cup of coffee. This is the comic with the most consistently interesting drawing from Turbitt, given that every one of the gags has to be sold by her ability to draw exaggerated, lurid figures and poses. Turbitt's voice is a welcome one, part of a new generation of cartoonists who aren't afraid to focus on humor and their own personal takes on it.