Miss Lasko-Gross' Henni

Miss Lasko-Gross is unusually versatile for an alternative cartoonist in that she can write a sci-fi caper, a highly personal autobio story or in the case of her book Henni, an allegorical fantasy book. What makes the book distinctive from a visual standpoint is her use of a cool blue-green wash, often in subtle ways. It doesn't dominate the page so much as it enhances it, and it's a nice contrast to her thick line and extensive use of spotting blacks. The characters in this story are a sort of anthropomorphic cat creature, and they have furry bodies, human faces and sharp teeth. Lasko-Gross is extremely skilled at portraying emotion with body language: arched eyebrows, furrowed brows, bulging eyes and just general uses of stance and gesture sell the story in a way that allows her to slowly unveil the larger plot.

The story centers around a teen named Henni, who lives in a corrupt, oppressive theocracy that her father was punished for defying. She was due to be put in an arranged marriage that was supposedly made in careful consideration and prayer by their priests but was really determined by how big a bribe you gave them. Henni is openly rebellious, something that her mother tries to quell to no effect. When she crosses over lines that she was forbidden to cross, her sister declares her a demon and a merchant sends off for a stoning party. In reality, he was a rebel who aided her escape. After that, she happens upon a village with its own corrupt set of values (not unlike Calvinism, with predestination and such), but she slowly began to realize that it's all one big con no matter where she went. Only the forbidden works of art left by a blind artist gave her hope, and after meeting her she learned that her father might still be alive.

This is a deeply feminist work, as Henni doesn't just rebel as an individual, but as a young woman who rebels against the roles put on women in this society, who exist mostly as chattel. They are to be seen and not heard, and educating them was frowned upon. She's able to turn the prejudices of the second village against them in trial and escape from horrible punishment. It's a book about irrational entitlement and male entitlement in particular, as the ruling class rules by force and superstition instead of logic and hard work. There will be future volumes of this story, and Lasko-Gross does well in letting the story follow its own pace. In searching for a land of truth and justice, Lasko-Gross turns a fantasy narrative into an update of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress, another allegorical story about the hard road to heaven, as Christian walked the land encountering the living avatars of various qualities like Faith, Hope and the Doldrums. Recognizing and accepting the hypocrisy around her while acknowledging that there was still hope was the key. This volume felt like a warm-up for the character and the world surrounding her, with deeper lessons still to come.

Miss Lasko-Gross and Kevin Colden's The Sweetness

I've been reviewing comics by Miss Lasko-Gross and Kevin Colden from the earliest days of High-Low. However, the Z2 comics series The Sweetness represents the first time that this married couple has collaborated on a major project. Their pairing on this gonzo sci-fi heist comic is as smooth as any I've seen in comics. Lasko-Gross's demented sense of humor is a perfect match for Colden's smooth line that still delights in gore and splatter. I have only read the first four issues (there is a fifth as well), but the series is filled with wit, interesting characters, plot twists and even surprising amounts of warmth.

The story is about two pilots hired to take a spaceship to a colony world. Also aboard is Nelly, an ex-con who is the liaison between the prisoners on board the ship in cryogenic sleep and those who are going to take them at their destination. That simple enough set-up is instantly complicated by one of the pilots nervously smuggling contraband as part of an apparently high-level deal. From there, the book becomes a kind of shell game as Nelly and Scout, a hilarious, bawdy pilot, try to outwit the other, smuggling pilot, a brutal customs process, an ambush on the colony planet they land on, aliens invading their ship and radical nudists.

The complicating subplot is the nature of the contraband: it's sugar. The aliens who tried to hijack them were after it, because for them it's an intoxicant of the highest order. That accounts for the outrageous covers, featuring an attractive, cute or harmless person with their eyes censored by a line and a close-up of their horrible, decaying teeth. It doesn't have anything to do with the plot other than as a visual metaphor for the rotten character of that particular future. Of course, the reality is that sugar truly is an addictive substance that's difficult to kick; it's just that supply and demand is very different than in this book. The aliens are so desperate to either consume sugar and/or obtain large quantities to get wealthy that they would attack any vessel that so much as had a packet of sugar. The series begins with aliens so desperate to score that they break a treaty between Earth and the aliens to do so. The punchline is they didn't want to harm anyone to get the sugar, but the authorities not only killed them but also the people around them, as a sort of sterilization measure.

This ultimately is a comic about negotiating hypocrisy as a means of survival. All Nelly wants is a cut of the action, because she knows it's going to happen no matter what. It's implied that as a black ex-con, she doesn't have many other options. The Earth officials are hypocrites and corrupt, the dealers she's working with are two-faced, and only Scout proves to be a real friend and ally. Nelly is tough, competent and no-nonsense, while Scout is wild, risk-taking and a free spirit. There's a scene where she is given a substance that's an extract of an alien's saliva, and it turns her into a monstrous, naked powerhouse that joyfully and viscerally tears apart a large group of people trying to kill her and Nelly. Lasko-Gross's sense of comic timing is superb here, as Nelly is trying to make a phone call to a drug dealer while Scout is killing enemies in the most disgusting ways possible. Colden picks up on that comic timing with a fine but detailed line that captures minute details for greatest shock and comedic value. I believe this series will be collected soon, and anyone interested in off-beat science-fiction that pulls no punches will find this to be a delightful read.

Sequart Reprints: Stuck In The Middle/Escape From "Special"

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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The teen-age years are prime ground for storytelling because of the inherent drama that adolescents create in their own world. The transition from elementary school to junior high is perhaps the most awkward move of all, because the formation of one's personality is as much a reaction to the Other as it is a development of their own self. Staking out one's place in the social hierarchy is a complicated game, where conformity to norms is the rule and the systematic hazing of those who are different is the means by which the system is maintained. Comics are an especially ideal means for talking about this period, because the expressiveness of cartooning can be a perfect match for the outsized feelings teens experience.

Cartoonist Miss Lasko-Gross, in her semi-autobiographical comic Escape From "Special", learns that if you're not any good at playing the game after you've learned it, you may as well stop playing. Starting with her earliest memories as a child, Gross manages to create a narrative out of a bunch of short anecdotes. On an initial reading, the narrative feels like a house of cards, threatening to tip over into an unfocused mess. The further one goes in the story, however, the more one can see it cohere. The story begins with young Melissa realizing early on that she was a bit different from others. The realization that she can never know anything for sure sent her into a tailspin, and her wanting to put Barbie into a murder-mystery freaked out one of her friends.

It didn't help that she had trouble looking others in the eye, and that she was behind her classmates in being able to read despite an active and engaged mind. It also didn't help that she was actively resistant to any kind of authority. That combination got her kicked out of her school and placed in a new age feel-goodery, which had its own absurd rules. Its "no-negativity" rules extended to wearing black and eating mushrooms, since they grew in dark places. Of course, her parents sending all sorts of mixed messages had its own effect--they made her go to religious classes but also brought her along when their band went on tour. Things came to a head when she's placed in a special-ed class. While this was certainly humiliating ("Why don't they just call us retards and get it over with?"), it allowed her to see the game for what it was.

As she went into junior high school, she tried to fit in but realized "I'm outside of some mass cult of social agreement." There was a period of despair when this realization sank in, leading to thoughts of suicide and non-existence. It got to a point where part of her wanted to be "lobotomized" like the rest of her peers, but she knew it wasn't an option. When she was given an ultimatum by the girls she was trying to be friends with not to hang out with "druggies & losers", she saw that her choice was obvious, and that choice brought the freedom to speak her mind and stop pretending. Gross is skillful in how she arranged the anecdotes and gave them an accumulated weight, especially as she grew older in the story. What's most appealing about the book is her warts-n-all portrayal of her stand-in. The slightly grotesque and expressionistic art is a perfect match for the way Melissa looks at the world and herself. She's not an easy person for the reader to like--she's cranky, argumentative and prone to outbursts of rage. But her eccentricities are not affected, and the ways that she comes to terms with how to deal with the world while embracing what made her different made for an inspiring conclusion.

Stuck In The Middle is appealing because it provides a look at a variety of experiences and a variety of artistic styles to match. It's no surprise that Ariel Schrag put this volume together, because she's well-known as someone who started doing comics about her high school life while she was still in high school. She's currently finishing up a book on her senior year of high school after a two-year stint on the TV show The L Word. In this anthology, she got heavy-hitters Joe Matt & Dan Clowes to allow her to reprint some of their work. Clowes' "Like A Weed, Joe", is one of his best short stories, dealing with a boy's boredom spending a summer with his grandparents and his struggle to create a narrative framework for his life.

One of Schrag's stories, "Plan On the Number 7 Bus", is about the other end of the teen hierarchy. She was one of the ones on top who used her position to heap abuse on others, and the story involves a plan hatched by her and a friend to humiliate someone they knew. When they wind up in an unfamiliar part of town and they panic, Ariel vows "I cannot be mean"... though it seems doubtful that she'll be able to hold herself to that vow. Her sister Tania contributes "Snitch", about the fluidity of the hierarchy and how easy it is to slide up or down. After snitching on a boy who was torturing her in class, she becomes a social pariah, looking for a new group. When she finally finds it, she eagerly says "Well, that's what you get when you're a snitch" when she hears about someone else's tattling to a teacher. The harsh reality is that no matter how oppressive & unfair peer pressure can be, most kids can't see a way out of it and want to use it to their own advantage. Along the same lines, Gabrielle Bell has a piece that gives a slightly different perspective on an outsider's relationship with her classmates. In "Hit Me", Bell eschews the use of thought balloons or internal narration, making the story unique in this collection. We never see her inner thoughts as her classmates taunt her for wearing the same clothes several days in a row and smelling odd. When another outsider challenges her to a fight, Gabrielle wins and abandons another outsider friend when popular girls invite her to sit with them at lunch. The narrative distance Bell erects makes this an especially effective and devastating story.

There are sweeter stories as well. Dash Shaw's "Crater Face" involves a boy with acne problems who falls for a girl, and manages to overcome his own insecurities and reach out to her and reassure her about her own issues. "Never Go Home" is a Robyn Chapman story about a girl who is abused by her father who winds up at a school dance and sits under the bleachers. She's found by another girl, and several minutes of awkward silence & conversation ensue until the girl asks her to dance, leading our narrator to think "Maybe I'm OK. Maybe this could last. Maybe I'd never go home." Aaron Renier's "Simple Machines" talks about the author's ADD and tendency to escape into his own world with his drawings. When others reach out to him and he takes a risk by trusting and working with them in school projects, he's able to mix his old world of fantasy with his new friends. It's an enormously touching moment, one of the instances where life-long friendships can grow out of the crucible of adolescence.

Virtually every story is at least worth reading, though Nick Eliopulos' tale about a batboy and a baseball mascot doesn't fit very well with the other stories. Jim Hoover's style is a lot slicker than the other artists', and his entry feels a lot more pat and less nuanced than the other stories in the collection. On a visual level, they at least do offer something different to look at, compared to the less "realistic" styles of most of the artists in the anthology. Schrag obviously took great pains as an editor. She balanced upbeat & downbeat stories, stories by men & women, and gave everyone plenty of room to tell their stories. She added touches like a yearbook-style "autograph" section and photos of the contributors from middle school (the photos of Clowes & Matt are especially amusing). The variety of stories that she gathered was crucial, because it's easy for a reader to grow exhausted by a "theme" anthology if the editor doesn't do a good job getting as many different takes on a subject as possible. Unlike many anthologies where the stories are too short to really make an impression, there's a meatiness to this 200-page volume that makes it an enormously satisfying read.

Skin You're In: A Mess of Everything

Rob reviews the second volume of Miss Lasko-Gross' autobiographical high school vignettes, A MESS OF EVERYTHING (Fantagraphics).

Miss Lasko-Gross' self-caricature in her autobio stories is an interesting mash-up of a typical teen with low self-esteem and that of an indignant outsider determined to make her increasingly confident voice heard--and loudly. While she is constantly bombarded with the message that she doesn't fit in, she's weird, she's not "cute" like other girls and this message certainly takes its toll, by the end of this book one can tell that the volume of this message grows more and more muted in her own head. It's easy to internalize this message, and to a degree she does, but her own stubborn individuality and sense of generalized outrage constantly talks her out of it. At the same time, her utter contempt for anything resembling an institution (especially of learning) is magnified all the more when she "succeeds" in school as she learns to play the game of what is expected of her as a student.

It was this rock-solid sense of self that anchored her as a younger girl in her first book, ESCAPE FROM 'SPECIAL', giving her the ability to rise above the realization that the world has a way of punishing the naive-but-different. "Outrage" was her touchstone in this book, as her anger at everything gave her the fuel to rise above her own doubts and anyone who dared mess with her. Fundamentally, she wasn't really just angry about specific injustices (such as feeling that all the schools wanted were unquestioning sheep spitting back desired answers), but rather that qualities such as honesty, empathy and compassion were not only not encouraged by the culture-at-large, but openly derided. In her own eyes, she was doing everything "right" but was not only never rewarded but frequently punished. While despondent over this understanding, sometimes to the point of no longer wanting to live, she nonetheless kept plugging away.

Lasko-Gross lays out a fairly conventional narrative in terms of time and flow, but breaks it up with short vignettes. In the first book, the vignettes accreted an eventual collective weight that was greater than the sum of its parts. Lasko-Gross alternated between small, funny moments and the larger snapshots of personal drama. In this book, with several sustained subplots, the formal choice of using the vignettes worked in the opposite manner: it broke up a "heavy" storyline and made it more palatable by feeding it to us in smaller doses, punctuated by occasional sillier stories that also served to lighten the mood a bit.

This was a needed approach, because the "after-school special" nature of a friend with anorexia threatened to bog the book down at times, even as Lasko-Gross is careful to tie this in with her own sense of self and what a friend is obligated to do. It was obviously tough to deal with, given that this was based on Lasko-Gross' own experiences, but she perhaps threw in one vignette too many that repeated the same themes and exchanges. That was obviously done to reflect her own frustration in dealing with her friend (and the friend's eventual behavior toward her) and the conclusion of the story was certainly powerfully & skilfully handled. At times, however, I thought this subplot was in danger of taking over the book. That said, Lasko-Gross was careful to illustrate why this relationship was so important to her, particularly in the way she showed how she struggled to reveal her "true" self to others.


It's interesting to compare this book to Ariel Schrag's work. The former was done in the moment during high school and lacked the perspective of time to evaluate what it all meant. Of course, such an approach also prevents a bit of retroactive editing of memory. Lasko-Gross has a very particular sort of story that she wants to tell, but the use of vignettes to break up the narrative helps remove some of the temptation to make more sense out of one's own life story than is really there. Indeed, she goes out of her way to not just be self-effacing, but to even point out that she's a sort of "type" (the rebel), with a whole host of expected behaviors. It's actually that realization that allows her to break out of that role when she starts failing at school and smoking pot. Her strong sense of self is balanced with how her behavior affects others, including her family.


Lasko-Gross' greatest strengths as an artist are her character design, gesture and use of body language. It's the way she stages her characters that makes looking at each page interesting. She uses a muted palette on pages that are mostly filled with grey, and jams every panel with either decorative details or fills them with moody shading. When Miss is feeling a strong emotion in the comic, there are often strange little noodly lines that surround her that remind me (oddly enough) of mainstream artist George Perez. I love the touch of the exaggerated and the grotesque that she injects into her drawings, distorting faces and bodies to reflect emotional tumult. Lettering also serves as a way to depict exaggeration, and the organic quality of her lettering often reveals emotional states in a more direct way than the actual words themselves.


Ultimately, what saves the character of Lasko-Gross in this story is the feeling that she can escape this world by running off to art school. Her identity as an artist and increasing confidence in her own ability is perhaps the leading factor in caring less and less about what mainstream culture thinks about anything. At the end of ESCAPE FROM 'SPECIAL', she found a way to work herself out of being abjected into so-called "special education". At the end of this book, she stopped rebelling against the machine and instead pretended to play ball, never once internalizing the voice of authority, just so that she could escape from "normal". What was left unresolved here was the way her aggressiveness protected her from the world also isolated her emotionally; it'll be interesting to see if this becomes the main thrust of the last book in this trilogy. The last story in the book, coming as an epilogue of sorts, indicates how much connections come to mean to her.