Top Shelf: Penny Nichols

Slice-of-life fiction is something I see a lot less of in comics these days, especially compared to its heyday in the 90s. A lot of it was perhaps thinly-veiled autobiography, only with a stronger narrative structure and/or more defined character arcs. Most fictional comics these days tend to be genre-inflected, even if the genre elements are in the background and the stories are heavily-character oriented. Tillie Walden and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell are good examples of doing that at a high level. On the other hand, while MK Reed has done her share of genre work, she started her career working on slice-of-life books, and her big breakthrough was her love letter to libraries, Americus.

Her latest book, Penny Nichols, was written with frequent writing partner Greg "Clutch McBastard" Means and drawn by long-time minicomics stalwart Matt Wiegle. It's about a smart but aimless 26-year-old woman (the titular Penny Nichols) who is working a series of pointless temp jobs and going on the occasional horrible date. In reading it, this book is truly aimed at that mid-20s person who hasn't found their purpose in life. They don't have the ambition, ability, or interest to hook into the business world, but they've also faced a lifetime of discouragement in trying to do anything else. Their liberal arts degree seems pointless. They don't just want to hop on the marriage train and start having kids, but they don't know what they want.

In the case of Penny, she gets mixed up with a troupe of horror movie filmmakers who have plenty of vision and creativity, but they are missing the essential element of a single organizational brain. Reed and Means create a vibrant cast of horror geeks, over-acting theater guys, and dreamers who want a taste of something beyond their service or office jobs. Penny soon learns that much of the group, especially the two guys running Satan's Fingers Productions (or is it Killshot Films?) are long on ideas and short on actual follow-through. The spine of the narrative is built around making a horror film in time for a big indy horror-film event called Splatterfest.

Along the way, Reed & Means keep the focus on Penny and her life. That includes her adversarial relationship with her roommate, her dysfunctional relationship with her prim sister, and her own self-esteem as a person. The cover of the book is a neat summary of the narrative: Penny is there making directorial notes, adding make-up touches, holding a boom mic, assisting with blood for special effects, and then mopping up the whole thing. She's in blue while everything else is in yellow, a nice trick that focuses the reader's eye and makes them understand that the same person is in all of these roles. Penny helps write the script and do the storyboards, goes out and looks for costumes, scouts locations, and reads up on how to make a film. More to the point: she was encouraged to do this, and encouragement was all that she ever wanted and needed. She wanted to be part of something creative and to find a community that valued her for her creative instincts. Moreover, Penny Nichols hammers home one specific point: nothing you ever do will ever live up to your own ideal of what you wanted, so the most important thing to do is finish it.

Indeed, the final day of filming is one where Penny has to take over the most significant role: directing itself. The flaky director, whose anxiety always rose directly the closer he got to actually completing any project, didn't show up. Instead, Penny takes the reins and not only gets through it, she even manages to come to an understanding of sorts with her sister. Reed and Means keep the characterizations relatively simple but still allow each character to feel satisfied with themselves for their own contributions to the film. From the young special effects guy to the actress hungry for real structure, the crew manages to find workarounds for everything, both in terms of props, location, and even the story itself.

If all of this sounds like a metaphor for the comics community, that's because it is. Splatterfest itself is a love letter to events like SPX. Indeed, there's a time gap between the last day of filming and the convention, which opens with a young woman flagging down Penny and lavishing praise on the film. We learn that they didn't win the competition, but they did get a lot of attention and interest. Every artist and writer knows that feeling of someone coming up to you and telling them how important their work is to them. It's a sense of validation and belonging that was heretofore missing in the lives of so many. While that validation and camaraderie feels good and can be sustaining, Penny Nichols is firm in asserting the idea that it's the work itself that's most important.

Speaking of collaborations, Wiegle's cartoony, exaggerated style is ideal for a comic about making a horror movie. While a lot of his comics have dealt with fantasy or genre concepts, Wiegle at heart is a gag man. This is a book that has a lot of funny character moments, and Wiegle delivers a host of quirky, bizarre, and amusing character designs. Penny herself is gloriously frumpy, with hair piled on top of her head in somewhat haphazard fashion. Wiegle's varied line weights allow for a lot of precision character details as well as denser, more expressive lines when they film a bunch of the blood-splattering scenes. There is a sense of joy at the heart of this book, as the collaboration of the artist and writers reflects the enthusiasm of the cast of characters. Penny Nichols is about the joy of creation from concept to problem-solving to finished product, and it reflects how this shared passion can unite a disparate group of people in such an ebullient fashion. 

Secret Acres: MK Reed, Robert Sergel

Palefire, by MK Reed & Farel Dalrymple. Secret Acres has built their backlist on collecting minicomics into full-length books. MK Reed and Farel Dalrymple's Palefire is something more unusual, as it's a comics novella originally written and drawn by Reed and now adapted by Dalrymple. Dalrymple has collaborated with Reed on other projects and strikes me as an ideal partner because his ability to depict naturalism and body language fits nicely with Reed's dialogue-driven comics about relationship conflicts. This one's about a teen named Alison who is interested in Darren, a suspected firebug that everyone warns her about. The book follows their interactions at a party and then what happens afterward when they leave.

The strength of Reed's work has always been her ear for dialogue, but I also liked the way she gave every character a fair shake in the book. Darren was obviously a creep, but Reed made him sympathetic. Alison's unwillingness to listen to the judgment of others was her major flaw, but her willingness to give others the benefit of the doubt was her greatest strength. I especially liked the character of Tim, the self-righteously obnoxious junior EMT who rescues Alison at the end and has a huge crush on her. His bluntness and lack of tact made him seem like an almost borderline Asperger's type, only with a bit more social awareness. Still, Reed managed to make this "heroic" figure insufferable and the villainous character sympathetic without warping the story or playing favorites. Everyone in the story is flawed. Dalrymple is adept at making the worst tendencies of each character evident simply through his visual representations without doing it in an obvious way. The way Tim dresses and stands betrays his awkwardness. Darren's posture makes him look like a predator. Alison's trusting nature is revealed through the way she sat relative to Darren. Reed cleverly upset expectations that might have been created thanks to teen-story cliches, as sometimes it is best to trust the instincts and experience of others.

Space, by Robert Sergel. This is the quintessential Secret Acres publication, as they've collected various minicomics by Sergel in one smart-looking package. Considering that these quasi-autobiographical stories are all connected over time, this collection and the way it was edited and arranged made it a particularly appropriate choice for the publisher. Sergel uses a stark, clear line with lots of black and white contrasts but little in the way of greys or hatching. The naturalistic but deadpan drawings combined with the crisp and thin nature of Sergel's line made for a "cool" reading experience in the McLuhan sense. The drawings are restrained in every way, especially emotionally, as Sergel forces the reader to pay close attention to what is being said and done in order to pick up cues as to what's really going on. It's a smart decision, because the strips in this book are actually packed with emotional trauma, anger, and bitter resentment.

It's also frequently quite funny, like the strip where a guy eats lobster's brains and says "I know things". Another example is "The Talk", where the book's protagonist (as a kid) asks his father about sex. His father, watching a baseball game, doesn't even bother looking away from it as he says "It's when a man puts his penis into a woman's vagina". That's followed by the boy asking his dad to explain the infield fly rule. More typical of the tone of the book is "Thirteen Bad Experiences Involving Water", which is funny in a cringe humor sort of why, as the young man encounters a series of humiliations involving water, like being spotted peeing off the side of a boat by some girls or being ridiculed for having to wear ear plugs in the pool.

"My Famous Grey Sweatshirt" is both a chronicle of the most trivial of objects (a beloved article of clothing) but also an account of the main character's obsessiveness. "Up Up Down Down" is a chilling story about him remembering a friend dying in an accident immediately after being dressed down by our familiar protagonist for hurting him by accident. Here, Sergel demonstrates his skill in using the slightest changes in expression to convey far greater emotional meaning, aided in part by his panel-to-panel transitions and tendencies to linger on key images. "Growth" is another fascinating story about coming to grips with mental illness; in this case, it's panic disorder. He goes to a disco as part of immersion therapy to confront his fears. One technique that Sergel used in the book was to have the narration comment on the images in unexpected but sometimes clinical or detached ways. In this story, the symptoms of a panic attack are listed as he's clearly about to lose it, until a bride-to-be at her bachelorette party asks him to dance and then later asks him to spank her. It's about as much of a best-case scenario as can be imagined, until the reader learns that she was doing it as part of a "bachelorette scavenger hunt".

The final story, "It's An Awesome Thing When The Spirit Leaves The Body", was clearly the most directly autobiographical vignette in the book. It's about the protagonist and his mother deciding to track down her black-sheep uncle, who turned out to be an illustrator. It's a delightful story about forming unexpected connections, both for his great-uncle (whose gruff manner was just a cover for his generous spirit and loving nature) and for the protagonist, who was fascinated by the way his great-uncle consistently bucked his family's desires for him to conform. It's also a story about how creating those connections is a powerful comfort in times of loss. It also connects the central theme of the book: the relationship of bodies in relation to each other. He starts off with Ptolemy and ends with Galileo, noting along the way whether the sun revolves around the earth or whether the earth revolves around the sun, metaphorically speaking, is less important than the fact that the two objects have a relationship with each other. In making this comparison, Sergel both acknowledges and cleverly undermines his own position as protagonist (the center of the universe), because their relative places in the heavens, so to speak, was less important to his great uncle than the fact that he had someone there. There is no single story, only a series of orbits in space.

First Second For Kids: Sturm/Frederick-Frost/Arnold, Reed/Flood, Wicks

Ogres Awake!, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost. This is the latest in the Adventures In Cartooning! series headed up by the head of the Center for Cartoon Studies and two alumni. Ostensibly designed to teach the basics of cartooning to kids, the trio of artists has also released a series of fun adventure books starring the knight who popped up in the actual instructional books. I had the benefit of my seven-year-old daughter asking me to read this book to her, sight unseen, and she loved the book's humor and sheer "loudness". The book opens with the crisis of the knight seeing a meadow full of giant, sleeping ogres, and the rest of the book is essentially a mad dash by the knight in an effort to thwart the crisis. About midway through, the artists come up with a counter plotline, wherein the knight's clamoring for battle is funneled into the knight helping to harvest food from a garden and chop vegetables, as the wise king beats the ogres by feeding them. The book is chock full of verbal and visual jokes, and Frederick-Frost's thick, brushy line sturdily carries the narrative without being overwhelmed by the book's bright colors. The endpapers, which contain brief tutorials on how to draw the characters and funny poses they can get into, were a particular favorite of my daughter, who loved the natural progression from utilitarian suggestions to sheer silliness, like a horse as a space explorer. It's the rare kids' book that goes all-out in an effort to be simply funny, without worrying about anything else.

Science Comics: Dinosaurs: Fossils and Feathers, by MK Reed and Joe Flood. The Reed-Flood team's last collaboration was the character-centered romance The Cute Girl Network. Flood's preferred thing to draw is more in the realm of monsters, which makes this clever and page-turning account of the history of paleontology right in his wheelhouse. Kicking off First Second's Science Comics line, each cartoonist will have the conundrum of just how to present their given subject in a way that draws in younger readers. Reed's solution was to create a narrative based not so much on the history and qualities of dinosaurs (although that's all here as well), but rather on the history of how scientists (as well as grifters, hucksters and thieves) have understood and classified dinosaurs. Reed focuses on the colorful personalities that populated the world of paleontology in the early days, like amateur fossil collector Mary Anning (who did not receive the credit due her), arch-rivals Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen (the latter of whom sought to discredit the former in academia), and arch-rivals Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope (whose field teams threw rocks at each other).

Reed didn't separate the book into chapters per se, but rather reset things based on the changing nature of scientific paradigms. Starting off in 1800, for example, it is considered to be a fact that the earth is 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs perished in the Great Flood, and there are no examples of them today. Every reset changed those assumptions dramatically, as science not only became more sophisticated but also started to admit to the ways in which new evidence can shatter old paradigms. Amusingly, that was backed up when Reed wrote a chapter that noted how the brontosaurus never really existed, only to have to add an endnote that said that the bronto's existence had been proven. Flood went to town drawing double-page splashes with dinosaurs but was equally up to the task of drawing historical figures. Reed keeps the narrative going with an arsenal of fascinating anecdotes, both about dinosaurs and the people who discovered their fossils. She even manages to explain some of the basics of geology along the way, thanks to her wit. While there are the occasional funny asides, Reed doesn't overdo and trusts in the narrative. Starting off a series about science that demonstrates how science is actually carried out was a smart move, as the clash between staying true to the scientific method and the human need for certainty is key to understanding paradigm shifts and the ways in which human bias can affect knowledge.

Science Comics: Coral Reefs: Cities of the Ocean, by Maris Wicks. Wicks had a taller order than Reed in talking about the science of coral reefs. Without a narrative to latch onto (other than the ecological one that essentially amounts to "Recycle and ride your bike!"), Wicks was essentially reduced to narrating a slightly whimsical nature documentary. The essence of that documentary was that despite coral reefs occupying a tiny portion of the earth, they are home to a majority of the earth's biodiversity. Once that point is made, she goes into a basic biological explication of the various phyla that can be found in and around coral reefs, all narrated by a fish wearing glasses. It's page after page of slightly cartoony drawings of sea life with amusing asides, scatological jokes and witticisms from the creatures themselves. The book picks up again when it gets into facts about the water cycle and ecological concerns, which is presented earnestly but without preaching. It's simply a matter-of-fact presentation of facts, one that presupposes a great deal of faith in the reader to do the right thing. A bit more restraint on forcing jokes might have made this a smoother read, though as I noted earlier Wicks was in a tough spot and relied on her storytelling instincts to work her way out of it. It's just that at around 120 pages, the book simply flagged once she started rattling off different species and felt padded.

Mini Fiction: Reed, Lindner, Trower

The Titular Hero, by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill. For a writer who got her start doing slice-of-life comics, Reed certainly has a talent for writing fantasy. This mini that originally appeared online not only gets at the mechanics of being a fantasy adventurer, it also takes the piss out of the ridiculous amounts of sexism that pervades the genre. Hill can draw anything Reed throws at him, in this story about a party going to a seedy part of town and being exposed to certain seedy books. The "Lady Bosoms" title is a particular best-seller, and Hill drawing the spoof of big-breasted heroine while the adventurers critique it incredulously works quite well. Like all of the fantasy excerpts that Reed has written, I found myself wanting to find out what happens next with this group of characters.

The Black Feather Falls, Book Two, by Ellen Lindner. Lindner's elegant and stylish whodunnit continues, as her two female protagonists (a boutique worker and a secretary) follow the trail of a murder up to a remote island near Scotland. The book is part murder mystery, part buddy action story and part exploration of dark, personal roots. The two women overcome some rather extreme sexism in hilarious and dogged fashion as they piece together clues to essentially solve some of the whys and hows of the case, setting up the climactic third book. The story is really about trying to create a new identity and running away from one's past. In the case of Tina Swift, the protagonist, she hints that she was able to create a new life for herself after a life of abuse and horrible circumstances. Of course, the surprise ending of this book showed that she couldn't quite outrun every aspect of her past. Once again, the use of vivid and rich colors as well as the stylized character designs and lettering, give this comic a distinct and powerful sense of time and place. That's true of both the backgrounds but especially the fashions. Lindner is truly hitting her stride with this series.

REM Pt. 1, by M.R. Trower. Speaking of leaping forward, REM is Trower's best work to date. Like many of their comics, REM is a story about finding one's identity in a culture that demands that one fits into a set of rigorously defined categories. The story follows a young person named Rem who's about to go through the process of being sorted into a profession/caste by means of the mark placed their body by the "holy beast". When there's no mark to be found, Rem runs away, eventually finding safety with a group of fellow "deviants". The end of this chapter finds Rem embracing their new role, even as their future is uncertain. This is a story that begins with the nagging sense of not fitting in but that quickly moves on to its hero having a new sense of purpose, one filled with mystery, awe and wonder. Trower lists Moebius as an influence, and that's apparent both in terms of the intricacy of the line drawings & character design, as well as the trippiness of the backgrounds. Moebius' stories also tend to be about transformation and struggle, though Trower's take on this is uniquely theirs.

Baited Expectations: The Cute Girl Network

Written by MK Reed & Greg Means and drawn by Joe Flood, The Cute Girl Network (First Second) takes on the notion of what it means to be in a bad relationship. It's about going with one's gut and own two eyes rather than the experiences of others. It's actually remarkably devoid of artificial twists and turns thrown in to give the potential lovers a conflict to battle against. Instead, Jack and Jane both have to battle the titular Network: a group of young, single women in the city of Brookport (a Portland/Brooklyn amalgam) who exchange information on their ex-boyfriends and stage interventions if necessary when they see someone going into a situation lacking what they deem to be crucial knowledge.

Jane is a skater who works in a skate shop, while Jack sells soup at a food court. What's interesting about the thrust of the book is that while neither character is very complicated, it's that very lack of complexity that draws them together. Jane faces rampant sexism at her job and at the skating park, a point hammered home in a sharply-written scene where she chews out a guy who first dismissed her ability to skate and then deigned to hit on her when she proved himself. Jack is lazy, spacy and clumsy. He's also kind, devoted and funny.

Jack's roommates include a true sexist pig of a bro and a devout feminist, but they all somehow get along because they all share their views openly and enjoy berating each other in a playing the dozens kind of way. I'm not precisely sure what the division of labor was between Reed and Means, but dialogue is Reed's specialty and a big strength of the book is its verisimilitude. It's that sense of being true to life that gives what would otherwise be cardboard thin characters some depth and heft. Still, one can't help but sense the writers of the book pushing back at the sheer shrillness of Network leader Harriet and her dogged insistence that she knows what's best for Jane. Jane is given an intervention by the Network and is taken around to meet several of Jack's ex-girlfriends, all of whom share hilarious horror stories about atrocious birthday presents, forgetting to show back up at an apartment for an anniversary dinner, talking to a girlfriend's mother about their sex life in excruciating (if oblivious) detail. Jack is aware that Jane is being fed this information and is on pins and needles regarding Jane's decision. Will she listen to the Network's (in the face of scold Harriet and her friend who also disastrously dated Jack) urges to dump him, or will she ignore the facts and take a chance?

Before and after images by Joe Flood. Note the level of detail.

The answer is not in the least surprising to anyone who read and saw that Jane consistently enjoyed being with Jack and that he made her feel good. Means and Reed suggest that in a way, the Network wound up subverting their own attempts to steer Jane away from Jack. First, Jane's stubborn and contrary nature made it unlikely for her to do something just because someone told her it was for the best, even someone she was friends with. Second, finding out someone's worst qualities from the very beginning can ground a relationship if there's a real attraction there and squash the fantasy construction we might have. Jane herself suggests that just because Jack wasn't right for these other women didn't mean he wouldn't be right for her, because she had little in common with the people she met. For his part, Jack gives an honest accounting of his many screw-ups but also provides context lacking in the horror stories; more to the point, he seemed motivated to try as hard as possible. Reed and Means give the book a romantic ending, but they also notably stay away from showing an epilogue, updating the state of the relationship in later times.

Another thing that makes the book work is the slightly scratchy and messy style of Joe Flood. Better known for drawing monsters and the like, the bit of grit he adds to the proceedings is not only appropriate to the characters, it helps steer the book away from the smooth, cutesy and more typical First Second house style. It especially helped that the book was in black and white, in part because Flood was more than happy to fill up his panels with the detritus and other details of a city. He didn't need bright, happy colors to fill in gaps. Reed and Means do throw him a bone by having him draw some pages from the Twilight-type series that's mocked relentlessly by the female members of the cast (yet secretly liked). I definitely sensed Reed's hand here, since she created a hit fantasy series for her book Americus.

Despite occasional foul language, I still see this falling squarely in a slightly upper level of young adult reading, like the sort of thing a 16 or 17 year old might enjoy. Ultimately, it's a well-crafted book that's not quite as interesting as Reed's prior book for First Second (Americus), even though it tries its best to provide a new, meta wrinkle on the romance comic. Indeed, many classic romance comics have plot twists that reveal how scummy an exciting bad boy really is, and end with the heroine tearfully intoning "If only I had known!" The Cute Girl Network shows how inside knowledge often reveals things that aren't as important to some as they are to others.

Sequart Reprints: Periodicals

In this column, I've mostly paid attention to the avalanche of quality graphic novels that have been released of late (I have a huge stack still demanding my attention) as well as the large variety of minicomics that grow ever more intricate. There's a big pile of the latter from SPX that will also get a full hearing soon. But what of that disappearing species, the serial alternative comic? Love and Rockets is still going strong of course, but let's take a look at recent issues of some other series, new and old.

DORK #11 (by Evan Dorkin, Slave Labor Graphics)

Evan Dorkin has always been an interesting touchstone creator of sorts for me. He's one of the rare artists who's liked by fans of even the most abstract alt-comics as well as mainstream fans. In fact, he's one of the most prominent "gateway" creators, someone whose work is accessible to mainstream fans but can lead them in other directions. His old Hectic Planet series may have begun as a sci-fi series, but it evolved into something quite different. It became a book about relationships with a sci-fi setting--both about friends and lovers. Certainly Love and Rockets had to have been a huge influence on him by that point, but it was all filtered through his own point of view. That point of view is one of someone who was raised on pop culture & comics, particularly Marvels. As far away from that sort of thing he is now in certain ways, he can't help but reference them in his humor.

That sense of humor is what makes Dorkin such a popular creator. No matter what he's writing or drawing, there's always a manic feel to every word, every panel. Early in his career, Dorkin compensated for his perceived lack of talent by overstuffing every panel full of Will Elder-esque "chicken fat". Now that he's a much more skilled draftsman, that mania remains, only it's on a well-designed page. Dorkin's relationship with pop culture is one of love-hate: his Eltingville Club stories, depicting the misadventures of four genre-loving nerds, is stinging in its depictions of the pathetic lives of these unpleasant individuals. Yet at the same time, there's an undercurrent of pity present as well--and even a certain degree of empathy. Above all else, Dorkin is concerned about his story, his characters and getting laughs--yet there's always a subtext of anger, frustration, depression and hatred towards the world but especially himself.

The latest issue of Dork distills all of this down to its purest form: 24 pages of nothing but gags. Some of them are single-panel, others are seven 4-panel strips, and there are a few extended sequences thrown in there. The issue began as something that Dorkin thought would be easy, just a bunch of gags strung together. But putting together joke after joke and making each one funny was a monstrous task. Dorkin really let his id wander in a lot of them, as his jokes became more vicious and nastier than usual, almost at an early Ivan Brunetti-level. Whether or not an individual finds them funny will vary, of course, but I did want to speak to the way that Dorkin works.

Reading this issue makes me appreciate the sheer effort Dorkin put forth to sell each joke. Take a one-panel cartoon. We see a furball with a hat and glasses having doggie-style sex with a naked woman. The caption reads, "My favorite porn star was Vixxen St. Clair, whose specialty was taking itt up the ass". The drawing itself is sort of funny, the work behind the pop-culture pun (Cousin Itt from the Addams Family) was admirable, the little detail of coming up with a dead-on porn star name was nice, but what took the joke over the top was the word balloon from It: "BRRPIDIT-BIPIBITIBIF BDRRHRHR-HBDRGT!" Dorkin's ability to really sell a joke, to go the whatever extreme was necessary to make the initial idea funny, is on display throughout the issue.

There are times when Dorkin doesn't care if you don't get the reference, but takes the joke to its logical extreme anyway. "The Prisoner of Second Avenue", featuring #6 asking where he was, and a St Marks Place punker naturally saying "You're in the village". You have to be familiar with The Prisoner and New York to really get enjoy that joke, but that's a case of Dorkin aiming some of his humor at certain audiences and making other gags more universal. "David Byrne Gets Alzheimer's" has the singer of course waking up in bed, saying "This is not my beautiful house", etc.

The violent gags are among the funniest in the book; Dorkin really cuts to the bone on them when he combines a familiar reference with a violent end. For example, "Tintin In Cambodia" is a one-panel gag that sees Tintin and Snowy bound, with their throats slit. "Bad Dad" is a page about an awful, abusive father making demented wisecracks to his son as he does ever-more repulsive and over-the-top things. The latter strip speaks not only to the antipathy he feels toward his own father, but there's also an extra undercurrent of discomfort now that Dorkin himself is a father.

Finally, I also rather enjoy his cultural and comics commentary, like his strip entitled "If Other Media Were As Sad As Comic Books" featuring characters saying things like "Dude! I saw this movie last night and they showed a character in it reading a book!" "Oh, I am in ecstasy!" Then there's the "Save CBGB's" strip, where the characters "forgot what a complete shithole this shithole was!"

This just scratches the surface--there's page after page of jokes. Some work better than others, but that will certainly depend on the audience. Dorkin has always noted that his work is polarizing even with his own fans, with some preferring Eltingville to Milk and Cheese, Fun Strips to the Murder Family, etc. This labor of love, blood, sweat and clearly many tears may be the greatest value for your entertainment dollar you'll see all year.

American Splendor  #3 (Harvey Pekar & various, DC/Vertigo)

Harvey Pekar is a name familiar to virtually every comics fan these days, thanks to the success of the film adaptation of American Splendor. However, Harv had been chugging along for years, first self-publishing his comics and then having them released by Dark Horse. While we did see an issue a year from Dark Horse, they never really gave his work the promotion and attention it deserved. While other major publishers were busy reissuing collections of Harv's early work (which sold like gangbusters), Dark Horse sat on a decade's worth of his comics--many of which were excellent.

Happily, the success of the film and his reprints opened up all sorts of opportunities: three original graphic novels plus a new series from Vertigo. Vertigo is doing a much better job of not only promoting him but getting an interesting variety of artists to illustrate his stories. It's unfortunate that Pekar didn't get these kinds of resources until very late in his career. It's a bit like Gary Payton signing on with Miami late in his career in order to get that elusive first NBA title--he still had moments of brilliance, but he was no longer a trailblazing force.

That's OK, because even an issue of American Splendor that covers familiar ground is still a unique event in the world of comics. Pekar not only is amazingly skilled in his depiction of quotidian life that is paradoxically poetic in its plainness, his cultural-political tangents & digressions on his career are also fascinating to read. I find his short stories are more effective than most of his graphic novels to date, in part because there's not quite enough narrative in most of his stories to sustain a long-form work. I would guess that's why he chose to write about other people in his latest graphic novels, and took a long look at his childhood in The Quitter.

While all three are quite enjoyable in their own way, there's something about a short Pekar story that is immensely satisfying on its own. The way he changes narrative strategies depending on the kind of story he tells and the type of artist he chooses to illustrate that story have a profound effect on the way the reader experiences them. For example, take "The Battle of the Vacant Lot". It's a story about his childhood and a violent event that took place, so it only made sense for his The Quitter collaborator Dean Haspiel to illustrate it. Haspiel's art is dynamic and stark, with lots of bold blacks, dramatic close-ups and tense compositions. That choice perfectly played up the story of Harvey accidentally hurting a friend of his as a child but feeling a weird sense of power after he did it. As with most of his stories, there's no neat conclusion or wrap-up; Pekar deliberately leaves his anecdotes open-ended for further contemplation by the reader.

"Medicating In the A.M." uses unusually loose art from another frequent contributor, Josh Neufeld. The slightly fuzzy line Neufeld employed nicely reflects the way Pekar felt in the morning as he contemplated what medicines he needed to take to combat his physical and mental problems. After using narrative captions in that first story to gain a little distance, the reader has full access to his thoughts via word balloons.

"Regionalism" employs long-time Pekar workhorses Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm. They're pretty much the working definition of "solid but unspectacular", which is what this story about urban sprawl, increased segregation and ways to combat it via a localized governmental model that encourages cooperation rather than competing for resources. Harv softens the didactic and rhetorical aims of the story by making it a dialogue between himself and a friend, and the art switches between Harvey and the scenarios he describes. One of the most interesting aspects of Pekar (one glossed over in the movie) is his status as a working-class intellectual, a renaissance man with extensive interests in politics, history and literature.

My favorite story was the quintessential quotidian Pekar piece, "Morning Route". Illustrated by Ty Templeton (an inspired choice) and looking like it was shot almost directly from his pencils, he adds a certain warmth to the proceedings. The story simply follows Harv around as he gets medication, goes to the post office, researches a story and buys some cookies for his wife. The undertone, as there almost always is in his stories, is how one man struggles to make sense of his world and feel like he's productive. As one reads his stories over the years, one picks up the thread not of a temporal narrative of his life, but an emotional narrative. Even when there's nothing but despair around him, he still plods through his day. After retiring from his government job and beating cancer a second time, he had to fight to stave off tedium and feelings of uselessness. For Pekar, not having a purpose and an outlet for expression is the same thing as death.


Copykat #1 (MK Reed & Laura Tallardy, Otazine)

Manga is very much outside of my sphere of interest, but I've always enjoyed MK Reed's portrayals of youth and relationships. Her ear for dialogue makes her stories pleasant page-turners. It was a bit odd to see her write for an artist other than herself, and it was even stranger to see the printing/paper quality looking so amateurish. The whole thing felt more like a minicomic than a more professionally produced magazine, although its very crudeness actually made it more enjoyable to look at. Most standard manga (yes, I know there are all sorts of exceptions) is so slick and stylized (especially American attempts at the style) that my eye slides off the page. Quite frequently, I can't hold on to what's on the page. The cruder art, combined with a naturalistically told tale, reduced this difficulty for me.

The story is amusing and given energy by Reed's vivid characterization. Every character is given some sort of depth and is neither entirely likeable nor despicable. The plot is rather familiar: a young woman with a bubbly personality but not much of a grip on practicalities comes to live with her sister in New York, waiting for that big break in the art world. Reality dictated that she had to go find a job, and so she stumbled onto one at the local copy shop. Kat, the title character, is the sort of naive but pushy young woman who is fun to read about in this sort of setting. The reader is drawn to her but also wants to see her take a few lumps in the process of figuring things out.

The one really jarring thing about the art was Tallardy interjecting photographic backgrounds at random throughout the story. I'm not sure if that was a stylistic choice or simply a way to avoid trying to tackle subjects she can't draw. Her art is actually fairly expressive, but it's obvious that she can't do everything she wants on a page yet and there's not much economy to her art. She would do well to perhaps use slightly thinner lines and clean things up a bit in general. I like the way she composes a page, but using thick blacks doesn't really compensate for crude draftsmanship.

Monster Parade #1 (Ben Catmull, Fantagraphics)

It's odd that perhaps the most "mainstream" of the comics I'm reviewing in this column in terms of its trappings is from Fantagraphics, the vanguard publisher of alternative comics. Monster Parade is the new series by former Xeric-grant winner Ben Catmull. His work features a certain ominousness in its atmosphere and setting, lightened by whimsical story elements and absurd situations.

There's a certain interconnectedness in the short stories here, but it's not explicit. Catmull's world is one where monsters are the norm but still inspire wonder. In "Winter Storm", a young boy watches a storm roll in, stoked by a gigantic 4-armed hillbilly who's throwing lightning bolts and stirring up a wind. A huge bird brings the rain, and then the boy comes face to face with a flying whale. As we cut to a train rolling by, the story switches from black and white to the next story's washed-out reds. In "Monster Express", we get a sharply timed comedy of discomfort combined with an off-panel rampaging monster on a train. The story is completely different from anything else in the issue. However, despite the escalating gags from page to page, it still manages to finish on an extremely creepy note.

From there, we segue into the local wildlife doing all sorts of odd things and come upon an image of a creature in a window in a town. The reader is immediately jolted into the next story, "Civilization Illustrated", a faux-academic study of a town surrounded by rivers. This was my favorite story in the book, as Catmull manages to combine comedy, weirdness, and creepiness in one package. There's almost a Lovecraftian feel to some of the images (like the creature in the "deep haunted cellars where no living person should tread"). Then there was the minimalistically depicted war between Louse Land and Mite Ville, two insect cities living underneath a dock. There's not really a narrative here, just a collection of dizzying images that make the reader want to know more about every tidbit offered.

Catmull has always been effective in creating mood, atmosphere and general discomfort for the reader. In the long period of time it took him to publish again, it's clear that he's added a lushness to his work that serves to soften its hard edges and induce a sort of nostalgia for events that never took place and locales that don't exist. That may be the most unsettling part of his art.

Apocalypse Nerd #4 (Peter Bagge, Dark Horse)

Peter Bagge is one of my all-time favorites, and I've enjoyed every series he's released since he ended regular publishing of his classic Hate a few years ago. There's a sense that while he's dabbled with children's comics for DC (Yeah!), a whacked-out Spider-Man story and a book about a comic strip artist & his staff (Sweatshop, also for DC) along with Hate annuals, he's yet to really get back in the groove that made him one of the most important and successful comics artists of the 90's.

Apocalypse Nerd, along with its backup feature Founding Fathers Funnies, is taking him a long way back to that status in my eyes. First of all, he's doing both writing and drawing again for this feature, which wasn't the case for his mainstream work. Second, this material is a return to the sort of freewheeling nihilism that made Hate such a landmark series. Third, the backup feature highlights what he's done best in the past few years: politically-oriented strips for places like Reason and Salon. Applying the cynical, smart-assed Bagge interpretation to sacred cows like the Founding Fathers of the US is instructive both as history and a lesson on how to think about politics today.

The title feature follows two friends in the Pacific Northwest after North Korea nuked Seattle and their wacky hijinx. This issue gives us a bit more information about what's happening in the world at large after civilization more-or-less ceased to function in the area. The protagonists stumbled upon a "nerd camp", as a bunch of academics set up a subsistence farm. That happened to be close to a compound filled with lesbian separatists. A raiding party of native Americans on horseback takes over the men's camp; and Perry, the less macho of our heroes, winds up begging to be taken in by the lesbian compound. They reluctantly allow it after he convinces one less threatening woman to injure him and play upon their sympathies. This sort of flies, as they turn him into a pet, even making him live in a doghouse! The story is typical Bagge over-the-top humor, beginning with a shocking premise and then taking it to its logical extreme. As always, his exaggerated, eyes-popped-out art perfectly matches the story. While his line is perhaps not as precisely rendered as it used to be in the Hate glory days, his unique stylization more than gets the job done.

The real main event of this issue was "Let's Fuck Shit Up!" starring the Beantown Boys--Sam Adams, John Adams, Paul Revere and James Otis. It's a hilarious look at the propaganda, chicanery and crudity of America's revolutionary forefathers. Flipping from year to year, Bagge comically explores attempts made at distorting the facts of the Boston Massacre, the political maneuvering surrounding the Boston Tea Party, Otis' demented public rants, and moneyman John Hancock & Sam Adams fleeing by gilded carriage when the battle of Lexington broke out. Bagge manages to accurately convey historical detail with modern dialogue, producing a highly insolent look at history. Considering the way that the Founding Fathers are mythologized in American school systems, getting a taste of the wackiness that truly surrounded the times is what makes his stories so effective. I can't get enough of these stories, and I love to see a book full of them.

The Vagabonds #2 (Josh Neufeld & Various, Alternative Comics)

I reviewed issue #1.5 of the Vagabonds back in 2005 for my MOCCA article, and much of that material is in the new issue. The "real" issue is even more attractive than the mini; Neufeld's design sense and aesthetics are subtle and refined. This comic is devoted entirely to Neufeld's collaborations and the nature of collaboration itself. Neufeld is so successful as an illustrator because he never fails to bring out the most in a script he's given but does it without overwhelming the text. This makes him an ideal choice for Harvey Pekar, for example, who usually favors simplicity and directness for his naturalistic storytelling choices.

Neufeld separated the issue into four categories: Confessions (biography), Health & Welfare (odd medical tales), Echoes (formal experiments) and Loss (literal and figurative). In the first section, Neufeld illustrates two stories about Donald Ross written by his son. The first sees his rise as a big-time CEO in New York; the second sees him in Barbados after having given up that life. Both stories involve him ambitiously trying to master his environment, only to find that he was in over his head. Neufeld uses a pleasantly cartoony technique for these stories, verging on bigfoot-style comics.

A highlight of the Health section was a strip that Neufeld wrote about breaking his finger and how alienated from it he became. In a tongue-in-cheek turn, he blames the finger for ruining his career and marriage and ends the story holding a cleaver vowing that "there isn't room enough on this hand for the both of us". The most interesting example from Echoes was Neufeld completely redrawing a page of dialogue from an issue of Superman. Neufeld rethinks a scene featuring Superman returning to the Fortress of Solitude into a scene where a man comes home to his apartment in the midst of winter.

My favorite bit from Loss was "Father McKenzie's Sermon", inspired by the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby". Of course, in the song, Father McKenzie writes the words of a sermon that no one will hear; Neufeld interprets this as a sermon for Rigby's funeral. Neufeld's design on the page was quite clever. We see a shot of his feet, then his gesticulating hands and a bible, then a cross around his neck, then the cross on the coffin. We pan back to see a church and its cemetery, and finally her grave. This strip, and the comics he drew that adapated poetry, show Neufeld's great facility with adapting nearly anything into the language of comics.

Though the issue is interesting in its multiple approaches, experiments and types of story, the best Neufeld stories are those written by Neufeld. His travel stories are reminiscient of Pekar's work in that they look at small moments but significant in unfamiliar places and situations. In this issue, Neufeld stretches the bounds of the unfamiliar as an artist and collaborator, and the reader is treated to a one-man anthology more diverse than many multi-creator anthologies.

Sequart Reprints: Yet More MoCCA minis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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