Two New Anthologies From Hic & Hoc

The Hic & Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humor, Volume One: The United States, edited by Lauren Barnett and Nathan Bulmer. In my idle fantasies where I suddenly become a multi-millioniare, I dream of funding and publishing a cutting-edge humor anthology featuring the best of new and old talent. The Illustrated Journal of Humor is remarkably close to my vision of what that anthology would look like. Editors Barnett and Bulmer are funny cartoonists in their own right, and they've assembled a book that has a lot of key veterans as well as younger talent. Their "Note From the Editors On Humor" is one of two expertly-executed fart jokes in this book, and it's rare that scatological humor in general makes me laugh at all.

The book opens with a fantastic Noah Van Sciver piece that positions one of his typical sad-sack characters who is sick and can't get sleep. Suddenly, there's an insistent narrator who questions him and urges him to look at the naked one-eyed monster in his bedroom, rubbing his genitals all over the character's beloved and important stuff. Lines like "It's true. You do indeed have a gun. It's right there being rubbed all over a dick" made me laugh out loud. There's also plenty of anti-humor and meta-humor, like Bort's hacky-punchline busting series of strips, or most especially Martha Keavney's "Buster" strips. Keavney has been a long-time favorite of mine, thanks to her Badly-Drawn Comics and Spelt-Rite Comics, and she's certainly someone I'd be eager to publish. The "Buster" strip is a hilarious take-off on hacky pet comics/sit-coms, only it's from the point of view of aliens with a pet human. Keavney's understanding of the timing needed to make such mimicry work is incredible.

Some of the artists, like Nikki Burch, use an exaggerated visual style to tell a simple joke. Others, like Sam Spina's excellent "Pern", use a simplified style to relentlessly pound the reader with a series of jokes associated with a couple having sex. The jokes are mostly in the dialogue, with the exception of the screwed-up angry face of the woman when they're indulging in "age play" and she slaps him and snarls "Don't you EVER talk back to mama.". It's hilarious because it's so incongruous. Of course, there's also the king of minimalist gag work, Sam Henderson.  He's another obvious choice for such an anthology, and his mix of visual gags and puns always deliver. Then there are strips that are funny because they exaggerate everyday situations, like going shopping for clothes. Madeline Flores' page of simple but exaggerated drawings and screaming things like "This shirt makes my tits look GOOOOOD!" was another stand-out in a book that was incredibly dense with great contributions. The same is true for Jane Mai's outrageous page of designing men's lingerie, slapping packages into "snake" or "elephant" and humiliating her man into getting a "shame boner" before she simply goes to sleep.

Not every strip uses exaggeration in its visuals, nor do they go for strict gags. For example, Grant Snider's comics are contemplative and amusing, where every panel is funny in its own way without building up to something larger. Dustin Harbin's "Lives of the Generals" similarly starts with a simple premise and riffs on it for panel after panel in his crisp and cartoony style. Sam Sharpe's strip about a boy's relationship with a beloved superhero of his youth carrying on into the bigger questions is more bittersweet than laugh out loud, even as the conceit of the strip (the answer to the question asked in every panel is "no"). Julia Wertz's amazing "Life Like This" equates being a "funny" cartoonist to a vaudeville act that's booed off the stage when she tries to discuss something serious. Despite (and really, because of) the gruesome ending, Wertz still manages to throw in a punchline. It really is her entire career boiled down to a single bit of brilliance. There's also solid work by Jeff Lok, Dakota McFadzean, Patt Kelley (pretty much the ultimate fart joke), Nathan Stapley and others. Even the worst strips in here are still solid, as Barnett & Bulmer both did a fine job of balancing the absurd, the grotesque, the whimsical and the flat-out funny. This is a smash-hit success.

Hic & Hoc Presents: Unknown Origins & Untimely Ends, edited by Emi Gennis. The titular subjects are objects of fascination for Gennis, who frequently writes about weird but true deaths in her comics. This anthology is the comics version of shows like In Search Of... or Unsolved Mysteries, further combined with urban or folk legends particular to certain areas. As is generally the case in such instances, I found that the stories that had more of a foot in reality were more interesting than the stories that relied on the potential of ghosts, monsters, UFOs and other some ephemera. For example, Jackie Roche's "The Leatherman" is a very humane look at an enigmatic man who made the rounds on foot in northeast America. Aaron Whitaker's "The Monster With 21 Faces" is one of several stories regarding unsolved crimes; this one was about a group that kidnapped the head of a candy company, let him go, threatened to poison his product and then later taunted the helpless police department. "The Voynich Manuscript", by the always excellent Julia Gfrorer, turns her spooky storytelling style on a mysterious manuscript that has never been decrypted. I also thought "Goo" by Jason Bradshaw and "Meat Shower" by Noah Van Sciver were funny and weird examples of strange stuff falling out of the sky for no discernible reason. Though it crossed over into urban legend territory, Tod C. Parkhill's "Polybius", is an elegant and creepy tale. It's about a legendary arcade game similar to the vector graphics action of Tempest and the nightmarish effect it had on some gamers, and it's done in that same vector line drawing style. Though the story devolves into men-in-black style conspiracy theories, it was stylish and just credible enough to be of interest.

In the "Untimely Ends" section, there are plenty of stories about unsolved murders, people who mysteriously disappeared, death that are totally unexplained, and certain famous people. WIthoutcomingout and saying it, for example, Phillip Sevy links the death of a young would-be actress named Elizabeth Smart to Orson Welles, connecting the dots in such a way as to explain why he left Hollywood, why he became so depressed and why his career never recovered. Lizz Lunney's take on the influence and death of Rasputin is played for laughs thanks to her cartooning style, alleviating the heavy sense of dread and mystery that most of the other stories in the book are burdened with. I appreciated the thoroughness with which Emi Gennis and JT Yost approached their murder-mystery stories, sticking as close to the facts as they were known while acknowledging the crazier theories surrounding their cases. Jenn Woodall and Sam Alden approached their subjects (a haunted forest, a ghost ship) in a more poetic manner, relying heavily on illustrations as a way of juxtaposing rather than simply guiding the text. For the most part, the very specific voice of each cartoonist was turned down a bit in service of their anecdotes, which makes this anthology something to pursue if you're interested in the subject rather than a particular cartoonist. 

Catching Up With Koyama

Let's catch up with some slender new releases from one of my favorite publishers, Koyama Press.

The Big Team Society League Book Of Answers, by John Martz, Aaron Costain, Zach Worton and Steve Wolfhard (aka Team Society League). This is 44 pages worth of a relentless assault of filthy, hilarious scatological jokes. While the inside covers detail the names of the many, simply-drawn characters that appear in this dialogue-free book, that's a fake-out. The characters are ciphers in the tradition of Lewis Trondheim's Mister I and Mister O. That Trondheim influence can be felt strongly in the way the artists go to work at sublimely-crafted fart jokes like some master artisans of flatulence. The reason why this comic works so well is that the artists don't end their gags with a fart joke--they begin their gags with something gross and then go to great lengths to not only top that grossness, they wrap it around a nicely-crafted joke. While the drawing is kept simple, it's actually quite skilled. There's one joke where the main character cuts out his own bowels, stuffs a pizza inside so as to make him a pizza-like character for a kids' birthday party, and then starts bleeding as he stumbles out in front of a group of terrified kids. There's a recurring character who's an anthropomorphic hot dog whose "meat" keeps coming undone and falling on people. There's one strip that subverts every other--a character sucks down gallons worth of gasoline, lights a match, smokes a cigarette, and then walks away with nothing bad happening to him even as the reader is eager to see how it end. Stabbings, incineration, various things being shoved in and emerging out of asses, and general mayhem rule the day in these comics, and there's a sense of glee on these pages as the four jamming artists try to one-up each other. It's a genuine treat.

Eat More Bikes, by Nathan Bulmer. This is another slender book of gags, this time more of the absurd and conceptual variety. Bulmer's line is lean and scratchy; he gives it some solidity by using grey-scaling. I've long enjoyed Bulmer's weekly strip over at tcj.com (in Tucker Stone's column), and his work actually gets funnier as you read more strips and come to understand his comedic rhythm. Like the Team Society League, he starts off with an inherently funny premise (Sheriff Duck, muscles in the shape of the Empire State Building, Children's Song Conspiracy Theories, etc) and then quickly escalates the humor in that situation (the best was having a mini King Kong climb the bicep tower and get shot down). Bulmer's other approach is to start with an utterly mundane premise (a party on a roof, a male stripper, an interview), quickly subvert reader expectations (often with violence) and then cap it with a perfect punchline. What's amazing is that Bulmer drew this entire 36 page comic in just a month--he's a relentless joke machine with a solid sense of craft.

Sunday In The Park With Boys, by Jane Mai.  This is a harrowing, unsparing account of one young woman's experience with anxiety, depression and sheer existential terror. Mai's rendering style ranges from a simplistic, cartoony line (almost like a manga character, complete with a sailor suit) to an intense, almost unbearable naturalism that oozes pain. If there's a credo to this comic, it's "I wish you could understand". Mai tries to get across what it's like to feel the way that she does on a regular basis. She often sees the world as inhabited by horrifying, multisegmented insectoid creatures. She frequently feels them on her own head, suffocating her, isolating her, causing her to become more and more desperate. The phrase she uses, "I wish I wasn't such an asshole" is the cry of depressives everywhere who feel like they don't deserve to be loved. The most devastating part of the book, and really the part that recapitulates Mai's many attempts at understanding herself, comes when she tries to describe how she feels when she's depressed.  She says it's like being in water, "complacent and happy" but "boring". Then you start to drown "and it gets harder to bounce back and stay afloat each time"; for a young person starting to get older, this is precisely what happens. What's interesting about this comic is Mai's use of whimsical storytelling devices that try to give her pep talks: her dog, a mermaid, a mirror, an eyepatch. It's like the entire book is really a dialogue between her depressive self and what is known in therapy as one's "wise mind"--the rational part of one's brain that knows how to help, if only the depressive self would listen. Mai's wise mind is just especially cleverly rendered in so many different ways, even as the specter of the all-controlling insect is such a dominant presence. The book ends on a hopeful note that is as much self-suggestion as it is an honest conclusion for this stunning piece of someone trying to get better in public through art. She and Lance Ward are my new favorite autobio cartoonists for the way they mix humor and unsparing self-examination.