Slipping Through The Shadows With Roman Muradov

Roman Muradov is one of the few cartoonists I can think of who is somehow an appropriate fit for NoBrow, Uncivilized Books, Kus! and Retrofit. Take Jacob Bladders And The State Of The Art (Uncivilized), for example. The mystery angle, satirical elements and stark black & white drawings are all perfect fits for the highbrow/lowbrow mix that Uncivilized is known for. (In A Sense) Lost & Found  (NoBrow) is far more clearly laid out and an easier read in general, and its use of color and its lush design puts it firmly in that NoBrow aesthetic. The End Of A Fence is a smaller-sized art object in vivid color, making it a nice fit in the Kus! family. They're all unmistakably Muradov in terms of the whimsical, angular drawings; a continuous use of shadow; and a bone-dry sense of humor that occasionally veers into too-clever preciousness.

Jacob Bladders is a sort of noir parody set in a ruthless 1940s publishing world where illustrators can get roughed up to get at their work. Even if it's the mediocre work of the titular cartoonist, whose drawing of "career ladders" for the New York Daily News provides steady filler. In many ways, this entire book is a shaggy dog joke, as it imagines Twitter existing in a slightly different form in that era (called Tweeter), with certain elite tweeterers being named as Twitterateurs, leading to the punchline of a book heavily influenced by the aesthetic of painter Paul Klee. The book claims that his ink-and-watercolor piece The Twittering Machine (below) was a satire of Tweeter, providing a groaner of an end for that shaggy dog joke. While Muradov's figures sometimes resemble that of Klee's fellow Der Blaue Reiter member Wassily Kandinsky, the famous Klee smudges are omnipresent in this comic, often deliberately obscuring dialogue and even action. This is a book about conspiracies at a high level, thuggishness and brute force at a low level, and art theory at an abstract and concrete level, with the drawings in an Expressionist style and the narrative being all about the value and meaning of art, especially with regard to how it interacts with commerce. This is decidedly the densest of Muradov's comics, and there are points when visual and narrative thickness becomes nearly incoherent, but Muradov is always able to bring it clearly back around to the narrative just in time.

The End Of A Fence has a pretty simple high concept: a world where one can be redirected to a different area where one can meet one's perfect match. The book starts with a break-up and a woman with a perfectly coiffed bun hairstyle going elsewhere. In this book, the characters are smooth and essentially piles of geometric figures carefully arranged to create what looks like people. The story is fairly predictable, as the protagonist learns that it's the differences that make relationships interesting, and too much agreement is not only boring, but can lead to conflict on its own. This was what I meant by Muradov's comics being a bit on the precious side, because if it wasn't for the remarkable use of color, this would be a fairly generic story. Indeed, Muradov's juxtaposition of colors makes the characters shimmer and shine on the page. The way Muradov dips colors into pitch black and out again is a particular visual highlight, as is his unusual lettering and neologisms that develop out of text that's slightly altered and bent. In Muradov's comics, reality has a slightly elastic quality, and the dance of color forms across the page is what makes this comic fun to look at; the actual text is of far lesser importance.

(In A Sense) Lost & Found felt like a kind of middle ground, wherein Muradov used a traditional comics grid (9 panels) and a russet-brown/deep purple color wash to tell this story of lurking in the city's shadows. Muradov is fond of doing homages to other artists and writers, and the introductory line of this comic ("F. Premise awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find that her innocence had gone missing...") seems to be a direct reference to Franz Kafka's classic The Metamorphosis, wherein "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." In the case of Ms. Premise, that transformation was similar to poor Gregor's in that she instantly became an outcast; her father told her to not ever leave the house now that it was gone. Exactly what "innocence" meant in the context of the story is left deliberately vague; it could be an awareness of how the world works (especially with regard to how women are treated), it could be one's virginity, but it's definitely something specific to being a woman.

She launches a quest to track it down, leading her to a fatalistically depressed bookseller who saves her from an angry mob. From there, she follows a clue to an underground series of merchants where she learns that her innocence had been taken to a certain address. She's forced to put on a pair of baggy pants to disguise her gender before she goes out, however. Eventually, she discovers her innocence has been mass-produced to make neckerchiefs, at which point she realizes she doesn't need it anymore. After that final, life-changing encounter, she negotiates her environment that shifts from the nightmare world of Pablo Picasso's Guernica to The Dance, by Henri Matisse. In other words, from the brutality of a judgmental world to a way of reclaiming her innocence on her own terms. Unlike Gregor Samsa, F. Premise lives through the nightmare and comes out the other side, thanks entirely to her own newfound understanding of her self and the power that not caring about social mores gives one. At the very end, she is literally writing her own story as she repeats the first line of the book's narrative, an indicator that her identity is something that can never be taken away from her, but it can be given away. The result of her quest was discovering that she had indeed never really lost it in the first place, but rather it had transformed into something she, and only she, had control over. Once again, the use of the grid and the mixture of total storytelling clarity mixed in with shadows, darkness and visual chaos made for a perfect blend in representing someone who started to see the familiar world as something new and confusing.

Satellite of Love: Moonhead and the Music Machine

Andrew Rae's Moonhead and the Music Machine is about a teen-age boy named Joey Moonhead, who has a moon hovering about his body where his head should be. Said moon has eyes, nose, etc; it's entirely functional as a real head, with the exception of the times Joey stops paying attention and his head floats away into the clouds. His parents are similarly moon-headed and similarly find their attention drifting far away, especially from their son and his emotional needs. This book would be unbearably twee and cliched, and its metaphors ham-fistedly obvious, were it not for Rae transforming its more trite elements by way of his mind-bending visuals. The ligne claire style of drawing combined with a soft pastel palette gives each page a gently psychedelic quality.

Another of Rae's assets is the straightforward literalization of what makes each person weird and unique, as he externalizes each character's true inner self throughout the course of the story. It's a simplistic technique, but it's told with so much sincerity and empathy that it winds up being a highly effective storytelling tool. The story follows the aimless high-schooler Joey, who doesn't find a direction in life until he invents a music machine with transformative qualities. He's aided in this by another kid who happens to be a ghost (in a subplot out of Fight Club), who gives him the confidence to perform in public. Rae then indulges in the old cliche of an outsider ignoring his best female friend in favor of a pretty but vapid girl and climbing up the social ladder.

All of that gets resolved, of course, but it's by way of some remarkably grotesque cartooning that is still somehow grounded in the mostly kid-friendly nature of this book. In the end, Joey learns to appreciate his best friend, not so much as a love interest, but as someone who's actually his superior when it comes to creating art. He also comes to terms with the ghost that's the literalization of his confidence in front of others, which is a key factor in allowing him to share the beauty and transformative power of his art with others. Bubbling under the surface of a mostly mellow story is the idea that art can be so powerful that it can cause those exposed to it to examine their true selves and find some raw, ugly truths. That was the most interesting aspect plot-wise of this pleasant if meandering book, though it got buried a bit in the resolution of the teen angst storyline.

NoBrow Week: NoBrow 7-9

Let's take a look at the most recent editions of NoBrow's titular flagship anthology. The anthologies were some of NoBrow's earliest publications and the first five volumes didn't actually have any comics as such, just illustrations (some of which had a narrative content). Now the anthology is split 50/50 in terms of comics and illustration, making it highly unusual in today's comics scene. The anthology can be seen as a celebration of the NoBrow aesthetic: elegance, simplicity of design and vividness of color. For many of the pieces, the most immediate impact comes from that use of color rather than the line of each artist or even the narrative. The effect is not a slick one, as the comics maintain a certain warmth and even welcoming quality despite the brightness of each individual page. NoBrow is old-school in that each volume has a particular theme the artists must work around. Each issue has an interesting mix of North American, British and European cartoonists, all of whom fit the NoBrow aesthetic in one way or another. There's also a sense of whimsy to be found in many of the pieces, if not outright (dry) humor. Most every piece tends to be four pages, with a few exceptions, and it's clear that the artists brought their A-games in order to participate.

The best of the three issues reviewed here is NoBrow #7, themed "Brave New World." Editors and publishers of NoBrow Alex Spiro and Sam Arthur put together a killer line-up, and they delivered. Beginning with a doomed bicycle rider as drawn by Joost Swarte, most of the pieces edge up against science-fiction and distopian fiction. Tom Gauld opens up with the ABCs of utopia ("jetpacks", "xenopets") and follows that with the ABCs of "Our Dreadful Future", including "kill-bots" and "zeppelin attacks". It's typically dry and witty Gauld. Joe Lambert's piece of course centers on children, and it's one of his best stories to date. It concerns a group of children worrying about mortality and meeting a rich next-door neighbor. They get into all sorts of shenanigans and the end of the story reveals that this was a flashback to the three friends in the future, reminiscing about how their bond started. Lambert's line is always superb, but here he's really getting at gesture and dialogue that really captures the experience of children.

Eleanor Davis goes backward, as a group trying to reenact Adam and Eve before the fall is slowly whittled down to a single couple. Davis has always worked well using color as a primary narrative tool, and her use of pastels mimics the effect of reading this as a series of cave drawings. Luke Pearson dabbles in a ghost story that involves jumping back and forth in time. Jillian Tamaki's story is about a woman who starts to shrink and simply carries all the way through her being absorbed in a story that's strangely moving. Ethan Rilly's story of a misanthropist working in a mining colony is fantastic, getting at both the alienation of the main character and just how incredibly intolerable he is to others. I could read a book about this character. Richard Short's highly cartoony strip using his usual cast of characters is typically amusing, philosophical and harrowing.

Michael DeForge's "Leather Space Man" strips are show-stoppers, introducing this alien being as a kind of documentary subject, one given over to eyewitness accounts of women trying to sleep with him. DeForge's use of red and black only adds to the intensity of the story. Domitille Collardey's story is another standout, a gorgeous and heart-rending story about an alchemist who systemically closes himself off from the world and his ex-lover through his talents. Anders Nilsen's "Poseidon" is the anchor story of Rage of Poseidon from Drawn & Quarterly, and its use of silhouette makes it a nice match for the kind of figure work on display in this volume. The only artist whose work I was not familiar with that I thought stood out was Andrew Rae; his "Space Cadet" used a panel-to-panel correspondence across pages to match the adventures of a little kid finding a page of pornography in the woods to a spaceman finding a relic on an abandoned planet. It's a cute concept, cleverly executed.

Luke Pearson's piece on anxiety leading to physical illness was fascinating and funny, and was one of the best stories in NoBrow #8, "Hysteria".  I found most of the stories in this issue to be lightweight and forgettable, though there were a few other exceptions. Zack Soto's story about a mecha-hero protecting a moon base from monsters was cleverly designed (action in big pictures at the top of the page, drama and dialogue in small panels at the bottom) and used soft colors to take the edge away from the story's action. Jose Domino's story about a man trying to get away from noise was so insistent that its final punchline landed despite being predictable. Matteo Farinella takes a look at the antiquated medical definition of hysteria, one where a "wandering womb" dresses up in a suit and starts hanging out in a park. It's a pointed tale that has a certain Jim Woodring quality in terms of its character design (the walking uterus is genuinely creepy-looking).

Marc Torices' "Broker", about a cold man with a high-powered financial job, uses a few tricks from the Chris Ware playbook in terms of design and color to relate his ultimate physical breakdown, likely due from guilt that was simply filed away in his brain. It's a smart story that's packed with information and is perfectly paced. Philippa Rice's "Crisis" added a bit of crude energy missing from much of the anthology, relating a story about a young woman in a grocery store trying to impress a bagboy. Finally, I thought the Dilraj Mann/Laura Halliwell story about a young woman trying to reconnect with a high school friend who had moved up in terms of her peer group was one of the sharpest-looking stories in the edition, especially in terms of its character design. The device of a gang of girls pretending to faint in order to gain attention was clever and sad at the same time, especially when the protagonist gets double-crossed but eventually becomes stronger for the experience.

NoBrow #9, "It's So Quiet", is certainly a bounceback from #8. Lambert returns is the loudest silent story I've ever read. Once again featuring kids, one of them starts ranting and raving, with the points of the word balloons appearing but not the actual balloons. He's initially embarrassed by his loquaciousness when someone plays it back to him, literally peeling the mouth off his face, but he later uses that phone recording to hijack yet another conversation. Jon McNaught kicks off the anthology with a story about a statue of St Francis of Assisi making a journey from garden store to garden, a mute witness to nature and fellow stone inhabitant of a lonely man's yard. Jim Stoten's atomic viewpoint story pulls the camera deeper and deeper into an image, revealing a smaller image and repeating this process ad infinitum until it all loops back to the beginning. It's a rapid-fire series of occasionally trippy and cartoony images. Will Morris' modern update of an old British ballad about an engaged man being tempted by a mermaid is extremely clever in terms of its design and execution; it's funny and sad all at once. Bianca Bagnarelli is an emerging talent from Italy whose work is reminiscent of Eleanor Davis' her "Say Hi For Me" follows a child's journey from the bustle of the city to the awesome hush of the rural winter.

Kirsten Rothbart's "Dead End" is less a story than an anecdote of a young woman who wears a bear costume for a living and her rock 'n roll dreams that she refuses to relinquish. Disa Wallender's "A Sneeze Within A Sneeze" is disgusting and hilarious, as a woman sneezes a miniature version of herself made out of snot into existence, only to be sucked up by her creation. The use of colored pencil gives this strip a rough edge that's unusual in an anthology whose edges are usually a bit smoother. Arne Bellstorf's "Silent Night" uses charcoal and gray and small panels to tell the story of a woman looking to kill herself, possibly as a reaction to the world at large. It is remarkably restrained in its storytelling, even as it makes clever visual connections (the pattern on her pants is that of static on a TV set, representing how alone she is). Mikkel Sommer's "The Silent Visitor" is about a woman welcoming an alien visitor, and at first it's all about knowing glances and seduction. In the second half of the story, it turns all of that on its head in hilarious fashion when the alien meets her dog. Hellen Jo's "Are You There, Lucifer? It's Me, Cindy" has Jo drawing a teenage girl (what she does best, of course) cutting herself ritually over a pentagram, crossing her arms petulantly when it doesn't seem to work, then spasm and glassily look off when she discovers that it indeed has, but not in the way she wanted. The blood-spattered message in the final panel is a funny and grim send-off.

I haven't touched on the illustration side of the anthology in this review and don't have much to say about them other than that some of them have a narrative quality and in some ways encapsulate the feel of the theme better than some of the comics. I thought the illustrations in #8 were better overall than most of the comics, for example. Just as the original Drawn & Quarterly anthology combined the best of Canadian, American and European cartooning, so does NoBrow express the state of a particular aesthetic in comics in a manner that no other anthology nor publisher in comics does at the moment. It's a cooler, more refined aesthetic, but one that allows for humor and even some genre tropes.

NoBrow Week: BlexBolex, Biografiktion

BlexBolex first caught my attention in his NoBrow book DogCrime, which I described as follows: "Blexbolex’s figures are colorformed shapes, sort of like the shapes Richard McGuire used in P+O. He accompanies these frequently dense, melting images with crazy narrative text." The same is true for the loose sequel of sorts to DogCrime, No Man's Land. However, where DogCrime was compact, No Man's Land is epic in sweep. The narrative, which has a crazed and apocalyptic quality, is episodic in nature. One narrative follows our protagonist, a detective/spy who fakes his own suicide after being convicted of a crime and goes on the run. The second narrative consists of flashbacks  that the detective recalls, slowly filling in the missing pieces of information for the reader. Despite the chaos present on each page, there's a fairly tight plot that ties things together, just as each page slowly comes into focus despite the splotches of coral, olive and midnight blue that make up each page.

No Man's Land slowly addresses the detective's struggle as one of battling every aspect of conspiracy imaginable. He is tortured for information by a multi-eyed monster that represents the confluence of military, corporate and governmental forces. An abandoned ship is actually full of biological weapons: plague zombies. He winds up in a house overrun by sharks and commanded by an officer and a priest, saying "I get out of one nightmare only to land in another, just as idiotic", a statement that more-or-less sums up the book as a reading experience. Surviving that experience, he talks to a soldier who had secreted himself away from his superior officers, spilling a story-within-a-story epic about being a grunt in a World War I trench combat situation and trying to figure out a way to survive. That led to yet another story-within-a-story epic about the soldier meeting another soldier who was part of a religious sect that used astral projection and drug use to send their consciousnesses out into the world, even taking over other bodies. Certain revelations come out that lead to the detective's capture by former comrades (including Puss In Boots) that reveal everyone's complicity in the scheme. 

The book's seeming deus ex machina calls back to an earlier sub-plotline but in fact loops the reader back to the very beginning, showing that the opening of the book was either an illusion or else a Schroedinger's cat choice. That is, the book has two possible openings: one where the detective died and one where he didn't, but the reality where he doesn't die leads directly back to the beginning. BlexBolex's comics are disorienting, hilarious, absurd and existentially bleak. Reality is constantly shifting sand and swampland, never allowing the reader or his characters a chance to stand on solid ground. In many respects, the BlexBolex style is the epitome of NoBrow, as it privileges color and design and gives them the same stand as drawing and narrative, and does so in a striking and powerful manner.

The same might be said for the Berlin-based collective known as Biografiktion, a group that consists of Ana Albero, Paul Paetzel and Till Hafenbrak. In their anthology of the same name, Biografiktion sees each artist do a ridiculously fake "biographical" story about a celebrity or celebrities. Collected from their original zine form, this volume features black & white stories about Eddie Murphy and ABBA. These are all strictly for laughs and are quite funny, drawn in a sort of cartoony, primitivist style. The three artists wouldn't look out of place in a Fort Thunder-style anthology, for example. The book opens up with each artist doing a biography of one of the other members of the group. Albero opens up with a vicious story about Paetzel being a "corpulent" kid who turned into a giant karate kid; Paetzel does a story about Hafenbrak becoming a fire-extinguishing hero; and Hafenbrak turns in a whimsical account of why Albero is afraid of bugs and understands both German and French.

The best Eddie Murphy story is one where he decides to write and direct his own romantic comedy, and all of the parts (including the female lead) will be played by him. This leads him to fall in love with the image of his female counterpart and spurs on a crazy series events that involves copious drug use, a hallucination of Sherman "The Nutty Professor" Klump giving him a secret formula, and the creation of his perfect mate. The author is not credited but I'm pretty sure it's Hafenbrak yet again. There's something delightfully creepy about the toothy grimace we see on Murphy's face throughout the story, and in general the slightly flat nature of his drawing style only heightens the craziness of the story. All three artists shine in their ridiculous ABBA stories, as Paetzel sees the young group blessed/cursed by a magical man from the future who fulfills their dreams of success but also lets them know that heartbreak is inevitable--and their fate is now inescapable. It marries silliness with an EC Comics-style ending. Hafenbrak's silly quest comic turns ABBA into something resembling fantasy characters, fulfilling their destiny through music. It's like turning a Luke Pearson comic into something much stranger and quirkier. Albero's comic about a girl resisting punk rock to become a love slave to one of ABBA's members is strangely touching and wistful, focusing on her ability to generate empathy for her characters through her use of body language and gesture. 

While this is the meat of the comic, the full-color sections on work and food fit more into the NoBrow aesthetic valuing color, design and illustration; this was perhaps the inspiration for NoBrow's initial interest in the collective. Mostly silent, these sections range from traditional comics to illustrations that explore those concepts in amusing ways. The brightness and power of the color contrasts are what give these comics such a vivid and memorable quality. They're not just funny, but beautiful as well. I think sometimes it's easy to get lost in the bright palette of the NoBrow aesthetic and miss the fact that a large number of the comics they publish are humor comics, or fantasy comics with a humorous bent. Biografiktion, for all of its flourishes and eccentricities, is a gag book at heart.

NoBrow Week: Robert Hunter, Jose Domingo

Robert Hunter's Map of Days is yet another exquisitely designed, vividly colored comic from NoBrow. The coloring process they use for the books gives every one a startlingly dense and rich palette, allowing cartoonists to use that color saturation as a narrative tool. NoBrow devoted an entire anthology to questions of cosmogony, and Hunter's book is very much about the ramifications of the origins of the world. In particular, what happens to old, heartbroken gods? Hunter's use of color is different than the way Luke Pearson or Jon McNaught (the two breakout stars from the NoBrow stable) tend to use it. It's softer, fuzzier and warmer, even on pages where there are bright yellows and oranges. It's more akin to a children's book, though the Chris Ware influence is still evident. The story itself is intricate and surprising, as the book turns from an initial account of the god-like creature at the center of the earth who falls in love with the sun to a teen staying with his grandfather by the sea during the summer. As the story progresses, what seems to be a quotidian series of anecdotes slowly converges with the first narrative, creating a jarring series of images that pop off the page. Hunter's dynamic use of color really pays off when the two narratives finally collide in an unexpected manner, but he then ups the stakes of the story to create an intense sense of drama by the story's end. The story is also remarkably touching, as it's ultimately about betrayals of trust on multiple and disastrous levels, and how one man tries to make up for his errors. The book is at once one of NoBrow's most stunning and most approachable releases.

Jose Domingo's Adventures of a Japanese Businessman is not unlike a Sergio Aragonnes cartoon on PCP. This entirely silent story begins with the titular businessman walking home after work, on an oversized page with a fairly regular 2x2 panel grid. By the third panel of the first page, Domingo has set this guy up to be at the inadvertent center of a great deal of trouble. In the first four pages alone, the businessman dodges a mobster gun battle, avoids a giant sushi roll sign from crushing him, accidentally inhales a chemical that turns him into a hulking monster and leaps away into a forest filled with magical creatures. That's enough action and mayhem for a single story, but Domingo has more than a hundred more pages of abuse to heap on this poor guy. He comes across a family of cannibals, gets seduced by a trucker who almost accidentally ran him over, gets turned into a leaf by a witch, gets revived by a guru, meets a family of benevolent yeti, dodges yeti hunters, and walks under the surface of the earth. There's an intensely rubbery quality to Domingo's line that actually reminds of another Mad artist--Don Martin. Those yeti have that same trembling, vibratory line that Martin uses. There's also a bit of a video game influence here, as the businessman's big square head and small body make him look like an 8-bit video game character. Just when you think the book can't get any crazier, Domingo leads the reader into my favorite bit, one that caused him to laugh pretty hard. The businessman happens upon a group of people entering what seemed to be a combination of demonic temple and workplace. They got dressed up in robes and their high priest went over a chart of some kind and then sacrificed an infant. Then they all went upstairs to their job: the Postal Service. It was an incredible punchline to a fantastic, unnerving set-up. The last third of the book somehow manages to become even crazier, with trips to hell and monster fights that looked like something out of a Fort Thunder comic dominating the action. The book ends appropriately, with a scatological joke that makes everything right again and an especially amusing double-take in the final panel. This is a work of relentlessly demented genius told with the tight, kinetic precision of a Carl Barks story and packed to the gills with eye pops and carefully-arranged gags. That four-panel grid and the seemingly never-ending journey of the businessman gives the book an almost spiraling feel that becomes vertiginous at times, held in place for the reader thanks to its tiny but indefatigable protagonist. Fans of visceral humor that backs up its gross-outs with gags that were clearly well thought-out for maximum impact must seek out this book.

The Beauty of Decay: Dockwood

Jon McNaught's design-heavy comics that employ simply-drawn characters and an extensive use of a beautiful but muted palette certainly brings Chris Ware to mind as an obvious comparison. However, I'd argue that their surface similarities are less important than the fact that they both share a dark sense of humor that's not afraid to be broad in unlikely situations. Both also have an eye for nature's beauty as an almost heart-breakingly sad phenomenon at times, in the way that beautiful things can be almost painful to watch. McNaught's Dockwood is explicitly about the season of autumn: the season of beautiful decay. It's a slow process of fading beauty, moving day by day until the leaves have fallen off the trees.

McNaught's book is all about process, slow movement and decay. The ways in which people deal with this as opposed to animals is carefully highlighted. At the start of the book, McNaught makes fun of the way he knows he's going to manipulate the reader by starting the day with a driver stopping in front of a billboard that has a beautiful woman on it that says "Summer Deals", and literally papering it over with an image that says "Autumn Bargains". Capitalism and advertising cease for no season, but I loved how McNaught literally plops a big sign that says "Autumn" into his narrative as a way of introducing his narrative.

The first story, "Elmview", follows the day of a kitchen porter at an nursing home. His day is based on ritual, timing and methodical execution of his tasks while trying to distract himself from his day through radio or TV (either or both are on throughout the book signifying that sense of trying to escape from the moment). That distraction i made clear by McNaught in how he alternates his panels between a commercial and a very brief conversation. A nursing home is an obvious setting for a story about decay, but McNaught distinguishes himself by depicting how each of the residents faces mortality in a different way: resigned and happy, constantly angry, deafly oblivious while puffing away on a cigarette. It's not a coincidence that the angry man yells at the cacophonous starlings outside his window as they prepare to migrate for the season; their departure is another sign that a season is ending. Eating is another frequently used motif, especially comparing how the people eat to how the animals find their own sustenance. McNaught loves to draw out small movements that are not significant to the plot but are relevant to his themes, but avoids getting bogged down by cramming as many as 30 panels on a page.

The second story, "Sunset Ridge", feels a teenage boy going about his evening paper route starting after school. Chronologically, it picks up where "Elmview" leaves off, as the boy is obviously an outsider with most of his peers, with the exception of a geeky chatterbox who soon leaves him to his route. The boy is unnerved when a woman appears at her door when he delivers her paper and gives him candy. It's not until he gets back home that the story's theme becomes evident: it's about the steady erosion of his childhood. Violent sequences from the video game he's borrowed from his friend are cut with  objects from his room, things that show he's very much still a boy even if his childhood is slowly fading away. There's a hilarious sequence at the end of this story where his video game character stops to admire the sunset in the game after a mission and watch the birds. Of course, the birds turnout to have fangs and there's little time for his character to waste, as the computer reminds him. It's a funny way of driving home those points about autumn's inevitability in an artificial environment. This is McNaught's first major release, and he certainly lives up to his considerable potential. Unsurprisingly, the production values from NoBroware first-rate, and McNaught's obviously dry sense of humor punctuates his beautiful, methodical storytelling.

Eight Publishers To Seek Out At SPX 2012

First, I wanted to note that I will be attending the Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda, MD, this upcoming weekend (Saturday 8/15 and Sunday 8/16).  I will be moderating a panel on 8/15 at 11:30am called "British Comics: Does It Translate" featuring a number of UK creators and publishers, including Glyn Dillon (Shade The Changing Man, The Nao of Brown), Luke Pearson (Hildafolk, Everything We Miss), Sam Arthur (co-founder of NoBrow), Ellen Lindner (The Strumpet), and Nick Abadzis (Laika, Hugo Tate). Regular readers of my column will know that several of these artists have been long-time favorites of mine (I've been reading Lindner's comics for over a decade now) and others are new favorites.

There are any number of reasons to be excited by this year's iteration of SPX. Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine will make their first-ever appearances here. Mark Newgarden will be here screening some obscure animation. Francoise Mouly and the Hernandez Brothers will be making much-anticipated returns visits. There will be the usual exciting debuts from stalwarts like Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, NBM, Top Shelf and PictureBox (debuts from Sammy Harkham and Johnny Negron, among others) AdHouse (new books from Ethan Rilly AND Tom Herpich, among others). However, I wanted to shine a little light on several publishers who will be making their SPX debuts, as well as a couple of other important smaller publishers who continue to have a strong presence at the show. Their tables will be loaded with interesting books you may not have even heard of and will be jammed with representative artists.

1. Hic and Hoc. (Table H10) New Jersey's Matt Moses  (at right, above, with Pat Aulisio) is the publisher of this relatively new outfit focusing on collecting minicomics and webcomics, as well as new material. I'll have a big piece on them and a number of other smaller publishers at tcj.com soon, but I've enjoyed Moses' focus on gag and humor work, an area often ignored in the world of small press publishing. Lauren Barnett (Me Likes You Very Much) will be at this table, and she's up for Promising New Talent at the Ignatz Awards. My favorite book of Hic and Hoc's to date is The Complete Talamaroo, by Alabaster. This has just gone into a second edition, so there should be plenty of copies available at the show.

2. Koyama Press. (Tables J7-J10) Toronto-based Anne Koyama finally comes to SPX after several years of publishing extremely well received and highly eclectic comics in a variety of formats. Her table will be jam-packed with her artists and new debuts. Comics wunderkind Michael DeForge will make his SPX debut with the anticipated fourth issue of his comedy-horror series Lose. Julia Wertz joins Koyama Press with the debut of her book on her experience with illness, moving, bad jobs, libraries and other issues, The Infinite Wait (full disclosure: I wrote a blurb for this book). Fellow Old North Stater Dustin Harbin will debut the fourth issue of his Diary series. The Team Society League collective (Aaron Costain, John Martz, Steve Wolfhard, and Zach Worton) will be their with their Book of Answers. Koyama has an eye for developing talent while giving her artists total freedom, not unlike the way Dylan Williams used to run Sparkplug. She also has the well-earned reputation as being one of the nicest people in comics.

3. Retrofit Comics. (Table H14) Philadelphia's Brian "Box" Brown took a well-funded Kickstarter campaign to resurrect the alternative comic book in the form of a subscription service and has turned it into a publishing concern with some impressive books under its belt. Josh Bayer's Raw Power may well be the best of the bunch (a profile I did of Bayer's comics will be featured in the upcoming Studygroup Magazine #2), and he will be at SPX with four new minicomics. Brown will be debuting Flocks #1 by the increasingly prolific and confident L.Nichols and New Sludge City by up-and-comer Brendan Leach, as well as a new comic by himself called The Mark. Tom Hart will also have a couple of heartfelt and personal comics at the Retrofit table but will be repping his own Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) table with his wife and fellow teacher Leela Corman, who will no doubt have copies of her excellent book Unterzakhn.

4. NoBrow. (Tables A1-A2) This is one of the top British publishers, making their US debut. They're bringing one of their best artists in Luke Pearson, author of Hildafolk, Hilda and the Midnight Giant and Everything We Miss. Known for their illustration books as well as their comics, each of the publications is an art object unto itself, each with impeccable design. In addition to several beautiful anthologies, they also have a number of shorter, affordable books in their 17x23 series (I strongly recommend books by Jon McNaught) and also publish Jesse Moynihan's excellent Forming. Co-publisher Sam Arthur and Pearson will both be part of my British comics panel while fellow co-publisher Alex Spiro tends to the table. Any fan of beautiful-looking comics owes it to themselves to give their table a look; their house anthology NoBrow #6 is up for an Ignatz award.

5. Oily Comics. (Table I12) Chuck Forsman (left, above, with Alex Kim) has ambitiously started to recruit fellow artists to publish serialized minicomics for his new publishing concern, and the results have been beautiful thus far. In addition to his excellent The End Of The Fucking World, he's publishing Melissa Mendes' poignantly sweet Lou, Max De Radigues' Moose, and new comics by Aaron Cockle, Dane Martin, James Hindle, Jessica Campbell and more. He'll be sharing a table with fellow Sundays editors/contributors Kim, Joseph Lambert and several others. Fans of quality minicomics should essentially buy the whole lot, because there's not a loser in the bunch he's chosen to publish.

6. 2D Cloud. (Table W61) This small outfit from Minneapolis begun by Raighne Hogan (above, with his wife Meghan) has been quietly publishing beautiful art objects and introducing new and exciting talent for a few years now. They will be out in force at SPX with new releases from co-publisher Justin Skarhus (RDCD Fist #1.5) and newcomer Christopher Adams' Period. Their table will also feature Nicholas Breutzman (Yearbooks, Motherlover), Sharon Lintz (Pornhounds, which includes personal, riveting stories drawn by the likes of Breutzman, Lindner and others), Meghan Hogan (debuting her new comic) Vincent Stall (with Things You Carry) and Will Dinski, whose 2D Cloud debut is a comic called Ablatio Penis. They also published Noah Van Sciver's excellent Igntaz-nominated comic The Death of Elijah Lovejoy. I would also strongly recommend picking up a copy of Good Minnesotan #4, which was one of the better anthologies of the last couple of years.

6. Secret Acres. (Table J11-J12) The Brooklyn-based publisher consisting of Leon Avelino and Barry Matthews (left to right above, with Gabby Schulz in the middle) have been showing at SPX for many years and have racked up a number of Igntatz awards, and for good reason. This year, they'll have Mike Dawson in contention for an Ignatz with his excellent Troop 142 and also have the debut of Theo Ellsworth's new hardcover, The Understanding Monster. Sean Ford will be at the show as well with his recent completed Only Skin. Eamon Espey will also be there, and I would urge you to check out some of his disturbing, intense minicomics that will soon be collected. This publisher has always combined a sterling design sense with cartoonists who have singular aesthetic senses.

7. Sparkplug Comic Books. (Table W59) Publisher Tom Neely (above) will be repping Sparkplug for SPX, the first after Dylan Williams' death last year. Katie Skelly will also be at their table with her recent complete Nurse Nurse, the first book Sparkplug has published since Dylan died. As always, Sparkplug always has a table full of marvelous minicomics discoveries thanks to their status as a major distributor of minis, and this year will be no exception. Be sure to check out Neely's own unique works, like The Blot, The Wolf, his anthology Bound & Gagged and his part in the amazing Henry and Glenn Forever. Tessa Brunton's Passage was nominated for an Ignatz, and she's also up for Promising New Talent.

8. Hidden Fortress Press. (Table C8) This is the name of Paul Lyons' (above, with Cheryl Kaminsky) publishing concern, and this former member of Fort Thunder will be debuting the new issue of Monster. This is one of the best of all alt-comics anthologies, pushing the line between fine arts and comics in a horror genre context. This will be one of the potential "book of the show" choices. Kaminsky, Roby Newton and possibly Brian Ralph will also be at this table.