mini-Kus! Of The Week #10: Booger, Lacko, Van Gheluwe

mini-Kus! #48: Nul, by Olive Booger. This is a harrowing account of one young man's crush being swept up in a whirlwind of inexplicable savagery. It follows the diary of a young man who is pursuing a young woman who seems mostly indifferent to his intentions. He starts stalking her and learns that she's left the country for a job. Managing to weasel her Skype address out of her cousin, he is surprised to find how much she seems to miss him on the call--and she invites him to come out to the island where she's working for a job of his own. From there, comedy turns into confusion as he doesn't understand the language and is perplexed at taking tests that ask him seemingly randomly whether a particular thing is cool or "nul" (stupid). Confusion turns into horror when he realizes he will never see his crush, he's assigned a wife, and learns that being considered nul is a license for execution.

Using a ratty line similar to Gary Panter and a nauseating palette that also resembles Panter at his most disturbing, Booger's strict six-panel grid creates a suffocating effect on each page from the very beginning of the comic. It's as though the reader is meant to see the world through the eyes of the protagonist: a paranoid, suffocating world where he's the one doing the oppressing. His world is grotesque and distorted, which is one reason why he only realizes what's happening to him on the island after it's far too late. His is a world of self-delusion driven to insanity from repeated trauma, and when he's reduced to animal status by the end of the story, he barely contests the idea. It's a remarkably dense, powerful attack on conflating obsession with romance and how those who choose to not ask questions inevitably wind up being sacrificed. There's a bit where he's allowed to go back to France in order to become a suicide bomber against "nuls", and all he can focus on is how happy he is to be eating Oreos again. As he descends into savagery and madness, he continues to fixate on those cookies as a symbol of how essentially he misses when his life was cool.

mini-Kus! #49: Call of Cthulhu, by Martin Lacko (adapted from H.P. Lovecraft). Yes, this is indeed a highly abbreviated adaption of the Lovecraft story done in MS Paint. Lacko distills the most essential elements of the story (a group of sailors accidentally letting monstrous elder god Cthulhu out of his crypt), which is important because what Lovecraft is known best for is thousands of words' worth of world building and scene descriptions. Beyond that, he intentionally uses the thickness of his prose as a way of creating this sort of dread mythology of hidden and madness-inducing knowledge becoming visible just very briefly. In many respects, he's the ultimate "tell, don't show" author. What Lacko does is totally demystify that entire process, laying it bare as the silly monster story that it truly is. Cthulhu here is a big, green squid-like monster with a slight grin. The story essentially boils down to a chase scene and an unexpected maneuver that saves the few remaining sailors from the monsters, though as Lovecraft would tell you, they were irrevocably changed. Doing it with the crudeness of MS Paint is not only funny, it was a way for the artist to deliberately handicap himself when drawing Lovecraft's world. In other words, he certainly could have drawn a properly scary and monstrous Cthulhu, but the reality is that no illustration of the monster has ever looked quite right because Lovecraft was deliberate in trying to describe something that could not quite be described or apprehended by the human mind. So rather than attempt to do so, Lacko went in the other direction, with the crudest possible drawings made without even the direct influence of his own hand. It's a good joke and does reveal that there's a lot of suggestion and stylization in Lovecraft and very little substance, but in an odd way it's also strangely reverent to Lovecraft in acknowledging that it takes an alien or artificial hand to depict the reality-bending world of Cthulhu.

mini-Kus! #50: Spectacular Vermacular, by Mathilde Van Gheluwe. This is a lovely story about being in one place in life and feeling tremendous sadness for a time in the past that was very much betwixt and between. Vlad the talking cat is a famous film star who appears on a talk show and was shown an old photo, when he was the mascot of the witch/stage magician Spectacular Vermacular. Van Gheluwe heart-breakingly depicts the moments after the photo was taken, when Vermacular decided to move on with her life and go to Vegas in search of her career. It's a devastating moment because what is left unsaid is how their partnership dissolved and why, but it's clear that Vlad made it big and she didn't. There's a look of guilt and remorse on Vlad's face, but there's something else as well--a look of wistfulness. In a bright and cartoony style, Van Gheluwe uses that cheery quality to get at that sense of wish for a time that is now in the past, and worst of all, wasn't properly appreciated at the time. The level of detail with regard to the hopes, dreams and frustrations of the witch makes the ending especially poignant, even if Van Gheluwe winks at the audience just a bit by going over the top.

Latvian Excellence: S! #11

The Latvian anthology Kus! is so successful that there's a smaller spin-off anthology called S! The 11th issue has the theme of "Artventurous", one that's vague enough for the artists to either totally embrace or ignore. Editors David Schilter and Sanita Muizniece lean heavily on artists from eastern and western Europe, with a smattering of contributors from north and south America. Everything about the anthology is first rate, including the production values and the individual effort from each artist. For many of these artists, it's their first exposure to a wider English-speaking audience, and it's clear that they're doing their best work within the confines of the theme. Schilter & Muizniece have broad tastes, with no particular preference given to artistic styles or fiction vs autobio. The cover, by Latvian artist Leonards Laganovskis, is a beautiful, stunning work that is an intersection of human forms as both functional pieces of furniture and works of art, cascading nonchalantly across the page in a pleasing pastel color scheme.

Some artists, like Martins Zutis, took the theme and reworked epics like The Odyssey into comics form. Betty Liang went in a different mythological direction in her depiction of the Leda and the swan story, which has a very different and grisly outcome in her telling. There's a charming crudeness in the way she uses color, making the pages look constructed as much as they are drawn. Others, like KJ Martinet, ran with the concept and did a story about a distopian future where survivors scavenge and murder in order to "complete" works of art, like adding arms to the Venus de Milo. Nicolo Pelizzon uses a noir style to hint at the conspiracy behind a series of art thefts and forgeries, while Jen Rickert offers up a chilling story of a murderer getting out his madness on canvas. Roman Muradov's "Little Clouds" gets at something else: the idea of aesthetic perfection and aesthetic repulsion and how they can be embodied in the same person when in different environments. There's something appropriately beautiful and elegant about his heavy use of a cartoony clear-line style and the colors red, brown and black.

Aidan Koch unsurprisingly is a standout with her "After The Bath", which is a sequential series of single-page images depicting a form only using colors after a path. It's like looking at a series of paintings done in non-intuitive, bright color patterns, with the watercolors barely coalescing into recognizable forms. Renata Gasiorowska has one of the funniest stories in the book, about a child whose entire family is comprised of artists but has no talents or interest in the arts. Gasiorowska ties the strip back into theme when the child notes that only martial arts interest her, spawning a rant about the uselessness of art. Told at the dinner table, one guest notes how suited she is for performance art, given how "brave and rude" she is! Told in a scrawled line with anthropomorphic characters in black & white, this story stands out from many of the other, slicker entries in the anthology.

Olive Booger details an embarrassing anecdote from his art school days having to do with performance art. A cute girl who shared his studio encouraged him to go to a performance piece where everyone naturally wound up naked and he was tapped to serve as a human table. He (not surprisingly) freaked out over this, causing much humiliation and trauma that obviously continues to trouble him to this day. His garish, grotesque style perfectly captures the awkwardness and strangeness of that situation. Dilraj Mann's take-off on Rear Window has some cheesily exploitative art and a pat narrative, which was unfortunate because his skill at depicting forms and using shadow made the story interesting to look at. Daniel Werneck's "Shoulders of Giants" is a bit too on-the-nose in the way he depicts the constant inspiration of a variety of artists and writers on his work. Much better is Simon Moreton's "Working", a typically restrained story about a man who becomes so obsessed with the beauty of a landscape view that it consumes him until he's able to return at the end of his work week, paints and canvas at the ready as he intensely tries to capture both his feelings and the essence of the environment.

That's a sampling of the pieces that stood out for me, though there are many others that range from gag work to autobio to something close to science-fiction and fantasy. What's most impressive to me is how the editors are able to produce this anthology like clockwork, bringing in new artists for nearly every edition of either S! or Kus!. It's really become the international successor of Mome in terms of spotlighting new and emerging talent across a broad spectrum of styles and influences. It also points to the ways in which art comics are now a truly international phenomenon, with European artists influencing American artists and vice-versa. There are certainly still regional peculiarities and references in some of the stories, but they are all easily recognizable as the kind of art comics that are pushing barriers everywhere. Kus! and S! may not always make a point of spotlighting the most challenging work in every issue, but there's a delicate balance in giving time and attention to cutting edge, avant garde work and more conventional yet still interesting work. This issue is a perfect example of that tension on display, and the way that the stories are sequenced helps heighten that frisson in a manner that works to the benefit of every artist in the book.