mini-Kus!: GG, A.Magan, P.Kyle, E.Androutsopoulos

I missed a recent early round of recent releases from our friends from Latvia:

mini-Kus! #55: Valley, by GG. The artist creates narratives out of contrasts and atmosphere. A story by GG inevitably becomes a lost world of some kind, a desire to cross a threshold that should not be crossed. In this story, a young woman gets a text from a friend that she and others are camping in a nearby valley but ran out of food. She asks her friend to bring them food so they can stick around. Of course, when the young woman arrives at the valley, her phone has no service and a dense fog has rolled in. In a series of light, airy panels, she negotiates the terrain, a driving downpour and hallucinating that a nearby volcanic steam opening was talking to her. She gets lost in all of this but calmly reacts by going for a swim. It's obvious that her coming out alone to rescue her friends was ill-considered, to say the least, which leads one to think about her motives. GG hints at her wanting to disappear but still wanting an overall goal to rein her back in. When her friend texts her that they decided to leave after all, she has nothing left to do, leaving her in an existential quandary as much as she's in a geographic one. GG's line is delicate to the point of disappearing on the page at times, in order to push color to the forefront. The ending is less downbeat than it is open-ended, with the main character's fate and path yet to be written.                               

mini-Kus! #56: A Friend, by Andres Magan. Done in a deliberately stiff style that emphasizes line above all else, this story is about a man and his missing dog. There are levels within levels at play here, and it’s unclear if those levels are all in the man’s mind or if they play out at all in real life. There’s a sense in which him losing his dog and reporting it to a police officer in the park is a cataclysmic event for the man, an event that triggers a lifetime’s worth of guilt and judgment. When he goes home after having lost his dog, a rock crashes through his wind with a note that says “Where is your dog?”. He accidentally (?) cuts himself on the glass when he picks it up, but the day seems to be saved when the policeman brings by his dog.

However, he rejects the dog out of hand; but is it because he has rejected his identity and the key relationship that defines it, or because he believes that is not his dog? The dog asks him “Where is your dog?” and we flash to his father, mother and sister all asking him the same question. Again, there is a collection of guilt that builds up to another rock coming through the window, this time with a card that matches the cuts he received on his hand. As though it were stigmata, his hand starts bleeding profusely all over the place, until we cut back to the park. The only difference this time is that the man expresses to the officer just how much the dog means to him. The dog had become the receptacle for all of his feelings, something he had to come to grips with lest guilt consume him. Whether or not his dog is found isn’t important; what’s important is that this emotionally stunted person was able to express his emotions in a positive way.

mini-Kus! #57: Night Door, by Patrick Kyle. Kyle’s warped, cartoony line requires careful attention, because there’s a clear narrative here underneath the extreme and cartoony stylization. Thematically, it’s a case of being careful of what you wish for, because you might just get it. A creature (looking like some sort of Disney nightmare) approaches the titular door, seeking admittance. He finds a tube sticking out of the door, and some sort of gas is emitted from it that allows him to go in. Through various twists and turns, he makes it through the underground maze until he comes to what seems to be a dead end as he’s neck-deep in water. He grabs for an object that lifts him, reduces him to a gas, and is captured in a pump. We see a man with a pump then push its contents through a certain tube. Kyle’s entire project has involved the subversion of the hero’s journey, and this is another take on the circularity and fruitlessness of the heroic quest. Kyle also writes a lot about isolation and how maddening it is, and this comic is thus a reflection and rejection of that quest as a means for an individual to somehow obtain greater knowledge or power.

mini-Kus! #58: Eviction, by Evangelos Androutsopoulos. This is a story about a man who heard a story from a man who became involved with a group of politically active squatters near the docks. It is implied that a number of them may be immigrants. It’s a story consumed by atmosphere by way of the balance between the shifting colors against a strong line but stripped-down character design. That atmosphere helps convey the vagaries of memory and how those details are possibly warped in the retelling. The original story is quite emotional, as the man believes his courage is insufficient and that he’s kind of a fake, unlike those who actually live in the squat. Eventually, the squat is broken up as the police use violence to clear it out. The man narrating the story to the reader visits the place and tries to square his idea of the place with the actual place—just as the reader tries to square fact and fiction. There’s no indication that this is based on a true story, yet it’s entirely believable. Just as the narrator is unable to put himself into the prior narrative, so too is the reader left on the outside, wondering.

Koyama: Don't Come In Here

Patrick Kyle's most recent book, Don't Come In Here, is a science-fiction effort more in the vein of Phillip K Dick than the more fantastic influences he's been drawing from of late. This is a story about paranoia, disconnection, isolation and technology. Told in Kyle's distinctive blend of visual styles and techniques, it relates the simple story of a man who moves into an unusual and ridiculously spacious apartment so he can work on his computer, and all of the weird and unpleasant things that happen afterward. Kyle's work has always been built on distortions in time and space, but this book explores more mundane aspects of those distortions that are nonetheless every bit as unnerving. The way he gets it across on the page is by pushing panel after panel on the reader in depicting an activity, be it a ten-page sequence (with two panels per page) of the protagonist trying to run down the impossibly long hallway to answer the phone. After a series of often hilarious body distortions warped into a variety of geometric shapes and sizes, the punchline in the last panel is that he's hardly made any progress at all. Similar sequences arise when he tries to deal with the dirt and dust in the apartment, kicking up a storm that takes pages to navigate, as well as the way in which time itself has become warped as his watch stops telling time in a way that makes sense.

Another funny example is the way his books, pets and even food became warped, forcing him to find ways to flatten them out (including trying to put a bigger cat on top of his warped cat to flatten it out). This also gets at another Kyle trope: disorienting the reader through near-abstraction that's thematically similar to H.P. Lovecraft's idea of "strange geometries". Common, perfectly-drawn shapes (especially the computer) interact with smudged lines, warped images, hand-drawn scribbles and other non-representational images alongside a more solid sense of reality. The dull, everyday sense of reality represented by the parallel lines of the hallway floor and simple geometric shapes are contrasted by dense, intricate drawings of jungle and deep woods images. Familiar images like squares and rectangle representing objects are threatened by drawings of entirely alien creatures lurking in the kitchen. The familiar and the solid, like the wall next to you, is revealed to be part of something far stranger and more sinister.

Very early in the narrative, the main character establishes that one's experiences are entirely dependent on one's point of view. He uses The Simpsons as an example and posits the idea that Mr. Burns is actually a kind and competent person, while it's Homer Simpson and his family who are the monsters. Unfortunately for him, that insight came in a dream and wasn't followed as practical advice, as a seemingly innocent activity (banging on the wall) turns into a bizarre warning to not come next door and to treat this seriously. Of course, he winds up doing neither, and winds up briefly trapped next door. It reflects the sort of passive/aggressive behavior he displays throughout the book. When he sees the weird creature in the kitchen, he simply chooses not to go back in there ever again rather than deal with it. When he sees the creature go next door, he ignores all directives and offends his neighbor. Even his long-suffering computer, his only friend, starts to chafe against its programming mandates and is eventually "killed" after a practical joke goes awry. He's eventually kicked out of the apartment, but the last scene is a dream where the apartment is perfectly normal and he has no problems with it. He's wondering whether he's asleep or awake and declares himself awake, though once again it's all a matter of perception. The reader certainly has no way of knowing.

All the reader can know is what's on the page, and Kyle spends a lot of time keeping the narrative zipping along in a series of vignettes. Some are self-described dreams, others are weird sequences like his bedspread and room taking on a psychedelic checkerboard pattern until he turns the light on. The reader is put through him quickly going from panel to panel but going nowhere fast. The reader experiences the unusually familiar vernacular of the computer, which is all part of the distorted nature of the figures and the way in which communication works in the apartment. In the end, it's up to the reader to interpret what's going on every bit as much as it's up to the protagonist to make his own conclusions. The end result is as absurd and amusing as it is unsettling, and that's mostly due to Kyle's masterful pacing and design.

Shape of Things: Distance Mover

Patrick Kyle's Distance Mover (Koyama Press), a collection of his minicomics series, is an excellent example of the "shape and squiggle" school of comics. The humanoid characters in this sci-fi book are unusual shapes and relate to each other in 2D space in nonintuitive ways. Characters who are interacting with each other often seem to slide past each other or else interact at strange angles. That kind of deliberate manipulation of space, scale and dimensionality is reminiscent of the sort of thing that Paper Rad does, wherein the reader is meant to see the drawings as drawings and the colors in the piece as colors in addition to having representational qualities. Kyle's use of this approach is greatly different from Jones, who used it for absurd and satirical effect. Kyle, on the other hand, uses it as a way to express the sheer otherness of the places and characters he introduces in the story. These are places so alien that our conception of space, time and physics not only no longer holds true, but it affects our very perception of aesthetics.

This collection of stories basically breaks down into two stories, following the adventures of cosmic guardian being Mr. Earth and his ship, the Distance Mover. The first story begins as a loose exploration of a different society and its aesthetics and turns into a story about stopping a corrupt government from literally sucking energy away from its people. The second story involves Mr Earth rooting out corruption among his fellow super-powered "Misters" as he's accused of treason and turns into a desperate battle against an all-consuming, evil space ooze. The first story relies almost solely on Kyle's idiosyncratic use of line, but the latter uses lots of ink splotches, zip-a-tone and fuzzy blue/brown shading. Given that the opponent is an all-corrupting black ooze, it makes sense that Kyle would deliberately challenge his delicate use of line with a disruptive and anarchic use of ink.

Simply by following Kyle's formal decisions, there's a great deal to like about this book. For example, the way he depicts motion is not by using traditional comic book zip lines or by way of panel-to-panel transitions. Instead, he takes advantage of the advanced physics of Mr. Earth and uses stretched lines in a static image that appears as stretched to those watching it in the panel, taking advantage of the ways in which comics are actually static purveyors of information rather than a fluid stream of information. He eschews standard definitions of "sequential art" by way of given every page an open format, with no panels delineating time sequences. Some of them are single-image splash pages, while others have multiple images blurring into and out of each other as a way of showing time passing.

While this is a science-fiction comic with moments of suspense, clever plot twists and all sorts of clever surprises, Kyle takes great pains to avoid sci-fi cliches. In part, that's because the pacifism of Mr. Earth makes him an unlikely action story star, yet both of the stories involve long chase and escape scenes. The overriding sense of gentleness as a response to aggression makes the book highly unusual for a genre comic, yet that gentleness in no way dulls the action or the stakes involved. Similarly, while many of the figures and character designs border on abstraction, Kyle invests them with a remarkable sense of expression and emotion. No matter how weird things get in this book and how strange its points of view become, it never stops feeling real. This is a beautiful, odd book, and it's well worth the effort it takes to immerse oneself in its understanding of reality.

Minicomics Round-Up: Stanton, Rae-Grant/Winslow-Yost, Kyle, Lee, Five True Fans, Bird

Gnartoons #1, by James T. Stanton.Stanton is great at drawing monsters, robots and monster-robot hybrids. He then accentuates these highly detailed, almost manic drawings with bright, lurid colors that almost overpower the reader before one adjusts. That's certainly true of the lead story in this one-man anthology, "Subterfuge", where a pet robot and its owner are ambushed by a huge network of threatening machines. Stanton can stop on a dime and go back to black & white for a story about an aggrieved classroom pet being accosted by a band of crazed kids, emphasizing the barbaric and grotesque nature of children who are let loose in packs without adult supervision. Stanton then pauses to consider his own obsession with drawing monsters, wondering if it's something he gets out of his head or if that obsession is leading somewhere darker, all on a cleverly-designed page designed to keep the reader off-balance with triangular panels and sickly colors. Stanton really throws the kitchen sink at the reader in this sampler, using highly realistic drawings in one disgusting strip about San Francisco and varying his color schemes in a more poetic strip. Stanton has the potential to be a major talent, and these minicomics offerings are an interesting way for him to warm up in public.

Steel Sterling, by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Michael Rae-Grant. This is the first comic by this writer-artist duo, and it's an impressive debut. Riffing on Charles Biro's Golden Age creation, Steel Sterling is a lab-created hero who goes on a psychedelic spreed of mayhem. There are three different operating levels in this comic. First, there's the constant, kinetic, left-to-right ass-kicking of the protagonist, who wades through ninjas, robots, grid-covered rooms, strange animals, axe-handed mustachioed-men sitting on toilets and other such nonsense, all in lurid, day-glo colors. Second, there's the earnest narrative captions that follow him around, commenting on his fights, offering advice and evaluating the evil of his opponents. Finally, there's the static, languid scenes of arch-foe the Black Knight (done in green as a counterpoint to the preponderance of red found in this comic), who counter-intuitively gets the center grid on every single page. This is counter-intuitive because as Frank Santoro would tell us, the center grid is where the eye goes to first, looking to balance the other figures. By inserting a very slow-moving narrative as the center of our attention on every single page, GWY and MRG subvert both reader expectations and the implied narrative of the story, telling the reader that the hyper-violent adventures of the hero are less important than this green-lined figure eating breakfast. This helps set up the final-page gag while foreshadowing the treadmill nature of Steel Sterling's mission. This is definitely a modern take on Golden Age tropes, as the authors seem to borrow as much from Michael DeForge as they do from Biro or even iconoclasts like Fletcher Hanks. I'd be fascinated to see what this pair of artists comes up with next.

Bird Brain Comix #1, by Bird. The otherwise anonymous Bird's comic is the first I've seen from Tom Hart's Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, Fl. It's the first comic of any kind I've received from my home state, which is not exactly a hotbed for alt-comics talent. In a spectacular explosion of self-deprecation, the artist notes (on the cover, no less) that this comic is "overly designed, inarticulate and poorly drawn". Of course, this issue is none of those things, even if it's obvious that this is an early effort in the artist's career. Instead, this comic owes a lot to long-form improv, with the added advantage that because Bird's not explicitly going for laughs in every strip, certain comics that stand on their own as serious statements are later revisited for both tragic and humorous results. Of course, in this comic, the "jokes" come at the expense of downtrodden characters victimized by unfeeling teenagers out to get wasted and violent. There's a matter-of-factness running through this comic as a robot separated from his body and the roadside assistance of Sasquatch are treated fairly nonchalantly. The one thing that drove me crazy about this comic was Bird's insistence on using a thin line and leaving a lot of white space without spotting a lot of blacks or varying his line thickness.  He also winds up relying too much on effects like zip-a-tone to fill in some of those big white spaces, and the effect is a greyish, unattractive page. Still, there's an interesting mind at work here, one that just needs to get back to the drawing board and continue to experiment.

Them's The Breaks, Kid., by Cassie J. Sneider, MariNaomi, Ric Carrasquillo and Tessa Brunton. This anthology is by the Five True Fans collective, and the theme of this one is essentially misfortune. This is a mix of comics and illustrated essays, most of which are quite personal. The cover is hand-stamped with an image from each story, which is one of those crazy yet endearing things about minicomic-makers insane work ethic. Sneider's "Bad Decisions" is a sound choice for lead-off story, given that it's grim but hilarious. The grim part regards Sneider's life-long near-poverty, meaning she's rarely had access to things like health or dental insurance. There's a bit where she's left to wait in a dentist's office with a painfully bad tooth for hours, until she decided to steal something from the exam room for every ten minutes she was kept waiting. That led her to possess some novacaine, which led her to ingest it into her face because she thought it might arrest an allergic reaction to antibiotics. It's a horrifying but undeniably hilarious image.

MariNaomi kicks in yet another variation on a story she's written about an ex-boyfriend who disappeared years earlier, this time including an epilogue about seeing his best friend as a homeless person and trying to ignore him as he now seemed clearly out of his mind. This set up the tragic end of the man killing himself by throwing himself in front of a subway car. The essence of her section dwells on being haunted by once-powerful connections suddenly disappearing forever, an event that has a powerful effect on one's memories of the original events. Carrasquillo's cartoony line focuses on the ways in which marketing is subverted by children, by how faux-humble introductions to one's heroes masks seething jealousy, and a gag where appealing to the true force behind the water bill is an imposing process. His contributions were well-drawn and cute, but seemed radically out of step with the rest of the artists in the book; if anything, they felt slight compared to them.

My favorite part of the book was by Tessa Brunton, who did a number of crisply-drawn comics about her battle not only with chronic fatigue syndrome, but the emotions and self-hatred that often accompanies a disease whose main symptom involves an inability to summon the energy needed to deal with a standard person's day. There's one powerful strip about her desire to give into her bitterness, her anger, her desperation and her hatred of her own body. Then she owns up to the real reason why she tries to stay positive: because "bitterness is repellent" and "I don't want them [her friends and family] to all go away." That's a powerful statement, but Brunton also notes that simply drawing these feelings and printing them is a kind of emotional therapy, one that certainly draws other people to give her sympathy but mostly makes her understand that others do care. Brunton's lack of relentless cheerfulness about her condition is refreshing and funny, giving her license to make some pretty dark jokes. (When an internet support group scolds her and tells her she can do whatever you put your mind to, she replies "Indeed I can" as she holds a gun to her head.) Between this suite of strips and her comic Passage, Brunton's beautiful and light penciling style and sharply sardonic wit have made her a talent to watch.

Distance Movers #1 and #2, by Patrick Kyle. This is straight-ahead surrealism, as Kyle puts together a comic that for all intents and purposes is a genre science fiction comic, yet doesn't conform to standard fantasy tropes. Instead, Kyle's drawings (all printed in color ink, one color at a time) are rubbery, highly simple but stylized and mostly static on the page. The sort of lumpy surrealism that flows from the Marc Bell tradition in Canada is present in this work, though this story of Mr. Earth visiting a backwoods village and later taking one of its denizens to a hyper-advanced big city zips readers through an increasingly complex plot that's more like Matthew Thurber. There are some wonderfully abstract sequences of pure, non-narrative shapes that represent a sort of virtual art gallery that fit snugly in with the rich and warm visuals in the rest of the comic, as the color printing (done on the highly versatile Risograph) simply grabs the eye and doesn't let go. Kyle combines simplicity and clarity of line with complexity of design and narrative to creative a beautiful new series.

Temple, by Jun K. Lee. This is a quiet, poetic story about a man finding god in another man's ear and a sort of phenomenology of what this experience is like. Lee's sparse, thin line reminds me a bit of Souther Salazar's delicate, almost fragile images, and Lee's equally delicate lettering has a strong visual impact as well. The lettering is just a little scrawled--it's entirely legible, but it's small and requires a bit of concentration to parse it. That actually folds in nicely with the increasingly strange images we're presented with in this 8-page comic, as the narrator focuses his attention on a small dot that provides a direct line between him and god. The end of the comic raises the issue of who is entitled to see god and for how long, especially since the narrator steals the ear to keep for himself. This brief story doesn't wear out its welcome and is remarkably clear and coherent, given the strange places it goes to.