45 Days Of CCS, #14: Rachel Dukes, Kori Michele Handwerker, Penina Gal

Some shorter works for today's entries.

Kori Michele Handwerker, by their own admission, is an artist who isn't quite sure what kind of cartoonist they should be. In their solo collection, I Would Like To Experience Less, Thanks., Handwerker gets to this very problem right away in "True Form." They lament that while they have experience at all levels of creation and production with regard to comics, they have yet to establish their identity as a cartoonist. They rattle off a half-dozen different kinds of things they could be doing but don't feel drawn to any one of them more than another. In the end, they conclude that they are making comics in order to figure themselves out, and that's enough for now. As a reader, however, this claim is belied by some of the other work in this collection. "Little Things" is a piffle of an anecdote; it's the kind of story that's amusing to the author but doesn't have enough bite to draw in a reader. "True Form" itself is so text-heavy that it fairly drowns out the images in many panels. On the other hand, "Rite Hand" is an astoundingly composed story about their husband's traumatic stay in the hospital for a liver transplant. It takes a fairly standard diary comic format and reworks it such that it begins in the middle and flips various days around to create a tense, compelling narrative. In this instance, when Handwerker found something they really needed to talk about, their skill as a cartoonist became obvious. 

The same is true of I Like Masking, Actually. Handwerker's character design and line are both so assured for a story that's essentially a series of throwaway observations about the pandemic. It's fine, and it makes sense that Handwerker seems drawn to these sorts of small, bite-sized stories, but it also seems obvious that they have the chops for something more ambitious. As a reader and fan of their work, I'm excited to see what this could be. 

Rachel Dukes details their own health difficulties and how it's affected their work as a cartoonist. In Poppy Seeds, Dukes did a series of diary comics as they started to emerge from an illness-induced absence from cartooning. Some of them veer away from comics and are more of illustrated zine-writing, but on the pages where they get down to drawing again, it's easy to see the incredible charm of their line. Dukes has been cartooning for a long time, and I recall reviewing their Side A and Side B anthologies they edited when they were still a teenager, in addition to their best-known comics about their cat Frankie. Their cartooning, even after struggling with illness, remains elegant, expressive, and versatile in approach. Dukes is also an excellent illustrator, as their interview zine with Lauren Denitzio makes clear; they are as comfortable with naturalistic approaches as they are with the most cartoony of techniques. 

Penina Gal is another longtime favorite who started their career with a YA fantasy story then veered over into comics-as-poetry. Their mini Baller Baby represents a move toward YA-style memoir, as it's about growing up in 1990s New York as a fan of the Knicks and the game in general, but also as someone who hated dresses and being feminized in very specific ways. Part of Paper Rocket's Mini Memoir Project, Gal's line here mixes sketchy immediacy with bold, thick ink lines. The drawings are lively and rubbery, which helps accentuate the way that the younger version of Gal loves to move with the ball. The contrast with their cousin E. sets a perfect thematic tone, as the active E allows Gal to be brave and try things they might not have otherwise, because they were shy. (The panel where they talk about that has a wonderful drawing of an engaged and curious but slightly shrinking Gal.) Gal took what was essentially a series of anecdotes and imbues it with thematic resonance without sacrificing any of the innocent exuberance that was at their heart. 

      

Thirty Days of CCS #14: Rachel Dukes, Sean Knickerbocker

Frankie Comics #4, by Rachel Dukes. Dukes has done a lot of different kinds of comics in her career, both personal and work-for-hire. Her best executed comics continue to be about her cat, in part because she achieves perfect balance between naturalist and iconic drawing, and in part because she makes sure to impart a central truth about cats: they are awful. They will mess with you just for fun, because they are mischievous, spiteful creatures. They are frequently either oblivious or indifferent to the needs of their humans. Mining humor out of these essential feline facts is what makes Dukes comics about them funny, because the truth about cat-loving humans is that they don't care. Cats are actually remarkably affectionate and intelligent if they feel like it, and their need to play as a function of hunting makes them extremely entertaining.

That said, as Dukes' partner points out in this issue, cats train humans to feed them, pet them and play with them--not the other way around. Dukes starts playing a game with Frankie where she throws a rubber band, but Frankie never returns it. Instead, Frankie has trained Rachel to keep playing the game precisely as she wanted! For all her mischievousness, Dukes portrays Frankie as a genuinely sweet cat who loves her people and wants their near-constant attention. These strips have become even stronger as Dukes has started to write longer narratives instead of just doing one-off gags, depicting a truly symbiotic relationship. And to be sure, the way Dukes draws Frankie is absolutely irresistible. It feels like Dukes is about half way through a serious collection of these comics, which will make for a formidable and fun book.

Killbuck, by Sean Knickerbocker. Knickerbocker has been writing stories about disaffected teens in cold, nowhere towns for pretty much his entire career. Killbuck represents the apotheosis of this work, distilled into a single narrative that unwinds to become surprisingly emotionally complex in unexpected ways. Killbuck is the name of the shit town these teens live in, and its very name is spoken of with venom. It's a thing to be derided and a place to leave as soon as possible, which means finding ways to pass the time until such a thing is possible. In towns like this where there's nothing to do, that often leads teens to do stupid things. In the case of Eric, Jesse and Kris, Knickerbocker has set up a classic teen friendship structure. Eric is the obnoxious, abusive alpha male dealing with his own abuse at home. Kris is the classic beta male: he's a fantasy role playing gamer in the early 90s (as his hinted by the lack of cell phones and the prominence of VCRs) who is constantly taking shit from his friends but is also kind of whiny. Jesse is somewhere in-between, going along with pranking Kris but also regretting it at times. He's at the center of the Venn diagram that connects them to Gracie and Sam, two girls who work at a diner and buy pot from Jesse.

The story begins with the friendship among the boys immediately starting to fracture. Eric finds a cabin abandoned for the winter and they break in, and immediately think of bringing the girls over for a party. When the girls realize that they are in the cabin illegally when Kris accidentally spills the beans, they leave and an ugly confrontation between Kris and Eric ensues. It's a line-crossing event whose repercussions are such that Eric not only cuts off all of his old friends and acquaintances, he starts to isolate himself from everyone while still remaining an object of abuse by others. Eric is ignored by Jesse even as he tries to keep an eye on Kris, as he's haunted by his brother brutalizing him and making him cry just as he did to Kris. Gracie becomes better friends with Jesse after he scores her some pot, but the last scene of the book reveals that for all his talk of leaving, he's still very much emotionally trapped in the town.

Indeed, Knickerbocker suggests that Killbuck is a state of mind as much as it is a place. It's a mean, petty and limited state of mind that is simultaneously resentful and entitled. Despite the behavior of his characters, Knickerbocker has empathy for all of them, even Eric, though it's unclear if any of them will take responsibility for their own actions and find a way clear of Killbuck. With this book, Knickerbocker's true style has emerged, with fully-assimilated accents of a dozen cartoonists but a finished look all his own. The emotions of his characters are raw and they wear them on their sleeves, but Knickerbocker's ability to modulate emotion and mood from the extremes of violence to dealing with sheer boredom is his greatest talent as a creator. That sense of verisimilitude, paired with his slightly bigfoot character design, provides a contrast that complements both storytelling aspects.

Silver Sprocket: I. Rotman, J Woodall, Io/Dukes/Warner/Fisher

No Gods, No Dungeon Masters, by Io, Rachel Dukes, Andy Warner & Hannah Fisher. Published by Avi Ehrlich, Silver Sprocket has become a publisher at the intersection of punk culture and geek culture. After years of releasing punk records, Ehrlich slowly made the transition to comics, and their most recent line of comics has cemented this. This mini was reprinted from the Subcultures anthology published a couple of years back, polished up a bit and recolored. The story is very much about a genderqueer person deeply steeped in RPG and geek culture who also identifies as an anarchist and part of punk culture. The story involves them going from a D&D session to helping thwart a police crackdown on a squat ("he just started screaming 'cast magic missile' and throwing bottles"), wondering why this cultural intersection didn't seem as natural to others as it did to them. Dukes was a perfect artist to portray this, as a queer person also deeply rooted in geek culture and punk politics. As such, there's a cheery, bright quality to this comic that carries over into the more political aspects of the story, since they are folded into the main character's fantasy life anywya

Girls, by Jenn Woodall. One of the big questions frequently asked by Silver Sprocket is why women (cis and trans), genderqueer folk and people of color aren't more readily accepted in punk/anarchist communities. Ben Passmore's brilliant Your Black Friend takes down the racial aspects of this in a measured, funny and angry way (he richly deserved his Eisner nomination) and Woodall's Girls, a collection of mostly silent images that scream more than a thousand words each, handles sexism. Often, quite literally with a baseball bat. It's a spiritual twin of Hellen Jo's Frontier #2, only with a different kind of aesthetic and purpose. Above all else, this is a comic about agency actively and forcefully expressing themselves in the world  in a variety of ways, from a variety of perspectives and aesthetics. From the young woman vomiting flowers to the weary astronaut on a moon orbiting Saturn, this is one long howl against discrimination, objectification, rape culture, violence against women and the patriarchy in general. It's also very much an affirmative display of women, not just a reaction. Woodall is a talented illustrator who manages to combine fantastical elements with an expressive naturalism. Every woman is vividly brought to life on their own terms, and Woodall emphasizes that despite a common desire to resist and struggle, the ways in which they do that differ for everyone here. There's also a sense of joy to be found in the righteous anger expressed in this comic, as it's a part of claiming that agency.

Siren School, by Isabella Rotman. This is a perfectly executed series of jokes about mansplaining. Rotman takes the sirens of myth and conceptualizes them having to learn modern techniques on how to lure men, as simply sitting on a rock and looking beautiful doesn't cut it anymore. Instead, each of the sirens develops a patter that flatters and encourages men to mansplain to them about cars, video games, Star Wars, fantasy sports and especially allowing men to think that the sirens don't recognize their own beauty and that only men can bring it out of them. The siren wearing glasses and saying that she plays video games, but not real video games, is a hilarious stab at the heart of the heinous "gamer gate" controversy and the whole "fake geek girl" nonsense that is so prevalent in pop culture. Each page is a single panel that continues to build until the inevitable: a siren showing her teeth, getting ready to reel in her prey. The concept of sirens playing to men's fantasies in an entirely different but modern way is a hilarious one, only Rotman tells the story not so much to emphasize the ways men are weak, but rather the way that their egos blind them to reality as they treat women like the weak-willed and ill-informed objects that the sirens pretend to be. It's smart, funny and just the right length at 22 pages.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 10: J.P. Coovert, Melissa Mendes, Rachel Dukes

Frankie Comics #2, by Rachel Dukes. This is a collection of Dukes' elegant and sparely-drawn strips about her cat. Dukes became momentarily famous when her strip "Life With/Out A Cat" was stolen from her website and used elsewhere without her permission, pointing to the sheer, naked piracy that occurs on an everyday basis on the internet. Dukes, of course, is a comics lifer who's been making ambitious anthologies like Side A and Side B while still a teenager. No one every went broke by making comics about cats, and many smart cartoonists like B.Kliban and Jeffrey Brown have had mass-market success with their cat comics. Dukes' Frankie comics are clear, well-drawn, and (most importantly) funny. Building off video game tropes in some strips and quotidian activities in others, Dukes alternates between quick-hitting gags (like a Cat vs Human fight) and slow-burn gags that build to a single punchline (like letting the cat manipulate her into increasingly difficult and annoying requests). This black & white comic adds zip-a-tone to give it depth and weight, but they look far better using the two-tone approach seen on her website or even the full color treatment she's used in some anthologies. At some point, I hope she collects enough of these to present to a publisher.

Joey, Lou #17 and A Very Special Lou, by Melissa Mendes. If there's a running theme connecting the three artists in this column today, it's that all three have a genuine sense of warmth and empathy that shows through on the page. Mendes has slowly built up a body of work about the lives of children, from comics about a version of her own life to new series like Lou that deal with similar stories of outsider tomboy types. The last issue of her Oily miniseries Lou found her exploring unfamiliar territory: putting her characters into actual danger. The events that led up to the younger brother character getting a gun pointed to his head in an abandoned building are complicated, but they're all a byproduct of what Mendes does best: family dynamics, family conflicts and the relationship between families and their pets. I'm not sure she quite stuck the landing in this issue, as she seemed to struggle with providing a happy ending with creating dramatic tension. The way she created the latter almost seemed gratuitous and random, and these are qualities I never associate with her work. A Very Special Lou, a follow-up to the series, finds her on more sure ground. It's about the contentious relationship between Lou and her younger brother, John. On his birthday, the one thing he really wants is some kind of input from Lou, who seems put off by him. When he finally gets it after an otherwise idyllic birthday (complete with attending a local wrestling card), it's clearly the gift he values most. Mendes adds a single-tone red accent to this comic that doesn't quite show up right on many of the pages (there's lots of bleed), but it's interesting to see her experiment with color after relying solely on her scribbly, expressive line.

As such, Joey is a big step up, both in terms of content and form. It's more reminiscent of a Max de Radigues comic than her prior material in that it deals with a kid who's having a lot of trouble at school and at home with constantly arguing parents. His only ally is his older sister, who at one point buys him a wolf mask. Given the opportunity to be someone else, and someone scary and powerful to boot, he naturally never takes the thing off until he's confronted by bullies. When this happens, there's no chance for solace from his parents, who are too busy screaming at each other to notice that he's not there. There are several lovely grace notes at the end of this comic, which has what can be called an ambiguously happy ending. Adding that level of ambiguity gives this comic a different quality than her prior stories, even as the rigid 2 x 4 grid keeps the story on a steady pace. I'm enjoying the restless quality of Mendes' comics, as it indicates a cartoonist who's trying to grow and expand.

Simple Routines Volume 3 and Broken Summer, by J.P. Coovert. Coovert's a member of the great 2008 graduation class at CCS, and he's been slowly cranking out gentle, warm comics for a number of years. His autobio/journal series, Simple Routines, is always a welcome presence because of that warmth, optimism and general decency that emanates from him and his comics. I don't generally consider the works of an artist as a referendum on their lives or personalities, but it's hard to not like the Coovert that we see in these pages. He's someone who's not afraid of his emotions, as the strips about graduating from CCS show in some detail. Most of all, he talks about his friendships and the way that they keep him connected to his past, and the lengths he goes to in order to keep them fresh. The strips about missing his fiance' (and later wife) Jacie are equally touching. Not everything is sunshine and roses, as there is real desperation in the strips where he's looking for a job and worrying about his worthiness as a person .His spare and lovely line that is as expressive as Duke's is laid out in classic Kochalka-style four-panel grids, and he alternates between strips with punchlines and strips with memorable and more serious final moments. There's nothing ground-breaking about his work here; it's simply an excellent example of the form.

Broken Summer is, in many ways, what cartoonists should aspire to do from time to time: make a comic that literally includes all of your favorite activities. This is about a magical world where monsters, kids and anthropomorphic animals all hang around and play video games, ride skateboards and go to concerts. It incorporates Harry Potter-style magic in a library as well as body-image issues in one neat package, making it a perfect all-ages comic. The stories are episodic and slightly aimless, but Coovert has a few through-lines that connect the characters and their activities together. All-ages comics seem to be Coovert's calling, as he infuses them with an easy charm that still has a little bite and sadness to it.

31 Days of Short Reviews #21: Hellbound #3 and #4

The Boston Comics Roundtable's annual Hellbound anthologies have grown increasingly stylish in presentation. The 2012 edition, "Darkness" starts out especially strong with stories by Janaka Stucky/Josh Wallis and Kimball Anderson. The former, "Blackout", follows a mortician confronted by a group of bodies who start whispering "You are dead but your body is still dying", which leads to a narrative side bar of discussing a sect in India that believes that in order to avoid reincarnation, we must transcend duality by embracing the most depraved of practices. Ultimately, it is hinted that he becomes one of them in a story that varies its visual styles from stark realism to shadowy expressionism. Anderson's "no, he can come" is a frightening but simple story about a young man negotiating a fog; everything he sees is in shadowy gray and black. He is invited to explore an old factory with what he thinks is a group of friends and reluctantly agrees to come along...until he has the chilling realization that he doesn't actually know them. It's a perfectly timed story made all the more effective thanks to its use of grey and black.

Of the other stories, Adrian Rodriguez's "Pedestrian" is silent and spooky in depicting the ways in which abandoned city streets can be terrifying; the Lindsay Moore/Donna Martinez/Joey Peters story "Garbage" effectively subverts the dynamic between the wholesome, perfect schoolgirl and the tough girl who's always in trouble; and the Gregery Miller/Jacob Oley story "Vinshaw" is mostly nonsense in terms of the story, but Oley's delicate and disgusting line art is a genuine pleasure to behold. The worst piece in the book was Jon Clark's "Void", which was less a horror piece than a bit of misogynist torture porn.

On the other, hand, Gulp!, the fourth volume of Hellbound, is an attractive, well-executed anthology that makes the most of its Risograph printing. Every story is scary or funny or both, and the mix of artistic styles makes looking at every story a genuine pleasure. It starts strong with Dan Moynihan's story about kids trying to avoid monsters on the way to getting cookies and Rachel Dukes' story about a ghost cat going from being cute to horrifying as they both grow up. Old Highwater favorites like Jef Czekaj and Greg Cook contribute cute stories in their "cute-brute" style, while Owen Heitmann, John Lechner and Jerel Dye go more in the direction of horror-adventure stories. There are no clunkers in this collection and the editing by Moynihan and Dan Flynn carefully shuffles the stories so as to avoid repeating themes on a story-to-story basis. The duo-tone orange and blue from the Risograph printing adds to the attractiveness of the overall work. This was by far the most skilled set of contributors and the most attractive presentation of stories yet conceived for this series, a trend that I hope continues for 2014.

New Faces From CCS: Leake, Malig, Onorato, Steinberg, Dukes, Howard, Almendrala

This column gives me the pleasure of examining work by students from the Center for Cartoon Studies from the classes of 2012 and 2013, artists whose work is (mostly) entirely new to me.

All Rumors Are True, by Laurel Lynn Leake.Of all the comics mentioned here, Leake's features my favorite cover. The sneering, lipsticked figure whose hair obscures her eyes issues forth pink, pixelated pronouncements while the title looks like it was drawn in red lipstick.This comic follows Scratch, a "tiny little legend in the local drag scene" who is cast by a "metareligious hallucinogenic radical queerotica" video company Pansexual Pantheon. In a truly inspired idea, Leake posits this outfit as one that casts actors as gods and figures from a variety of religious pantheons from across history and has them fuck each other, all told through the details and history of those belief systems. Scratch is cast as the Shinto goddess Amaterasu and Leake tells the story of her experience through a series of behind-the-scenes clips, internet commentary interspersed as actual narrative, and bits and pieces of the film itself. She jams every panel with cartoony character interaction (her drawings of the zaftig actress who plays the goddess Uzume are especially eye-catching), whirling decorative flourishes, eye-grabbing text that has an almost visceral impact, or some combination thereof. This comic is successful because it's so highly stylized, a pure distillation of glamor, excess and sheer presence.

Stonewall #1, by Sasha Steinberg. This is a work of historical fiction about the famous Stonewall riots that sparked the LGBT movement in the US. Steinberg reminds us that at the start of the movement in particular, there was a strong emphasis on the "T" (trans) portion of the movement that got lost for a long time and has only within the last five to ten years become an accepted part of the overall rights movement (after considerable struggle). Steinberg draws this full-color comic in the style of golden age cartoonist Tarpe Mills, whose Miss Fury strip was very much a mix of drag disguise (for fighting crime) and fashion. It's a genius move to depict trans folk in that glamorous style, and I especially liked Steinberg's notion to create a fictional character (a 14-year-old trans person who called herself Miss Venus--especially clever given her resemblance to the golden age Bill Everett character called Venus) to go along with real figures like Sylvia Rivera. Venus is the sort of innocent new to a scene that allows veterans to play off of, a catalyst that causes the other characters to have something to react to. Steinberg skillfully creates an enormous amount of tension and drama considering that all of the action in this issue takes place in a cramped hotel room. The people in the room, he's careful to depict, were not saints or heroes. There were conflicts, jealousies and a frequent sense that many of them only associated with each other because they were all in the same boat.

The Stonewall riots were born out of frustration above all else, and Steinberg amps up that level of frustration and weariness in the form of people like Rivera, Ivan Valentin and Tammy Novak. Years of random and indiscriminate police raids and persecution made living and expressing themselves acts of boldness, even if being bold was less on their agenda than simply being. Venus represents the power of youth and hope that fuels every movement, the younger generation that has yet to be jaded and demands more. She's the focus of this first issue and so the figures here are representative of how Venus sees the world and the scene: glamorous, tinged with a hint of danger and excitement. Steinberg has really done his research here and transformed facts into a living, breathing story in a clever and innovative manner. Given that this is part one of ten, I'm eager to see how the series proceeds and what other visual representations he chooses to use.

Anything Is Anything, by April Malig. This is a bit of comics-as-poetry that takes the reader through Malig's sensation of falling as she tries to go to sleep and extends that metaphor through a number of experiences in her life, especially those that involve relationships. Malig has a strong sense of composition and design and works hard to make each page a poetic construct of is own and does a nice job of using blacks to create a dizzying sort of dream world. Her figurework is a bit stiff, which renders some of the key scenes lacking the kind of emotional power that I believe Malig intends. In particular, her use of gesture and the way her figures interact is stilted in a way that draws unwelcome attention from the reader's eye. I think this is simply a matter of experience, and that her figures will fit better with the rest of her graphics as she continues to draw, because otherwise it's obvious that she displays a great deal of nuance and emotional sensitivity as a creator. I especially liked her lines about communication, like "Words don't always hold, if they are even caught at all. It's hard not to feel like we're all just thumping glass upon glass". The image here are two people in bubble space helmets, frowning as they try to communicate. If anything, I'd like to see Malig go a bit more abstract on the page, breaking down figures more as shapes and seeing how that works with her strong decorative and design sense.

Chimps In Space #1-3, by Donna Almendrala. These three comics are Almendrala's way of exploring genre stories using the titular chimp characters, mixing extreme silliness with a genuine affection for each genre. The first issue is an outer space story where we eventually learn that the captain of the ship (who is narrating the story) is a complete idiot. It actually is less of a space adventure than a locked-door murder mystery whose resolution is also quite silly, especially when the captain tries to tack on a Star Trek-style moralistic message at the end. The second issue follows two of the crewmembers on a planet where they engage in Western-style hijinx; the beginning of the story is taken from an anthology story Almendrala did a while back. This issue was the most forgettable of the three, as it was really all over the place narratively and in terms of tone. I liked the third issue best, which featured the adventures of a dead crewman in the afterlife who is recruited to join Hermes, Ulysses, Hercules and Achilles to go on an adventure. He is reluctant to join this motley crew, which is why generates both narrative friction and humor. Almendrala really seems in her comfort zone with this comic, easily navigating fine details regarding mythology while reworking them for comedic purposes. There's an easily-detected Ernie Bushmiller influence in her figure drawing and use of spotting blacks, making each page a pleasure to read and giving each image a certain comedic charge. Even before she sets up a single gag, I found myself being amused by the figures themselves. I'd love to see her take on more mythological stories in a comedic tone because of the fluidity of that third issue.

Rockall #1, by Amelia Onorato. This is the first issue of what is shaping up to be a fantasy/romance story set in an island off of Ireland. We meet Tommy Kagan, a young man who has purchased property on the island is rowed out there at the beginning of the story. He quickly discovers two things: like all small communities, the island is a place where your business is everyone's business; and there are two inhabitants in the house he has bought. One is a woman accused of being a "selkie", a seal who takes human form who can be captured by a human who happens to see her dance. She can only be freed if she finds her skin after her human master has stolen it. Onorato wisely plays coy as to whether the woman is actually a selkie, though she is indeed searching for something and is trapped on the island after her husband mysteriously died in a fishing accident. That's an event the islanders blamed on her ("calling up the sea"), sparking mutual distrust and loathing. This is obviously a groundwork-laying issue, but it's one that's well-structured and built in part on a patois that is at once distinctive but not confusing. One gets a real sense of time and place very quickly in this comic. Onorato's line is simple, cartoony and expressive. The comic did cry out for color, however; a light green wash or even some kind of blue-green duotone would have looked much better than the grey wash used on a number of pages. I'm quite curious to see how the story proceeds.

"All Coons Look Alike To Me": The Life of Ernest Hogan, Father of Ragtime, by Luke Howard. In dealing with racism and the realpolitik of exploiting one's race for profit at a price, Howard manages to use a lot of highly emotionally charged images with a thorough degree of sensitivity and context in telling the story of musician Ernest Hogan. This book is told in black and red (two colors that wind up having considerable significance in the story) with single-page panels meant to emulate silent movies, complete with full pages devoted to dialogue or narration. Howard depicts Hogan's tale as one of a devil's bargain in an era where choices were few. There's a sense of joy and triumph early in the story as Hogan first hears and then later develops the musical form that would come to be known as Ragtime: melodic, upbeat, exciting music dependent upon the piano as its driving force. When he finds he can't sell his music to anyone (and white people in particular, because they're the ones with the money), he happens upon a minstrel show and decides to combine ragtime with minstrel show imagery, all in an effort to amuse white audiences.

He writes the title song, which is an immediate smash hit that trades in on white stereotypes about African-Americans, and immediately becomes rich and famous. Of course, this doesn't earn him actual respect from caucasians, who take it upon themselves to repeat and laugh at the racist imagery he celebrates while they're hanging out with him. More to the point, when fellow black folk stare at him with a mixture of disdain and deep disappointment, it causes him to create something more uplifting, "something the next generation can look up to". But it's too late, as he's locked into being a minstrel show man for life. There's a powerful scene where Hogan has trouble getting off the blackface and red lip makeup he uses for shows and has a nightmare that white men wearing minstrel masks chop off his own face and replace it permanently with a grinning mask. The last chapter shows him dying of tuberculosis (the red blood on the white handkerchief showing it all), finding a black man playing piano in a bar and being invited to play with him. Howard sides with Hogan in this question: if someone makes a devil's bargain, do you blame the person for being naive or the devil for being evil? In this case, Hogan got what he wanted--fame, success, money and simply a chance to play a new kind of music. The price he paid was severe, but he could never go back after establishing himself, even though he desperately wanted to. The stereotyped, grinning black imagery that Howard employs here is even more powerful than the hateful words--and Howard doesn't hold back from depicting it exactly as it was, from showing just how white folks saw black folks. It reminds me a of a quote from Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn: "Black music is in, black culture is in, but black people will never be in." It's a phenomenon that while not as nakedly racist as it was in Hogan's day, continues to persist in the overall culture (cf Robert Townsend's film Hollywood Shuffle). Howard is successful in evoking the aesthetics of the day without for a moment indulging in nostalgia in a book that is provocative, intelligent and striking to look at..

Comics Cardigan, by Rachel Dukes. Dukes is no newcomer to comics, after having edited and published a few music-related anthologies (Side A and Side B) as well as operating a small-scale comics distro. Going to CCS, I'm guessing, is a way to settle down and work on her own chops. Her Comics Cardigan package certainly displays her skill as an editor and publisher in terms of packaging and all-around attractiveness as an art object. A cardboard sweater snugly holds all sorts of little treasures. Let's unpack them one by one:

* "Hello Sweetie", a promotional notebook for her new mixtapecomics.com website. There's an attractive, single-tone screenprinted cover.

* A priority mail sticker-stamp with the Mixtape Comics symbol screenprinted on it, with the motto "No worries. just keep drawing."

* An 8 page mini called Adventure Story. Done in the style of Ed Emberley (he of the simple, geometric how-to-draw books), this is a cute story about a cat that goes overseas to try to rescue its beloved teapot, only to find a surprise.

* Frankie's Busy Day, a 32 page full-color mini aimed at kids, about a confused cat unsure of why all her toys were being taken away by her people, until she is taken to a new apartment. The very simple line (drawn on a computer, perhaps?) is nonetheless expressive, and the use of color makes the characters pop off the page.

* A 20-page mini consisting of one-page autobio strips, process pages, and an excerpt from a longer ongoing series that seems to be an intense family/high school drama.

It's easy to tell that Dukes has a strong work ethic and is constantly compelled to not only create nice-looking comics and zines, but to get them out to the public. What is not clear to me is what sort of cartoonist she is at this point. None of this is related to her first-year thesis project, for example, and I get the sense that her "real" work tends to be in the naturalistic style she displays in "Primary", her ongoing series.Reading the Comics Cardigan package certainly made me want to find out more about her cartooning, but I only wish there was something here that I could have really sank my teeth into. That aside, her children's book was really well-done and contained a number of moments of sly humor.