Breakdown Press: Anna Haifisch, Richard Short

The Artist, by Anna Haifisch. Haifisch's work bears a superficial resemblance to that of Michael Deforge's with her thin line, background detritus and distorted figure work. Though originally printed in Vice, these comics certainly fit in with the Breakdown Press aesthetic. The use of color is slightly off-kilter, the humor is bleak and yet there's a certain propulsive quality at work here with regard to the nameless protagonist. To a degree, a strip making fun of the art world and those whom inhabit its margins is shooting fish in a barrel. However, Haifisch is careful to never let the punchline stray very far from the Artist  himself, a lean, pale and bedraggled figure with four frizzled strands of hair extending from his head and bloodshot eyes. The book consists of short vignettes, with a splash introduction and then a two-page story. That keeps the book moving quickly, as Haifisch has to get to her punchlines without dawdling. The second story, where the artist goes to a gallery show, is hilarious, especially when he says "The world was waiting for this, Marcel 'Douche"-Champ" in response to a ripped campus with a neon light behind it. The visceral disgust toward a naked guy doing performance art was particularly delightful.

Much of the rest of the book focuses on the artist's natural agoraphobia, inability to finish assignments, and overall crippling depression inhibiting his ability to create. A strip about a smug rejection letter from a gallery sees a sinister figure smash the artist's head down. The worst part about the rejection letter was the gallery sending cheap candy and a toy as compensation for the rejection, as though the artist was going to a birthday party and getting a goodie bag. An anxious group dinner leads the artist to say something, no matter how stupid, just to make himself known. A trip home to his loving parents turns humiliating as they tell him their plan to try to encourage the family dentist to buy one of his paintings by putting it in their bathroom when he visits for dinner. The artist's drone art concept turns into tragedy, complete with broken glass and a dead pet. A court judges him for "withdrawn artsy behavior" and finds him guilty for "total uselessness", especially after he reveals his income. After this combination of self-flagellation and sharply observed humor (often preceded by an image invoking a classic work of art), the final strip is both satirical and sweet in its admonition for people to take care of the poor artists in their lives. This is a perfectly-realized book that doesn't wear out its welcome, with a sharp sense of design, engaged sense of humor and a self-awareness that punctures every ounce of pretension possible in the discussion of art and the life of an artist.

Klaus Magazine No. 2, by Richard Short, et al. Short's whimsical, poetic and sometimes bleak comics start from a Charles Schulz template but grow increasingly complex, philosophical and beautiful. As I've noted before, the earthy and sometimes coarse humor as well as the bizarre, anthropomorphic animals remind me a bit of Jon Lewis' classic True Swamp, and the greater sense of continuity in the stories here just reinforced that pleasant association. The book starts off with the titular cat waxing philosophic while laying indolently in the fields, until he happens upon a horse that he secretly falls in love with. The main theme of this issue is what happens when intense desires go unfulfilled, starting with the seemingly calm Klaus being in reality a seething cauldron of lust and hunger. Short often springs images like Klaus badly wanting to eat the bird friend next to him who asks him what he's thinking but managing to restrain himself. What makes the gag so effective is that in response the bird says, "I understand--to name a feeling is to lose it..."

Short takes that theme and expands on it in the story "Fancy", which is all about unrequited love/desire and the sense of being alienated from both one's past and present circumstances. The story revolved around Klaus' desire for Lovely Horse, Lawrence the duck's sad love for a pet cat gone astray named Fancy, and Fancy's intense conflict between freedom and being a pet again. For Klaus, he suffers in sweaty silence, as he always does. For drunkard Lawrence, he attaches himself to the cat in any way possible. Fancy is the character lying to himself and others, as he concocts a plan to free the neighborhood dogs as a ruse for getting rid of the dog that blocks his way back into his old house. It's the sway of a demagogue, with only Klaus being disinterested. The story ends with no one being satisfied, as even Fancy's plans go awry and he's forced to embrace being feral in order to survive. In terms of the oddity of the character design and the expressiveness of the characters, Short's comics are endlessly entertaining, plumbing the character's emotional depths and providing the fodder for some remarkable punchlines.

There are also a number of other features in the magazine, including guest Klaus strips by Michael DeForge (who concentrates on the horror of visual representation) and Alice Socal (whose entry is closer in spirit to Short's). It was fascinating to see Short collaborate with Joe Kessler (the superstar of Breakdown Press), with Kessler's bright and discordant color schemes merging with Short's poetic,existential storytelling. Their story is about conflicts in the nature of identity being conflated with being embodied, with a dog running in the desert representing the height of dogness because of its total commitment to running, as opposed to Klaus and the stray wanting to be freed from their bodies, which they viewed as prisons. The final Klaus strips find Short really exploring the limits of the four-panel grid, exploding the imagery in an almost psychedelic manner in some panels. There's a density to this comic that makes it an especially satisfying read, with both its visuals and its writing equally significant in creating the humor and pathos that make up Short's work.

Comics From the UK and Ireland: Robbins, Short, Moreton, Pomery

Between The Billboards, by O.D. Pomery. These modestly-packaged, short minicomics come in drab cardboard covers that barely hint at the melancholy of the characters within. This comic is about a dramatic and vivid way of withdrawing from society, as a man named James Ebner lives in a small room he crafted between two advertising billboards in a city. The series is essentially several setpieces that get at the heart of why he withdrew, the potential for him to come back to society full time, and how living in total isolation and at a great height influences his thoughts regarding oblivion.  The first issue sets all of this up as a kind of man between the margins, unnoticed by most. The second issue sees an old friend try to talk him out of his solitude, to no avail. The third issue sees James wandering the streets, reminiscing about a particular girl left behind and trading barbed quips with a friend who works at an all-night bowling alley. The fourth sees him confronting death and loneliness after a friend dies, flashing back a bit more to that woman who was so uninhibited where he was so unsure of himself. Pomery's drawings are crisp and precise, making great use of both negative space and geometric patterns, especially when trying to create a vertiginous effect as the reader looks down a sharp drop. This is a somber, reflective comic drawn with skill and intelligence, and I'm curious to see how Ebner's story turns out.

Grand Gestures, by Simon Moreton. Published by Box Brown's Retrofit, this new book by Moreton is absolutely lovely to look at, first and foremost. His evolving style of removing as many lines as possible is similar to what John Porcellino does, but the effect is much different. With John P, there's a sort of simple but firm structure that underlies all of his figures, landscapes and other drawings. They are stripped down to a kind of essence. With Moreton, he goes beyond that essence at times into the realm of figurative abstraction, recognizable only by dint of context. It's a kind of filter that goes beyond removing all but the essentials and into erasing some of them, creating a sense of stirring beauty on page after page. The story, which is told without words, follows a middle-aged man through walks around town and in a sales conference. There's some ambiguity here as to what the reader sees. Are we seeing what the man sees, what he wishes he could see or do, or some ghostly form of the man who is finally free (perhaps after killing himself)? When his body turns into a circle with a couple of loops trailing after it, it's almost as though he's a spirit floating around, but that could be him imagining himself floating freely on the breeze, freed of the dullness of his daily life. It's telling that we don't see the man in the final chapter after he seems to fly off with a flock of geese, and instead we only see busy city streets and people walking before Moreton pans back to an image of a single bird in the sky. Once again, Moreton offers no explanatory details, making the images all the more haunting and yet uplifting, because those images of freedom are peaceful ones, especially for a man who seems to be living a life of "quiet desperation".

Klaus, by Richard Short.The Charles Schulz influence is obvious in these strips, from the introspective nature of many of the characters to its overriding sense of melancholy. With the little rat creatures who otherwise look like humans and the strip's generally earthy and occasionally vulgar sensibility, there's also a bit of the sensibility of Jon Lewis' True Swamp. Finally, the frequent lack of punchlines and drifting nature of the character interactions reminds me of Glenn Dakin's comics. While Short's influences are clear, he quickly transcends them to create beautiful, funny and thoughtful comics about topics like music, dreams, loving and nature. Short's figures are simple, crisp and cartoony, which sets them off nicely from his lovely and more detailed drawings of nature. Indeed, the pastoral quality of these strips adds to that sense of contemplative longing that pervades it. At times, the strip is also wickedly funny, like when a favorite strip is sold, the scandalous nature of insects is eschewed as an example of virtuous living, or when a smoking squirrel flat-out admits that he doesn't like jazz. Even an attempt at suicide has a funny punchline. This is really excellent work and is highly recommended for readers who like their humor mixed with poetry.

Curtains, by John Robbins. Robbins has really refined his pitch-black sense of humor and interest in the ways in which people think about and deal with death. The title story is about a sort of OCD man obsessed with his dead mother's obsession with telling him to close the curtains before turning on the light. The story deals with the way the narratives and voices of others seep into our consciousnesses  Far crazier and his most ambitious story to date is "The Heart Bowed Down By Weight Of Woe". It's drawn in a clear and even cartoony style, which makes it a nice counterpoint to the darkness of the humor within. The story has two narratives: the death of the ailing father of a family and how reluctant his wife is to do anything about it, and the relationship between his son and an odd woman obsessed with a missing child. The mother character flatly states what a relief it is that he's dead, considering his nature as a tyrant, hilariously imagining that his obituary would focus on how long-suffering she was. The increasingly uncomfortable joke in this story is that she keeps making up excuses not to call an ambulance or deal with his dead body in any way.

Of course, his son Tom is a misanthrope who can't be bothered either. As we learn about what a socially inept misfit he really is, the reader can't help but wonder how he managed to get a girlfriend, especially one as sweet-seeming and caring as Wendy, who scours the countryside in an effort to find a missing child named Mary. As the story proceeds and Wendy becomes creepier and creepier, Tom is mostly oblivious to her behavior until being confronted with it in a funny and unsettling scene with a neighbor who tells Tom about Wendy's dark past while trying to get him to agree that pedophilia is something everyone is interested in. The cheerfulness with which Robbins depicts all this is both dissonant and a big source of the humor. Robbins has always been fond of dramatic, horrific twists in his stories, but now he's balancing them with restraint, humor and a real sense of humanity, twisted as it may be.