CRAM, Part 4: CRAM #3

CRAM #3 has one of the funniest covers I've ever seen for an anthology. In an image that encompasses both front and back covers, artist Laura Lannes (her work is missed!) has a fairly familiar image on the right-hand (front) side: a young woman, lying down, reading a comic. It's something out of NON from some years ago. However, a closer look reveals that the image is...odd. Her legs are up in the air and there's a random hand on her left thigh. Opening the whole thing up reveals that someone is going down on her while the cover woman's attention is on the comic. It's a solid gag. 

There's the usual array of vastly different styles on display here, Alexander doesn't have any art in this issue, which isn't surprising, considering how hard putting together an anthology is. Angela Fanche opens up the issue on the inside front cover with a short comic; it's a good space for this kind of tightly-compacted storytelling. Her style continues to evolve, going from more basic diary comics to this slightly fantastical anecdote about a memory that acts as a song stuck in her head. She plays on this metaphor until it transforms into music and nearly suffocates her partner. Fanche's drawing is so delightfully scratchy and spare in some panels, and then she swoops in with big swathes of black patterns in others. It's a fascinating strip to attempt to decode. 

Steve Grove's "Potboilers" is done in the sort of unfussy, slightly cartoony naturalism that I see in a lot of comics these days. It's the kind of story where the characters have one narrative, but there's another narrative at play with the visuals and backgrounds, in particular. The premise of the story is that there's an agency that will send someone over to boil water for you so when you arrive back home, you have a boiling pot of water ready to go for cooking. While this is an absurd and funny idea, the premise is far less interesting than the interplay between the employees. The strident Peggy, trying to make a sale over the phone, has to deal with the distraction of boil specialist Bumphus' failure out in the field. She loses the sale, he goes off the deep end, and she does a "reset" by looking at violent imagery on the internet and then fantasizing about him being killed in a variety of ways. All around them, the house they're working out of is mysteriously dilapidated, and the final scene sees Bumphus on the sidewalk, slumped over after he's clearly slit his wrists with a broken bottle. Everything about this story is off-kilter and anxious in a way that requires multiple readings to absorb its nuances. 

Audra Stang's short comic features a couple of her "Star Valley" characters cozily watching a fantasy show of some kind. In pages with a 20-panel grid, Stang offers pieces of the show with no dialogue, creating a sort of bubble of fascination for the duo that's broken when a commercial comes on and they make a crude joke about it. Stang has an uncanny sense of recreating that sense of mundane magic felt at that age when two friends can share a common obsession together; it's a sort of ritual that still lets them be teens. 

Jack Lloyd's cartoony "Pickles" fantasy story reminds me a lot of Vaughn Bode's stuff, down to the color scheme and eccentric character design. It also has a touch of futuristic urban stories that touch on graffitti as a cornerstone aesthetic. It's one of many stories in the anthology where that aesthetic is more important than the actual narrative. Michelle Kwon's "Autobio" is another such story and self-consciously so. She starts off by declaring that she's tired of drawing herself and so chooses to draw herself as a sort of cute anthropomorphic animal. This is after she turns down other potential character designs, as though she's building a character in a video game. The comic itself is all about treasuring memories on her travels despite her anxiety about the future, and the cute characters turn what is otherwise a routine diary comic into something that's fun to look at visually. 

Steven Christie's "Punchline Sinker" might be my favorite story in this issue. It's a sci-fi story abot a young woman named Zander who recalls her first job, which was a fulfillment center in a satellite orbiting Earth. She worked the job with her friend Peanut, and at first the story seems like a pleasant bit of slice-of-life fiction. She announces to Peanut that she's going to quit in order to get married at precisely the same time Peanut's girlfriend breaks up with her. This leads Peanut to snap as she comes up with a theory: whenever something goes well for one of them, something bad happens to the other. This leads to a surprising and clever turn of events, which turns the story from slice-of-life to a tense action story. Christie uses a classic 9-panel grid to create a particular tempo, and then stays with it as the tension ramps up, but the reader (and protagonist) are unclear on where this is all going. Christie's thin line and limited pallette all help play into this aesthetic repetition. 

After the first half of the issue was mostly conventional narrative, Alexander returned to the weird stuff in the second half. Nicole Rodrigues' "We Hold On To Things" is a colorful bit of comics poetry, using an open page layout and a narrative mostly told in captions that illustrate the feelings of the narrator. She's depicted as a monarch in her own mind, even as she has to fend off her own destructive feelings. The textual meter sets the pacing in this comic, as opposed to a truly integrative approach between word and image. Grayson Bear's "Relatable Richard" is a lampoon of diary comics, featuring a lisping protagonist who sets off on a date, only to slip on a banana peel, fall down a mountain, and get sliced to pieces. The Riso colors are all jacked up to neon levels in four pages of pain hilariously piled on its protagonist. 

After non-traditional-narratives, Sam Sharpe offers "Annie and Alex at the Heartland Cafe." It's one of those narratives that appears to be one thing at first, then quickly becomes something else. A waiter is having a normal day at his job until a man and woman dine at a table outside. It quickly becomes apparent that he's autistic and she's his aide, taking him out for a meal. However, he's disregulated, which manifests as shouting, then throwing his food on the ground, and then eventually punching his aide in the face. All of this is being seen from the waiter's point of view, who is at a loss at what to do, until the aide tells him pointedly: "Don't get involved and do not touch him!" She calms him down, they pay, and then leave. What makes the story interesting is that the waiter can't let this go, and when he sees the woman at the train station, he expresses his remorse for not doing anything. She reminds him that it had nothing to do with him--all of his machismo, all of his need to be a main character (so to speak), was irrelevant. Sharpe's cartooning is top notch as always, blending a slightly cartooning quality into what is otherwise naturalistic work. 

The anthology ends with a trio of stories that are more about sensory impressions than story. "Rangers," by Ethan Means & Ashton Carless, is a gritty black & white war story that may be in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting. A group of soldiers (or prisoners?) sets out to tag things with bright yellow happy faces, until they try and head back. Brendan Leach (a welcome presence!) offers up "Storm and Stress," about a violenist who sees one of her colleagues menaced by a guy on a subway car, but she winds up looking away despite her colleague's pleading eyes. The bright splashes of color contrasted with the black & white images of her anxiety lead to a loose, free-floating sense of guilt and despair. Finally, Aidan Fitzgerald's "Contestants" uses deliberately crude, 8-bit digitally-created color images of contestants in some bizarre game show. The game is about slowly rising while recounting a memory, with that memory being judged by a panel. Fitzgerald is riffing on the public distillation of memory and identity (on social media, presumably) but doing it in a way that doesn't repeat the obvious downsides to social media participation. 

Alexander seems determined to never do the same issue twice, and the result is an anthology that's greater than the sum of its parts. The pieces by Bear, Rodrigues, Means/Carless are somewhat slight on their own, but they make a great deal of sense within the context of the issue. Alexander is adept at pairing more conventional (if odd!) narratives with more experimental pieces, resulting in an anthology that's challenging at points but also entirely readable. 

Last Hurrah: Runner Runner #4

After shuttering his excellent and long-running minicomics anthology Papercutter, Greg "Clutch" Means has been doing an annual, free anthology for Free Comic Book Day. Titled Runner Runner, the fourth issue (from 2015) was unfortunately also its last, but it certainly went out with a bang, with the usual mix of ten page stories and single page entries from a wide swath of cartoonists with different styles.

Sam Sharpe's "The Woman From Tuesday" is absolutely top-notch storytelling from a cartoonist who deserves much more recognition. The concept is simple at first: a man talks about him going on dates nearly every night with someone from the internet, interspersed with a memory from an old comic character: Cognito The Super Spy. The latter character essentially recapitulates the history of mysterious, adventurers, from Mandrake to the Shadow to Batman to Rorschach. The theme of the story is shifting identities and disguises, and the ways in which one can forget one's own identity by spending so much time as someone else.

Turns out the guy, named David, classifies each date by type--Deconstructionist (those who talk about the structure of dates on a date), Formalist (asking specific questions in a specific order), etc. Unmentioned but very clearly visible is the fact that David changes his appearance to match that of each date. He wears the same kind of ski hat and scarf as his first date, and puts on a curly wig and glasses to match his second date. The asides to old issues of Cognito perfectly match key moments of his dates in funny ways, especially when he starts thinking about Cognito's boy sidekick, Hypno.
Things get weird when a woman he dates on Thursday turns out to be the woman from Tuesday, in disguise (like he is). From there, the postmodern twists and turns of latter-day Cognito continue to get further wrapped up in the way this man and woman interact and the ouroboros swallows its own tail in a very amusing way. Sharpe's facility for drawing faces and sticking with a steady grid allows him to nimbly go from drawing superheroes to regular folks without jarring the reader once.

Evan Palmer's "The Godins: The Last Meal" is a fantasy story with lots of gray wash used to create mood. It's a flashback to one character's mentor, a hard-as-nails chef who always keeps her eyes on the prize with regard to serving the intimidating masters of the realm, dressed and armed to the teeth. His mentor saves his life when she takes up a sword to help a squadron instead of allowing him to go to certain death. The jarring transition makes the reader think for a moment that it's a reverie that's being interrupted instead of a flashback, which adds to the excitement of the story, until he snaps back in the future. Palmer's figure design is idiosyncratic (especially the odd noses) but smooth, with a clear and crisp line.

If you've ever wondered what one of Joey Alison Sayers' Thingpart strips might look like expanded to full length, then "Silly Town" is for you. It's a fabulously demented tale about a children's music singer named "Jenny Rainbow" who sings the sort of cloying, catchy songs for kids that adults hate. Jenny sings a "concert" for some kids in an alley in a post-apocalyptic city, with her husband reminding her (and filling in the reader) that the government rounded up all the adults, leaving kids to fend for themselves. The bummer-proof Jenny takes that as an opportunity to become the biggest band ever. From there, things get even more absurd, as Paul had actually packed three oboes to take on his survivalist mission. When they get captured, the President himself sentences them to hard labor, but one of their songs has its own revenge on him. The structure of this story is quite clever but the best thing about it was the Jenny character, whose delusional qualities completely took over the strip.

Finally, Andrice Arp has a one-pager making literal the mess in her head when she finishes a project and how sometimes it's best to create in a state of chaos. I've missed her beautiful, detailed line and inventive use of angles and anthropomorphic creatures, bridging naturalism and mythology. Farel Dalrymple does a strip from his Pop Gun War world about a vicious cat, detailing what he's killed while wondering how something so cute can be such a killer. It's effective both as a stand-alone store and a palate cleanser for other Pop Gun War stories. I wish Means had the funding to do a bigger anthology, because he has an uncanny sense of pacing as an editor, knowing just how to create a smooth flow from story to story. Not everything he's published has been great, but it always fit in the context of the anthology at hand, inviting the reader in no matter what its subject matter or style might be.

Minis: J.Lisa, K.Krumholz, S.Sharpe/P.Goodrich

View-O-Tron #3, by Sam Sharpe & Peach S. Goodrich. This has very quickly become a must-read two-person anthology, with Sharpe in particular turning in memorable stories. "That First Summer After College We All Stayed In The City And Founded Religions" is told in Sharpe's typical anthropomorphic style, and it's an achingly familiar story about that first awkward year after college friendships start to fall apart in the face of adult life. The titular activity of all their friends starting their own cults may be absurd, but it was contextually just a metaphor for young people doing something kind of ridiculous when they can still get away with it. What was interesting was that when two of their friends founded "The Church of the Sandcastle", it had a fervor that piqued the interest of both the narrator and her boyfriend at separate times. There's a metanarrative about a novel that's being read out loud that's also about relationship and a search for meaning, as each character separately finds themselves going to a sandbox service and only one of them emerges as a true believer. Sharpe really gets at that sense of utter certainty and energy of youth that goes hand-in-hand with a sense of aimlessness and a lack of meaning. His characters are far from deadpan; in fact the bulging eyes of the boyfriend after he's found a way out of his personal malaise, even if it came at the price of brushing his girlriend off.

Goodrich's pieces are about seekers: one, a stand-in for the artist, and other a giant monster (also possibly a stand-in for the artist) trying to find one's way in a hostile world. The first piece is an extended visual metaphor as the author goes on a literal hike around the world, only to be told to come home, where their house is made out of their friends. The rest of Sharpe's strips are shorter and more absurd, yet all of them pull on that same sense of displacement in his main story, only he uses sci-fi allegory to get across that point in silly ways. The final strip has callbacks to several earlier stories in a story about stress and how different people react to it, starting with a woman walking down the street and ending with a cosmic eater of worlds, who thinks about the woman walking when it's stressed out. There's a sense of yearning in these comics, of wanting to be comforted by someone or something that knows better. It's implied that the true believers who find a way to become happy are both extremely lucky and hopelessly deluded, like someone had flipped a switch in their heads that not everyone possessed. The cartooning is crisp and attractive, with Goodrich using a thinner line weight, as compared to Sharpe's denser comics. View-O-Tron is just one of many recent traditional comic books that's shown just what can be done in a short story format, but there's no doubt that it's one of the best.

Dotty Spotty 1-2, by Jennifer Lisa. This is a collection of classic 4-panels a day diary comics that mix whimsy and weirdness with frank talk about her emotions. The strips about the anxiety that an ultrasound produced are nicely built up with humorous tension that's diffused when all the portents turned out to be nothing. There's another strip devoted to a deceased and beloved dog, where Lisa talks plainly about allowing herself to forget that her dog was dead, then fake-jokingly noting "Hey, remember? Remember how we healed each other of broken pasts?" The drawings are spare and quick in this strip and in general, as Lisa doesn't get overly precious with her line. Lisa is also frank about trying to find the time and energy to do her comics, as much as she loves them.

The second issue is even sharper than the first, with a strip about playing pinball for an anniversary date that uses repetition nicely in its punchline. Then there's simply a strip about struggling with ADHD, including getting people to take ADHD seriously as a problem. There's a whimsical strip about wanting babies & toddlers to look like forest creatures (the mushroom-raised baby is particularly cute AND disturbing). There are strips about feeling shy in public and depression that resonate thanks to how immediate and urgent all of these comics feel. There's a note in issue two saying that while it's now 2017, she drew the comics in 2015 and hadn't done any since. This is unfortunate, because Lisa's willingness to let her mind wander and then snap to attention on a particular image, or emotion, or memory give the reader a crystal-clear understanding of that experience, whether it's funny or sad.

Revolt To What?, by Daniel Landes & Karl Christian Krumpholz. While this comic takes place in a bar (Krumpholz's specialty as a cartoonist), the story is by Landes, seemingly trying to channel Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Sacco simultaneously. It isn't quite successful, because Krumpholz's figure work is highly stylized in a way that clashes with Landes' already bombastic prose. The story is set in the early 90s in Prague, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and it started to dawn on the Czechs that they weren't exactly being handed paradise in being raided by capitalism. There's a character who is Landes' stand-in, an Argentinian scholar, a highly sexualized female revolutionary, and a world-weary male revolutionary. There's a bar, there are locals acting like American frat boys, and there's general unrest. There are musings on the strength of Czech beer. There's lots of pontificating. It just does not cohere. There's an interesting story to be told, even about these characters, but Landes' stylizations as a writer renders his characters into cliches. Krumpholz' line is out of control with spiky hair on everyone, an excess of cross-hatching and and dull grey-scaling that is suffocating, and an overall lack of restraint. Indeed, Krumpholz is far more restrained as a storyteller with regard to his own work.

New Books From Yeti Press

After a successful Kickstarter, publisher RJ Casey has published a number of new books from his imprint, Yeti Press.Most of these books are by relative newcomers, but a number of them are printed in lavish color. In general, these books have an all-ages vibe to them.

Bird Witch, by Kat Leyh. Leyh collected the first few issues of her minicomics series in this book, and it's an attractive package. This is a well-developed but character-based fantasy story that slowly builds its backstory around the friendship of young witch Nina and her new friend Tali, who is of a race that is part bird. They initially bond over flying (Nina with her broom, Tali with her wings), and Leyh skillfully establishes their friendship and personality types before introducing a conflict in the form of the Bird Witch, an evil being that captures rare types of birds for her own ends. There are chase scenes, reversals, desperate plans and a last-second rescue by a relative. Leyh is definitely of the Kate Beaton school of cartooning in terms of her line, body language and simply-designed characters. Color adds texture and depth to her work, making the world feel real and making Tali all the more exotic because of the rich colors and patterns of her clothing. Later chapters in the book flesh out the world a bit, as Nina is revealed to be the daughter of a forest warden, who protects the magical forest against evil creatures; this is her ambition in life as well. There are bits and pieces of subplots and foreshadowing laid down for future chapters, but the real focus on the book is the way in which Nina and Tali quickly bond and find ways to get into trouble. Despite the extensive use of color, it all feels organic rather than part of an assembly line, like the Amulet books.

Pecos, by RJ Casey and Eric Roesner. This is sixty pages of total nonsense. Casey writes and Roesner draws the adventures of Pecos Bill, a bounty hunter in some crazed, mythical version of the old west that includes a demented, opium-dealing Johnny Appleseed and a Paul Bunyan who is all too intimate with his blue ox. Pecos Bill is one of those "one-upping" kind of characters, where everyone tries to one-up each other by talking about his deeds in the first story. Things are a bit silly and crazy throughout the book, but Casey takes it to the next level in a sequence where Pecos Bill rides one of Paul Bunyan's sperm while he's having sex with Babe the blue ox, then plants explosives inside Babe's body while singing a deranged song to the tune of "Home On The Range". It's a pretty magnificent gross-out gag, one that justifies the tamer and duller jokes earlier in the book, which are fairly disposable. Roesner's exaggerated and grotesque character design does a lot to carry the book, though it's uneven at times and some of his storytelling was difficult to follow at times.

Rose From The Dead, by Andrea Bell. This supernatural romance book feels like something Slave Labor might have published twenty years ago. Bell's character design and use of color are both quite appealing, as she makes the graveyard setting both spooky and funny. It's the story of long-time friends Jack and Roz on Halloween, when Jack is finally determined to tell his whirlwind of a friend that he's in love with her. She can't quite stand still long enough for him to tell her, and all of this is interrupted by skeletal ghosts, one of whom drags Roz into his grave. This is a charming comic, even if the relationship between Jack and Roz isn't exactly novel, and Roz makes for a compelling and clever heroine. The problem with the book is the page design. The panel-to-panel transitions are frequently confusing, as the order of the panels is often unclear. The dialogue and action is frequently vague enough such that it doesn't help clear this up any. Once Bell is able to clean that up a bit, she'll be on her way, because she has the skill to create fast-moving stories with clearly-defined characters and add just the right amount of humor.

Poops Boobs Poo, by Sam Sharpe. This is a killer collection of gags greatly inspired by Ivan Brunetti and the tradition of classic single-gag cartooning in places like The New Yorker. The gags run from the silly (a squirrel talking about how it bothered him just how much he liked nuts), to the edgy and violent (a man holding another man's severed head saying "You tell me this now?" after Moses brought down the ten commandments), to the gross (an amusing fisting joke). There are bad puns, penis size jokes and even a few call-back gags throughout the book. Sharpe has two things on his side: the level of craft in constructing his gags and his draftsmanship. Take the cartoon above, for example. The reader is immediately drawn to the figure in the middle thanks to the way he's positioned on the page. The reader immediately understands that he's a cyclops, that he's unhappy, and that his friend is exuberant after walking out of a film. Searching for context (and going from left to right), the punchline immediately becomes evident thanks to the "Blast-o-rama in 3D" poster. Some of Sharpe's gags had images that existed solely to set up the caption as the punchline, while others used words to set up a funny image as the punchline. He doesn't go quite as far as a Brunetti or a Ryan in most of his gags, in part because he's more about the laugh than the shock, but he's not afraid to get pretty transgressive. Sharpe is a thoughtful, interesting young cartoonist and it was fun to see him cut loose on this kind of gag, almost as an academic exercise.

Well Come, by Erik Nebel. This is a vivid, funny and sometimes gross series of silent cartoons about the interactions of various cartoon shapes. Some are sharply delineated as people, and some are shapes that blend, bleed or outright take over other shapes. Some shapes complete others, making a new mouth or a smile. Other shapes infiltrate or steal parts from other shapes outright. Nebel's use of color is almost psychedelic in its brightness, and the thick, glossy paper allows the color to really soak in on the page. The semi-connected mini-narratives bring to mind certain Lewis Trondheim comics in the way that blobs interact with other blobs in a frequently violent and/or visceral manner. The Team Society League collective's gross comics are another touchstone, though Nebel mostly resists gross-out gags in favor of a gentler sense of humor. The use of color reminds me a bit of Paper Rad a bit, though without the greater weirdness and depth of strange narrative. What you see is what you get on these pages, and Nebel's adherence to following the logic of each gag to its ultimate conclusion works well on page after page. It's the sort of book that you never quite want to end.

Minicomics Round-Up: Roberts, Sharpe, R.Smith, Fleener, McMahan

There's no through-line in the minis reviewed in this column this time around, other than I found them all to be quite good.

Powdered Milk #11, by Keiler Roberts. This mini is an especially sharp and subtle bit of storytelling. Roberts has been doing comics about being an artist and a mother for a few years now and hasn't flinched in detailing her struggles with post-partum depression along with the ups and downs of being a parent. This issue is a tightly-drawn series of rapid-fire comments from her toddler daughter, and while many of the comments are hilarious and played for laughs, it's clear that Roberts is drawing these comics as a way of letting off steam as well. Having your child yell at you, hit you, bite you and just do inexplicably destructive things is maddening  Children are also quite intuitive and can pick up on emotional signals both subtle and not so subtle, and they are quite willing to confront you on them, like when Roberts' daughter asked why her eyes are crying. Roberts also hints at the difficulties of being a primary caregiver, especially when one is trying to be an artist. There's a page where Roberts tells her daughter "You're supposed to be napping" when she's drawing a strip, only to meet with curiosity from her daughter. When she sees the strip is about her, she says "Thank you for drawing that, Mommy". It's the situation in a nutshell: guilt, joy, frustration, astonishment. In strip after strip, Roberts gets across what it's really like to be a parent.

Viewotron #2, by Sam Sharpe. Employing frequently deadpan anthropomorphic animals as a storytelling device not unlike the artist Jason, this is a devastating story about the disintegration of the relationship between a son and his schizophrenic mother that seems to be at least partly autobiographical. Sharpe opens the comic depicting himself as a child, talking about his mother being missing with a friend, as well as the odd fact that his father let him read the strange, convoluted and paranoid letters she sent to her boy. From there, we see the hopeful reconnection between mother and son as we're privy to Sharpe's nervousness and uncertainty about what, exactly, he wanted from the relationship. Sharpe slowly, painfully details the way his mother's mind starts its descent back into paranoid delusions, as she thinks that her son is part of the "Sharpe crime family" and wants him to disassociate from his father and family completely. He humors her and tries to change the subject as much as possible, helping her when a friend of hers from therapy suddenly commits suicide. The end of the comic is chilling, as Sharpe is forced to confront his mother's mental illness with her when she demands to know if he's seen the horrible things she hallucinated at his house. Even then, the connection he wants to have with her (as opposed to the actual connection) is so strong that he patiently tells her that they just see things differently and that she has a mental illness. At that point, she starts laughing hysterically, writing him off as a duplicate and telling him that her son is dead. Even drawing his characters as anthropomorphic dogs does little to blunt the emotional impact of the scene, and one senses that drawing his characters in this way was as much for Sharpe's benefit as it was for the readers. Sharpe uses a 2x3 panel grid to maintain the same sense of rhythm and pace no matter what the situation, so even the rougher scenes aren't lingered on for very long by either artist or reader. This is a powerful comic that's told with confidence, skill and even flair.

I Am Fire, by Rachael Smith. This is a full-color mini about a couple of wildly dysfunctional teens who develop a crush on each other. British artist Smith has a nicely-honed sense of comic timing and manages to create a pair of protagonists who are near-sociopaths yet strangely likable at the same time. The story follows a girl named Jenny, who creates havoc doing an internship of sorts in a department store, and Chris, a pyromaniac who somehow winds up as an intern for a fire-prevention outfit. While the cover certainly has an apocalyptic feel to it, the actual circumstances of how Chris winds up wearing that sign are quite amusing. Smith is unrelenting in these forty pages when it comes to the obnoxiousness of her characters and the shtick that surrounds them, as the cast includes an obsessed fire safety officer, an alpha male fireman, a dotty saleslady and various other somewhat one-dimensional character types. Smith manages to insert a bit of humanity into the proceedings in a way that doesn't seem ham-fisted, unearned or sentimental, and that rescues the comic from falling into cliche'. Indeed, it provides some rather amusing surprises for a number of characters. Smith's bug-eyed characters remind me a bit of a slicker Kate Beaton or perhaps Raina Telgemeier. That smooth, slick line actually goes nicely with her acerbic sense of humor. Given the way she writes her characters, I thought her use of color was a bit over-the-top, however. Nearly every page had dense, rich colors that at times overpowered the eye, especially on pages where nothing much was actually happening. A more muted palette would have been appropriate for much of the book and might have allowed the reader a better chance to take in the loveliness of her drawing style. There's no question that Smith is funny and talented but a smidgen of restraint could have made this comic even funnier.

You Were Swell, by Sophie McMahan. Getting this comic in the mail is one of those rare occasions when you get a comic that's completely bonkers and fantastic from an artist you've never heard of. This is an amazing series of strips mashing together 50s advertising art and romance comics tropes with modern body horror/body dysmorphia that together give a scathing, hilarious critique of gender norms and roles. "Other Self" illustrates a seemingly happy, white 1950s family with heads that split off, as the narrative caption posits the question "Do you ever feel split between two selves?" It's an arrow aimed right at societal and consensus constructions of "normal" and acts both as a declaration by the artist and a hand extended to the reader. In "What If?", McMahan takes an idyllic scene of three women enjoying ice cream, inserts a traditionally handsome male making a crude remark, and then has the women disintegrate him with a laser eye blast. I found this comic to be hilarious, partly because the wish fulfillment is so obvious but mostly because of the way she juxtaposes bland figures with crazy action. "Winner", which details a beauty queen winning first prize, goes in a similar direction, as she loses all of her teeth upon getting the crown, though no one seems to notice. It's a funny image to begin with, but it also pokes fun at the ways in which beauty is so obviously a socially constructed concept, something the pageant setting makes quite clear.

"Bad Thoughts" is the central piece of the comic, where McMahan explores and admits that the hateful thoughts she has about others are literally ugly and a reflection of her own self-hatred. This comic is a way of acknowledging this tendency and destroying the notion that we are abnormal if we have negative feelings. McMahan subverts and undermines this notion at every turn, like in one strip where a handsome guy tells a beautiful girl with lovely lashes that mascara is made out of bat feces, or another "perfect date" where the couple's faces melt at the end. This remarkable comic covers a lot of ground and hammers home a lot of provocative ideas thanks to McMahan's command over her line and willingness to explore the grotesque. That facade of beauty that she punctures again and again is set up perfectly, as McMahan has an unerring grip both on what makes such art and imagery appealing as well as how it is also innately revolting. That sense of revulsion is almost palpable throughout the comic, whose commentary is less overtly political (though there is a political and satirical element to it) and much more deeply personal. McMahan has an interesting career ahead of her.

The Less You Know, The Better You Feel #2, by Mary Fleener. This early alt-comics era standout continues to draw political comics for The Coast News, focusing in on local government greed and calling them out for getting in bed with big developers trying to extract every dollar possible from her idyllic and arts-oriented beach town in California. Fleener's at her best when she gets into particulars, like in the above strip about the right of every citizen to speak for three minutes at every city council meeting. Another strip gives advice on how to be effective when given that platform. Fleener also veers away from politics to offer amusingly-illustrated recipes, complain about aggressive bikers (those strips are especially hilarious), talk about the local flora and fauna or whatever strikes her fancy. Still learning on the job as a political cartoonist, she's making much better use of simple and striking images and cutting back on fussy over-labeling and complicated drawings. Strips where she compares a local politician named Stocks to MacBeth (complete with the three witches and their cauldron) are a good example of this powerful image-making. Fleener is a naturally funny cartoonist, and it's been interesting to see how she's allowed her whimsical nature to merge with her sharp, focused political instincts to provide cartoons that are memorable and brutal. She's not afraid to repeatedly get out the long knives to carve up hypocrites and greedy politicians who would prefer that the public simply ignore what they're doing.

Anthologies: Little Heart

2D Cloud's Kickstarter-funded anthology Little Heart is uneven as far as the quality of its contributions goes, though in some respects that's beside the point. A portion of the book's proceeds went to [MN]Love, a nonprofit dedicated to marriage equality in Minnesota. As an adopted North Carolinian, enduring the results of Amendment One this past year was disgraceful, as it made so-called "marriage protections" part of the state constitution. Until the US Supreme Court rules otherwise, more states are in danger of having to deal with these barbaric and discriminatory practices. As such, one can forgive that some of the entries in this anthology either aren't comics or else display more enthusiasm than skill.

Let's take a closer look at the stories themselves. One thing that I liked about the anthology is that there was no specific requirement for the contributors to make their story about gay marriage. Indeed, a number of the stories are personal accounts from people who are single or have no desire to get married. I thought two of the better (if on-the-nose) stories came from Virginia Paine and Maurice Vellekoop, respectively. Paine talked about that even when she dated men, she never thought of marriage as an attractive option, but did say that having a choice like anyone else is important.Vellekoop, the great Canadian illustrator, interviews some friends after nearly a decade of equal access under the law in his country. It's a fascinating piece and a nice capstone to the book, as some of his friends discuss the pros and cons of marriage as well as their own mixed feelings about the institution. A couple of his friends felt it was too imitative of the straight world (a quite common claim), while others liked the idea of being part of an ancient institution and making it their own. It's a fascinating discussion of some finer points of the experience that many don't think about, drawn in Vellekoop's trademark angular, attractive style.

A couple of stories were personal accounts of deciding to get married, focusing in on specific aspects of the experience. For Emily Carroll and Kate Craig, their story focused on the simple engagement ring purchased online, which had an inscription from another couple. It's a simple sentiment, wondering about who these people were but focusing more on the present. Mari Naomi's account of proposing to her husband was more complicated, as she spoke to one queer friend whose less than enthusiastic "How nice for you, that you're able to do that" spoke to the divide between gay and bi individuals as well as the dilemma many hetero partners feel when they think about marrying. That said, the sheer enthusiasm and nervousness comes through on every page, and the splash page featuring the proposal was nicely understated, as Mari Naomi puts the image of her proposing in the bottom left hand corner, surrounded by tons of white space.

Some of the strips focus less on the idea of marriage than the experience of being queer and exploring that identity.Alex Fukui's "Footsie" for example, is a painful example of having desperate yearnings as a young person and wondering if someone you have a crush on is interested in as well, with the added layer of total fear about being a teen and being gay. Ed Choy and Sam Sharpe's "Roosterlegs" is by far the best-looking strip in the book thanks to the bold, confident lines, clever character design and interesting use of spot color. It's a strip about a young person trying to investigate the realities of what being queer means in nature and exploring the possibility of trans identity.

Other stories focus on being alone vs being with someone and the sacrifices one makes in either scenario. Christopher Adams' evocative silent story about a priest going about his day, hanging out with members of his congregation, speaks to the nature of the solitude of his position and the peace he has ultimately made with it. Hannah Blumenreich's story of a lovable pre-teen oddball who earnestly believes that she is psychic is endearing precisely because of her lack of self-awareness, even as she makes subtle shifts in attitude when reality dictates it. Joseph Remnant's excellent story about a guy crushing hard on a girl he sees at a bookstore and subsequently talks to at an art show is funny because of the quite deranged nature of obsessiveness overriding reason. The fact that this story gets a happy doesn't feel like a cheat so much as an indication that the leads occupied the same place in their circle of friends and really did find out by accident that they were perfect for each other. Noah Van Sciver's account of Richard & Mildred Loving's struggle to have their mixed-race marriage accepted in the south is especially poignant given that their union was opposed on many of the same supposed moral grounds as gay marriage is today. Jeremy Sorese's story about his divorced parents remarrying provides the structure for his own mixed feelings about marriage in an elegant and stylish series of highly stylized images. He gets at an interesting point: even if gay marriage is a big deal, why should a 23 year old be worrying about marriage anyway?

Most of the other stories are pleasant enough, if forgettable. I thought the inclusion of spot illustrations didn't do much to strengthen the anthology, especially since few of them were especially memorable. The handwritten coming-out story of Tammy Ray was impassioned but wasn't really comics, and Rachel Kowarski's poem did not fit at all. Editor Raighne Hogan likes to take risks in his anthologies and errs on the side of leaving in submissions that perhaps should have been cut. He leaves it up to the reader to decide their worth, which is admirable, but I'd love to see him exercise a firmer editorial hand. Of course, this anthology wasn't necessarily the place to do so, and erring on the side of enthusiasm in this case made sense. There's no question that it's a beautifully designed book, as all 2D Cloud projects tend to be, and I hope that it makes a difference.