Mooz Boosh: More Spinadoodles From Sam Spina

There's never a question that any autobio strip that Sam Spina happens to put down is going to be full of goofy humor, and his new collection of his "Spinadoodles" strips, Mooz Boosh, is no exception. He and his wife Samantha are often depicted as acting like big kids for comedic effect. What's changed over the years is that each year's collection of new strips has become slimmer as he is now a full-time writer and artist working for the Cartoon Network. Instead of writing a strip a day, every day, he's only doing them as inspiration strikes, and the result is a consistently funny personal narrative with an undertone of personal dissatisfaction. That's actually been a running theme, first when he was an aspiring cartoonist/animator who worked a waiter job and now that he got a job as a pro. The difference now is that there's a self-awareness of the #firstworldproblem nature of his unhappiness: he has a great job, a great wife, a nice apartment, etc--why should he complain? The answer is that one's dreams matter, and his dream of having his own show was dashed twice (off-panel) in the course of the year. There's a sense of him struggling with negative emotions in general as a subtext in these strips, but that sense of feeling that he's not entitled to his emotions is palpable.

Spina's always used a cluttered approach to the page, filling up any negative space with a gray wash. What's changed over the years is his growing confidence as a draftsman. In "Stung", for example, his over-the-top foreshortening of his thumb getting stung has images of bug-eyed Sam freaking out, but also a perfectly-rendered hand in one panel. Indeed, there are plenty of pages that can be navigated solely from a visual perspective, especially when Samantha and her many expressive faces are involved. Spina also threw in some sketchbook doodles to fill up space but also to give the reader a sense of the sort of thing he's working on. One gets the sense that Spina has once again come to a betwixt and between portion of his life, where he's an adult but hasn't yet punched every square on the adult bingo card (own a house, have kids, etc), but he's way past being a young adult. There's career ambitions being thwarted but also a sense that he has plenty of time. One also gets the sense that he hasn't forgotten how much joy he gets out of simply drawing, and that really comes out in his Hourly Comics Day strips.

Doubling down on cat jokes and fart jokes is both consistent with everything Spina has done to this point and a sense that he may well feel compelled to write about other things in the future. In the meantime, Spina's depiction of his job and his relationship are both quite compelling and illustrative. Not only do we get a sense of what Samantha is like, the reader also comes to understand their chemistry and bond. And while there's plenty of goofing around at work, there are also meetings about redoing a script that he's been working on for a year with someone. One almost doesn't notice when Spina actually dwells on something serious, because he's so good at the structure of making virtually any kind of anecdote into something with a comedic structure. I hope he keeps doing these strips forever.

Minis: S.Spina, N.Garcia, B.Berry, M.Turbitt

Supercar 1, by Brandon Berry. This short comic, designed to briefly introduce a setting and its main character, reminds me a lot of the sort of thing that Brandon Graham and Malachi Ward are doing: thoughtful, off-beat and highly stylized science fiction. In this comic, we're introduced to a driver who's getting their car upgraded by an anthropomorphic rabbit creature. After dropping in a component that seems to work on magic as much as it does science, the driver gives the rabbit an old Mac laptop, establishing the timeline as some post-apocalyptic future. The last scene finds a cop on a motorcycle (with perhaps dubious authority) chasing after the driver. Along the way, Berry's wobbly and wonky line adds a tremendous amount of atmosphere and texture to the story. Some panels are missteps (one panel with just the driver has too much negative space), but overall, Berry's chunky line width and the fluidity of his figures makes this a striking little comic to look at.

Malarkey, by November Garcia. Matt Moses of Hic & Hoc handed me this mini at SPX, and he said he plans to publish a longer collection of her work. He noted the obvious comparison between Garcia and the work of Julia Wertz, and it's certainly there on the surface. Their figure composition, line, sense of humor and even personal struggles are much alike. That said, Garcia has her own unique voice, and that's not just because she lives in the Philippines. Her sense of comic timing, her willingness to use aspects of her life (as well as the lives of others) as a rich vein for her comic material, and her skill with regard to body language, expressiveness and page layouts made every story a delight to read. Garcia also exploits the differences between she and her mother, who on the one hand is scandalized by her daughters openly displaying the tampons they bought but on the other grew up playing with spiders and tadpoles. Lighthearted stuff like teasing her mom about her phone screensaver is interspersed with much darker material, like a funny strip about a dilation & curettage procedure she had to get after a miscarriage.

Garcia isn't afraid to shove the reader head-on into some pretty intimate material while at the same time distancing herself from it just enough to extract a punchline. The same is true about her struggles with drinking, the behavior of certain ex-boyfriends, pondering the reasons why she's put off having a baby and juxtaposing the text of a funny story from a beloved aunt with the reality of her life in hospice. What also struck me about this comic is just how important comics are to her. In "The Story Of You", a take-off on the sort of story one tells your young child about how they were born, she goes into detail about how much time, energy and thought she put into each strip. The final panel, where both Garcia and her anthropomorphic comic are homeless, is both tender and hilariously self-deprecating at the same time. There's another strip where she's over the moon about John Porcellino following her on Tumblr and she punches a scoffing friend ("Who the hell is John Porceloono?") in the breast while never taking her eyes off the phone. That sums up Garcia's work in a nutshell: committed to her craft, highly expressive, generally inappropriate in all the best ways. and possessing great comic timing.

Being Myself Is A Treasure and Having A Time, by Sam Spina. These are the collections of years six and seven of Spina drawing diary comics. He abandoned printing or even attempting a daily strip a little while back, preferring to focus in on days where he had a gag, a life event to report or simply something interesting to say. That was a wise move, because while doing a daily diary strip can help a cartoonist improve drastically, they aren't necessarily great reads, nor are they always well-drawn. In recent years, however, Spina's skill as both a cartoonist and a storyteller has been steadily honed through sheer, hard work. At the same time, these strips still retain that same boundless, goofy energy that permeated his early work. He also retains a willingness to put himself out there in terms of things he thinks and says, but is also willing to give his wife, Samantha, her own say in how events played out. Their sweet and occasionally pugnacious relationship is a highlight of the strip, as both are strongly attached to their very different points of view and are willing to defend them, but their ultimately loving foundation grounds the strip.

Being Myself Is A Treasure (volume 6 of the Spinadoodles diary series) is a major turning point, as Spina is suddenly offered a job doing storyboards for the Cartoon Network series The Regular Show. It's reminiscent of Mike Doonesbury being taken out of a dead-end job and suddenly being plopped into a new life, as Sam & Sam leave Atlanta and move to Los Angeles. Spina mixes in some fantastic sketchbook pages (in color) among the diary strips, which I especially enjoyed because they're more characteristic of his other work. There's still an utter lack of pretension to be found in these comics, as he still writes a lot about his job. It's just a job he's always dreamed of, instead of being a waiter. Volume 7 (Having A Time) is even more successful, as Spina's able to devote more time to his diary as it's clear he started to get the hang of his new life. Spina started to expand his autobio stories out to more than a single page on a more regular basis, resulting in richer, funnier stories. Many autobio cartoonists have done a strip about going to the San Diego Comicon, but Spina's focus on details like being unable to sleep, spending time with a friend and being frustrated when his wife wasn't there to pick him up at the station in the middle of the night provided a funny contrast to the usual business-oriented con experiences. There's an Hourly Comics Day experiment that's by far his most successful, a funny account of a trip to Iceland with his wife. more sketchbook comics, and the realization that while his life was great in many ways, he desperately missed the cartooning camaraderie he had in Denver. The highlight of the book is a day-by-day account of precisely how being a storyboard artist works for his show, which was fascinating in terms of the details but hilarious in just how honest he is about how much time he wastes along the way. There's even a point where he's bummed that drawing storyboards has altered his own drawing style. Whatever his concerns, it's clear that Spina is hitting his stride as a creator, as Having A Time is just the right length and has just the right balance of material.

Self, by Meghan Turbitt. Turbitt's parody of trashy women's magazines isn't simply a satirical takedown of such publications, though that's part of it. Self is no less than a total reimagining and warping of women's magazines around Turbitt's own particular aesthetic obsessions. An article about sex tips is an interview with someone that Turbitt has had sex with turns into a consumer goods survey, as she asks questions like "In what ways could I improve the experience for people wanting to have sex with me?" A fashion article titled "How To Wear A $3 Bra" is a hilarious series of drawings where Turbitt is unable to get her breasts to behave when she moves or runs, leading to an encounter with friends where she screams at them not to "look at my boobs jiggle". It's a real exploration of the concept of clothing that's affordable and functional, that at the very least doesn't embarrass the person wearing them. "Bros Who Brunch" is a hilarious but almost loving takedown of an Instagram account featuring guys eating ridiculous foods and absurd drinks in a show of conspicuous consumption. All elements of Turbitt's satire, no matter how mean, are turned at least in part on herself, as she always reveals that there's an aspect of her that loves and wishes she could be a part of that vapid, shallow wallowing in excess wealth. "2016 Best Beverages" is essentially whatever Turbitt found most satisfying at a particular point in time, so it includes things like "Diet Coke from McDonald's" as well as "Coffee in French Press". Turbitt throws in a couple of dirty strips involving men exposing themselves to her, which makes sense since the kind of magazine this satirizes is a reflection on the standards for beauty, grace and culture that are imposed on women by outside sources. One strip features a hilarious punchline where Turbitt uses an exposed penis to open a bottle of wine, and the other is an expose' of what dog owners who don't restrain their pets from jumping all over others are really thinking. There's plenty of familiar, furious Turbitt lines as she's frantically in motion at various points, but the success of this comic is largely conceptual.

Sam Spina's Diary Training Ground

If Dustin Harbin's diary comics were a form of personal obfuscation in the form of a lark, then Sam Spina's diary comics are a lark that wound up having unexpected and personally beneficial side-effects for the artist. After claiming to be done with diary comics after the third volume (not to mention the fourth volume), Spina kept coming back to this exercise. Fortunately for the reader, Spina no longer felt the need to do a strip every day (something that resulted in a lot of bad entries), nor did he abide by the classic James Kochalka/American Elf model of a four-panel strip. In the fourth volume of Spinadoodles (I'm Zonin) and the fifth and supposedly final volume (Know Me Now), Spina balances gags, observations regarding his daily life as an artist and as a waiter, life with his fiancee and later wife Samantha as he slowly transforms a strip that began as quotidian work into something with greater depth and resonance.

Spina did this in a manner more akin to Jesse Reklaw's classic diary strip Ten Thousand Things To Do as opposed to Harbin's strips. That is, unlike Harbin's tendency to suddenly turn on a dime and become suddenly introspective and meta after weeks of the usual gags, he instead slowly lets his deeper concerns and fears become part of the background. Reklaw's strip was really about the artist's attempt to deal with fatigue, pain and depression while constantly keeping himself busy. Similarly, the jocular Spina's record of his life really becomes about his lack of self-confidence as an artist, even when he starts to get significant opportunities from Nickelodeon. One of the most memorable sequences in the book comes when he does an interview with a newspaper about his animation job, one in which he not only put himself down, he also was fairly negative about the process itself. That drew the ire of the network and caused some soul-searching as to why he did these things.

Such revelations came in bits and pieces as he slowly started to grow up, but he never pushed these themes on the reader in an obvious fashion, instead trusting the reader to tease this out. What he does as a memoirist is focus on the details of his relationships with others, especially Samantha. About half of the strips in the book touch on the amusing nature of their relationship, but it also touches on arguments, stubbornness, emotional breakdowns and their differences as people while revealing a deep and abiding mutual sense of love and respect. Spina doesn't merely tell us that Samantha and his friends are important; instead, he shows us the specifics of how and why they're important. That's conveyed so effectively that it's entirely unnecessary to know anything about the history or context of these relationships.

One of the keys to the success of these volumes is that Spina's visual approach is lively and eye-catching. There's a lot of ink, clutter and detail in nearly every panel, but Spina keeps his storytelling clear with simple and expressive figures. His bug-eyed characters, pointy noses and fluid lines, as I've noted before, remind me a bit of Kate Beaton. The eye simply wants to look at these figures. It's not a surprise to know that Spina is a graphic designer and has experience in animation, but the slickness that often afflicts cartoonists with those backgrounds is nowhere to be seen. The grit on each page keeps the images immediate, sharpening the punchlines or emotions Spina is featuring. In his final strip, Spina notes that comics gave him, a perennial shy kid, a voice and a way to express himself. That expression may not be especially profound (in one strip, he talks about his paintings always sucking because he has nothing to say), but it's honest, funny and earnest. .

New Comics From Sam Spina

Sam Spina is at his best when he's drawing dopey, funny adventures that don't take themselves seriously. For example, his new comic The Frantastic Four (Kilgore Books, who publish Noah Van Sciver's Blammo! series) moves quickly beyond being a superhero pastiche and becomes something much weirder and more wonderful. Spina's work looks great in standard-pamphlet size, though it did fairly cry out for color. The story starts out as a quasi-serious riff on an obsessed astronaut who travels to Neptune, trying to better himself after his brother (beloved of his parents) disappeared. Every step Spina takes after that subverts genre conventions in the silliest way possible. The astronaut (Frankie Frantastic) meets an alien on Neptune and brings him home, "hiding" him in the most obvious ways possible. The super-intelligent robot his brother built is curious about this walking stalk of celery, but then a Godzilla-style creature pops up to fight Celery, only to agree to join with the others. The quartet bumbles through a series of ever-goofier adventures until they decide to open a restaurant, which winds up getting rave reviews. You get the idea. It almost feels like an example of "yes, and..." improvisational storytelling, except it was Spina himself who kept giving himself crazier things to throw into the story.

A more concentrated blend of Spina's penchant for visceral violence and nonsensical gags is Daggurs, a (mostly) 24-hour comic that recalls Kaz Strzepek by way of Kate Beaton. His simple character design is heightened by sharp-edge faces and cartoony expressions on the faces of animals. The comic veers from funny violence for its own sake to a denunciation of violence to a warped parody of "issue" comics, as the title character teams up with the angelic form of an angel he killed (a "whangel", of course) to spread the word about anti-violence. It's a more focused work than The Frantastic Four, which tends to repeat some of its jokes as it searches for new ones. Daggurs' more abbreviated length ideally highlights Spina's comic timing and understanding of how to use story beats to maximize visual gags.

Finally, there's Spinadoodles: The Third Year, the final collection of his autobiographical daily journal comic. In each of the past two collections of this comic, Spina has quoted from my reviews of his work to comedic effect. In this volume, he took the most negative quote from my review and zeroed in on it to create a strip that wasn't exactly funny in terms of having a punchline but was nonetheless amusing because of the way he digested the comment. Spina notes that the reason why he quite doing the daily strip is that he felt that he had pretty much mastered it, or rather, that it no longer held the same sort of challenge for him as an artist that it once did. It became something safe and dependable, and to his credit, Spina saw that it was time to step away and focus his energy on other work. In general, the same critique I made of past volumes still holds: some of the strips are half-assed and ill-conceived; they are simply Spina trying to fulfill his vow of doing a strip every day. In a sense, this collection is a warts 'n all spotlight on his process as an artist, because he easily could have curated this book to feature his best strips. Spina rarely lets the reader get too close to his darker moments, but he handles it quite well when he does go that route. The comic where he and his girlfriend sit around and muse out loud that they may well never achieve their dream jobs, but where they are now wasn't so bad was both reassuring and heartbreaking. Indeed, much of this book features Spina thinking about the future as he still has fun as a 20something person halfway between adult responsibility and the college life. One senses his ennui at certain points as the easy community of his youth starts to slip away a bit but can be reclaimed with relative ease with a trip or a visit. Spina also hints at the ways he and his girlfriend come into conflict but rarely goes into much detail. Mostly, Spina comes off as a fun guy who plays things for laughs and is in love with someone who feels much the same way. I hope to see longer, more focused autobio comics from him in the future.

Minicomics Round-Up: Spina, Robinson, Solomon, Kirby, Ullman/Brown

This batch of minicomics is a true grab-bag and is hard to pin down to any one particular genre:



Fight, by Sam Spina. This comic won a Xeric grant for Spina and is not unlike a slightly gentler version of Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit. While Spina's diary strip may be prosaic at times, his fiction has always been extra-crazy in response. He comes up with wacky premises, carries them through to their logical extremes, and then bombards the reader with uncomfortable gags along the way. Fight features a world where certain creatures have been bioengineered for specific tasks. This comic focuses on humanoid creatures bred only to fight for entertainment. The plot follows a creature called Fight, his downfall and eventual triumph over the female Super Fight that defeats him via trickery, her psychopathic offspring that forms as a result of their brief coupling, and lots of battles along the way. Spina loves gross-out gags, like when Super Fight gives birth to a bounding creature or the truly revolting Boobstadon, a sort of walking set of teats with a brain that is forcibly milked. The scene where an overeager farmer fondles it lasciviously is hilariously uncomfortable, but Spina tops it with Super Fight's child unexpectedly ripping it (and everything else in its path) to shreds. Spina's line is simple and energetic, and the mini-sized format helps add a density and urgency to each page. It's definitely an interesting step for an artist still developing his voice as a humorist.


Box Office Poison #78, by Alex Robinson. This minicomic represents Robinson's failed attempt to revive his first comics series, as he was looking for a new direction after some false starts. He has said that he thought it might be easy and fun to see what his characters were up to a few years after the conclusion of the series (which of course was collected by Top Shelf in one massive tome), but he abandoned this path as well. This mini represents a few pages from that attempt, packaged as though Robinson had never stopped doing the series as minicomics. It's clever and a delightful little gift for fans of the series. All of the BOP trademarks are there: interstitial stories focusing on one character, character surveys, a guest pin-up, a letters page, and a page from another abandoned Robinson project, a sequel to Lower Regions. Seeing some of Robinson's tricks like temporarily abandoning a realistic style for cartoony anger or filling up pages with thought balloons was also quite welcome. That said, I can understand why he abandoned the project: he wasn't saying anything new. He had a fairly definitive ending for BOP, and while it might have been tempting to see if protagonist Sherman Davies could be rescued from a hellish existence with his girlfriend Dorothy and find a healthy relationship, I thought that originally downbeat ending was a more appropriate way to leave the character. It was still nice to see the sprawl of characters even in this short minicomic; this is where Robinson has always excelled as a writer. That's why I prefer BOP and especially Tricked! over Too Cool To Be Forgotten; being able to explore a number of different emotional states and personae seems to be precisely the kind of challenge that pushes Robinson to evolve.


Our Fantastic Universe, by Lizzee Solomon. This odd little comic is the black & white version of a story that's going to be published in a collection dedicated to extraterrestrial sex. This version puts the emphasis on Solomon's grotesque linework, balanced against the amusingly sedate and even detached narration of the "host" of this "series" about alien sexuality. The story details the mating habits of cactus-like creatures called Milchigs and tiny, airborne creatures called Fleart, as the two species have a synergistic relationship. In pulsating, undulating and throbbing detail, Solomon shows us both the typical, nature-show style side of their sexuality as well as some unexpected aspects of their lives. The Fleart, once ingested by the Milchigs, engage in frottage. The Milchigs, once engorged by having ingested Fleart, engage in an extreme form of S&M that not all of them survive. The effect is a variation on body horror, where instead of physical transformation being a source of fear or dread, it's a source for pleasure. For the reader, it's no less strange an experience to read and just as unsettling.


King For A Day, by Rob Kirby. This comic is an interesting departure for comics veteran Kirby, best known for his slice-of-life relationship comics as well as for helming the queer-themed anthology Three. This is a silent comic about a man who is literally shat upon who then finds a crown. That suddenly inspires instant worship and admiration from everyone he happens to come upon. Of course, this sad sack character can't quite end up with a happy ending, even in his own dreams, and Kirby takes great delight in piling on a series of catastrophes, humiliations and general physical comedy. His art is simple and classically cartoony, with rubbery character design that expands into full-out exaggeration during certain scenes. The way he varies line thickness is a big key to the success of the comic; a thicker line usually indicates something significant happening, but that slight variation also makes the lines comprising his characters pop out on the page. The result is a delightfully charming comic that makes the most of a thin premise thanks to funny drawings on nearly every page.


Old-Timey Hockey Tales, by Rob Ullman & Jeffrey Brown. This is a comics rarity: a straightforward series of stories about sports. It helps that cartoonists Brown & Ullman chose to write about the most visceral of major sports, ice hockey and that its early participants were kind of crazy. The design of this mini is typically handsome, thanks to Ullman's eye for detail. Ullman selected items that were more anecdotes than narratives, like a strip about Maurice "Rocket" Richard being banned from the NHL and the ensuing series of riots, or a tight-fisted owner resisting the league mandate to put the names of players on the back of jerseys and protesting with names that were the same color as the uniforms themselves. Brown favored more sustained narratives, like when how the Detroit Red Wings wound up playing a group of prisoners; how one player got revenge on a coach who tried to trade him; and why anyone who messed with Gordie Howe was an idiot. Ullman's story about the great goalie Terry Sawchuk (originally published years ago in an SPX anthology) is still one of his best, documenting Sawchuk's skill as a player and how awful he was as a person. At 28 pages, this mini left me wanting more, especially because the two cartoonists have art styles and approaches to narrative that are so different. I'd love to see an all-sports comics anthology; Dan Zettwoch has done interesting work about basketball & baseball (if I had a million dollars, I'd commission Zettwoch to create an illustrated version of the book Loose Balls, an oral history of the ABA), while Dennis Eichorn has written a number of stories about football. This would be truly "mainstream" work, given America's love of sports.

Autobio/Diary Roundup: Dabaie, Wertz, Baylis, Spina, Marcej, Harbin

Let's take a look at a variety of diary and autobiographical minicomics.

He Also Has Drills For Hands!, by Marguerite Dabaie. This is a self-curated collection of Dabaie's best daily strips over the span of a year, and the result is a minicomic that leaves the reader wanting more. These are drawn in a sketchbook and combine the intimacy and loose feel of such a drawing with a surprising level of detail and some attractive decorative features. In her Hookah Girl comics, Dabaie isn't necessarily known for her sense of humor (though there are funny moments), but her daily strip is far more likely to end with a punchline of some kind. The title of the strip refers to one of her childhood crushes--a character from a video game with drills for hands. Dabaie throws in bits and pieces from her childhood, creativity, daily life, her then-fiancee (and now husband) and a tale about inadvertently meeting John Cusack. In the selection of comics she published in this mini, it seems that she takes great pains to tell an entertaining story of some kind in her strips, rather than just focus on relating particular quotidian events. That said, Dabaie does reveal bits and pieces about her life through stories about her grandmother and things she sees on the streets of New York--it's just that every strip has the same slightly comic and exaggerated flavor, heightened by the charming immediacy & roughness of her line.

Spinadoodles: The Second Year, by Sam Spina. This is the latest big batch of diary comics from Spina, a cartoonist who's clearly attempting the daunting task of getting better in public. In over a year and a half worth of daily strips (he never missed a day), Spina tries different art styles and moves a bit away from the obvious influence of James Kochalka. The overall experience of reading this was not as rewarding as reading the samplers from Marcej and Dubaie, two cartoonists who pared down their strips to a "best-of" selection. Spina chose to steam ahead with every last strip, no matter if they were half-assed, uninspired or repetitive. This mini is a document not only of his life, but also of his development as an artist. It wouldn't be quite truthful to omit strips done while he was dead tired from a long day at work, but the resulting reading experience was a bit of a slog at times. This is not to say that there weren't highlights; indeed, about 1 out of every 4 strips either landed a decent laugh, contained a personal revelation or had an interesting drawing. Given that there are 400 or so strips (with 4 crammed to a page), that's still a fairly solid showing. And some of the best strips (like the ones where he shows snippets of arguments with his girlfriend) are all the more effective because their tone is so unlike his other comics. The strips that work best are usually the ones that look the least like Kochalka's; that is, strips with less line weight (especially in the panels) that rely more on the basic figures rather than textures.

One thing that surprised me was that after a certain point, the rhythm of the strip started to grab me. It wasn't so much that the individual entries became noticeably stronger over time, but rather the kind of observations Spina was making started to become appealing on their own. Spina portrays himself neither as a deep thinker or someone who's especially introspective, but the raw surface energy of his observations has a propulsive quality. Eventually, Spina's simple caricature of himself (big, angular nose and sharp chin), frequently childlike enthusiasm, and self-deprecatory charm leave more of an impression than any particular anecdote. Projects like this eventually tend to have diminishing returns (Spina himself complains about how much more productive he might be if he wasn't doing a daily strip in one entry) unless they become one's life's work, ala Ben Snakepit. I don't think this is true of Spina, so I imagine there will come a point where what he's getting out of drawing these strips is far exceeded by the amount of time and effort he puts into them.

So Buttons #4, by Jonathan Baylis and various artists. Baylis has been writing autobio comics drawn by others for the past couple of years, but this issue of So Buttons represents his biggest leap forward in all respects. First off, the format and coloring of this mini are clean, attractive and reflect a lot of attention to detail. Second, the ordering of the stories was deliberate (as Baylis notes in his introduction) and far more effective than in past issues. There's a beautiful flow of styles as Baylis roughly moves in chronological order. Third, everyone in his roster of artists did a fine job. More on that in a moment, but Baylis' past contributors in particular have made real strides in their storytelling. Lastly, Baylis has finally learned to rein himself in a bit. A huge flaw for many writers who don't draw (especially those that do autobio) is that they tend to over-write their stories. They simply don't know how to let the visuals of the story work as an equal partner. There's also a tendency to ramble on for too many pages instead of distilling an anecdote to its essence, the way that Harvey Pekar did so well. Baylis still has a tendency to overexplain the significance of certain events rather than letting the event speak for itself, but that tendency is lessened when he writes shorter stories. The fact that the stories in this volume were all between two to four pages seems to be a key as to why they were so effective.

Much of this issue is an ode to filmmakers that have meaning for Baylis, often in connection to specific life events. "So...Chalk It Up To Konglateral Damage", drawn by Thomas Boatwright, is interesting because Baylis associated the movie with Thanksgiving--and that he never got to see it all the way through. "So...Stranger Than Parrot Eyes" (also drawn by Boatwright) is a more cartoonish story about Baylis seeing director Jim Jarmusch on the street. Baylis fantasizes about hanging out with him and his "Sons of Lee Marvin" friends while ruminating on what appeals to him about film and what turns him off. Noah Van Sciver draws "So...Loyal", a history of his baseball fandom. Van Sciver eschews a literal approach in terms of the imagery he uses to illustrate Baylis' narrative in favor of a more whimsical take. It's an approach I haven't seen before in a Baylis comic, and it works. Fred Hembeck draws a very funny story about Baylis' internship at Marvel Comics and how he was put in a position to correct John Romita, Sr. on a piece of art. That there are so many stories in this issue (eleven plus a bonus page from Van Sciver) gives it a nice weight and denseness; the issue turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts.

My World And Welcome To It, by Richard Marcej. Marcej is a toy designer and occasional cartoonist who decided to do a diary comic as a way of getting himself to draw every day. The subject matter is mostly standard diary work: movies he sees, bathroom habits, notable sights and events from his life. He is, however, extremely open about his life in terms of his dating habits and family tragedies, treating them with respect but also with the same level of detail he uses in his other strips. What sets this strip apart from similar work is the fact that each entry is cleverly composed and extremely well drawn. Marcej uses a single large panel frame and varies the strip's internal structure depending on what sort of story he's telling. For things like movie reviews, he splits the page up into four panels, underneath the date and a title for the strip. In the strip above, a single image dominates the entire page. In other strips, he'll lead the reader in three different panels that bleed into each other. Marcej pays special attention to clarity in his storytelling while adding a lot of detail such as hatching, cross-hatching and carefully-rendered structures. Marcej is also a fine letterer, a crucial but overlooked aspect of diary comics--especially for wordy artists like himself. The clarity and simply pleasing quality of his lettering makes even the most text-dominated strips nice to look at. Marcej isn't exactly being innovative with this strip, but it's one of the best examples of this sub-genre.

The Great Pretenders And Other Stories, by Julia Wertz. Some of these stories have appeared in past Wertz minicomics, but this mini is the best collection of Wertz's new trend in storytelling until her new book comes out. All of the stories here are from Wertz's childhood and they're entirely unsentimental, raw takes on the ways in which children parse the adult world. There's a reference in the title story to a baby in Wertz's family dying when she was just a child, leading to a game with her older brother wherein he pretended he was his own fictional twin brother. There's a running theme in Wertz's comics of wanting to be someone else, wanting a different life and identity. There's a tension between being a near-solipsist and someone desperately craving meaningful interaction, and that conflict is evident in these childhood strips as well. Wertz has a constant sense of things not being quite right (like the amazing strip where she and her brother are momentarily excited that they might be getting a heat lamp for Christmas instead of a Nintendo video game system), and that feeling is hilariously warped through her own logic as a child. The dread that Wertz felt as a child also emerged in her anxiety over "killing" Jesus in a tea party game and living at the foot of a mountain that supposedly housed vicious flying monkeys. Wertz's bug-eyed drawings are getting more and more self-assured; she's found a clear, distinct and funny drawing style that works well for her.

The Doug Wright Awards 2011, by Dustin Harbin. This is a collection of the strips Harbin did at tcj.com earlier in 2011 as part of their Cartoonist's Diary series. It's essentially a love letter to Canada and its Doug Wright Awards, a ceremony honoring the best of English-language Canadian comics. Harbin is impressed by the simplicity (just four awards), sincerity and seriousness of the event. It's an event that everyone involved believes in, a group that includes the greater Canadian cultural community, not just comics. Harbin heaps on the praise a bit exorbitantly, though he's aware that his status as an outsider perhaps blinds him to Canada's flaws. That said, there's no question that Canada has produced some of comics' greatest artists over the past thirty years or so, and so an event like the Doug Wright Awards is certainly warranted. The real appeal of this comic is Harbin's remarkable skill as a caricaturist, really nailing artists like Chester Brown & Seth without belittling them.