Minis: Stripling, Meloro, E.Johnson

The Outliers #1, by Erik T Johnson. Kickstarter can result in some over-the-top embellishments for their final product. In this case, this mini has a color dust jacket, letterpressed covers, high-quality paper and monotone coloring throughout. The covers are particularly striking, as Johnson renders a host of nightmarish and fascinating monsters. This first issue boils down to the story of A Boy And His Bigfoot, as the seemingly mute boy Tsu endures taunts and humiliation from his classmates until a bus wreck brings an eighteen foot tall giant to his side for aid after he speaks a word in what seems to be an unintelligible language. Johnson throws in a sinister monster-man and his killer pet/chauffeur into the mix right away in this nicely-rendered (if occasionally stiff--some of the panel-to-panel transitions don't quite flow smoothly) and moody comic. I get the sense that as Johnson really starts to explore the mysterious forest that's full of monsters, things will get more interesting in a hurry. As it stands, this is a solid monster comic that plays to the artist's strengths as someone who excels in revealing powerful, static images.

Misper #1-3, by Anthony Meloro. These are some crazy comics, screenprinted on what appears to be construction paper and rendered in a crude but powerful style. Ostensibly about missing persons and police procedurals, Meloro immediately takes his comic on a supernatural turn. For example, when one cop is shot by a suspect, he is encouraged by the visions of girls the cop couldn't save to get up. When he manages to do so and makes it to a hospital, the apparitions reappear when the criminal comes to the hospital in an effort to finish him off, warning him away. Another story features a cop angering a group of cultists by accidentally stumbling upon one of the sacred shrines, and he is ultimately chased down by the bulletproof cultists and burned alive. I found these comics to be wonderfully strange and fun, bursting with energy and hastily-scrawled ideas and drawings. It's the opposite of polished storytelling, but it's what minicomics can do so well: create an artifact.

Book of Job #2 and other minis by Scott Stripling. Stripling's comics blend Gary Panter and Jack Kirby in equal measure.  Mixing in elements of War of the Worlds, fantasy and the titular story, this mini follows what is Stripling's most pressing interest: evolution. The hero is subjected to a series of trials, tests and tortures until he floats in a space pod, waiting to emerge as a new being. That fascination with divinity, magic and evolution is also evident in an untitled mini that mimics the Norse myth of Balder, an invulnerable god who is killed by a humble arrow. In the mini, the gods are big and blocky Kirby-style space gods, and the invulnerable god in question is shrugging off power rays before the arrow fells him. In another, more polished and stylish untitled mini, a caveman learns how to kill using weapons, a revelation tainted by the fact that he becomes haunted by ghosts until he's driven into a cave. There, he encounters a crystalline, alien intelligence; presumably, this contact alters the savage (there's a relentless motif of teeth tearing through their prey) forever. Finally, "Shock and Awww" is a quickly-scrawled mini that relates a disgusting anecdote that the wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper witnessed early in his career. There's a rising interest in cartoonists doing comics about 1980s wrestling, which is not surprising given the colorful characters involved in that business. Stripling is clearly still finding his footing as a cartoonist, but I like the ways in which his comics are bursting with energy and ideas.

Minicomics Adaptations: Choy, Gamboa, Stripling

Three intriguing minis this time around, all of which use the language of comics to adapt works of literature.

The Book of Job #1, by Scott Stripling. The artist was new to me, and there's no contact information in the comic. From the way that the book's panels were hand-drawn and out of alignment to the sketchy nature of his line, this comic feels like a sketchbook job done by a beginner. Nonetheless, Stripling packs a lot of interesting detail into this slightly modernized retelling of the biblical story of a virtuous man named Job who is beset by all manner of woes by God as a test of faith, though God is egged on by the Devil. What's interesting about this version is that God appears to be more of a concerned bystander who reacts with alarm to Job's woes but is seemingly powerless to stop him from losing all he has or to prevent his wife from running off with the pool boy. Job dies and goes to hell, but then emerges to much worse: a real accounting of his sins. Stripling implies that the supernatural force judging him is his own consciousness, or perhaps a part of him related to a sort of superconsciousness. The end of this issue sees Job struggling to figure out what questions to ask, and the result is something closer to Zen Buddhism than traditional Western ideas, though mixed with a carnival barker's patter. This is an odd little comic that's a big jumbled and disorganized, as though the ideas and images came faster than the artist could record them, but I'd be curious to see more.

Ed Choy Draws James Joyce, by Ed Choy. Choy is one of my favorite young artists but still seems to be slowly experimenting in public as he refines his chops and his style. Choy obviously takes great delight in exploring just how vulgar and scatological the great Joyce was, as his stream-of-consciousness writing frequently zeroed in on sexual obsession. Here, Choy chooses to tackle a couple of Joyce's more conventional works ("Araby" from Dubliners, and an excerpt from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), while teasing out some anecdotes from Joyce's life on the cover.  I could have read an entire comic's worth of these hilarious three and four panel strips, as Choy really plugs them into the language of comics. In "7 Words", for example, when Joyce delivers the punchline that he doesn't know what order the seven words he wrote that day go in, the person he's talking to does an old-fashioned plop take. It's all fun and games, but Choy also gets at something here, even in the hilarious four-panel strip where Joyce writes a love letter and talks about how much he loves his girlfriend's farts. He gets at the total immediacy, that total indulgence in the id that Joyce represents and that is quite familiar to an alternative/underground cartoonist.

 

The short stories look beautiful (this was printed on a risograph and really make the dark blue and pink hues he selected pop on every page) and flatter Choy's line and figure drawing, which is becoming ever-more assured. "Araby" sees a young man with a crush on a woman come to terms with the unreality of his desires, and it's a rather conventional adaptation. His excerpt from Portrait is more interesting, using a fuzzy zip-a-tone effect to create a dreamy atmosphere that befits the story lingering on school days. All told, Choy continues to push himself formally and experiment in new and interesting ways as he explores culture and finds new ways to interpret it. I like how deliberately he's working through his ideas, though I'd love to see him become more prolific as he gets better in public.

Miss Lonelyhearts #1, by Gabrielle Gamboa. Gamboa is a familiar name to alt-comics fans from the 90s, and she's returned to doing comics after a nearly eight-year absence. This Kickstarter-funded comic is an adaptation of the Nathanael West novel from the 1930s, and Gamboa uses a number of interesting visual tricks to add a vein of pitch-black humor to the grim nature of this story. A young man is given the task of writing the "Miss Lonelyhearts" column for a newspaper in the 1930s. These sequences in the book are drawn in a grey-scaled, naturalistic manner, echoing the somber nature of the story. While trying to figure out which letters he should chose for response so as to beat a deadline, the young man reads three tales of woe, each more brutal than the next. The twist that Gamboa provides is illustrating each of the three letters in the style of a different comic strip artist. The sad story of a Catholic woman whose unfeeling husband keeps getting her pregnant despite a very serious health risk is drawn as Popeye and Olive Oyl. The letter from a teenaged girl pondering suicide because of her deformed nose is done in the style of Little Orphan Annie. Finally, the story of a teenaged boy worrying about his deaf-mute sister's well-being after she was raped while enduring an abusive mother is done as the duo were Nancy and Sluggo.

Gamboa is not a style mimic a la R.Sikoryak or Roger Langridge, but she gets her point across with these visual approximations. The fact that they aren't exact reproductions actually works in her favor, allowing her to go a little more grotesque, like an image of the "Popeye" character looming with a disgusting leer on his face as he has sex with "Olive". Another example is the touch of pathos she adds to "Nancy" and "Sluggo", making them feel more real than the impenetrable Ernie Bushmiller originals. It's a bit of a gimmick to be sure, but one that works within the context of the story as West's prose is truly bleak, as his protagonist faces the most desperate of pleas for help. The fact that the protagonist's boss comes along and dictates a heap of platitudes for him to expand upon makes his task all the more grim. I'll be curious to see where Gamboa takes this series visually as she continues to adapt the novel.