Moreton Of The Week #6: Minor Leagues 1-3

My feature on Simon Moreton concludes with his Minor League zines, issues 1-3.

Minor Leagues is Moreton's latest catch-all series, and in many ways, it's his most mature work. Looking at the first issue, it's that Moreton is still experimenting with different line weights and moving into some different territory. There's one drawing of an elderly couple sitting, watching some event. It's a sublime illustration, capturing their essential qualities with a few swooping lines here and there. Moreton mixes printed text & illustrations, text alone, text that inspires several pages of illustrations, and regular comics. I still prefer his most minimalist attempts at illustration the most, like the sketchy illos for a story about a trip to Paris that Moreton took. They are so expressive and beautiful that they almost seem as though they came out of Moreton's pen effortlessly. There's a sharply observed and reported strip about a trip to America when he was younger (including a few Warren Craghead style text immersions into the image), a gorgeous silent story about a long walk in the rain, and a lovely (and lively!) story about a trash can fire for leaf burning that was part of a memorable afternoon in his youth.

One of Moreton's skills as a storyteller is his ability to write a story about a memory and really inhabit it on the page, and then move on to a completely different era and inhabit that just as fully. Moreton's best selection of drawings ever came in Minor Leagues #2, in a section about summer that uses a hybrid visual aproach. There's a judicious use of splotches acting as spotting blacks, there are several variations in line weight, and there's a careful balance between a minimalist approach that nears abstraction and a sketchy naturalism that once again covers the essence of each character thanks to his use of gesture and body language. There's a photo series that seems to be a reaction to the disastrous results of Brexit, as though Moreton was almost saying that for a while, he could no longer see the beauty in the every day and abstract it from the original object. Interestingly, Moreton retreats back into drawing pictures of nature as a further reaction: birds, flowers, sunsets and even elegant graveyards, as though there was a more urgent need to create beauty than usual. There's also a letters section that's every bit as meditative and thoughtful as the ones that John Porcellino publishes in King-Cat. 

The third issue is shorter and sadder, as it focuses on the death of his father. After a strip about the uncertainty of his father's condition in a hospital, Moreton follows it up with an startling walk in the rain featuring a line that's about five times as thick as his usual line. The effect is a kind of heightened reality, one that's repeated later in the comic in a story about birdwatching. Moreton counters the sadness of the eventual death of his father with more images of flowers and memories of teenage hooliganism. The extensive use of negative space, the relaxed pacing of every story, the meditative quality of his prose and the general rhythm of each thick issue create a comic with powerful emotional content, using restraint to address some frequently intensely raw emotion. This is the best work of his career overall, and it looks like the best is yet to come with Moreton.

Moreton Of The Week #5: Garden & Bright Nights

Here are are in week five of my series about Simon Moreton. I'll wrap things up next week and start a new feature in its place.

Garden. Published by Lydstep Lettuce in association with the Lydstep Library, this is a zine done on conventional copy paper that follows the slow progress of a garden over time. It's nice to see Moreton's work on a big canvas, allowing his book loops and swirls room to really expand across a page. Moreton walks a delicate line between a naturalistic take and abstraction here, as certain objects (like watering cans) have a solid composition but others (like chairs and tables) are a bit more abstracted. Moreton flips between single-page images meant to slow the reader down and take in the image in full for a moment and a 2 x 3 panel grid that emphasizes the slowness and sequentiality of the garden, as observed one bit at a time. It's Moreton quietly taking in his environment and not glamorizing it--he's trying to capture an essence in terms of shape and form that emphasizes broad strokes of perception rather than exacting minutia. Moreton is also playing with light and shadow (created through the use of zip-a-tone), as he draws the garden at different times of the day. There's also the relationship between nature and the way it's hemmed in, with as much emphasis on pots and planters as the actual vegetation, as well as an acknowledgment of the background with clothes hanging on a line, flapping in the wind. There's also a record of dark clouds and rain (a favorite of Moreton's to depict), adding a degree of animation to the stillness of the prior scenes. This is a nice, simple form of meditation exercise for Moreton, drawing without narrative expectations but still with some kind of sequential base.

Bright Nights, by Simon Moreton & Jason Martin. This is a shared zine between Moreton and Martin, both looking back at past events from today's vantage point. Each of Moreton's stories is taken from a different year of his life. "Fifteen" sees him and his friends jumping out a window to hang out with some friends on a trip, watching the sun rise. There are a lot of these sorts of moments in his comics that he turns back to again and again: perfect little moments in time, frozen by beauty. There's a perfect balance of negative space and actual drawing in each panel, and Moreton's composition is simply top-notch. It's not just about abstracting a sequence down to its core, it's doing so in a way that makes it look best on a page. "Sixteen" is another perfect, simple moment of walking home in the snow from someone he obviously loved, feeling "Like I could do anything". That kind of spontaneous joy is remarkable, and Moreton knows just how to capture it by sort of capturing just the edges of the experience. "Nineteen" is a flood and flurry of racing down a road as fast as he and his friends can, until arriving at a special hang-out spot. "Thirty" is a lovely reflection of "Fifteen" in some ways, featuring a gathering where he met someone special and a subsequent trip to a mall with her and other friends, forming that awkward, exciting moment of possibilities ahead. It's Moreton at his best.

Martin's style is a simple, naturalistic style that's on the crude side but still gets the job done in terms of expressing emotion. He seemed to take his cues from Moreton in terms of what age he was in the stories he tells. "Gualala" is about him going with friends to a party on Y2K. He notes that even though he was just four years younger than most of the people at the party, that as a teenager that kind of age gap is more significant. The story is full of those unforgettable moments when a teen gets a glimpse of a life just ahead of them. That's especially true when he hears the stories of a group of older girls who give him a ride home from the party. His second story is a brief one from age 16, recalling the first time his parents felt comfortable leaving his older brother in charge of him and his younger brother for a night, and the things they did together. His third memory is that of a huge delay on a train as he was going to a Leonard Cohen concert. It's a perfect Martin story in how sanguine and measured he depicts himself in that situation, and the gratitude he feels at the end of the Cohen show. Every one of these stories has that sense of gratitude, including the final one, where he and his girlfriend crash at a friend's house with two other couples all saying goodnight to one another as they fell asleep.

I also wanted to mention the comic that he gave out at his wedding, Michelle And Jason Comics. It's a funny, lovely little inventory of small anecdotes about his future wife that delighted him, the ways in which they've influenced each other's tastes and interests, times they may have crossed each other's path in the past, the precise moment he knew he wanted to marry her, and a special moment on a carousel. It's simple and heartfelt without being sentimental or saccharine: the perfect blend of restraint and emotion that marks so much of his work.

Moreton Of The Week, #4: Days

Days, from Avery Hill, is a collection of some of Moreton's earliest work with his Smoo series, issues four through six. As much as I enjoy Moreton in minicomic form, it was nice to look at these pages blown up and breathing a bit more. That's especially true since Moreton's earlier work depended a lot more on naturalism and detail than his current comics. I reviewed issue four here, and issue five here. I wanted to talk about the sixth issue, the supplemental material and overall what's changed with Moreton's work since his earlier days.

I had forgotten how much more naturalistic Moreton's work was in his early comics. The houses he draws had not yet been abstracted to geometric shapes, and he actually drew in things like bricks and windows. You could see him leaning toward the John Porcellino side of the fence and allowing his work to become more immersive and poetic, but he wasn't quite there yet. Still, there's plenty to see and hear: Moreton's smudged pencil technique is incredibly evocative, and his voice was still similar in the way that he processed the past and pain in particular. Issue five was the first fully realized comic he did, as it was conceptually more sophisticated, funnier and in general more daring than his past work.

The sixth issue features work that most closely resembles his current output as an artist. It opens with a classic Moreton "walk" comic, as we see the world stripped down as he passes by. One nice flourish is how he imagines he hears his Husker Do song coming out of every window, with blank word balloons emanating from them. The next story is rare in that it features some incredibly detailed drawing from Moreton in the form of water on sidewalks and the way the sun catches them to create blurry reflections. Matching that particular bit of naturalism with the slightly abstracted surroundings made the effect all the more prominent. "Houses/Homes" is a nice silent poem aided by simplification in showing how the process of moving puts one in a strange limbo state, until order (symbolized by a hot mug of tea) is finally restored and a new steady-state is established. "Routines" starts with typical Moreton solitude on a walk and ends with a swirl of lines representing a crowd surrounding his figure, head slightly bowed so as to avoid direct interaction. "Holiday" combines those lovely smudges with his stripped down figures; it was actually beautiful enough on its own visually to not need the text.

With regard to the anthology pieces, the earlier ones are very pencil-heavy. Some of them look fairly stiff, even if the actual technique is aesthetically pleasing. A strip he did for Secret Acres' Leon Avelino that's drawings inspired by a Pixies song is excellent: fluid and striped-down. A strip he did for Kus is unusually dramatic and calculated (it's about trying to get out of an office and into the woods, where the main character can paint), especially since as Moreton notes in the helpful endnotes that making a distinction between work and art can create a false dichotomy. I'm glad that Moreton had all of this material collected, because it's fascinating to watch his voice develop and see him make leaps of quality from issue to issue. He experimented with a lot of different approaches before he found one that worked for him.

Moreton of the Week #3: Smoo 8-10

Let's take a look at the last three issues of the self-published series where Simon Moreton got his start, Smoo.

Issue #8, in several small vignettes, talks about different ways Moreton felt the weight of anxiety and stress, and the ways in which he found himself coping. Walking around Washington, DC in the fall, the sight of a snapping turtle on a rock was somehow reassuring. Reading Moreton's work over time, he's become remarkably assured in his minimalist take, as he's not afraid to draw big, bold strokes or use a few strategically placed and confident squiggles around a simply-defined central figure. The vignettes refer to a relationship that's in the process of being redefined and reevaluated on the fly, in the middle of what is ostensibly a vacation. In classic Warren Craghead fashion, when he talks about the pieces of the relationship being taken apart, the very text that proclaims this falls apart, drifting down the page. There's a remarkable segment where he's alone in a bar, where the pages flip open and fold apart, as he feels powerless to stop what's going on in his life, like a "drunken ghost". Finally, there is quiet reconciliation and more contemplative walks, the event of music suddenly breaking out on the street the kind of marvel that reminds us of the random gifts that life can bring.

Smoo #9 introduces a lot of text on its own pages, as a kind of reflection and amplification of the images on other pages. This issue reflects on family and previous states of mind. There's a touch of a regular Moreton theme in the way that friendship endures and in many way freezes one's age with that friend back to childhood, while also being aware of being adults. It's about gatherings of friends and families at wakes. It's about understanding how and why someone isn't doing well at a given time in one's life. In "Doubt", Moreton ponders the notion that he's never really "lived a day in my life". There's a recurring theme in his comics that he feels stuck, running in place and living an inauthentic life. That's countered by the way he observes his environment and treasures his friends, because the ability to perceive and then convey beauty is a remarkable act of authenticity.

The final issue, #10, touches on a number of these themes. There's a lot of text used once again, as he thinks about places he's lived and the visceral qualities of each: sights, sounds, smells, heat, cold, etc. There's an interest in larger forces that shape his days. From lingering in the past to capturing a moment comes Moreton watching a group of birds in the fog, and then following a path with a lover to find a waterfall. This time, it's conveying that sense of aesthetic experience that is both shared and entirely personal, relaying a few moments in time in as stripped-down a manner as possible. It's his way of relaying that sensation of the sublime, when things seem to be moving in slow-motion, seem to make sense and are heart-breakingly beautiful. The issue ends after another nature excursion and then a slow moment at home, saying "We've been changing" That's neither a positive nor a negative statement, simply a fact of mutual experience. In exploring deeply personal and individual thoughts  while clearly trying to put them in a larger context, Moreton has expanded his range as an artist while still working within his strengths in depicting spare and expressive visual stimuli.

Moreton Of The Week #2: Rain and What Happened

Catching up with some more by Simon Moreton:

What Happened. A Kilgore Books release (one of my favorite small publishers around), leans heavily on Warren Craghead in terms of some of the actual drawings, but in terms of composition it's very much something else. Like Craghead, Moreton uses a lot of extremely thick lines in his drawings as a weigh of emphasizing weight, space and presence. They are deliberately non-naturalistic, as they are designed to make the reader think about that space and the drawing that's there than actually represent something. He uses zip-a-tone for similar reasons. Moreton messes around a lot with different grid designs, going from a four panel grid in the early going to an open-page layout on facing pages and back to the four-panel grid. When the storyline took on a slightly added level of complexity, Moreton quietly went with a six-panel grid that then filled up the page (he left negative space with the four panel grid). It's all part of the fluid rhythm of the comic, that sensation of rising and falling, of going from calm to excited and back to placid.

The structure of the comic revolves around a spring and summer Moreton spent as a teen. Using very few words, he gets across that amazing feeling when you're old enough to organize activities with your friends, go over to their houses on your own, etc. He also details the ways in which teens are sort of emotional ticking time bombs. There's one scene where Moreton is at a friend's house, and his friend just launches into a brutal brawl with his younger brother, leaving Moreton sitting there stunned. Another finds Simon and his friend Hadyn renting a UFO video that freaks them out; it's one of the two page, open-panel spreads, along with the fight. There are first loves, walks in the woods, trips to the beach, games of football and a glorious concluding segment where Moreton and his friend sit in a car, absorbing the words and music to a song from a tape they put in. Moreton is recording not a season, but rather a chunk of time specific to his friendship, and it ends with this segment, this song, the images and words jumbling together until the memory fades and the book ends with a number of blank panels in a row. Moreton had told the audience "what happened" and no more.

Rain and Other Stories. This is a more spontaneous effort, drawn from cues provided by Moreton's friends. The first story is "Three Transgressions", which Moreton imagined as people in fancy dress jumping fences and climbing through windows. This slightly moodier, darker work from Moreton, but it doesn't quite coalesce as well as his other work, especially since the rhythm of the piece feels off. "Fizzy Drink" goes back to his well of childhood stories, where here the hope of a new soda turns out to be disappointing. It's the opposite of a special childhood memory; it's a memory because of the way it so strong affected the sense of taste. "Rain" is the true highlight of this mini, as it combines a nice looseness in Moreton's line with strong compositions with regard to the buildings and trees (I love the way they almost jut up against the rain), The rain itself is drawn in a simple way that varies in intensity from panel to panel, as we see it batter a pedestrian until the lines get shorter and fewer and the storm goes away. Here, the length of the story really works to its advantage, as it needed to be a bit long to give the shower a real lifespan that has the correct feel, while still whipping across the page quickly enough to follow the story's main figure through the rain. The result is a beautiful, visceral story about watching and experiencing a rainstorm.

Simon Moreton of the Week #1: Plans We Made

Simon Moreton is one of my favorite artists to emerge in the last five or so years. His style, which has evolved past influences like John Porcellino and Warren Craghead, is elegantly stripped down, meditative but active and fascinated by the past but not weighed down by nostalgia. I have a number of books and minis by him to examine, so I thought I'd do a bit at a time, starting with Plans We Made, a 2015 volume published by Uncivilized Books.

The book is a look back at time spent in the suburbs growing up and into his teen years. The dominant theme here is one of inhabiting that sense of special, sublime time spent as a youth, where moments in real time simultaneously become beloved memories. Moreton's bold but spare line is perfect in providing just enough detail to inhabit those memories along with Moreton, to get a sense of the emotional narrative of running around his neighborhood as a boy, playing in the forest, claiming a chunk of land as theirs. At the same time, Moreton starts to build a competing emotional narrative as he grows older and his circle of friends expands: a sense of needing to escape, to move on to something bigger. Those two strong impulses circled each other, as Moreton's mastery of his territory started to feel like treading the same ground over and over. At the same time, the pull of his friends is beautifully depicted in small anecdotes like watching a building catch fire from their vantage point in the forest and being struck by the strangeness of it all. It's an experience marked in their memories as something atypical in their daily patterns, their daily interactions that were driven to creak a spark. That spark is the sublime quality of feeding off of and feeding others in conversation, in love, in closeness and in treasuring simple, small moments. It's an evasive feeling frequently blunted by the mundane aspects of everyday life, but Plans We Made reads like a narrative not so much of events but of exceptions to the daily grind.

Each story was an exception, forging a group memory. Moreton uses very little text in telling his stories, and the spareness of that text is often simple but poetic in nature. More often than not, he prefers to let his line do the talking in terms of capturing and explaining an experience. The trees, the lines of houses, the heat of the sun, the blare of the radio, body language at parties: even as things become more complex emotionally, they retain that same simplicity in form in terms of the drawing, as well as in scale. There's a brutal scene where it's implied that Moreton breaks up with a girlfriend and she urges him to go, and we see him on that brutal, solitary walk home. He's alone with his thoughts and the familiar surroundings are not comforting to him. The last section of the book, where he's alone in his house for a month as his parents are away, happen to coincide with 9/11. It was a final moment of not quite understanding himself, or the world, in that moment. It recorded perhaps the last time he felt at home in some sense. Sitting outside the house with his friend, trying to make sense of it all, trying to connect all the dots of his life, nothing quite fit.

It wasn't a part of his life that had a definitive conclusion; rather, he was there until he left, and all that remained were the memories that had changed from pure, innocent joy to an aching impatience mixed with a profound sense of connection. Moreton does it with a slow pace, with single panels or images taking up one page (and not even all of it, much of the time), as he wanted to portray a sense of looking at the page reliving the memory in the same amount of time. At the same time, detail mattered less than impressions, and so the hints at trees and houses and neighborhoods got sketchier in some segments, and slightly more detailed in others. The way in which Moreton takes his time and in so doing makes the reader take their time as well, is the key to emotionally inhabiting each scene and letting the reader in on these feelings. It's an honest, gentle, and bittersweet account of the feeling of having close friends, a first love and a place to explore.

Brit Comics: Simon Moreton's Smoo 7 and Twitching

Simon Moreton's seventh issue of Smoo continues in his recent, ultra-minimalist style of drawing. Moreton's comics tend to be concerned with the act of walking and landscapes as a kind of mental clearinghouse. Abstracting that walk and the view on that walk down to a few essential lines is a way of digesting and making sense of one's thoughts above all else. In this issue, he returns to his childhood home and devoted three separate mini-volumes to three different views of a particular path taken. Of course, the comic is more than the walk and more than the view: it's the emotions that arise as a result of being in a particular place at a particular time. Moreton avoids the whiff of simple nostalgia or sentimentality while acknowledging the deep grooves growing up in a particular place leaves on a person.

The mini actually begins with a letter from Moreton to the readers talking about the process of making the comic. He tries to get the reader to understand some of the more visceral conditions regarding the environment: cold giving way to sudden warmth, the threat of rain. That's followed by a map/poem, where a map of his home (labeled the way a kid might, with landmarks like "Old Pond" and "Our House") is intercut by text interact in clever ways, like a particular road labeled as "the road that takes you from here to there, forever" and a river labeled as "the Ledwyche flows through our woods...my heart in grassy patchwork". The map is really the closest Moreton gets to nostalgia, and he keeps it short.

The next comic is a silent one; it details a walk in an old neighborhood. Moreton draws the sky and trees but is also interested in seeing how old landmarks have changed, drawing buildings for sale. His drawings are wonderfully minimalist; his own self-caricature is simply a round circle for a head and two slightly curving lines under the circle representing his body. He wants to represent himself as present in this walk, as part of the environment, even if he's just a small part of it. At the end, he comments on what's different about his neighborhood.

The next comic begins with the phrase "This place is in my bones" as he recalls trying to run away once and then discusses his urge to want to run away. Moreton's battles with depression have always been a sub-theme of his comics, and this mini is the one that addresses it. The most compelling sequence comes when Moreton starts staring at the sky and clouds until his mind goes blank with several pages of no markings whatsoever. He confesses that he fights "the blues", but finds himself back in the same place emotionally, "the same sky" that he used to stare at in his darkest moments.

The final comic is about his memories of the old neighborhoods and haunts and the vague way they play in his mind; he notes "all my memories are myths" when he thinks of remembering a ball of light moving past him while walking down a hill. His memory of the woods is especially lovely, with drawings of far-off birds singing being replaced by simple, small and empty word balloons. The best feature was of "Caynham Court", an old, abandoned building that made for a myth-making playground for Moreton and his brother. Even with sketchy, abstracted drawings, Moreton gets at the sense of decay, the play of light and shadow, and features like a fake bookshelf that revealed a genuine secret passage. Revisiting these places now is less a matter of nostalgia than in thinking about one's own personal mythology and the ways in which it provided comfort as well as inculcate anxiety.

I also wanted to mention a comic Moreton did for SPX 2013 with Warren Craghead, Twitching. It's a flip book, and Moreton's half is based on a picture that Craghead dew of a man standing outside using a camera with a telescopic lens. Moreton transformed that into a story of a man trying to get the perfect angle for a photo of a bird, only he can't quite capture it before it decides to fly away.The last panel/page, where the tiny figure of the man walks away from the camera in frustration while we see a wide swath of nature, is both funny and indicative of the difficulty of trying to frame nature. The Moreton-written "Blinking" is drawn by Craghead and uses a different approach: a thick and sometimes sloppy line, scribbles and other spontaneous imagery. It's all to depict the sensation of being bombarded by different kinds of light, and like the first story, we often see the point of view directly from the eyes of the narrators. Craghead's approach is visceral and immersive, while Moreton's approach aims at expressing the outlines of things as they are quickly observed. Both are beautiful in their own way.

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.

Latvian Excellence: S! #11

The Latvian anthology Kus! is so successful that there's a smaller spin-off anthology called S! The 11th issue has the theme of "Artventurous", one that's vague enough for the artists to either totally embrace or ignore. Editors David Schilter and Sanita Muizniece lean heavily on artists from eastern and western Europe, with a smattering of contributors from north and south America. Everything about the anthology is first rate, including the production values and the individual effort from each artist. For many of these artists, it's their first exposure to a wider English-speaking audience, and it's clear that they're doing their best work within the confines of the theme. Schilter & Muizniece have broad tastes, with no particular preference given to artistic styles or fiction vs autobio. The cover, by Latvian artist Leonards Laganovskis, is a beautiful, stunning work that is an intersection of human forms as both functional pieces of furniture and works of art, cascading nonchalantly across the page in a pleasing pastel color scheme.

Some artists, like Martins Zutis, took the theme and reworked epics like The Odyssey into comics form. Betty Liang went in a different mythological direction in her depiction of the Leda and the swan story, which has a very different and grisly outcome in her telling. There's a charming crudeness in the way she uses color, making the pages look constructed as much as they are drawn. Others, like KJ Martinet, ran with the concept and did a story about a distopian future where survivors scavenge and murder in order to "complete" works of art, like adding arms to the Venus de Milo. Nicolo Pelizzon uses a noir style to hint at the conspiracy behind a series of art thefts and forgeries, while Jen Rickert offers up a chilling story of a murderer getting out his madness on canvas. Roman Muradov's "Little Clouds" gets at something else: the idea of aesthetic perfection and aesthetic repulsion and how they can be embodied in the same person when in different environments. There's something appropriately beautiful and elegant about his heavy use of a cartoony clear-line style and the colors red, brown and black.

Aidan Koch unsurprisingly is a standout with her "After The Bath", which is a sequential series of single-page images depicting a form only using colors after a path. It's like looking at a series of paintings done in non-intuitive, bright color patterns, with the watercolors barely coalescing into recognizable forms. Renata Gasiorowska has one of the funniest stories in the book, about a child whose entire family is comprised of artists but has no talents or interest in the arts. Gasiorowska ties the strip back into theme when the child notes that only martial arts interest her, spawning a rant about the uselessness of art. Told at the dinner table, one guest notes how suited she is for performance art, given how "brave and rude" she is! Told in a scrawled line with anthropomorphic characters in black & white, this story stands out from many of the other, slicker entries in the anthology.

Olive Booger details an embarrassing anecdote from his art school days having to do with performance art. A cute girl who shared his studio encouraged him to go to a performance piece where everyone naturally wound up naked and he was tapped to serve as a human table. He (not surprisingly) freaked out over this, causing much humiliation and trauma that obviously continues to trouble him to this day. His garish, grotesque style perfectly captures the awkwardness and strangeness of that situation. Dilraj Mann's take-off on Rear Window has some cheesily exploitative art and a pat narrative, which was unfortunate because his skill at depicting forms and using shadow made the story interesting to look at. Daniel Werneck's "Shoulders of Giants" is a bit too on-the-nose in the way he depicts the constant inspiration of a variety of artists and writers on his work. Much better is Simon Moreton's "Working", a typically restrained story about a man who becomes so obsessed with the beauty of a landscape view that it consumes him until he's able to return at the end of his work week, paints and canvas at the ready as he intensely tries to capture both his feelings and the essence of the environment.

That's a sampling of the pieces that stood out for me, though there are many others that range from gag work to autobio to something close to science-fiction and fantasy. What's most impressive to me is how the editors are able to produce this anthology like clockwork, bringing in new artists for nearly every edition of either S! or Kus!. It's really become the international successor of Mome in terms of spotlighting new and emerging talent across a broad spectrum of styles and influences. It also points to the ways in which art comics are now a truly international phenomenon, with European artists influencing American artists and vice-versa. There are certainly still regional peculiarities and references in some of the stories, but they are all easily recognizable as the kind of art comics that are pushing barriers everywhere. Kus! and S! may not always make a point of spotlighting the most challenging work in every issue, but there's a delicate balance in giving time and attention to cutting edge, avant garde work and more conventional yet still interesting work. This issue is a perfect example of that tension on display, and the way that the stories are sequenced helps heighten that frisson in a manner that works to the benefit of every artist in the book.

International Mini Round-Up: Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Great Britain

I am always thrilled when I received a minicomic with a foreign stamp on it, be it from a familiar favorite or someone completely new to me. This round-up will feature comics from Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Spain and Great Britain.

Smoo Comics #5, by Simon Moreton.  The British Moreton's increasingly confident voice and line have made his quiet, reflective and poetic comics a rich and rewarding experience. He's not quite at John Porcellino or Warren Craghead levels of refinement of his words and lines down to the sparest possible levels of meaning, but he's getting there. This issue contains a number of short stories and meditations on his time spent in the seaside town of Falmouth, which was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Moreton gets at the intense loneliness he felt in the form of drawings of street lamps, fog-bound coasts obscuring boats and buildings, and the simple quietude of the countryside. When drawing figures, he has a new economy of line that gets across the bare minimum of human details but still does a tremendous job with gesture and body language so as to convey emotion. In other strips, he uses smudges and scribbles to get across that feeling of desperation and of emptiness during what was very much a drifting portion of his life.

Haunted Bowels, by Craig Collins and others. This is a bit of silliness from the Scottish writer/cartoonist, who mostly collaborated with other artists in this collection of short gag strips. Accustomed as I am to seeing cerebral if visceral horror stories from Collins, it was amusing to see him riff on pop culture and lay down some deadly puns. (Example: "Glee Van Cleef", which features the tough-guy cowboy actor gunning down the cast of America's most annoying non-reality TV show.) One of his best running gags was the "Zinder Kurprise", a take-off of the "Kinder Surprise" chocolate eggs that come with toys that are very popular in Europe.As always, his best collaborator is Iain Laurie, whose detailed, intensely-lined style is a perfect match for the density of Collins' work--even his silly work, like the hilarious "Seamus Heaney's Heinous Penis", which features the famous poet's penis singing a techno song while the man himself is trying to do a reading. Collins' evil floating head strip, "Omniscient Zorgo", is perhaps the most reliable generator of laughs, even if the punchline is more-or-less the same every time. Collins is better-suited to horror with slight comedic overtones than comedy with horror flourishes, but there are still some solid pieces in here.

Om, by Piotr Nowacki. Polish artist Nowacki likes to draw almost silent comics, generally using simple onomatopoeia to punctuate his visual gags. The narrative about a sort of all-devouring lizard-creature going about its day with its giant pet is just one funny drawing and gag after another, as Nowacki's feathery but simple line has enough weight to make the reader linger on each image but is fluid enough to push the reader onward to the next panel. Nowacki squeezes a lot of humor out of his characters' eyes; the lizard creature's eyes cross whenever it starts munching on something (alarm clock, toothbrush, chess set, etc)  that sets up a nice visual rhythm for the book. This comic is absurd in a low-key way, as the egg is awakened by the lizard putting it on a frying pan every morning, and the two go to school with varying degrees of success.  The female robot teacher (also with crossed eyes) gives the lizard an "A" for solving a math problem by eating the chalk and eraser, but the egg gets an "F" when it complains that there's no chalk. Nowacki heightens the stakes when a ninja kidnaps the egg, leading to a detective search, an epic rescue, a friendship with a fish-headed prisoner, a showdown with a giant octopus, and other silliness. This is a near-perfect all-ages comic, jam-packed with action and jokes on every page. I could easily picture this upgraded to a hardcover board book by a publisher of children's books.

Silent V #6, by Kyle Baddeley. In some respects, Silent V has been Baddeley's thesis project as a cartoonist. It's fitting that he's ending it with #7, because he's taken the lessons, ideas and absurdity about as far as they could stretch. This issue starts to wrap things up with helpful exposition filling in the blanks of the crazy, inexplicable action of the earlier issues. There are aliens disguised as bears, monsters disguised as robots, time-traveling gods affecting the lives of their adversaries so as to turn the tide of war, and the driest of gags being trotted out at odd times (like a giant button that says "Escapees Please Press Here"). Baddeley's figures are big, broad and lumpy, possessing a cartoony presence that chews up the page. His backup story, "Maggot Lump", featuring a heroic maggot foiling a candy-store robbery, is as silly, weird and gross as it sounds. I'd love to see Baddeley continue to explore that short story urge, as it seems to be a more coherent and easy fit for his silly and occasionally terrifying sense of humor.

The Well Below, by John Robbins. This mini by Robbins, aka Sean MacRoibin, was one of four the Irish artist sent to me after I review an anthology of Irish artists at the tcj.com version of High-Low. Robbins' line is spare and sketchy (a trait he shares with the other Irish artists in the batch he sent me), but also expressive and attractive. Robbins seems most interested in time, memory, and the irrevocable break between childhood and adulthood. The first story, "Find The River", is a simple slice-of-life story about two men on their annual fishing trip on a nearby river, as they try to reconnect while dealing with their own dysfunctions as adults.  The catch: Robbins draws them as children throughout the story, a tactic that starts off as confusing, then clever and finally more than a little sad. The art reveals that the men only relate to each other as boys, taking on old roles, while also simultaneously wishing for simpler times. "Man From The Past" and the prose story "The Time Machine" both have to do with the ways in which outcasts are effectively out of synch in a world with highly developed rituals and social roles. After a mini's worth of downbeat stories, Robbins caps things off with the title story, and the reader is tipped off that things will be a little different with the more solid but cartoony line that Robbins uses.  This story follows a man whose only emotional connections are ones that are superficial and from years in the past, resulting in a string of completely outrageous (yet somehow low-key) series of acts. Meeting up with a girl he had a crush on in grade school by coincidence, the middle-aged protagonist Tom tells her of his love for her in the past, which results in a highly unusual and gross sexual encounter that gives the phrase "a brown trout, a pine cone and a couple of maltesers" an especially hilarious and disgusting context. Tom is a fascinating character, one who is entirely unapologetic for his near-sociopathic inability to make connections with those who should be his loved ones. This was my favorite of the four minis, revealing an artist equally adept at depicting sadness and absurdity.

Matter #1, by Philip Barrett. Barrett is well known to alt-comics fans, thanks to having some of his comics published and distributed early on by Dylan Williams' Sparkplug Comic Books. The story in this comic, "A Stagnant Pool", is the quintessential pub/club story. Barrett uses a loose, sketchy line, strategic scribblings, and a slightly reserved, almost detached narrative style to tell this story of a young man who goes to see a band at a bar, the women he encounters, and the large part of his own story he forgets after drinking too much. Barrett's use of restraint is what I loved best about this comic, as a clearly turbulent and upsetting time for the lead is kept at arm's length from the reader, even as his actions are more and more unstable. Visually, Barrett cleverly uses the repeating motif scene above, substituting the lips or the lips, eyes and nose of a woman for the actual woman herself, as though that was the only thing he could see or focus on at that given moment in time. Those lips later took on different meanings depending on the situation: lust, desperation and even bewitching. The comic focuses on how he got lost with one woman but it was her best friend that he was really after, and this is repeated as a motif through the use of her star tattoo turning into a maze, the maze he felt he was running when he left the house of the first woman the next morning after a night of sex that he had blacked out. This is also a story about connections, secrets and mysteries and the ways in which all three can elude us. The artist whose work is most similar to Barrett's is perhaps Sacha Mardou in terms of its verisimilitude, along with the spareness of John Porcellino.

Other Days, by Patrick Lynch. Lynch isn't quite as accomplished a draftsman as the other artists from Ireland, as both his drawings and lettering are a bit on the rough side. However, Lynch certainly shows plenty of formal daring, like in one story where his big-headed figure delights at getting to go to his job, where he is bullied by an unseen boss who bludgeons him with huge, blocky letters. Lynch is more interested in depicting quiet but significant moments, like a boy playing with his best friend, only to show that it's the boy's last day in town as he and his mom are moving away. Lynch also does work on the fantastic end of things, like one story about a man being visited by a dead friend who urges him to live his life. There's also a strip about firefighters encountering all sorts of silly, weird people on nights of the full moon. Most of these stories were done for anthologies, accounting for the disjointed nature of the collection, but the collective weight of Lynch's work has a smudgy, scrawled and fiercely intelligent appeal.

Absence, by Andy Luke & Stephen Downey. This is part-autobio, part public service announcement on the part of Luke, and the entire comic is available at the link above. It's a nice companion piece to David B's Epileptic, this time from a person who actually has this condition. It actually reminds me a bit more of recent comics about their own disease from Nomi Kane and Sam Gaskin, in that it focuses in part on how this affected their childhoods and how they gained control of their own narratives as adults. Downey does a remarkable job in telling Luke's story with expressive art that focuses on gesture and faces. What's most interesting about this comic is how Luke has managed to go nearly a dozen years without a violent grand mal seizure. Part of that was accomplished by letting go and allowing smaller seizures or moments of freezing up to happen without resisting them, which in turn allowed him to learn things at an accelerated rate, which in turn builds neural bridges that help prevent seizures. Narrative is a powerful theme in this comic, as Luke advocates "owning the experience" as "gatekeepers of this exclusive knowledge" of what it is like to experience these sorts of neural disruptions.

Switching gears, let's take a look at the work of Danish cartoonist Allan Haverholm. Like Derek Badman, he's a formalist interested in comics-as-poetry. The comic that best sums up his work is Koan,which is a series of pages with roughly four panels per page whose images are not explicitly linked, but their juxtaposition creates a kind of narrative of rhythm. Divided into "travel", "home" and "surveys", the first section is marked by speed lines and propulsion, the second by a kind of stillness, and the third by more abstract patterns often coalescing into forms that suggest water, air, movement and sometimes stillness. 30 Days of Comics is a more ambitious comic, as it was part of a month-long challenge to do a new strip every day. This comic is a mix of standard cartooning, more abstract work (including his attempts at graphically illustrating music), gag work with unusual self-restrictions (like "What Telekinetics Do To Show Off", where the titular character never moves while opening up a can), color experiments, strips where key panels are left out so as to make the reader fill in the narrative blanks, and scenes inspired from TV and Twitter. His comic Lots is a collection of strips done while watching the show Lost, minus all of the characters. It adeptly picks up on the way the show established mood with its island backdrop and ominous use of stillness. Finally, Sex and Violence is a flip book whose Sex section is a series of orgasmic drawings of his girlfriend, the presentation of which is more warm and tender than erotic and certainly not exploitative. The flipside, drawn by Mattias Elftorp, simply details an onrush of riot-garbed policemen armed with truncheons and shields bearing down on the reader's perspective, eventually blotting it out altogether. Haverholm brings a lighter touch than many to this sort of experimentation, injecting even the most abstract of his comics with a sense of whimsy.

Finally, there's the El Monstruo De Colores No Tiene Boca ("the color monster has no mouth") project from Spain. This is a series of double-sided, folding cardstock illustrations of children's dreams. Each "issue" is devoted to a single artist, who attempts to capture key images from these very brief dreams. It's not quite what Jesse Reklaw does in Slow Wave, because there's no attempt at narrative here.  Instead, each illustrator chooses a different method to create a striking image. Roger Omar collected the dreams and handed out the assignments, and deliberately chose a number of different styles for the project. There's Javier Saez's intensely hatched pen-and-ink drawings, Takeuma's beautiful, stark and simple black & white drawings, Max's typically funny and surreal gag panels, Thomas Wellman's energetic and muscular action-oriented strips, Mitch Blunt's approach that used the faces of the children with a single image on their forehead from their dream, and Pedro Lourenco's frightening, psychedelic drawings. While it's not quite comics, it's still a fascinating project that's producing some intriguing art objects.

Comics-As-Poetry: Badman, Moreton, Zervakis

Let's look at some recent minicomics examples of comics-as-poetry:
No Way Constant and Untitled (Sternwood), by Derik A. Badman. Badman is a critic whose comics play around with appropriating and repurposing the texts and images of others to create new and frequently elliptical meanings. Untitled is one of his most successful comics to date. The front half of the comic consists of images appropriated from stills taken from a variety of film noir examples, including The Big Sleep. We see close-ups of doors, telephones, revolvers, cameras, statues with hidden compartments, shower stalls with bullet holes, and finally a wisp of cigarette smoke in the dark. Badman is ingenious in the way he strings together unrelated images and completely eschews depicting any people to create a more accessible narrative, yet the atmosphere he creates and the images he chooses make it easy to roughly understand what's happening. The key here is his choice of a midnight-blue wash in every panel, truly creating the "noir" atmosphere found in those sort of movies. The back half of the comic has a dark yellow wash and similarly depicts a place and a set of objects. The difference is that it's modern-day and that the things he depicts are stripped of the cultural meaning imbued in film noir: it's just a normal person going about their day. Yet, many of the objects he portrays could easily have a sinister bent depending on coloring choices and the juxtaposition of images. This comic is a witty depiction of how we read, comprehend and contextualize images.


No Way Constant is just as intriguing in its own way, working as a mash-up between Robinson Crusoe and 1940s/1950s romance comics and jungle girl comics. The way he juxtaposes Crusoe author Daniel DeFoe's prose regarding desire and danger with both the sort of action one would see in a jungle comic and the yearning found in a romance comic is especially clever. The one problem with this attempt is that Badman's attempts at copying masters of motion like Jesse Marsh comes out looking stiff. The sheer lushness of image that made those comics interesting is absent here, and as a reader I found myself being taken out of the page by the crudeness of some of the drawings--especially the figure work. It was an interesting experiment, but it's nowhere near as fluidly successful as Untitled.


Strange Growths #15, by Jenny Zervakis. For a variety of reasons, this 90s and early 2000s minicomics mainstay has had a reduced work output over the past few years. Like her friend and peer John Porcellino, she does autobio comics with a heavily poetic bent, focusing on the meaning to be found in small but significant moments. Her line is scribbly and warm, echoing the way her text invites the reader into her life without necessarily giving them much context. It's a portrait of a life lived, moment by moment, told in a series of short anecdotes. "Iceberg", for example, talks about an iceberg screensaver on her computer that comes to represent the feeling of stasis she herself was experiencing--especially with regard to being creative. This issue marks the melting of that iceberg, as she herself put forth the question. Much of this issue focuses on family, like the sort of things her daughter says or connections back to her relatives in Greece. Zervakis seeing the world through the eyes of her daughter is especially fascinating, as she treats her observations seriously but without overt sentimentality. Zervakis also has an ear for what others say that's reminiscent of Harvey Pekar, like a conversation she overheard on a bus between two people who were putting down someone else. There's a lyricism present in her work that gives each story a satisfying quality on its own, but the accretion of her short stories in this issue adds up to a gestalt that's warm, sincere and honest.



Smoo Comics #4 and The Escapoligist, by Simon Moreton. Moreton continues to refine his voice as a poet and cartoonist. Smoo #4 is an especially lovely meditation on the town he grew up in as a teen-ager called Marlow, which is essentially a suburb of London. Working with a spare, scribbly and occasionally smudged pencil line, Moreton evokes memories through geometric figures, lines and shadows. The way in which he leaves so much open space on each page allows the reader to fill in the gaps while still maintaining the essential sketchiness of both image and memory. Moreton takes the reader on a recapitulation of his perceptual journey of Moreton, going from the awe of childhood to the contempt of his teenage years to the ways in which he and his friends tried to create meaning. The revelations Moreton provides about his sense of growing old externally but not feeling it internally are not especially innovative, but that does not diminish the impact of the revelation as he feels it, nor the beautiful way that he expresses it on the page. I loved the added touch of Moreton attaching an envelope that has a postcard and a hand-drawn map of Marlow.

If Smoo is Moreton's take on John Porcellino, then The Escapologist is his attempt at Warren Craghead's style of comics-as-poetry. Here, Moreton cleverly juxtaposes the solidness of place (brick walls, bushes, lawns of carefully cut grass) with his geometrically spectral figures. Like in Smoo, this is a comic about being from a particular place and knowing particular people, and how the sum total of our personality is constructed in part by our relationships with others. It's a short and sweet depiction of a feeling and a sense of loss, of being connected and feeling apart.

Small Press Anthologies: Three #2, Candy Or Medicine, The Sorry Entertainer

Let's take a look at three anthologies of various shapes and sizes:

Three #2, edited by Rob Kirby. Nothing in this issue of the queer-themed anthology of Three matches Eric Orner's story from the first issue, which earned an Ignatz nomination. That said, there's a certain sweetness and vulnerability to be found in each of the three stories in this issue. "Dragon", written by Sina Evil and drawn by Jon Macy, is the least compelling of the three. It's about a young man who meets a cartoonist he admires and feels close to on the basis of his familiarity with his material. They have a romantic encounter during which the young man is coerced into doing things that made him somewhat uncomfortable, yet are rationalized away because of the connection he imagines between them. The "dragon" metaphor (and insertion into the story), however, is a painfully obvious metaphor, especially when something dramatic happens. It's annoyingly "cinematic", adding little to a story that's already a bit bland to look at.

Things pick up with "Help Wanted", a jam between Jennifer Camper and Michael Fahy. This is a delightful little comedy of misunderstandings with a distinct romance comic flair. What's surprising is that even though Fahy and Camper alternate panel tiers, there's a remarkable sense of continuity in terms of both story and art between the two. This is quite unusual for a jam comic, which usually tend to be huge messes. I don't know if the two improvised from tier to tier or if they wrote it beforehand, but the smooth result speaks for itself. I like the way that Camper and Fahy play up the romance comic tropes, down to lines like "Happy, darling?" being followed by "Oh yes! A thousand times yes!" coming after a man's FTM transexual boyfriend reveals that he's pregnant and once had a fling with his sister.
The best of the three stories is "Nothin' But Trouble", a collaboration between Craig Bostick & David Kelly. It's a story of a closeted country-western singer who picks up a prostitute after a gig but falls in love with him. There's a clever narrative trick where the story is told first by the singer (Jimmy, drawn by Bostick) and the prostitute (Butch, drawn by Kelly), alternating every couple of pages. The trick comes in terms of coloring: the red-toned pages belong to Jimmy and the green-toned pages belong to Butch, allowing the cartoonists to make whip-crack transitions with a minimum of narrative disruption. Bostick has always had an appealingly clear line, and the cartoony quality of his line is a nice counterpoint to the low-key melodrama of this story. There's no easy happy ending to be found to this story, yet both characters wind up having a surprising and positive effect on the other. It's a pitch-perfect slice of life story, with the two artists meshing remarkably well despite portraying two different but complementary narratives.


Candy Or Medicine: The Compleat First Year, and Candy Or Medicine #14 & #15, edited by Josh Blair. Blair decided to reprint the first four issues of his all-comers minicomics anthology which has a lower hit-to-miss ratio than virtually any other anthology, yet always yields some gems. As Blair notes in his introduction, this is a deliberate strategy. He's less an editor than an "OE", to use APAzine parlance. That is, he serves to collected and publish material sent to him, with the money he earns from sales (at just a dollar an issue, it can't be much) to support collating and copying each issue. His hope is that every story will appeal to at least some readers, even if they aren't necessarily the stories that he likes most. From the very beginning, Candy or Medicine attracted people who could barely draw or conceive of a coherent narrative as well as great cartoonists with no other print outlets. Brad W Foster (a Newave era stalwart) and Matt Feazell (the DaVinci of stick-figure minicomics) make early appearances with drawings instead of comics. The strip has also drawn an unusual number of international cartoonists eager for any kind of exposure to American artists, like Greek artist Kostis Tzortzakasis and Briton Kel Winser.

The most recent volumes (#14 and #15, sold as a two-pack for two dollars) show that the anthology is both much the same but has also started to attract a better quality of cartoonist. #14 is a particularly strong issue, with a strange and beautifully drawn story about how the mold in a kitchen spawned a new ecosystem and saved a marriage as its centerpiece. Emi Gennis contributed one of her "Wikipedia List of Unusual Deaths" comics, this time about an old man who was exercised to death by his wife, who happened to be a MTF transsexual and who also happened to be the child of old family friends thirty years his junior. Gennis' line just gets sharper and sharper, matching her wit as well. Lauren Barnett's absurd scribble is typically funny, especially in the way it makes fun of her own limited draftsmanship. Issue #15 doesn't feature any stand-out strips but is still interesting for publishing short comics from Lithuania and Guatemala. I love that Blair is so committed to this anthology, giving cartoonists the opportunity to get better in public.


The Sorry Entertainer, edited by Simon Moreton & Nick Soucek. This is a cheap newsprint anthology from the UK that includes contributors from Ireland, the US and Argentina, based around the theme of performing and performers. The results are a mixed bag, as some of the artists don't really rise to the occasion of using the space in an interesting manner. On the other hand, there's plenty to like here from a number of artists who have been making some noise in the UK and US scenes the past couple of years. Moreton's own strip follows a schoolboy persecuted by his peers who slips into fantastic reveries, acting as a sort of prologue for the kinds of stories that follow.

The tone of the anthology slips from light-hearted to the contemplative. Paddy Lynch, for example, submits a wispily-drawn story about a man going to a park musing about how difficult it is us for to live in and enjoy small moments while listening to a guitar player, only to have a policeman come by and shoo the guitarist away. Jason Martin's adaptation of Mike Watt's tour diary is hilarious, with his rough style a perfect match for Watt's whole demeanor. Another example of that swing is David Z. Greene's full-page wrestling strip that winds up with a silly (if bloody) punchline. Greene's one of the few artists in the whole broadsheet who really makes use of the space, filling up the page with big images that go a long way in selling his gag. Rol Hirst and Andrew Cheverton's "Face For Radio", on the other hand features an ex-DJ with a new gig: introducing records at a retirement home.

The ubiquitous Noah Van Sciver contributes a story about a four-eyed man shunned by society who joins a traveling freak show, grows embittered and kills his audience and the circus. Van Sciver crams the story into fifteen panels, yet nothing feels cramped and his drawings carry the story. The bitterness of performing is ground that's covered by Richard Worth & Jordan Collver as well as Chris Fairless. The former story is a detailed character portrait about a magician who first waxes nostalgic about his career, and then when the page is flipped, complains bitterly about it. Its outer border is that of a playing card, and his story is supported by a lightly penciled series of figures in the background. It's a clever bit of cartooning. Fairless' story is about a young immigrant who performs in a park by speaking truth to power until he gets busted, and then simply performs as a statue. Fairless uses shadow and light contrasts to tell his story, and the modulation of these tones is what gives the story its emotional power.

Other highlights include a typically goofy strip by Lauren Barnett about a sad clown who performs for Jesus, a funny strip about a comedian with a particularly lowest common denominator for a gimmick by Sam Spina, Peter Batchelor's story about a psychic with a horrible secret, Soucek's account of a story about a rock band who got the greatest gig of their lives under dubious circumstances, and of course an epic bit of full-page lunacy from the inimitable Rob Jackson. His account of an entertainer who recalls his life's story is full of hilarious non sequiturs, with his typically rough style somehow accentuating the effect of his silliness. While there were no true duds in the anthology, none of the rest really registered after an initial reading. That said, this broadsheet was an interesting alternative to the typical minicomics anthology, allowing artists the opportunity to go big with a theme vague enough to allow them to tell the sort of story they wanted.