Thirty Days of CCS #28: Simon Reinhardt

It’s no surprise that some of the material in the new issue of Aaron Cockle’s Annotated first appeared in Simon Reinhardt’s grab-bag comic series Mystery Town. This anthology (sometimes one-man, sometimes with several contributors) is a pure expression of Reinhardt’s aesthetic vision, which reflects Cockle’s understanding of our senses being completely mediated by our cultural influences (or as he might put it, cultural viruses). Where they differ is in the sharpness and direction of their commentary; for Cockle, it’s a critique told in the language of the oppressors. For Reinhardt, it’s simply new grist for a mill of feelings and fears that go back way before capitalism.

Both cartoonists are not at their best when they attempt typical, narrative rendering. Collage, abstraction, erasure and hints at drawings best convey what they’re trying to express anyway, and it so happens that it’s their best fit as cartoonists with a limited toolbox. The conceit of the anthology is that it’s the official municipal newsletter of a place called Mystery Town in the USA, with the mayor (Herman T. Billfolde, a name worthy of Groucho Marx), where all sorts of strange things happen. So there’s a bit of Twin Peaks and every other form of media featuring a quirky, eccentric town. That said, that’s not really the focus in most of the stories. Instead, the stories are often intensely personal and elliptical. Issue 3 has two recurring features: “Nite Time Music” and “Endless Hallway”. The former is a series of mood pieces about music at night: in the desert, on the highway, in the forest, in the city. It’s music as something haunting, something the lingers and evokes deep feelings and memories. These pieces almost read as fragments of something that Tim Lane might do.

The latter feature speaks to Reinhardt’s other fascination, which is the ways in which horror works on a psychological level. Disorientation, both of the audience and the protagonist, is one way to evoke anxiety and panic, as not being oriented toward space (and eventually, time) takes away one’s epistemological foundation. Each of these strips has a different character in a different hallway, trying to make their way as best they can but sensing that they are doomed.

Issue #3 is the “Art Issue”, featuring a story where a show about volcanoes is held in what turns out to be an active volcano that erupts and wipes out the show and everything in it. It’s a funny send-up of art that cares less about its target than it does riffing on what kind of hubris would lead an artist to stage a show in such a place. The citizens of Mystery Town that we meet are often lonely, sad, scared or some combination thereof. Luke Healy’s contribution in #4 is a series of drawings on post-it notes that resemble Seth’s more spontaneous, cartoony style. The fifth issue chases down memories, ghosts, love and Drone Gang life.

In the sixth issue, Juan Fernandez contributed “Wired”, a sketchily drawn story about power lines (and cutting them) that has a narration detailing what happens when one stays awake for too many days in a row. It’s chilling, especially in how impersonal the imagery is. One of Reinhardt’s best stories, “The War Years”, is in this issue, about a sojourner in the wasteland who finds respite in the arms of a woman whose house he comes upon and later steals a device from her. The terrifying thing about this story is that the man who’s trekking is completely cut off from communication; he doesn’t know whether his actions even have meaning anymore. The unknown, Reinhardt suggests, is much more terrifying than a known horror, even if it’s awful.

Eventually, Reinhardt starts to stray away from straight narrative and begins to experiment with collage and mixed media, redrawing a page from an old Adam Strange comic and emphasizing the alienating quality of the shadow ray shot at him. Mystery Town #9 sees a reversal, as it’s a single story by Reinhardt that works in thick black lines. It examines the theme of what crime means during wartime, as a Cyclopean woman lives to steal, until she’s caught and rehabilitated…for a little while. This is really a story about addiction and the way one attempts to replace something that’s missing in one’s life with the object of that addiction. #10 has a lot of guest content from Drake, Nik James and Dean Sudarsky, and it’s epic in a way that other issues are quiet (it includes surfing in a fiery ocean, for example), yet it fits into Reinhardt’s overall aesthetic. 

Reinhardt snaps back full force in #11 with a hilarious send-up of navel-gazing autobio, except that in this case he’s still going to his boring job even though he just won the lottery. #12 juxtaposes a blank form against a series of clocks, as the narrator feels like he’s fallen behind time and doesn’t catch up with it again until his moment of death. It’s an elegantly-constructed story that still has Reinhardt’s hand in it prominently, despite its levels of abstraction. #15 has fragments (some dream, some excerpts from other authors, some autobio), but #16 seems to sum things up with an issue set at the Mystery Town Awards, an event that in itself is odd and mysterious as diamonds appear to rain down from the ceiling. It is, as a series, about fragments and pieces that make up a community and mind.

Reinhardt’s next project was October Movie Diary, a fascinating account of 31 horror movies watched during October. Each movie got four panels, and in many ways this is the first time I’ve seen Reinhardt in control of his line. It’s tough business selecting a few representative images from each film, yet he was up to the task as he used colored pencil both to create a wash effect and to color key elements in each panel (like blood). I think it would be accurate to say that Reinhardt has a cinematic eye when it comes to drawing comics, but not in any traditional sense. He’s obsessed with the single image that represents so much more. It’s not just a matter of shock, but a fascination with the sheer beauty and fascination with something horrible. Reinhardt is also an excellent critic, humorously and mercilessly reducing each movie to a few words, for good and ill.

With Reinhardt’s latest comic, Slow Theft, he moved into a comic book-sized format and full color. The comic reprints some of the best “Nite Time Music” strips (now in color and it features several new stories by Reinhardt. Without the Mystery Town scaffolding, these strips feel like they’re depicting a world that’s desolate and threatening, be they “inside stories” or “outside stories”, as noted on the back cover. “Maze” is about a world where death can come up from the ground in the form of a branching lightning bolt. What’s scariest about this story is that the protagonist’s rules for survival simply stopped working at a certain point.

The title story is about three people who break into a huge home, aiming to do a quick smash and grab and then get out. Slowly but surely, they find the house irresistible, despite multiple attempts by the house itself to warn them away from there. After months of laying around, they realize that they can never leave. The “theft” here is not of valuables, but of lives. Reinhardt’s character design here is clever, and the ratty use of mark-making adds to the sleazy intentions of the thieves. “The White Woods” is interesting less than the story than its bleak tone, as a couple in the woods tries to rely on their physical intimacy as a way of keeping out the desolation of the woods they’re in, with one character unable to maintain that connection after he’s been outside for too long. It’s the color contrasts that make this story work, especially the unsettling white woods themselves. Reinhardt continues to challenge himself as an artist, and the result is a series of ever-more-challenging comics. 

Thirty Days of CCS #33: Dog City

The latest edition of another significant CCS anthology series, Dog City, went in a different direction than the first three volumes and took some interesting risks in doing so. While the first three volumes used clever packaging and design in order to celebrate the minicomic, Dog City #4 is a book that celebrates collaboration. Unlike what we might think of as collaboration in comics, this isn't really one person handling the script and one person handling the pencils. Instead, each of the seven stories features a far more involved level of collaboration, with each pair of artists deciding on methodology and division of labor in a different manner. The results were highly uneven but still quite interesting.

A lot of the matches were between cartoonists in different countries, and also between men and women. I'm not sure if this was by design or a natural consequence of how the editors (Juan Fernandez, Luke Healy and Simon Reinhardt) sought out talent, but there's no question that this diversity made for a more interesting comic. The first story, "Untitled Correspondence", was in many ways the most intimate collaboration, in that Swedish cartoonist Disa Wallender and American cartoonist Matt Davis literally mailed pages of drawings and scraps of drawings to each other, cannibalizing and reusing the other's images in photocopies and montages. The story itself was about consumption, criticism and creativity, as well as the diferences between virtual and real-life experience of art and experience itself.

American Sasha Steinberg and Irishman Luke Healy collaborated on the best story in the book, "Berghain Berlin". This is about identity on a literal level, as we meet a dull cubicle worker named Karl in Berlin and quickly understand that he has a queer alter-ego named X. With Healy drawing the story from Karl's perspective and Steinberg from that of X, we quickly start to question who is real and who is in fact the alter-ego. The dizzying scenes in an underground club and the dissonance between Karl and X are sharply portrayed, as X eventually must learn to integrate aspects of both people into his life. The different styles of each artist clash in a manner that makes complete sense given the context of the story, but that clash is an organic one and in no ways feels contrived.

Brazil's (but now in Taiwan) Iris Yan and Ireland's Sarah Bowie collaborated on "Crossed Memories", and their approach to this memoir comic was to react to something from the prior artist's page. The chemistry between the two was remarkable, as a page by Bowie that evoked memories of growing up in a rural area is matched by Yan recalling the details of her father telling her about growing up in the countryside and making "cow pies" to use as fuel. That led to Bowie recalling a story about burning coal (using the last image from Yan as a visual seque), which led to Yan thinking about barbecues, and so on. There are interesting coincidences, like Yan and Bowie they were both tall for girls their age, which led to both considering the social implications of their height. Bowie's gritty style is a nice contrast to Yan's simpler, cleaner line.

Britain's Ed Cheverton and America's Dan Rinylo did a trippy strip that looked and felt a lot like the sort of thing that Marc Bell does. I found that distracting in reading it, though I imagine the inspiration might have come from any number of artists who have made Bell's unique style a key influence, especially the Adventure Time and other Nickelodeon artists. I'm familiar with Rinylo's other work and it hasn't looked quite like this, and one gets the sense that this collaboration came about quite organically, but it's not especially strong work overall.

Reinhardt teamed with Whit Taylor to create a series of small moments in "Gestures", where they switched writing and drawing responsibilities depending on the titular gesture. I thought the first two mini-stories, involving a failed attempt at breaking a pinata and a woman alone at her apartment brushing her teeth, were interesting because they hinted at deeper emotional subtext, whereas the next two didn't have much to offer beyond the surface facts. Taylor's increasingly stripped-down and refined line and open-page layout made the strips she illustrated more visually appealing than those of Reinhardt's whose occasional over-rendering was distracting.

Aaron Cockle and Fernandez sent each other drawings, and each would work over the drawings of the other. This was the most intensely integrated collaboration of the book, as the outcome didn't strong resemble the styles of either artist but ceretainly had elements of each. The blotches, scribbles, splatters and stabs were given context by text later added by Cockle, grounding the images with musings about wandering, the possibility of integrity and the reality of heartbreak.

Finally, Jennifer Lisa and Caitlyn Rose Boyle's collaboration is at once seamless in the sense that it wasn't clear who did what, but the line weight and line quality varies so much that it looks like a hastily constructed 24-hour comic rather than a carefully considered work. That's too bad, because they touched on some interesting issues regarding the ways in which teenage girls relate to each other as friends.

Overall, there are a couple of excellent stories in here as well as some lesser efforts, but the process of collaboration was clearly a reward in and of itself for the artists. I'm not sure all of it merited publication, but I admire the chances that were taken here and how difficult it must have been for the cartoonists to move out of their comfort zones.

Thirty Days of CCS #22: Simon Reinhardt

Simon Reinhardt has been learning, little by little, how to tell a compelling story with limited drafting skills. By simplifying and stylizing everything and incorporating a more poetic approach to his comics, he's created some compelling recent work. Starting with Trash Ghost, Reinhardt confounds expectations regarding rock band road trip stories. Using a scribbly line, Reinhardt relates a road trip undertaken by Trash Ghost, "New England's Premier Ghost Rock Band!". The put-upon drummer who's driving the band's van is confounded by the fog, as the lead singer and drummer make up excuses as to why they can't drive. When the lead singer goes out and sucks up the ghostly fog, her head swells comically, as though it were to float away like a balloon. It works, and it inspires the band's song for their recording session. This is a silly comic that nonetheless has its own punk style, as the furious scribbles and strange events create their own visual logic and establish a world.

That world is the same as is presented in Reinhardt's Mystery Town comics. This is a Pickle-style zine that purports to be an official town newsletter with a variety of story types. It begins with a funny contest regarding decorated mailboxes and then switches to a running series called "Nite Time Music", involving someone trying to chase down a tune they hear in the night. The first one features a record executive trying to chase it down and getting clubbed for his troubles. There's the dread of the "Endless Hallway" serial that resembles an EC story and the gleeful nihilism of "Savage Skies", which resembles a Blobby Boys comic with its vicious and hilarious "Drone Gang" fulfilling one man's existential dread in a way he never expected.

The second issue touches more on the absurdly Lovecraftian nature of Mystery Town, with the two ice cream trucks whose clashing jingles cause madness. There's more Drone Gang silliness, more Endless Hallway dread, but also some poetic comics in the form of Nite Time Music, catching the powerful and immediate feeling of the sentence "All My Favorite DJs Are Passing Cars" as we see a dancer next to a window, music blasting through. There's also a strip about a man who studies the human face at mural sizes to the exclusion of all else. Mystery Town is all about extremes, obsessions, absurdity writ large and life as both a horrifying mystery that is to be dreaded and a fascinating mystery that is to be gratefully explored. It's a grab-bag of cliches turned on their head, of feeling horrified at funny things and laughing at the horrific.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 25: Luke Healy and Simon Reinhardt

Luke Healy is one of my favorite of the recent CCS grads, both in terms of his line and his dark sense of humor. Like many recent CCS grads, he often reaches into genre tropes to generate ideas. One such example is the first chapter (of three) of The Exquisite Corpse. The high concept is ingenious: personal fitness trainers literally swap consciousnesses with clients so that they can get their bodies fit over a several month period. The trainer in this story also has the difficulty of dealing with his client's smoking addiction, which leads him to violate some rules before he's accused of murdering his client. Healy sticks to a crisp 3 x 2 grid on each page, giving this story a steady rhythm with a simple line. Starlight doubles as a fan club publication for the world's #1 pop star, one who is obsessed with cake and her missing mother. This mini veers off into some truly weird directions as it explores fame, memory and what it means to be stricken from the public record. Both of these stories can be found in anthologies; the former will be in Maple Key volume 4 and the latter in Dog City 3.

Mountain, Take Me is a story about a group of teens who follow a woman who predicts that the end of the world will occur on that particular day. It's really about a girl who returns to her small town after several years away, and how difficult it is to integrate herself back into the community. In many ways, she clearly feels for this outcast woman who hikes to the top of a mountain in order to meet her maker. It's also pitch-perfect in the way he gets at the way teens talk. LCD finds Healy satirizing blogger culture in a hilarious but dark manner, as a stand-in character moves to a new city and finds it hard to meet people and generate material for his blog. A TV with a particular, pornographic image burned into that he received for free stops becoming a conversation piece and takes over his life bit by bit, until the final, inevitable scene. The superimposition of images from the TV that then starts superimposing itself on his consciousness and vision is a clever visual conceit, especially thanks to Healy's slightly smudged pencils.

Bob is my favorite of Healy's comics. It's the one that stretched him the most as a draftsman, as he worked a number of different styles into this Walter Mitty-esque story of a man who imagined himself as the protagonist in all kinds of different scenarios: a worker clone whose DNA was based on Jackie Gleason, a Seinfeld-style sitcom, a tavern-based soap opera and several other TV-related tropes. It's a sad and funny story about a man trying to break out of his shell who gets his heart a little broken, but in the end gets something from the experience. The drawing is excellent, as Healy is enough of a style mimic to make the transition from trope to trope easily understandable and leave quite an impact.

Simon Reinhardt's recent work is clearly the best of his young career. While always conceptually interesting, his minis suffered from some of his technical limitations. Take At The DJ Screw Museum, for example. His rendering is once again crude, but his use of color to create both positive and negative space brings this mutation of a story by Donald Barthelme to life. It's a hilarious send-up of museum design as well as a loving tribute to the mixtape master. On the other hand, his collection of his absurdist strip Detectives doesn't quite work because the color seems more perfunctory here, and the crudeness of the rendering combined with the aimlessness of the humor give the whole thing an undercooked quality.

On the other hand, that loose crudeness actually aids Superstition, the story about what happened when James Kidd disappeared. A quiet man, he simply disappeared on a trip one day and had no heirs or relatives. Eventually, a will was found in his effects that left his money to whomever could prove that the soul was real and could be photographed when leaving the body at death. Reinhardt actually clips a copy of his will inside the comic on yellow paper, adding a nice primary source touch. Reinhardt gives the facts as they were known, but he also muses on the nature of mysteries in general, relishing their existence.

The best mini in his bunch, the excellent Lost Films, picks up on this film of what is lost and unknown in a fascinating way. A writer is recruited by an eccentric and wealthy man for a mysterious project. He's informed that most silent films from the 1920s and 1930s no longer exist, but that it's his mission to recreate these films with his own director, cast and crew. It's an incredible concept that's visually exciting, as each character is more or less represented by a color form in all but close-up panels. It's a sort of visual shorthand that makes instant sense, as do other uses of this sort of shorthand in the rest of the comic. That use of color extends to the narrative captions, instantly cluing the reader in on who's speaking. Reinhardt gets across the central theme of this comic (longing for what cannot be attained) quite clearly and forcefully while spinning a clever fantasy built out of actual facts.

Thirty Days of CCS #21: Luke Healy, Max Riffner, Mathew New, Simon Reinhardt

This time around, I'll be discussing the work of three current students, set to graduate in 2014, as well as one graduate from the class of 2013.

Luke Healy's Of The Monstrous Pictures of Whales is one of the more fully-realized comics I've read from a student. Starting with the beautiful, silkscreened cover, continuing with the whale-themed endpapers and into the confidently rendered, simple clear-line style, Healy creates memorable and distinctive characters as well. Healy's watchword is restraint, as he slowly reveals the reason why two Irish sisters and their mother go on an ocean voyage taking off from Iceland while quickly establishing their fractious interpersonal dynamics. The ship is a whale-watching voyage, and one of the daughters, Liz, is an acerbic young woman who winds up being a sort of object of affection both for a whale (it only surfaces when she's out on a particular deck, soaking her every time) and the slightly buffoonish son of the ship's captain. Moby Dick and Herman Melville are name-checked a number of times, as the comic is indeed about a kind of obsession. In this case, it's about Liz's troubled relationship with her father. The end sequence, which uses larger panels at the bottom of the page to slowly relate in real time Liz's emotional reaction to having pitched something valuable at the whale "following" her and smaller panels on top to flash back to the history of the relationship with her father, is emotionally powerful. Indeed, Healy seamlessly incorporates humor (both absurd and sarcastic) into a comic that at its essence is about grief. I haven't read much else by Healy, but this comic establishes him as part of the very top rank of CCS artists.

Mathew New's Billy Johnson and His Duck Explorers is a Tintin-inspired bit of nonsense. Borrowing a bit of Herge's character design, the story mixes in aspects of Indiana Jones as well as Bill and his talking duck Barrace Wilcox open the comic with absurd dance moves that's a result of a competition performed at random for someone who came to deliver a package. New's sense of silliness goes from there, as they must deliver a trident to the middle of the ocean, Billy angers the statue heads on Easter Island by picking their noses, causing them to get up and walk into the ocean, and the intrepid duo encounters a Lara Croft-style explorer when looking for a valuable artifact. New's line is decidedly unfussy and utilitarian, aiding the gags in the simplest manner possible. The mini itself is an amusing trifle of perfect length, as I'm not sure the concept could sustain a narrative that was much longer than a few pages.

Simon Reinhardt's comic, Crime Planet, is a graphically bold, if extremely silly, comic about the rise and fall of a gangster that brings to mind classic crime series like Crime Does Not Pay. Reinhardt makes up for limited rendering skill with a bold, dynamic sense of page composition, employing dense blacks on some pages to draw in the reader's eye and carefully spotting blacks on other pages so as to move the eye around the page. Starting with a boy who declares that "Crude entertainment has eroded all my moral fiber", Eddie Ford "turns to a life of crime" as a result, He gets recruited to a mysterious criminal organization called Crime Planet, and his subsequent success and eventual downfall are documented in a manner that slips between deadpan and directly comedic. Inbetween, there are various "public service announcements" for neighborhood watch announcements with secret codes and a corpse protection service. Like New's comic, it's all good dumb fun. Reinhardt doesn't quite have the chops to pull off every visual gag he attempts, and that's a strain on the reader at times, but the boldness of his storytelling does offset this difficulty.

Max Riffner graduated in 2013 from CCS, but he's had a long career as a webcartoonist. He did a strip called Lydia that I quite enjoyed. The comics I'm reviewing here were part of this CCS thesis packet and include the minicomic Doomsday Democracy and the book The Crippler's Son. Using a sketchy, expressive style that reminds me a bit of a slightly less scribbly Jeff Lemire, The Crippler's Son is about a professional wrestler nicknamed "The Crippler" (a name he took from his wrestler father) and his much younger brother, James. James is an ER resident whose entire education was paid for by Jack ("The Crippler") and the success that his wrestling career brought him. The Lemire comparisons extend to his Essex County trilogy, which is a story about familial relationships and misdirection regarding same. It's also about James seeking an identity as a gay man who grew up without real family relationships or close bonds. It's also impeccably researched, as Riffner did a fantastic job researching the back story behind wrestling and the kind of terms that only insiders tend to use, and made it part of the book's vernacular. Whether or not someone knows what a "shoot" or "kayfabe" are isn't important, because the technical aspects of the sport are akin to the behind-the-scenes nature of being an ER doctor. Indeed, Riffner makes pointed comparisions between the ER doctor locker room and the wrestling locker room, even if what happens afterward is obviously different. The point Riffner makes is that James learns only too late just how much he means to Jack, and why, even as he tries to open himself up. While the relationship between the two becomes obvious at a certain point, the way Riffner ends the story gives it a powerful sense of emotional ambiguity.

The mini Democracy Doomsday is a far more labored (and labored-looking) comic using zip-a-tone and other visual effects, printed in blue ink. It's about a Nazi-smashing robot that wakes up in a world where the Nazis won World War II, and finds a way to wipe out every Nazi and everyone under Nazi occupation. While nicely drawn and designed (the tall, angular and slightly goofy robot is an especially great character design), the end of the story is a bit heavy-handed. Riffner's use of restraint in The Crippler's Son is what made it such an effective story.