New Stuff From Old Favorites: Steve Lafler & Lance Ward

Death In Oaxaca #3, by Steve Lafler (Alternative Comics). It's increasingly clear that when Lafler refers to death in the title of his series about a family of American ex-pats who settle in the arts mecca Mexican town, it's not so much about murder than the personification of Death itself. In this case, Death comes as a friend and source of information for Rex, a cartoonist and amateur musician (and Lafler's stand-in) whom Death visits in his sleep in order to jam with him musically. Rex's wife Gertie decides to become a superhero in Luchadora form, while their teenage son Myles is more of a background character but hints at burgeoning adulthood in this issue. 

This third issue starts to tie a few of the early plot threads together and smartly gets its protagonists on the same page. Death takes Rex on a walk that reveals that Rex is a reincarnation of the son of Eduardo, a local eccentric who is an immortal vampire. What's revealed in this issue is that Eduardo became a vampire when his village sent him to investigate a mysterious, huge rock that suddenly appeared, and the beings inside turned him vampiric for mysterious reasons. Meanwhile, Eduardo, who subsists on animal blood, is getting weaker and weaker and is rushed to the hospital at the issue's end, but not before getting a human blood transfusion. It's hard to say where Lafler is going with all this, as the story meanders in an episodic fashion more than any of Lafler's non-psychedelic stories. It was smart of him to have Rex and Gertie reveal their secrets to each other, as the strength and ardor of their relationship is one of my favorite things about this comic. It's clear that Lafler is happy to let the story set its own pace, as he dips into local culture, cuisine and politics in addition to the soap operatic hijinks (and parody of same) of its cast of characters. There's no question that this comic is a genuine delight to look at from a structural and storytelling perspective; Lafler is one of the best figure artists in comics, with a rock-solid understanding of anatomy that meshes with his loose, playful line. His hatching and use of negative space and spotting blacks is all in service to the story; he never shows off or wastes a line. I imagine Lafler will start to draw together plot lines shortly, but it is odd that there doesn't seem to be a clear antagonist as of yet. That may well become Eduardo or someone else, depending on how many issues he plans for the series. I'm simply happy to be along for the ride. 

A-Hole #6 and Blood And Drugs, by Lance Ward. One of the best and most bracing autobio cartoonists actually does all sorts of comics, and A-Hole is his catch-all anthology for such material. There's his "Fatnuts" strips, a brutal parody of Peanuts that doesn't so much make "Chucky Brown" the butt of jokes for being fat as much as it makes every character their worst possible selves, with Chucky still the center of it all. It's also Ward's catch-all strip for anything he's angry or concerned about, like his characters getting radiation poisoning thanks to the disaster at Fukashima in Japan, Bernie Sanders, science without morals and nightmares. His "Stick Shifter" strips are all-aggro parodies of The Fast And The Furious type of car adventure movies, with the main driver always getting so angry that horrible things happen with the car. There are also strips credited to "Jason Walters", and I'm not sure if that's a Ward pseudonym or not, but the "Kafka The Cat" and other strips are mostly mild genre parodies. While the overall content is amusing, it's not anything that's especially innovative or that sticks with the reader like Ward's autobio strips.

On the other hand, Blood and Drugs, while being (apparently, mostly) fictional and also a different aesthetic approach than his fairly straightforward design of his autobio strips, packs as much of a wallop as his best work to date. Using a six-panel grid to anchor the rest of his page, Ward frequently goes off the rails in this comic about heroin addiction and what a person is willing to do to keep it going. In slashing red and black markers on the early pages, Charlie Brown and Calvin & Hobbes scream at each other until it resolves into Ward on a bus, in deep pain, willing to try anything. Ward sells all of his art to his initial fixes, gets a friend to drive him to a dealer's house (under protest) and is forced to give the dealer (depicted as a Jabba the Hutt-style creature) head in exchange for heroin. Ward bits the guy's dick off instead and flees, knowing that he's doomed and screaming at a local street Santa that he sells lies to children. The whole thing is over the top and scrawled, looking a bit like Josh Bayer's work at some points, only much more scribbled and intense. The key page in the story is when Ward scores some heroin to "get normal" so he can finish doing a story, only for the reader to see four straight blank panels. Heroin takes away one's capacity and interesting for much in life other than heroin. It certainly takes away pain, but it takes away desire, motivation and inspiration as well. The story may seem over the top in terms of its approach and histrionics, but it feels authentic in a way that implies familiarity with these kinds of stories, even if this wasn't something that Ward experienced personally. As always, however, Ward is his own best character, even in a fictional story. 

Mini-Comics Grab Bag: Bagnarelli, Ghetti/Schiesaro, Lafler, Alabaster

January The First, by Bianca Bagnarelli. Bagnarelli is a big-time talent from Italy. Her cartooning looks and feels cool and detached even as the actual events of the story are intense and often upsetting. Consider this short story, a first-person retrospective narrator about a young woman going off for a drive with two shifty young men. Bagnarelli uses cool pastels and a stripped-down approach to character design, with a small line and a few simple loops here and there for faces. Those faces rarely betray the uncertainty felt or the later sense of betrayal, as everything and everyone is deadpan. That sense of restraint is almost agonizing, considering the outrageous but absurd level of violation she experiences. This one's from the Italian publisher Delebile.

Myriad, by Lorenzo Ghetti and Ugo Schiesaro. Also from Delebile is this first chapter of what promises to be a longer work. The art here is scratchy and cartoony, giving this story of life on a space station a grimy, lived-in feeling. As the first chapter unfolds, the reader is slowly made to understand the order of things on a station that's been inhabited for years. It's actually modeled on industrial revolution-era family life, where there's a child class, an adult worker class and an elder class. In the case of this ship, the elders are there to provide instruction to the children until they're ready to take over leadership from the adults, who then become the new elder class while the adult women are impregnated and prepare to have children. What happens to the former elder class is the subject of this issue, wherein conflicts between generations are hinted at and something goes horribly wrong when the elders are being "processed". This comic is a great use of genre as a setting, because it allows Ghetti and Schiesaro to create a social engineering experiment and expand upon its implications.

Death In Oaxaca #2 (Alternative Comics) by Steve Lafler. An alt-comics veteran since the 80s, Lafler continues to make great use of the periodical format. He describes the contents of this series in a text feature at the end as "reportage, satire, self-discovery, and surreal fantasy". In other words, it's Lafler as usual. Even his truly crazy series like Dog Boy that were essentially excuses for his id and subconscious to go on a walk together still had elements of political content, autobiography and social commentary. For Lafler, it all goes hand-in-hand, and no one element is more important than the other. That said, his fantastical elements have certainly always stood out, and this series is no exception. The story is about a family of ex-pats moving to the remote, historical city of Oaxaca in Mexico. Along the way, the father, Max, hooks up with a group of local musicians (much like Lafler) and starts having conversations with Death. Death is a musician who jams with him and reveals that he had been here before in a past life.

Meanwhile, Gertie (Max's wife), dons lucha libre tights and decides to fight crime. A friend of theirs is revealed to be an ancient vampire who was Max's father and Gertie's husband in a past life. Along the way, Lafler provides a loving look at the sights and smells of the city, gently mocks ex-pat culture, and generally rambles his way through the issue with episodic little vignettes. Lafler is in no hurry to get anywhere, as scenes in markets and with musicians jamming having a languid quality. At the same time, the issue feels packed, thanks to the weird images and rubbery art that's Lafler's trademark. Lafler's drawing fundamentals are rock solid, especially with regard to anatomy, body language and gesture. That allows him to loosen up his figures, sometimes going dramatic with the occasional use of hatching and detailed, decorative features on the story's more supernatural elements. Lafler's character design looks a lot like Steve Ditko's, especially in the confidence he evinces in the odd and slightly ugly nature of many of his characters. In Lafler's eyes, the world is beautiful just as it is and doesn't need any sort of idealistic sheen being added to it.

Mimi And The Wolves,Act I by Alabaster. I was introduced to Alabaster's work in The Complete Talamaroo, which highlighted the essential frisson in her comics. That is, her delicate line and ultra-cute character design are simply the facade for a much darker, weirder world where sex and/or violence can spring at the reader on a moment's notice. Consider the first few pages of this comic: we see the faces of the characters, and they're all adorably stubby-looking. Even we we meet a spooky figure in the woods, it's more pleasantly eerie than anything else. When we meet the titular Mimi (a sort of cat girl), she's busily gathering flowers with which to make garlands. She then goes off with her self-described mate Bobo (a little dog man), they go to work on the farm of friends and later go into town. It's a little jarring when the characters undress at the end of the day given Alabaster's style, but that should be the reader's first clue. This isn't a fairy tale, but rather a world that's quite real for the characters involved, and they act as anyone might. After that pleasant day, Mimi has a nightmare with some grotesque, violent and sexual imagery out of an Eamon Espey comic--and it turns out this is a recurring nightmare.

Things get more intricate and complicated, as the story takes on feminist undertones given the reactionary and controlling actions of Bobo when she starts to explore her dream and meets up with wolves who claim to worship the woman that Mimi sees in her dreams. When Mimi and Bobo break up at the end of this first chapter, she essentially cuts off her last tether to society as she knows it--and she says "I feel free." That said, the wolves seem to be on the up-and-up, but it's clear that they're not telling her everything. This comic is all about the freedom to explore one's true self and how that sometimes leads to uncomfortable and unpleasant conversations and confrontations. Alabaster creates a world that's bursting with life, with each page cluttered in all the right ways. She's careful to leave a lot of negative space in each panel so as not to get in the way of her storytelling, but the small panels and lack of gutter space between them is a strategy that allows her to use a lot of quiet moments at a fast pace.

A Notable Kickstarter: Steve Lafler

Steve Lafler has long been one of my favorite cartoonists. However, I also happen to own three of his paintings, which are every bit as lively and witty as his comics are. He's doing a modest kickstarter to fund a book of his paintings of daily life in Oaxaca, and there are some incredible rewards for reasonable donations. Check it out at this link.

New Versions of Old Books: Steinke, Bagge, Lafler

Let's take a look at some new collections and volumes of comics that I reviewed in their previous forms.

Big Plans: The Collected Mini-Comics and More, by Aron Nels Steinke. I reviewed the bulk of the contents of this book here and here. This collection of Steinke's early work looks great in this collection, especially his more recent stories. The earliest work looks a lot more uneven, especially in terms of the character design. The static nature of his storytelling also continues to be a distraction at times. Later in the book, Steinke makes his style work for him, incorporating beautiful and detail-oriented drawings to accentuate elements of the story in an unobtrusive way. Steinke presents himself as a figure in a permanent sense of agitation in this book, even more than he expresses anger. Indeed, he frequently holds in his anger until long after the object of his fury is out of sight and earshot. Steinke's use of interstitial pieces from short stories effectively serves to give some breathing room to the other pieces, especially since they tend to be his funnier works.All told, this book just feels like a dedicated cartoonist's first book: filled with enthusiasm, errors and a clear path of development and evolution made in public. His more recent comics about teaching really seem to be the right path for him, as he's able to merge his childlike exuberance with an adult's sense of responsibility and duty. When he collects those strips, I think we'll begin to see the fully mature phase of Steinke's career.

Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me, by Peter Bagge. In my review of the first edition of Bagge's political strips from Reason magazine, I noted that the longer pieces were more thoughtful and interesting than some of the shorter and punchier single-page strips that lacked the even-handedness of the longer stories. In this revised edition, Bagge dropped a few of those shorter strips in favor of adding longer stories, and the result is an even stronger book. Bagge is a libertarian in terms of philosophy, but is quite willing to take on Libertarian party points of view. While many think of libertarians as being gun nuts or obsessed with legalizing drugs (two points of view that show how libertarians dip into both right and left-wing ideas), Bagge's story "Brown Peril" highlights another important libertarian ideal: free and unimpeded immigration. Bagge actually does the work of a reporter and goes on the scene to political events, in this case a hispanic, pro-immigration march in Seattle. Using his quick, merciless wit, Bagge skewers those who are opposed to free immigration and reveals it as another form of othering. "Shenanigans" sees Bagge talk about the ways in which the oldest trick in politics (intimidating voters at the voting booth) was in display in Seattle when the Republican party had a schism between the old-school Mitt Romney supporters and the younger Ron Paul backers. Bagge was diligent in writing about how the backers of the other GOP candidates were in on the freeze-out at first, until they realized the Romney camp pulled a double-cross on them. Bagge really lifts the lid on the garbage pail of politics here, revealing it to be every bit as petty as one might suspect.

On a different note, I thought "Caged Warmth" was amazing. Bagge assisted a group of women in a minimum-security prison stage a musical performance by helping out with the art. The stories he tells are heart-breaking, especially when he relates his own emotions upon hearing the spoken-word testimony of one woman whose drug addiction drove a wedge between her and her children. Bagge still manages to highlight the humor of the situation while skewering his own sense of guilt in not being able to help these women, who are desperate for a letter of recommendation, a job, anything, once they are released.

The best new story t is "I.M.P.", a short biography of maverick critic and writer Isabel Mary Paterson, whose ferocity and wit made her the terror of the New York literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s. At one point a friend of Ayn Rand and a woman who was constantly amazed by the rise of technology as a way of man establishing its dominance over nature and fate, Paterson was an entirely independent thinker who owed no allegiance to any political party or system. Bagge manages to capture the essence of the historical literary figures mentioned while still maintaining his exaggerated, curvy and rubbery line and smart-ass sense of delivery. Bagge also has a knack for writing with affection about those he admires while presenting them warts 'n all. Wrapping things up with a funny strip about his relationship with Ayn Rand's works, this new edition from Fantagraphics is tremendously satisfying, even if (and perhaps especially) if one is at odds with Bagge's political beliefs.

Menage a Bughouse, by Steve Lafler. Steve Lafler was one of my earliest subjects for High-Low some years back, as I took an extended look at his Bughouse trilogy. Comparing the small print size of those comics with some of the original pages published in his Buzzard anthology, it was obvious that the Top Shelf editions looked cramped and small by comparison. This latest collection of all the Bughouse comics finally restores the series to a size that befits Lafler's character design and trippy detail. This was one of my favorite comics of the last fifteen years and a fine synthesis of Lafler's explorations into psychedelia, pulp storytelling, the world of music and the act of creation itself. It's jammed full of excellent drawing, memorable characters and a lively, joyful storytelling tone.

Sequart Reprints: Steve Lafler's Musical Comics

Steve Martin once noted that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture." It's difficult to make interesting statements about music without losing hold of the essence of the art itself. It's even more difficult to do so with only the written word, without the benefit of sound. It's tempting to devolve into using musical jargon in an effort to describe the music, or to recite biographical anecdotes in order to make sense of the musician's place in their world, but both seem inadequate to the task of conveying the feel of experiencing the music as a phenomenon and getting to the heart of what it is to be a musician.

Steve Lafler is a cartoonist who manages to get at both in his series of fictional jazz comics, Bughouse, Baja and Scalawag (all from Top Shelf Productions (c 2000, 2002 and 2005, respectively). Lafler is a longtime professional who was best known for his fractured, trippy comics in his Dog Boy series and later as an editor and contributor for the Buzzard anthology. Many of his comics were completely improvised, which gave them a loose and free quality that later allowed him to effectively portray musical improvisation. The problem with some of these stories was that they meandered too much, with no plot to hold the stories together. There also wasn't much in the way of characterization, since these comics journeys were pretty much reflections of things going on in his own head.

This all changed when Lafler started work on his first Bughouse short story and began publishing individual issues. When his work was picked up by Top Shelf, he received the editorial guidance needed to tighten up and organize his stories a bit more, and the results of this collaboration have been spectacular.

The books are the story of sax player Jimmy Watts and the rise of his bop combo Bughouse. Lafler employs a number of devices to make this more than a straight-ahead narrative about some musicians. First off, he made the decision to draw all of the characters as anthropormorphic insects. This was a key move, because this adds a fictive layer necessary not for distancing the audience from the characters, but rather to provide a slightly fantastic context for some of Lafler's more unusual narrative moves. One might call aspects of the story magical realism, and the fact that the reader can accept the characters as bugs makes accepting other aspects of the story much easier. The second major device Lafler uses is a time and narrative fractioning. The story begins with the death of a major character, zips back to the beginning with Jimmy Watts as a child, and frequently takes side trips to the future, where we meet Jimmy's child (who has become a member of the band) and grandchild.

With the audience already accustomed to expecting the unexpected, Lafler throws in visions, hallucinations, magic, time distortion, doppelgangers and other weirdness that is all firmly rooted in the narrative, yet has a profound effect on each character. Every hallucination is very real in its own way, and these jarring scenes are some of the emotional highlights of the books.

One of Lafler's main themes is addiction and how creative people are often susceptible to it. Lafler creates "Bug Juice" as a stand-in for heroin or any other drug of choice that can take over lives. His treatment of drug use and drug users is cautionary but sympathetic. This is no BIRD (the Clint Eastwood film about Charlie Parker), where the central theme is a simple "drugs are bad", but rather an honest look at both the allure and pitfalls of substance abuse.

All of these choices are matched with Lafler's art style, which can be described as both tight and loose. His understanding and portrayal of anatomy and motion are impeccable, but there's a loose and rubbery quality to his figures that makes the hallucinations fit right into the narrative flow. His character design is another highlight, as he manages to invest each character with their own unique look apart from being an insect. In a book where the plot is very light, Lafler succeeds in making the reader invest in each character, whatever their foibles may be.

The first book begins with a look at young Jimmy Watts, who at a very young age has an advanced understanding of what he one day might become. An early theme of the book is the relationship between religion and music, as Jimmy slowly starts to evolve away from his Catholic upbringing. He does initially describe himself as an "ecstatic loonie, a bonafide Catholic subspecies...from which are drawn saints, poets and heretics". His best friend and partner-in-crime is Slim Watkins, a piano player and city boy who is Jimmy's college roommate. Slim is the cynical counterpart to Jimmy's early small-town naivete, but the two quickly understand how well they work together in every aspect of life.

Jimmy has an ecstatic vision (based on a drug experience that Lafler experienced) that separates him from his need for religion, because he understands that "with music, I can unhinge time, subvert ego" of both himself and his audience. He decides he needs to start a band, because "musicians are like priests...we provide ritual" and "[create] the world from scratch every night." Hence the power of improvisation.

Jimmy and Slim eventually wind up joining Buggy Eckstone's bop group, one of the most famous combos in the city. They are quickly thrown out for dabbling in bug juice, but Jimmy bounces back to form his own combo with drummer Ralph Rojas and his protege "Bones", a standup bassist. Getting high inbetween sets, Jimmy is confronted by a future version of himself who reveals that his gift is "music that speaks the language of joy without words" but also notes that he was well on his way to becoming an addict.

When Lafler concentrates on the music and the characters, the book shines. When he starts to become bogged down in a melodramatic plot (there's an extended bit where Jimmy gets shot by a drug dealer, with various one-dimensional cops and low-lifes coming into the picture), the picture gets fuzzier. Fortunately, Lafler quickly turns away from such problems by simply fast-forwarding a bit to a future tour and an intriguing set of encounters between Jimmy's band and a blues group led by a thinly-disguised Muddy Waters character named McKinley. The camaraderie of a band and life on the road is the focus of the latter half of Bughouse, particularly the relationship between Jimmy and Slim and their "ongoing musical conversation."

Lafler's second book, Baja, jumps ahead in time a few years. Through a series of plot contrivances, Bones is forced to hide out in Mexico to avoid a phony drug charge. Lafler was inspired by his time spent in Mexico to craft a magical realist tale about Bones falling in with a latin R&B combo and falling in love with a young woman who may or may not be a bruja (witch). Bones is not nearly as powerful a personality as his bandmates, but that very innate sweetness makes him a perfect character to react to the weirdness surrounding him--particularly in the way he's able to accept it.

Lafler's third book, Scalawag, jumps back in time to Bughouse's encounter with McKinley's band, and the decisions that Ralph has to make. Normally the most level-headed member of the group, he too has to go through a series of bad decisions before righting himself. The second segment of the book focuses on Julie, Jimmy's wife, co-manager of the band and one of the driving forces of the book. An interesting side angle to Jimmy's story is the way he depends on others for his basic day-to-day survival, especially when he was an addict. The third segment of the book concentrates on Dennis, the newest member of the band, who is not what he seems.

Lafler veers into some weird territory here, with angelic avatars following around the band, Julie meeting up with a deceased member of the band in some kind of afterworld library, and a doppelganger of Dennis tormenting him at every turn. There's a beautiful page where the dead band member is seen climbing away into the afterlife on a ladder of notes played by the band in his honor. Dennis' story is the weirdest of the series, as he's manipulated by a cartoonist in a town the band's playing in and is confronted by mistake after mistake as the facade he presented crumbles away.

Lafler's wild visual imagination is key to making the musical sequences work. The looseness of the characters allows him to get across the frenetic soloing. For songs like "Big Cats, Dancing Cats", Lafler draws in some loony-looking felines coming out of instruments. At one point, instead of the standard musical notes emanating from Jimmy's horn, we instead see "$!?" and a cross, reflecting Jimmy's thoughts. Lafler's sense of pacing is what makes the scenes work so well. The reader is never bored or confused by the performances, but rather intrigued by what's going on in the minds of the musicians. When they deliberately and playfully try to trip each other up musically on stage, it's a reflection of that "ongoing musical conversation" that binds them together.

The Bughouse saga reflects an artist at the height of his own powers who has gone through the same struggles that his characters have encountered. The reader is able to empathize with the bandmates because they while they all get the warts 'n all treatment, they are handled with so much affection. At 300+ pages and counting, it's obvious that Lafler still has quite a bit more to say about his Bugtown combo, and it will be interesting to see where he goes next. Every character has had their moment in the sun, and Lafler has come close to exhausting his main themes: addiction, friendship, performance & creation and how they all interrelate. The one thread that hasn't yet been finished is how and when Jimmy Watts finally grows up, and what role his becoming a father has in this process. Hopefully Lafler can take his group in some unexpected directions.

Sequart Reprints: Tranny and 40 Hour Man

Steve Lafler, artist of the BUGHOUSE series of graphic novels that are among my favorite comics, just self-published an intriguing collection. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I published an excerpt of one of the stories ("Cat Suit") in Other magazine, for which I am the comics editor. Of course, I wouldn't have published it if I didn't think it was a hilarious, bizarre story--just what one would expect from Lafler. Lafler's new collection, TRANNY examines, celebrates and explores the world of cross-dressing from a very personal point of view.

Indeed, Lafler's cross-dressing alter-ego is named "Fiona Mallratte". In the first story, "Drunken Lady", Lafler details the origins of his interest of dressing in women's clothing from the time he was child, then fast-forwards into some excerpts from his "The $99 Drag Makeover", a hilarious yet practical guide for cheap cross-dressers who still want to look fab. This story was the first time he talked about the connection between being a transvestite and having a secret identity like a superhero. The effect is literally transformative, where having this different persona becomes an entirely different way of looking at the world. The superhero conceit is then carried to its obvious conclusion in "Stupergal's Slave, Jimmie Ogler", a parody where Jimmie is as interested in Stupergal's outfits as he is in her. The bit where he's angry that she doesn't have a pair of "spike heel booties" is particularly amusing. "Halloween Mashup" is pretty much more of the same, this time substituting Halloween and monstrous transformations for the cross-dressing urge.

"Cat Suit" is the collection's best story, and one of my favorite-ever Lafler stories. It's a mash-up of Lafler's various interests, as we follow the cat-suited Manx around town. He's a bored, rich guy who puts on a cat suit as a way to alleviate his boredom and help him figure out what he wants to do with himself. Lafler then takes a left turn into his metaphysical ideas, as Manx realizes what he wants to do is publish a book about his theories about time, that all moments are the same moment. The story is classic Lafler, going back to his old Dog Boy stories. The story rambles on pleasantly, as Manx meets a sexy woman at a club, smokes dope, joins a homeless man in a street band, grapples with an amorous but vicious psychotherapist, shoots a waiter in the head with a Drano-tipped dart, and smokes dope. The whole story is a play on the fetishistic power of transformation and otherness that wearing the suit brings, as Lafler makes a connection between cross-dressing and the appeal of superheroes.

It's all done very playfully, as is the entire book. Lafler's purpose isn't a heavy-handed treatise on cross-dressing or being trans, but rather a light-hearted look at a way of life that's obviously been enormously beneficial and liberating for him. Lafler has always had a very elastic view on reality, and this looseness plays out on his comics pages. As he's matured as an artist, he's tightened up his imagination on the page a bit into something with more narrative coherence, but he still retains his essential free-flowing spontaneity in what he draws. There's a sense of great joy in Lafler's line, one that draws in the reader's eye and follows it wherever it may go.

*********

How do you measure someone's worth? In a society where one's career is supposed to define one's self, what does this mean for the millions who work minimum-wage, soul-crushing jobs? Even for those who work to support whatever it is they really want to be doing (not uncommon in the comics industry), how does one come to terms with those 40+ hours where we don't get to do what we want? Stephen Beaupre and Steve Lafler's answer is to laugh to keep from going insane in 40 HOUR MAN.
Back in 1990, writer/poet Beaupre and writer/artist Lafler began an anthology called BUZZARD, which more or less took up a role not unlike the classic anthology WEIRDO. That anthology was created by Robert Crumb and later edited by Peter Bagge and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Its title said it all: Crumb liked publishing the unusual, often outsider art, continuing in the vein of the underground movement that he helped to create. Beaupre & Lafler were clearly working in the same continuum, though they also weren't afraid to get overtly political. Their anthology was completely unpredictable, publishing the likes of Gerald Jablonski, Joe Sacco, Mary Fleener, Julie Doucet, Phoebe Gloeckner, JR Williams, Mario Hernandez, Lloyd Dangle Tom Tomorrow and many more. The editorial duo also published a number of their own stories. Lafler's BUGHOUSE graphic novels started here, and the duo collaborated on an early serial called "Duck and Cover".

In BUZZARD #7, they teamed up for "Almost Chinese". There were four panels a page, but instead of a standard comics panel featuring dialogue, there was a text box running above it. Some of the panels had dialogue that was directly illustrative of the narration. It was somewhere between a comic and illustrated text.

With BUZZARD #8, Beaupre and Lafler repeated the formula by beginning "40 Hour Man". The hook is simple and powerful: Beaupre recounts every single one of his jobs, starting from his teenage years in the 70's up until the end of the dot-com bust. Beaupre's slangy prose is perfect for pointing out the absurdity of each job he happens to wind up in. He's both blessed and cursed by having a brain: he understands the tediousness of each job and hates it, but at the same time can't quite play the corporate game either. In every job, he found as many ways as possible to goof off, get drunk or high on the job and otherwise have fun inbetween the drudgework. Despite these diversions, one can sense a certain desperation slipping through the cracks of his humorous narrative. "40 Hour Man" ran until the series ended with #20 in 1998, but the story itself wasn't quite done.

The authors finished the story and are publishing the compiled result through Lafler's own Manx Media. The images were blown up a bit, with one panel per page. The result is a page-turning experiences that compels the reader to race through it. Beaupre starts with teenage jobs like stockboy (fired for "basic incompetence"), dishwasher, maintenance man, etc. Then things get weird, with trying to maintain a putt-putt golf course run by a poodle-obsessed woman and her hard-drinking husband. Part of the job involved driving around the beach town he was in and trying to drum up business by shouting into a loudspeaker. Growing quickly bored of his script, he instead started ranting about whatever came to mind. This becomes a constant theme: Beaupre is quite willing to pretend to be a diligent employee to get a job, but simply doesn't care enough about the job to stop him from amusing himself by whatever means are at hand. The threat of the axe, especially as a younger man, was simply not a deterrent.

There's a panel later in the book when Beaupre is working as a cook in a nursing home where he has a smoke and tries to "imagine what it would be like to have a job that I actually liked." But he can "only imagine the same paper hat and milk crate". After being told to learn to work slower after he finished his chores, he quit. Later, he gets a job as a security job, and finds that "doing nothing might be more work than doing something". Bits of his life outside of work slip in, as he recounts when one mysterious phrase he espies at a job inspires a song for his band; or when he mentions meeting a woman after losing a job inspired by his aspirations as a poet. His time as a late-shift security guard found him musing about the daily life of those who worked in cubicles.

First and foremost, though, this book is funny. After getting hired at a steakhouse when he lost the stockboy job, he notes "Somehow I had managed to take my burgeoning flair for incompetence and move it two hundred yards to the left". Describing the poodle-obsessed wife of the putt-putt owner and their house, he observed "Chez Whoopie looked perfectly normal from the outside. But inside it was pure David Lynch deleted scene." While living in his run-down college dorm, he "awoke to a commotion outside my room. When I opened the door, I witnessed my fellow residents, armed with hockey sticks, chasing rats down the hall. This was the extent of Graham's sports program." Going through the types of employees at one of his job, he described one job that needed attention to detail. "But that was hard to come by. So instead they settled for chain-smoking, hard drinkin' women in their late fifties with silver hair."

Probably the funniest section of the book is the "Rock Star Petting Zoo" chapter, detailing his days working in a record store. The best bit is when his store is tapped to host an in-store appearance by none other than the Village People, at the height of their popularity. They turn out to be jerks, even whining about the pens they were using. In general, Beaupre loved the job until he was somehow promoted to assistant manager. Another subtheme throughout the book was the hindsight that whenever he happened to be happy in a job, it was doomed to end sooner rather than later.
Eventually, he wound up in "cube land", where not only could he no longer say what was on his mind (he once said "Fuck you" to one of his direct supervisors when she made absurd demands on him), everyone around him was deliberately using management-pleasing buzzwords in a desperate attempt to move up the corporate ladder. Eventually, the company starts hemorraging cash and he's downsized. He then winds up working for a dot-com, during the height of that insane era. That ends predictably, but it still gets to him as "over three decades of employment leading up to this one solitary impossibly-dumb moment. Is that all there is?"

Beaupre doesn't pretend that there's some greater overarching meaning to his work life. He tried to have as much fun as he could and his breezy writing style captured those extreme moments that fueled his story. Bad jobs, moronic bosses, mind-deadening tasks, insane coworkers all wound up as raw material for his narrative. The secret ingredients that prevent this from devolving into Dilbert are Beaupre's take on autobiography and the rubbery art of Lafler. Beaupre credits Harvey Pekar, the master of mining gold out of life's little moments. Pekar wrote a number of stories revolving around his workplace at the VA hospital in Cleveland, and Beaupre similarly found plenty of inspiration from the oddballs he met over the years. The main difference is that Beaupre was actively trying to play it for laughs, and that's where Lafler helped him. Lafler credited the genius of Harvey Kurtzman as his wellspring, with the creator of MAD's skewed and irreverent way of looking at the world. In particular, he was inspired by Kurtzman's constant assault on society's institutions. While this book has an undercurrent of personal desperation, it's also a polemic against the culture of capitalism and the American dream. But like with Kurtzman's MAD, it's a polemic that goes down smoothly, bending minds and bringing laughs.

Excellent Kickstarters:Steve Lafler and Dennis Eichorn

There are a couple of Kickstarter fundraisers that I really want to heartily recommend. First up is a collection of Steve Lafler's underground comics series Dog Boy, titled Doggie Style. The fundraiser is designed to build up some stock to sell ahead of print-on-demand. This is free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness weirdness with all sorts of crazy gags and scenarios.

The second is a Kickstarter by Tom Van Deusen, who will be publishing two issues of Real Good Stuff. This is all-new material written by Dennis Eichorn, whose 90s series Real Stuff was one of the premier venues for excellent and outrageous autobio stories with art by the cream of the alt-comics set. The art for the new comics will be done by a mix of new and old artists, including Jim Blanchard, Max Clotfelter, Mary Fleener, Sean Hurley, Aaron Lange, Pat Moriarity, Tom Van Deusen, and Noah Van Sciver. This has made its goal, but its stretch goals are still in play, with some interesting new rewards.

Plug Time: Bourdeaux, Aushenker, S.Toth, Standfest, Espey

A few requests for project publicity have come my way, so I thought I'd run a little clearing-house here.

First, cartoonist pal Michael Aushenker is working on the comics end of an overall revival of The Human Fly. Billed as "The Wildest Super-Hero Ever -- Because he's REAL!", the Human Fly was a costumed 70s daredevil who had a short-lived Marvel Comics series. There's going to be a movie based on his life as well as the comic. This is about as obscure a 70s revival I can imagine, but the premise is so agreeably strange (as was the 70s Marvel Comic, written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Golden Age legend Lee Elias) that I can't wait to see what it looks like.

This isn't strictly comics, but I was enormously excited to have received a bag of cookies from the Golden Age Bakery in Chapel Hill, NC from a friend. It's starting to make the rounds that baker Sylvia Toth is creating cookies containing panels from public domain golden Age comics, including a batch that's nothing but Fletcher Hanks' Stardust the Super-Wizard. Toth recently quit her day job to bake cookies full time, and they are delicious and beautiful.

Ryan Standfest has just opened a Kickstarter fund for his second issue of Black Eye, his intriguing comics/essay publication dealing with satire and black humor. This issue will feature comics from Michael DeForge, S.Gross, Ben Marra, Brecht Evens and many more. The first volume was excellent and ambitious, so I'll be curious to see how Standfest refines his ideas for #2.

I haven't yet had a chance to review it in full, but the puppet show adaptation of Eamon Espey's Songs Of The Abyss looks fascinating. Espey and his wife, Lisa Krause, co-created the show. Check out details and a schedule here.

My old pal Steve Lafler has a video up about his Dog Boy series and its recent revival on the web: 

Finally, I wanted to point readers to the fine job Robyn Chapman did collecting Ariel Bourdeaux's Deep Girl series. Full disclosure: I interviewed Ariel for this book.That said, I recommend her comics unreservedly.

Help Fund Steve Lafler's Tour

Steve Lafler is going on tour to promote Menage a Bughouse, his new collection of the three superb Bughouse books originally published by Top Shelf. In the interest of full disclosure, I will be appearing at one of his stops to do a panel with Steve and Austin English, at MOCCA in New York on July 12th. Since he's using Indiegogo, he will receive all funds donated.  Take a look at his website, and please donate if you are so inclined.

Another Worthy Kickstarter Project

Anyone who's read the various iterations of my column over the years knows how much I admire the work of Steve Lafler. As such, I wanted to let folks know that he's started a Kickstarter fund to offset the costs of printing. For larger donations, one can get a Lafler original painting, which is a great inducement considering how fun his paintings are. Here's a link to my review of the book.

10 artists to seek out at SPX 2002

(This article was originaly published in Savant, in advance of SPX 2002, and is being archived here.)

The Small Press Expo (SPX) will be upon us in just a week, and the con has grown so large that it will be moving in 2003. Yes, this will be the last year possible to experience SPX "the way it used to be" before it merges with the more mainstream Baltimore Comicon and leaves the charming Bethesda area. Whatever its flaws, it still stands as the single most important gathering of the small press, its fans and those who choose to study it, thanks especially to the International Comics Arts Festival (ICAF) that takes place alongside it. ICAF almost always brings in interesting European artists and holds interesting crossover events with SPX itself. This year's SPX has its usual impressive array of well-known artists, with first-timers including Art Spiegelman, and Los Bros. Hernandez.

The complete list of attendees is staggering, with nearly 160 tables in four different rooms. A reasonably educated fan of alternative comics will know to seek out big names like Spiegelman, Bryan Talbot, the Hernandezes, etc.; but with the dizzying array of choices, one might well overlook some very worthy artists. The list I present contains a number of names that I feel don't get enough notice, even within the alternative community press. The list rather eclectic one, with a few artists who have been in the businessfor years and some who aren't even old enough to buy alcohol yet. Some work for major companies like Fantagraphics and Top Shelf, while others are self-published. There are humorists, historians, formal innovators, skilled storytellers and those whose work has difficulty fitting into any category. While not all may be for every taste, every one of them deserves your attention--and all of them will have tables at SPX. They are presented here in alphabetical order, with links to their websites where applicable.

** Sean Bieri: He is a longtime and quite accomplished creator of minicomics and part of a thriving Detroit-area scene that loves minis for their own sake and doesn't view them as a stepping-stone to something else. Like his friend Matt Feazell, Bieri excels at humor, though his style couldn't be more different. New readers will want to pick up his minicomic collection JUMBO JAPE. His full range of styles and clever wordplay are on display here. Bieri is a skilled mimic who knows how to parody with particularly trenchant punchlines in mind. His two best features are "Jesus The Savior Man", a hilarious series of strips that crosses the Popeye characters from EC Segar's THIMBLE THEATRE with the Gospels. What is especially impressive here is a complete mastery of the Gospel stories of Christ as well as an uncanny rendering of Segar's thin lines. Almost as funny is "Good Ol' Conan The Barbarian", a mixture of Conan and PEANUTS.

Bieri's art style can vary from project to project, though his defacto style is somewhat loose and cartoony, much like Terry LaBan. Unlike LaBan, he doesn't go for long narratives, instead preferring parodies (like the two mentioned above or a SIN CITY take-off set in a dentist's office) or mixing a sight gag with a punchline. Not all of his gags work well as comics, or rather, they work effectively as just jokes. (His "Worse Than Hitler" strip is a good example.) Bieri also throws in the odd personal observation or two, which can be amusing but rarely as funny as his other material.

Bieri frequently takes full advantage of the DIY possibilities that minicomics can offer. He's done comics with hand-silkscreens, hand-constructed and decorated covers and has experimented with size and format. In his hands, the minicomic form isn't just a comics starter set, but a legitimate means of expression in its own right with its own special rewards. The biggest drawback is low print runs and circulation, which makes shows like SPX so crucial in getting a good understandings of what's out there. Bieri isn't just a punchline man, as he did a mini contrasting the lives of Gertrude Stein and Kiki (a wild woman of the night) in 1920's Paris. Another clever comic is a tongue-in-cheek listing of some Nazi aircraft that didn't quite get off the ground, with hilarious manglings of the German language.

I wouldn't say that Bieri is a unique talent or trailblazing innovator, but rather is a skilled craftsman who brings a high level of imagination, care and energy to his work. Humor is a difficult thing to bring off well, especially when working within a certain tradition, and this is what Bieri does best. I would start with JUMBO JAPE and then just get one of everything if you really dig it. JUMBO JAPE was nominated for a 2001 Ignatz and richly deserved it.


** Paul Hornschemeier: One of the most interesting and aggressively experimentative of the group I call the "neo-formalists." They are artists, often with animation backgrounds, that are interested in what makes comics tick, take them apart, stretch them to their limits and take risks. Many of them are not coherent in terms of narrative structure, often by design. Some of them have clearly been inspired by Chris Ware in terms of their fascination with form and its possibilities of getting across emotion, but many of them seem to have come from outer space. On this list, I have included two, Hornschemeier and Dash Shaw (see below). Including both reveals the range of what is possible in exploring these aspects of comics.

Hornschemeier, like Kevin Huizenga, has dutifully self-published for quite some time in an effort to improve as an artist. He's also clearly invested a great deal of money in getting the best possible productions values for his work, so as to fully realize his vision of what he wants it to look like. Those of you who associate minicomics and/or self-published work with cheaply-printed scrawls on typing paper will faint when you see his SEQUENTIAL #7.

His interests as a storyteller are all over the map. A lot of his comics are funny, but with a long cruel streak intrinsic to them. His ideas have gotten bolder and more fully realized as he's evolved and had a better idea of exactly what he wanted to do. After doing a broad range of interesting but unremarkable stories in minicomics format in issues 1-4, he switched to a tabloid format that was as much a comics criticism publication as it was a comic, featuring an interview with Dan Clowes among other things. This was possibly his least successful effort, as it really seemed that he didn't know what he wanted to do. Then came #6, which really made me sit up and pay attention to this work. In it, he has any number of funny but disturbing stories ("Too Many Monkeys" being an amusing Seuss tribute), but he also introduces several features that show his successful use of experimentation.

First there's "The Peculiar Mr Williams", which is an EC comics tribute of sorts, complete with a gruesome but funny ending. The odd thing is that the story never quite goes away, as the unfortunate title character is written about as a missing person by a local newspaper, and the writer of said paper often drifts off into writing melancholy snippets about life in general. Then there's "The Devil's Lonely Day." As we read it (a gorgeous grey-scaled, meticulously drawn strip), we notice that there seem to be pages missing...and that not only was this deliberate, but that the author hasn't drawn and doesn't know what will be on the other pages yet! An experiment drawn out of a dada tradition, to be sure. A continuing feature called "The Supression of William T Andrews" details the title character's struggle to accept his own sexuality, done in this issue in the form of a conversation with a "friend".

SEQUENTIAL #7 is his true masterwork to date: a slick, attractive package that fortunately is merited by the contents within. New episodes of "The Devil's Lonely Day" and "William T Andrews" may be found within (with the latter being the best episode yet of that feature), along with two other noteworthy features. The first, "Ex Falso Quodlibet", appears to be at least partially autobiographical. It's about an anthropormorphic fish who is having difficulty facing life in the absence of a loved one. The second, "Language Lessons", ironically ignores the lush production values of the issue and is comprised of variation of the sort of stick figures you would see on a "Safety Instructions" card. Hornschemeier even provides advice at the end of the issue for how he was able to print the issue.

FORLORN FUNNIES is his newest effort, a full color comic that has evoked more Ware comparisons than anything else, though it traverses some territory that is quite different. It's a story that's about characters, essentially--fictional characters. We start with a stereotypical villain from a western, complete with long moustache, who somehow walks off the set and past a lonely woman who goes up to her apartment to watch an animated show. The star of the show is fired, but escapes cancellation by magically jumping intoother shows, or worlds. The whole issue carries a dreamlike but desperate quality with it that requires rereading. Hornschemeier has deservedly gotten an Ignatz nomination for Outstanding Artist. He represents comics' true cutting edge, so if you want a challenging but fascinating read, I would strongly recommend SEQUENTIAL #6 and 7 as well as the first issue of FORLORN FUNNIES. Find out more at http://www.sequentialcomics.com/.

** Kevin Huizenga: Huizenga is one of the best exemplars of the concept that minicomics can provide a training ground for development for new artists. Tracing his improvement from issue to issue of his comic SUPERMONSTER is remarkable. The most recent edition, #14 (GLORIANA), is an amazing formal and narrative achievement that really should be required reading for any serious comics fan. Tom Spurgeon wrote an excellent article on him and this issue in particular that appeared in the Comics Journal #240, and I would urge interested readers to seek it out.

Huizenga's comics always carry a sort of gentle intelligence in the way they're written, and are formally exciting without flaunting their stylistic innovations for their own sake. While his comics are sometimes astonishing, there's a calculated lack of pyrotechnics in his stories. Huizenga's background in philosophy fuels his curiousity about the world, with the technique of phenomenology clearly at play in his art. Put simply, this is a method of observing the world where one looks at something understanding its context, removes it from its everyday, understood use...and then describes it. With Huizenga, we get pages of drawings of forested neighborhoods, parks, children, etc--drawn without judgment or particular moral value, other than a profound respect. The other major influence one can see at play is that of Asian paintings of a certain era. It's well known that certain of these paintings focused on landscapes and backgrounds--rarely would we find any people in them.

Huizenga does an entire issue of these sorts of drawings, done while walking around. In a later issue, he takes it a step further, actively mimicking these paintings while using as narrative the adoption papers of a child in China. At his heart, Huizenga is a comics guy, and draws from a number of inspirations. John Porcellino is an obvious one, from the top lists at the end of his earlier issues to the quiet, small bits of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical detail that we learn. Huizenga is also inspired by the loose, flowing line of early 20th century cartoonists, particularly Roy (WASH TUBBS) Crane. There are moments of humor here, though it's mostly gentle and rarely laugh-out-loud. They sometimes relate to his religious beliefs, which are clearly quite sincere and earnest but are never actively promoted in the comic. When asking "What Would Jesus Do" about having to run an ad offensive to zen, his imaginary Jesus almost obnoxiously points a finger and says, "I forgive you!" Kevin's character is annoyed because that advice had no relation to his dilemma, so he draws a flowsheet illustrating each of his options.

Supermonster #14 (subtitled "Gloriana Comics") has been nominated for Outstanding Minicomic. In an unusually strong field, I think that this was truly the best. At 100 pages, he throws in three stories that follow Glenn and Wendy Ganges. One is a story about Wendy at work, or rather, a particular stretch of time where every event happens at once. Then the two are at home and each imagines what their future unborn child will be like...except that time slows and accelerates without warning, with "real" time being replaced by a fantasy. The masterpiece is "The Sunset", where Glenn tells a friend about a sunset he saw. We the reader get to experience the full event, frame by frame, often out of order, of the sunset and even when his vision blurs. We get to see his thoughts and even fantasies of the notes from bird whistles wrestling with each other. It's a fascinating experiment in showing simultaneity. The last Glenn story has him trying to reassure a family that the earth isn't coming to an end despite the presence of a huge, blood-red moon--complete with astronomical diagrams!

Huizenga's talent really all came together with #14, but the other issues are quite worthwhile on their own. It does make me wonder where he's going next. I can see him continuing to publish beautiful minicomics, and I can also easily see him using a more standard format. But there's no polishing necessary in his work: it's fully realized and beautifully produced. See some of his strips online at http://usscatastrophe.com/kh/issues.html and drop by his table in the Versailles Room.

** Jason: Though he's represented by Fantagraphics, he's one artist that not everyone may be aware of yet...though they should be. Jason is a Norwegian who does a comic called MJAU MJAU (Norwegian for "Meow, Meow"). One story, called "Wait A Minute", was translated and published by Fantagraphics as "Hey, Wait..." It concerns two teenaged boys named Jon and Bjorn and their adventures over a particular summer, until a horrific event occurs that changes the tone and direction of the comic. To give away more specifics of the plot would be an injustice to the reader, but I will talk in more general terms about his work.

Jason's characters tend to be anthropomorphic, in this case dogs. That first layer of distance between reader and subject makes it easy for him to bend both time and reality. The story is rooted in the everyday details of summer that so many of us will recognize, yet its magical realist touches will fracture our expectations of what comes next. An early clue in how to read the comic comes when one of the boys, asked what time it is, replies "Summertime!" A period where time takes on a sudden flexibility, frequently whipping by at a furious pace, sometimes slowing to a crawl. It's important to approach each page as potentially both true and imaginary, as actual event or simple reminiscence. There are some really striking images here: a character sneezing and then changing into an adult in the next panel; a character noting that certain photographs seen by a friend are of him in fifteen years; the use of all-white and all-black panels. The book is deceptively simple to look at and yet symbolically complex; as such, it rewards many re-readings.

Meeting Jason will be a rare privilege for US audiences, especially as a new collection of his work from MJAU MJAU has just been released here, called SHHH! As the title implies, it's a wordless comic, drawn from considerably different themes from HEY, WAIT... Check out his style from his Norwegian publisher Jippi Forlag at http://www.jippicomics.com/english/index.html and see him at the Fantagraphics table.

** Megan Kelso: Despite her long association with Highwater Books, Megan Kelso remains one of the most underrated talents in the alt-comics scene. Part of the reason this is so is that her work simply hasn't been as visible as some of the other names on the Highwater roster. The only collection of hers currently in print, QUEEN OF THE BLACK BLACK, is an eccentric collection of stories, many of them delicate & intricate, and others a bit too ephemeral to take seriously. Her simple, breezy line has always been an attractive starting point, but she has now really found her voice through a series of minis (to eventually be collected) called ARTICHOKE TALES.

In fact, over the past year Kelso has hit a remarkable stride no matter where she's appeared. The problem is that she's mostly popped up in anthologies and in minis; until ARTICHOKE TALES is compiled, I fear she won't get the exposure she deserves. She had one of the best three strips in both the Winter and Summer editions of the COMICS JOURNAL SPECIAL, had one of the best strips in the zombie-themed BOGUS DEAD, and her surprisingly explicit version of her ARTICHOKE TALES characters in the erotica compilation DIRTY STORIES VOL III was one of the few stories that was arousing on an emotional level. And of course, a long chapter of ARTICHOKE TALES was one of the best things in the groundbreaking anthology/art object NON #5 that came out last summer.

ARTICHOKE TALES is her most notable achievement to date, and is unusual for alt-comics in that it has significant fantasy elements. I'm not talking about unicorns 'n' dragons type fantasy, but rather a fanciful setting and not-quite-human characters. Like all great fairy tales, AT at its heart examines humanity's higher aspirations and its grim realities. The characters in the story look human with the exception of their hair, which looks like artichoke leaves. This slight distancing of the characters from our reality makes it easier to fall into their world's mythology. It's a world where a village was once part of a war, where another community is still at war, and healing has yet to take place. A soldier separated from his company meets the granddaughter of an apothecary. A love story emerges, but not necessarily one with a happy ending. One of the key components of the series is the story within a story--the origins of various conflicts are told as myths or fairy tales themselves. And like true fairy tales, the stories often contain gruesome elements and rarely end happily.

Kelso's art perfectly complements her sparse narrative. The reader is provided with little information early on, and must rely on the clues her art provides. The essential lightness of her style contrasts well with the often grim story; the entire story is about forcing contradictions upon the reader to figure out and making the reader work to decipher what's below an often still surface. This conflict is never heavy-handed because the art is always in service to the story and never exaggerated. As stories are told within stories, the art for those sections grows cruder and more iconic, reflecting a more simple abstraction from the world.

Essentially, anything that Kelso's put out in the last year or so is pure gold. We are seeing an artist fully realize her potential, and it's an exciting journey to watch. She'll have a new chapter of AT available at SPX, along with the first two chapters. Check out her website as well at http://www.girlhero.com/. Kelso is up for four Ignatz Awards at SPX, and this honor is well-deserved.

** John Kerschbaum: Kerschbaum's gags seem cute and innocuous until you dig a little deeper and notice with horror the real punchline of some of his strips. His comics owe little to anyone and often make the reader work for the punchline. I am delighted that he received two Ignatz nominations, because he deserves both the recognition and the publicity. Kerschbaum matches a solid level of detail in his backgrounds with more iconic characters that thrusts the focus of his strips on what they do. The background detail often dominates the reader's focus in a strip's early panels as we're trying to figure out what's going on--he always starts subtly. Oftentimes, he will quickly derail a story and go way over the top to deliver a punchline.
A good example is a woman who comes home, makes dinner and settles in on her couch to watch TV under a blanket. A weird look of discomfort appears on her face and she stands up, looking confused. We then see a pair of breasts on a hairy, sleeping man...and they're giggling. Looking back, we can see the woman was top-heavy and that when she stood up, she was flat as a board.

Some strips begin with a shock and then twist it and twist it beyond all recognition. One example is a story of a woman who comes home to find her husband having sex with an exact duplicate of himself. The two men try to convince the woman that she should stick with them...until one of them reveals that he's not human at all, but a gigantic beetle in human disguise. The way that one ends is both hilarious and unsettling.

Kerschbaum will go for the gross-out, but only in the service of an actual joke--it's never gross for its own sake. More disturbing than any gross-out is the relentless (but hilarious) nihilism of his comics--he's incredibly cruel to his characters. A strip where two dancing robots are separated, abused, stripped to spare parts and then "united" in the cruelest and most banal manner possible is both heartbreaking and funny. Another long strip retells the story of the city guy and country guy, both meeting the cruelest fates imaginable--and getting abused even worse after death.

Most of the following strips come from his 3-issue series, THE WIGGLY READER. Issue 2 of that series has one of the best covers of all time, which I will only describe as being a series of reimaginings of Abraham Lincoln, Mary Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. In some ways, his minicomics are even better than his other works. His latest, HOMECOMING, was nominated for an Ignatz. It's about salmon swimming upstream to mate--except that they're anthropomorphized into 1950's high school kids. His crowning achievement, however, is TIMBERDOODLE, a mini about an ordinary young man born with an enormous wooden cock. Every single panel dances with ingenious combinations of both verbal and visual jokes, and the final payoff is classic Kerschbaum: ambiguous and over-the-top. Kerschbaum does put his minis online when they go out of print, and they're worth seeking out. Many of them are true art objects in their own right. Check out http://www.fontanellepress.com/ for more on this demented genius, and come see him in the Washington Room, table 2.

** Steve Lafler: Lafler's been in the business for over twenty years, self-publishing his own series DOG BOY and co-editing the anthology BUZZARD. But it wasn't until he collected a series of stories called BUGHOUSE that everything seemed to really click for him. Lafler's comics have always relied on a sort of stream-of-consciousness inspiration, with storylines that alternated between overtly political rants, psychedelic journeys, and sexually charged explorations of his id. While interesting, not all of his experiments were equally successful or bore rereading. That changed when he started doing BUGHOUSE, which harnessed everything that made his work interesting into a gripping narrative.

Working with Top Shelf editor Chris Staros, he wove all of the disparate Bughouse vignettes into one story, writing new bits to connect the previously published chapters. The key to understanding and appreciating Lafler's work is that he has always valued improvisation as a creative device, making him an ideal candidate to write a story about improvisational jazz musicians. With Staros as editor, Lafler's story gained structure and organization, much like a good rhythm section holds down the bottom, allowing the soloist to shine. While there are any number of excellent Top Shelf artists I could recommend, I feel that Lafler has been the most overlooked considering the excellence of his work.

Describing BUGHOUSE is relatively straightforward: it's about a sax player named Jimmy Watts and his journey as a musician. We trace his development as a child to meeting musical partner Slim Watkins in music school in the big city. Watts is from the midwest while Watkins is a city slicker, but the two quickly form a tight musical bond. When the story takes place is somewhat vague, but it's at around the time when bebop was just being born. The two gig with a Duke Ellington stand-in named Buggy Eckstein before getting kicked out and starting their own group: Bughouse.

It's the twists that make this something to pay attention to. First, all of the characters are drawn as anthropormorphic insects. Like many artists who use this kind of tactic, it allows them to make reality just a little bit more fluid. Lafler uses this to maximum effect and he has to, because it can be so difficult to depict music in comics form. It works, partially because he occasionally adds little graphics to illustrate the songs, (like when Jimmy springs a number about cats) or when Jimmy hallucinates something associated with the music he's playing.

This brings up another aspect of the book: Lafler deals with addiction in relation to the creative process. The drug of choice for many of the musicians is something called "bug juice", which is really just a stand-in for any drug. Jimmy gets hooked on it by his girlfriend Julie after being convinced that every great jazz man needed it for inspiration, and struggles with it for much of his career. This struggle and the kind of shady characters he winds up dealing with as a result are a major source of the tension in the book.

But the heart of the book is the joy of the creative process and the camaraderie found in in collaboration. Lafler's fluid, expressive art and jaunty dialogue makes this a page-turner and simply a joy to read. I also strongly recommend BAJA, a follow-up to the original story concerning Jimmy's young bass player Bones and his adventures in Mexico while laying low from police attention. Anyone interested in music, the creative process or simply a good yarn should give this one a shot. Check out Lafler's website at http://stevelafler.com/ or the Top Shelf website at http://www.topshelfcomix.com/topshelf/index.html.

** Roger Langridge: A master gag cartoonist with the cleanest, purest line in all the land. Originally from New Zealand (which seems to have more interesting cartoonists per capita than most countries), Langridge now lives in England and has been cartooning for about 15 years. His work with his brother Andrew writing was published by Fantagraphics in their comics ART D'ECCO and later ZOOT. The latter was collected in a hilarious and demented edition called ZOOT SUITE and is a great introduction to Roger's clean and precise style.

Currently, Roger is publishing a series about an idiot clown called FRED THE CLOWN, a sort of catch-all character for his extremely expansive imagination. Langridge clearly has drawn inspiration from MAD, both in its pre and post Harvey Kurtzman incarnations. Before the current FRED series, he did a one shot that reimagined Fred throughout the history of comics, where Langridge drew him in the style of virtually every important cartoonist of the 20th century. Langridge is not especially concerned whether or not you get the reference or the joke--he truly is cartooning for his own pleasure and that's what sets his gags apart. His skill as a mimic is astonishing, able to pull off Winsor McKay, Robert Crumb and Jack Kirby with equal ease. In the regular Fred series, Langridge shows off his love of 20's era animation with strips that evoke the weird feel of that time. While it's his art that's the main attraction, both in terms of humor and in sheer beauty, Roger can also get off a dizzying array of absurd lines. Within a panel about how "the strip is made", the narrator says: "The final decision, however, is always made by Fred the Clown himself." Fred: "Fred like this one." Roger: "That's a bank statement, Fred." "Fred insist." Narrator: "It's a jolly good thing that Mister Langridge's bank statements are in fact quite hilarious!"

Langridge is coming in from England to attend the show and will have a new issue of FRED with him. With a gag-heavy and classical style, his work is better seen than described, and he fortunately has a website at http://www.hotelfred.com/ that has tons of current and older work. He also appears on the roster at www.moderntales.com.

** Ellen Lindner: Lindner is my prime example in the "one to watch" category. Her talents and interests have been all over the place in her short life, but her self-assuredness as an artist grows from project to project. A mixture of wild abandon, trenchant wit and erudite scholar, Lindner's comics are utterly idiosyncratic and difficult to pin down. Some of them in fact go nowhere but are interesting exercises, while others capture the essence of some experience. There's a great graphic novel in her that's dying to get out (and from what I hear, it's slowly in the works), but in the meantime I'll simply enjoy the steady stream of minis and zines that she produces.
Linder publishes a zine called LITTLE WHITE BIRD/MEGACOM, which I took a shine to initially because it reminded me so much of my own zine days. Some of the layout is crude and a lot of the pieces are fluff, but the interviews are fun and the pieces that Lindner contributed on music and city life are enjoyable. The other half of the zine is all comics, and their quality varies. Some of Lindner's early, more unfocused efforts can be seen in last year's edition, but one can note her progress as a storyteller and an artist in the more recent edition.

Of greater interest to me are her minis. I would begin with BLONDE ON BLONDES, #1 and 2. Lindner is absolutely all over the place, with straight autobio stuff (a strip about 9/11 that appeared in Dark Horse's anthology), more veiled autobio material, stories about high school all-girl rock bands, biographies, slice of life and surreal accounts of films. One can sense how eager she is to explore a number of genres, particularly those that haven't had a lot of attention in comics of late. Her story of a Catholic schoolgirl and her rock band nails smartass teenage angst. Another story dealing with a beatnik girl going to college in the 50's also shines with smart dialogue.

Her autobiographical and semiautobiographical material demands the most attention, however. Lindner's most interesting story may be "The Best Year of My Life" followed immediately by a story called "The Worst Year of My Life"--with both stories covering exactly the same period of time, a year spent in France. Lindner's own stories resonate because they are told as stories, not autobiography, and so escape the tedium and navel-gazing that so often plague that genre. Instead, real life sneaks into her interesting anecdotes. Another favorite strip is Lindner's character in therapy, with the therapist giving her some unusual instructions. Then there's a strip about about a hip elderly woman who looks like Ellen in about 40 years or so. Another mini, THE EGG MYSTERIOUS, details a film and discussion Linder saw in person, said film leaving her mouth agape.

Lindner uses a lot of thick, bold black lines. There's very little use of grey or crosshatching, nor much feathering. The results are unusual, with a realistic style where the characters all look very slightly grotesque or distorted. The result keeps the reader off balance, with the stories themselves coming from a similarly skewed point of view. There are a lot of contradictions in the feel of her work: cynicism and romanticism, euphoria and dissolution, playfulness and lost innocence. Her comics keep a certain cool distance from the reader, but her lust for life comes through all of her work.

Check out her website at http://www.fantasticteam.com/lwb/. Lindner will also be in the SPX anthology this year, which is always recommended reading. Within a couple of years, I expect her to produce some truly lasting works. Until then, make sure to follow the development of a great artist in progress.

** Dash Shaw: Of all the artists on this list, 20-year old Shaw has the best chance of being a truly innovative comics master. Loosely associated with the neo-formalist group Meathaus, Shaw's work differs in that his work is strongly rooted in narrative. This doesn't prevent him from going absolutely crazy in the use of formal innovations and unusual techniques in panel design. There's nothing he won't try, and while not all of it is successful at this stage, it's all fascinating to watch. Shaw likes to use thick, expressive brush work and lots of blacks, throwing in mixed media techniques like collage. Matching his daring as an artist is his vivid imagination as a writer, plumbing his academic influences while always focusing on richly defined characters.

He has two projects currently available: a planned 10-chapter series called LOVE EATS BRAINS! and a mini-graphic novel called GARDENHEAD. He describes the former as "a zombie romance" and that's exactly what it is. It centers around a young man named Williams who is being yelled at by his girlfriend Julie because of his involvement with another woman named Nachi. Nachi was an outsider raised in Japan who became obsessed with comics--but primarily in the spaces between panels. This obsession with spaces inbetween led her to film zombies in the local graveyard, because she felt that with death, zombies were no longer concerned with the survival instincts that prevented humans from fully being able to create art. (Yes, zombies are taken as a given here.) Chapter 1 makes you stand up and pay attention, but the visual pyrotechnics begin in chapter 2. Shaw often views panels as puzzle pieces, connecting and then fracturing images. Panels warp and bend as the story gets stranger, and Japanese language characters pop up and plays significant roles. I believe Chapter 4 (the newest one) will be available at SPX.

LOVE EATS BRAINS! is a fascinating series, but it was really just a warmup for what he did with GARDENHEAD. The story is concerned with learning, language, school and our roles in society. It skips from being a kindergarten-type primer, matching up things under the letter A (apple with a drawing of an apple, arrow with a drawing of an arrow), until it reaches "art"--a frame hung in a gallery. This is continued as we are introduced to our three characters: a boy named Raymond, his older brother and a college age woman. Raymond is struggling with his kindergarten art class, as his teacher constantly berates him for not following the standards of art--but praises all of his classmates, comparing their work to Mondrian and Giotto! His brother is a college librarian whose real love is phrenology, the old pseudo-science that claimed it could determine a person's character by the bumps on their head. He has a date with the young woman, a bulimic with a vehement distrust of language. The comic details their relationship and Raymond's struggles, often inserting clip art or anatomical diagrams for effect. It's nothing short of the best comic I've read in 2002.

That said, Shaw's work is still a bit rough, with errors in spelling and lettering here and there. The production values are also somewhat primitive at this point--GARDENHEAD very much has the feel of a DIY zine rather than a professional graphic novel. That is part of its appeal, but I don't see it as essential to Shaw's work. Rather, I see him as someone still absorbing influences both within and outside of art. Shaw's influences vary, but his writing is informed by philosophy and cultural studies, as well as art history and criticism. He'll have a story in the upcoming NEW THING anthology, and you can read his comics athttp://www.dashshaw.com/. He'll be sitting at the Meathaus table at SPX.

** Drew Weing: A common kind of comic seen these days is the cartoon diary, an innovation made popular by James Kochalka in his very popular SKETCHBOOK DIARIES. It's an appealling kind of strip to do because it's a combination of doing sketchbook exercises, having them printed for all the world to see, and blogging. That's why you'll see lot of these cartoon diaries on the web, and as one would guess, they vary wildly in quality. One of the best is from a young artist named Drew Weing, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design's Sequential Art program. His JOURNAL COMIC can be seen on a nearly-daily basis at his website, (http://www.drewweing.com). Compilations of his JOURNAL COMIC as well as his other work will be available at SPX.

What separates Weing from the other diarists is that first, he treats each strip as a truly discrete entity and not just a throwaway sketchbook item. Second, each strip has a definite sense of closure. That closure is not always a punchline, but it does always get his theme across. Third, Weing is genuinely amusing. Even though he's living the typical lifestyle of a 20-something (group house, unsatisfying job, never enough money), he rarely mines the kind of humor one would expect, and never tries to pretend that his life is especially compelling. Weing views himself as a person, not a character, and that viewpoint is refreshing after reading more egomaniacal autobio comics. As he writes in his masthead: "A daily comic 'diary.' Why should you care about my life? Beats me." This lack of pretension makes it easy to like him.

The other interesting thing about the strip is that unlike many diarists, his strip is not relentlessly upbeat. In fact, an undertone of ennui that borders on desperation permeates the strip as he struggles to find ways to stave off boredom. The journal strip was clearly his answer to finding a way to keep doing work while struggling with his difficult advertising job. Despite that streak of desperation, Weing as depicted in this strip is not a loser; he has a number of friends and rarely feels sorry for himself. Of course, the tricky thing about autobio is that the artist chooses what we get to see, but Weing does a good job at depicting the mundane as well as more significant events in his life.

The other thing that recommends this strip is the high quality in its craft. Weing keeps it simple visually, imparting an iconic quality to himself and his friends, but his uses of thick lines and blacks helps the strip avoid too cutesy a look. The JOURNAL COMIC looks like a series of exercises designed by Weing to help him keep doing comics and improve, but his attention to detail makes it a delight for fans. This is not formally innovative work in any sense; both the format and subject matter have been done many times in alternative comics. Also, the format is inherently limiting in some ways; at some point, I'd like to see Weing take up a more ambitious project. Regardless, I would recommend Weing's work to anyone who enjoys well-crafted autobio with an eye towards entertaining an audience, not just the artist himself. I recommend reading it from the beginning if you have the time, as well as picking it up in paper form.

** Kurt Wolfgang: He's the biggest smartass in comics and the creator of some of its most tender, sensitive moments. Wolfgang both writes evocative, sad stories about loss and love and then creates minicomics slagging just that kind of story. Often associated with Highwater Books he's a sort of court jester of the alternative comics world, skewering its pretensions better than any outsider could. At the same time, he makes fun of himself. Contradictory? Sure. But it's no contradiction to enjoy every single thing he publishes, writes and/or edits, because his humor cuts deep and his stories are genuinely touching, all with a startling visual style.

Wolfgang has primarily been known for being able to assemble that rarest of creatures: the quality minicomics anthology. It's called LOW-JINX, and has had an amazing list of talent in its three issues. The second issue was subtitled "The Horrible Truth About Reinventing Minicomics (The Bastard Format)", and it featured Wolfgang, Johnny Ryan, and Tony Consiglio. Among others. Wolfgang's features stood out, as his first was not only a hilarious parody of Scott McCloud, it actually tried to define minicomics (in a chapter appropriately titled "What The Fuck Is A Mini-Comic?"). Wolfgang struck again with a story about the lonely life of a minicomic creator, with lines like "I'm sorry, Mr Wolfgang, but we've just recently discovered that india ink causes impotence".

Wolfgang and friends take it to the next level with LOW-JINX #3, subtitled "The Big Rip-Off". This was a full-out assault on alternative comics, with an artist choosing to satirize or parody another well-known artist's work. Part of the fun was figuring out which artist did which parody. Do yourself a favor and seek this out. While Jordan Crane eviscerating Chris Ware was brilliant, Wolfgang was once again the star of his own anthology with a riff on potty humor cartoonist Johnny Ryan that takes on the entire indy scene. Wolfgang won an Ignatz for Outstanding Minicomic for LOW-JINX #2 and #3 was nominated for the never-awarded Ignatz last year as well.

Just when you think that Wolfgang is making a career as a wiseass parodist, he turns around and produces WHERE HATS GO, a wordless comic originally printed as part of the 5th issue of the anthology NON that is now sold on its own. HATS is a sweet tale about a boy who loses a prized hat given to him by his grandfather, and the extraordinary lengths he goes to in order to retrieve it. Along the way, he is aided by a girl clearly in love with him whom he essentially ignores--except when she assists him in finding his hat. What makes this more than a sugary trifle is the ambiguous relationship between the boy and girl, and Wolfgang's eye-popping art. Wolfgang favors heavy blacks with a style influenced somewhat by 20's animation and somewhat by more familiar underground artists. But his panel design and layout is wholly unique.

You can really see Wolfgang go to town in his new project, an adaptation of the classic PINOKIO. He's printed the first chapter as a minicomic and it already is several leaps ahead of HATS in terms of its innovative design. The darker, sadder subject also lends itself well to Wolfgang's approach. Once again, this comic is wordless, and Wolfgang effortlessly conveys emotion and meaning through his design and clever visual cues. An example comes when the elderly Gepetto has just fixed a radio and puts it on. The radio becomes the center of the page, fracturing it and creating different panels for each station it's turned to. Wolfgang may be found at Top Shelf's booth, since they will be publishing PINOKIO once it's completed. Check out his style at http://members.aol.com/noefiepub/.