Heavy Hitters, Part 2: Thurber, May

Men's Feelings #2, by Ted May (Revival House). May's sardonic strips about men and men's culture are always hilariously dead-on, whether they stray into absurdity or border on the poignant. His loose, cartoony line is a big part of his appeal, as what appears to be a plain, no-frills style works because of subtle flourishes, steady expressiveness, and a flat approach that creates a deadpan effect for much of the book's humor. "Reflections", for example (the book's opener), features a man shaving--one of the manliest of activities. When he looks into a mirror and sees three faces staring at him (somehow, companies can install one-way glass in people's homes that sometimes gets revealed as there being a secret room there), the man goes into the fetal position on the floor. It's a fantastic gag to start off the issue, as May dials up and down absurdity, poignancy and pettiness in equal measure.

As to the latter, "Connecting Flight" is a good example. A man who hates flying looks on his neighbor, wearing too much perfume, with contempt. It's not until he dismisses her musical taste out of hand, thinking "Nothing we could possibly have in common", and he sees an Abba best of collection, that he thinks, "I stand corrected." Once again, May takes the piss out of this guy's aggro attitude and diffuses with a less-than-macho musical selection. "Lifetime Subscription" is an example of how May's deadpan style and careful pacing crafts a punchline. When a guy asks a drug store clerk for cigarettes and a copy of Alone magazine, there's a bit of awkwardness when she says they don't. Nine panels of walking home, going upstairs and lighting a cigarette later, he says, "I need to develop a better pickup line." May retroactively adds an extra layer of awkwardness as the reader is made to realize that the bizarre nature of the man's request was his attempt at flirting, especially since the tact was so remarkably pathetic in nature.

The silliest strip was "Finally", which starts off with a man on his deathbed being visited by his departed wife to take him to the great beyond, only to get fussy about the appearance of his body and blow his big chance. May has a way of drawing bug-eyed characters (not unlike Steve Ditko) that later have their irises reduced to dots while the rest of their eye still bulges out. It's his shorthand for an extreme reaction, be it anger, disgust or some other negative emotion. "Call Of Duty" is about a younger sibling managing to carry out the instructions of his mother in a highly indirect way, "putting away" some eggs by feeding them directly to his video-game playing brother. It's a funny, almost sweet little episode that reveals a surprising amount of empathy between siblings. Equally funny and more poignant is "You Can Skip This One", which is a sort of shaggy-dog anecdote about a man trying to make friends with his girlfriend's preteen son. The kid is entirely quiet while the guy hopelessly and painfully babbles on, desperate to make some kind of connection. That's the focus of the story as the man then turns to skipping rocks on the nearby lake, trying to teach the technique to the kid (who fails hilariously), only to wind up accidentally committing an act of destruction that ironically elicits precisely the kind of connection he craved. There's are two glorious splash pages in a row that depict the act of destruction, as May finishes the shaggy-dog joke before adding the final punchline. May is so remarkably assured in his pacing and use of expression, creating a naturalistic environment to act as the underpinning of the gag.

The last big piece, "Wait, What?" is a hilarious send-up of sports fandom and sports announcing. A fan sitting in the stands watching the last play of a football game is also listening to the radio commentary at the same time. May perfectly captures the pompous, over-the-top, life and death nature of sports commentary while creating a ridiculously bizarre end to the game, then deflating it at the very end. Finishing up the issue with a kid being made to say his prayers and expressing his hatred for everyone and everything more-or-less sums up the issue.

Art Comic 1-2, by Matthew Thurber. Thurber's sense of humor and approach land with me like few other cartoonists. His combination of intelligence and absurd sense of humor make every comic he does an incisive commentary as well as something I laugh at on nearly every page. With his new series, Thurber turns his attention to his own sphere: the art world. Having worked in New York art galleries for a number of years and attended art school at Cooper Union, it's safe to say that this is a subject that's well in his wheelhouse. What's interesting is that for all his absurdity, Thurber has shown that he uses the same narrative technique in each of his major works. He starts the story in media res, writes short vignettes about a set of characters and then moves on to another vignette involving completely different characters, and then eventually connects all of them up. The main difference this time around is that a number of his characters are actually real people.

It's perhaps a bit cliche' for a cartoonist to do yet another version of "Art School Confidential", poking fun at the more pretentious and pompous aspects of art school. While Thurber gets off plenty of jokes at the art world's expense, this isn't really his project here. Indeed, Thurber has said that he enjoyed art school because he was encouraged to do a number of different things and he managed to avoid the fate that many cartoonists who were scorned by their professors, especially in the 80s and 90s. This comic is much more about the professional art world, which Thurber has noted is entirely run by money, using a number of different takes on satirizing it.

The first issue is set in 1999 and features Cupcake, a student at Cooper Union, being told by a friend that he spotted the artist Matthew Barney on the street. There's a perfect Thurber panel where they run to find him where Thurber contorts Cupcake's body such that his leg appears above his head; it's a delightfully rubbery image. They get a lecture from a clerk at Kim's Video, go to a Turkish bath filled with Vaseline (something Barney actually used), and realize only too late that the attendant at the baths was Barney himself. It sets the tone for the comic: frantic and absurd, but closer to real life than you would expect.

That's certainly true in the second chapter, where there's an art critique. Cupcake gets lectured for yet another Barney-inspired piece (a gingerbread house of the baths filled with Vaseline), but Thurber quickly segues to an art opening, two gate-crashers from "Drunk TV", and the intervention of three little pigs in a brick house smashing into the gallery. From there, Thurber goes rapid-fire with new characters: Ivanhoe, a knight in armor who is aiming to crash the "Miami Basel Art Faire" with his squire/intern Walter, Ivanhoe's object of affection Tiffany Clydesdale, and Jesus Christ emerging from the cube near Union Square and turning the manager of the local Chase bank into a pack of rats before turning the building into a giant ice cream cone that rains down money. There are also two robot handlers whose charges are directed to have sex.

After Thurber threw a lot at the wall to see what would stick in the first issue, he remarkably tightened up the narrative without losing an ounce of energy in the second issue. For example, he went deep into the story of Password, Cupcake's art professor. Initially a disciple of Robert Rauschenberg (depicted as a tyrant who'd smash you in the head with a bottle), he's revealed to be working for a cabal of veteran artists who want him to undermine any potential future competition from art schools. Naturally, when visited by his master, the master turns into a vampire bat and flies out the window, just as a student whose spirits he had crushed was committing suicide. Ivanhoe is revealed to be a classmate of Cupcake's who was hit on the head and learned that his parents had been accidentally killed by a piece of art, launching a crusade of revenge with one goal in mind: destroying art.

In a story about art, Thurber manages to introduce a quest narrative fueled by a desire for revenge and a shadowy cabal with supernatural connections into a story about the hypocritical nature of an art teacher telling his students not to worry about how to make a living. By heightening the absurdity around the edges of the story and using over-the-top elements, Thurber's able to make his points about greed and the art world without lecturing the reader. Indeed, this is a story about multiple characters with different obsessions and the ways in which those obsessions are being constantly thwarted. His character design is hilarious, from the chainmail that Ivanhoe wears, to Tiffany's beret, to the cartoonishly vile face of the vampire bat artist that has the only dense use of spotting blocks and hatching, to the various artists that he caricatures; Thurber's characters always have a rubbery quality that makes them capable of anything. I enjoy the fact that Thurber continues to release work as periodicals, complete with full color covers and letters pages. 

That Is All: Amazing Facts and Beyond

Kevin Huizenga and Dan Zettwoch (along with occasional contributions from their other USS Catastrophe crewmember, Ted May) did something quite unusual in this day and age for alternative cartoonists. They actually had a successful and long-running comic strip in an alt-weekly (the St Louis Riverfront Times). Both of them manage to combine their different cartooning sensibilities in a strip that is a combination of Ripley's Believe Or Not and John Hodgman's fake trivia books in describing the anecdotes and adventures of one Leon Beyond, trivia master. One can immediately tell which artist is handling the strip on a given page, and it's not just because Huizenga and Zettwoch's art styles are so different. Zettwoch treats each Leon strip like he does all of his comics: as an excuse to indulge in his love of comics-as-diagrams. Huizenga's strips are more sparse and more like a Ripley strip, but they're also more deliberately funny than Zettwoch's manically detailed entries. Both artists share in shaping the personality of Leon, creating a ridiculous mythology surrounding him and the world of trivia.

That mythology is partly a lampoon of sports, partly a lampoon of secret societies and part Wimbledon Green-esque absurdity. What makes the strip work so well is that it's mostly played with a straight face, as Huizenga and Zettwoch (abbreviated Wu-Tang Clan style as HZA and DZA at one point) never come out and say that these "facts" are false. They also add enough true tidbits here and there to make readers think twice about some of Leon's claims.Indeed, I really wanted Zettwoch's strip about certain abandoned water towers in St Louis being used to store alcohol during prohibition to be true, especially the detail about hobos huffing alcohol fumes from them to this day. While much of Zettwoch's work is lighthearted to begin with, the real revelation in this book is Huizenga. He's mostly known for his philosophical, experimental and formally ambitious work in places like Ganges and Or Else. However, Huizenga always managed to inject sly and dry bits of humor in those books. Furthermore, he's done plenty of minicomics that had funny and strange overtones, like his "Fight or Run?" series of strips. A look at Huizenga's blog reveals that he's a fan and student of classic newspaper comic strips. Given that, it's not surprising to see him try his hand at writing a gag comic, albeit one where the laugh is generated less by a punchline and more by an accumulation of details.

At over 200 pages (including a color reprint of the story "The 66-Year Stink"), this is a very dense read. The Zettwoch strips in particular are absolutely crammed with details and eye-pops, Uncivilized Books publisher Tom Kaczynksi keeps things simple in terms of design, as the authors wisely chose to arrange the strips roughly by subject. This results in some sections being dominated by one cartoonist, like Zettwoch and sports, but it also results in amusing single-entry chapters like "Chainsaws". The collection also has the original covers to the earlier Beyond collections, including one of the greatest titles of all times, Back That Fact Up.I greatly admire Huizenga and & Zettwoch's relentless commitment to their gag, as the best Leon strips were the ones where he was off on some trivia-related adventure or event, or else refining or explaining his personal brain space and how he used it. I thought the more meta strips, like "reader correction" emails and the occasional presence of Huizenga or Zettwoch themselves in the strips (they are, after all, merely illustrating Mr Beyond's factoids) served as needed palate-cleansers for the book. Even as crazy as some of the strips got, there was a sameness to them that never quite reached formulaic, but got close from time to time. That said, this is a book that should be read slowly and in small chunks for maximum enjoyment. The longform stories included here are excellent, as they allow the gags a bit more room to breathe while at the same time doubling and tripling down on the initial concepts as the two cartoonists wring every bit of humor imaginable out of  them. If the artists ever choose to do anything more with Leon, I'd hope it would be in that sort of format, like an old-fashioned 22-page comic book.

Minis: Roberts, Viola, May, Fitzpatrick

Powdered Milk #9-10, by Keiler Roberts. Issue #9 of these strips taken from her website focuses in on more anecdotes about her young daughter during her toddler years. As her husband notes, toddlers are walking joke and anecdote generators, and so in one strip he literally tells Keiler that what their daughter just said will be her next strip. Her mentioning him saying this adds another meta level to the strip, something she's done a few times. The last couple of pages feature Keiler and a friend sitting naked in a hot tub at a day spa, with the talk turning to the attractiveness of each other's breasts and her friend's desire to get her entire body rubbed down. Roberts really captures both the sense of ease with which they talk and acknowledges the awkwardness inherent in their conversation. Issue #10 is all about a film she remembers seeing as a child about a man who didn't know how to read and her present-day extrapolation as to how the story might have continued. When she learns that it was a book, not a film, and that she had misstated some of its elements, she rewrote her extrapolation based on that new evidence. This is a hilarious examination of the perils of memory, especially when one tries to create a narrative based on those memories. Roberts is a witty and pithy cartoonist, and she seems to really be hitting her stride as a memorist who mines humor from her dark and light moments alike.

Men's Feelings, by Ted May.May has a knack for delivering sublimely formatted comics and minis. Men's Feelings, a "tears and toilets" comic to use his description, is no exception. Published by Revival House, May is at his best here in depicting the lives of men of varying ages, sending up both their own feelings and how other people view them. For example, "Earthlings" is a hilarious story wherein a number of younger people congregate outside the window of a middle-aged man's house, displaying this football-watching average schlub as though he were in a zoo.May is a master at delivering a lot of information with very little text, and this story is a good example of that. "New Life" is one of those toilet stories, as a guy sits in a coffee shop on top of the world one moment and then on top of a toilet as he has painful diarrhea that seems to last forever, driving him to tears. Another highlight is "Milestones", featuring two guys griping about marriage, children and religion as they stand against a wall at a wedding. When they scatter when they see the priest approaching, it highlights just how toothless their rants really were. "Dimensions" is so knowing regarding the banality of interoffice chatter that it hurts, and I loved the way May inserted the possibility of stopping and literally smelling nature as an almost mystical and incomprehensible act. May is great at depicting schlubs, losers and burnouts, as the band of weirdos in the poker story "Winning" puts on full display. The funniest story is "Token", about a balding man who is constantly choking on all kinds of food until a magician intercedes and the man chokes out a casino token. How magical this man actually is is a central part of the joke. May is an assured storyteller and underrated as a humorist because his stories always have a certain flatness to them that forces the reader to really engage them to see what's really going on, and this mini is a fine example of that humor at work.

Jerry's Journal #2 and Me, by Neil Fitzpatrick.I've critiqued Fitpatrick's comics in the past for being too twee. His musings seemed shallow, as he was more interested in a quip than a genuine moment of understanding. With Jerry's Journal #2 and Me, Fitzpatrick took a hard turn into expressing some hard emotional truths as he tried to make sense of an unraveling relationship that nearly wrecked him. Jerry's Journal is full of rage and bile, a righteous feeling of being burned and the desire to somehow get back. Me abandons the pretense of the Jerry character, laying Fitzpatrick and his feelings totally bare. While he never gets at the specifics of the nature of the betrayal that ended his relationship, it's clear that he felt side-swiped and that her attempts at apology seemed halfhearted at best. Fitzpatrick goes through a lot of grieving in the pages of this comic, alternating between expressing anger and trying to forge a new life and identity for himself. Of course, stating that he's in a new life and actually living it are two different things, as he lapses back into anger and finally a sense of acceptance by the end. It's a pretty bold experiment to expose his emotions so openly (something he also acknowledges in one of the strips), but it seemed key that this needed to be sent out into the world. These comics are a breakthrough for Fitzpatrick, one that I hope keeps up without the pain and rage that fueled them.

Fear of Flowers, by Jason Viola. Viola is generally a gag man, but this trio of stories about cryptic plant behavior is contemplative and philosophical. It also doesn't hurt that his renderings of flowers are beautiful without overwhelming the eye or obscuring his narrative ends. The first story, considering sunflowers mysteriously all turning in one direction when they mature, gets at this sense of the enigmatic quality of nature being overwhelming in the way he renders an entire lea's worth of sunflowers. The second story, about a rare flower called a kadupul, discusses the plant's rare and nocturnal blooming pattern, as though it waited until everything around it was absolutely still before flowering and wilting before anyone could see it. Again, the fact that this is unexplained makes it all the more intriguing. Finally, when considering the orchid, Viola holds forth on the topic of mortality and how we never know when we will die. This final mystery in our lives is what largely motivates are actions, whether we acknowledge this or choose to distract ourselves from this fact. Viola then informs the reader that under the right conditions, the orchid can effectively be immortal. It's a clever final bombshell in a mini that's about nature defying our conventions and expectations, one that's well-matched with its drawings.

Sequart Reprints: Shirtlifter, Love Stories, Spelt-Rite, Injury 2, Awesome

Shirtlifter #1-2, by Steve MacIsaac. MacIsaac is an extremely astute observer of human nature in his stories, both fictional and autobiographical. Issue #1, "Unmade Beds", is fictional but is based on MacIsaac's time spent in Japan with his partner. Identity and a sense of purpose are running themes in MacIsaac's stories, as is self-deception obscuring the same. In "Unmade Beds", the story's ex-pat protagonist Derek finds himself as a "kept man" as Michael's partner. He's deeply unhappy but is unable to express it to his partner; instead, his ennui plays out in the form of anonymous sex while denying his sexuality to his co-workers. His unwillingness to come to terms with what he really feels and own up to those feelings is in direct contrast to his otherwise sharp intelligence and awareness. That blind spot he has is his own latent self-loathing and selfishness, and as the story ends it becomes clear that his dawning understanding of both is too late to save his relationship. MacIsaac's restraint and subtlety are what make this story work, never hammering home key points of characterization but instead allowing them to unfold for the reader.

His autobio work in #2 ranges from brief musings and digressions to stories that are more explicitly driven by narrative. These stories link sexuality and identity, an issue that becomes especially pointed for gay men and women. The very declaration of sexual identity becomes a defacto political statement, and to publicly deny that sexuality is to distort an essential truth about identity. In stories like "Waiting For The Bus" and "You Can Tell Us Anything", MacIsaac struggles with his own desires and the experience of coming out to a family that is not entirely supportive. In the latter story, the juxtaposition of hurtful family statements with scenes from his loving relationship with his boyfriend are especially powerful.

The exploration of desire and its consequences are seen in stories like "Safe" (about the simultaneous desire for unsafe sex and the pressure often created to do so) and "Crush" (about an encounter on a jam-packed bullet train in Japan that underlines MacIsaac's alienation and isolation). My favorite stories were probably "Border Crossings" and "You Do The Math". The former is about MacIsaac's struggle to find a job in the US (he's a Canadian), which balances multiple identities (sexual, national, career, artistic) and forces him to make a leap of faith. The latter story is about the public/private dichotomy of sexual identity, where MacIsaac is still uneasy about how and when to come out to the general public (like many of his ESL students, who are homophobic). MacIsaac explores this issue through a series of clever vignettes, culminating in an exchange in a florist's where he makes a point of saying flowers are for his boyfriend.

There's one major issue I have with MacIsaac's work. While he has a solid understanding and grounding in the language of comics and page composition, his figures have an essential stiff and static quality that is created by his drawing this comic using a computer. That makes a lot of his stories look and feel much colder than I think MacIsaac intended. This is ameliorated somewhat in stories where he uses color but was a significant difficulty in "Unmade Beds". His use of a realistic style probably contributes to this problem; using a slightly more expressionistic approach might make his figures come alive a bit more. As I noted earlier, the use of color greatly aided in bringing his characters to life in #2, and I'll be interested in seeing how he continues to develop his visual approach. He's already one of the stand-out autobiographical writers working in comics today.

John Henry, by Dmitri Jackson. Jackson retells the legend of John Henry, steel-drivin' man, whom he refers to as America's First Black Hero, and this story subtly deals with the racial overtones of the legend. Jackson employs a simple, blocky style and a steel-blue wash to depict the duel between man and machine (John Henry vs a steam-powered drill). Jackson's character design is his greatest asset. His line is not quite assured enough to easily carry a story, but he generally avoids over-rendering and allows his compositional skills to drive his narrative. I also enjoyed his "Brother Rage" character in his minicomic Frotoons #3, a firebrand black orator whose speeches seem to contain parody, satire and a few grains of truth as well. Jackson obviously has a lot of potential as an artist and a distinctive point of view; his task at this point will be one of development, refinement and continued experimentation.

Love Stories #1, by Mat Tait. This New Zealander tells stories that are mostly about and set in his nation. This is a visually striking collection told in stark and boldly outlined black & white, giving his pages a certain weight while not sacrificing the fluidity of the narrative. Tait's local and Maori stories like "Graveyard Etiquette" (comparing a Maori creation myth to the simultaneous gratitude and resentment children feel toward their parents) and "The Heading Dog Who Split In Half" (about a legendary sheepdog) are crisply told and a delight to look at. Tat goes in a different direction with his last two stories. "Great Historical Disasters" is a hilarious collection of one-panel fictional historical events like "Admission of the Antarctic Empire to the U.N., 1974", where we see a Jack Frost-looking figure freezing the Secretary General. "Shortcuts To Enlightenment" is a creepy story reminiscent of Zak Sally involving a ritualistic process of adding an extension to one's house and various disturbing steps needed to possibly become enlightened. Tait is a master of tone, both visually and verbally, using shadow and intense cross-hatching to tell stories that linger in one's mind. Tait is a major talent, skillfully navigating the intensity of his imagery with the clarity of his storytelling.

Injury #2, by Ted May, et al. I loved the first issue of this series, and this issue is more of the same wonderful big fun. One thing I should note is that this is not actually a one-man anthology; Jeff Wilson co-wrote one story while Jason Robards did the finished art on another. "Hair of the Dog", involving teenaged stoner metalhead soap opera, had a number of laugh-out loud moments. With the story set in 1983, I grew up with a number of metalhead kids like Jeff and Ray--every beat of this story felt familiar. The climax of the story, where heartbroken Jeff imagines that the lead singer of Nazareth (helpfully labeled with a shirt that read "The Dude From Nazareth") sits next to him while they both sing "Love Hurts". The overwrought, over-the-top scenario was played entirely straight, which is why it was so funny.

The other story, the next chapter of "Your Bleeding Face", was yet another action-packed, over-the-top story with unexpected laughs. It was the story's little touches that made it so much fun, like two gang members playing a Slade pinball game or the video game-influenced action scenes. The scene where our hero, Manleau, is in a bathroom trying to get a man waiting in a stall for anonymous sex to leave for his own safety, was a riot ("I gotta get this guy outta here. Need to keep my phrasing free of double entendres!"). May's line is loose and lively, with a touch of that kinetic Jack Kirby energy informing his action scenes. What makes these comics so pitch-perfect is the way he's able to tell these stories in a completely straight-faced manner that respects the source material, yet at the same time has an understanding of the ridiculousness of it. That fine balance, much like Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar are able to achieve in their Dungeon series, is what makes Inury such a great comic.

Spelt-Rite Comics #1, by Martha Keavney. Keavney is a long-time favorite artist of mine and one of the funniest comics creators around. After a long hiatus, she's launched a new series, following her hilarious Badly-Drawn Comics. Spelt-Rite doesn't use a lot of self-reflexive humor like BDC did, but rather creates premises and either subverts them or takes them to extreme lengths. "Oh, The Irony!" takes every single time-travel cliche' imaginable (Hitler's mother, averting a world war, traveling on the Titanic, etc) and turns them on their head as a time-traveling Keavney enters the story for the most banal of reasons. The final punchline is Keavney at her best, managing to top every gag she had dished out. "Cease and Desist" is a story where every bit of dialogue and sound effect is a registered trademark. Amazingly, Keavney manages to construct an 18-page story out of these trademarks (even things like "Beep" and "True" are trademarked), including a guy trying to pick up a woman and that same man trying to talk a friend out of suicide.

"The Hypocrites" (a story I published in Other magazine) takes a particular set-up (two guys showing how hypocritical the other is) and takes it to its wildest extreme (a third person performing a hypocritical act that is as ridiculous as it is monstrous). The masterpiece of the issue may be "The Minuscules", the "correctly spelled comic", starring Aloysius and Siobhan. Every bit of dialogue is packed with commonly misspelled words ("chaise", "cemetery", "desiccated", etc), leading up to a final punchline involving the word "stationary". Keavney's art is quite functional in its role as joke-delivery system for her set-ups--it's simple and unfussy as she doesn't depend on visuals for her jokes. Her combination of complexity of setup and absurdity of her jokes makes her one of the most effective humorists in comics today. Hopefully this issue will spur her productivity.

Awesome, The Indie Spinner Rack Anthology. This book certainly has a noble aim--providing a cash award to a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies. That award, by the way, was awarded to Chuck "McBuck" Forsman, whose excellent first issue of Snake Oil was just reviewed here on May 3rd. This anthology was conceived by the co-hosts of the Indie Spinner Rack podcast, "Charlito" and "Mr. Phil" and published by Evil Twin Comics. It is unfortunate that so much of this anthology ranges from awful to pleasant but forgettable. While it was admirable for so many artists to donate their time and stories, too many of the stories felt lazy, rushed or inconsequential. Too many of the stories (with the nearly incoherent story by Robin & Lawrence Etherington being the worst example) almost felt like advertisements for their creator's series rather than stories that stood entirely on their own. The exception to that objection was Kazimir Strzepek's Mourning Star short story, mostly because he did a great job in quickly setting up a premise and telling a clear story.

This book seemed to suffer from the spirit of "let's all get together and make an anthology", lacking an editor and direction. That said, about a third of the book's fifty or so entries were memorable, and of that number, seven were excellent and merit further discussion. First, Matt Kindt's "Misery Index" relating stories of people he's met on the title index--containing four quadrants of tragedy, humor, suffering and irony. True to description, the three anecdotes he relates are indeed very funny in their own awful way. Jamie Tanner's "The Accommodation of Old Man Small" is a typically creepy, beautifully drawn entry by Tanner, whose peculiar, meticulously drawn but cartoony art always impresses.

Chuck Forsman's own strip, "God vs Idiot" continues to plumb the themes he's explored in his other comics: alcoholism and family. This darkly comic story was a bit reminiscent of Chester Brown, with a thin line and absurdist elements like the hand of god coming along and smashing a bottle of alcohol, and the alcoholic man somehow having the devil's phone number from the phone book. Forsman's self-doubting afterword was almost as funny as the strip. His fellow CCS student, Joseph Lambert, contributed another visually striking strip about the creative process and the way it creates multiple voices of doubt and rage--and how this affects others. Roger Langridge added a typically zany story about a filthy vaudeville singer who managed to cheat death, effortlessly propelling the narrative while staggering the reader with his decorative touches.

One always hopes to discover a surprising gem in an open anthology such as this, and there were two notable entries in Awesome. Jesse Post and Ben Towle's "The Gates of the Garden" manages to pack a lot of portentous history and humanity into just four pages. It's an anecdote about British diplomat Gertrude Bell, whose influence in the Middle East can still be felt today. The biggest surprise in the anthology was Sarah Oleksyk's "The Enchanted Stag", a well-drawn, well-designed story that starts out in typical fantasy-genre fashion but soon turns those tropes on their head. The punchline of this story is so effective because Oleksyk stays completely within the expected rules and even visuals for such a story, but still manages to quickly surprise the reader.

Of the remaining stories, entries by Nick Bertozzi, Joshua Cotter, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Al Columbia, Liz Baillie, JP Coovert, Sam Hiti, Matt Bernier and the team of Harvey Hsiung & GB Tran were also quite good, but not quite as memorable as the artists mentioned above.

Three From Buenaventura: I Want You #1, Injury #3, The Aviatrix #1

Rob reviews the upcoming three-pack of single issues from Buenaventura Press. Included are I WANT YOU #1 by Lisa Hanawalt; INJURY #3 by Ted May, Mike Reddy, & Jeff Wilson; and THE AVIATRIX #1, by Eric Haven.

As I've noted in other columns, Buenaventura Press has found a clever way around Diamond's more demanding minimum order mandate that has led to several cancellations of well-regarded alt-comics series. By bundling the publication of three single-issue comics into one package, Buenaventura was able to raise both price point and ordering interest, given that a fan of one of these comics was likely to be a fan of the other two as well. It's great news for the comics community, given that all three of the comics in the bundle are best-of-the-year candidates.

Let's start with Eric Haven's THE AVIATRIX #1. Haven's TALES TO DEMOLISH series with Sparkplug highlighted his impeccable sense of absurdity and merged it with a fondness for Kirby/Ditko era monster comics. In the tradition of Lewis Trondheim, Haven tells a straightforward adventure story filled with ridiculous concepts, trappings and asides. His nameless protagonist (a stand-in for the artist) is a wonderfully blank canvas, attempting to negotiate situations that soon spin out of his control. After insulting an anteater at a zoo, he is horrified to find the beast attack him and suck out his brains. On a date with a 6-inch high woman dressed in some sort of jungle queen outfit, he suffers extreme gastrointestinal distress (which nearly kills her due to the odor) and leaves. He isn't worried because he's wearing a tie, which was supposed to bestow some sort of immunity that he kept repeating up to and including the time he is eaten by a shark.

Haven eschews any sort of explanatory exposition, knowing better than to overwrite his gags. He lets the images speak for themselves, and his steady refinement as an artist has only served to add even more of a deadpan quality to his pages. That was certainly highlighted in "Confluence", the long story that featured the comic's title character. This is Haven's best story, highlighted by the many wordless panels at the beginning that make it feel like an ambling, quotidian autobio story of some kind. Our protagonist looks at porn on his computer (his drawing board noticeably unused), drinks a beer, gets high and then takes a walk around his neighborhood in four slowly-paced pages. Only a bizarre panel of him popping up on some sort of sci-fi device on the second page of the story gives any indication that something odd is going on here.

The protagonist then sees a mountainous monster and a World War I style biplane engage in battle, as he is saved by the Aviatrix. In a hilariously impassive series of pages, she rescues him from being stomped, leaps onto the beast and finds a convoluted way to kill it--complete with heroically expository dialogue. When he asks her who she is, she flashes back in her mind's eye to her "Secret Origins", a ridiculous story of invisible avian beasts taking away her parents and secrets revealed by a weird mountain mentor on how to fight them. A scene where she told an over-eager government agent keen to gain access to the secrets of her craft to "suck my dick" speaks to the way Haven builds up one set of expectations in the reader and then gleefully bludgeons them. Haven wrapped up the issue in roughly the same way he began it: with a bathroom emergency and a longing for love. When we realize the Aviatrix has been spying on him all along, it adds an amusing level of creepiness to the whole story.

Haven's art is genuinely thrilling and his character design enormously clever--especially the monsters, of course. The Aviatrix's goggles give her a marvelously inscrutable expression; Haven is careful to never show the reader her eyes without them, even in the account of her origin. All that we know about her came from the out-of-nowhere narrative captions that told us of her motivations, and which promptly disappeared as that story ended. There's a rock-solid structure to this very silly comic, one that allows the artist to insert awkward pauses, weird images and explosions from the id without it becoming incomprehensible or self-indulgent. Haven's comics have always seemed to me to be about repression and the way that repressed desires inevitably surface. There's a flatness of affect to be found in his characters, even in the weirdest of situations, that speaks to a total disconnect between consciousness and repressed needs. That played out with the weird voyeurism of the Aviatrix countering her bad-ass persona, and the protagonist's ongoing battles with his own digestive system whenever potential romance reared its head. It's exciting to see Haven's chops catch up with his ambition as an absurdist; like Michael Kupperman, being able to draw something blandly but precisely only helps to heighten the humor of a deadpan story.

All three of these comics are funny in their own way, with Lisa Hanawalt's I WANT YOU #1 spotlighting a similar sense of absurdity, this time fused with autobio anecdotes and a touch of the grotesque. Hanawalt follows Laura Park as an artist who came from seemingly out of the blue to become an artist everyone was talking about. This comic felt like a mix between Lauren Weinstein, Renee French and Phoebe Gloeckner, yet that only scratches the surface of the compelling weirdness found between its covers. This comic is a loosely-related collection of personal hygiene anecdotes, bodily fluids, anthropomorphic animals (drawn in disturbingly exact detail), raunchy sex talk and off-the-wall concepts. The absurdity reminds me a bit of early Weinstein, especially the first page where Hanawalt rattles off lists of things like "Things I Should Probably Hide Before A Date Comes Over For The First Time" and "What Did We See Today". That page encapsulated the issue as a whole: dada observations, gross anatomical drawings (in the tradition of French and Gloeckner), and frank but decidedly unerotic sex talk.

That strip acts as a table of contents and answer key of sorts for the rest of the issue, as Hanawalt veers from a laundry list of "Mistakes We Made At The Grocery Store" (including "We were too sexual when we checked our eggs for cracks") to a story about sex bugs inhabiting her keyboard at work. In highly naturalistic detail, we see a cute little sex bug ejaculate on her face, setting off a chain of events both disgusting and hilarious. What I liked about this piece is how low-key it was drawn, despite the subject matter. The flatness of affect of the characters made the various bodily fluids spewed all the more shocking. Hanawalt purposely avoided using funny drawings or grotesque figures, which heightened the eventual punchline.

In some of the strips, Hanawalt the artist drives the humor. In "Love Letter", "Lunch Break" and "I Love She-Moose", the heads of her anthropomorphic animals are drawn so much like animals that they are unsettling to look at. There's no cuteness to be found in those stories (despite the trappings of same), only a weird sort of neurotic energy. That's heightened by the intense detail of the backgrounds--finely rendered patterns in wallpaper and carpets, checkerboard patterns in clothing, and tons of cleanly rendered bric-a-brac. With the reader already disoriented, Hanawalt drops the hammer with She-Moose getting her "scent" across a computer screen, He-Horse's losing his nerve and his erection, and the moose and cat getting their minds blown by irrational numbers.

In other strips, Hanawalt the conceptual gag writer is dominant. Her laundry list comics start from great concepts (like "Common Dirty Talk And The Questions It Raises") and go in some truly deranged directions ("8. I want to be your little slut. Q: How little?"). "Top Causes Of Freeway Accidents" all somehow involve horses, including "Pretending to be a horse". "Menstrual Terminology" is ruthless in the detail it immediately goes into regarding tampon use, including "Bento Box: inserting tampon while traveling by car or train" and "The Death Valley Stuffer: Trying to insert applicator-less tampon into dry orifice"--complete with the skull of a buffalo. Hanawalt is quite aware of what she's doing here, ending this strip with a list of ways people use to avoid hearing about menstrual terminology. "The Faux Jack-Off" is "a thing you can do while driving" that warns the reader to be careful not to think sexy thoughts while doing it, lest they actually jack-off while driving. Why someone would want to do this in the first place is a question that is not considered.

This comic has a relentless quality reminiscent of the first time I read Ivan Brunetti's SCHIZO. On page after page, there's an assault straight from the artist's id. In that respect, it doesn't seem like Hanawalt is out to shock readers deliberately, but that these are simply the topics she finds funny. Despite the unflinching nature of I WANT YOU, there's also a sense of restraint as well. The blandness of some images play off of the outrageousness of the concepts, while the funny drawings all have an unnerving quality to them. Hanawalt instantly became one of my favorite humorists after reading this comic, and I can't wait to see what's next from her.

I've long been a fan of Ted May's anthology comic INJURY, especially the ways in which he works with collaborators. My favorite ongoing feature in the comic may be Jeff Wilson's 80s high school metal saga. It strikes a chord initially because I went to high school during this era and knew lots of kids like those featured in the story. The way May & Wilson depict overwrought teen emotions is both hilarious and true to life, giving these stories a self-inflated but epic sense of importance for the principal members. This issue featured young Jeff going through in-school suspension (an especially humiliating process) after tussling with a brutal bully. As always, May excels at fight scenes both visceral and comic, and he expertly captures the sense of excitement and malaise of their fellow students when the fight spills into a classroom. The scene where his eager counselor gets him to come up with a list of three things he felt thankful for, and that the exercise not only helped with his depression but proved to be a useful resource throughout his life, was funny for a different reason. It was almost heartbreaking to see a teen try to come up with the cognitive and emotional tools needed to recognize depression, and while his answers "metal, squid, Sagan" were those of a juvenile, they also proved to be keys to unlocking his imagination. The extended fantasy sequence he has with Carl Sagan telling him about the potential for glorious heavy metal played by squid creatures on other worlds was a sweet one, helping his hopes trump his fears.

The other major story of the issue was written and laid out by May, but drawn by illustrator Mike Reddy. He hasn't done a lot of comics (mostly doing art for CD releases), but he reminds me a bit of Kaz Strzepek in terms of his character design (especially the eyes). The "Beast Biplane" is a typically ridiculous May character--a furry Bigfoot character known for his skywriting prowess from his souped-up biplane. (What are the odds of two biplane-related comics from the same publisher at the same time?) May just keeps upping the deadpan weirdness factor of this story as it proceeds, mixing up the titular hero with aggressive drag queen drug pushers forming a human pyramid, hippies selling hemp-based soap products, and turning his biplane into a giant bat. It's a hilarious bit of nonsense, and the greyscaling that Reddy uses adds to the overall density of the strip.

What these three comics share in common is a total commitment to concept. That deadpan nature, where the author never winks at the reader so to tell them that it's all a joke, is a crucial element to the success of all three comics. The reader is never told when to laugh in any sort of obvious way, in part because each comic is meant to work on multiple levels. All three of these comics are also very much from the id. Sex, an obsession with bodily functions, food and simple desire drive the characters in every story--and in a more direct way than most stories. These are all incredibly dense comics, inviting multiple readings and perusals of art. Hopefully all three books will find audiences, but there's no doubt that Alvin Buenaventura's strategy in this regard was enormously clever.

Huizenga Bonanza

Rob reviews a batch of comics by Kevin Huizenga (and friends). Included are THE FACTOIDS OF LIFE, OR ELSE #5 (Drawn & Quarterly), FIGHT OR RUN: SHADOW OF THE CHOPPER (Buenaventura Press) and NEW CONSTRUCTION #2.


Kevin Huizenga is a hard cartoonist to pin down. In an era when most cartoonists are looking toward book deals, Huizenga's new work came in the form of four simultaneously published minicomics. Each one shows a different face of perhaps the most important cartoonist to emerge so far in the 21st century. Huizenga owes a lot to classic cartooning, especially in terms of his figure work. He also looks at comics as a sort of diagram, constantly exploring form and structure. The themes of his comics run the gamut from metaphysics to sheer whimsy. One story might be a complex phenomenological exploration of time and space, another might be a video-game inspired series of iconic character battles, and a third might be a gag strip involving a fake trivia maven. In every one of his comics, one can sense a probing intellect, a restless problem solver and a dry, sharp sense of humor. Huizenga's spontaneous-looking line manages to bring an understated quality to his work, even stories that are heavy on formal pyrotechnics. That restless quality seems to be a big key in why he chooses to do a number of smaller projects rather than gear up for The Big Book. While none of his individual comics this year are quite in the same class as the new releases by Chris Ware or Lynda Barry, when one considers his work as a whole it's clear that he had as good a year as any cartoonist in 2008.

NEW CONSTRUCTION is a fascinating peek into the working process of Huizenga and the other USS Catastrophe artists (Dan Zettwoch and Ted May). This mini features thumbnails from all three artists of familiar work, in an effort to display just how useful thumbnailing can be for an artist. Like Barry, who urges drawing and doodling as a means to unlock one's muse, Huizenga enthuses over the use of thumbnails as a way of getting started and creating a quick visual layout. What's great about this comic is that we see three very different visions of what a thumbnail sketch is. For May, it's a fast, loose and sloppy way to lay out his story, throw in dialogue and generally get down gesture and composition. For Huizenga, it seems like panel design and structure is key; he mostly sticks to stick figures. For Zettwoch, it's a scribbly, messy page that simply serves as a source of information and a rough compositional outline. If I were teaching a course about comics, this mini would be my reference for teaching the importance of thumbnails.

The USS Catastrophe artists have been collaborating on a ridiculous fake trivia strip for a local St Louis newspaper called AMAZING FACTS...AND BEYOND! The first collection of these strips, THE FACTOIDS OF LIFE, is a delightfully assembled, complete with a list of other (non-existent) volumes in the series, like "Underwater Facts!" and "Facts On A Plane". Each artist sticks to their strengths here: May's strips tend to be less in a "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" format and more absurd vignettes, like "Cell Phones". This strip posits that cell phones trigger an imaginary veil of privacy in their users (letting them talk at top volume about intimate details), and then notes that scientists developed a drug that did the same thing to ease anxiety--causing people to talk out loud to no one in particular. (One passerby yelling "What do you not understand about Planet of the Apes" had me laughing out loud.)

Zettwoch's strips invariably involved some kind of complicated gizmo or process, almost like a Rube Goldberg strip. His strip about how the basketball game of H-O-R-S-E originated with the Aztecs was both hilarious and disgusting, while "High Spirits" intricately describes how bootleg liquor was kept in abandoned St. Louis water towers. Huizenga goes in some truly strange directions, like his "Bible Fu" strip that imagines a missionary mixing the Bible with Shaolin kung-fu stories, creating "Fight Or Run" style matchups between the likes of Ruth & Leviticus (armed with a Scroll of Unclean Discharge). The single funniest strip is "Cat Calendars", telling of the secret history of cat calendars, like Joseph McCarthy going after communist sympathizer calendars such as "Revolution of Preciousness". This minicomic sees these artists at their most accessible, yet totally within their own wheelhouses in terms of interests and style. It's clear that all three are having a ball coming up with gags.

FIGHT OR RUN features a series of short strips not unlike the first part of GANGES #2--a comic book representation of video game-style fights to the death. There are hints of influences from sources as diverse as Mortal Kombat, EC Segar's POPEYE, Mad's Spy vs Spy feature and Mat Brinkman's flowing, rambling adventure strips. The simple format of two odd-looking characters meeting and a decision made to fight or run actually opened up a huge range of formal possibilities for Huizenga. Some strips are straightforward fights, others are more meta (like "F" battling "R"). Some strips are intricate, like a battle between Duck and Rabbit (two characters who look exactly alike until you consider them within their named contexts), while others are stick-figure extravaganzas (cute-girl McSkulls vs everyone). The strips in this book are a relentlessly delightful exploration of cartoon problem-solving. Huizenga starts from a premise and finds ways to take that idea to an ultimate, logical extreme. While well-drawn, there's a spontaneity to Huizenga's line here that gives each page a lot of pop and energy. FIGHT OR RUN is just as instructive in its own way as NEW CONSTRUCTION in how to maintain spontaneity and build structure.

OR ELSE #5 is the most wide-ranging of these comics in terms of content. It's funny that even though this is a release from preeminent art comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, it looks like a very nicely-designed minicomic. This comic consists of quietly personal anecdotes, a sweeping, post-apocalyptic story featuring Huizenga everyman Glenn Ganges, and more abstruse strips like "The 100 Most People In America", "Profiles" and "Which Sentences Are We Diagramming?" "Profiles" is a remarkably clever strip that uses the size and abstract symbolic content of word balloons to create a coherent narrative despite the fact that no recognizable words are used. Tongue firmly in cheek, Huizenga then gives us a "preview" of the next 19 issues of "Or Else", spanning the next dozen or so years. In addition to assorted adventures, furniture refinishing, and interviews with wise celebrities, the last issue promises a "description of a new world and way of life"...plus reviews. Perhaps the oddest thing in the issue is what appears to be a scathing parody ad for something real: a seminar on "Revelation Offers Hope In A World of Terror". Belief and metaphysics has always been a running theme in Huizenga's comics, and this ad parody is a pretty vicious take on what he obviously views as exploitative fearmongering.

Huizenga's work is so effective because of the way he's able to balance a number of seeming contradictions. His line appears to be free and spontaneous, yet his thumbnails reveal a meticulous planner. His approach ranges from enigmatic to easily accessible, often in the same comic. He's daring but not ostentatious, quietly providing eye-popping surprises and (at times) big laughs. There's a thoughtfulness to his work but also a sense of whimsy. His comics sneak up on you, rewarding multiple readings. While one can spot his influences, he's not beholden to any singular artist or style. He's an exciting artist to watch because it's difficult to predict what he'll eventually evolve into as he matures.