Minis: Catching Up With Rob Jackson

I've been reviewing Rob Jackson's work for a decade now, and the British cartoonist's comics are just as strange and funny now as they were then. Pinning down exactly what he does is impossible, because he flips between genres effortlessly, even including quotidian slice-of-life comics. While he's happy to tell those genre stories in a straightforward way, the crude quality of his line and his sardonic wit always make whatever kind of story he's telling ridiculous on the face of it.

Take the four issues of his Flying Sausage Academy miniseries, for example. It's Jackson's mutated take on high school dramas mixed with supernatural/mutant high school genre material. The genius of the series, which begins as a punk rebel named Daryl is sent to his new school, is that it makes no attempt whatsoever to explain away the weirdness inherent in the series. His schoolyard nemesis is a kid nicknamed King Penguin, who has a bird's head. The headmaster wears wizard's robes as a way of impressing the students. One of Daryl's best friends is a skull-faced boy named "Lord of Despair, Devourer of Worlds, Jr." There are numerous student gangs like the Tough Girls, the Math Genii, the Alien Abductees, the Fashion Victims, etc--and they tend to have regular rumbles. When Dayrl is forced to be an informant for the headmaster, that's when things really take off as all sorts of weirdness emerges. Jackson's plots are remarkably tight for all of their silliness, and this is no exception as the reader slowly learns about the secrets of the school, the reasons why there are gangs, and why both giant spiders and music class play such prominent roles. Through it all, the usual high school drama is front and center, only it's far more seedy and less romantic than Harry Potter-style proceedings. Jackson's method here is to whip the reader through the story by cramming ten or eleven panels on each page. Jackson's line is deceptively simple: every panel is well-balanced, the character designs are memorably odd, and there are even moments of well-placed cross-hatching to add variety to the aesthetics of the story.

Ragnar The Cheesemonger is a classic Jackson story, in that he seems to have a special interest in stories set in the Middle Ages and a talent for emphasizing the mundane, unpleasant aspects of those times. This one's set in a small Viking village and involves the titular cheesemonger (a very funny variation on using a bad-ass name with a powerful-sounding title, like say "Conan the Barbarian") being threatened by a lunatic warrior. The entire plot revolves around Ragnar wishing he could get away from the warrior's challenge, yet won't accept the alternative--falsely apologizing for his cheese getting him sick. While the plot twists and turns in all sorts of unexpected ways, the heart of the piece is in the quotidian routines of Ragnar and the other villagers. The evil warrior is also a very funny character and brings an anarchic presence that drives the humor of the piece, as everyone else is a reasonably sensible person who's willing to talk through their problems. That style of humor is exactly the opposite of Flying Sausage Academy, where Jackson the one sensible character was the protagonist. It was up to him to navigate that chaos and ride it out. On the other hand, Ragnar had the whole of consensus polite society backing him up and he almost didn't make it past the chaos agent that affected everyone in the village.

Jackson's also been involved as an editor of various anthologies, including the third and fourth (and final) issues of Rhizome. They lean toward genre comics a bit but aren't necessarily restricted in any particular way. Issue three features a typical William Cardini story where a scribbly boulder becomes a troll and attacks what turns out to be a wizard. Cardini's comics always emphasize that these are marks on a page and play on those qualities in as visceral a manner as possible. Kyle Baddeley-Read uses his deliberately stiff figure drawing style to create a horrible scenario where everyone is happy all the time, no matter what. His other story uses grotesquely cute character design to create a horrible world where only a drug can restore that cutesy fantasy world. Both stories juxtapose that friendly line and open layouts to create remarkably grim, nihilistic worlds. Jackson's story is a departure, making it an illustrated walking guide in an icy, wintertime England. It's reminiscent of the sort of thing Oliver East does so well in exploring an environment and describing it in beautiful, poetic detail. Nick Soucek's does his own end-of-the-world piece, as what appeared at first to be a training exercise later turned out to be the real thing. It's a bit predictable in its execution and isn't especially memorable visually, either.

The final issue, #4, opens with Desmond Reed channeling Gilbert Hernandez with an awesomely gross story about a "disgusting man" named Ronald who's kidnapped by aliens. He winds up getting his owners pregnant, and the offspring are deposited on a suitably ugly world. It's Reed's level of detail that makes the strip so repulsively funny. Jackson's comic takes the rough plot of Star Wars (shepherd goes on a space adventure to save a princess with rebels) and then reverses every assumption the reader makes about who's good and who's evil. It's hilarious, even as the "good" guys turn out to be pretty brutal themselves once they've come into power. Once again, Jackson's wacky character design is the star here, as he makes most of the cast grotesque and deliberately avoids aesthetically appealing character and prop designs. Soucek's "Response" is extremely clever, as he stripped down his line even more than he did in #3 to tell a story of a guy growing up who is aware that someone is watching him at all times, and his disclosure to her that this is the case is a surprise that triggers a series of strange events. Baddeley-Read offers up more of his cute/grotesque nihilism, David Shenton's highly detailed superhero parody runs out of steam quickly, while Adam Smith's densely crude story about a robot war is funny at times but does not flow well. That said, it points out Jackson's willingness to give younger artists a showcase, something that this anthology did throughout its run.

Saying Good-Bye To Sparkplug: Lee, Sakugawa, Smith, Cardini

Nearly five years after the death of Dylan Williams, his eventual successor Virginia Paine has decided to shutter Sparkplug Comic Books. In the interim, she published a few projects that had been ongoing and introduced the world to some interesting young cartoonists. She did a fine job of continuing in Williams' memory by being true to her own aesthetic and interests and published some strong work as a result. This column will review the last few original publications from Sparkplug.

Vortex, by William Cardini. This is the collected edition of Cardini's interesting four-issue series that was more about texture and shape than it was character and story. That's OK, because watching Cardini cycle through his Mat Brinkman influence by drawing the entire thing on a computer asks the reader to consider each image as an image, both in terms of its over gestalt as well as its individual component. He works so big that the dots in the zip-a-tone effects he uses are enormous, reminding the reader that what they're seeing is computer-generated. That trick offers a layer of humor to the proceedings, as the story's protagonist (The Miizzzard) at one point bites the arm of an opponent and eats it. It's more like a video game effect than the more visceral experience one might get from the "warmer" environments that Brinkman creates. The story follows the galactic traveler The Miizzzard to a planet of living weapons who beg him to destroy their central control circuitry. That's pretty much the entire plot, as the Miizzzard has to go through a series of trials that attack his sense of reality and identity, expressed by Cardini as a series of wavy lines, repeated patterns and psychedelic effects. Here, the artificiality of the line and the "cold" effect the reader feels actually advances the narrative, as the Miizzzard must break through the illusion. Only the Miizzzard is continuously depicted with a thick, defining line, befitting his status as the most solid, "real" character in the story. Most of the other characters are grey-scaled blobs without that sort of defining line, which allows them to melt and warp on the page. Above all else, what this shares most with the Fort Thunder aesthetic is that this comic is an exploration of space and environment, only Cardini finds a way to depict its total otherness and alien qualities rather than warmly taking the reader on a tour. Only the Miizzzard stands in for the reader, and he's as baffled by what he sees and experiences as the reader is. The ultimate result is Cardini's most ambitious, eccentric and amusing project to date.

Ce/Ze, by Suzette Smith. This is a fascinating, unsettling story about two high school girls who become friends and share the same dream: of one of the girls dying in a girl accident. They come to believe that they're aliens who have lived past lives, which informs their friendship, their relationships with other friends and how they act around their parents. I love the way that Smith draws each figure: Amelia wears huge, almost bug-eyed glasses, while Honey's appearance is almost always deadpan. They both have a sort of alien, almost reptilian, presence at times. Smith strikes a balance between a portrayal of the ways in which friends can develop their own language and identity apart from societal approval and understanding with a genuinely fantastical story that unspools itself, bit by bit. That said, Smith always leaves a layer of ambiguity to the proceedings. Are Honey and Amelia really remembering their past lives together? Did Amelia get murdered several times in different lives by a male, kingly figure? Are they aliens, fairies, or something else? Will the outcome be different this time around? Is there fantasy relationship a sublimation of their attraction for each other? Smith provides no easy answers, but does create fascinating connections between the characters. Whether or not those connections are real, synchronicity or pure fantasy is left for the reader to decide, but there are certainly enough clues to tantalize the reader. The muddy, murky drawings in pages with panel-less borders adds to the dreamy quality of this comic, as Smith wants a slightly strange, disorienting visual experience for the reader.

Bird Girl And Fox Girl, by Yumi Sakugawa. I was greatly impressed by Sakagawa's recent Ikebana, and one can see the leap she made from this comic to her more recent work. This comic is a sort of modern fable that begins with the relationship between the titular characters being severed, and the rest of the comic is the fallout from these events. We never learn why they were torn apart, only that it scarred both of them so deeply that they literally became different beings as a result. Bird Girl got an operation that turned her into a human, got married and had kids, which is as clear a metaphor for identity self-erasure as I've ever seen. Fox Girl becomes a model who specializes in dangerous settings, a drive toward self-destruction by way of conforming to gender stereotypes. The two eventually find their conventional lives fragmenting, leading them both back to the desert from whence they came, but their reunion only recapitulates the pain they felt. Sakugawa's voice and point of view are sharp and bold, but her line isn't quite as refined as it would later become. Simply put, there are a lot of drawings that just don't work in the context that she's trying to create, and it's distracting. An example is a drawing of Fox Girl wearing a mask, only her mouth is clearly drawn too far to the right on her face. There are a lot of images that are clearly meant to be singular and striking, but they just don't have the impact that was perhaps intended. Still, this is a fascinating comic from a thematic point of view, and Sakugawa's deadpan, almost cold narrative voice is an interesting contrast from the actual events of the comic.

A Wretch Like Me, by Ebin Lee. This is not a narrative, per se, in the sense that there's not a linear narrative on a page to page basis. However, there's no question that Lee is telling a powerful story in these pages. The subtitle of this comic is "Sad/Black/Ugly/Queer", and it's all about the ways in which feeling like the Other in a space dominated by the dominant hierarchy can be so devastatingly alienating. I'm not sure if the dysphoria that Lee refers to is gender dysphoria (feeling like one is in entirely the wrong body) or a more generalized dysphoria, a general dissatisfaction with one's own skin in general. Regardless, the above image encapsulates that sense of frustration that one can't simply choose another body to take off the rack. Another theme that Lee elucidates is being black in white spaces, with a nightmarish image of hands tearing at his head with the caption of "Can I touch your hair" indicating the way that sort of microaggression can be amplified in an unsafe space. There are images of Lee's face melting as he looks in the mirror, another where Lee is trying to rescue a black shadow of himself. Lee's images are often so dense that they appear to be etched, like in a two page spread of a "mammy" on one page and a crying face eating watermelon on the next, captioned "Trapped in the white imagination". Another page notes the pain of invisibility (erase of race, gender, and identity) with the danger of visibility in a public space. This comic is a howl of truth, flipping from painful image to painful image almost like a fever dream.

Thirty Days of Short Reviews #19: Cold Heat Special #10

William Cardini is a natural as a choice for a Cold Heat Special. His stripped-down, Fort Thunder style of art and Risographed color choices fit right into the aesthetic of the original series and the follow-ups. He also has a refined sense of how to put together genre concepts into an avant-garde framework, as can easily be seen in any number of his own projects (but Vortex is the best example of this).

This issue involves a woman hunting a minotaur in a labyrinth. There's a clever visual here as her sword contains a sort of GPS system that guides her through the maze and takes her to her target. The way in which Cardini alternates between pink and blue creates quite a trippy experience for the reader. His figure drawing is actually more conventional than usual here, as the figure of the woman is stripped down to a few bold brushstrokes here and there. The actual maze has that sort of wavy line he uses so much, allowing the reader to know that what they're reading is pure artifice while it's creating its own world. The comic goes into some truly wacky directions after she discovers the corpse, as spiders come out. One is cut in half, only to reveal a rare record that starts playing, starting a sort of impromptu dance party. At just twelve pages, this is the perfect length for the kind of silly weirdness on display.

Revising Myths and Twisting Sci-Fi: Kinoko, Maggie Woolfolk, William Cardini, Matthew McDaniel

The Epic of Gilgamesh, by K. Kinoko Evans. This is a charming, cartoony and yet mostly faithful adaptation of "the world's oldest story". In three issues and around 75 pages, Kinoko distills the highlights of Gilgamesh's journey from boorish and hated ruler through a hero's journey that matures him. Along the way there's sex, violence, monsters, the gods, double-crosses, schemes, journeys through the land of death, an account of the Great Flood and essentially the template for every other mythos and epic belief system ever recorded. Kinoko uses a charming line and a cute set of facial expressions that amusingly contrasts the seriousness of the events of the story. In that respect, her art reminds me a bit of Kate Beaton in terms of its breeziness, clarity, decorative qualities and gentle irreverence in depicting the classics. Kinoko does use a thick, fat line in drawing the lead's eyes and eyebrows, giving him an immediate sense of power. Kinoko depicts Gilgamesh as a sort of overgrown frat boy with godlike abilities; it's no wonder that he inflicts so much misery on his subjects, especially in the form of jus Primae Noctis, or having sex with virgins on their wedding nights before their new husbands do so. To that end, a priestess of Ishtar lures Enkidu, the Wild Man, to the kingdom of Uruk to fight Gilgamesh. Finding themselves to be equals after fighting for hours, Kinoko then transforms the book into the first bromance. The way Kinoko incorporates modern slang is still entirely in keeping with the spirit of the story, as it is certainly no less epic or violent in her interpretation than in its original form. She also adeptly captures the inherent pettiness of the gods and the ways in which they mimic humanity's own short-sightedness. In the end, Kinoko also captures the epic's central message regarding the power of friendship and the need to live one's life in the moment.

Ratchethart Forest, by Maggie Woolfolk. Inspired in equal parts by Norse mythology, Pogo and maybe True Swamp, Rachethart Forest is a funny, weird, charming and disturbing comic that seems to be a perfect outlet for the artist's pop-culture and literary segues. Woolfolk has really hit on something here, as these characters resonate in a way her past comics never quite did. Part of that is that delicate synthesis between character and concept; some of her older work fell flat because it was entirely conceptual and reference-based, or else too personal in relating her particular tastes. Here, her forest animals are both familiar to a reader in terms of their archetypes yet entirely within the bounds of her broad, silly and sometimes violent sense of humor. Fittingly, this is a quest comic. The ancient crow known as Ode guides a beaver named Sixer across the swamp in an effort to alleviate her pain after her husband went crazy/was possessed and ate their son's eye. Other creatures have their own agendas and their own journeys in this swamp, which is part mythological dumping ground, part swamp and right next door to a nuclear power plant. Woolfolk saturates her dense and expressive drawings with musical references, odd pop-culture appearances (I especially liked the Log Lady haunting a dazed owl), puns, wordplay, poetic allusions, scatological humor and in general a rousing blend of high and low culture. The earthiness of the swamp and its denizens is countered by the mythological weirdness of many of its features and creatures. The grey-scaling and printing job in general is a bit on the muddy side; I'd love to see this collected when it's done (two more issues) and printed larger and on better paper.

Optik Noize #4, by Matthew McDaniel. I'm not sure how much earlier issues are supposed to inform this lighthearted bit of escapism, but this issue felt like a complete product not dependent on other stories. The drawing is somewhere between Scott McCloud cute and Charles Burns grotesque, while the story itself trades in on classic sci-fi tropes like clones (and the problems with cloning a clone) and an all-encompassing "everything equation" that solves every problem. McDaniel also makes this an old-fashioned romance comic as well, with a square-jawed hero and a long-suffering romantic interest, with their relationship being thrown into bold relief when an evil version of him asks some uncomfortable questions. This mni is certainly an amusing throwback; it's the sort of comic that would have been published by someone like Comico or Pacific in the 1980s. It's a fun and breezy read and well-executed at a genre level, and it doesn't aspire to do or be more than that.

Vortex #4 and Tranz #2, by William Cardini. Once again for Cardini, his comics are less about story and character than they are about texture and shape. If a comic drawn on a computer can be said to espouse the "mark-making" ethos of so many characters influenced by former Fort Thunder cartoonists like Mat Brinkman, then Vortex certainly fits in this category. This fourth and final issue of the series finds its protagonist, the Miizzzard, in conflict with the head of an evil slaver empire. The battle is all wavy lines, repeated patterns, zip-a-tone effects and a cascade of psychedelic effects. There is still a character at the heart of things in the Miizzzard, but he's more of an audience entry point and interpreter of an environment than a character that's been fully fleshed out. The second issue of Tranz is more of the same sort of action without the benefit of a particular plot or character to lead the reader along. I find the zip-a-tone in particular to be hypnotic and beautiful in its own strange way, just as I'm drawn to Cardini's comics despite his obvious influences.

Past and Future: Vermilyea, Cardini, Chad, Leach

Battle Burger, by Jon Vermilyea. This isn't a comic, but rather a series of illustrations of Vermilyea's violent, creepy anthropomorphic food characters done up in full gladiatorial garb. Silkscreened in full color, these drawings are funny, beautiful and disgusting--all at the same time. My favorite images include a two-page spread of a Road Warrior-inspired armored tank driven by a bloodthirsty slice of pizza and cut of meat. Even better is a monstrous doughnut, its hole encircled by sharp teeth. Vermilyea has done too few comics by my estimation, which is unfortunate because he's a big-time talent. He probably has done enough minis and anthology entries to fill up a collection by now, but as it is he's underexposed.

Vortex #3, by William Cardini. I love the increasingly abstract and artificial texture of Cardini's series, which will likely wrap up with #4. It's a fascinating take on the Mat Brinkman/Fort Thunder school of exploring a space, as the protagonist, the Miizzzard, struggles to regain coherence while traveling through a dreamspace. Using a variety of repeating patterns, zip-a-tone and other effects, and simple shapes, Cardini keeps the reader's eye moving across the page without leaving them in the dark for too long. Cleverly, he makes the artificial feel of each page part of the story itself, as the Miizzzard breaks free of the illusion to reach the final stage of his journey, which is where the issue ends. It's interesting to see a book done in the "mark-making" school of comics drawn entirely on a computer, as it heightens reader tension and makes the contents all the more alien in its coldness.

New Sludge City, by Brendan Leach. This is a tight, moody futuristic caper story by the talented, emerging Leach. Published by Retrofit Comics, Box Brown's innovative venture, it's a modest-looking comic that looks like it was shot straight from pencils with some grayscale effects. It's a deliberately ugly, low-fi look for an ugly little story about a pair of thugs who plan to use boutique body-switching technology to pull off a big score. The scuzzy underbelly of the city is highlighted by its otherwise futuristic and even utopian trappings, like cars that drive themselves and fully automated homes. Of course, the punks aren't rich and are trying to get over by getting paid for allowing rich people to inhabit their young bodies for an evening, a sort of obscene cosplay for the futuristic 1%. When it becomes evident that there's no honor among thieves, one only wonders how long the eventual triple-cross that concludes the book was actually in place. The scribbly pencils and heavy atmosphere of the piece do a lot of the narrative heavy lifting in this comic, leaving the reader only to wonder about the nature of the relationships in this comic prior to its events. In this and his earlier The Pterodactyl Hunters, Leach seems to enjoy exploring cities and societies in their decline. In the former comic, certain characters will do anything to maintain their status. In New Sludge City, certain characters will do anything to escape their societal standing.

Maser, by Jon Chad. Chad's rightly received a lot of attention for his all-ages Leo Geo series, but his genre-inflected stories sometimes go in a darker direction. This mini he was selling at SPX is a short, funny and nasty story about a social outcast scientist who perfects his maser (different from a laser--Microwaves Amplified by Stimulated Emissions of Radiation) and calls up a random co-worker in the middle of the night to talk about it. Of course, when the co-worker curses at him and later belittles him at their job, the scientist first takes drastic measures, then takes even more drastic measures in order to get what he really wanted: a chance to talk about his maser with this random co-worker. Chad's a superb draftsman and draws the horrific scenes where someone's face gets burned with an almost loving attention to detail. This one's well worth reading if you can track it down.

Odd Genre Minis: Cardini, Baddeley, Burggraf, Harder

Let's take a look at a few odd genre minis, each with their own unique take on sci-fi/fantasy/adventure.

Vortex #2, by William Cardini. Cardini is headed in an interesting direction by continuing to work big and using an amorphous figure-drawing style that continues to drift away from his biggest influence, Mat Brinkman. This issue also establishes a real narrative outside of the "two powerful figures meet and fight" nature of the first issue. His protagonist The Miizzard, after seemingly defeating his sword-wielding opponent in the first issue by biting its head off, finds his opponent bursting out of his stomach. To his surprise, the creature asks for his help, and Cardini takes the reader on a journey underground as he explores an environment with page after page of eye-grabbing images. Cardini's characters are frequently amorphous, something he represents with limited use of line and a heavy use of effects like zip-a-tone and grey-scaling.Only The Miizzard himself is depicted with a continuously thick line, befitting the solidity and quiet resolve of his presence. Working big and using so many decorative patterns gives this issue a psychedelic feel, yet one that's grounded in rock-solid and simple layouts. It's enjoyable seeing Cardini move his characters around, with or without a larger narrative, but he seems to be building up to something interesting here.

Silent V #5, by Kyle Baddeley. Baddeley starts to connect some dots in this crazy, loopy sci-fi/time-travel/occult/horror comic. For a comic that features an ancient god brought forth by blood sacrifice traveling to the future to confront his enemy, there sure are a lot of weird quips and funny situations. At the same time, Baddeley treats his narrative with deadly seriousness, even if all of his characters are silly-looking (the ancient god looks like a dog-like Muppet) and do odd things (the god happens to have a glass-cutter in his shorts, a minute after his acolyte thinks the god is about to masturbate while standing on top of his shoulders looking through a window). Baddeley's line is growing more confident and he has a much better sense of how do design and balance individual panels and pages. The back-up story, the silent "Flotsam and Jetsam" is a truly disgusting bit of oneupsmanship as two men devour a meal, devour the bones, devour their feces after the meal, and then look to devour each other. The bulbous noses and shading that Baddeley employs reminds me a little of Skip Williamson in places as he goes into lovingly gross detail of the things the two men are eating. It's probably the single best set of drawings and most coherent narrative I've seen from Baddeley to date; he mentioned possibly adding a short story in every issue, and I think this is something that would anchor the comic a bit more for new readers as well as allow him to complete full but simple narratives. Slowly but surely, Baddeley is becoming a talent to watch.

Furlqump, by Brett Harder. This lovely little hand-made object falls into the genre of children's lit, with a clear line of inspiration from the surreal storytelling style of Dr. Seuss. This is more of a heavily illustrated story than a "pure" comic, though there are pages with a panel or two and word balloons. The key to this book's success is the clear and attractive lettering of Harder and the eye-popping use of watercolors. The story involves a peek into a nearby floating world whose entrance from earth is elusive and one particular inhabitant of this world, an outcast Qumpod named Tedlow. The book is about the ways in which the other members of his race communicate and shun his new mode of communication, until he's able to solve an intractable problem. There's a marvelous fluidity to Harder's storytelling in this book, effortlessly introducing new concepts into the story and quickly integrating them with what the reader knows up til that point. Like Seuss, there's an additive quality to the story as new concepts keep stacking up until they come into conflict with each other until they finally resolve. The other thing I enjoyed about Harder's artwork is the way he adds solidity to his figures with delicately feathered cross-hatching, making his characters feel real in a way that most children's characters don't. Despite the craziness of his figures, Harder is actually quite restrained in his storytelling, providing a number of quiet and contemplative moments for his characters. This is a delightful and genuinely touching book, lovingly produced by its publisher.

Mongoloid Revenge and Kid Space Heater, by Josh Burggraf.  These comics are broad, cartoony, violent and silly. Mongoloid features a moose bent on revenge getting a gang of underwater ghost pirates to make his mongoloid enemy's life hell. Kid features a young boy stumbling upon a sentient superweapon with a dark sense of humor. The former comic finds the title character's life ruined in an unexpected gag in an ending that's bleakly funny.  The latter comic is big (about 8 x 10") and agreeably bombastic, as there's some kind of explosion, bizarre tech or chase on nearly every page. Burggraf mixes his simple design figures with what look like computer-drawn backgrounds, allowing the figures to pop on every page without isolating them too much against bland backgrounds. The mix works, as the eye always has something to follow on every page without getting confused or bored. His anthropomorphic figures are funny and slightly disturbing, rendered with thick, rubbery lines. There's not much nuance in these comics as Burggraf goes over the top on every page and in every panel, but there's a light touch to his storytelling that makes these comics a breezy read. There's not much in the way of substance in Burggraf's work, but that's not to say that they're not impeccably planned and designed. In his case, style is substance.

Sci-Fi Minis: Cardini, Smith, Costain

SF Supplementary Files #2, by Ryan Cecil Smith. Printed on Risograph (a reproduction process that uses ink and allows the easy use of color), these three minicomics (each of the three issues is #2a, 2b or 2c), find Smith once again veering away from the main narrative of his over-the-top sci-fi series to explore a particular character or indulge a particular interest. In this case, he adapts Matsumoto Leiji's Queen Emeraldas, a space pirate fantasy which is adapted faithfully in a number of respects. For example, the narrative reads from right to left, from the end of the book to the beginning. The comics themselves are bizarre artifacts that feel like they were made thirty years ago, the sort of thing one might find in an obscure corner of some dusty bookstore or comic shop. The story follows a pirate dropping a boy off on a world, only to discover that the world is a fake and the boy has been captured by a fiendish mastermind. Issue C in particular is one crazy image after another on a different one-tone color sheet. The colors feel "wrong" in the best way, as they jar the reader on page after page as the action gets more and more intense. I'm guessing that Smith chose to re-do this story because it fit into his ultimate storytelling goals for SF, but also because there are so many great things to draw: the scars on Emeralda's face, the sleek design of her spacecraft, the scenes underwater, etc. While the story is ultimately fairly conventional, Smith's design continues to be the main draw, along with his impeccable sense of pacing.

Entropy #7, by Aaron Costain. Costain sent me just the seventh issue of an ongoing series, but it's an intriguing one. There are two different storylines. One involves a man's car breaking down on the side of a road in a heavily forested area. He walks with his infant son on a bridge that crosses a river until he is accosted by a dog and falls off the bridge. In the book's key sequence, we see the man tumble off the bridge in a series of five vertical, rectangular column panels, and underneath them, we see the baby tossed to and fro until he loses consciousness. On the next page, we see a humanoid figure impaled upon a huge spike for an indeterminate but obviously long period of time in a series of five vertical, rectangular columns. Beneath those columns are smaller square panels that go from all black (unconsciousness) to a close-up of the inert humanoid form being buffeted by the seasons. The creature, as we learn, is a golem, and an angel appears and gets him off the spike. He carries him much like the father carried the baby for much of the issue, cleans him up, and revives him. The golem's obvious question as the issue ends is "Papa?". I'm not sure if the connections between the two storylines were more obvious in the earlier issues of the series, but Costain cleverly uses a number of visual tricks to keep the reader interested in what is essentially a bunch of walking around. For example, the angel is first seen as a burst of energy defined by blank space in the shape of a man, and then inverts the energy to become a sort of man-shaped vibration. Simply looking at the angel performing mundane tasks is interesting because of the way it sticks out in every panel. I don't have much else to say about this comic in terms of narrative, other than that Costain likes to take his time and make the reader think about the physical reality of both mundane and highly strange activities.

Vortex #1, by William Cardini. I've enjoyed Cardini's development as an artist and the refinement of his heavily Mat Brinkman-influenced style. Cardini works big in this sci-fi/fantasy battle comic, but more interestingly, he uses a deliberately artificial-looking style of line. You can see the dots and pixels on the page, giving the whole thing a cold and digital quality that is trying to separate the reader from Brinkman's warm, organic and oozing imagery. That slight distance and primitiveness of the line quality (as opposed to the drawings themselves) adds a certain extra comical layer to a story that involves a wizard quite graphically and viscerally biting off the arm of a monster. The whole thing has a light-hearted feel, much like the rest of Cardini's work, odd as it may appear on the surface. Working bigger certainly suits him, and I enjoyed looking at the images as images.

Whores of Mensa #5, Candy or Medicine 13

Time to look at a couple of minicomics from near and far.

Candy or Medicine #13, edited by Josh Blair. The latest in this all-comers minicomics series is the usual mixed bag of visual & narrative approaches. William Cardini's story, as always, was welcome to see, as he unleashed his usual Mat Brinkman-style exploration of environment with monsters and robots. It's a nice mix visually between heavy use of black in negative space with wavy lines filling up entire panels. There's also a slice-of-life gag from Katie Omberg that was fairly routine up until the punchline, which actually landed with some force. Brad W. Foster shows once again that he's a fine artist, even if his gag was less-than-inspired. As an editor, Blair has shown a tendency to try to print some genre-oriented stories, like this issue's "The Cloud Catcher" by Christopher Tupa. It's a mildly amusing fantasy story that lacks visual appeal thanks to its use of grays; it probably looks more interesting in color. Blair's commitment to a variety of material as well as experience & even talent levels has always been impressive, and some interesting names have floated through this anthology as a result.

Whores of Mensa #5, edited by Ellen Lindner & Jeremy Day. Kickstarter strikes yet again to produce another attractive, lengthy comics anthology. In the past, the Whores of Mensa anthology printed no more than three or four cartoonists. This UK-centered anthology has also traditionally published the work of women, a tradition that continued in this issue with one exception. Each issue has also revolved around a loose theme; this issue's central idea is "parties". This approach spawned a surprising number of variations on the experience of a party. Patrice Aggs, for example, set her comic in a hair salon where everyone there talks about potentially attending a party at a club later that night. Aggs skillfully depicts the inanity of workplace chatter with great affection. Perhaps too much affection, as the comic slightly outstays its welcome at seven pages.

Sarah McIntyre's two-pager about being forced to fold paper napkins for her mother's parties, on the other hand, benefited from its brevity, as it possessed a clever punchline. Co-editrix Jeremy Day's nine-panel comic "Larderella" is typically cheeky, turning the Cinderella story on its head with the prince being interested in the heroine's shoes for a quite unexpected reason. Cloidhna Lyons' story features lovely art with bold black lines, but it was more than a bit predictable and ultimately forgettable as a result. Francesca Cassavetti's childhood anecdote is typical of her in that she goes from the general (attending all sorts of parties) to the specific (a party that her secret crush Serge was supposed to attend) with great fluidity, easing the reader to her eventual punchline. Her scribbly art is a perfect match for the kinds of stories she tells.

Co-editrix Ellen Lindner, long a favorite of mine in the minicomics world, shows off a remarkable amount of polish in her story of a young woman bouncing from London to New York with great misgivings. Her precise misgivings go unrevealed, but her tendency to bounce from affair to affair may well have something to do with it. There's a stark precision to Lindner's line combined with a certain stiffness of figure that almost reminds me of Steve Ditko. It's stagy, an aesthetic that fits due in part to its nature as a period piece. Howard John Arey (formerly of the High-Horse collective) contributes a two-pager about the sort of person who isn't invited to a party, but desperately longs to be. It's a clever story with an agreeably sloppy line. Emily Ryan Lerner's story about two friends negotiating a New Year's Eve party at an unfamiliar apartment has the sort of specific detail that this sort of slice-of-life story demands. The simple line allows the reader to fly across the page.

My favorite story was that of Maartje Schalkx's, a cleverly-designed map comic that follows her progress walking up a street (shown as walking "up" a landscaped page) with a lost little boy. There's a remarkable spareness of line and image in this comic, as she has the street map take up most of each page. Finally, Tanya Meditzky's comic features small drawings and tiny print, which was certainly distracting as a reader. The simplicity of her line allows her to lead the reader across and around the page with surprising fluidity, much like the conga line she depicts. Whores of Mensa #5 is somewhat uneven but overall still a coherent and joyful shout of a comic. It's another example of the way the British comic scene is growing and the variety of approaches that are springing up.

Mini-Comics Round-Up: MariNaomi, Gonzalez, Jackson, Moorman, Cardini, Melaina

Rob reviews autobio confessional minis by MariNaomi and Melaina; odd genre takes by William Cardini and Ed Choy Moorman; underground-flavored minis by Jenny Gonzalez; and a lyrical take on water by Martine Workman.



ESTRUS #7, by MariNaomi. The Bay area artist specializes in confessional stories from her love life, but after the rather dramatic account that capped her previous issue, MariNaomi decided to fill this issue up with bits and pieces from various sources. Some are illustrations for various zines and anthologies, the most notable of which was a panel that was reproduced on well-known USA Today writer Whitney Matheson's blog. MariNaomi repurposed one of those assignments to hilarious effect here, adding captions to illustrations designed to make children less afraid of needles. Photos of cheerful children with captions like "I sure hope there aren't any bubbles in that syringe, or you're gonna die!" reveal her dark sense of humor.

While there was a fictional story in this issue, MariNaomi's strength is autobiography. "In Case Of Emergency" saw her ponder the notion of having to save everyone's life on a subway car in case of terrorist attack, and the ways in which she'd fall short. "Not My Celebrity Story" is a funny anecdote about her ex flitting from new crush to new crush and getting burned when his new girl turns out to be a porn star lying about her identity and intentions. The most revealing piece was "Euphemisms = Love", a one-page strip where her lover makes MariNaomi feel better about drinking too much with a well-placed euphemism. What's most interesting about this comic is the number of visual styles she uses, depending on the assignment. some are more naturalistic, others are steeped in the deep blacks that are her usual trademark, others are more spontaneous and cruder, while others still are deliberately cartoony. Her brand of wit seems to do best with a non-naturalistic style; there's something about her authorial voice that seems to "sound" best with a more fluid, cartoony style. There's a fluidity to her narrative style to begin with, so it only makes sense that her line should match it.



DATER'S DOZEN, by Melaina. Melaina lists MariNaomi as her comics mentor, and it showed in this mini about the artist dating different men. The kicker here was that it was a deliberate, chronological pursuit after a difficult break-up, and the dates came from the internet or were blind dates set up by friends. In terms of a visual approach, Melaina's work is very much unlike MariNaomi's in that she doesn't do much in terms of spotting blacks. Instead, she presents a flatter page and relies solely on her minimalist but expressive linework to tell her story.

Overall, this was a charming, breezy read. Melaina is a nurse by profession, and that sort of no-nonsense attitude found in nurses surfaced in the way she approached her dates. At the same time, she found ways of expressing her vulnerability and pain in a manner that was forthright and honest but not whiny or self-pitying. Regarding her art, she displayed a lot of cleverness in solving certain storytelling problems, with her panel composition in particular being fun to look at. In terms of her figure drawing, her self-caricature is distinctive & expressive as well as being a funny drawing. Her biggest weakness as an artist is in how she presents gesture and character interaction. There's a real stiffness there that could be aided by spotting blacks to establish mood, which would force the eye to see how characters are reacting to each other more clearly. What I liked most of all about this mini was that it was a warts 'n all examination of her dates and relationships, one in which she took herself to task as much as she did those men who didn't quite measure up. The power of her comics personification's personality combined with her ability to cleverly lay out a story will no doubt continue to lead her to create some interesting work.



TOO NEGATIVE #9-11, by Jenny Gonzalez. Gonzalez is a long-time mainstay of the minicomics world, working roughly in the tradition of underground comics. Gonzalez employs a cute, cartoony style to depict a "halfway house in hell". These minis seems to be fairly crude reproductions of strips originally printed elsewhere, and the copies don't do her work any favors in the way they chop of border edges and even dialogue at times. That's unfortunate, because her rubbery figures, over-the-top sense of humor and thinly-veiled fictive self all pack a powerful punch. While the series is ostensibly about a group of characters living in hell and either recovering or helping to treat others, it's mostly about the experience of living through mental illness. More to the point, it's about the experience of living through institutional treatment for mental illness.

As such, the Devil Dahlia character is obviously a liberating fictive construct, both for venting on this harrowing set of experiences and also as a powerful id-figure. She's quite matter-of-fact about her grip on reality, never preventing it from living her life freely and to the max. She's in a band, she freely expresses her libido, and she reaches out to others for friendships and connections. Gonzalez freely experiments with formats and story goals in these minis. One issue is nothing but dark four-panel gags. Another issue features an extended story of how Devil Dahlia wound up in an institution. Both of these issue flattered her strengths for the most part. Gonzalez's comics were less compelling when she was venting against crummy bands, whiny hipster cartoonists and other more ephemeral complaints. These tended to feel a bit dull and flat in comparison to those strips that flexed a sharper, darker sense of humor or depicted a nightmarish experience with wit and more than a little detachment. Her comics certainly deserve an extensive repackaging that flatters her expressive line to a much greater extent.



8 STORIES, by Rob Jackson. Rob Jackson is an artist with a pleasingly loopy sense of humor whose art is rapidly starting to catch up with his ambitions. His use of grey and black in depicting a city that fell in love with its own reflection nicely established the story's mood, and the way he both anthropomorphized the city and displayed the collateral damage it inflicted on its people was quite clever. Jackson's cruder stories tended to be more autobiographical, though these stories all had humorous content. "Rob Jackson's Rules of Life #6" was a brief bit of deadpan silliness that subverted its own initial conceit at the end. "Blood and White Water" amusingly told the story of his one and only attempt at white-water rafting, a story that played up his own ineptitude and humiliation to great effect. "Show Me Your Insect Hooves" was about his experience going to see his favorite band, drawn more-or-less on site. While I appreciated the spontaneity of this piece, it was so rough that it either needed to be left in the sketchbook or else redrawn.

My favorite two pieces in this comic couldn't be any more different. "My Nearest Mountain" finds him experimenting with what looks like a brush to tell a more serious story about a particular day trip. His line here is thicker and more expressive and gives the reader a real sense of the terrain. "Math-Ro-Mancer" is the sort of absurd, violent genre comic that Jackson does so well. It begins as a fantasy tale as two children seek out the Math-ro-mancer to help them multiply fractions, and the title character teaches them with the gruesome use of a corpse that induces them to vomit. Pulling back, we see that this is an educational TV show and our hero pensively wishes that he could do math without terrifying children. Jackson takes a ridiculous premise and then subverts it in the weirdest way possible. About the only thing I could have wished for in this story was a line that was either more deadpan or funnier looking. Jackson's line here falls short of the situation he creates. It serves well enough to understand the joke, but what separates Jackson from being a great humorist is that he doesn't yet have a fine enough control over his line to go the extra mile to sell his joke. Given his improvement in composing a page, he will likely soon reach a point where his line catches up to his ambition.



DARK CLOUD COMIN', by Ed Choy Moorman. This mini feels strongly influenced by ED THE HAPPY CLOWN-era Chester Brown in terms of its line, the ambiguity of its narrative and its bleak view of humanity. More specifically in terms of the art, the way Moorman uses oversized heads and straightforwardly engulfs his character in a world of nightmare logic also recalls Brown. There are a number of striking images in this comic: the mute giant who must swallow children to live and in turn (supposedly) protect a value; the way he feels haunted by this proposition and scrawls his tortured confessions on the side of a mountain; the girl/boy child Elona stopping the giant's heart from the inside; the final page where we see the interaction between Elona, a baby tadpole and the wind whistling through a tree's long branches.

This story feels like a splinter from a longer epic, pared down to a few important emotional beats. While the character of Elona and the giant maintain a certain delightful mysteriousness, the other principals are all frustratingly bland: the deceptive priest, the helpful newfound friend, the earnest but impotent mother. It felt like Moorman either gave the reader either too much information or not enough, and I am actually leaning toward the former. Moorman might have been better served removing a few pages of exposition in favor of forcing the reader to work harder to engage the many striking images in this comic. Still, it's obvious that Moorman is bursting with ideas, and each successive comic of his I read is better than the last. He's one of many comics in Minnesota who are making a name for themselves.



FROGHEAD HANGOVER, by William Cardini. Despite this comic's absurd title, it is absolutely an accurate description of its contents. Reminiscent of somewhere between Mat Brinkman and Sam Gaskin, Cardini tells a story of a video-game playing humanoid who wakes up from a bad hangover to find that a large froghead has somehow wound up in his house. It's 12-pages of well-designed silliness and a vibratory line that winds up teaching us not to play Dr. Mario with mysterious shamen, lest one find oneself at the receiving end of a powerful magic spell. Cardini doesn't bother with set-ups, explanations or other extraneous details to get to his eventual punchline; once reached, the story's over. His line is so appealing (yet idiosyncratic) to my eye that every page is a pleasure to look at. Unlike a number of artists influenced by Fort Thunder & Paper Rad, there's a great deal of clarity and confidence in his line. I could easily imagine a collection of a number of stories like this one making an impact in the world of comics.



WATER AND FALL, by Martine Workman. This is a charming series of drawings that loosely work together to form a narrative of sorts about water. Mostly, it's about water spraying people in weird and unexpected ways. At times, it acts as comics-as-poetry, creating a certain rhythm of images on the page to get across the visceral sensation of floating and/or being splashed. I particularly liked the way that Workman diligently stippled drops of water while crafting figures that were small blobs in the face of nature. This comic is a beautiful trifle; it doesn't aspire to deliver a powerful emotional statement but rather simply creates an atmosphere and details a singular and similar set of experiences. It fits quite nice into the overall aesthetic of comics & zines published by Little Otsu.