Recent CCS Work: Sophie Goldstein, Beth Hetland, Max Mose

Let's look at some recent work by grads and students from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS):

Fugue #3, by Beth Hetland. This is the third and final chapter of "a family in three parts" and the ways in which creativity and performance intersect in the lives of many of them. The first chapter focused on Hetland's mother, an aspiring concert pianist who freezes up before a big show and abandons performance. The second chapter focuses on her having children and how each of them related to music. Beth and her older sister never quite had the skill, but the youngest daughter, Rachel, was every bit as talented as her mother. She unfortunately suffered the same fate: freezing up before a big show and abandoning the piano. Both comics were heartbreaking in their own way, and the third chapter is both epilogue and a chance for healing. This chapter circles around to Hetland herself and her younger sister's graduation, dancing around her recent reticence to play. One thing I love about these comics is how saturated they are in music; for this family, it is very much a second language, a way of communicating. Even non-experts like Beth can't help but know and truly appreciate so many complex pieces, something that she cleverly weaves in and out of the comic by using a sort of erasure technique on musical notes. Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" is the piece most often always in the background like this, which is fitting considering its highs and lows. There are two killer pages in this comic. The first is a 3 x 3 grid where each row sees each child at the piano in the left panel, an empty piano in the middle panel and each child as an adult sitting upright doing what it is they really have grown to love as adults. It's a beautiful, succinct way of summing up the family's relationship to music and the ways in which their individual passions were nurtured and encouraged. That's recapitulated on the last page, when watching the film Little Women with her mother, and transforms the line "Now it [a piano] will make music again" into "you will make your own music." What is life but finding one's own rhythm? Hetland's character designs are simple, which helps make her occasionally complicated page designs all the more easy to immediately apprehend. Her anatomy is a bit wonky at times (a number of drawings needed to be tightened up), but never to the detriment of the story's flow. This is a fine first major solo work for a talented and emotionally perceptive artist.

Betsy and Mothership Blues, by Sophie Goldstein. Despite using sci-fi trappings, these comics by Goldstein are really about deep and abiding loneliness and alienation. Mothership Blues is about a couple of glorified space janitors aboard a sort of living slug spaceship, going about their day. One of them is in love with the captain, while another makes friends with these ghostly mold creatures. Goldstein uses a clear, bold and cartoony line to propel this story of an unrequited crush and an unfulfilled desire to create family. She even uses a seemingly throwaway plot element to good use in the book's final act, adding a sense of doomed poignancy for one of the two janitors who realizes the other is his only friend.

Betsy packs an even stronger punch. Skimping on details, Goldstein slowly reveals a young woman living in a futuristic society where she has to wear an atmosphere-tight suit just to go outside who works at something called "Future Inc." She cheerfully greats a lumpen creature (one of many) called Betsy. It's clear that this is a child and the woman is trying to train her. Goldstein's understanding of body language carries this story powerfully, Details like the way little Betsy reaches up to the woman to be picked up, the way she clings to her, the way she smiles when praised and the way she ambles along indicate an artist who has a real understanding of what children are like. These scenes of tenderness make the end of the story all the more gut-wrenching, as the real purpose of the creature-children is made clear. In just twelve pages, Goldstein gets at the heart of an ethical debate that rages today, regarding bio-engineering our children and what we would do if we knew a special-needs child was going to be the result. The story just makes that debate all the more pointed. Goldstein's work reminds me a bit of Eleanor Davis or Dash Shaw in terms of the way they use sci-fi trappings to express complex emotional truths.

Terror Terror Terror, by Max Mose. Channeling his inner Rory Hayes (not to mention Al Feldstein), Mose does off-kilter horror stories with a touch of the ridiculous.His balance of genuinely scary ideas with grotesque art and a touch of parody reminds me a great deal of Rob Jackson's genre work. The opening story features death being pissed off at a bunch of people permanently on life-preserving machines, musing that he was going to reincarnate one of them as a scorpion. Like a Lewis Trondheim story, there's a lot of ridiculous dialogue surrounding a very sound idea. The same goes for "Welcome to Castle Gorgon", a Gothic potboiler about a marriage doomed to a snake-bitten end. "The Cap of the Wolf" is a fantasy story about a top-notch archer who kills a tribe of marauding wolf-skin clad men, including its lyncanthropic leader. When he kills the leader and takes the titular wolfskin cap, he naturally goes crazy and unleashes a greater evil -- only to be exploited in an ironic fashion at the end of the story. Finally, "Space Terror Maggots" is exactly what it sounds like: a grotesque story with wooden leads and stilted dialogue (not unlike a 50s sci-fi flick) who discover a series of asteroids inhabited by brain-eating maggots. The revelation in this comic is the way Mose is using color to create a sort of queasy, over-the-top and non-intuitive series of effects that really drive the emotional core of the action.

Sequart Reprints: Sardine, Tiny Tyrant, Black Diamond Detective Agency, Professor's Daughter

The newest Sardine In Outer Space book is more of the same. Sardine, her uncle Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie fly around the universe having light-hearted adventures. They're always running up against space dictator Supermuscleman and his mad scientist Doc Krok. This edition gets a bit meta, as our heroes are not only aware that they're the stars of a comic, but that they also only get 10 pages a story! Guibert and Sfar run with this idea in "Why Don't We Make A Movie?", where famous movie director Kubik tries to convince the gang to let him make a movie about them. The plot he describes comes to life as our heroes have a big space fight with Supermuscleman, but Sardine tells Kubik that his ideas aren't quite as exciting as their real lives.

The book is at its best when the premises are at their most absurd, because the plots are repetitive. The best stories include a visit to the Kingdom of Yummy, with fields of french fries, wild Burgeegies, the ketchup eruptions of Mount St. Heinz, and Weddingcake Mountain--with the King and Queen atop it. Along the meta lines, "The Sabotage Artist" is about a plot to make Sardine's comic unpopular by adding poorly-drawn characters, thanks to Supermuscleman. Then there's the Queen of Applet and her agents Dotcom, Clickalink and Doubleclick, who steal a statue and get tracked by the kids. As I noted in my review of the previous edition of Sardine, the book is best read a bit at a time, because there's not a lot of story or characterization to latch on to. However, it's ideal for younger children, especially those just getting into "real" books and comics. While Sardine's set-up is limited, the wacky scenarios that Guibert cooks up and Sfar playfully draws is a great way to get kids into comics.

Tiny Tyrant, on the other hand, is a stunningly hilarious work because of its tight plots and superb gag resolution. That's no surprise, considering that Lewis Trondheim is a gagman supreme, in addition to his many other talents. He's aided by the fantastically clean & expressive art of Fabrice Parme, whose style is reminiscient of 1960's animation. This clear-line style is a nice match for the frantic and energetic stories of young King Ethelbert, 6-year-old ruler of Portocristo. The king is a spoiled brat and terrorizes his ministers and citizens with his whims. The design of this book is fantastic: panel frames are left out. Instead, each story has a pastel background that brings the most out of the linework and the bolder colors used for the figures.
With the knowledge that Ethelbert is a little spoiled brat who will happily threaten those who disagree with him, Trondheim concocts plots that come up with an escalating set of problems and then devises an unexpected solution. In "The Ethelbertosaurus", the king is told of a dinosaur fossil being found. He immediately wants it named after himself, but balks when he sees it's a tiny creature. Wanting a larger dinosaur, he demands that his scientists create one. Through an unlikely series of events, one is created that immediately menaces him. The creature is sent back in time with Ethelbert (by accident), and the story resolves itself with a wacky set of events that is topped by a punchline that cleverly folds in events from earlier in the story.

What makes these stories so funny is that Trondheim stacks gag on top of gag, giving each story a momentum that plows toward the punchline at the end. Parme is more than up to the task of illustrating these gags, given his exaggerated figures and facial expressions. In "Safety First", Ethelbert is assigned a personal bodyguard. In order to test how good he is, he takes out a contract on his own life, and we proceed to see his bodyguard rescue him from catastrophe after catastrophe. Parme drawing "the Dastardly Detroiters" popping up out of a bunch of garbage cans is a hilarious image, one of many in a story that has genuine excitement from panel to panel. Once again, the final punchline is not only funny, it unexpectedly references an earlier plot point.

In The Professor's Daughter, Sfar and Guibert trade roles for what was actually their breakthrough work a decade ago. Guibert's moody, fuzzy art here meshes well with Sfar's melancholy fantasy romance. What I like best about this story is that its most absurd aspects are played straight. In Victorian England, an archeologist's daughter falls in love with the mummy of a former Egyptian pharoah that has come to life. Sfar understands what makes for a compeling story, because the plot is less concerned with the hows of the mummy's return than why he falls in love with the woman. Sfar spins this into a story of a son's relationship with his father, and crosses it with an ocean adventure, a prison breakout, a courtroom drama, and an absurd encounter with Queen Victoria. The comic almost feels as though it was originally twice as long, but Sfar cut out everything that wasn't essential to the story. Indeed, on the first page of the story, we're introduced to the mummy wearing a suit and out on the town with the titular daughter.

Color is a crucial component in the story's emotional narrative; the washed-out tones (watercolors?) evoke their environment so acutely that one can almost feel the fog or smell the ocean reflected in a cabin's light. As delicate as the coloring is, it's the liveliness of Guibert's figures that add drama to the action. The dreamy quality of the art allows the reader to make an easy transition between the action and several dream sequences, as well as even more absurd sequences like two mummies being laid up in hospital beds. While the book certainly has its share of shenanigans, it lingers in one's imagination because of the underlying sadness and emptiness of all its characters. The attempt to fill that void is at the heart of the book, and even the final page of the book has its own moment of tragedy despite what is otherwise a happy outcome. This book just feels like both artists having an enormous amount of fun riffing off each other, using a kitchen-sink approach to throw in everything they wanted in a story, and leaving out whatever disinterested them. It's simply a pleasure to read, from beginning to end.

Lastly, we have Eddie Campbell's The Black Diamond Detective Agency. It's based on a screenplay, and promises "mayhem, mystery, romance, mine shafts, bullets" and it certainly delivers. The story takes place around the turn of the 20th century in the American west--both in a small town and the big city. The anxiety surrounding the changes in the modern world is a running subplot that winds up holding the key to the story's mystery. The story begins with an argument between a man and a woman and the destruction of a train that kills dozens in his small town that is subsequently attributed to him. The man, John Hardin, is the sort of super-competent but haunted hero that's enormously compelling. Throwing him in with the eponymous private detective agency reminded me a bit of "The Fugitive", except the twist is that Hardin manages to disguise himself enough to temporarily join the agency!

While the story has interesting characters and some intriguing twists & turns, it really isn't much more than a rousing potboiler of an adventure story. What distinguishes it is the tour-de-force of design and composition that Campbell creates on the page. He combines his trademark scratchy style with a washed-out palette that perfectly depicts the grit and grime of the era. Acts of violence are in bold penstrokes and brighter color, popping them off the page. The pages go from full-page splashes to smaller grids to panels placed at odd angles to move the eye along the page with confusing images. Those readers who know Campbell from his autobiographical work might forget that his long-running adventure series Bacchus; he's no stranger to convoluted adventure stories. Still, this book isn't in the same league as something like Fate of the Artist, but it's a more-than-amusing diversion.

Once again, First Second excels at advancing comics that are another strain of "new mainstream" books. These comics are accessible to anyone, and the fact that they aggressively market comics for kids as well reflects the vision of the line's editor, Mark Siegel. He wanted comics to attain the same sort of respect and widespread cultural importance that they have in France, and wisely aimed his books directly at the bookstore market, but has done this so as to attract a wide audience. I wouldn't regard any of the books in this most recent wave as Great Works, but they do address comics' need for more solid, accessible and entertaining works. The term "middlebrow" is a bit too much of a pejorative to describe these well-drawn and written comics. These are, however, comics that anyone could enjoy but are clearly the personal vision of the artists involved.

Systems In Flux: Comics from L.Nichols

Let's take a look at a big batch of minicomics from the talented L.Nichols.

Flocks (Chapter One) was published through Box Brown's Retrofit Comics, and as such, it's the most straightforward of these comics.  Flocks was done in Nichols' most naturalistic style, with the exception of how she portrays herself. As always, she is a rag doll with x-button eyes. This is a heartbreaking account of Nichols' upbringing in the South as a devout Christian who knew from a very young age that she was a lesbian. What's remarkable about this story is not that Nichols felt like a freak and an outcast, but that she doubled and later tripled down on being more devout in an effort to receive a miracle: to not be gay anymore. She goes through full immersion baptism, more church services, more bible study, etc but still feels the full weight of being queer. This is depicted with arrows, much like a physics problem (Nichols has a degree from MIT and frequently depicts human relationships in terms of physics equations). Of course, when she more or less has an innocent first kiss with another girl (in a playacting scenario), she is both thrilled and terrified, as the arrows pierce her ragdoll body. This isn't a screed against Christianity; indeed, Nichols notes that her faith carried her through the conflict in her own family and offered her some comfort against her feelings of alienation. Rather, this is a personal story that takes aim at a cultural breakdown that crushes the faithful much more than the faithful. It's told in a restrained, almost poetic manner.

Unsurprisingly, much of Nichols' work focuses on transformation, identity and changes in systems. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, she reminds us in one of her comics; it can only be transformed. Her adaptation of Tejal Rao's "The Shucker's Tale in her catch-all anthology Jumbly Junkery #11 is a good example of this, as it's a whimsical tale of a shucker who's an oyster whisperer of sorts, encouraging whole choruses of oyster singing despite his father's objections. Nichols turns to mythology as well in this issue, with tales of Penelope and Prometheus that get at their hidden perspectives: Penelope's pain and Prometheus' matter-of-factness through doubt. In the other stories, conflicts and relationships intertwine as Nichols' line is quite different, as she makes her characters marionettes with realistic heads but painted-on cheeks. She also has time to do a silly "Outlaw Dog" strip, which is pure, visceral fun as a post-apocalyptic, motorcycle riding anthropomorphic dog gets in a race and then blows shit up.

Input/Output and Free People get at the struggles and pressures of life and expectations. Her storytelling is far more elliptical here, as the former comic uses color to heighten the sort of conflicts we saw in Jumbly Junkery. Input/output refers to eating/excretion, but it also refers to the infusion of the soul and taking life, as well as the ways in which we all ultimately "become part of a larger system". The comic hints at our choices as humans in how we channel the energy we receive as part of a greater system, and how truly understanding our eventual fate might also transform our choices. This was Nichols' most beautiful, effective attempt at comics-as-poetry, heightened by her figure drawing, use of color and mix of realism and the grotesquely cartoony. Free People is a juxtaposition of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and images from the Free People store catalog. Nichols bends both of these sources to her general themes: pressure to conform, seeking freedom (often through radical means like escape), transformation. She turns the fashion model photographs into her cubism-inspired jigsaws (once again with painted-on cheeks that suggest both life and external manipulation). It's an interesting appropriation of other media for an artist who's produced some interesting results dabbling in comics-as-poetry. Nichols just started her own micropublishing concern, which is fitting considering how hard-working she is as an artist and how she's developed so quickly.

Sequart Reprints: Life Sucks

I've been reading Jessica Abel's comics since the Xeric grant-funded Artbabe #5. Her greatest skill is her character work, especially in terms of the verisimilitude of her dialogue. In portraying little snippets of the lives of her 20-something characters, she managed to get at the core of their concerns and lives. There is a vividness in her character portrayals that made her stories linger long after reading them. With La Perdida, she once again created a vibrant set of characters, this time in a much more extensive narrative. Her running theme of characters feeling lost and trying to find their place in the world was put to dramatic effect, adding a frenetic element of action to her story. She made the bold choice of presenting us with a cast of characters who were mostly unsympathetic, especially the main character. By telling the story from her point of view but making it eminently clear that this character was deeply flawed, Abel made some telling points about identity and authenticity.

With Life Sucks, Abel is aiming a book at a different audience. The problem with this book is that its intent, flow and execution all seem to be at odds with each other at various points, which led to a comic that feels disjointed and overly labored. I'm not sure if this came about because she worked with another writer (Babe Soria) and another artist (Warren Pleece) to illustrate it, but the end result was largely unsatisfying. The book's high concept is very clever: a 20-something man is a vampire and is the servant of another vampire (the one who "made" him). As his servant, he's expected to work--in this case, the night shift of a convenience store. We meet his friends, the human goth girl he has a crush on, and his antagonist as the story unfolds. The effect we get is Vertigo comics meets Kevin Smith's Clerks.

The problem is that this comic is neither fish nor fowl. The rather predictable plot gets in the way of the kind of languid character set pieces that Abel excels at. We don't meet characters, we meet character types, and the main character is the flattest of them all. Dave is the familiar kind of sniveling, put-upon passive protagonist whose story arc is trying to screw up his courage to woo Latina goth girl Rosa. Dave is a "vegetarian" vampire, meaning he doesn't want to suck blood from humans and instead gets his nourishment from plasma. He's spurred into action by his irritant vampire friend Jerome (the bloodsucking Randal to Dave's Dante, to compare it to Clerks), his human roommate Carl but most especially by his rival Wes. Wes is a rich, spoiled vampire who has multiple slaves and furthers the whole "slobs vs snobs" plotline. He is determined to win Rosa, mostly as a way of annoying Dave.

After 90+ pages of this story, there's a shocking act of violence committed by Wes that reminds us that vampires are powerful and amoral. The violence is jarring and certainly changes the tone of the story momentarily, but we then return to the regular story with Dave. He then gets the girl when she realizes that Wes has several lovers, loses the girl when she realizes that Dave concealed his vampiric nature from her and refuses to turn her into one, and then has a big confrontation with Wes after she begs him to "make" her. This leads to a surprisingly downbeat ending where Dave makes a sort of sacrifice to win her her freedom from Wes.

There were aspects of this book that I found were done well. A leaner book with a tighter narrative built around its high concept could have been fun, especially if there had been a few more twists and turns in the plot. Alternately, a book that forgot about the plot and stayed with the high concept but concentrated solely on fleshing out the characters beyond the one or two notes that we saw in this book could have been a winner. Instead, we got to see way too much of Dave's vampiric sidekick Jerome, too much of the "old school" owner of the store Radu, and too much of the too-easy goth caricature Alistair.

The biggest problems, however, are the romantic leads. Dave is so put-upon and self-pitying that it's impossible to root for him. While this can be a bold decision (as noted above with La Perdida), it backfires in a familiar narrative like this that demands that the main character be at least somewhat sympathetic. Rosa is an even more frustrating character, with her falling for the trappings of the goth world as a means of rejecting her family; her eventual shallowness in choosing to become a vampire speaks to how underdeveloped she was. If those characters had had more than one dimension, or had been part of a tighter narrative, then Life Sucks would have been a much more engaging read. Warren Pleece's art walks a pleasant edge between realistic and cartoony, but does little to liven up the narrative. It's functional but unremarkable. I think it's quite possible that I'm not the target audience for this book, and that it may well be aimed at a teen demographic. That may be the case, but the rather graphic violence would seem to be at least slightly at odds with that goal in terms of marketing (though perhaps not appeal). I think if some of the more dramatic twists that were crammed into the end of the story had been employed throughout the story, or if the whole story was a more amiable (if oddball) slice-of-life story, I would have enjoyed either story more wholeheartedly. Life Sucks tries to be too many things at once, and while I admire the ambition of its creators, the execution of that vision simply didn't coalesce.

Latvian Excellence: S! #11

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

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

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

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

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

Scenes From A Portland Bar: Adult Babysitting

Sometimes you read a comic and the high concept is so obvious, one wonders why it hasn't been done before. So it is with Adult Babysitting volumes one and two, Maryanna Hoggatt's illustrated account of being a bartender in Portland. These minis are a mix of drink recipes, bar vignettes, ruminations on being a bartender, gags and other assorted ephemera done in a smooth and highly attractive style that's a nice mix between naturalism and cartoony. These comics go down so smoothly that I immediately wanted to read the second issue after I read the first and then was disappointed when I was done with the second issue that there wasn't more. That's a tribute to Hoggatt's easy-going storytelling persona and her sense of humor. For example, the first issue leads off with a series of gags called "The Lessons of Bartending". The first, captioned "Never ask a girl why she's crying", features a stone-faced Hoggatt simply asking "Neat or on the rocks?" when a woman sobs out a drink order to her. Hoggatt is a great letterer, and that's key in the format she uses here, with lots of open space to take advantage of. It has a pleasant, decorative quality that morphs into more elaborate script to emphasize certain concepts (like "full moon") but mostly is just clear and attractive.

What I like most about these comics is the way Hoggatt captures the rhythms of her workplace and the occasional way a bar can become a true center of community, with favored regulars and a buzz of energy that sustains a bartender over a work shift. Her full-color section detailing the ways in which seasons change the atmosphere of the bar is simply beautiful cartooning, capturing the nature of her clientele as they vary their routines but include going to this favored pub. At the same time, Hoggatt draws humor out of the exceptional and memorable events surrounding the bar, like being present at a robbery at the bar across the street (and actually getting up to get her drink after being told to get on the floor!) Hoggatt's bartending tips are actually quite useful (like using the tip of a rubber glove so the acid from limes and lemons doesn't damage one's finger), as are the drink recipes and the best ways to hold glasses. Honestly, I could easily see her expanding these comics out to book length and selling them to a general audience. She's a skilled cartoonist, has an understated sense of humor and an eye for detail. I hope to see more of these soon.

Assorted Plugs and Kickstarters

First on my list of things to look at and possibly support is the new comics website of Noah Van Sciver and Joseph Remnant: The Expositor. These are two of the hardest-working, most rapidly improving cartoonists in comics today, and both are essentially serializing their next book online. Noah Van Sciver's story is "Saint Cole", which is about one of his typical loser characters on the edge. This one happens to have a girlfriend and young son, and the early chapters of the story show him on the verge of either an easier life or some bad decisions. Remnant's story is "Cartoon Clouds", which is a post-art school story about a painter with little sense of direction. Both see each cartoonist at the height of their powers as mature artists.

Another interesting web site is 4Panel, a project that has a killer lineup of cartoonists all doing just four panels at a time. Michael DeForge, Dunja Jankovic, Derik Badman and a couple of dozen other artists have all been contributing to the Carousel-magazine led venture edited by Mark Laliberte. Much of it is in full color, allowing artists a full toolbox to attack the four panel grid, with the idea being that formal and poetic innovation is encouraged as opposed to standard narrative strategies. The results to date are fascinating.

Let's look at some very worthy kickstarters:  first up is LOVF New York: Destination Crisis, which is being run by Robyn Chapman. Seeing as she's being the very successful kickstarter and subsequent publication of Ariel Bordeaux's The Complete Deep Girl, it's a no-brainer that this comic by Jesse Reklaw will be excellent.

Next up is Bingo Baby, an improvised story done by five CCS cartoonists, including Joe Lambert, Amelia Onorato, Denis St. John, Bill Bedard, and Donna Almendrala. The story was improvised, with each actor playing a particular role, their performance was recorded and turned into a script and then finally became a comic. It's a fascinating concept for a comic that's a very different spin on jam comics. Jason Lutes, a member of the CCS faculty, is running this kickstarter, which is about halfway to its goal of 7K.

Finally, there's the kickstarter for the Zan Christensen-edited anthology Anything That Loves. While it's already met its goal, a firmly-defined amount of money will go to the involved artists as certain new goals are exceeded. The concept for the anthology is intriguing: tales of people in-between: bisexuals or those whose sexuality defies easy description and labeling on the Kinsey scale. It's an admirable project, and from Christensen's perspective as a gay man, he correctly notes the ways in which the gay community has been outright hostile to bi-identified men and women. There's a great lineup for this anthology, including MariNaomi, Roberta Gregory, Bill Roundy, Ellen Forney, Erika Moen and many others.