Foxing Reprints #7: Julia Gfrorer

Palm Ash, by Julia Gfroerer. Gfroerer is a cartoonist who uses magic as a device to highlight the extremes of human emotions and interactions. Acts of extreme religious faith are indistinguishable enough from magic to certainly qualify for a similar level of scrutiny. Gfroerer has always said that the magical aspects of her comics were less important than what the people in them said and did, that they could be dismissed by a reader as fantasy or not real. In Palm Ash, the magic is entirely stripped away and all that's left are the characters and their actions. The story is set in Rome after the death of Christ and the rise of Christianity as a cult religion that was still punishable by death. To be a faithful zealot in that atmosphere required an incredible amount of conviction that bordered on insanity, a theme that Anders Nilsen explored in his book Rage of Poseidon. 

The story opens with a pit being opened and two lions emerging from it. A kneeling man, his hands bound and eyes closed, silently awaits them. Sizing them up, the lions start to purr and eventually lie down next to him. It's a genuine miracle, but Gfroerer depicts the man, named Simeon, with huge beads of sweat on his brow. He has faith in god, but it's not an arrogant or cocky faith. He's far from being Daniel in the lion's den, and as we learn later, certainly doesn't think of himself as a hero or martyr. He's there because he baptized people and wouldn't stop doing it, even at the risk of execution.

His survival was witnessed by a slave named Dia, who burst into tears upon seeing him live. It's a silently transformative scene, because it simply affirms her own growing, now inescapable faith. Her story is interlocked with another slave whose aim it is to seduce one of the gladiators, as well as a citizen in the crowd who panics when he sees that his mistress has been thrown to the lions. Gfroerer threw in those details, as well as constant details regarding games and betting, to give the reader a sense of what human life was worth on a daily basis. The Roman Coliseum was the site of the original "society of the spectacle", one where the value of life was only worth as much as it would entertain the crowd and distract them from their own lives. 

The belief in a god that transcended, and indeed contradicted, the daily butchery and cruelty that passed for entertainment was undeniably threatening to the powers that be. You can't argue with or reason with a fanatic (in the most literal sense of the word), and that's why Simeon was willing to baptize Dia's son in secret. Violence against zealots only creates martyrs, as the history of the Catholic church demonstrates. When things go awry in the story, there's a fascinating final page the reprises the opening page. We see things from Dia's point of view once again, this time as she crawls to the window with the "show" about to start, this time featuring both Simeon and her young son. The final panel might seem like a teaser at first, but it's one that leaves open the idea of another miracle or the inevitable death of a zealot. It's a tense, beautiful way to end this thoughtful storey that not only explores matters of faith, but also matters of class and gender as well in its twenty pages. Gfroerer's thin and scratchy line is astoundingly expressive. The way she draws her female characters, modulating emotion and expression with a simple raising of an eyebrow, as well as her slightly pathetic and even neurotic zealot, give the story a powerful sense of visceral authenticity. When she depicts violence, it is shocking and terrible, the way it should be. Working a nine-panel grid gives the story a strong sense of panel-to-panel rhythm, one unbroken by any circumstances. It's an unyielding view of a horrible world, one where acts of compassion are possible but likely to be harshly punished. 

2dcloud: MariNaomi's Turning Japanese

Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. First, here's a review of a recent publication.

MariNaomi's newest memoir, Turning Japanese, is on the one hand a chronological continuation of her first memoir, Kiss and Tell, as it picks up more-or-less right after the final relationship depicted in that book. On the other hand, it also has a good bit in common with her shorter works that were originally published on The Rumpus and later collected as Dragon's Breath And Other Stories. Turning Japanese is all about not just contradictions and opposites, but also about how someone can be and feel two things at once. In a society that privileges binary distinctions (and almost always creates a hierarchy based on those distinctions), MariNaomi's status as someone frequently in-between points out how simply living her life in certain places and spaces created a tension born from social mores being stretched. She's a person, not an accumulation of traits, and as such this book is about the thoughts and feelings that go into creating and presenting one's identity as well as exploring different aspects of one's roots. All of this is done with an absence of pretension and an emphasis on humor, and it's served to the reader in the form of both extended narratives and bite-sized vignettes.

Like Kiss and Tell, this book to a certain degree is the story of a relationship, this time with a man she called Giuseppe. Through him, she meets a friend who works as a hostess in a Japanese bar, a peculiar sort of job that required them to be extremely friendly bartenders, flirting with men and singing karaoke to create a particular kind of experience for their (mostly male) clientele. MariNaomi reveals that she's half-Japanese but can't really speak the language, a point of frustration for her. So she takes the job in the hopes that she'll be able to pick it up in an immersive environment and also finally get to experience Asian culture and people beyond Western stereotypes. In a series of amusing vignettes that reveal the backstories of the other young women working at the bar as well as the bar's owners, MariNaomi is quickly disappointed by the nature of her interactions with her customers, who range from indifferent to flirtatious to engaging in severe sexual harassment. What had begun as a lark and a genuine attempt at cultural outreach quickly became a job that relied on her deference to men and dependence on her looks and charm in order to please customers, which naturally severely rankled her feminist tendencies.

The most fascinating extended story from this part of the book was her description of her "regular" customer, Hitoshi. He took a shine to her and immediately wanted to shower her with money, compliments and even declarations of his love. Being the person she is, she felt guilty for accepting big tips because she felt she was leading him on, yet she couldn't quite manage to tell him she was engaged when she accepted a lunch date from him. That all led up to him offering her $20,000 to pay off he debts, only he wrote the "check" on a napkin. The idea of accepting this amount of money literally led her to experience her first panic attack. That particular page is illustrated quite differently than most of the rest of the book. MariNaomi usually prefers to use a highly stripped-down approach that employs a great deal of negative space, conveying only what is absolutely necessary in each panel for the reader to understand what's going on in a narrative sense as well as to understand what's going on in an emotional sense. MariNaomi will zoom in and out on faces, going from dots for eyes in a long or medium shot to a more detailed facial close-up that fades out almost everything else in the scene. On the panic attack page, virtually every every inch is taken up illustrating the feeling of panic: spiraling fear lines, eyeballs pulsating, her head exploding and her heart flying out of her mouth. It all kind of melts together as panel distinctions fall away. It curtly ends in the final panel which is more typically minimalist in its drawings and carefully defined with panel borders, when she narrates "Somehow I managed to keep it together".

When the outcome of that whole situation with Hitoshi ends with the whole napkin thing being a fake-out, it revealed that her attempts at empathy and human connection as a hostess were remarkably misplaced. It was a scenario where seemingly everyone else was trying to be someone else, and someone as sincere as MariNaomi presented herself was kind of an easy mark for the right sort of person--even as she had her guard up against creeps. When a different guy out-and-out gropes her, she quits but goes through weeks of agony surrounding digestive issues. She would have agonizing stomach cramps every time she ate something, followed by a panic attack. There's a great page where she was walking up Nob Hill in San Francisco and simply couldn't make it: her fiancee had to carry her up. The bottom panel forms a perspective triangle where we see the concerned faces of her parents forming the base of the triangle and the figure of Giuseppe carrying Mari forming the third point. MariNaomi was wise to leave this as a silent panel, letting the panel's composition speak for itself.

The punchline of that particular situation is that she eventually got better and finally got tested by a doctor, who revealed that she survived a severe case of salmonella. The panel where she and Giuseppe learn this is hilarious, as their eyes bulge out as though they were in a daily newspaper comic strip. That ends the first part of the book and includes an interlude that talks about her prior visits to Japan as well as visits from Japanese relatives. All of her attempts at connecting to her Japanese side in America had failed miserably, but she and her fiancee decided to visit Japan for three months, leading to the fascinating second half of the book, which is part travelogue, part documentation of an eroding relationship, and part spiritual journey. If the first half skipped forward in time in part to demonstrate the relative sameness of each day, then the second half skipped few details, especially at the beginning of the trip, when even trying to get around town in Tokyo was a harrowing adventure.

MariNaomi really does see Tokyo in an almost magical realist way, as everything from vending machines to pigeons in the park takes on a fantastical quality. The reality of day-to-day living starts to set in, as Mari takes a hostess job and Giuseppe is offered a host job at a strip club that would wind up paying him $20 a night after he took a cab home. Turning it down meant insulting the person who arranged it in the first place, which was a big deal. This was the first sign that a move made in America (turning down a potential job offer) that would have few consequences wound up being deeply offensive in Japan. The book settles down into a series of vignettes once again, but this time around it's not just about life as a hostess; Tokyo itself serves as a secondary character that reminds the couple of how different things are there. It also provokes a sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety, as MariNaomi realizes that learning Japanese from a bunch of drunk businessmen was not necessarily her best idea, and Giuseppe starts to evince resentment toward his fiancee. The one thing that the experience in Tokyo taught her was that the cultural divide, which valued deference to one's parents above all else no matter what, was something she couldn't begin to understand.

The final part of the book featured Mari visiting her grandparents, an occasion that was at once nostalgic and anxiety-ridden. She had wonderful childhood memories of her grandparents but had no idea if they would accept her or even if she would be able to communicate with them. She learned that no matter how much she struggled, she was able to pick up more of the language than she had guessed. The problem with that was she was now placed into the burden of translation for Giuseppe, who resented being left out of conversations. However, having to constantly translate conversations made communication extremely difficult and annoying for her, which allowed her to empathize with her mother a bit, who showed a similar level of annoyance about being forced out of the natural flow of conversation.

In a book about an experience that was supposed to be about transformation and getting closer to one's roots, the only genuine experience MariNaomi had in this regard was in a surprising area: prayer. A staunch atheist, she at first prayed at her grandmother's shrine in an effort not to offend her (silently cursing her own need to "conform"). Later when she went to a temple devoted to the prayers of parents for their sick children, MariNaomi was overwhelmed by the energy she perceived in the place. It didn't make her believe in god, per se, but she did acknowledge that prayer could be a way of releasing energy into the world. Though she doesn't make this connection overt in the book, that overwhelming, visceral feeling that she got from being in that environment was almost the polar opposite of the feeling she had during a panic attack. That's both in the sense of the energy she was receiving as well as sending in both instances as well as the way her body reacted each time.

It was also ironic that while MariNaomi found herself willing to compromise so many aspects of her identity, including her status as a feminist and an atheist, in order to keep the peace in particular social situations, she didn't think twice about not only telling her grandparents that she didn't want children, Not only did she say this, but she said it in a remarkably blunt manner ("Never! I don't like! Children make noise. I like quiet."). She didn't think for a moment that in a country obsessed by family ties, professing out-and-out hostility toward children (something she clearly rarely thought about, considering how rarely it even came up on her radar) might be the most upsetting and disrespectful thing possible. That unexamined hostility also sparked an argument with her fiancee, who wanted children and thought she might change her mind, creating all kinds of doubts in her mind and revealing one of the chief sources of his resentments toward her. While that bluntness had repercussions, it ultimately led to the right decision in terms of her relationship and (as she showed in an epilogue) didn't permanently erode her relationship with her grandparents. In the end, MariNaomi took what was useful from her experiences (empathy for her mom, sympathy for prayer) and rejected what wasn't (polite deference, obeying customs and conventions). MariNaomi's restraint as an artist is perhaps her best quality, both in terms of what she chooses to show on the page as well as the way she uses humor and quotidian anecdotes to act as a palate cleanser for the larger issues she opts to examine.

Foxing Reprints #6: Gillmer/Thompson, D.Williams, Brown/Ollmann

B.F.D. Chapter 1: All My Best Friends, by Scotty Gillmer & Carl Thompson. This is a charming and low-key slice-of-life comic about six high school friends and their varied & complicated dynamics. Set in Minnesota (home of the writer and artist), this first issue takes us through a day in the life of the six kids, culminating in a community "leaf burning". There are echoes of films like Dazed and Confused to be found in the verisimilitude of the dialogue and the ways in which teenage emotions tend to be overblown, but the story doesn't overplay its hand in that regard either. A more direct line can be drawn to Jaime Hernandez' work in Love & Rockets. 

Indeed, there are sequences where Thompson liberally borrows from the Jaime handbook, like when one of the girls balances on a train track as she and her friend have an ambling conversation. The girl, Ava, seems a lot like Maggie, Hernandez' signature character. However, Gillmer & Thompson certainly ring forth in their own voice as well, as the characters feel fully formed and don't fall into the sort of one-note, cliched roles typical in such stories. The first two pages neatly set them up, as each page has three stacked, horizontal panels that wordlessly show each character getting dressed and getting ready for skill. Simply by observing their rooms, their clothes and their body language, the reader is made privy to a great deal of information about them before one of them utters a single word. The issue follows their friendships and tracks one romantic relationship in its incipient stages as well as one about to fall apart. This is just the first chapter of a series that promises to delve into the lives of each of its characters, and I hope each issue is handled with as much restraint as this one was.

We, The Odd #0, by Delicia Williams. This is essentially an "ash-can" edition of what should prove to be a long, weird and complicated fantasy story. In this issue, we are introduced to a fairy godmother who discovers something is horribly wrong with the infant she's supposed to help out. We meet a woman trekking through a contaminated building who winds up encounter underground cultists, a potentially magic frog, and a man with an envelope for a head wearing bunny slippers. Williams is interested in using familiar tropes in unfamiliar places, but at the moment the story is in its very formative stages. These issues show off her skill with a pencil (there are no inks), especially with regard to figure drawing and body language. Her panel-to-panel transitions are a bit stiff at the moment, but one senses that will get ironed out as she gets deeper into this project.

Milo & Sam, by Andy Brown & Joe Ollmann (Conundrum Press). This is a collaboration between Brown, the publisher of Conundrum Books, and his old friend Ollmann, whose books he currently publishes. It's a story about being stay-at-home dads for their toddler boys and a particular adventure in the countryside. It's about the feeling of constant danger befalling one's kids and how that feeling can only get ratcheted up over the course of a day. When Brown & Ollmann give their kids apples and turn the heads for a moment, they are alerted by Milo that "Sam barfing", as he chokes on an apple. When they turn around, Milo's disappeared into the forest. After a frantic search, they see that Milo may have eaten a poisonous mushroom. After a frantic visit to the emergency room (with Milo's mom given a panicked but cryptic phone call), everything turns out to be fine. The comic is given a little more resonance because Milo's mother eventually died of breast cancer, making her appearance here sort of a bittersweet event. The format of the book (it's 3 x 4"), the slightly dressed-down art by Ollmann (it's typically dense but much more spontaneous-looking than his usual work) and it's brevity (52 pages, but each page is one panel) make this a little treasure of a mini. It's a zippy and unsentimental look at fatherhood that still manages to tell its frantic story with a great deal of humor and sweetness.

2dcloud: Gina Wynbrandt's Someone Please Have Sex With Me

Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. First, here's a review of a recent publication.

Let's examine Gina Wynbrandt's collection of stories, Someone Please Have Sex With Me. Along with Sophie McMahan, Wynbrandt is very much in the Lisa Hanawalt school of using static images to create confrontational, hilarious and absurd scenarios. Whereas with Hanawalt's work sex was often present but never emphasized, Wynbrandt makes it a point to get in the reader's face regarding her desire and the various ways it has been thwarted. In that sense, Wynbrandt has a lot in common with Meghan Turbitt, another cartoonist who spins her own insecurities and desires into comics gold. Like Hanawalt, Wynbrandt is an extremely skilled illustrator with a naturalistic style that she warps for her own cartoony ends. Wynbrandt uses bulging eyes, flared nostrils and exposed teeth as her comedic arsenal, celebrating her own desire and personhood even as she creates ever-more-bizarre scenarios that appear self-deprecating on the surface.

"One Less Lonely Girl" sets the tone for the rest of the collection while at the same time is the most conventional story. Her younger sister encourages her to become interested in teen idol Justin Bieber, which starts a chain reaction of self-infantilization that is a running theme throughout the book. This story features her trying to get the attention of men her age (she's 21 years old and in college in this story) without having a clue as how to do so. There's a hilarious scene where a guy offers her a pretzel, which she takes as a sign of attraction, so she does her best to eat it as sensually as possible. Naturally, this provokes bafflement and alarm on his part. There's another funny scene where two skinny (naturally) female classmates babble on about their lives, and Wynbrandt meets them with a furious, silent glare: eyebrows furrowed, nostrils flared, eyes piercing like blades. Wynbrandt has further misadventures, including a disastrous party, before she receives an actual twitter reply from Bieber to an incredibly crude post she made. The resulting drawing of Wynbrandt in silhouette, jumping for joy, is hilarious.

As amusing as that story was, it's restrained compared to the rest of the book. "Tiger Beat Exclusive" starts off with Wynbrandt going full-bore in terms of her obsession with teen idols, which is emphasized when her mom tells her that "It's like, really creepy, Gina" and follows that up with an even creepier "I'm just trying to help you get laid". Like Turbitt, Wynbrandt is visited in this story by Kim Kardashian, who announces that she's her fairy godmother. There's the expected montage scene of shopping, makeup, wine-drinking and "industrial strength anal bleach". What helps push this story over the edge is that Wynbrandt keeps the gags flying on every single page, be they crazy drawings or absurd situations. She winds up going to the Teen Choice Awards (mistaken for "a very pregnant Kim Kardashian"), and there's a page of hilarious physical and facial contortions as she's desperate to "smell just ONE boy". Even her crisp, beautiful lettering plays a part in the storytelling, going from all uppercase to all lowercase as she's clawing at herself in ecstasy. Things continue to escalate on page after page, winding up in the Teen Choice Awards being burned to the ground and Wynbrandt winding up in Jamaica with Bieber ("meh....okay"). Using the framework of teen mags like the aforementioned Tiger Beat and celebrity mags like Us Weekly, Wynbrandt turns the vapid nature of the entire culture as fuel for laughs as she wants nothing more than to embrace all the frippery. Even the halfhearted acceptance she got was enough.

"Someone Please Have Sex With Me" is a far darker story, as it discusses the feeling of simultaneously not feeling desired by those she finds desirable while being targeted by creepy, unsavory men. It also points to the problematic nature of placing the entirety of one's self-esteem on whether or not someone will have sex with her. This story is a sort of career arc of sexual dysfunction, starting with an eight-year-old Wynbrandt selling Playboys to boys in high school to literally throwing herself at anyone who'd have her, with dialogue like "WOW, I drank an entire beer. ANYONE could take advantage of me right now." From there, Wynbrandt details a humiliating photo shoot where she's told to keep stuffing her face, a gym fantasy that turns into a gay orgy scenario, a scene in the future where she forces an employee to have sex with her in order to keep his job, getting a Pikachu-shaped sex robot when much older (only to have it self-destruct!), coming to terms with her problems on her death bed and then getting fucked by a demon in hell ("Hooray!") . Wynbrandt gets at the heart of her dilemma here: having her desire subjected to erasure, exploitation, and humiliation. The objects of her desire are also the source of her pain.

In the staggering "Big Pussy", Wynbrandt further identifies her other problem: her self-imposed perpetual adolescence. Instead of taking charge of her own sexuality, she surrenders it to these dream scenarios that never materialize, or even worse, are warped by those who take advantage of them. In this story, she is inspired by an anime character blossoming thanks to the tutelage of a talking cat, so she naturally seeks out her own talking cat. Amazingly, she winds up finding a bunch of feral cats with human faces who agree to train her after she pays them, and they have her perform a number of demeaning and disgusting tasks that center around feeding them (snapping a rat's neck), grooming them (not with a brush!), and in a page that defies any kind of polite description, gets fucked by them. That clinches her training and subsequent over-the-top bacchanal, which includes some amazing panels where she's snorting catnip. Wynbrandt is an artist who loves extrapolating beyond the obvious end of a story, and so she takes things to another level with her giving birth to a cat/human hybrid, and extends the joke one last time while tying it into the beginning of the story (where she mocks her inherent laziness and childish behavior) when she and her daughter later appear on Maury. Wynbrandt's willingness to go to any extreme for a joke is at its zenith here, and the varying shades of pink only add to the story's ridiculous atmosphere.

The final story, "Manhunt", sees Wynbrandt with a "boyfriend", i.e., a guy who fucks her and tells her to go away afterward. In the story, Wynbrandt exaggerates the slightest non-abusive behavior as exorbitantly generous, like giving her some gum. When he stops answering her calls, she turns to her "Palpable Loneliness" wishlist and she gets a recommendation for an x-rated video game featuring a female bounty hunter. What follows is ridiculous scenario after ridiculous scenario starring Wynbrandt as the hero, featuring a lifeguard, a librarian, go-go dancing, x-rated puzzles, choking an enemy, and finding a unique way to subdue her target. The "inspiration" she finds from the game goes down the drain when her hook-up texts her, with the overcooked text of "For a moment, I gave up on love. But love didn't give up on me" being a perfect recapitulation of how Wynbrandt's fantasy scenario was a product of romantic tropes she had been fed (and feeding on) her whole life, tropes that were impossible to fulfill in any real way. Wynbrandt is a force of nature as a cartoonist, evincing a fully-formed toolbox of drawing and storytelling skills, a razor-sharp sense of humor, and (contrary to the image she portrays) a powerfully developed sense of self. One other young cartoonist who comes to mind as a comparison is Nick Sumida, and that may well be the best match, given their youth, their ability to exploit popular culture and social media to specific ends, and their unflinching willingness to talk about their desires and how they are frustrated.

Foxing Reprints #5: Asher Z. Craw

Hungry Summer, by Asher Z. Craw (Sparkplug Comic Books). Continuing my reviews of Sparkplug Minis, the mini this week is Asher Z. Craw's Hungry Summer. Craw's quasi-autobiographical comic Zebediah, was an unpredictable, absorbing and ultimately humane fantasy account of how he came to understand his nature as a trans person. Hungry Summer covers some of the same territory with regard to gender and identity through magical realism, but this time the focus is entirely different. The main character of the comic is a bike-riding, shape-changing Baba Yaga, the Eastern European supernatural figure. Always an ambiguous figure, encounters with her would often result in both good and ill. At the start of this comic, a bunch of dudes heckle her as she rides her bike, which results in her spitting on the loudest and rudest detractor. That spit renders him entirely immaterial and forgotten, as a ghost who did not actually die. Ghosts are at least remembered, but in his case, it's as though he never existed. A woman named Yolanda who helps Baba Yaga is "gifted" with continuously coughing up expensive jewelry. When she later complains to Baba Yaga about this gift, she is gifted with coughing up extremely valuable and rare lizards instead..

The rude guy winds up in a boarding house for ghosts, led there by a man who turns into a woman when he walks into the house. Yolanda winds up back at Baba Yaga's house yet again, and this time the house (always on chicken legs) picks up and leaves with both of them in it. Meanwhile, the ghost, in search of Baba Yaga (ironically so that she could remove the very curse she laid on him, unbeknownst to him) is left behind. With a slightly ratty line that adds additional ambiguity to every panel, this is a story about visibility, agency and transformation. Here, the visibility and agency of the unnamed ghost are abruptly taken away from him after a lifetime of presumed privilege. Even as he's invited into a ghost house (in part to relieve him of his money), he is uninterested in actually reflecting on his own life or considering any kind of atonement; instead, he takes what he thinks is the easy way out at first opportunity. 

For Yolanda, her relationship with this trickster agent of change is far more complicated. Drawn to Baba Yaga, she is told to carry her bag to her hut. Yolanda is portrayed as a seeker of something, but Craw makes exactly what ambiguous. Baba Yaga's transformative gifts all have a price, as the wealth Yolanda receives from the jewelry is obviously outweighed by the toll it takes on her life, and the same is true for the lizards. I found this an interesting commentary on material possessions and wealth, especially since Yolanda never actually asked for a reward or money. Instead, the gift she receives at the end, when she finds Baba Yaga yet again, is the chance to run off with her, to permanently leave her life behind and transform it through the act of giving of her presence rather than asking for something. It's the gift of establishing one's own identity and creating a space of self-integrity, even in the face of total societal abandonment. Craw challenges the reader to think about gender, privilege and identity without making the importance of these ideas explicit. Indeed, the fabulist nature of Craw's storytelling actively deflects any sort of polemical quality his comics have without losing any of their thematic bite.

2dcloud: Emilie Gleason

Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. First, here's a review of a recent publication.

Emilie Gleason's English debut, Salz and Pfeffer, is a loony amalgamation of Disney satire, extended fart jokes, a UFO abduction story, and a journey to hell. The Mexico-born and Belgium-raised cartoonist invokes a number of familiar comics characters and styles in telling a story where the protagonists have little to no control over what's happening to them. The first section tells the story of Pfeffer, an ordinary illustrator who is kidnapped by a gang of vicious Mickey Mouse lookalikes. Gleason uses a rough pencil style throughout the book, as she emphasizes the sense that that these are drawings on paper that were labored over and show her hand. Everything about the book is deliberately crude, from the lack of overall polish to the crude nature of the humor. That crudeness stands in direct contrast to the polish and shine of what Disney stands for, from its films to its theme parks.

Pfeffer is taken to another world and subjected to all sorts of humiliations (he's kept on a leash and not allowed to wear pants). What makes this especially funny is that he's built like a muscular athlete; that idealized form is in itself as much a cartoonish creation as our the assorted anthropomorphic animals that he encounters, including an especially foul-mouthed rooster-bro. In order to properly indoctrinate him, he's tied up and forced to view and listen to (Clockwork Orange-style) the "national anthem" of the planet: "It's A Small World" for four days. Anyone who's ever been subjected to that song at Disney World on repeat will instantly understand just how funny that joke is. Poor Pfeffer's eyes get turned into Mickey Mouse heads as he goes home and pencils the most banal drawings possible; indeed, they look like old Art Instruction Schools ads ("Tippy", "Tiny", etc).

The second half of the book concerns Salz the mouse, whose anxiety-induced farts get him thrown into fart jail by order of the king. After busting out, he wants revenge and enlists the help of Gaston and his identical cousins, all of whom are dead ringers for Tintin. He eventually gets sent to hell, which resembles a typical idea of heaven (angels, clouds, etc), except it's mind-boggling annoying and saccharine. After an encounter with Jesus (or was it Tarzan?), Salz gets kicked out of hell and is sent to Hungary, where he changes costumes in every panel thanks to a curse. For all the weird silliness, Gleason's storytelling is entirely straightforward and easy to follow. What makes her work effective is the subversion of images and ideas like Mickey Mouse and heaven and folding them into scatological humor, the arbitrary and often cruel nature of authority, and a point of view that can be described as gleeful nihilism. In a world where artists can be beholden or in fear of cruel, inhumane interests and masters, sometimes the only response that makes sense is a total descent into tearing down every social more and convention in the most juvenile way possible.

Catching Up With Hic & Hoc: Tsurumi, Aulisio, Kelley

Hic & Hoc's publication rate has slowed down a bit in the past year or so, but Matt Moses still releases all sorts of interesting comics. Let's take a look at recent work.

Why Would You Do That?, by Andrea Tsurumi. Somewhere between Lisa Hanawalt and Kate Beaton lies the content of this book, though this book is most interesting when Tsurumi focuses on a particular obsession and just runs with it. Early features about how to go to one's local pool and the secret greatness of poodles, feel labored over, pounding an underwritten joke into the ground in the hopes that repetition would make it funny. It's only when Tsurumi abandons more conventional humor and decides to get really word that the book starts to take off. Take "Yup/Nope", for example. It's a hilarious and bizarre satire on the arbitrary nature of sports fandom, or really any kind of competitive activity that creates opposing camps by its very nature. The eccentric and monstrous figures combined with crass consumption and the ways in which fans fostered self-esteem by way of identifying with a group made this story funny, strange and pointed.

A gag where the food photographer for a newspaper is forced to take over as primary news photographer sees Tsurumi at her best, as every single story somehow manages to focus on any food-related images that are nearby. There's a fine line between beating a gag to death and escalating humor through repetition, and Tsurumi here tops herself in image after image. Speaking of food, "Cake Vs Pie" combines the antagonism of "Yup/Nope" with a certain kind of wartime photojournalism, creating visceral and even hilariously disturbing images of various dessert items doing horribly violent things to each other. The scene where a medical surgeon pours out a surgical pan filled with pie fillings is somehow simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, due in no small part to Tsurumi's considerable drafting skill. The book gets even better as Tsurumi quotes and illustrates the astoundingly cruel 19th century children's book The Peep Of Day, which reads sort of like a Jack Chick tract, only even meaner. The last big story in the book is the epic "HMTown", which is about growing up as part of a tourist trap town that prides itself on being haunted. It's a funny and sweet meditation on the ways in which the town's "ghosts" provided a memorable upbringing and gave the protagonist a sense of connection that she deeply felt despite her urgent desire to leave as a recent graduate. It was interesting to see Tsurumi pair her wacky imagery and conceptual gags with a more emotional, quiet and thoughtful premise. One gets the sense reading this book that Tsurumi is just getting warmed up as a humorist and storyteller, because it's obvious that she has the chops, delightfully skewed perspective, keen observational eye and clear ambition to continue to evolve as a humorist and storyteller.

Fedor, by Patt Kelley. This is a bit of historical fiction about Fedor Jeftichew, aka Jojo the Dog Faced Boy, who was one of the world's most famous and wealthy circus freaks. In sepia tones that ground the story in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and character design similar to that of Jay Howell (most famous for the character design of Bob's Burgers), Kelley spins a lovely and heartbreaking romance about Fedor and Helena, whom he met when he was a young man in the circus. The daughter of the bearded lady and the scaly man, she immediately fell for the young man who had a condition that caused him to be entirely covered in thick hair. What's clever about this comic is the way that Kelley jumps back and forth in time to create mystery, tension and slowly unravel a long-simmering conflict. Kelley introduces the couple in 1904 as simply a man and a woman meeting up again after a long time; it takes a few pages before it's obvious that the young man is a "Jojo" who had shaved his face. We then go back twenty years to when they met, in a fascinating section that establishes Fedor as a star, a sensitive young man, and a potential target for belligerent townies. It establishes Helena as a young woman with a strong sense of self but an indeterminate sense of purpose who is fiercely protective of those she loves. From there, we continue to flip back and forth in time as we see them splitting apart and meeting up again over the years, with neither willing to do what it took to really be together. Kelley perceptively guts romance without realism or true commitment, as Helena at one point takes him to task for loving the idea of her and not the actual person, and for caring more about his Jojo persona than her. The lengths that Fedor goes to in the end to prove his devotion provide an excellent final twist that takes advantage of real life events and reimagines them. Kelley backs up his time-jumping with panel design that seems to intentionally avoid any kind of consistent grid pattern, which keeps the reader off-balance while whipping them through memory after memory at a dizzying pace. There's a sweetness to the proceedings that takes it for granted that the couple saw past their obvious physical extremes and instead focuses on the ways in which their bodies were exploited for pay and how this kept them apart for so long. Fedor is about learning to be real and understanding & acknowledging the factors that keep people apart. 

Infinite Bowman and Xeno Kaiju, by Pat Aulisio. Aulisio uses a variation of the Brian Chippendale/Mat Brinkman style in depicting monsters investigating an environment, often with a layer of deliberately crude humor thrown on top. He also looks to work big, with as many splash pages as possible so he's able to cram as much detail as possible into his page. Xeno Kaiju was published as an oversized, 12 x 17 broadsheet to maximize the impact of his images. The title roughly translates to "alien giant monster", with kaiju being a type of film genre originating in Japan where a monster would attack humanity. Obviously, Godzilla is the most familiar example, and it's no accident that the monster in this story resembles the fire-breathing, giant lizard. The key to reading Aulisio's comics is that for all their scribbly clutter and lack of flow, the artist only has one or two images on each page that the reader needs to focus on. The rest is all noise or decoration, which one can study or ignore, because they have little importance to the overall story. On each of the pages here, the only thing the reader needs to pay attention to is the monster's egg that crashes to earth (seeded by an alien spacecraft) and its eventual transformation into a monster that starts destroying everything around it. The day is saved by a supertank that obliterates it, but in an EC-style twist ending, the final image is that of the alien craft launching six more monster eggs. The big format was essential in getting across the massive scale of the creature and its destruction, as well as enjoying the visceral pleasures that monster movies and comics bring.

Infinite Bowman has Aulisio writing about the further adventures of 2001: A Space Odyssey's Dave Bowman, the astronaut who survived the murderous HAL-9000 computer and was taken by a mysterious monolith and rapidly evolved. In the original story, Bowman becomes a godlike Starchild. Aulisio imagines something quite different, as Bowman is sent to another dimension, meets up with Kirby-like space gods who help him conquer his new world, goes to the earth of the future and winds up in hell, where he stirs up a rebellion. In essence, every panel in the book is designed in the same way that Xeno Kaiju is: despite there being a lot of visual "noise", the reader is always pointed to a single, defining image or pair of images. Aulisio fuses a hyper-violent, relentlessly weird set of images with what is basically dick joke humor. It's the essence of the book's humor: the supposedly advanced space gods seem to have no agenda other than conquest and destruction, and their chosen one is a boorish brute who is making his campaign as their avatar into his personal mission of revenge against anyone or anything that ever slighted him. Aulisio's visual approach changes slightly as the book proceeds, leaning away from the ultra-cluttered look and instead started to strip away scenes to their essentials. Aulisio's aesthetic can be wearying after a while, but he changes things up just enough to make this a consistently amusing read.