Review and Kickstarter for Awesome 'Possum

The editor of the Awesome 'Possum anthology, Angela Boyle, sent me a copy of the second volume to review in conjunction with the Kickstarter for the third volume. Here's a a link to that kickstarter, and I would consider making a donation if possible. The anthology's mission is to publish comics and illustration about the natural world, and to leave that mission as loosely defined as possible so as to give the artists some room to interpret it.

That variety of approaches is what makes this a surprisingly readable book, especially given that so few of the entries here resemble conventional narratives. The other thing that makes the book a pleasure to read is the wide variety of visual approaches that were used. It would have been easy to make it a densely-illustrated book with an entirely naturalistic approach, but that would also have been boring. Furthermore, that type of art is often difficult to match up with cartoon storytelling, panel-to-panel flow and general readability. Even artists with somewhat limited draftsmanship ability managed to fit in by limiting the complexity of what they chose to draw, synthesizing the information conveyed by text with spare imagery to create a fluid piece.

Boyle is all over the anthology and has some of its best pieces. including the opener about how Opossums are enormously helpful creatures, the psychology of dogs, and the structure of fungi. Perhaps the best piece in the book was by her mother, Anita K. Boyle: a fascinating and beautifully composed ode to the role of water lilies in their environment. Though an entirely scientific account regarding these plants, Boyle's use of decorative elements, humorous flourishes, clever page design where everything is elongated much the way the lilies are underwater and a clear line made this strip the model for the rest of the book: clear, clever, entertaining and informative. Another highlight was a strip written by Steve Bissette and drawn by his former student Ross Wood Studlar (whose focus as an artist has been on wildlife). It concerned his sighting a fisher cat (a variation on the weasel) in the forest, which is a rarity, and finding that the animal stared him right in the eye. The story balanced a description of this interesting animal and its habits and ended with Bissette expressing his respect for it. This was one of the few conventional narratives in the book, and it worked precisely because of Bissette's knowledge of and respect for the Vermont woods.

Other highlights include Stephanie Zuppo's story about the Thyacine, a species thought extinct that keeps getting sighted; Kelly Swann's "first person" story from the perspective of a Thorny Dragon, which is exquisitely rendered in addition to being amusing; and Reilly Hadden's wistful account of being around Common Loons. Some of the material might have been trimmed from the anthology, but there's nothing that brings the anthology screeching to a halt. Indeed, virtually every piece is at least interesting to read, and few of them wear out their welcome. The general restraint and succinctness of the artists in this anthology definitely work in its favor. The end section, featuring a number of illustrations, provides different renditions of previously-mentioned plants and animals, this time from a purely static standpoint. This section fit well and didn't feel like the anthology was simply being padded. I'll be curious to see if the balance that made this volume work well continues to hold in the third volume, which will be nearly twice as long.

Minis: S.Mannheim, B.Heinly, D.Johnson/R.Lockie

The Amazing Vanishing Man: Prelude, by Daniel Johnson and Rosie Lockie. This mini is about the juxtaposition of fame and performance with a desire to escape it--escape from all contact. It follows an escape artist in a circus who comes to want to escape the ultimate trap: his own body. By learning astral projection, he's able to accomplish this, but then he starts having trouble getting back into his body, realizing that the only way to accomplish his goals is to do it in his laboratory of performance: the stage. The pressure of the stage paradoxically allowed him to relax into performing his tricks, as having something at stake allowed him to concentrate in a way that trying in a less risky fashion couldn't. This comic was just the first part of a larger story, and it was interesting to see how the artist (Lockie) expanded on the script, using a variety of compositional techniques on each page. Sometimes she went for a straight grid with minimal detail--especially with regard to the other characters in the story, who naturally were fuzzy because of the escapist's indifference toward them. On other pages, she used a lot of heavy hatching and cross-hatching to get at the heaviness of certain experiences, like trying to escape from one's own body. The final product felt rough, both in terms of writing and drawing, in a way that I don't think the artists were intending. It seems to be the work of younger artists figuring things out in an ambitious manner, and I'll be curious to see how they develop as a team as the series progresses.

Roxie #6 and #7, by Stephanie Mannheim. These two issues complete the saga of rocker Roxie, an over-the-top stew of sex, drugs, violence and rock-and-roll rendered in the tradition of Peter Bagge and Johnny Ryan. The plot is actually reminiscent of Josie And The Pussycats more than anything else, only everyone in the story is either looking to get laid, get famous, get revenge or some combination of all three. The plot is about two rival bands, one all women and one all men, and their various sexual/romantic entanglements and mutual plans to sabotage each other. The story comes to a head in the final issue, in which all of these terrible characters do awful things and get some partial comeuppance for it. Of course, these comics work because Mannheim has a great sense of the cultural zeitgeist and just the sort of references that make the most sense for it. In particular, her commentary on fame, what creates it and what people will do for it is especially on-target. Of course, the main appeal of these comics is her frenetic and funny cartooning. Her characters have crazily gritted, cartoony teeth, bulging eyes, and pointy noses. With all of that visual "noise", Mannheim did something especially clever on a page where she drew two characters falling in love in a naturalistic style, representing a truly over-the-top and sappy event in the story. Mannheim isn't afraid to get mean, which gives her work a powerful source of energy. Over the course of this series, Mannheim has also refined her line, giving it a precise crispness that makes the eye-popping quality of her subject matter all the more effective. It's cartoony art that is powerful because she has total control of her images, as well as the compositional elements of each panel and page.  In many respects, this series felt somewhat disposable, as though it was a way of stretching her writing abilities such that she could put together a longer narrative while keeping it both coherent and funny. I get the sense that the best is ahead for Mannheim.

Camp and The 3:00 Book Best of 2016 Again, by Beth Heinly. Heinly, a friend of Meghan Turbitt's, works in a similar, unfiltered and funny manner. The 3:00 Book reprints her internet single-page gags as well as her Facebook commentaries on same. Many of the commentaries wind up being funnier than the actual strips in question. Sometimes it's because Heinly is beating herself about a weak strip and hilariously over-explains, a favored comedy technique pioneered by Johnny Carson. That kind of meta-humor is in full effect throughout this book, but Heinly is careful not to pour it on too thick. Sometimes, the commentary is just commentary, adding context or an anecdote about the set-up. That said, the commentary is almost always funny no matter what its aim. The big weakness in these strips, and something that she gets at in the introduction, is that there's no particular point of view that emerges in the course of reading them. Heinly says "There is really nothing special about me or these comics because there about 500 straight white cis freckled girls who write the same shit." I think what differentiates the better autobio cartoonists is that they find an angle, be it Turbitt's over-the-top cultural commentary, Vanessa Davis' layouts and sharp awareness of how she relates to others, etc.

Where Heinly excels is in more conceptual humor, something that gets lost in the midst of doing a diary comic. That's why her comic Camp, a "stoner horror comedy", is so much more effective as a cohesive work of comedy. The cover promises that "Everyone dies" and Heinly lives up to that promise, albeit in the most hilariously convoluted manner possible. The concept is that a group of stoners are camping out in the woods with the idea that they're going to rough it. The only problem is that most of them are either stoned, stupid or both. Rather than an external force hunting these clowns one by one, the only real threat to them is their own stupidity. Two of the stoners find rare mushrooms in the forest, which may or may not be poisonous. Of course, they eat them and then die. One woman stacks way too much wood in the fire pit they've built, catches on fire, and falls into the inferno she's created. Heinly keeps escalating things from there, with the members of the party dying in increasingly absurd ways. The real humor of the book is that they're pretty much either too stoned or too sociopathic to care that their friends are dying left and right. The survivor was, of course, the stupidest and most stoned member of the party who was more concerned with getting joints off the dead body of a friend than either the friend's death or the need to actually find a way out. Heinly then takes that premise and goes way, way over the top, suddenly turning scene after blase' scene of people dying into something truly horrific. It's a grim final joke, but Heinly pulls it off thanks in part to the rhythm and structure of the story. Her line is serviceable and more effective here than in her other gag work, because her simple but exaggerated character design makes sense within the context of the story. Her strict use of a 2x3 panel grid keeps the story zipping along, another element that shows how carefully she considers and structures her work.

Minicomics: R.Valero-O'Connell

If Only Once, If Only For A Little While, by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell. I first noticed Valero-O'Connell's work when she was a first-year at MCAD and she was doing OuBaPo-style structured comics with rules as part of a larger event. The concurrent manga and art comics boom that began roughly around 2000 has had an interesting effect on young cartoonists, especially women. More young women have read comics and manga actually aimed at girls than at any other time in the US since probably around the 1950s. This is not to say that boys and girls don't read and enjoy all sorts of comics, but the way that the superhero comics industry aimed stuff at boys was pretty obvious--especially in the hypersexualized early Image era. Moreover, every year that goes by sees more comics being stocked in bookstores, libraries and school book sales, meaning that the sheer variety of comics available is growing every year. Valero-O'Connell is someone whose work seems clearly influenced by that variety, incorporating aspects of both manga and western comics in her storytelling and her line.

In many respects, she's working in a purely naturalistic tradition. A look at the first page sees three perfect establishing panels, formatted horizontally. The first panel is a carefully-rendered shot of some flowers. The second is a pair of feet and a bicycle seat, clearly fallen next to the flower bed. The third is a beautiful establishing shot of Charlie, her eyes closed and in profile, a sly and relaxed smile on her face. The first panel establishes Charlie's name, the second panel acknowledges an accident and the third introduces both a sense of relief and her best friend via dialogue, Olive. The character design, especially the exaggerated size of both women's eyes, reveal that manga influence. It's actually a bit jarring at times, seeing this juxtaposition of styles, but Valero-O'Connell makes it work thanks to her absolutely sterling layouts. Her use of negative space and her ability to balance elements in a panel is remarkable. Her lettering does get a bit cramped at times, but she chose a really tough route in using both uppercase and lowercase letters. Her use of a grid variation shows an advanced understanding of how form can affect emotional content.

For example, this story of two friends hanging out, enjoying the routine of being with each other day after day, first hits a speedbump on a page where the first three panels on the page are either filled with detail (panel one) or else make extensive use of white negative space (panels two and three). Panel four is at the center of the grid, and it's a disturbing fortune from a fortune cookie that Olive opens that is entirely offset by black negative space. Valero-O'Connell then uses a modified mirror technique, making panel five be a shot of a concerned-looking Charlie and the final panel at the bottom collapsing into a single image that mirrors the first panel, only it zeroes in on Olive at the bottom right corner, with the rest of it taken up by a dragon mural. That fortune is the first of a variety of seemingly supernatural elements, or perhaps hallucinations, from people around her. The rest of the comic follows from that moment, ending as a meditation on death, grief and healing. Valero-O'Connell perhaps lays it on a little thick toward the end as it becomes obvious as to what's going on, but she makes up for that with the last five pages that confront tragedy head-on. Her level of craft and storytelling is as good as it gets for a young cartoonist, and the next step for her seems to be more a matter of refinement and nuance, especially in terms of characterization. She's illustrating a book for First Second that's coming out, and I hope she's coloring it as well because that's yet another strong element in her toolbox. It won't be long before she's writing and illustrating her own books.

Alternative: Jim Campbell's At The Shore

Jim Campbell's At The Shore has been coming out in dribs and drabs over the years, but Alternative Comics has finally come out with a definitive collection. Alternative seems to be swooping in and publishing deserving, previously self-published comics with solid design and production values. Campbell is a veteran of the Meathaus comics collective, which used to regularly release interesting-looking anthologies but is mostly reduced to just a collective web presence now, as its members pursue their individual comics and animation careers. Campbell's toothy characters and cartoony art give him a different look than most of the other Meathausers, and he took that to its logical end in this funny and totally off-kilter sci-fi/zombie/teen romance story.

The success of this book lies in Campbell's ability to constantly keep the reader off guard by feeding them just enough plot or character development and then zooming off into a seemingly absurd or unrelated direction. The main character, a weird young woman named Gabi, tries to start telling a story to her friends about eating seaweed as a child when she's interrupted by the conventionally attractive Astrid. Her friends then drag her down to "the shore" for a little fun, but she's reluctant to go. Every time she tries to tell her increasingly weird and convoluted story, her friends contemptuously interrupt her. To be fair, it is weird: dredging for seaweed, her father (constantly in a diving outfit) and his professor friend finding out that a dead fish, placed back in a bowl of water, would come back to life, etc.

When the group gets the car stuck on the beach, that's when the real shenanigans begin, as a zombie in a wetsuit attacks them. Gabi manages to keep her cool and has a friend use a frisbee to stun it (one of the many eccentric details in the book is the way frisbees rebound) before she runs over its head. As the narrative proceeds, Gabi restarts her story again and again, each time providing more context. The key plot point was her father and the professor using a chemical to clean up the harbor, which worked to clean up the chemicals but had the unfortunate side effect of reanimating the dead. Throw in a ship that recently lost its entire crew, and you have instant zombie invasion. What makes the book fun is the weird characterization and plot aside Campbell throws at the reader, like the nonchalant revelation that there are Loch Ness monsters living in the ocean, the fact that Gabi's mother dressed like Gilligan all the time, the weird chemistry between the professor and one of the guys, and the professor's demented, inappropriate timing for humor and history lessons.

For all of the gratuitous weirdness and silliness that Campbell throws in, it should be noted that the book actually has a remarkably tight plot and great use of suspense. He pours humor on every tense moment, but the humor works because the tension is palpable. The way Campbell wove his characters into and out of trouble while throwing in new complications was highly skillful, something that he almost seemed to want to hide with all the silliness. This isn't an absurd comedy with extraneous zombie elements; it's a nasty, cleverly-plotted zombie story with an absurd veneer. That veneer is aided by Campbell's entirely non-naturalistic use of colors, veering from the muted to the lurid. They serve to manipulate the reader's emotional reaction rather than simply provide information, as they create a frequently queasy atmosphere interspersed with more sharply defined use of color around certain character entrances, as though a spotlight was being cast on them. It's the equivalent of mood lighting, offsetting Campbell's deliberately goofy character design with its own impact. For a goof of a zombie story, there's an awful lot of craft and thought that went into this book, which is what sets it above most genre-oriented work.

Uncivilized: Mike Dawson's Rules For Dating My Daughter

The one constant in Mike Dawson's widely varied narrative choices in his career is that no matter what he's doing, he always tends to use a bit of narrative misdirection in establishing his true themes. For example, Freddie And Me is ostensibly about growing up as a fan of the rock band Queen as he transitioned from living in the UK to the US, but it's really about the properties of memory as they relate to identity. By the same token, his collection of essays from Uncivilized Books (by my count, his fourth publisher to date), Rules For Dating My Daughter, bills itself as "The Modern Father's Guide To Parenting". In reality, the book is about moral and ethical paralysis, as Dawson repeatedly finds himself confronting the question "Am I Good?", especially now that he's a parent.

A word on the cover. I've been baffled by some internet comments I've seen about the cover that claim it's glorifying gun use, toxic masculinity and Dawson's privilege as a straight white male. One look at the book's contents (and the story the image is taken from) quickly reveals that this is an ironic image, one that's deliberately made as hypermasculine as possible. These are issues that he quite explicitly explores, without finding a way to resolve them adequately in his own mind. Indeed, the entire book reads like a philosopher carefully weighing both sides of an intractable issue, unwilling or unable to issue an appropriate, all-encompassing ruling. Dawson is exploring the world of ethics throughout the book, and the only firm decision he seems to come to terms with as a moral imperative is becoming a vegetarian, though the argument he makes for this position is personal and arbitrary. Otherwise, one of Dawson's missions in the book is thinking about extremist moral positions and how uncomfortable he is with them, even as he understands that having a framework that he didn't question would make his life much simpler.

Dawson begins the book by addressing a classical ethical quandary: is having good intentions and ideas enough to make one "good", or does it require a specific set of actions? Is believing in social justice or gun control in itself sufficient to be "good", or can only only consider oneself good if one is working directly to make change--especially if that person is in a position of relative privilege? Dawson is well off enough, as he relates in the book, to work part-time from home in order to draw and telecommute while taking care of kids, but he also has a part-time nanny. It's important that he acknowledges all of this up front, that posting political links on facebook and twitter is literally the least he can do in order to live up to a certain nebulous ideal.

The title story explores the idea of a "feminist father" t-shirt about the rules for dating his daughter, that in essence, she makes the rules because it's her body. He explores the idea of "you'll need a shotgun to scare off the boys", which is of course problematic for all sorts of reasons. It treats his daughter like property, it denies her agency, it turns relationships into primitive shows of strength, etc. Dawson deftly puts himself into that mindset and then tears it down as he imagines the future version of his daughter demanding her own agency, and then even his son objects to the idea of that possessiveness, asking if it was OK if other fathers wanted to shoot him. Dawson goes over a number of variations on "the rules" before concluding that the more rigid one is about future events, the less likely it is that your rules will have any relevance or value. More to the point, worrying about that hypothetical future only detracts from being able to build trust and foster agency now.

Throughout the book, Dawson's focus shifts from quotidian strips about what a day is like in his life at the moment as he and his wife raise their children to a particular point he might choose to bring up. His art is in the style of his recent book Angie Bongiovanni, which is to say using a lot of big, stylized heads and smaller bodies and an emphasis on naturalism otherwise. His frequent use of an open page layout instead of a traditional gig gives the book a deliberate photo album feel, especially when he starts stacking panels on top of each other.  Work/life and art/life balance is the subject of one strip, where he once again concludes that any notion that he has to have a certain level of productivity is arbitrary and an idea that simply isn't relevant for him anymore. In other words, if life dictates that he spend a certain amount of energy simply being a dad and being present with his kids, then so be it. It's a decision that female artists have had to repeatedly make throughout history.

He also flips to more explicitly political pieces, like one where he uses a couple of alpha male types in different poses to underline that Americans don't in fact like underdogs, they like underdog stories. Stories like that don't affect their equilibrium; in fact, it becomes part of the American myth. Dawson's further point that Americans hate underdogs is right on, although I'm not sure it's entirely because they "hate a loser for losing" (though that's part of it, since winning is an endemic part of American culture. I might posit that there's a belief that an underdog winning represents an open threat to them and their way of life, and it plays out in topics like immigration, race, gay rights, etc. Something that represents a gain for someone else is automatically perceived as a loss for them--and "losing" is intolerable.

In the most chilling story in the book, "overcompensating", Dawson takes that brew of toxic masculinity, glorification of violence as a solution to one's problems and an unexamined stance towards one's own beliefs and privilege and sets it squarely on himself. Throughout the book, Dawson takes great pains to show himself in a warts 'n all manner with his family. Sometimes his children frustrate him. Sometimes he yells when they're not listening, or are endangering themselves. There's a story where his daughter in fact draws him yelling. This story relates a time when he was younger and a girlfriend left him for someone at her job, and he went down to confront him about it. Things got physical. Dawson described himself as full of righteous fury, interspersing drawings of himself with 80s action heroes like Clint Eastwood and the Punisher. Throughout the story, he pops in domestic violence statistics and gun violence statistics. The comic is not an attempt to justify his actions in any way, but rather to express the remorse he felt for his pointless actions and attempt to understand what brought him to that point. This story is Dawson admitting that he's part of the problem and has tried to change, but is that enough?

Does being a vegetarian make him good? Does acknowledging his privilege, over and over, make him good? Does raising his children in a loving and supportive way make him good? What Dawson hints at throughout the book is that while this is perhaps the most anxiety-producing topic there is, as it is doing nothing less than figuring out where one stands in the cosmic scale of things, it's also beside the point. Worrying about the semantics of being good is less important than the intuitive properties of kindness, mercy and acceptance. It's not unlike the ethical approach to Lynda Barry's famous two questions. This is in relation to what happens when one looks at a story or a drawing or anything you've created, and instead of simply enjoying the action of creation, you start to ask "Is this good? Does this suck?" Similarly, asking "Am I good? Do I suck?" leads to the sort of moral paralysis that we see throughout the story. The reality of our situation is that we make hundreds of small ethical decisions every day, and after a while it becomes obvious which decisions are selfish and destructive and which decisions come from a place of kindness and empathy. Having an open mind, a willingness to change and evolve, and the ability to understand the beliefs of others are the keys to "goodness" in my view, where kindness and a simple respect for the humanity of others intuitively guide our decision-making instead of the sort of titular rules that are incapable of dealing with nuance. It's Dawson's ability to shift from all-judging editorial cartoonist to flawed but always striving husband and dad that display precisely that sort of kindness and empathy. It may not be something that comes easily or naturally, but Dawson's whole point is that it can be learned.

Fantagraphics: Dash Shaw's Cosplayers

The collection of Dash Shaw's comic book series Cosplayers loses some of the energy from the original periodicals, which seemed to really revel in being actual comic books in a comic-book size and format. The smaller hardcover makes up for that a bit with a lot of supplementary images in the form of Shaw's collages from the original covers and new drawings of cosplayers, a form of expression that Shaw not only loves, but has engaged in. (He cosplayed as his own character, Paulie Panther from Bodyworld, at MOCCA one year.) The story of cosplaying friends Annie and Verti is one about how the shared idea of relating so much to a fantasy world that one wants to bring aspects of it to real life is especially fascinating, because they went a step further in starting to film themselves doing cosplay.

In this context, "cosplay" started to mean anything that was captured on film that could then be repurposed later. For example, Annie pretended to deliver a package to someone, and they filmed that. Annie hid a knife behind her back while going out with a date she selected from OKCupid because he seemed to be the least threatening guy there. While Shaw resolutely chooses not to judge his characters, he's also not at all reluctant to show the real-world collateral that Annie in particular causes with her behavior. The guy she goes out with thinks she's "the one". When Verti goes on a date and its goes well, she feels guilty for lying to him about stuff she made up for the purposes of the film and later apologizes. For Annie, the line between fantasy and exploitation is a thin one, one she herself has trouble understanding. The appeal of using one's time to not just become someone else, but to live one's life as if it was one long performance, was difficult for her to separate from an attempt to make actual connections outside of Verti.

That performative aspect made Annie acutely aware of her potential audience. Early on, when they were first posting their videos to YouTube, Annie violently overreacted to a piece of criticism from someone she wound up knowing, but scaled back her reaction at the end when the unspoken sense that going down the rabbit hole of trying to get back at your critics wouldn't help her. More troubling was the idea of fame, as she was approached by a nerdy fan at an anime convention who wanted nothing more to simply be around (and hook up with her), and she was weirded out by the attention. The entire convention sequence was one of Shaw's funniest, and the book in general is notable for Shaw exercising that part of his skill set: there are more jokes in here than anything he's done since Bottomless Belly Button. That was especially true in Shaw's depiction of manga/anime critic named Ben Baxter, who was given the unforgiving 9am slot for his discussion of Osamu Tezuka, was shown as a bumbling, penniless man whose life and self-esteem was as wrapped up in his knowledge and critiques of manga as the cosplayers were obsessed with the idea of manifesting and living their fantasies.

There's a hard line between art and commerce that's explored in this comic as well. Annie & Verti are bitter that the cosplayers who spend thousands of dollars on their costumes always win, momentarily coveting fame and recognition over the simple love of what they enjoy. Baxter may not have had the money to actually go to this convention, but it's clear that it's the only time he feels alive, even as he's disrespected by virtually everyone. It gets more complicated for Annie & Verti later on, when they're approached by someone from a major website who offers them a big budget. The entire process changes how they make art and what it's like to see a creative friendship that's battered by outside forces, such that the reaction of the crowd becomes the only thing that manners.

This is a book of vignettes, and it certainly reads that way. The last story, about the cosplayers going to a comic book store, steps out of the cosplay scene and more into the idea of repurposing things into objects of beauty as well as being a take-off on people who are totally sold on comics. It also serves as a tribute to Jack Kirby on a couple of levels, both for the weirdness of his 2001 comic book series as well as his interest in comic book collage. This book must be read as a series of vignettes, or else it  feels half-finished. There's no arc that really concludes what the cosplayers are doing, and the last story is such a departure (it was published in a place other than the original Cosplayers series) that it almost feels like a non sequitur compared to the other stories. One gets the sense that Shaw wrote as much about these characters as he wanted to say and then stopped without trying to write a larger, overarching plot. He simply let these stories and characters meander pleasantly for a while, and the stopped when he was ready to do something else. As such, it's more of a fun side-note rather than one of Shaw's major books, but there's still plenty to look at. For example, his use of coloring flips between four-color standard and his abstract, emotionally jarring color technique that he used in New School. He uses it sparingly here, making it all the more effective.

Minis: S.Spina, N.Garcia, B.Berry, M.Turbitt

Supercar 1, by Brandon Berry. This short comic, designed to briefly introduce a setting and its main character, reminds me a lot of the sort of thing that Brandon Graham and Malachi Ward are doing: thoughtful, off-beat and highly stylized science fiction. In this comic, we're introduced to a driver who's getting their car upgraded by an anthropomorphic rabbit creature. After dropping in a component that seems to work on magic as much as it does science, the driver gives the rabbit an old Mac laptop, establishing the timeline as some post-apocalyptic future. The last scene finds a cop on a motorcycle (with perhaps dubious authority) chasing after the driver. Along the way, Berry's wobbly and wonky line adds a tremendous amount of atmosphere and texture to the story. Some panels are missteps (one panel with just the driver has too much negative space), but overall, Berry's chunky line width and the fluidity of his figures makes this a striking little comic to look at.

Malarkey, by November Garcia. Matt Moses of Hic & Hoc handed me this mini at SPX, and he said he plans to publish a longer collection of her work. He noted the obvious comparison between Garcia and the work of Julia Wertz, and it's certainly there on the surface. Their figure composition, line, sense of humor and even personal struggles are much alike. That said, Garcia has her own unique voice, and that's not just because she lives in the Philippines. Her sense of comic timing, her willingness to use aspects of her life (as well as the lives of others) as a rich vein for her comic material, and her skill with regard to body language, expressiveness and page layouts made every story a delight to read. Garcia also exploits the differences between she and her mother, who on the one hand is scandalized by her daughters openly displaying the tampons they bought but on the other grew up playing with spiders and tadpoles. Lighthearted stuff like teasing her mom about her phone screensaver is interspersed with much darker material, like a funny strip about a dilation & curettage procedure she had to get after a miscarriage.

Garcia isn't afraid to shove the reader head-on into some pretty intimate material while at the same time distancing herself from it just enough to extract a punchline. The same is true about her struggles with drinking, the behavior of certain ex-boyfriends, pondering the reasons why she's put off having a baby and juxtaposing the text of a funny story from a beloved aunt with the reality of her life in hospice. What also struck me about this comic is just how important comics are to her. In "The Story Of You", a take-off on the sort of story one tells your young child about how they were born, she goes into detail about how much time, energy and thought she put into each strip. The final panel, where both Garcia and her anthropomorphic comic are homeless, is both tender and hilariously self-deprecating at the same time. There's another strip where she's over the moon about John Porcellino following her on Tumblr and she punches a scoffing friend ("Who the hell is John Porceloono?") in the breast while never taking her eyes off the phone. That sums up Garcia's work in a nutshell: committed to her craft, highly expressive, generally inappropriate in all the best ways. and possessing great comic timing.

Being Myself Is A Treasure and Having A Time, by Sam Spina. These are the collections of years six and seven of Spina drawing diary comics. He abandoned printing or even attempting a daily strip a little while back, preferring to focus in on days where he had a gag, a life event to report or simply something interesting to say. That was a wise move, because while doing a daily diary strip can help a cartoonist improve drastically, they aren't necessarily great reads, nor are they always well-drawn. In recent years, however, Spina's skill as both a cartoonist and a storyteller has been steadily honed through sheer, hard work. At the same time, these strips still retain that same boundless, goofy energy that permeated his early work. He also retains a willingness to put himself out there in terms of things he thinks and says, but is also willing to give his wife, Samantha, her own say in how events played out. Their sweet and occasionally pugnacious relationship is a highlight of the strip, as both are strongly attached to their very different points of view and are willing to defend them, but their ultimately loving foundation grounds the strip.

Being Myself Is A Treasure (volume 6 of the Spinadoodles diary series) is a major turning point, as Spina is suddenly offered a job doing storyboards for the Cartoon Network series The Regular Show. It's reminiscent of Mike Doonesbury being taken out of a dead-end job and suddenly being plopped into a new life, as Sam & Sam leave Atlanta and move to Los Angeles. Spina mixes in some fantastic sketchbook pages (in color) among the diary strips, which I especially enjoyed because they're more characteristic of his other work. There's still an utter lack of pretension to be found in these comics, as he still writes a lot about his job. It's just a job he's always dreamed of, instead of being a waiter. Volume 7 (Having A Time) is even more successful, as Spina's able to devote more time to his diary as it's clear he started to get the hang of his new life. Spina started to expand his autobio stories out to more than a single page on a more regular basis, resulting in richer, funnier stories. Many autobio cartoonists have done a strip about going to the San Diego Comicon, but Spina's focus on details like being unable to sleep, spending time with a friend and being frustrated when his wife wasn't there to pick him up at the station in the middle of the night provided a funny contrast to the usual business-oriented con experiences. There's an Hourly Comics Day experiment that's by far his most successful, a funny account of a trip to Iceland with his wife. more sketchbook comics, and the realization that while his life was great in many ways, he desperately missed the cartooning camaraderie he had in Denver. The highlight of the book is a day-by-day account of precisely how being a storyboard artist works for his show, which was fascinating in terms of the details but hilarious in just how honest he is about how much time he wastes along the way. There's even a point where he's bummed that drawing storyboards has altered his own drawing style. Whatever his concerns, it's clear that Spina is hitting his stride as a creator, as Having A Time is just the right length and has just the right balance of material.

Self, by Meghan Turbitt. Turbitt's parody of trashy women's magazines isn't simply a satirical takedown of such publications, though that's part of it. Self is no less than a total reimagining and warping of women's magazines around Turbitt's own particular aesthetic obsessions. An article about sex tips is an interview with someone that Turbitt has had sex with turns into a consumer goods survey, as she asks questions like "In what ways could I improve the experience for people wanting to have sex with me?" A fashion article titled "How To Wear A $3 Bra" is a hilarious series of drawings where Turbitt is unable to get her breasts to behave when she moves or runs, leading to an encounter with friends where she screams at them not to "look at my boobs jiggle". It's a real exploration of the concept of clothing that's affordable and functional, that at the very least doesn't embarrass the person wearing them. "Bros Who Brunch" is a hilarious but almost loving takedown of an Instagram account featuring guys eating ridiculous foods and absurd drinks in a show of conspicuous consumption. All elements of Turbitt's satire, no matter how mean, are turned at least in part on herself, as she always reveals that there's an aspect of her that loves and wishes she could be a part of that vapid, shallow wallowing in excess wealth. "2016 Best Beverages" is essentially whatever Turbitt found most satisfying at a particular point in time, so it includes things like "Diet Coke from McDonald's" as well as "Coffee in French Press". Turbitt throws in a couple of dirty strips involving men exposing themselves to her, which makes sense since the kind of magazine this satirizes is a reflection on the standards for beauty, grace and culture that are imposed on women by outside sources. One strip features a hilarious punchline where Turbitt uses an exposed penis to open a bottle of wine, and the other is an expose' of what dog owners who don't restrain their pets from jumping all over others are really thinking. There's plenty of familiar, furious Turbitt lines as she's frantically in motion at various points, but the success of this comic is largely conceptual.