Conundrum: Jillian Fleck's Lake Jehovah

Jillian Fleck's debut book Lake Jehovah is the sort that an artist with a lot to say tends to throw at the world; there are multiple levels of meaning, metaphor and symbol in the comic that take a long time to unpack, along with a complex visual playbook that riffs on all sorts of formal tricks like the use of the grid and repeating visual motifs. Fortunately for the reader, Fleck was up to the task that she set for herself in telling a story of multiple apocalypses, mysterious illnesses, horny demons and talking animals, and a remarkable balance of the absurd and the deadly serious. Along the way, there's a serious examination of the value of poetry, the utility of language in general and a restless exploration of gender and sexuality, It's done with a humane and sympathetic take on all of the characters, no matter their experiences.

Whether one prefers to refer to it as magical realism or simply deeply symbolic, here's the book's plot. A young genderqueer person named Jay finds ximself diagnosed with Soft Disease, which is apparently a not uncommon diagnosis in a world that's experienced multiple apocalypses up to that point. Jay is constantly worried that xis partner, Mells, is going to leave xim, which in fact is exactly what happens, as Mells runs off with Jay's old professor Asterix. When Jay falls asleep for several months as a result, a number of odd things occur. First, Jay's writings have become a prophecy of the new apocalypse, and created a tourist industry as a result. (This is one of many cleverly sardonic touches in the book.) Jay encounters an old friend who dresses up as a spirit animal to give tours, meets two true believer Apocalypse Tourists, encounters a sleazy poet, the poet's demon drug dealer, a talking fox and what purports to be Jay's guardian angel. In the end, the apocalypse may or may not have happened, but Jay realizes that it doesn't really matter.

Let's unpack all of this. This is a comic that is primarily about mental illness and how that plays into relationships, real world difficulties and day-to-day survival. Jay is deeply depressed and anxious, exhibiting any number of mental illness symptoms, but most significantly is that of catastrophization. That is, every problem or fear is extrapolated so as to become a worst-case scenario. That depression is closely correlated to feelings of worthlessness and meaninglessness, especially when faced with any kind of perceived betrayal or rejection. Suicidal ideations become common. Anxiety is another major symptom described here as well. The exact diagnosis is less important than the symptoms in terms of the story, but the way they're described it could be anything from bipolar 2 to borderline personality disorder, with the latter seeming more likely.

How does this play out in terms of the story? A "soft disease" sounds like an apt description of mental illness. The apocalypses and the sense that the world is ending (especially when Jay's fiance leaves) fit right into that sense of imminent catastrophe, especially the fact that the world has seemingly ended multiple times in multiple ways. Suicide and self-harm are given form in the titular lake, whose name represents the cold judgement of an omnipotent god. When Jay confronts xis "guardian angel" at the end, it's at the bottom of the lake, with the full weight of god's judgment literally on top of them both.

Drugs are a big part of the book, and all they seem to do is magnify one's problems and self-image, not provide answers or refuge. It's no accident that the "guardian angel" avatar is the same lurid, day-glo color as Jay was when xe was on a serious trip; it's a huge ball of rage against everything in the world, especially ximself. There's a grueling scene where Jay in that mode brutally murders a vicious dog, which in itself was colored in the same way and thus feeling the same kind of rage. Meeting rage with rage, Fleck suggests, does nothing to actually address the root of that rage, that self-hatred that comes from a lack of self-worth.

Jay's antipathy toward poetry is another key aspect of the book. Xe hates it because xe regards it as a form of lying, of being indirect in communication. Jay's fiance Mells loves it precisely because some things cannot be expressed directly, that sometimes language is incapable of accurately capturing certain kinds of experiences in a straightforward manner. You have to talk around and through certain things to really deliver the message, which is especially funny because this comic makes great use of comics-as-poetry at times. The repeated use of tiny panels; the use of "rhyming" images to indicate patterns of behavior or portents of things to come and even the use and then breaking out of the grid to get at a sense of disorder are just a few examples of how Fleck's visual strategies reflect poetry, not to mention the heavy use of symbolism.

Another key to the comic is that no one is any more or less a sympathetic figure. When Jay finds ximself with a huge, gaping wound on xis stomach (and I don't believe it's a coincidence that the genderqueer Jay, who has a penis, would develop a wound with a labial shape), the wound winds up being xis real conscience. There are no apocalypses save the ones you make up. Jay's fiance' left because Jay had become mentally ill and was unwilling to recognize this, much less get help. Jay's pathological need to be reassured that a relationship would never end is what caused the relationship to split apart. Sex for Jay was not always a means of connection; it was sometimes a means of escape. Fleck makes it clear that Jay's problems are not imaginary; the world is an awful place in many ways, with toxic landscapes and violence & death lurking in so many places. There's always a personal doomsday that's about to arrive for someone in the world. Jay did have genuine mental illness issues and did have a loved one leave xim. The problem, Fleck suggests is taking those problems and turning them into something far worse, something monstrous.

Fleck's figurework is a little rough in some places, as her characters look somewhere between Archie characters and Simon Hanselmann's, with a strong understanding of how both Chris Ware and Frank Santoro create a page. The use of the grid is central to so much of the story, but so is finding ways to literally destroy it as Jay smashes symbolic shapes. Ultimately, the story winds up being one about self-acceptance, even in the face of one's darkest fears.

mini-Kus! Of The Week # :11 S! #26: Dada

This is my final Kus! article for a while, as I've caught up to most of their work. For this final installment, I'll be reviewing issue #26 of the Kus! anthology, S!. Doing Dada-inspired work can be a tricky business, especially if one's understanding of Dada as an art movement is limited to surface qualities like absurdity, randomness and negation. Dada is aesthetic, political and personal. It examines the limits of rationality and the ways in which rationality is a slave to convention. It questions assumptions, smashes elitism and is frequently conceptual at a level where one questions the foundations of art. Dada is dead because specific Dada artists created particular works to address specific ideas at precise moments in time. Those moments of time are now gone, and now the work is inert. Dada will never die because there are always new moments to describe and new problems to address. The famous quote goes, "Like everything else, Dada is meaningless." Dada questions its own assumptions and existence the way it questions everything else.

So what are comics inspired by Dada like? They should be personal, they should be readily available to the public (a comic is an excellent format for Dada-inspired art), and they should explore and go beyond our everyday understanding of what comics, lines on paper and text can be. Two of the artists who really nailed it were Marc Bell and Dunja Jankovic. Working in their own styles, they captured different senses of what Dada explored, with the understanding that Dada's various manifestations across the globe had different emphases. Bell has always been an absurdist who has used cultural detritus to inform his jokes, as well as a "ready-made" style of repurposed imagery. In his strip here, he employs his tortured warping of language to create almost entirely nonsensical conversations between different creatures, with a nod of the hat to Dada artist Francis Picabia. There is nothing naive or random about this comic; it's an entirely calculated series of images and words that form a complex and connected set of visual and verbal jokes. Jankovic works in her story, eschewing language in favor of alternating psychedelic black & white patterns and brightly-colored & vaguely phallic shapes. Each is meant to stimulate different parts of the brain; the psychedelia is there to shut down thought and engage in the powerful visual stimulus. The shapes are meant to inspire interpretation, preferably a dirty one. It's part of the gag, and the way Jankovic whips one's sense from one mode of thinking to the next is precisely the kind of disorientation that Dada is meant to produce.

Roman Muradov, another artist already heavily influenced by the shapes of artists like Jean Arp, uses the old Dada cut-up technique to form text that drives the geometric shapes he uses for this slip of a story about body parts. Olaf Ladousse uses the formal qualities of bright blue and pink, reminding the reader of the artificiality of the colors in his construct, to create a gag about Dada. Brie Moreno does something similar with her Peter Max-inspired, brightly colored figures that discover a living version of Raoul Hausmann's famous sculpture The Spirit Of Our Time: a sort of (literal) dummy head representing banality. The characters in the story are literally bitten by this banality in their effort to try to care for it. Jaakko Pallasvuo uses a collage technique by taking an old issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and repurposing it as an ode to Marcel Duchamp, especially the way his art was so conceptual. The story is a kind of dream about Duchamp (hence appropriating material about the Dream King), thinking about his prowess playing chess and the way he rushed through his ideas.

Andy Burkholder's absurd breakdown of language and image, of sign and signifier, is funnier still because of the way he also breaks down the idea of the iconic, cartoon image. It's a metacommentary where all artifice is not only laid bare, but the component parts are broken down to such a degree that language is made meaningless and image is also an artificial construct. Vincent Fritz explores shapes and the way the brain immediately applies utility to them, using three circles as a sort of perpetual-motion figure that's having items dropped to it. Sammy Stein comes at this idea from a different angle, as he begins with a tree, then we see it chopped down and sectioned; the sections are sent overseas to then get stacked and covered in concrete, and finally they are placed in a graveyard as a sculpture memorializing Dada. It's a good gag that nonetheless gets at the absurdity of certain processes and the arbitrary nature of monuments.

Daniel Lima brilliantly remixes the dialogue and situation of a George Herriman Krazy Kat page in his own style, with the now-human characters in sacks and toting around doors, creating odd geometries that still has a powerful impact because of the Herriman's deliberate mangling of language that is nonetheless recognizable. Both Liva Kandevica and Jose' Ja Ja Ja focus in mostly on the ways that language gets mangled; in the former case, language is seen as a constant form of aggression, and in the latter, the artist reinterprets famous Dada quotes around his own angular, cluttered imagery. Some of the other comics don't quite zero in on Dada's principles in a recognizable way; a couple (like Dylan Jones and Ernests Klavins) focus in on more of the random images or strange narrative ideas that some associate with something being absurd than specifically Dada. Still, this tightly-edited book is surprisingly challenging and well-considered with regard to its theme, and a number of pieces fit perfectly in the Dada tradition.

Aaron Lange Sells Out

One of the most talented of the latest generation of underground artists (the Mineshaft generation?), Lange's comics are a mixture of brilliant drawing, challenging insights and juvenile humor. For Lange, his idea of selling out came in the form of his CaSh Grab comics, issues one through three. Published by The Comix Company, they are meant to mostly be sketchbook highlights but Lange inevitably adds his own ideas and meditations on any number of subjects, starting with his struggle to get sober. There is a remarkable power to be gained in understanding one's own sense of powerlessness in the face of addiction, and going sober not only did nothing to dull Lange's edge as an artist, but it gave his work a great sense of clarity. The first issue of Ca$h Grab has a lot of portraits drawn at bars, and Lange is superb at capturing the essence of his subjects with a naturalistic style the emphasizes weariness and even pain on his subject's faces, like that of a "horny mom threw teen daughter a naked twister sex party, AA sponsor says". Lange drew her as sad and searching with big eyes and a sense of desperation, not as a lurid figure.

Which is not to say that there's not any filth to be found here. No one does it better than Lange, but even here, he uses it for more than just shock. Depicting addiction as a beautiful, naked woman begging him to come back gets at his lament of "oh, gawd, it's just so awful sometimes". A lot of the drawings here were clearly done as a way to keep his hands busy and his mind active, from drawing pictures of Scully from the X-Files to old superhero logos to an account of a recent acid trip. Without perhaps even meaning to, Lange created a sobriety journal with a remarkable amount of impact. The second and third issues are more conventional, as they are mostly assembled from reprints of the kind of Hollywood portraits that Drew Friedman does. That is, the portraits, though mostly naturalistic, often offer a kind of commentary about each figure. Every now and then, Lange made a joke about the subject's appearance or their role (Elizabeth Montgomery). There are punk figures, figures from old Hollywood and cult figures. Lange ranges from his standard, thick black line to a painstaking use of stippling. The effect is different from Friedman, who uses a hyper-real style to make his figures seem more rubbery, while Lange seems to want to create a noir, sleazy atmosphere for all of his subjects to be a part of. The third issue has more of Lange's silly jokes, like changing the DeNiro film to "Uber Driver", with DeNiro holding up two phones that have pictures of guns with them, saying "Are you texting to me?" A lot of the images in this issue came from commissions, but the funniest image was that of Klaus Nomi as The Punisher.

Lange's real work comes in the pages of his series Trim, and the third issue has a lot of highlights. I find Lange's casual use of racist and homophobic terms to be kind of dumb, because it's obvious that he's a smart person who actually thinks about social and political issues. Part of that stems from his "I don't give a fuck" attitude, which adds energy to a lot of his work but also detracts from it at times. Opening the issue with images from his high school yearbook and the creepy feeling he gets from looking at them now is Lange at his best: confronting his id without letting himself off the hook. "Where Have All The Cool Faggots Gone?" is actually an interesting piece in its analysis of the conflation of outsider culture with gay culture as he discusses a number of historical figures, but coming at this culture from a position of obvious privilege was not only obnoxious, it refused to do the hard work of actually trying to investigate the current avant-garde of gay culture.

As always, his autobio is top-notch. "Bummer Vacation" finds him quitting his awful job and running off to his mom in Cleveland, leaving his long-suffering wife behind. It's a fascinating account of literally trying to go home again, finding some aspects of it sweet and other aspects bitter as inevitable decay struck at beloved childhood memories. More than anything, the trip served to calm him down. "Float" is about him finally getting to try a sensory deprivation tank and feeling ready for whatever hallucinations and/or revelations it might bring, only to panic after just a couple of minutes in the tank. As someone curious about the experience yet knowing that I would also resist the experience, I could sympathize. The back half or so of the comic was dedicated to the sort of "horrible, horrible" gag cartoons that Ivan Brunetti used to do, only Lange relies heavily on visual and verbal puns. This is where Lange goes all the way to the edge and beyond, with jokes about Rwandan genocide, Nazis, Anne Frank, desperately wanting a drink and more. My favorite features included the running "Sassy Bartender", which plays on the increasingly dumb and dirty names for drinks and "Bill Fingered", a Batman joke I couldn't help but laugh at. Lange's approach, as always, is to pummel the reader with joke after joke, delicately-rendered & filthy image after image. For every dumb or gross joke, Lange lands two smart and pointed gags. Lange's comics are high-risk, high-reward and packed with content from cover to cover.

Trim #4 may be the best issue yet, anchored by the excellent biography of musician Peter Laughner that also serves to act as a sort of history of Cleveland itself. With a flowing, open-page layout that mixed in naturalism, caricature, stippled portraits that had a ghostly quality (an intentional effect), Lange told the short, unpleasant story of an influential but highly self-destructive musician who was in a number of bands, including the first iteration of Pere Ubu. In Lange's view, Laughner and Cleveland were inseparable: two doomed, isolated and underappreciated entities consumed by disaster. There's no question that he was a genius, but he was also violent, unpredictable and frequently anti-social, making him difficult to work with in a band setting. Throughout the story, Lange peppers it with repeating jokes, lyrics and images that reflect the "Ain't No Fun" quality of the story's title and also a title of one of Laughner's songs. This is punk as true nihilism, seeking nothing but total immolation of everything, including oneself. This is Lange at his best: cogently critiquing Laughner without either judgment or sentiment, letting the facts speak for themselves even as he improvised a different visual technique to anchor each page, be it a psychedelic background for Laughner's high school band days or a savage pencil-dominated drawing of animals reclaiming Cleveland. Lange's research was clearly extensive, and it was clearly relayed with a minimum of tedium and a high degree of focus on its most interesting aspects. The rest of the issue is also solid, as Lange puts his remarkable observational and raconteur skills on display in a story about the strange behavior of his new neighbors and unleashes the usual array of pretty funny, filthy gags, the best of which were the hilariously weird "Pig the Fucks" (involving putting pig noses on cops) and "Twerk Will Set You Free", which is perhaps the most absurd Nazi-related filth I've ever seen.

The collection of Washington Beach strips basically showed that a little of that concept went a long way. Compiled in one place, the strip mostly feels like a waste of Lange's talent, as he takes fish-in-a-barrel aim at hipsters and their assorted drug habits, obsessions and sexual habits. While the structure and rhythm of the strip is drum-tight, the gags are often groan-inducingly obvious or cheap. That said, some of the running gags (one of the hipsters often saying "I better txt andy about this!") were sharp and Lange is superb at creating callbacks. On the other hand, his My Dad collection is tremendous, with each strip building on the next to create a hilarious, nuanced portrait of his father that gently mocks him and also displays Lange's genuine affection and admiration. The mini is also a document of Lange's growing skills as an artist over the past few years, as his figure drawing in particular has become much more confident and bold, even as his versatility in terms of drawing style has blossomed. There's one sequence of strips where we see a completely naturalistic image of his dad, a stripped-down/geometric Brunetti-style drawing, a cartoony version and a number of in-between versions--all of which made sense depending on the nature of the anecdote. Two fun running gags: Lange throwing in a blatant lie about his father that his dad would yell about, and Lange's father yelling at his brother (drawn either as a hippie or a punk) about all sorts of things. Lange's use of layout is unusual, as he packs a lot of material into a small space but uses carefully-placed and differently-shaped panels (often circles) to break up the page and let the eye rest a bit.

Finally, there is Huge, a double-barreled blast of putrid filth aimed at the Trump administration and all of the associated cronies. In other words, when they go low, Lange responds by plunging his targets into oceans of bile, shit and filth. He actually starts out in smartass mode, using various slurs as Trump's hair, but then goes into full Ralph Steadman mode, creating hallucinatory nightmares of monstrous Trump figures with penis pustules all over his face, dripping blood and other fluids. Other targets like Mike Pence and Steve Bannon are barely human predators, eating rats and drowning in semen--barely able to grunt. It is an all-out assault that hits as hard as any Trump caricatures this side of Warren Craghead. Lange really hits a nerve with depicting these leaders as luxuriating in death, decay and their own depraved sickness. Unlike Lange's usual filthy drawings, there's no joy or fun to be had here: just a powerful mirror held up to those in power. These images are drawn as much as they seem to be vomited straight from Lange's mind onto the page, and their impact is more visceral than anything I've ever seen the talented Lange do.

Secret Acres: Gabby Schulz's Sick

Gabby Schulz's Sick is body horror in the most relevant and realistic sense of the word. In many ways, it's a recapitulation of his entire career to date, and it's the most brutal and nihilistic take on both humanity and (especially) himself since the first couple of issues of Ivan Brunetti's Schizo. The story is simple: it's an account of fifteen days spent with a serious illness, one that debilitated him to the point where he could no longer even get up to drink water or use the bathroom. From the description, it sounded like an extreme form of the flu. Influenza is no joke, and it can kill people who don't have strong constitutions, are very young or very old, or have no support or care. The latter case describes Schulz, and that's the heart of the comic.

Living alone with roommates he doesn't know all that well and without being in contact with any friends, Schulz also didn't have the money to go to a doctor and wasn't willing to risk a hospital ER that would likely turn him away for lack of insurance. The sheer misery of that experience, where one's skin feels like it's on fire, where your entire body is wracked with pain, your stomach is doubled over with cramps, you lose control of your bowels, you are unable to eat, where sleep barely seems to help--it's no wonder why it led to such a brutal dark night of the soul for him. That said, Schulz has never been one to mince words with regard to the horrors of our society and to the ways in which we fool ourselves into buying into a system that is essentially meaningless and hollow at its core. Even trying to enjoy the little things is next to impossible because it's all part of a doomed, poisoned world. Schulz is well aware of how much worse most people in the world have it than him, as a cis white straight male; indeed, he knows that he is complicit in what he has been given as a result of his privilege.

What's interesting is that despite all of this and frequent wishes that he would just die, Schulz simply wasn't wired for suicide. He had no way of answering the question: "Why bother living?" other than to say that we're hard-wired to do so and equally hard-wired to have hope in the face of calamity. There's no ray of sunshine to be had here, making this an even grimmer read than Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (its nearest literary equivalent), which at least held out experiencing aesthetic beauty as a meaningful activity. For an artist like Schulz, even that activity is spoiled by the reality of the world. And yet, he does it anyway, walking out to a park and drawing in his sketchbook. If the problem of existentialism is how we relate to the sheer existence of other people (think the final line of No Exit: "Hell is other people."), then what Schulz does is hint at that connections are the only way we can successfully fool ourselves into continuing to have meaningful hope.

He suggests that the moments of happiness in his life consisted of finding ways to return to the womb, and that included his relationships. The problem with that point of view is another central problem of existentialism: that we can never truly know the point of view of another person and thus can never make a real connection with them. That said, there are also thinkers who have demonstrated that empathetic understanding, when given and received freely, is a real phenomenon. The understanding at a deep level of each other's "otherness" (often through an understanding of looking at the other person and you knowing that they know they're looking back) is another form of connection, upon which entire societies can be built. What can really be drawn from Schulz's work is that a lack of empathy, a lack of connection and a willingness to be totally isolated is not just what literally led to his physical sickness, it also led to his emotional sickness. That biological drive for hope is also a biological drive for togetherness, and despite his despair in this book, what becomes clear that is that it takes the courage of authentic action, of a willingness to reach out, is in many ways the only thing that separates humanity as a species from total barbarism. A lack of empathy makes it easy to commodify others as well as commodifying oneself.

The power of this book is in Schulz's agonizing but frequently hilarious drawings. He wrings coal-black humor out of the bleakest situations in the manner of a Ralph Steadman, and the original webcomics downward scroll effect is maintained in the page design and oversized pages. Schulz has always been an impeccable pen-and-ink artist, but his secret weapon here is his use of color, especially a kind of bruise-colored and nauseating yellow. He alternates between an open grid on some pages and full-page splashes on pages where he really wants to drive a point home, like about religion, belief systems in general and his central metaphor of humanity being the real disease. To say that he lays it on thick is an understatement; there's not a single page that goes by without grotesque and over-the-top imagery. Connecting a childhood nightmare with his current state felt almost cathartic in the context of the story thanks to its visceral qualities, and it's that total commitment to the image that makes its exaggerated qualities so powerful. Schulz wasn't simply out to shock the reader in this book, but rather to draw a reaction as real and powerful as the one that he experienced himself. I still believe his conclusion was something of a cop-out that allows him to get through life without actually doing the hard and brave work of making connections, but there's no doubt that his deconstruction of society, politics, culture and religion were all devastatingly on-point.

Koyama: Don't Come In Here

Patrick Kyle's most recent book, Don't Come In Here, is a science-fiction effort more in the vein of Phillip K Dick than the more fantastic influences he's been drawing from of late. This is a story about paranoia, disconnection, isolation and technology. Told in Kyle's distinctive blend of visual styles and techniques, it relates the simple story of a man who moves into an unusual and ridiculously spacious apartment so he can work on his computer, and all of the weird and unpleasant things that happen afterward. Kyle's work has always been built on distortions in time and space, but this book explores more mundane aspects of those distortions that are nonetheless every bit as unnerving. The way he gets it across on the page is by pushing panel after panel on the reader in depicting an activity, be it a ten-page sequence (with two panels per page) of the protagonist trying to run down the impossibly long hallway to answer the phone. After a series of often hilarious body distortions warped into a variety of geometric shapes and sizes, the punchline in the last panel is that he's hardly made any progress at all. Similar sequences arise when he tries to deal with the dirt and dust in the apartment, kicking up a storm that takes pages to navigate, as well as the way in which time itself has become warped as his watch stops telling time in a way that makes sense.

Another funny example is the way his books, pets and even food became warped, forcing him to find ways to flatten them out (including trying to put a bigger cat on top of his warped cat to flatten it out). This also gets at another Kyle trope: disorienting the reader through near-abstraction that's thematically similar to H.P. Lovecraft's idea of "strange geometries". Common, perfectly-drawn shapes (especially the computer) interact with smudged lines, warped images, hand-drawn scribbles and other non-representational images alongside a more solid sense of reality. The dull, everyday sense of reality represented by the parallel lines of the hallway floor and simple geometric shapes are contrasted by dense, intricate drawings of jungle and deep woods images. Familiar images like squares and rectangle representing objects are threatened by drawings of entirely alien creatures lurking in the kitchen. The familiar and the solid, like the wall next to you, is revealed to be part of something far stranger and more sinister.

Very early in the narrative, the main character establishes that one's experiences are entirely dependent on one's point of view. He uses The Simpsons as an example and posits the idea that Mr. Burns is actually a kind and competent person, while it's Homer Simpson and his family who are the monsters. Unfortunately for him, that insight came in a dream and wasn't followed as practical advice, as a seemingly innocent activity (banging on the wall) turns into a bizarre warning to not come next door and to treat this seriously. Of course, he winds up doing neither, and winds up briefly trapped next door. It reflects the sort of passive/aggressive behavior he displays throughout the book. When he sees the weird creature in the kitchen, he simply chooses not to go back in there ever again rather than deal with it. When he sees the creature go next door, he ignores all directives and offends his neighbor. Even his long-suffering computer, his only friend, starts to chafe against its programming mandates and is eventually "killed" after a practical joke goes awry. He's eventually kicked out of the apartment, but the last scene is a dream where the apartment is perfectly normal and he has no problems with it. He's wondering whether he's asleep or awake and declares himself awake, though once again it's all a matter of perception. The reader certainly has no way of knowing.

All the reader can know is what's on the page, and Kyle spends a lot of time keeping the narrative zipping along in a series of vignettes. Some are self-described dreams, others are weird sequences like his bedspread and room taking on a psychedelic checkerboard pattern until he turns the light on. The reader is put through him quickly going from panel to panel but going nowhere fast. The reader experiences the unusually familiar vernacular of the computer, which is all part of the distorted nature of the figures and the way in which communication works in the apartment. In the end, it's up to the reader to interpret what's going on every bit as much as it's up to the protagonist to make his own conclusions. The end result is as absurd and amusing as it is unsettling, and that's mostly due to Kyle's masterful pacing and design.

2Dcloud: Powerpaola's Virus Tropical

The beauty of reading a childhood memoir like that of Ecuador's Powerpaola and her Virus Tropical is that contains a number of familiar elements as well as some aspects that seem remarkably strange. When the author notes that even within her own countries (Ecuador and later her adopted Colombia), her upbringing was unusual, it makes for an even more fascinating read. The overall effect, if I can make a crude comparison, is somewhere between Julie Doucet in terms of style and bluntness and Lat in terms of bringing a place to life with both a sense of innocence & naivete as well as its rough edges. Told entirely from a modern, first-person point of view, Powerpaola tries to be as brutally honest about everything as possible regarding her family's highly disfunctional yet still somehow quite loving dynamics.

Two odd details surrounded Paola's birth. First, no doctor believed that her mother could be pregnant because she had had her tubes tied, and one doctor wrote it off as a "tropical virus" and another said it was simply "air". The unexplained detail in the book was that Paola's father was a priest. He no longer seemed to be practicing clergy (nor was he Eastern Catholic) and he was much older than her mother, so there was a major bit of drama there that was simply never touched on. Her father Uriel stopped being a priest to marry her mother. She then experienced life growing up with two much older siblings, which put the middle child (her sister Patty) in a position of being jealous and giving her sort of a distant relationship with her oldest sister, Claudia. Paola depicts herself as having a sense that something odd was going on but never quite understanding what it might be, and no one was interested in cluing her in.

The book follows her father leaving to live with his demanding mother in Colombia, then her older sister leaving to also go to Colombia after conflicts with her mother. Paola's whole world revolved around her family, especially her sister Patty, who changed course as a teen and saw herself as Paola's real caretaker. Even working with a mostly six-panel grid, Paola was adept at portraying the claustrophobic nature of their living situation, and not just because of a lack of room. There was a surfeit of strong-willed personalities, none of whom were interested in yielding to each other. When you throw in the maid, that added another dimension of conflict, as she was practically a family member considering how young she was when she came there, yet was explicitly reminded that she wasn't a family member. Because of my own South American heritage, I was aware that maids were not a status symbol the way they are in the US, and that most families had them. That said, it still created a strange dynamic to have this person who was sort of a sister but also someone you could boss around, and Paola does not ignore this fact.

Like most coming of age stories, Virus Tropical is about the struggle to go from someone who is unwelcome and unwanted to someone who has found their tribe. Paola at first resents the fact that she doesn't fit in because she's poor and doesn't have the right pair of sneakers, but when she too moves up to Colombia, she also resents being mocked for having a different accent and vernacular than the students at her middle school. She also happened to arrive in Cali right smack-dab in the middle of a drug war that often saw shoot-outs break out in the middle of the street, making her resentful of drug culture and the liars and show-offs she saw that seemed to represent it. She looked to her sister on advice for everything, including and especially boys but also fashion and career advice. Their mother wound up having a minimal influence on all three of them, and it speaks to her frequent absences (she lived between Colombia and Ecuador) affected her connection with her children. Indeed, Paola's memories of her father are even less distinct. Once again, it was a demonstration of how the bonds of family are far more fragile than one might think, especially when one is a very young child.

It's not a surprise that Paola found her people when she started hanging out with a group of artists. the immediate sense of energy and warmth she felt from simply staying up all night doing a mural with her new friends was clearly a life-changing event. It's interesting that without specific guidance, Paola still chose certain events to mark growing up, like having her first period (depicted in the title page of this section with a Julie Doucet-style drawing of her flooding the town with menstrual blood), or consciously deciding to put away all of her toys when she had her first date. Whether or not she was actually ready to grow up, she decided to try to at least act the part. Paola's use of the grotesque, much like Doucet, was another key aspect of the comic, like when a boy who made fun of her for having bad teeth is depicted as having an impossible number of tiny, misshapen teeth in his own mouth. Like Lat, Paola drew inspiration from both members of her family and her friends, until she found her own tribe. The drawings may be grotesque, but it's not just that they're frequently and deliberately ugly--they are also exaggerated for comic effect. Huge heads, nests of scribbles for hair, bulging eyes and long faces are all part of the artist's arsenal that's used as much to make the reader laugh as it is to simply express herself in an honest and direct manner.

Frontier: Richie Pope, Rebecca Sugar

Frontier #13: "Fatherson", by Richie Pope. This is a fantasy story in a deep sense. The idea of being able to open up a box and create a FatherSon in your own bathtub is an astounding fantasy, even if the way that plays out is unpredictable. The high concept of the comic is taking a pellet out of a package like it was medicine and waiting for it to grow. What's profound is that you're creating a father figure out of thin air, but in so doing you're creating a being dependent on you to a degree. The variations in how it behaves are a simple commentary on how as children, we don't really know what are parents are capable of. They are initially symbolically omnipotent and omniscient, but we later come to understand that they are just human. Pope's use of blue, yellow, purple and red only slightly recontextualizes his interest in exploring different kinds of black fathers in particular. It's yet another binary that Pope blurs, as the comic both is and isn't about race. The things Pope describes are very much the sort of things that a kid would find impressive (like being a good basketball player) or embarrassing (like being a bad basketball player).

The book has the cadence and form of a children's book, which is another interesting binary, because it also feels like a commercial as well. Each page introduces us to a different Fatherson, be they kind or abusive or artistically inclined. The implication that some Fathersons simply leave is left lightly on the page, yet that also has heavy symbolic value, especially the lines: "Some Fathersons run so far they forget where they are."/"Others run so far they forget who they are." On the other hand, there's something wonderfully warm and touching about some Fathersons creating their own Fathersons, which act as the consumer's Grand-Fatherson. Pope then shocks the reader back to reality on the last page, letting the buyer know you can return your Fatherson for credit if you don't like it. It reinforces the capitalistic aspect of the product in that it's designed to create an experience in creating a parent as opposed to having a child. What is left unstated is what the Fatherson is doing for the consumer on a practical and emotional basis, yet it's obvious that this is the key aspect of the comic. And of course, in real life, we can't go back and get a new father; all we can do is understand and accept our parent's flaws. The flatness of the drawings and the garishness of the colors are meant to mimic advertising materials, yet Pope at times injects a real sense of humanity into his drawings that defy the consumer qualities of the product.

Frontier #14: Rebecca Sugar. Sugar is of course an animator best known for her extremely popular and groundbreaking animated show, Steven Universe. This comic is kind of a dumping ground of ideas and themes that abound throughout her work, including her show, from her sketchbook. The first is a strip called "Margo In Bed", which involves a stand-in character meeting a cartoon character from her childhood in the 90s that she was in love with. It was one of those painful attempts at creating a cool character, a surfing dog named Rad Rover. Upon travelling to meet the dog, she remembered she was a princess in this land and wanted to meet her perfect fantasy boyfriend prince. Here is where Sugar gets at the heart of the strip: the concept of obsession that in reality is just narcissism. It's wanting to see the reflection of yourself in the object of your desire, not seeing them as they actually are. This is a theme that's constantly repeated in Steven Universe, that obsession is an attempt to take ownership of someone else, and that to be obsessed with a thing or work of art can be a way of avoiding one's desires in a mature way. Of course, obsessing over a cartoon is far less harmful than over a person, especially as a cartoon, and Sugar notes that her relationship with 90s cartoons is far different now than it used to be, especially since she's now "behind the looking glass" in that she's created an object of obsession for others.

The second half of the comic focuses on dance and movement, which are also hallmarks of the show as forms of both self-expression and intimacy with others. It's easy to respond to Sugar's work because her characters are so expressive and over the top; their emotions are easy to read not just because of their facial expressions, but because Sugar was careful to make their body language an essential element of the show. Her drawings also reflect her interest in drawing a variety of body types, from lithe to Rubensesque to muscular. Every body is capable of its own form of expression, and that's reflected in these drawings of dancers, which reflect raw emotion as much as they reflect movement on the page. Another thing that's evident in her work is how her method starts from the complex and is eventually simplified. Sugar's dense and almost frantic scribbles are an attempt to create a certain energy on the page in the hopes that this energy can be retained even as the images are refined. Her drawings have a fluid naturalism and anatomical accuracy that provide the bedrock for cartoony expressions, exaggerated action and general larger-than-life qualities. Like "Margo In Bed", Sugar's strength as a creator is making something that feels both real and like a dream. Like in the poem on her phone that opens the comic, it's an "organized mess".