Sabin Cauldron's Maleficium

Sabin Cauldron's minicomics series Maleficium is the lesbian separatist witch comic I never knew I needed. It's a funny, action-packed and over-the-top trip through a number of different sub-genres that reminds me a bit of Ben Marra's stuff. In fact, his hyper-masculine action comics satires are a kind of mirror image to what Cauldron is doing here. Both artists take their genres quite seriously, but there's a ridiculousness to it all that's told with a straight face.

The first issue, set in 1969, is a send-up of horror/detective stories. "Lesbian Renegade Witch" Lobussa Thirst has to track down a killer that cleanly decapitated the head of a friend of hers, and the stories follow those beats until she tracks him down. Turns out she knows him, because she helped create him when she was getting her own head lopped off during the French Revolution. She inadvertently made him into a Human Guillotine, with the actual mechanism of how he accomplished it turning into a remarkably grotesque image. When she manages to seduce him, it's all over, as the story goes in a markedly different direction with a full-tilt series of occult rituals that bind him to her will. Cauldron only winks at the reader a couple of times (like with the epilogue), but the gritty, naturalistic art lends gravitas to a story that could have been much more ridiculous (and not in a good way) in different hands.

The second issue puts the rest of Lobussa's coven in the spotlight as they are forced to go up against a gang of biker werewolves whose bikes are also lycanthropes. The latter revelation made me laugh out loud, one of many funny moments in this satire of biker exploitation films crossed with a similar kind of witchsploitation film during the same era. This issue also makes use of psychedelic imagery, especially in its use of splash pages for some of the more outrageous scenes. The fight scenes are interesting in the way that Cauldron plays around with page design, putting the panels at jagged edges next to each other. Cauldron also makes nice use of negative space, flipping between positive and negative space in the most violent of scenes to lessen the impact a bit. There was even a bit of over-the-top poetry at work, as the comic began with an ode to the unpredictable power of electricity and ends with the witches triumphing over the wolves thanks to a live wire.

The third and fourth issues are even wilder. One of the witches, Caprina, was bitten by a werewolf and the result was that her head became that of a goat's. Later, she's dragged forward into time (into the far reaches of 1996), as San Francisco is becoming big on tech. She hooks up with a group of women anarchists in a squat and opposes a mysterious hooded figure who uses superpowered creatures like Finjas (merman martial artists) and an armored figure that's a Judge Dredd send-up called Kill-O-Byte. Throughout the issue, Cauldron drops dozens of easter eggs with images that refer to the women's alternative comics of the time. It's funny to see Carrie McNinch laying on a sofa in the squat as Caprina comes in. The hooded figure is trying to control the then-developing world wide web through Caprina, until the latter blows it up at the end of the issue.

Caprina is blasted forward to 2016, and virtually every character looks like a famous cartoon character, with Nancy giving a real estate tour to Daddy Warbucks. Caprina's therapist is "Dr. A.Kominsky", with Cauldron nailing the cartoonist's slightly grotesque self-image but not taking the reader too far outside familiar territory. When Caprina tracks down the hooded figure, a monstrous ball of energy emerges and destroys her old foe--but later comes for her. There's a lot of intrigue and running plotlines in this issue, as Caprina has to figure out why it seems like her partner is plotting against her. There's an amazing scene where she seeks out her former coven member Starlite, who complains that "black, brown and asian witches [are] used for emotional labor" when asked for a favor. The end of the issue reveals the origin of the energy creature that started stalking her as well as a surprise climax. For all the bombast and absurdity of the story, it's actually quite tightly plotted. There's also romance, betrayal, the ways in which gender identity changed over the years and much more. Though each issue stands alone, the running storyline becomes more compelling with each issue. Despite all the visual silliness, Cauldron never drops a straight narrative face in doing the comic, which makes the more dramatic portions of the comic all that more tense

Tyler Cohen's Primahood: Magenta

Tyler Cohen's collection of her Mamapants/Primazons short stories and minicomics, Primahood: Magenta (published by Stacked Deck Press) is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. What I mean by that in this case is that the alternating Primazon and Mamapants stories gave each other structure and context in a way that was difficult to achieve in single issues of her minis, where Cohen had to sometimes overexplain what she was trying to do. Here, she doesn't even have to try, as Roberta Gregory's superb introduction makes some important distinctions between the two interlocking storytelling devices. The Mamapants stories are a Cohen's autobiographical comics about being deciding later in life to have a child as a bisexual woman who eschews labels as much as possible. The silent Primazon illustrations depict a matriarchal society whose members seemed to be a mix of insectoid and avian, but still humanoid. They're Amazons, of a sort, in a society that's at once whimsical and fierce. Everyone is at play, but play for everyone is deadly serious.

In the Mamapants stories, Cohen is interested in three things: to record the fierce and highly unpredictable behavior of her daughter, to comment on how she and her partner were raising daughter Nene--and in particular, the ways in which they were trying to avoid patriarchal influences, and finally what other "Primazons" had to say when she asked them questions about their bodies, femininity, and being treated like an object. Cohen was adamant about not letting gender hold her daughter back in any way and she wanted it to shape her personality as little as possible. Of course, the influence of society is powerful, so she came back from preschool wanting to play princess and she wore little else but pink. At the same time, her daughter loved playing outside, being physical and getting the kind of knee scrapes that Cohen got as a child. Still, Cohen obviously struggles with the influence that pop culture and other children have on her child, not to mention the omnipresence of sex being introduced as a kind of commodity.

Cohen's art is a mix of fluid, scribbly and cartoony. It's no stretch to see a naturalistic pose turn into a fantastical one, like depicting her young daughter as a tiger after dreaming she was giving birth to a cat. While spot color is used in the autobio comics, Cohen depends on her line to provide structure and stability for those comics. They are grounded in reality, with some of the color leaking in from lands of fancy in certain panels. The Primazon material is almost entirely dependent on color, often eschewing black lines altogether and sticking to bright, colored pencil renderings. When Cohen relates the results of her various survey, the figures telling the stories are Primazons. In many ways, the Primazons aren't so much an alternating storyline as much as that they seem to exist in the same space but in a slightly different dimensional space. Sometimes, there's some bleed between the two dimensions. 

Cohen has certain hopes and dreams for her daughter, but she's also adaptable and eschews rigidity whenever possible. When her daughter wants a particular doll that mixes monster tropes and Barbie tropes, Cohen relents. In short order, Nene becomes disinterested, which likely would not have happened if Cohen had forbade it. Cohen understands that a child's energy and desires can't be extinguished, but rather only rerouted to something healthier. While Cohen is fascinated by various milestones (like when her daughter's breasts start developing) and genealogical similarities, she's mostly just fascinated by the crazy magic of raising a child and seeing them develop their own sense of energy. When a bystander asked young Nene what she was (princess? ballerina?), Cohen simply said, "She's herself." That self is a slightly inchoate, rapidly developing (and sometimes in a contradictory way) young person who is pushed and pulled by contradictory images and desires that trusts and talks to her parents on her way to new adventures. There's a wistfulness at work here that covers up some of the extremely annoying parts of being a parent to a young child to be sure, as this volume roughly finishes up the preteen years. Cohen does it all with a very purposeful, radical point of view that is less interested in lecturing than it is in simply being honest, humane and funny.  

Comics-As-Poetry #9: Inkbrick #3

Alexander Rothman, Paul Tunis and the rest of the Inkbrick gang have been quite busy since I reviewed the first two issues a while back. They've taken on an incredibly difficult task: publishing a journal of comics-as-poetry on a semi-regular basis. Given that it's still a fledgling sub-art form of an art form that itself is still in relative infancy (or perhaps young adulthood by now), finding good candidates can't be easy. There's also the problem of defining just what comics-as-poetry is. Some might include what I would simply call "poetry comics": poems with some illustrations. Such work lacks the interdependence of word and image that poetry comics has, even if making such a distinction is of the "you know it when you see it" kind.

Still, there's no question that even when some issues are a little thin on the best of comics-as-poetry, it's unquestionably true that they still publish the best of the best as well. Anna Grzton's "Gert" is a good example of a great find. In relating this story of his father and an imaginary friend, creating an immersive environment that takes the metaphor of tears cried by peonies falling like diamonds. Rothman continues to grow more daring in his experiments, sticking to concrete imagery (like a bird and a walnut as actors in a play) but more abstract ideas. His images are becoming more abstracted while still retaining some literal roots by using techniques like negative space to create foreground figures and a dense use of colored pencils.

Sabin Cauldron's "Water Damage" was an interesting piece that considers the micro and macro ramifications of a humble kitchen sponge. There's a micro level of the internal structure of the sponge and of bubbles, and the macro level of a hand about to disturb this equilibrium of moisture and dryness. The orange used in the comic adds an alien feeling to the whole thing, down to the shadowy, spidery black fingers reaching for the sponge at the end. Wynn's "Unanswered" uses negative space to talk about identity in the form of one's self-image. In some ways, it seems to be a reference to proprioception, the sense that we know where our body is even when we don't see it. When that sense goes awry, we literally can't feel ourselves. Expanding that idea to identity itself (as opposed to one's position in space) is a clever idea, perfectly suited to comics to quickly explain.

Paul Tunis' matches images to text in a way that doesn't quite jibe. It's not random, but there's a false solidity in the way in which the naturalistic images and the short narrative bursts of text don't contrast in ways that seem very meaningful or interesting. Similarly, the rhyming structure of Laurence & Myra Musgrove's is a big distraction with regard to the simple image of a crow singing about its world. A lot of the artists take a big chance with the visual structure of their pieces, and not all of them are successful. John G. Swogger's "The Shrine" successfully redacts aspects of archaeological drawings to compose a beautiful poem about an abandoned space from all four cardinal directions. On the other hand, Alexey Sokolin's "Panopticon" uses 3D art effects that veer, paradoxically into total abstraction and the uncanny valley effect. It's distracting more than disorienting, and the font used for the lettering doesn't aid the reader in grasping the work.

Other notable contributions include Anthony Cudahy's mixed-media entry "No Eyes", which features drawings and photos of statues from antiquity and obsesses over the way they stare, even when they've been torn out. Catherine Bresner's excerpt from "January 2nd" is also a mixed-media piece reminiscent of Julie Doucet's recent collage work mixed with text. She also took images that look like they came from 1950s and 60s lifestyle magazines and inserted images of dominance, violence and in general elements related to patriarchal oppression. Maelle Doliveux and Alyssa Berg both rely on a sharp use of color and the passage of time in their pieces. Doliveux's is a clever one about a woman with a blossom for a head that slowly wilts over time when her lover leaves and doesn't come back. Berg's strip is rougher, using color to create the crest and fall of an ocean wave and comparing it to the rise and fall of a (presumed) lover's chest. The use of color crosses panel borders as we see two images simultaneously, just as she does.

The two long narratives in the book come from Glynnis Fawkes and the team of Marguerite Van Cook & James Romberger. The former story is a funny one that focuses on Fawkes' established fascination with Greek mythology, as she tells the tale of how she met her future husband as though she were a wild nymph and he was a charming faun, trying to lure her away from her busy life. There's a lushness to her brushwork and use of color that matches the heat of the sexual tension depicted in the book, but there's also that lasting sting of no longer being able to frolic in quite the same way as she did before she and her husband had their sun. Fawkes also expertly depicts that push-pull feeling of loving someone but desperately wanting to retain independence, until the attraction and affection wins out. Van Cook & Romberger's "Perfectly Manicured (To the Bone)" sees Romberger doing a take on the illustration style of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant strip, down to the flourishes selected for lettering. It tells the tale of the garden of dead children, the remnants of war, and horror and exploitation, waiting to bloom again in the wake of disaster. The question is, bloom for good or ill, as a young girl walking through the garden takes one of the "flowers" with her, against the advice of the gardener. It's a fold-out that doubles as a dust cover, and it's a spectacular, beautiful work. It's one of many chances the editor-publishers were willing to take, and it was a success.

Koyama: Eric Kostiuk Williams' Condo Heartbreak Disco

Eric Kostiuk Williams' debut was technically Babybel Wax Bodysuit with Retrofit, but he's been self-publishing his own smart, funny and visually exciting autobio/anthropological comics for quite some time. What's interesting is his abiding interest in mainstream comics styles and tropes, as well as his desire to subvert and repurpose them. That's exactly what happens in his debut with Koyama Press, Condo Heartbreak Disco. It follows the adventures of two immortal beings, The Willendorf Braid and Komio, who have been companions for centuries but now live in a highly ethnically diverse, inexpensive section of Toronto. It's a fascinating comic because of the way it manages to combine all of Williams' interests, be it queer culture, city life, larger societal trends and the concept of magical helper beings.

Williams goes beyond sheer novelty in presenting this story about a benign, sheltering human braid-creature and a rubbery, shapeshifting creature of vengeance. Komio the shapeshifter hires herself out to people who are being abused, mistreated or otherwise treated poorly by their partners/lovers/flings. The comic begins with Komio pretending to be seduced by a guy at a club, going to his place, and then revealing their true self in horrifying fashion. Komio was hired by several women treated poorly (there's an implication of rape, but it's not explicit) by this guy to torture him for two hours, which they do. Very quickly, the reader learns that this is less a super-hero comic than it is a horror comic in many ways, with ancient beings whose standards of behavior and beliefs is very different from humans.

Williams sets up the story where Komio and the Braid are happily and quietly living with a flatmate in a low-income but ethnically diverse and exciting neighborhood in Toronto. There's a devastating bit of social satire unleashed when a photographer starts taking pictures of people in the area and puts them online, only to have the photos commandeered by a faceless, evil, real estate conglomerate. There's a brilliant twist in the book where we expect Komio to go up against and defeat the conglomerate. However, Komio switches sides when the power behind gentrification is another immortal being whose desire is to slowly eradicate humanity. The condos being built weren't for the rich; they were made to stand empty, slowly driving out every person. It was a way of wiping out the scourge of humanity.

In so doing, Williams revealed some uncomfortable truths about the characters. Komio's years of acting as an agent of vengeance had soured them on humanity as a whole, even if there were a specific few humans that they liked. The Braid's status as a loving nurturer was on hold until the real estate crisis came, and then they became a powerful, humane force for good--especially when Komio disappeared. In the end, the book ends on a note that reminds me of the biblical story of Lot, trying to convince the angels not to destroy Sodom & Gomorrah as he looked for virtuous people. The challenge laid down here is trying to convince Komio that humanity is actually worth saving. Through the Braid, Kostiuk makes a powerful argument on behalf of humanity, showing that crisis has a way of bringing people together. More to the point, the Braid argues that those being exploited by the rich and powerful shouldn't be lumped together with those oppressing them. It's a humane, one-on-one, interpersonal response. It's an ethical position closer to virtue ethics than Komio's almost utilitarian response of wiping out humanity as a kind of ethical equation. It's empathy vs rationality, and it's obvious that Williams meant for both characters to be powerful advocates of their positions but that empathy was ultimately more important.

Williams told me that one of his biggest influences is Joe Sacco. You can see it if you're familiar with Sacco's earlier work in particular, especially the stuff most recently reprinted in But I Like It. Sacco's work is much more stylized and rubbery, even as he maintains a strict naturalism in terms of backgrounds, character design, gesture, etc. Komio and the Braid are weird, larger than life figures in a real-world Toronto who manage to fit into a neighborhood where everyone's a little bit different and foreign but still accepting. Williams' page design flips from homey and warm to skewed and scattered, depending on whether he's trying to focus on warmth or keeping the reader off-balance. In other words, the parts of the story that focus on Komio are chaotic and unpredictable in terms of page design, panel construction and size. The Braid's are in a more standard grid that allows the reader to focus on emotion instead of spectacle. In the panels they shared together, they were wobbly and fantastic at times, but never out of control in the way they became when it was Komio alone. It was a smart shorthand for the emotional lives and impact each of the characters had on each other and their environment. Williams' imagery is intense and splashy, but above all else, he's a thinker as a cartoonist. He's always trying to find a new way to express ideas, combining his personal and political ideas into a potent, visually startling, storytelling experience.

Malachi Ward: Vile Decay and Top Five/Sweet Dreams

Malachi Ward is one of the preeminent science fiction cartoonists working today. Though his work is unabashedly genre-oriented, its attitude and inspirations clearly come from the world of alternative comics. This week and next, I'll take a look at some of his comics.

Sweet Dreams/Top Five. This is an interesting flip book that's about science-fiction tropes, sleep and fantasy. Sweet Dreams is a first-person narrative about a man with a slightly oddly-shaped head who doesn't dream that he was abducted by aliens; instead, he dreamed he was the alien abducting people! With just one or two panels per page and an all-black background, it would seem that the comic might be frightening. Far from it, as it ends with the man (now in classic alien "grey" form) kissing his former abductee on the forehead. What's funny about the story is that despite being the alien and going through his process, there's still no explanation as to his goals or reasoning behind probing and examining humans. It's every bit as opaque in this fantasy as it is for those who claim to remember being kidnapped.

Top Five, the other story in the flip book, is a story about grim survival with a first-person narrative that tries to take the protagonist's mind off his situation. He's an explorer on another planet who thinks about Star Trek minutiae in order to pass the time and deal with grueling physical labor as he struggles to make it through each day. There's an urgency to his fantasy life that goes into details about things like the top five time travel episodes of Star Trek that supersedes the urgency of his dull but frightening everyday life. Whereas the man in the first story has the luxury of pretending he's an alien, the spaceman in the second story retreats into fiction as a means of keeping his sanity. Both men dream of a different life for different reasons. This story has a rigid four panel grid that de-emphasizes the exotic nature of a foreign planet, instead putting the reader right into the heart of the man's boring work rituals, again and again. While the images tell the story, they do little to tell the story of the man's inner life, which is told almost entirely through text. In both stories, the actual drawings serve to tell the story in a mostly naturalistic style, but in neither case are they designed to draw a lot of attention. It's the page composition and panel set-up that do all the heavy work here.

Ritual #3: Vile Decay is the latest issue in Ward's running series with Revival House. The approach is radically different in this comic, as the reddish pinks dominate everything, including line. The story is indeed about decay, the decay of time and narrative, and the fragility of the line contributes greatly to the way the story works. Using a simple 2 x 3 grid, the story starts with a father and son walking around the beautiful canyons of a desert, with the father telling a story of a family going to visit a city. When they approached the city, a mob overtook them and did horrible things to the man's family. The moral of the story is that there was no moral; "Everything just gets worse" and "That's why you don't go into the fucking city, boy." Then the whole environment was revealed to be a hologram. Flash back to the man remembering being in a political protest with his girlfriend that turned into a riot, and then the boy is revealed to be a hologram as well. Then theres's another flashback to a few years after the riot, when everyone there talks about the incident. The political urgency of the moment is replaced by one of intimacy rotting away, as the couple is no longer together in the future, and they're with different partners. The former girlfriend of the protagonist in particular seems resentful of this in the sense that she created this powerful narrative with her former boyfriend, but it wasn't enough to keep their relationship a living, vital thing. Seeing the sun come up, the last few pages are all about her thinking about the sun, a seeming constant but also in a state of decay. She literally thinks about past sunsets and time passing, as she seems lonely and isolated. Whether in the past or in the future, Ward seems to suggest, the characters in this story all die alone.

Fantagraphics: Tardi & Malet's Fog Over Toliac Bridge

Fantagraphics' sadly-deceased co-publisher made it his life's mission to get the books of Jacques Tardi translated into English, but it took him a long time to build any kind of audience in the US for this kind of work. An early attempt came in serializing a story in the now-defunct Graphic Story Monthly, one that he translated himself. Years later, Thompson finally achieved success in getting Tardi recognition with nine volumes, including a few that won Eisner awards. It's only now that Fantagraphics has gotten around to publishing Thompson's translation from Graphic Story Magazine, Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge, as the tenth volume in the Tardi series.

This was one of several books that Tardi illustrated, as he was fascinated by hard-boiled detective stories set in Paris. Leo' Malet wrote it, and it's full of detective-story cliches, racist caricatures (in this case, a common one of referring to Roma as "gypsies" and depicting them as unrelentingly violent and immoral), and hard-boiled action. There's also something very French about it as well, as detective Nestor Burma is trying to find out who killed a friend of his from his former anarchist days. Set in the 1950s, the image of the bomb-throwing anarchist was as fresh then as the concept of the terrorist is today.

The book is pretty much the pinnacle of genre fiction, or what Thompson might call "good crap". The source material is fine, as Burma gets tangled with a Roma woman who was befriended by his dead former comrade, gets mixed up with other former anarchist friends of his whom might have had something to do with his friend's murder, and has to outwit cops who are circling around him at the same time. Burma is a detective with no special, poetic qualities; he's just a man trying to do his best by others. What makes the book special is Tardi's immersive, evocative art. Every brick, every cobblestone and every archway feels real and trod upon. The reader smells the smoke of pipes and cigarettes, feels the icy rain, feels the punches thrown and tastes the wine thrown back. It's not just that Tardi has a compelling, realistic style, it's that he knows precisely how much to render on a building to make it come alive on the page. He's a master of perspective, switching between foreground, middleground and background with his characters as he turns a corner. There's one scene where Burma and Belita (his Roma love interest in the story) are questioning a ragman who knew his friend. In the story, he was a bust as a witness. Tardi framed this by putting their encounter in the middle ground, with the bustle of the street in the foreground and various buildings dwarfing the characters in the background. It's a clever note that subtly accentuated the text, one of many in the book.

The verisimilitude of the setting is contrasted by Tardi's cartoony, exaggerated faces. Burma has ears like the handles on a trophy, but Tardi is especially good at drawing middle-aged men with comb-overs and narrow faces. That stylization of character allows Tardi to exaggerate action here and there when he needs to, as well as provide the audience a point of reference that they should be concentrating on. Tardi's work is dense, exciting and captivating, powerfully evincing the experience of times past, even though the reader has no connection to this time or place. It's a satisfying bit of comic book junk food that goes down easy but still pleasantly lingers long afterward.

Minis: M.Aushenker and M.Collar

Michael Aushenker and Marcus Collar have worked together before, but let's take a look at some recent solo projects and collaborations with others:

Pool Care Handbook, by Marcus Collar and Joe Collar. The central narrative that runs through the book is that a version of the Creature From The Black Lagoon has taken a job as a swimming pool cleaner. He's friends with various other monsters, all of whom inhabit a typically drab suburban neighborhood that freaks out when they appear. There's also a running narrative that follows a family that goes camping and encounters a benevolent bigfoot. Video games later get interpolated into rock 'n roll dreams with Funkadelic references and laser shootouts with aliens, and the kid from the family is later hunted by actual werewolves and saved by the yeti. It's a weird and wacky series of events that's mostly played straight, which is to the benefit of the material. The art is almost entirely naturalistic, with even eyeball monsters rendered with the same kind of detail as people and buildings.

The fact that the Collars never wink at the reader in telling these nonsensical stories is what makes them work, even as the pacing of the stories is sometimes a little wonky. There are also points where I'm not sure whether the reader's knowledge of what is about to happen matters much, like in a drawn-out story involving a fishing expedition and the yeti. The tone of the book is clearly comedic, but it's written almost like a slice-of-life comic, only with monsters interacting with often-terrified humans. There's also a clear narrative through-line that is mostly just hinted at in this issue, as the Collars were more interested in establishing tone and character than anything else. Overall, this is a well-produced, quirky comic that isn't quite sure what it's going to be just yet, which is both intriguing and distracting at the same time.

The War On Dental, by Michael Aushenker. When Aushenker grabs hold of a concept, no matter how silly it may be, he goes all the way with it. In this completely wacko comic, he riffs off the infamous story of the American dentist who killed a beloved, protected lion named Cecil and turns it into an apocalyptic tale. The story begins with a dentist stealing the teeth from Cecil, father of dragons, and taking them home as a trophy. From the very first page, Aushenker assaults the reader with a garish color scheme designed to make the whole book look larger than life. As the narrative begins, he switches from a thin line to his usual ultra-thick line that is matched in his lettering, with every panel being composed conservatively but featuring highly stylized images. In the story, the rest of earth's dragons decide to get even with the dentist. The way he depicts the dragons is hilarious, as a cross between a biker gang and a hipster enclave. Aushenker's style of humor is almost entirely visual, as there aren't so much jokes or even a funny story as there is something weird and humorous in every panel, often as a sidebar to the actual narrative. An example is the absurdity of the Pacific Palisades community in California, going to extremes in depicting its bizarre "small-town charms".

After getting revenge on the dentist and his family with fiery righteousness, the dragons decide to destroy the entire city. Then they decide to kill every dentist on earth, just in case. That leads to various militaries and the usual Aushenker weirdo-characters (this time around, it's "Jump Boy Olson" and "Fancy Youngin") getting into the fight. They wind up deciding to destroy Korea and Iraq, sparking an all-out war that destroys everything. There's something satisfying about the lunacy of this comic. Aushenker never lets up, but he does allow for enough silly moments to make the comic more than a simple exercise in drawing mayhem. Although to be sure, there's plenty of that as well. Aushenker had a vision of complete ridiculousness when he started this comic, and he more than lived up to that goal with page after page of brightly-colored, silly and frequently nonsensical mayhem.