Inner Lives: The Mourning Star, volume 2

Rob reviews the second volume of Kazimir Strzepek's post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic, THE MOURNING STAR (Bodega Distribution).

Kaz Strzepek's MOURNING STAR series provides a number of visceral thrills and and an opportunity for readers to explore a carefully designed world. However, there are any number of genre comics that do much the same thing that aren't nearly as compelling. Speaking to him at SPX and trying to get a sense of his influences, he revealed that Megan Kelso's ARTICHOKE TALES (first seen years ago in the legendary NON #5 and soon to be published in its complete form by Fantagraphics) was the single biggest influence on this story. In particular, he was impressed that Kelso's clear line and cute character design could be used to tell a story that was in turns grim, romantic and thrilling. While he indeed took up those cues from Kelso for his story, he also picked up another element: creating a compelling inner life for every single character, be they hero or villain.

For example, volume 2 of the series of books opens up with what turns out to be an extended reverie by a character who was seriously injured in a fight with a bizarre assassin. The character is part of the Rule (the brutal, thuggish villains of the story), yet is treated as just another kind of protagonist by Strzepek. What was remarkable about this sequence (which was a callback to a tossed-off line in the first volume) was that it not only provided thrills and key plot information, it made the reader genuinely feel for the maimed guard. The sequence also took us on a tour of the daily lives of a group of thugs: they see themselves as the bold protagonists of a new world where force is the only currency. They're still capable of tenderness (the relationship between the chief lieutenant and his pregnant wife stood out), but crossing the line of murder and pillaging forces them into a permanent state of dissociation. It pushes them to create a rigidly-defined set of us-and-them, one where the Other is an object fit only for subjugation or murder. The sequence doesn't exactly make us sympathize with the Rule characters, but certainly makes the reader understand their point of view. It's life in theHobbesian state of nature: nasty, brutish and short.

The rest of the book finds Strzepek slowly tightening the varied character threads, getting the disparate protagonists in deeper trouble while pulling them toward the same place. The way that Strzepek creates not just scenes, but densely-packed environments, invites comparison to two other key influences: Brian Ralph and Mat Brinkman. Ralph has always preferred to let his environment dominate his narratives, engulfing the one or two protagonists who have to confront it. Brinkman goes even further with the way his characters and their environment don't have much of a sense of separation between them, with only constant movement differentiating the two. We never get a sense of the inner lives or motivations of their characters beyond simple survival and/or curiosity. With Strzepek, the characters drive everything with a complex set of motivations. Throughout the story, Strzepek creates lulls that allow for exploration of those desires, often in surprising ways.

For example, the dream-eating ghost-like character that has a symbiotic relationship with one of the heroes gets separated from his friends and winds up having his own set of adventures with others of his kind. Stzepek whisks the reader along on this diversion, having long imparted to the reader that he was in no hurry to get from point a to point b plotwise. These side adventures add a richness to the overall story that fits in well with Strzepek's sense of humor. In the style of Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's DUNGEON series, Strzepek keeps things light with his dialogue even when the world he created is a grim one. That balance is perfectly struck with the character of the nameless Snipper-sniper, a deadly mercenary assassin who's almost impossible to kill. This particular character has amnesia, so he spends much of his time bumbling around until something challenges him to a fight, which he inevitably wins with a mix of brutality and comic timing.

There are quests in THE MOURNING STAR, but not a Quest, per se. The reader slowly starts to learn a bit more about what really happened to their decimated world, a plot point that is deliberately shrouded in mystery. The quests introduced are small: finding a lost loved one, finding a new place to live, recovering one's memory, climbing a brutal social order. We get hints of an overarching plot in this issue when we meet a group of rebels seeking to assassinate the mysterious leader of the Rule, but Strzepek never lets that interfere with having the reader concentrate on a succession of moments.

Visually, Strzepek creates a set of characters with cute features: simply designed faces, pointy ears and stumpy bodies. Like Trondheim, it makes the violence they engage in simultaneously shocking and hilarious. Strzepek adds a layer of dust and grime to his characters and their world befitting its status as wreaked by war and chaos. He alternates all-black background bleeds with all-white ones, sometimes doing so as to establish time of day and sometimes doing so as to establish mood. He favors a lot of small panels with close-up shots, creating a world that feels a bit claustrophobic. He never overloads panels with unnecessary detail, instead allowing the eye to fly across the page with his breezy dialogue or frenetic (but clearly-presented) fight scenes. That's due in part to the clever simplicity of his character design and disciplined use of spotting blacks. THE MOURNING STAR may owe a debt of inspiration to a number of sources, but Strzepek has succeeded in creating something that feels like an exemplar of a new, intelligent sort of genre comic instead of a simple knock-off.

Pride and Prejudice: Aya--The Secrets Come Out

Rob reviews the latest volume of AYA, subtitled THE SECRETS COME OUT, by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie (Drawn and Quarterly).

Some have compared the interactions of the cast in the AYA books to soap opera, and there are certainly some of those elements in the story. A better comparison might be an extended comedy of manners, much like a Jane Austen book. Indeed, the action in the AYA books, set circa 1980 in the Ivory Coast, depends mostly on the clash between new and old sets of cultural & gender expectations. Men behave badly and vainly try to relive their youths by taking lovers and trying to take on additional wives, but the women in their lives flex their own power. The younger women try to negotiate the lies that young men tell them while dreaming of a way out of small-town life. The gulf between children and adults is sometimes bridged in surprising ways while being broken irreparably in others. Pride becomes an impediment to intimacy, while prejudice emerges with regard to the very surprising reveal of one particular romantic entanglement. Through it all, the character of Aya is a level-headed heroine who navigates the craziness of her family, friends and village while always looking to her own figure.

What's fascinating about this book is the way it fully embraces the cultural specificity of the Ivory Coast during this period (years before civil war and deprivation struck the country) while making the characters and their situations relatable to anyone. There's almost a visceral quality to Aya's Yop City environment that Abouet relates in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and temperatures. Oubrerie channels a bit of Joann Sfar in his work, both in terms of the expressiveness of his figures and the vivid use of color. Color is a crucial storytelling element in this book, especially with regard to the brightness of the characters' clothes and how that figures into identity.

The Aya books have character threads that cohere into a story, but not much of a master plot. In this volume, for example, the book revolves around a "Miss Yop City" beauty pageant that concludes about halfway through the book. The story's really about the desires of every character and how that leads to conflict when the secrets concealing their desires emerge. A young, single mother dreams of having her own restaurant. A hapless young man wishing to please his overly demanding father overhears him speaking ill of him and is crushed. A young woman dreaming of life in France puts perhaps a bit too much of her trust in a scheming lothario. A young man desperately wants to be able to love openly and will even leave the country to do so, hoping his lover will come with him. The lover of Aya's father gets fed up with a lack of attention for herself and the children she had with him, and exposes their affair to his wife.

Abouet tells these stories with a remarkably light touch, one that's matched by Oubrerie's cartoony style. No matter the difficulty or conflict, there's a way to deal with it. Aya really is an Austen-style heroine in that she takes it upon herself to inject herself into all sorts of problems of others--when they're not directly barking up her tree to do so. She's come to terms with that role, even as it interferes with her desire to be an intellectual. Indeed, her affection is boundless for those characters with the least means--both intellectually and financially. That's especially true of the family maid (one of the most vivid characters in the book) and a badly uneducated and gentle mechanic. She doesn't seek to dominate their lives, but rather gives them an opportunity to develop their own sense of agency and express their voices.

Aya has a bit of pride and stubbornness herself, but Abouet generally writes her as having the fewest foibles of any of the Ivorians we meet. I think this is partly because she's a gateway character to everyone else we are introduced to and partly because she's acting as a stand-in for the author. Abouet can't help but throw in a childhood recollection of seeing a child psychologist in France and then turning it around to how insanity is seen in Africa. She also has a couple of character relate recipes in an appendix, further adding a sense of longing for tastes and smells of a particular region.

While the AYA books are a celebration of a particular culture at a particular time, they are also a gift to non-African audiences. The delicate web of family and city is one that's more tightly woven than in most english-speaking cultures, for example. The small-town nature of Yop City is both a comfort and an occasional sense of frustration, especially for the young. Everyone is aware of everyone else's business, and there are societal obligations that can be as annoying as they are important. Abouet doesn't overly romanticize tradition and in fact takes the more sexist aspects of customs to task in this book. At the same time, Abouet is forgiving of even the most ridiculous of her characters and portrays them all as people simply trying to find a way to be happy. They may well get roundly chastised and publicly exposed, but it's more a matter of family squabbling than unforgivable offense. The pleasures are small in this slice-of-life series and not surprising, but it's the way they're woven together that makes each volume so satisfying.

20 Years And Counting: New Minis from Henderson, Porcellino and Reklaw

Three of comics' mainstays from the 80s continue to go strong in publishing their work. John Porcellino just celebrated the 20th anniversary of KING-CAT, Jesse Reklaw publishes in every form of media imaginable, and Sam Henderson is looking for a new publisher with the slowdown at Alternative Comics. Let's take a look at three of their most recent minicomics.

TEN THOUSAND THINGS TO DO #5, by Jesse Reklaw. This is the penultimate collection of Reklaw's flickr-based diary comic. In going over quotidian details like meals and sleep time, Reklaw gave himself a structure so as to express feelings he had difficulty expressing in his day-to-day life. This is even more explicit in his COUCH TAG autobio comics, but the day-to-day measure of things like how much pain various parts of his body were contrasted with his impish, joking nature. One senses that his reporting on his pain was an organic decision, something that just grew out of his goal to have a daily diary comic. This issue found him trying to relax, going on a Hawaiian vacation to see his girlfriend's family and having fun with his mother and younger brothers on a visit to see him. As always, Reklaw worked with a four-panel grid, occasionally breaking his pattern to solve a particular storytelling problem. There's a sense that Reklaw simply didn't want to settle for just a standard accounting of his daily activities, and made a point of relating at least one funny anecdote, one moment with his girlfriend (though never any sort of explicitly emotionally revealing details), one moment with his cats or one moment with his friends. It's a distillation of his day, one where it seems that he feels a duty to his audience to entertain them, but also a duty to himself to get across some kind of emotional truth. It's his skill as an entertainer that makes each strip so dense and compulsively readable, but it's a tribute to his own honesty that he tries to relate something more.


KING-CAT #70, by John Porcellino. Porcellino's 20th anniversary issue is another moving collection of lyrical short stories, pithy anecdotes, gags about cats and emotionally intense memories. Porcellino's minimalist line is poetic, abstracting image as much as his zen koan-influenced text does the same to language. What separates Porcellino's work from other autobio cartoonists (including his many imitators) is the way he grapples with life so directly. That's both in terms of the way he addresses his battle with depression and despair, as well as the manner in which he engages his environment and finds small joys. "Meds" is a good example of this, as he opaquely refers to being in therapy, the process of waiting to get a prescription--and the nervous process after "I put the bottle on the shelf. I waited..."

Porcellino still manages to mine interesting stories from his youth. "(Do The) Pete Duncan" related a time when he and a friend used his dad's office after hours to make photocopies of their zine and a night when they got caught when the machine kept jamming. The incident was less important than their friends' recollection of the incident and the way they kept it alive as an inside joke, even recording a song about it. "Ruby Hill" comes at a memory in a different manner, as he looked out over at Denver, noting "The sky was up/The Earth was down/The last thing of which I was ever certain". The simplicity of his line added to its effectiveness, down to using the principle of the Golden Triangle in every panel to construct an image that drew the eye to its key elements, maximizing its emotional impact. "Wisdom Teeth" plays a memory strictly for laughs, making rare use of funny drawings. This comic is filled with shorter stories that span a life's worth of memories, making it an especially fine issue for those looking for an entry into his work.

MAGIC WHISTLE #11 1/2, by Sam Henderson. Henderson is on the short list of comics' greatest humorists, but hasn't received a lot of attention in recent years. Hardly anyone seemed to make mention of the most recent big issue of MAGIC WHISTLE #11, which came out last year. Henderson is funnier than ever, crafting astonishingly convoluted stories that are funny on several different levels: as funny drawings, as gags, as absurdist statements and as meta-humor. He and Michael Kupperman are geniuses at deconstructing humor, simultaneously telling a joke and mining further humor from even the silliest of gags by breaking it down. This mini featured a number of single-panel gags, like a man on a cross saying "The thing I miss most is sex with animals", a man holding some snotty cats who exclaimed "I've got to stop blowing my nose with cats!" and a flowchart called "Your Mind At Work" that followed the thought processes of a man who just stepped on a tack. While his gag work is solid, Henderson tends to shine most with his longer stories. This issue's "Fucking With Jasper" is such an entry, a shaggy dog story about a guy who has to stay by his telephone and the friends who keep upping the ante in how they annoy him. The ridiculousness of their actions was funny enough (including their utter lack of motive), but the defenselessness of the main character was even funnier--including a punchline that featured the passive guy mustering up a tiny bit of anger.

What separates Henderson from other humorists is that he's a conceptualist with a style of art that is funny-looking but crude enough to be off-putting to some audiences. I find the simplicity of his drawings, all in service to gags, to be beautiful and strange. The way he arranges eyes on heads (paired together on the same side of the face ala Picasso), the funny lumpiness of his unclothed bodies, and the slightly grotesque shape of faces and figures gives Henderson's comics a distinctive feel. He's a cartoonist in the tradition of James Thurber, with a deceptively crude line that anyone can latch onto. Henderson is an artist best suited for periodicals, but given the current market this obviously isn't a viable option. The next best thing for him would be a thick collection of his comics, perhaps printed on coarse, thick paper. A collection that simply reprinted the best of his longer stories, or at least sectioned off single page gags from the longer stories, would be an incredible volume.

Two Takes On Manhwa: Mijeong and The Color Of Earth

Rob reviews two notable manhwa (Korean manga) releases, MIJEONG by Byun Byung-Jun (NBM ComicsLit) and THE COLOR OF EARTH by Dong Hwa Kim (First Second).

Regular readers of this column may note a huge gap in a particular area: manga. This is for three reasons: 1) Typical manga has a slickness to it that makes it difficult for me to engage; 2) Typical manga tends to be genre material of a nature that doesn't interest me; 3) There are many, many other writers out there to tackle this sort of material. That said, there's a growing wave of alt-comics manga out there that have started to get english translations, and I will be addressing a number of those. In this column, I'll take a look at two manhwa, or Korean manga. Kim Dong Hwa's THE COLOR OF EARTH and Byun Byung-Jun's MIJEONG couldn't be any less alike in terms of story, even if they do share certain structural similarities.

THE COLOR OF EARTH is the first entry of a trilogy about a young girl's burgeoning sexuality and her widowed mother's reawakening sexuality. This 300-page book is told at a leisurely pace and is as much about the environment as it is about the characters. The design of the book is gorgeous, printed on coarse & uneven paper. Kim's figures are all in a clear-line style with simplistic & exaggerated facial expressions (the eyes being the most expressive), but uses an intensely naturalistic style with buildings (down to the most minute whorls in wood) and the countryside. What makes this book work is the page-to-page composition and the way Kim arranges his characters against the backgrounds with the reader feeling distracted by either. He creates a rock-solid structure in every panel in the way characters interact with each other and their environment.

And by "structure", I mean that almost literally. The way the characters are arranged against their environment forms a "golden section" in nearly every panel, balancing character and background, no matter how differently the two are drawn. The solidity of each page allows Kim to give his book a wistful quality that allows him to stretch otherwise thin plot points across the duration of the book. There's nothing revelatory about the book's subject matter or his treatment of it, other than giving it a slightly feminist bent. It's a book about young love, romance nurtured and delayed and the delicate balance between the sexes. The extended metaphor equating sex and flowers is startlingly obvious, but the characters themselves are quite aware of this, choosing to avoid the subject in a genteel fashion. The book is based on the experiences of the author's mother, and as such there's a certain sense of nostalgia for a simpler time and reveling in the roundabout ways romance was expressed. At the same time, Kim didn't ignore the baser aspects of desire either, mixing crude sex talk with starry-eyed romantic talk. I didn't feel much of a need to read the other volumes in the series; I get the sense that it will be more of the same. THE COLOR OF EARTH is a beautifully told, if entirely conventional, story. While the wisp-thin story faded from memory shortly after completion, many images still lingered.

If THE COLOR OF EARTH has a sentimental, traditional tinge to it, Byun Byung-Jun's MIJEONG feels distinctly modern (and even Western) by contrast. Byun is a stunning draftsman and character designer, but one got a sense of restlessness from this collection of stories. His previous book had been in a far cartoonier style, and MIJEONG seemed in some sense to be his attempt to prove to himself that he could work in any style. The restlessness of the artist did match up well with the restlessness of the characters, even if the intensity of his style made the emotions depicted on the page a bit too on-the-nose at times. Byun excelled in the few stories that had a humorous aspect to them, like "202, Villa Sinil", a story about a guy whose powers, unbeknownst to him, were inadvertently killing and maiming public figures. The climax of the story, where he accidentally destroys the earth, was one-upped by the Twilight Zone finale. Even if one could see it coming, it was still a funny capper. "Utility" mined an even darker vein of humor, as a group of children debated the best course of action after finding that a sibling committed suicide. Their worries about shame outweighing actual emotion and later confusion after being found out were slyly portrayed, and the scene where the parents walked in was hilariously executed.

The first story in the book was influenced by the film Wings of Desire, as we see an angel forlornly rescue a girl while ruminating over his own fate. For an artist of his considerable skill, Byun tends to overwrite his scenes a bit instead of letting the images tell more of the story. "Yeon-Du, Seventeen Years Old", is a considerably more ambiguous and rewarding story, about a traumatized young girl who kills a potential abuser and a desperate old man who knew her from her youth. It's the most visually restrained story in the book and one that plants visual clues that bear fruit later in the story. In "A Song For You", Byun goes to the trauma/sexual assault well one too many times, and the tortured use of watercolor to express emotion made the story almost unbearable. On the other hand, Byun sends himself up with "Courage, Grandpa", yet another story involving the assault of a young girl. This time, she was rescued by a young man that she eventually tracked down, much to the chagrin of a scenery-chewing cat that loved her.
Some of these stories have the feeling a Neil Gaiman or Jamie Delano-written Vertigo comic, as drawn by Steve Bissette or Dave McKean. Those tendencies are balanced by his own training and traditions, with the same sort of rock-solid structure on each page. There's a weird sense of idealization of women in this book as vulnerable, mysterious and ultimately tragic, even as he portrays men as pathetic, predatory and small-minded. This book felt like an author trying to shake something loose in himself and looking to a different set of influences and styles. This book distinguishes itself from THE COLOR OF EARTH in that it is modern, urban and squalid. Tradition had been long forgotten and animal urges threatened to destroy delicate beauty. Byun perhaps overplayed this point at times in this collection, but MIJEONG did act as an acidic counter to the other book's treacly qualities. Byun is certainly an artist whose work I'd like to see more of.

The Art of Editing: An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories Volume 2

Rob reviews the Ivan Brunetti-edited AN ANTHOLOGY OF GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS AND TRUE STORIES, Volume 2 (Yale University Press).

I've had a copy of Ivan Brunetti's AN ANTHOLOGY OF GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS AND TRUE STORIES, Volume 2 (henceforth to be referred to as ANTHOLOGY 2) for a year now and have had trouble finding the right approach on how best to review it. Given the complexity of connections in the first volume, I thought that I'd carefully write notes after reading each entry. Then I thought it might be best to re-read the first volume. After several abortive attempts at doing both, I reread the introduction of ANTHOLOGY 2 and finally realized that all of these efforts ran counter to the spirit with which the book was created. Thus, I set about simply reading the book as quickly as possible, letting the connections and juxtapositions of each story register without slowing down or analyzing them too closely during this process.

The result from this approach was the experience of a book that, despite having no material in it from the editor, was as intensely personal as any of his own comics. There was a certain burden in the first volume of the anthology to put in certain well-known stories from well-known cartoonists. In a sense, that volume mirrored Brunetti's own course on cartooning: starting from single-panel comics & mark-making and working up to increasingly more complex narratives. While not making a value judgment on what type of expression was "better" or more sophisticated, there was clearly a progression of at least technique and complexity of form, one that any reader could follow.

This volume also had its own set of progressions, but they are more idiosyncratic and personal. Brunetti himself described it as a family album of sorts, and this concept was concretized as Brunetti juxtaposed older strips against newer works, creating a richer context for both. The first volume of the anthology had an extended tribute to Charles Schulz, the most popular cartoonist of the 20th century. That tribute was especially interesting because of the way Schulz affected so many different kinds of cartoonists, a fact that would be especially revelatory for the casual reader of comics. Everyone knows Peanuts; not every reader perhaps has a deep understanding of the elements of the strip that inspired so many. ANTHOLOGY 2 has an extended tribute to Harvey Kurtzman, a figure far more obscure for the casual reader, yet much more influential for several generations of cartoonists than Schulz.

Brunetti's introduction is brief and lays out several crucial pieces of information for those who might wonder why and how the contents of the anthology were selected. In addition to noting that his choices were personal, reflecting his own idiosyncrasies, he makes a clever comparison between comics and family. That metaphor allows him to note that he couldn't include all the "far-flung and distant relatives" (the most experimental comics), and that some would be "prohibitively expensive to fly in" (corporately owned comics that were nonetheless of interest) or "would not attend the sitting" (those artists who simply refused to have their material printed in the anthology). Brunetti also clearly expressed what drove him to make his choices: "formal experimentation, uncompromised subject matter, uniquely expressed mood, deeply felt theme, inventive drawing or sheer craft". Not every comic in the anthology necessarily had all of these traits, but knowing this ahead of time was an aid in understanding the way that Brunetti chose to link each entry. The Saul Steinberg cartoon, depicting each member of a family being drawn in a radically different style, was the perfect springboard for describing what Brunetti was attempting here.

Brunetti deliberately eschewed hard-and-fast categorization and sectioning in this volume. How and why the comics were sequenced was left not so much as an exercise for the reader, but rather as an opportunity to make connections on one's own. It allows the reader to let the works reveal themselves to them. While it is true that the most important references for any particular piece were the stories immediately preceding and following them, I thought there were some rougher groupings that tended to reveal themselves only after finishing a section and seeing a significant shift. As such, there were roughly nine different groupings to my eye in this 400-page tome.

The first section was from pages 1-47 and served as an introduction and ode to a number of classic cartoon tropes: funny animals, superheroes, gag work, and horror. Sammy Harkham's strip "Napolean!" was a great starter strip, given the way it addressed a chief concern of the cartoonist (iconic vs representational work) and turned it on its head when it's Napolean Bonaparte who's tackling this problem on a battlefield. Indeed, this whole section serves as both tribute and subversion of familiar cartoon imagery. Chris Ware's intricate gag work made for a nice connection, given the downbeat nature and innovative page design of his jokes. Going from his God/Superman strip to R.Sikoryak's hilarious "Action Camus" Superman/lit mash-up was an inspired choice. Michael Kupperman's deliberately stilted art style that recalled older comics for absurd effect is cleverly paired with Drew Friedman's ultra-realistic but grotesque figures. The fatalism of that strip made for a natural partner with Mark Beyer's crude "Messenger of Death" comic. In turn, themes of death, the afterlife and desire find a partner with Kaz's "The Tragedy of Satan". It's a spin on the devil as a sympathetic figure of sorts, forever denied his only desire in Kaz's trademark cartoony & feverish line. From there, it's short takes on horror (body horror especially, as detailed by Jayr Pulga and Renee French), deviltry (Mack White's deadpan nude nun/satyr story) and mystical experiences (Kim Deitch's Al Ledicker strip). The section ends after a series of grisly funny animal strips, the last one from an anonymous cartoonist.

These strips were all from contemporary cartoonists, and the way they subverted expectations naturally led one to ask for further sources of inspiration. That led to the Kurtzman tribute section, which made sense when one considers the deep impact he had both on popular culture and the underground cartoonists. MAD planted the seed of satire and questioning popular ideas in several generations, turning cliches and familiar tropes on their heads in ways no one had seen before. That opened the door for the underground generation and total, uncensored free expression.

While Brunetti obviously celebrates and showcases his influence in this volume, he also makes the case that Kurtzman was very much part of a continuum of cartoonists, as he included strips from Harry Tuthill, Milt Gross and Bill Holman that showed the debt owed to them by Kurtzman. After running a few early Kurtzman strips (nothing from MAD, alas, other than a classic Basil Wolverton cover), the reader is treated to twin tributes from Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Those two artists couldn't be any more different aesthetically (as their editorships of WEIRDO and RAW, respectively, demonstrated), yet both cited Kurtzman as a primary influence.

Spiegelman's piece made for a smooth segue to a section devoted to comics formalism and the act of creation. Beginning with Spiegelman's most visually stunning work, "The Malpractice Suite", this section is all about different ways of approaching the comics page and understanding the medium. Comparing Spiegelman's "Dead Dick" to the fine artist Jess' "Tricky Cad" (which is in the Hirshhorn Museum) is interesting as a point of reference, given that Jess years earlier had done a painting that was a mash-up of Dick Tracy before Spiegelman used an even more surreal approach in his strip to make meaning elusive. From there, we get the comics-as-poetry of John Hankiewicz, a mixture of John Stanleyesque cartooning and naturalism from Tim Hensley, a play on "The Plot Thickens" by Bill Griffith wherein panels become smaller and smaller as the story becomes denser, and some stunning visual experiments from Richard McGuire and Gilbert Hernandez. From there, we turn to Jim Woodring's "Particular Mind", one of his dreamlike autobio pieces. This one's all about the act of creation and being an artist and what that means, especially in terms of one's sanity. That's driven home in David Collier's "Artist", about an artist who became an accidental acid casualty, only to meet up with Collier in a low moment for both men. One gets a sense of the cost of being an innovator. Someone who sees the world differently as an artist may well have trouble coping with all sorts of aspects of that world on a day-to-day basis.

The next section of the book is perhaps its most clever and directly didactic, as Brunetti flips from an older comic to a more contemporary piece, so as to allow the reader to draw a direct line between the two. It begins with obscure artist Eugene Teal's bizarre & crude strip about murderous frogs to Charles Burns' ultra-slick BLACK HOLE excerpt that featured an ominous frog dissection. A painting by Karl Wirsum had a figure that could have been part of Gary Panter's JIMBO stories, an excerpt of which immediately followed. The raw craziness of Fletcher Hanks was flanked by Paper Rad's calculated pop-culture crudeness and CF's sketchy, nervy violence. Charles Forbell's intricate "Naughty Pete" strip, about the relationships between children and their environment, was followed by Ron Rege's "We Must Know, We Will Know", about people and their relationship with knowledge. Concluding the section is a Winsor McCay dream comic followed by a stunning Matthew Thurber bit of dream logic. It should be noted that the contemporary cartoonists featured in this section are some of the most innovative and experimental (and some just plain out of left field) in comics today. That said, Brunetti demonstrated that no matter how experimental the strip, they all had predecessors of a sort in comics or fine art. Brunetti tightens the bonds of history in this section both between classic cartoonists and today's artists as well as fine artists, blurring the traditions of both.

If the preceding section was more deliberately intellectual in the way it was assembled, the next hundred or so pages were far more intuitive and personal. The first thirty pages (roughly from 146-177) are all about family, relationships and longing. It starts on the absurd side with Souther Salazar and Kevin Scalzo, then takes a plaintive turn with a Megan Kelso strip about what is left out of a family's vacation slideshow. We then get a run of diary comics, including a reproduction of James McShane's day recorded in ten-minute intervals, Laura Park's stunning and intricate strip about getting a pedicure, Vanessa Davis' hilarious evocation of small moments, and Onsmith's strip detailing memories that only features places, not people (and has a stunner of an ending). This run is about details, minutiae, and the ways in which these quotidian moments accrue meaning. Longing and desire, carried to frequently neurotic ends, mark the next four strips, featuring Joe Matt, Jeffrey Brown, Martin Cendreda and Dave Kiersh.

The Kiersh strip is about a sense of longing with regard to place, making a nice segue to the next mini-section, Brunetti's tribute to his hometown of Chicago. It begins in the suburbs with John Porcellino and a favorite dog that tied him to the city. Carrie Golus contributes a strip about an observation of youth in urban Chicago and a memory of her own youth in suburban Chicago with Patrick Welch. Jessica Abel's "Jack London" is a meditation on a drifting young woman's life as the city was covered in snow, while Cole Johnson concludes the section with a younger woman's memories of a forest. This section also acted as a sort of pivot point for the rest of the book, leading into a darker section on the ways in which friends & family can betray us, grief, loss and life and death struggles.

The section begins on a light note with Lynda Barry, and it ties into a consistent theme in her work: the ways in which self-awareness and self-judgment destroy our ability to create and seize joy. Family, time and place all figure prominently in this story about how a friend's judgment affected young Barry. That leads into a typically shattering story from Debbie Drechsler, about a girl and her best friend, and how the incestuous advances of her father destroy her joy. Diane Noomin is featured in a strip about three best friends and how she drifted apart from each of them. In that same, slightly crude style, Aline Kominsky-Crumb depicts her mother as a grotesque figure. Ariel Bordeaux's one-pager about an almost pathological need to seek validation in others is followed by Chester Brown's strip about what schizophrenia actually is. That sense of one's world breaking down is heightened by Anders Nilsen's minimalist, labyrinthine monologue touching on the death of a loved one and the ways it destroyed all sense of possibility. Joe Sacco took that feeling to another level as he detailed the raw struggle for survival in the ordeal a group of people from the Bosnian town of Gorazde had to endure in a time of war. Using that same intense, naturalist style of art, Phoebe Gloeckner's devastating "Minnie's Third Love" topped Sacco in terms of the intensity of suffering and betrayal that her teen stand-in suffered at the hands of adults and so-called friends, in the form of sexual abuse and drug abuse. The section concludes with Elinore Norflus' crudely drawn and darkly hilarious story about a woman calling a vicious suicide hotline and finally taking solace from a kind operator.

The focus changed from family and friends to time and place with high stakes. The excerpt from Brian Chippendale's NINJA takes the baton from Norflus in terms of the crudeness and almost OCD quality of the line. The stories are about sex and death, leading into Leif Goldberg's bit about two animals trying to brave a freeway to make it to the ocean. David Mazzuchelli's "Near Miss" sees a character worrying about the apocalypse in the form of an asteroid before heading out to the desert for a hallucinatory encounter, while Jerry Moriarty contributed a "Jack Survives" strip about the frustration of trying to experience a boxing match on TV and being denied it. Ben Katchor is the ultimate cartoonist in creating a space for characters to inhabit that becomes an entity unto itself, as he does in these stories about a fictional city filled with patron saints of jaywalkers, cryptic notes under tables waiting to be read and men who pretend every day is their birthday so as to take advantage of others. The sketchiness of Katchor is followed by the similarly loose style of Frank Santoro in a STOREYVILLE excerpt that flipped between character and scenery--both urban and pastoral. That sense of community is further explored by Dan Zettwoch in "Cross-Fader", one of his classic diagram comics that subtly gives us an understanding of a midwestern church community. Kevin Huizenga's "The Curse" keeps up that midwestern exploration but brings an air of creeping menace in the form of a starling invasion. Like Zettwoch, his story has a diagrammatic feel to it, with frequent asides to ornithological history reinforcing that sense of dread. Finally, Bill Griffith's "Is There Life After Levittown", about his youthful troublemaking in his dull suburban hometown, is very much about time and place--it's just a place that the writer couldn't wait to get away from.

That focus on one's teen years led neatly to the last section of the book (approximately the last hundred or so pages), which focused on youthful obsession, especially as it related to music and the process of creation, as well as the way the passage of time affects our relationships. The Harvey Pekar/R.Crumb piece about Pekar's obsession with collecting jazz records, ends with Pekar kicking his habit so as to finally become a comic book writer. Crumb's "That's Life", about obscure blues artist Tommy Grady, ends with young Crumb finding an obscure record by this guitar player who was shot to death after fooling around with someone else's girlfriend and getting it appreciated years after his death (albeit by a room full of white blues scholars). Brunetti then gives us another variation on this story, this time with Crumb's "Patton", about one of the legends of the blues. Crumb bemoans that his death went mostly unnoticed by the national press, but at least he managed to influence the entirety of 20th century blues and rock with his raw country playing. Crumb doesn't exactly romanticize these men and plays up their infidelities, lack of interest in other forms of work and hard-drinking ways. (In a sense, he identifies with these men who were imperfect human beings but great artists.) Crumb finishes this part of the section with a short story about trying to buy an old blues record from an African-American woman and getting shouted down about him trying to take advantage of her. It's an interesting story given that he didn't quite feel guilty about possibly exploiting her (because he really didn't have much money) but was haunted enough by the experience to record it.

The subsection featured the intersection of youth and old age, wandering and being sedentary, impatience and calm reflection--in other words, the way time passes. Carol Tyler's "Country Music" played on this idea cleverly on several levels as she was out in the country with her grandparents and heard the "music" of nature, but then got asked to put on country music (and it winds up being John Phillip Sousa!). Maurice Vellekoop's melancholy one-pager about the passage of time in a park was a perfect transition to an excerpt from Seth's CLYDE FANS, which dealt with a man's mother slowly slipping into dementia. Her being unable to remember him fully made her a little dead to him already; Seth's use of silver-blue gives the story a distancing effect.

That sense of distance with relation to memory and identity was flipped with the next piece, Adrian Tomine's "Hazel Eyes". It's a story about a young woman struggling with social anxiety and trying to create a new version of herself by imagining herself a different person when she stopped the car. That slicker line made it a perfect transition for the Jaime Hernandez story "Jerusalem Crickets", a classic about life on the road for a punk band and how one character tried to deal with the guilt of abandoning her best friend. Daniel Clowes' "Blue Italian Shit" was a stunningly self-deprecatory account of a man's youth and attempt to lose his virginity. In these stories, it's the little details of nights spent in bars and clubs and the desperate searches for connection therein. Connection and alienation are important themes for Clowes, as the excerpts from ICE HAVEN demonstrate. Working in a variety of comic strip and comic book style, Clowes shows us a child who keeps his desires pent up (but emerge in unexpected ways), a frustrated hack of a writer, a detective blind to the needs of his wife, and a teenaged girl who is simultaneously wiser than her years and enormously naive.

Brunetti concluded with an excerpt from Chris Ware's BUILDING STORIES wherein Nanna details her time as nanny in a story that distilled this idea of disconnection and flailing for meaning. This story brings to a crescendo Brunetti's suite of stories that marry a coolness of line with an increasing sense of desperation. Ware's pages are stunning both in their formal cleverness (with a number of recurring visual motifs) as well as the humanity he's able to express. The anthology ends on sort of an odd note, with an extended excerpt from the then-upcoming MY BRAIN IS HANGING UPSIDE DOWN by David Heatley, featuring portraits of both his mother and father in short strip format. I thought this was odd not for its inclusion, but for the length of the excerpts and placement in the book. Following Ware seemed a bit of an odd choice, especially given the ways Heatley went back and altered some of the original strips he published in the book in an act of self-censorship; it seemed a bit counter to Brunetti's desire for "uncompromised" material. On the other hand, the strips acted as a coda of sorts to the book, after Ware opened and closed it with his work, working in a number of themes found in the rest of the book.

That slight hiccup aside, this is one of the most challenging, exciting anthologies I've ever read. The Clowes cover is hilarious, with two figures with a thought baloon made of a cloud and street lamps and a word baloon made of an unusual ceiling lamp. Clowes explodes that image with a "Joe Bristolboard" strip about an artist trying to come up with an image for an anthology he's in (unpaid, but "it's great exposure!"), cleverly skewering every struggle of the alt-comics artist struggling with inspiration and self-esteem. No one is better than Clowes at satirizing his own profession while still sympathizing with its practitioners. The back cover image of a lonely cartoonist in his socks staring at his drawing board, surrounded by half-eaten pizza and other effluvia, is an image every cartoonist can relate to. If cartoonists are all members of a family with any number of distant branches, they are all united both by the despair of the blank page taunting them and the joy of mark making.

Another Generational Shift: SPX 2009

Rob reports on this year's Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD.

I've been attending SPX since 1997, the last year that it was a one-day show. As always, the types exhibitors present made it possible for attendees to have completely different kinds of shows, depending on their interests. In its old location, the show was small enough for me to feel like I'd exhausted every possibility in terms of seeing old favorites and carving out time for new discoveries. The show has changed in ways that no longer make that possible, something I discovered last year and really had driven home to me this year after I left. Here's a list of observations about the ways SPX has evolved in its fifteen year history and other observations related to this year's event:

* The sustained presence of web cartoonists. Kate Beaton stunned all sorts of people with her rock-star reception last year, and it was more of the same for many fans who came to see their favorite webcartoonists and who had little interest in other exhibitors. By the same token, many fans who came to see their favorite print cartoonists were baffled by the lines the webcartoonists had at their tables. The Comic Strips: Online and In Print panel was absolutely packed with fans in a way that few other panels could boast.

* The absence of well-known cartoonists from New York and the west coast. There was no table from Artists With Problems, no one from Meathaus, a tiny turnout from the Sparkplug gang, few cartoonists from the Portland or Bay Area scenes, and so on. This represented a generation of cartoonists mostly older than thirty that weren't at the show. I'm not sure how much of this was local shows drawing those cartoonists in (Portland has Stumptown, and there's going to be a new alt-comix show in Brooklyn), the national economic crisis, or simply folks getting older and not having the time to make it to the show. Along the same lines, there simply weren't too many artists older than 30 at the show, including any number of long-time stalwarts at the show. There were exceptions: Josh Neufeld (completing his rise from self-published artist to receiving national & mainstream praise for his recent Pantheon book), James Kochalka, Jeffrey Brown, Kevin Huizenga, and Dan Zettwoch, to name a prominent few.

* The influence of formal comics education. Schools like SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design), MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art & Design), SVA (School of Visual Arts) and especially CCS (Center for Cartoon Studies) are producing wave after wave of young, enthusiastic cartoonists. CCS-related cartoonists had a dozen or more tables, with nearly three dozen students or alums in attendance. In talking to a number of CCS folks, I was struck not only by how many alums stick around White River Junction after graduation, but by how totally sold out to comics they are. A culture has been created that not only provides support and encouragement but also demands a strong work ethic and a commitment to constantly growing.

I spoke to Zak Sally, who is currently a teacher at MCAD, about how he felt going from being a DIY cartoonist to an educator. He noted that he felt conflicted about this at first, but that quickly faded when he saw the impact that he had in helping young cartoonists solve storytelling problems and their enthusiasm. To me, this feels less like going to school to learn cartooning and more about old-fashioned apprenticeship. There's a tradition of younger artists learning the nuts and bolts of the art from experienced masters, and it's a tradition that seems to be coming alive now. The best way to go about this is still a matter of some debate, so I will be curious to see how Jesse Reklaw and a number of Portland cartoonists approach this problem with their educational program at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC).

* The wane of traditional genre comics. A decade ago, the show was roughly 50% genre comics of some sort (many of them superhero comics), 50% alt-comics. Now it's more like 15% genre comics, 85% alt-comics--and most of the genre comics are either fantasy or horror (there were lots of zombie-related comics around). Minicomics dominated this show, and there seemed to be a sensible balance between mini as art object and mini as storytelling device. That said, the distinction between genre and non-genre comics has not only become less important, but it's started to blur. The New Action panel dealt with artists who drew genre comics of a kind, like Kaz Strzepek's THE MOURNING STAR. This is a post-apocalyptic story that's published by Bodega, one of the most refined of all publishing concerns.

* The strength of the programming. In the older days of the show, much of the programming was strictly perfunctory, with the exception of events related to ICAF (International Cartoon Art Festival, which brought in any number of interesting guests). Since Bill Kartalopolous took over the programming four years ago, nearly every panel is worth seeing. Bill dutifully made sure events started and ended on time and that panelists & moderators were in the right place at the right time. That also speaks to the organization of the show. Simply put, this is the best-run show I've ever attended, and it's only gotten better since it moved to North Bethesda.

This is a nice segue into the panels I attended or participated in during the weekend. First up was Debut Cartoonists, a panel I moderated. I showed up right at the 12:30 start time, running a bit later than I would have preferred, but all four participants had arrived. The panel was devoted to four cartoonists debuting new work at the show, a sort of replacement for the always-nebulous Best Debut Ignatz award which had been done away with. The group included Ken Dahl (aka Gabby Schulz), debuting MONSTERS; Zak Sally, debuting a collection of older material called LIKE A DOG; Eleanor Davis, debuting the kid-aimed THE SECRET SCIENCE ALLIANCE (AND THE COPYCAT CROOK); and Hans Rickheit (THE SQUIRREL MACHINE). After a slow start, the artists started to bounce ideas off each other, resulting in a panel that felt a bit like a cathartic therapy session at times. Sally talked about the struggles he had in going back to old material and trying to reconnect to the feelings he had about comics at the time. He and Dahl (a natural storyteller) commiserated on fighting feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing as an artist and allowing themselves to say that it was OK to seek feedback and get people to read their work. Davis was the panel's catalyst, engaging her friend Dahl on several occasions and creating debate around the feelings an artist gets when a project has been completed. Rickheit talked about his creative process and working from dream imagery, and noted that he particularly enjoyed hearing new interpretations of the book's ending from readers. I've rarely seen a panel where the artists really engaged each other so thoroughly and on so many levels.

I participated in this year's Critics' Roundtable once again, with Gary Groth, Douglas Wolk, Chris Mautner, Joe "Jog" McCulloch, Sean T. Collins and Tucker Stone. Moderator Bill Kartalopolous asked us questions less about specific works and more about a variety of experiences related to writing and critique. Johanna Draper Carlson had a nice summary of the event on her blog. For my part, I wished the event was about three times longer, so as to get longer answers from everyone. What I liked best about the panel this year was the looser feel of the event, with more give and take between panelists. We were just starting to get warmed up on the subject of negative criticism when we ran out of time. I could feel half of the panelists bristle when I noted my disdain of snark in criticism, and I would have enjoyed some back and forth on that topic. Collins has audio of the panel.

The attendance at panels and spotlights varied widely. For reasons I don't quite understand, the critics' panel was packed. On the other hand, the spotlights on legendary artists Carol Tyler & John Porcellino were sparsely attended. Porcellino's longtime friend and current publisher Zak Sally loosely moderated his panel, which began with a slideshow presentation of his brand new King-Cat collection from Drawn & Quarterly, MAP OF MY HEART. The material from this book is rather downbeat, given that it covered a period of time when he had to deal with sickness, divorce and loneliness. I asked him about his work in relation to poetry and its rhythms, because the actual comics only cryptically alluded to the real-life events that inspired them. He replied that he indeed took a cue from poetry in the way he pared away anecdote and tried to get at the feelings behind them. This work covered a fairly long span of time, and one could see the way his minimalist style became even sparer, yet more confident. The same is true of his use of language, which has a remarkable precision. Porcellino noted that while this material dealt with depression, he was also hungover and was hoping for some fun questions. Someone asked him about his beloved Chicago Bears and a fan told him that he used to use one of his book collections as a defacto bank.

Tyler, as one might expect, was a warm and charming raconteur. Douglas Wolk moderated her panel, wherein she discussed her brilliant comic YOU'LL NEVER KNOW. She spoke at length about the new audience she's acquired in the publication of this book about her father's World War II experiences. That includes places like American Legion meetings, VFW gatherings, etc. Her book is about trauma and how a generation was trained to subsume it, and how it came out in other ways. At one meeting, she talked about laying out the art on a number of tables for the veterans to walk around and peruse, and she noted how many of them were reaching for their handkerchiefs and gruffly blowing their noses so as to not reveal their tears. Tyler spoke of trying to bridge the generation gap and telling these men it was time for them them to tell their stories. To that end, she said that she invited a large group of veterans to the class she teaches at the University of Cincinnati on comics. She paired up students with veterans and assigned the students the task of interviewing them and adapting their stories to comics. That's an inspired move, and she noted it was her way of breaking the students out of their navel-gazing comics by telling someone else's story--of something that was important.

I don't know the final numbers, but I was impressed by the attendance at the show. Even with panels pulling in a couple of hundred fans for an hour, traffic on Saturday was shoulder-to-shoulder. SPX Director Karon Flage told me that DC folk not only flock to this show, they do so looking to spend money. A lot of exhibitors told me that sales were doing quite nicely for them, which had to be heartening given the economic downturn. This is an event that people save up for, and everyone seemed to get something out of the experience. While it is unfortunate that the encounters fans have with artists here is primarily a commercial one, as artists are looking to make sales, I was struck by the number of lingering conversations and interactions I saw at the tables. I still dream of a juried art exhibit room for SPX, where fans can peruse original art (and make arrangements to buy it later if so desired). I'd also love to see the CCS workshop on both days of the show, given its popularity and opportunity for fans to experience comics in yet another different way. As a venue, the Marriott is functional, if a bit stiff and cold for such an event. On the other hand, the surreality of seeing a beauty pageant or gospel music event next door to SPX was amusing.

Flage noted that no changes were planned for SPX in terms of size, and that none would happen unless attendance continued to grow. At this point, I'm not sure that will happen anytime soon. There are simply too many regional comics festivals that have sprouted up to make SPX a can't-miss event on a national scale every year. The reality is that there are no can't-miss events anymore, because chances are that both fans and exhibitors will have any number of chances to attend a relatively nearby comics festival of some sort. Still, with guests like Gahan Wilson (whose spotlight session was quite well-attended), SPX is still the premier show of its kind--especially given the recent organizational problems that MOCCA has suffered. All told, the generational shift has been good for the show, keeping it fresh for both participants and exhibitors.

High-Low, Baillie, Reed & Dahl @ Duke University

Attention North Carolina Residents: I will be moderating a panel featuring MK Reed, Liz Baillie and Ken Dahl on September 29th (that's this Tuesday) at the Sallie Bingham Center (in Perkins Library, room 217) at Duke University in lovely Durham, NC. The three artists will be reading from recent works and then will discuss them in relationship to gender. Festivities begin at 4pm and will conclude at 6pm.