Artist Introspective, Part 1: All And Sundry

Rob reviews Paul Hornschemeier's sketchbook and rarities collection, ALL AND SUNDRY (Fantagraphics), as the first entry in a three part series on artists with recent publications that look back on their careers.

Most artists, in evaluating their own work, often find it difficult to revisit old pieces because all they can see is what's wrong with them. For some, it's a matter of having moved on to a different phase or set of interests; it's as though a completely different artist had created these older works. For others, it's a painful reminder of what they had to go through in order to create the work. In this series, I'll be examining recent books by Paul Hornschemeier, Zak Sally and John Porcellino that touch on these concepts in different ways. These books are unusual in that they not only present a work of art for a reader to absorb and interpret, they also contain extensive notes by the artists themselves that contextualize their comics. The sort of comments that each artist chose to make reflected on them directly as individuals, as well as the internal and external forces that were at work while they were writing their comics.

I've been reading Paul Hornschemeier's work since he was self-publishing SEQUENTIAL, an ambitious and gorgeous comic that focused heavily on formal experimentation. Hornschemeier has always hovered between an expressly downbeat, naturalistic style (characterized by heavy tones and thick lines) and a deliberately off-the-wall, cartoony style that frequently juxtaposed the lightness of the line with the subject matter at hand. The latter style felt like a conduit straight to his id, while the former seemed more deliberate and cerebral--even if he was usually exploring a series of tragic events. His book THE THREE PARADOXES was a remarkable marriage of his different impulses, combined with his impeccable design sense and subtle use of color. In many respects, it was the culmination of his artistic and intellectual career to date, embracing his degree in philosophy, his love of old comics and his desire to explore human emotion.

Hornschemeier obviously draws a lot of inspiration from Chris Ware, especially in terms of color scheme and alternating between naturalistic and iconic styles. There's a different level of emotional impact in his comics, however, a certain distance that reminds me more of what Daniel Clowes or Art Spiegelman do in their work. In his cartoonier work, I sensed a Skip Williamson influence in terms of the looping way he drew hands, heads and facial figures. Considering that ALL AND SUNDRY collects his sketchbook work from the time he was writing THE THREE PARADOXES, I was curious to see what it would reveal about the struggle he had creating that book. I was especially interested in taking a peek at his process as an artist, given that this book was a return to his more aggressively experimental style after having toned it down a bit for MOTHER, COME HOME and even his MOME serial, LIFE WITH MR. DANGEROUS.

I found the experience of reading and looking at this collection to be an oddly ephemeral. I rarely got a sense of the artist, the process or the work. In his introduction to the book, Hornschemeier justified the book's existence as a sort of self-validation, tangible proof that even though he's only published a small number of books, the actual work he does on a day-to-day basis has added up to something. What we got was a book that's pretty much for Hornschemeier completists only. The "Drawings and Stories" section was dominated by alternate covers in other languages for his books and reprints of his short stories from MOME. There were two items of interest here: first, a clever comic for the Luaka Bop Records album Yonlu that leaned a bit on his Skip Williamson chops in depicting the label as a home for the unusual and hard to categorize. Hornschemeier is at his best depicting wanderers in dreamlike landscapes, and this strip played off that motif but gave the wanderer a certain sense of purpose--even if he wasn't quite sure he knew what he was looking for. The second strip of interesting was "Huge Suit Among The People", a strip that once again used a Williamson-like figure as a God stand-in, randomly inspiring people to do horrible things. The way he connected characters and played off different moments of time was both clever and moving, and it made me wish the strip had appeared in a different book.

That highlighted one of the problems of the book for me: it was neither fish nor fowl. I would have liked to have seen a more extensive Sketches & Drawings section that went deeper into his philosophical & personal ideas surrounding "The Three Paradoxes", for example. More drawings from life combined with more personal notes (ala Chris Ware's ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK) might have also been interesting, but Hornschemeier is one of my favorite thinkers in comics--and we didn't see enough of his thought process in this book. Even worse than ephemeral, it felt like it came all too easily to him, a notion that is probably far from the truth, yet haunts the page. Once again, there were fleeting moments in this section of the book that grabbed me: mimicry of classic comics and cartoons, character studies (I like how his initial drawing of Amy from LIFE WITH MR DANGEROUS is labled "John Pham rip-off?"), drawings of togas, a page about a particularly meaningful moment. Most of it was nice enough to look at but left me cold as a reader.

ALL AND SUNDRY is less about the work itself and more about the artist as worker. It's a justification of time spent, a validation of illustration projects undertaken. It's like his comics were a math problem and he was told to "show his work". Quite honestly, Hornschemeier's actual work was far more revealing than this behind-the-scenes look at his process. We don't get much of a sense here of why Hornschemeier became so obsessed with the ideas in THE THREE PARADOXES, or why loneliness recurs so often in his comics. There's almost a sheepishness on some of the pages included here where he indicates that his life is going well and that he's comfortable. Certainly, it's not that I want to read about an artist suffering for their work, but in reading a sketchbook/coffee table book/miscellaneous story book, I want to get a sense of why they're doing what they're doing, and why I as a reader should care. Hornschemeier's concept was to give the reader a little of everything, but this wound up frustrating me as the servings of this fish/fowl mishmash were too small. Fans of his work will find some intriguing nuggets and beautiful images, but this sketchbook contains few of the qualities that make Hornschemeier's work so consistently engaging and challenging.

Real America: Cross Country

Rob reviews the new book by MK Reed, CROSS COUNTRY (self-published).

"It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America."--former vice-president Dan Quayle.

MK Reed's CROSS COUNTRY is ostensibly about a young man who is forced to travel across the country with his odious former fratboy boss. It's also a vicious takedown of nondescript small town America as well as the monotonous corporate entities that wind up gutting them. Reed's go-to skill as an artist has been her uncanny ability to evoke the way young people speak and act. The way she managed to mine comedy and pathos out of a particular subset of youth culture (urban hipster types) reminded me a bit of the early days of Peter Bagge's HATE in the way that the reader gets a sense of time and place as well as character. Visually, Reed tried to play to her strengths as much as possible. She focused on gesture and expression, zeroing in the pained faces of Ben, the protagonist, and the blankly smug look that was permanently plastered to his boss Greg. The key to the comic's success was the way Reed wrote characters that she had little in common with. While Greg was a strutting, cocky and privileged boor, Reed wrote him in such a way that the reader really understood his point of view.

The story's plot is fairly straightforward: Ben was a few years out of college and trying to figure out his life as a frustrated creative person. He's traveling by car with Greg, the heir to a WalMart-type series of big box stores, sponsoring sweepstakes that were really an excuse to ferret out underperforming stores. Greg was pretty much the personification of the unexamined life: he's stuck in a life of adolescent excess and tastes that's an extension of the soul-crushing corporation that he's an heir to. He eats junk food, seduced underage waitresses and constantly revisited his college days. The tragedy of the character is that no matter how he's chastened (and Reed certainly piles on), the ridiculous largesse he enjoyed made all of his problems go away. There's never any reason for him to grow or evolve, because he can enjoy his life as a perpetual adolescent.

Greg was a perfect (if unwitting) antagonist for navel-gazing Ben, who's the personification of passive frustration. He can't get over his college girlfriend who dumped him, can't revive his dormant creative impulses as a writer, can't confront his boss and is in love with his best friend from afar. He's stuck in a rut and has no one but himself to blame, and the job he's taken for the summer reminds him of this through his recurring nightmares. Ben's story was one of going from passive to active. The first transformative event for him was visiting his old college girlfriend (living in the middle of nowhere) and realizing that she was no longer the same person who dumped him--and he was no longer the same person who was dumped. The second key event was rescuing Greg from being savagely beaten by some townies at a fair in a manner that was humiliating to Greg, but not in a way that he could understand as demeaning. That moment of clever assertion was entirely believable and affecting, as Ben moved from slightly pathetic sad sack to getting his life on the right track, all while never losing his credibility as a character.

Reed has been an ace at this sort of character development throughout her career. What was most interesting in this book to me was the sociopolitical subtext. As much as Reed sneered at the vulgarity of middle America, the book was more of an indictment of lowest-common-denominator corporate culture. The scene where Greg is confronted by two employees of his store who were just fired for swearing was especially delicious, as they were quite aware of the way conglomerates systematically exploit small communities and eradicate local culture and commerce. Ben and Greg are both revolted by the towns they pass through not because they are weird and alien, but because they are all depressingly the same.

Reed's art is serviceable, especially in evoking the personalities of the characters. The bland handsomeness and perpetually blank expression of Greg dominate the page, and the way Reed zoomed in on him, chin in hand, when he was pondering which girl he'd pick up for a one night stand was simply great drawing. Where the book suffers a bit is the occasionally muddy use of greyscale. The book truly cried out for color, especially in scenes involving a lot of shadow and in the stores. There's a garishness to big-box stores that was slightly lost in translation in black & white, and Reed did herself no favors by leaning so heavily on adding so much shading. The book would have looked a bit clearer with either darker blacks or relying on linework. The shading felt like Reed trying to evoke the experience of color, but it didn't quite work. Still, the shading didn't interfere with Reed's ability as a storyteller, especially her interesting panel placement choices, weird angles and time being warped when Greg was getting beaten up. Overall, CROSS COUNTRY was the best-realized of all of Reed's comics to date. It was the most complex, ambitious and visually interesting of her comics, and I will be curious to see how she continues to develop as a draftsman in her career.

Minicomics Round-Up: Krall, Turnbull, Viola, Ineke, Runkle, Jordan & Harada

Time for another look at a variety of minicomics that have been sent my way. Reviewed are RUNX TALES #2 by Matt Runkle; HERMAN THE MANATEE #1 & 2 by Jason Viola; THE SLEEP OF KINGS by Ibrahim Ineke; PRIZE #2 by Hawk Krall; INVASIVE EXOTICS #2 by Jack Turnbull; and MOULGER BAG DIGEST #2 by Rusty Jordan & Brent Harada.

RUNX TALES #2, by Matt Runkle. Runkle has a crude but expressive line, but these comics popped off the page because of his terrific design sense. In this large format comic (8.5 x 11), the standouts were "Nora Stories" and, oddly enough, a long essay on ranch dressing. With the former, Runkle's character design was key, especially with regard to the huge eyeglasses of the title character (they fairly overwhelmed her face) and the sleazy vagrant named Crow who somehow kept popping up in her life. Nora's exasperated but resigned body language was nicely related by Runkle, particularly in the way she looked exactly like a weirdo magnet--the sort of person freaks gravitate toward because they know they'll be tolerated. Runkle's comics essay on the virtues of ranch dressing leaned heavily on his use of white-on-black images and a clever use of fonts. Runkle was more than a little tongue-in-cheek in this essay, especially when he compared the dressing to semen and noted that many of the folks he waited on reacted to it much like a desired money-shot.

Runkle's own personal observations also had some amusing moments. "Wrestling With The Truth" was about his high school experiences as a wrestler, while dealing with the awkwardness of being gay in rural America. While that was the backdrop of the story, the meat of it dealt with what happened when he was thrown to the mat in practice and hit his head hard. He saw a vision where for a second, "it all made sense": a middle-aged woman, a ladder and other vague details. Runkle contrasting this to San Francisco goddess worship was hilarious, noting that this goddess was very much of her surroundings: "farm-hardened, sensible and the type that would hate new-agers". His story about a recently deceased friend of his was touching, funny and compelling, detailing the ways in which this trans friend embraced living. Runkle is a great cartoonist despite being a mediocre draftsman who plays to his strengths, understands how to compose a page, and focuses on his line expressing his sense of humor and point of view. The result is one of the more entertaining one-man anthologies I've read in quite some time.


HERMAN THE MANATEE, #1 & 2 by Jason Viola. At first glance, I thought this might be a series of cute strips about a manatee and worried that it might be a bit saccharine. Then I read the first strip and realized that it was about a manatee who was hit by a speedboat in strip after strip. It was the equivalent of reading a collection of PEANUTS wherein every strip featured Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Varying the set-up to a situation with the same punchline every time is not easy, but Viola went through a lot of variations: flashing back to childhood, being deceived by god, playing Marco Polo, doing a Gorey pastiche, etc. By volume 2 of this mini, Viola started an extended narrative about the perils of having a protected pond, including being forced to pose for humiliating photos with tourists and being exploited for money. Viola is a good gagsmith with an appealing line who gets a lot of mileage out of being extremely cruel to his characters for no particular reason. Herman isn't punished because he deserves it; it's simply his fate to have his head hit by boats. While I can understand the difficulty of coming up with variations on a particular formula, I did think that Viola started to drift away from what made his strip successful when he went on to do the longer storyline. His attempts at satire were clumsy, but more problematic was that he was trying to turn Herman into a real protagonist. Sure, he still turned out to be a failure, but it still felt like an uneasy match of ambition and character. Herman is perhaps less like Charlie Brown (a sad-sack who is multidimensional) and more like Wile E Coyote, and the extended storyline felt like Viola was plopping him down into a story that didn't suit the character.


THE SLEEP OF KINGS, by Ibrahim Ineke. Ineke is a Dutch artist with a fine arts background who has recently started to move into comics work. His specialty is horror, but less an American sense of horror and more of a Japanese one. That is, the ideas presented and hinted at by the story are more awful than the standard American presentation of gore. There's also a bit of Lovecraft to be found here, in that evidence of something ancient & horrible is discovered with disastrous results. The story finds two boys playing sword and sorcery games in the woods. When one boy disappears for a bit, his friend finds him with his back to him, unresponsive--and surrounded by buzzing insects. What I liked about this story is that its horror takes place in broad daylight, with light and shadow cleverly deployed when an eclipse occurs. Ineke only hints at what's happening here: stones in a circle with some sort of mystic runes, and some type of demonic possession. All the reader needs to know is that both boys meet a terrible end in a story that moves leisurely but doesn't outstay its welcome.

Ineke's figures, especially in close-up, have a scribbly & energetic quality to them that made them come alive. Indeed, there's a spontaneity to his line that made reading this sort of story more entertaining than usual, given that I'm used to a certain slickness with American horror comics. There were some panels where he seemed to be losing a bit of control with regard to characters in motion (not surprising for someone from a fine arts background); panel-to-panel transitions as well as characters in relation to each other are things that I imagine he'll continue to improve on as he continues to draw comics. He's certainly an interesting artist, and I'll be curious to see how he would tackle a longer-form work.


PRIZE #2, by Hawk Krall. I first became aware of Krall's work in the pages of Danny Hellman's anthology TYPHON, with his "Summer of Seven-Eleven" story being a standout. PRIZE is a collection of shorter strips in three different categories: stories about working the graveyard shift at a 7-11, stories about living in squalid conditions with his art school roommates ("Living In Filth"), and tales from the kitchens of a big city ("Dirty Dish"). Krall's work is very much in the tradition of underground comics, with a particular focus on grotesque character design. Krall is a great yarn-spinner, especially when he zeroes in on the most sordid details. He plays up the absurdity of living with filthy roommates in a run-down apartment, of the frequently disgusting truth of working conditions in a kitchen, and the sort of people he encountered working in a convenience store. His ability to capture the characters he met and crystalize them in short order made strip after strip a hilarious experience.

Of the three different features, I thought "Dirty Dish" was the funniest and most original. They're presented as single-page strips, and it's a format that flatters Krall's style. Krall doesn't vary his line or panel composition much from strip to strip. With his longer stories, the reader is hammered in panel after panel by Krall's grotesque imagery, and the effect can be suffocating at times. "Dirty Dish" not only opens up the page a bit, it finds Krall concentrating on a single image or idea and playing that out. The strip also provides the reader a peek into the world of professional kitchens. Krall portrays it as an unrelenting series of hostile encounters, where the workers struggle to hold on to their sanity. He also made it seem like fun, at least in the sense that huddling in a foxhole develops camaraderie. Even in strips that seemed a bit cluttered, Krall's ability to escalate situations is the hallmark of his very sharp sense of comic timing.


INVASIVE EXOTICS #2, by Jack Turnbull. Turnbull's APOLLO ASTRO series of minicomics that he published before he went to art school positioned him high on my list of interesting young artists. His new series is a radical departure from those comics that clearly displayed his influences (Clowes, Ware & Tomine in particular) but still showed that his voice was one that needed to be heard. INVASIVE EXOTICS is a mash-up of a startling array of genres, including sci-fi, conspiracy fiction, psychedelic social satire, slice-of-life, and crime fiction. While not a direct influence, Matthew Thurber's 1-800-MICE is the closest point of comparison I can think of, though Turnbull's comic is not as tightly plotted or outrageous in its conceits.

Most stories involving satires of corporate America tend to fall flat, but Turnbull mutated an obvious visceral dislike of Coldstone Creamery (the one where the servers are forced to sing whenever they get a tip) into an over-the-top conspiracy story. I've always liked Turnbull's elongated character design, and the slightly bigfoot nature of his character design serves the story well. The villainous "Slimecold" CEO resembled a warped Bozo the Clown, with pointy hair that he used as corporate iconography. His scheme was to force out the residents of Brooklyn using a mutated form of killer ant that would cause them to flee, create gentrification and then provide the sort of Brooklyn where he could open up many more stores. He's opposed by a small cadre of eco-terrorist types, with the character of Jane Easewell being Turnbull's all-purpose satire of scientist-as-action hero. The first issue sees her go on a one-woman commando raid at a Slimecold lab in a sequence that's deadpan in its depiction but completely ridiculous. At the same time, there's a pastiche of slice-of-life romance going on in the backdrop that gets dramatically halted when the ant rampage story slams into it.

This comic is jam-packed with ideas, characters and crazy page layouts. At times I think it's too all over the place, as Turnbull seemed to want to draw every single idea he had had for the past several years in one series. The action scenes, while funny, didn't really work on their own visually because there's a lack of fluidity in the way he depicted motion. His figure-to-figure interactions also felt a bit stiff. The comics simply seemed rushed at times, with a slew of spelling errors and some cramped panels. That said, there was a lot to like in INVASIVE EXOTICS. Panels where you see ants who have been put to sleep with tiny little "zzz"s next to their head displayed just how loony Turnbull was getting here, while still positing the insects as a very real threat. Turnbull created caricatures that, while exaggerations, still have a lot of uncomfortable truths to them. This comic simply needs to be refined, edited and cleaned up; the energy, ideas and images are all there.

MOULGER BAG DIGEST #2, by Rusty Jordan & Brent Harada. This is a comic very much in the Fort Thunder tradition, with a big dose of Gary Panter. There is a kind of narrative at play here, on pages dominated by psychedelic character design that's mashed up much like a collage. The narrative involves ambling movements followed by utter stillness and a sense of characters constantly changing and pulsing into one another. What's surprising about this comic is the way my eye was able to latch on to the figures on the pages. Even the most jam-packed pages had a few images that seemed to pop out at the reader. I'm not sure what to make of this succession of images that combined figure and structure, other than I liked looking at it. It certainly felt like an object that was meant to be looked at more than read, especially given the oblique nature of its narrative.

Back to Zero (Zero): Mome #16

Rob reviews the 16th volume of Fantagraphics' flagship anthology, MOME, edited by Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth.

I had noted in my last review of MOME that it was starting to become a callback series to Fantagraphics anthologies of the past. In particular, we're starting to see more contributions from artists who submitted work to ZERO ZERO, a series that had some outstanding and unusual work from a variety of artists before getting canceled. This issue brought us new work from Archer Prewitt, Ted Stearn and Renee French. Prewitt contributed a "Funny Bunny" strip that was a bit more restrained than usual, but set the tone for the rest of the issue in terms of its raw, visceral qualities. There wasn't a lot that was delicate in this issue of MOME, and the few strips in that vein felt a bit out of place. The strips that stood out were either vicious, gritty or even borderline garish in presentation. Aesthetically, it made this issue of MOME different from the rest. Indeed, each of the issues post #10 or so have all stood out as individual statements, as opposed to the anthology's initial identity as an incubator for a select group of young talents. While that paradigm hasn't been in effect for quite some time, issue #16 felt like more like an issue of BUZZARD (a 90s anthology noted for weird juxtapositions) than any past issue of MOME.

For example, the Stearn piece (the first chapter of a graphic novel that will run in the anthology) was a classic Fuzz & Pluck story. The chicken and stuffed-bear duo are trapped on a boat, starving and antagonizing each other. When Pluck cuts off a bit of his own tail to use as bait, it leads to Fuzz nodding off and dreaming of a horrible scenario wherein Pluck keeps cutting off bits of himself and bleeding out, and Fuzz having all of his stuffing pulled out. It's a sequence that's simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and added some gruesome laughs in a volume that mostly avoided that direction.

French's piece, also part one of a larger story, introduced us to a young boy living in a bizarre environment. With his sunken eyes and bowl haircut, he's a typically droopy and slightly grotesque French protagonist. This part of the story saw him walk to what appeared to be a cafe built into a giant, dead worm propped up on columns. He buys a poster that seems part-worm, part-mandala and ponders the existence of tendrils arising from water. No one is better at creating oblique environments that immediately shunt readers into new ways of seeing than French, and the first part of this story is no exception. She combined her usual fastidious, pointilist style with a looseness of line with regard to the character, giving him a sort of fragility not unlike her Edison Steelhead character from THE TICKING.

Todd Bak, in the second part of his epic storyline about Georg Steller, employed a similarly visceral storytelling style, with white on a black background helping to depict the desolate and hopeless Arctic landscape the explorer and his men found themselves in. The strip is part straight history (especially in the flashbacks), part philosophical musing and part mystical conflict with one's environment. Bak's comics are all about exploring environments that are at once beautiful, mysterious and relentlessly hostile. There's an interesting element of fatalism to them as well, as the characters feel inextricably drawn to their adventures, even when they know it could be their end.

The COLD HEAT strips, by Ben Jones, Frank Santoro and Jon Vermilyea, all leaned on the inscrutable side, forcing the reader to simply accept the images laid out before them and follow them as best as possible. The first strip, about a girl luring a jock to a sexual encounter with a demonic creature, keeps the audience off-balance by working entirely in shades of brown, pink and dark pink. When the jock is drugged, the way that pink and white were interspersed in the panels was dizzying, creating a desired hallucinatory effect. In the second strip, which is essentially a slice-of-life strip involving two aliens, the dullness of their daily life on a mission is juxtaposed against the garish colors of their environment. It feels alien, with the colors clashing so as to create dissonance for the reader. We're viewing someone's home, where they are comfortable--but the reader is made to feel decidedly uncomfortable.

That sense of discomfort can also be felt in the strips by Laura Park and Sara Edward-Corbett. Park tackles the horrific feeling of social anxiety in this strip head-on, as every encounter with anyone she meets winds up with her hearing the ways in which she is a failure, an asshole, an awful person. When it extends to her beloved pets and even animistically to objects in her apartment, she reveals that all she can hope to do is ride the feeling out. The blue-grey wash she used was a perfect way to illustrate these OCD & depressive thoughts. Edward-Corbett's contributions to date in MOME had been amusing but comparatively lightweight. This issue saw her submit some interesting autobiographical material from her childhood, recontextualizing her older strips about children. There's a coldness to her line that informs her strips that are about the ways in which children are cruel to each other, and that certainly held true for these matter-of-fact reminiscences. She simply presented a series of anecdotes that clearly held some meaning for her, but did so with no additional layering of sentiment. While both of these strips were comparatively restrained visually to the rest of the weirdness in this volume, they were no less visceral or harsh.

The three other color strips had different intents and effects. Conor o'Keefe did an extended take on his Winsor McCay riffs, deliberately attempting to evoke classic cartooning with the washed-out colors and simple line. His strips in MOME have mostly been a colorful contrast to other works, but they haven't really stood out until we got to see him flesh out his world a bit more in this issue. He also worked a bit bigger in this issue, with larger panels and bigger characters. He's not necessarily an artist whose work I turn to first when I read MOME, but he's occupying a very specific niche that works well when considering the issue as a whole.

Nate Neal has quietly been doing all sorts of interesting visually things during his tenure at MOME (his first strip in particular was a deconstruction of quotidian comics), and this issue found him creating a new sort of iconography for language. "Mindforkin'" was just that--a man thinking of various things he could do in a given day, the various events that could occur as a result of his actions, and his varied responses to those events. They are all told in a cartoony style that leaned heavily on color to provide mood and help the reader decode the symbology. The symbols he chose were not arbitrary; indeed, he created a language for this strip, and one can decipher bits and pieces of it both from repetition, a partial key on the first page and visual context.

Dash Shaw had the third color piece, a comic strip adaptation of an episode of the crassly comedic TV show Blind Date. That's a show that depicts a blind date and runs all sort of pop-up commentary along the way at the expense of the daters. Shaw took that formula, softened it with a sea-green wash, and stripped it of the snark. The result left only the pathos of the experience, with two people desperately looking for a connection but having vastly different ideas of what that connection might mean. That became especially clear at the end, when the woman is taken by the man, but he said he didn't feel a spark that he had vaguely defined earlier in the story. Shaw makes heavy use of shadow in this story, almost as if the reader is seeing the characters through a thick window. The effect is both distancing and yet strangely intimate, as though the reader was spying on a couple they cared about. This is a comparatively minor Shaw story in terms of scope and ambition, but it certainly fits into his recent interest in the use of color to drive narrative in different ways.

The stories that felt like odd fits were Nicolas Mahler's "Is This Art" and Lilli Carre's "It Was Too Hot To Sleep Indoors". Which is not to say that they weren't good stories, but rather that their presence here was jarring. That was especially true of Mahler's charming, minimalist story about being an cartoonist and having to prove to an IRS agent's satisfaction that this meant he was an artist. On the other hand, Carre's story was yet another home run in a series of home runs she's swatted as a cartoonist in the last couple of years. It's as though she and Shaw are in some kind of competition to become Most Exciting Young Artist, because the two of them love playing around with the language of comics, finding new and interesting ways to explore their themes of interest. In this issue, Carre's story is a quiet one about the yearning of a teenaged boy and the mysterious presence of an older girl hanging around him at some sort of beachside house. Carre's stories always have an element of mystery to them, as though there's a secret the reader is not quite privy to but we nonetheless experience during the course of the story. The mystery in this story was embodied in literally shedding skins due to sunburn, and the way we leave marks on others without understanding what we've done. The final image of a story done in greyscale is a striking one, with burnt-pink legs revealing the extent of a prank indicative of deep feelings.

One of the best things about MOME is that, as a reader, I feel like I'm getting work from each artist that's their "A" material. Carre' and Shaw have many other outlets for publication, but it's clear that they take a special delight in having an outlet for their short story ideas. Neal and Kurt Wolfgang have MOME as their primary outlet for publication, and clearly go all-out in every story. If early MOME had a flaw, it was that some of the artists were phoning in some of their contributions because they had so many irons in the fire. I'd like to see young artists like o'Keefe and Edward-Corbett grow more ambitious and perhaps even serialize a story in the anthology. Of course, seeing outstanding work from old favorites along with translated short stories of European artists has been another welcome trend for what continues to be a must-read book, issue after issue.

Dream Team: Dungeon The Early Years, Volume 2

Rob reviews the second volume translation of the Dungeon: The Early Years, by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar and Christophe Blain (NBM).

Twenty-four volumes of the various DUNGEON books have been translated into English by the stalwarts at NBM, reprinted at smaller size in twelve editions. That leaves thirteen volumes still to be translated, with the Trondheim/Sfar team at this point writing the books and leaving the art to a variety of people. In addition to the three main storylines (Early Years, Zenith and Twilight), most of the untranslated volumes are in the miscellaneous "Monsters" category--stories that fill in cracks between other stories. Trondheim and Sfar love playing around with time jumping; indeed, in this translated edition, we go from volume -97 (of a lighthearted series that began at -99, reflecting the "early" notion of this story) to volume -84. That second story, "After The Rain", is a much more grim depiction of our hero, Hyacinthe, the future Dungeon keeper of the Zenith books.

One of my favorite trends in comics over the past five years has been the concerted effort made to translate Sfar and Trondheim's work into English and the way in which audiences have responded. Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics tried to do this a decade again with full-color translations of two books in the Lapinot (in English: McConey) series and then several issues of a Trondheim grab-bag series called THE NIMROD. The latter had some of Trondheim's best and most unusual work, but with the decline in the overall comics market and comics that didn't have any kind of genre-related hook, that series didn't do well. For the McConey books, it was proof that Americans just don't like the French album format. Those slice-of-life books were easily approachable and witty, but simply didn't draw readers in.

NBM took up the torch first with a black-and-white series that translated DUNGEON, ASTRONAUTS OF THE FUTURE and some McConey stories. With the rise of the graphic novel in bookstores and libraries, they switch over to smaller-format, full color translations, a strategy that has worked wonderfully. First Second came along and has translated close to a dozen works involving Trondheim or Sfar. Fantagraphics will be getting back in the game by finally publishing Trondheim's autobio classic APPROXIMATIVEMENT, most likely next year. There's still a ton of Trondheim work to be translated: VENETIAN BLIND, more LI'L SANTA, more TINY TYRANT, comics involving monsters & dinosaurs, and some more cutting-edge material. It's become clear that Trondheim & Sfar's genre material has found an audience, one that continues to grow.

A highlight of the Early Years story is the third member of this artistic dream team, Christophe Blain. With his SPEED ABATER, and ISAAC THE PIRATE books, he's proven himself as an artist who creates imaginative and exciting action scenarios. His art for DUNGEON combines the charming character design of Trondheim with a fluidity of movement that results in a work that's both funny and thrilling. Trondheim's art in the series was always better suited to more satirical stories (even when they were darker in tone), but with Blain we get the rush of adventure along with affectionate jabs at genre.

The first story in the volume, the aptly-titled "Innocence Lost", sees the ramifications of Hyacinthe's romantic dalliance with the serpentine assassin Alexandra. Manipulated into killing a man, Hyacinthe starts down a slippery slope from being a noble avenger of wrongs (as The Nightshirt) to a cynical aristocrat leading a double life as the head of the assassin's guild. Through it all, his real concern is his doomed romance, and this is another area where Blain truly excels. His GUS AND HIS GANG book was a similar mix of action and dead-end romance, and Blain was able to create pathos with a character who had been a mix of walking comic relief and hubris. The character's design, as a diminutive and cute anthropomorphic bird, made this especially challenging for Blain. By the end of the story, when we see Hyacinthe dress up in his Nightshirt outfit but see him visit Alexandra instead of going after criminals, it's clear that our protagonist has allowed his entire moral code to lapse for the sake of his love.

The second story is a much grimmer one and covers the eventual ramifications of his actions. Hyacinthe and Alexandra don't marry, and he keeps up appearances by marrying someone that his lover murders. As the story opens, the human price just paid for his double life suddenly become much clearer, and is complicated by a plot contrivance that forces him to deal with the woman he now both loves and hates. That contrivance (the potential destruction of the city thanks to faulty construction) is an entertaining side-story of its own, thanks to the almost robotic ruthlessness of Professor Cormor. He's the man trying to stop the construction who turns to Alexandra, who in turn agrees to help him if he'll help her get back with Hyacinthe. Things eventually go horribly awry, winding up with a downbeat ending that signals the beginning of what would become Hyacinthe's rule as the Dungeon Keeper.

This volume marked the first time I wished that NBM could have kept the larger page format. There are some spectacular action scenes that felt cramped shrunk down to a smaller size, and other pages crammed with panels that felt similarly claustrophobic. A lot of darker colors were used in this volume, which made those pages feel a bit muddy at times as well. In an ideal world, we'd get an "absolute edition" of DUNGEON on oversized pages and nice paper, but as a reader I'm grateful that we're getting this much Trondheim & Sfar in English. Trondheim and Sfar have taken the series into greatness by refusing to repeat themselves and have instead upped their degree of difficulty with ever-more complex plots and nuanced characterizations. DUNGEON has gone from being a bit of a lark to one of the greatest genre series of all time, affectionately spoofing and celebrating not just fantasy, but the investment of a reader into a world of fantasy.

Embedded: Joe and Azat

Rob reviews the new book from Jesse Lonergan, JOE AND AZAT (NBM).

Jesse Lonergan's JOE AND AZAT occupies some unusual territory. Part of it is a slightly distanced account of a country under totalitarian rule like Guy Delisle's trio of Asian travelogues. Part of it features the sort of first-person reportage of someone who sought to become part of a community before telling its story, like Joe Sacco's work. There's certainly a sense of the sort of chaos and corruption that Ted Rall brings to the table in his comics. These are all important features of this story, but the real focus of the book is on a single relationship: the friendship between the narrator Joe and his Turkmen friend Azat. It's a friendship of remarkable tenderness on the part of both men, and this book seems like a tribute not only to that friendship but to the dreams Azat held so dear.

The book is "loosely based" on Lonergan's own Peace Corps experience in Turkmenistan after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the former SSRs fell under the influence of brutal strongmen, many of whom took their leadership cues from Caligula or Pol Pot. That bit of data quickly becomes a background detail of the book, along with the way daily life was often an ordeal. Part of the point of the book was the way Lonergan's stand-in Joe marveled at and struggled with the way Turkmen redefined logic and reality as a matter of course. Part of that craziness was the injection of the ideas of capitalism into a society that didn't have a lot of natural resources nor any understanding of how it worked after 70 years of socialist dictatorship.

Lonergan's line is decidedly unfussy and even cartoony. His figures are simple and expressive, and he varied the visuals through two strategies. First, he employed a variety of panel sizes and shapes, with the use of big circular panels to highlight drama, emotional tension or panoramic views. Second, he made extensive use of negative space both as a way of breaking up the page and creating transitions, as well as it being another method of heightening emotional tension. It's obvious that Lonergan really enjoyed drawing Turkmen characters, from their bulbous noses to their angular facial features to their complexions. Their easily-identifiable characteristics made them perfect for cartoon representation. Lonergan clearly contrasted the figure of Joe with the Turkmen, given that the character was blond, bespectacled and had sort of a weak chin. He was far from the ideal Hollywood American that the Turkmen imagined him to be, yet that was the way he was seen.

The synecdochic manner in which the Turkmen treated Joe spoke to the way that America represented something they desperately wanted to emulate without understanding how to do so. When the realization started to dawn that the Turkmen perhaps were not only not all going to be rich and famous like in the movies, but also in a sense left completely out of the cultural discourse, a sense of panic ensued. That sense of abjection, of being thrown down and marginalized, was embodied by Azat's brutish brother. He combined a sense of entitlement (riches and glory without work) and resentment of a lifestyle out of his grasp with a desperate sense of not just being left behind, but being forgotten. There's a funny but powerful scene at the end where Azat's brother punches Joe out at a wedding, and then embraces him when he learns that he's leaving, shouting "Remember me!"

Azat, on the other hand, is an inveterate optimist with boundless enthusiasm. For him, becoming friends with Joe was the equivalent of becoming friends with America. His approach was the opposite of his brother's--he didn't want Joe to do something for him, but rather wanted to present himself to Joe as a great ambassador for Turkmenistan. It wasn't fakery on his part, but a genuine desire to create a link between what he thought of as two great nations. His greatest fantasy was for Joe to fall in love with a Turkmen girl and remain in the country, their children growing up together as friends. That fantasy was due in part to Azat being forced to marry out of convenience instead of getting to marry the girl he loved. At least if he was with his friend Joe, he'd have some kind of love in his life.

Despite being the narrator, the character of Joe is very much a cypher. He wanted to experience another culture, but didn't want to do it as a tourist. At the same time, his desire for immersion had its limits, both in terms of involvement and time. He wanted an experience as part of the Peace Corps but not a conversion. Azat wanted Joe to want Turkmenistan to be his home, but Joe was only ever on a journey that had his own home waiting at the end. Beyond learning that he wanted a new experience, we learn little of Joe's desires or personality. He's entirely a reactive character, a reader surrogate who keeps people at a bit of a distance. There's a closeness that develops between Joe and Azat, but Joe knew their friendship had an expiration date in a way that Azat never wanted to admit. Lonergan's approach here is different from Sacco's in that his Joe character isn't simply there to collect the stories of other people, but to have his own experience and fulfill his own desires. The fact that these desires are presented rather superficially shifts the focus entirely to Azat as a protagonist.

Joe becomes, in some sense, the object of desire for both Azat and his brother. It was odd to read a story so heavily dependent on a single narrator that revealed so little about him, yet at the same time presented another culture to the reader through his eyes. It made the story resonate with tenderness yet still feel a bit cold and distant to the reader. Joe never really commits himself to the people who meets in Turkmenistan, and that lack of commitment on the part of the narrator led to a lack of connection to me as a reader. It's still a tremendously entertaining read, but it wound up perhaps being a bit breezier than the author might have intended. It's a fascinating book in a number of ways, flooding the reader with all sorts of visceral images, from the bazaars to eating to drink in huge crowds. What we are left with is a snapshot, not a fully formed and rounded image.

The Joke's On Us: The Gigantic Robot

Rob reviews Tom Gauld's new book, THE GIGANTIC ROBOT (Buenaventura Press).

Tom Gauld's comics have often had the hallmark of juxtaposing frequently tiny, minimalist figures against vast backgrounds. His comics are frequently about futility and humanity's struggle for relevance as a cosmically absurd battle that can't be won. Gauld is best known for working small, with minicomics-sized entries for his stories that nonetheless focused on emphasizing small figures buffeted by forces stronger than they were. For THE GIGANTIC ROBOT, Gauld goes in the opposite direction, using an 8x10 format with image and text alternating on each page. That adds an extra layer of opposition to Gauld's narrative and creates a nasty comic tension that only escalates as the story unfolds and eventually collapses.

Gauld begins the book with the phrase "The war rages on.", but the facing page is almost completely blank, with only some rolling hills and a leafless tree providing any contrast to the all-engulfing white space on the page. In this comic, even the environment is insignificant in the face of the story. When we meet the people who convene for a secret project, they are minimalist even by Gauld's usual standard. They're little more than a few lines, slightly elongated. They're stretched out like a Giacometti sculpture, and their faceless nature certainly reflects the existentialist quality of the sculptor's work. They share that same hunched-over posture, the same long legs, the same sense of restlessness. They're walking and working, but to nowhere in particular and for no good reason, as we soon learn.

When the scientists create their gigantic robot superweapon, the first page upon which it's revealed sees the huge figure nearly fill up the entire page. This is where working big started to pay off for Gauld in this comic, selling the contrast between figures and environment. The robot is a huge Something, something big enough to fill a void. It represents a promise of action as an expression of pure will, a sense of mastery over others and the environment. Gauld then deflates the reader on the next page by revealing "The gigantic robot doesn't work." Here, the hunched nature of the scientists reveals their defeated and puzzled states as they try to figure out why their creation is immobile and one of its hands has fallen off.

Gauld then gets darker and darker as his joke gets sharper. The war ends, ending the need for the robot. The robot is no longer an expression of will but rather a monument to failure. We never even saw any evidence of the war, which made the peace insignificant. Each subsequent page features a heartbreaking image of decay as the robot falls apart further. Even as the reader is informed "Another war begins", getting up one's hopes that the rusting robot might eventually serve some purpose, Gauld pulls the rug out by finishing the sentence on the next page "and ends". He brutally finishes off any investment the reader had in this symbol of potential by simply having the narrator drift away, saying "Things happen elsewhere." and then cease altogether for the last two pages. Those pages saw the robot completely disintegrate and become part of the background.

The robot's fate is both tragic and comic. Its purpose was to be an engine of destruction, and it was not a bad thing that it never got off the ground in that respect. The robot was comic in that its creation and proportions were an act of defiance and almost hubris that was smacked down before it (and its creators) had a chance to exercise any kind of will to power. Ultimately, the secret weapon was abandoned by its creators and destroyed by the passage of time and the elements. It's a suggestion that no weapon of man could ever be as destructive as nature itself. Going a step further, Gauld suggests that any creation is doomed to eventual irrelevance and decrepitude. That said, Gauld in many of his comics has saved special venom for those projects of man's that glorify vanity, brutality and sheer vulgarity over beauty & self-expression, and this book is his most savage indictment of those former qualities. In THE GIGANTIC ROBOT, Gauld has created a beautiful-looking book about ugliness that is almost meta in the self-indulgence of the format. The simplicity of his line and the huge amounts of negative space he used in this book act as a sort of self-parody in parallel to the hubris of the scientists we see from a distance. In the end, the scientists no doubt went on to build some other pointless device in an effort to stop thinking about the fact that everything they will ever create will fade into oblivion--just like they will.