Three Worthy Fundraisers: The Projects, SAW, Bonesteel

I'd like to point out a few worthy fundraisers related to comics. First, the innovative comics show The Projects (in Portland, OR) is in need of help. After being way behind in their goal, their fundraiser has rallied and is only a couple of grand away from making it. Here's more info on the Projects 2.

 Tom Hart of the wonderful Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville passed along info on a History of Comics class taught by John Ronan. It's going to be an online course, and it looks well worth its price.

Finally, the cartoonist G.P. Bonesteel is raising funds to print a second volume of his hilarious Jason comic. I thought it was the funniest comic of his young cartooning career, and I'm eager to see the next volume. Here's more about his fundraiser.

The Imitation Circle: The Making Of

Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens has carved out an interesting career to date by eschewing line and instead focusing solely on color to form that backbone of his comics. His most recent book, The Making Of (2012 Drawn & Quarterly), is a book about artists and artist wannabes (and really, everyone in this book is an artist wannabe whatever their reputation might be) where Evens differentiates them less by forms and shapes (though those are present as well in surprisingly subtle ways) and more by a particular bright watercolor. The story is a classic farce: a struggling painter, jealous of the success of his peers, is invited to a small Belgian country town to create a piece for the town's biennial celebration. His comrades for the art show are a group of amateur locals, most of whom have limited ability. As the big fish in a very small pond, the regard he gets starts to go to his head a bit as the piece he intends to create taxes the abilities and interest of his fellow artists. That's pretty much it as far as the plot goes, but Evens is always more concerned with scene and character than story.

Evens has fine comedic chops. The artist, Peterson, is pretty much constantly thwarted by life; it's as though Charlie Brown grew up to be a fine artist and somehow managed to grow an ego along the way. Going to the town of Beepoele is like that one time Charlie Brown drew the admiration of an entire summer camp's worth of kids, to his constant wonderment and even bemusement. Of course, in the case of Peterson, he eats the attention up with a spoon, as the townspeople trip over themselves to make him feel welcome. That includes a sexy teenaged girl who volunteers to document the making of their art piece through photography and is more than willing to throw herself at him. The scene where they finally hook up is deftly set up (as they leave behind Leslie, a local who has essentially become Peterson's shadow) and hilariously interrupted as a real disaster befalls their piece. Evens could have used any number of approaches to tell this story, and it still would have been funny.

However, the approach that Evens chose is what makes this book so interesting to look at. Every character is depicted with a single color, carefully brushed on to each page. Kristoff, the man running the biennial, is a nice ruddy red, which sets off his huge frame and hands nicely with dot eyes. Leslie is blue and ghostly, with an elongated head. The damaged artist Dennis is a mostly brown smudge. Peterson himself is a translucent green, and he looks elfin with his slightly pointy ears and long sideburns. Evens uses a gridless open page that allows the characters and events to flow and seep into each other. When Evens wants a hard stop or to really get the reader's attention, he suddenly pulls back and puts the characters into a dense, rich realistically painted setting. Indeed, Evens repeatedly shows the reader that the most beautiful thing in the town is the actual setting: the trees, the flowers and its people. It's very much the same principle as the common practice of using iconically drawn figures up against a realistically drawn background. Peterson is the emperor with no clothes, as his idea of a worthy project (a giant garden gnome) is denounced by a clown (!) as kitsch, before Peterson "corrects" him. The only worthwhile thing Peterson does in the whole book is calm down the artists after the gnome gets ruined and makes them feel good about their efforts. In a sense, he's trying to convince himself of this as much as he's trying to convince them.

What I like most about this book is that Evens turns the notion of art imitating life on its head in the way he depicts his characters. It's as though this comic was about the figures in a static painting coming to life and interacting with each other on page after page; eventually, the novelty of this wears off as the reader becomes completely immersed in Evens' approach. The fact that this "painting" is about artists creating art, trying to think about art and understanding how and why art is important to them further complicates that art/life circle, with the proper response (in Evens' eyes) being to do a send-up of art and artists. That said, it's a gentle and affectionate send-up, where even Peterson gets a bit of redemption. Incidentally, I thought the way he used the teenager, Cleo, was quite interesting. Far from a simple doe-eyed groupie, she has real agency as a person and in many ways is the most successful artist in the town. The final sequence of the book, where she dresses up as a flight attendant at the senior center for which she volunteers, shows her commitment and devotion to a performance that actually makes a difference. This is simply a beautiful, funny and humane book that shows Evens really showing off his chops as his style evolves and matures.

Sequart Reprints: Best American Comics 2007

When I reviewed The Best American Comics 2006 last year, I noted that it was clear that the choice of guest editor had an enormous impact on which comics were selected. Because the guest editor was Harvey Pekar (of American Splendor fame), most of the stories were naturalistic, often with a strong political bent. Unsurprisingly, the anthology lacked genre work, but it also lacked the sort of aggressively experimental comics seen in Kramer's Ergot. Overall, the book was a fine primer for readers interested in art comics who didn't know where to begin.

Chris Ware was the guest editor for the 2007 edition, and the book certainly reflects his interests. Unlike Pekar, Ware had already had the recent experience of editing a comics anthology, the all-comics issue of McSweeney's  (#13). That experience allowed him to create an anthology that not only flowed better, but where each individual story was enhanced by its juxtaposition to the other stories in the book. In some instances, there were stories that I had initially disliked that gained a new life due to the way they were sequenced.

Phenomenology is a philosophical technique used to describe an object. Among other things, it requires the observer to remove one's preconceived notions about the observed object and to attempt to remove it from its average, everyday contextual understanding. The Best American Comics series has received a lot of flak in comics circles, largely because of an unwillingness to actually engage the text or read it out of preconceived contexts. The "best" label seems to throw everyone off every bit as much as the "American" label does.

Superhero fans are frustrated that their "team" (as it were) isn't represented and validated. Heidi MacDonald at The Beat wrote a column saying that this book was emblematic of new mainstream-type storytelling under-representation. The problem with her essay was not just that she vacillated on how culpable this volume was in a supposed lack of critical attention, but also in privileging the idea of "story" as something with a specific set of easily-recognizable fictive elements (and presumably fantastic ones). There's nothing in this volume that isn't a story, just perhaps not the kind of page-turning stories that some readers might find comforting. There are some in the genre camp who have dismissed this book as stories filled with navel-gazing & whining, sight unseen. Even art-comics fans have been unhappy with the book because so much of the book came from other anthologies like Mome and Kramer's Ergot. None of these suppositions accurately reflect the actual experience of reading the book and thinking about why Ware chose the pieces he did, and why he put them in that particular order.

A shorthand way of describing the progression of stories in the anthology is that it goes from autobiography to fiction. This is not quite accurate. Insead, Ware takes a page from Ivan Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction and has what can be called pods--a few stories that address roughly the same concerns, but either do it in radically different ways or else comment on each other by virtue of their placement. There's also a certain overlap where story A bears some similarities to story B, which in turn bears a different set of similarities to story C.

The book begins with two opening salvos: a hilarious bit of self-loathing by Ivan Brunetti done in his more recent, minimalist style; and the selection that kicks off the book's first story cycle: Art Spiegelman's "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young %@?*!". It makes sense to start off the meat of the book with a strip by one of the world's most famous cartoonists, but a more salient reason is that the story concerns itself with the point of view of children. That's followed by a jam strip with Robert and Aline Crumb, visiting their daughter Sophie in New York. They adore and dote on her, but these two underground veterans feel more than a little out of place in a squat. Even two radical cartoonists can embarrass their daughter. Ware follows this with a Sophie Crumb strip that was a bit of a petulant throw-away in the pages of Mome, but here is a sly commentary both on her parents' work and her own shortcomings as an artist.

An excerpt from Alison Bechdel's Fun Home brings these relationships into sharper analytical focus, as she grapples with the apparent suicide of her father, his closeted homosexuality, and her own obsessive nature. Carol Tyler continues by flipping perspectives and writing about her daughter as a young girl, wistfully crafting stories about a time gone by. That perspective is then flipped once again as we move to some strips by Lynda Barry, focusing on a teen's point of view, and then concludes with a lighthearted Lauren Weinstein story about a teen's first date.

This section focuses on the primacy of family, both as a child and as an adult. We seek to understand our parents and parents seek to understand their children, but the fractured nature of generational communication frequently makes that process difficult. Children also seek to understand and master the world and their own desires, especially as it plays out in terms of sex. Longing has always been a running theme in Ware's own work, and thus it's no surprise to see his interest in how other artists grapple with it. Visually, Ware goes from the relatively staid compositional style of Bechdel to the wild full color expressionism of Tyler to the scratchy black & white drawings of Barry to the almost lurid quality of Weinstein's work.

Weinstein's story makes a nice transition point to the next cluster of stories, dealing with the concerns of young adults. Vanessa Davis presents a series of one-page vignettes involving snippets of her life hanging out with her friends, going on dates, etc. Ware flips that yet again by following her strips with a black & white Gabrielle Bell journal comic that's about visting her family in California. Ware then intersperses her dry, observational humor with another balls-to-the-wall Brunetti strip, this time a tribute to his girlfriend. Ware then presents the observational work of Jeffrey Brown, an artist whose voice is quite different from Bell's. Bell likes to quietly observe her surroundings, even as she internalizes her neuroses. She always has the air of being detached. Brown is someone who lives entirely within each moment, even as he tries to get some sense of perspective. This series of strips deals with the power of that moment, as it affects him in terms of relationships, art and daily life.

From Brown's scratchy but naturalistic style Ware takes us to Ron Rege's stylizations. His stripped-down but hyper-stylized character and panel design will be jarring for a reader unfamiliar with it. This is the first comic in the book that may require the new reader to force oneself to engage the work and try to understand the visual language and series of symbols that Rege uses. It's worth the effort, because the story that he unfolds is heartbreaking. Rege challenges the reader with his shifting color scheme, his unusual panel presentation, and a raw portrayal of human emotion.

Rege's work marks another shifting point, as Ware turns toward a series of meditative works. While some are fictional, they all share a quietude and respect for the importance of living in the moment and respecting the often beautiful rhythms of quotidian existence. John Porcellino leads off this set of stories as he ponders the possibilities of living in a small town. Jonathan Bennett slows the pace down to an absolute crawl as his mind wanders during a reverie on a park bench. Kevin Huizenga has his Glenn Ganges character off in a similar reverie as he watches his wife sleep, but this time the thoughts of our main character center around mortality and the possibility of losing his wife. These strips might give the typical fan of genre comics the most difficulty, because there's no action here, just a series of character moments that nonetheless linger on. The beauty of this anthology is that Ware quickly moves on to other approaches in short order and makes an obvious point of varying stories in terms of both their emotional tone and the way they're paced & structured.

Reverie is a waking dream, and Ware marks the next transition point with a transcribed David Heatley dream that has a charged racial component. Racial and ethnic identity are the focus of the next section, beginning with Sammy Harkham's short story about Hassidic Jews in the 19th century. This story depicts one man trying to negotiate his way through the world as an artist and a man expected to be a good Jew and the difficulties therein. I also read it as a sly parody of modern autobiographical comics. The story concludes with a couple of gentiles wanting his blessing on their marriage because they automatically assume he's a man of god. That slightly ambiguous ending leaves the protagonist with a sense that being a Jew is something that he doesn't necessarily have a choice in, for good or ill. That's driven home in the next section, an excerpt from Miriam Katin's shattering book We Are On Our Own. Here, Miriam's mother has to pretend not to be Jewish in order to survive. I love this juxtaposition of stories: different time periods, completely different styles (Harkham is inspired by early 20's comic strips and Katin has a lush, feathery look to her pencils) and very different explorations of similar ideas.

Ben Katchor contributes a story that deconstructs a particular kind of cult built around shoes that's weirdly hilarious in Katchor's inimitable manner. Katchor's ability to create alternate city realities out of whole cloth never ceases to amaze, and it was interesting to see this story placed with other shorts that discuss ethnic and religious identity.

In the second half of the book, Ware subtly shifts the stories he chooses in terms of their primary focus. In the first half, it was longing and a desire to understand and be understood. In the second half of the book, the stories are about desire: sexual desire, the desire to be accepted, the desire to master one's environment, the desire to fulfill a quest. Ware starts with an excerpt from Adrian Tomine's new book, Shortcomings, about an Asian-American man who yearns to be with a white woman. This is both for fetishistic reasons and a desperate attempt to squelch his own self-loathing.

After a couple of more Heatley strips that briefly touch on guilt and desire, Ware contrasts the thwarted desires seen in Tomine's story with one filled with characters who fulfill their fantasies in Gilbert Hernandez' "Fritz After Dark". The story is lurid, populated by those who take their desires to logical extremes. Fritz is the one character who always bravely indulges herself, even if it leaves her vulnerable to the manipulation of others. Those that internalize their desires (especially muscleman Enrique) are susceptible to forms of fetishization so extreme that they can no longer relate to real people. Again, the differences in art and technique heighten both stories: Tomine's stories have a cold distance to them even when they grapple with the most lurid of topics, while Beto has a warm, cartoony style that sweeps the reader into his world.

The next three stories also deal with desire, but of a different kind. In a Kim Deitch excerpt, he's trying to get at a mystery that gets at the heart of his creative process. Anders Nilsen's Big Questions excerpt deals with the inexplicable desire of a bird to be gripped by a human that could easily kill it. It's the desire to touch the unknown, even if it risks oblivion. Oblivion is the theme of the last piece in this section, an excerpt from Charles Burns' Black Hole. In this story, a young woman contemplates suicide as she floats on the ocean at the beach. She is completely disconnected from the world and those she loves, yet can't quite bring herself to leave it.

These three stories are quiet and contemplative, even if they are bizarre. In each of the three, we're on the verge of something important happening, but these stories are about the sensation of being on the edge. In the final section, Ware presents stories that are variations of The Quest, where we are presented with nothing but action. Throwing his audience a curveball, Ware presents stories that are increasingly abstract and difficult to engage, yet bursting with energy. He begins with an excerpt of Gary Panter's Jimbo's Inferno, where we follow an everyman and his magical talking valise as they descend into the Inferno--which looks very much like a mall.

The artist C.F. takes this one step further in a story about a boy breaking into a house in order to gain power from objects inside, combining elements from video games, role-playing games, and psychedelia into his storytelling bag of tricks. The outsider art duo Paper Rad takes this quest idea to its weirdest extreme as the Kramer character from Seinfeld winds up hallucinating an explosion of bizarre imagery. Ordinarily, I have a great deal of difficulty digesting Paper Rad's material, but once again the story's contextual fit seemed ideal in this anthology.

Ware reels the audience back in with another Heatley story that involves a strange journey and an attempt to go home. That leads neatly into one of the most naturalistic (yet playful) stories in the book: Dan Zettwoch's "Won't Be Licked", an account of his grandfather's trip around town in a homemade boat during a catastrophic flood. This story has all of the components of a quest story, yet it's told in Zettwoch's typical deadpan, playful and detail-oriented style.

After some extremely revealing and helpful contributor's notes, series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore then presents a list of 100 other comics worthy of mention. They certainly would have made for a much different anthology, but it's hard to imagine breaking up the storytelling flow that Ware directs here. Ware concludes the anthology with an excerpt from Seth's Wimbledon Green. This story is about the title character of the story musing on his origins. Of course, this story is really about everyone who not only reads comics, but who reads and desires in general. He asks why we read, why we care about books, why we look at the world, why we have desires. These are questions without answers, but what Seth implies is that to ask these questions is what it means to be human. For Ware, the story is a perfect encapsulation of what he tried to present in this volume. He said in his introduction that he wanted to present stories that tried to capture the truth, and though he didn't explicitly state what he meant by this, it seems clear that he meant the truth of the human condition.

There's a lot of autobio here precisely because Ware isn't interested in navel-gazing; he instead wanted stories of human connection and disconnection that could reach any reader. He wanted stories of lusts and desires fulfilled and unfulfilled, and stories about goals met and unmet. Ware did this while simultaneously showing off the broad spectrum of storytelling and compositional styles in comics today, notably choosing a number of artists whose styles couldn't be any more different from his. The result was a gift from Ware to the reader, providing a very specific but powerful reading experience; whether or not this was the "best" possible anthology of comics is not an important question.

Building Story: Interiorae

Gabriella Giandelli's Interiorae was orignally published in duotone as part of the sadly defunct Ignatz line of comics co-published by Igort's Coconino Press imprint. This collection of the original issues adds additional colors, including a rich, kaleidiscopic sequence toward the end. It was one of the quieter, more contemplative comics in the Ignatz line, featuring lush but restrained art and a story that straddled the line between fantasy and quotidian reality. It's a story about the relationships humans have with their dwelling places and the ways in which our collective dreams fuel the life cycle of a building. Interiorae chronicles the decline and fall of one such building, visiting with characters who are either moving on with their lives or stuck in a repeating loop of dysfunctional behavior. After the reader is slowly introduced to the desperate hopes and dreams of several of the flat's inhabitants, one is then introduced to a magical, invisible white rabbit as he closely observes their lives before he relates these stories to his master: a dark, blobbish creature that lives in the basement, hidden from all. The reader learns that this creature fancies itself crucial in the life cycle of humans, purging them of their toxic and weird dreams. There's no question, however, that the creature needs humans in order to exist. Dreams are very much a commodity for the "master", and he despairs that the most recent batch lacks quality control.                                                      

There's a real verisimilitude in the way Giandelli depicts the everyday life of her characters, both young and old. Secrets, lies and mysteries all abound here, but the device of an omniscient observer renders them petty and silly. Many of the characters are profoundly lonely and alienated, and deal with it in different ways: drugs, affairs, screaming arguments, and fantasies. The book's iciest character, an executive who's fooling around with a woman who herself is involved in an affair, loves to spy on others with his telescope, desperate to break free of the boredom in his life. There's a drug addict who's been hiding in the basement for much of his life, afraid of the world at large. There's a ghostly family that died in a plane wreck that inhabits an abandoned apartment, reliving their happiest memories. There are housewives who have affairs simply to have something to do with their day. Indeed, even the "master" is tired of their affairs, their lies, and their boring interests.

Giandelli's art is rich and eye-catching, though she offsets that quality with a flat color wash to get at the flatness of everyday routine that she depicts. The flatness of scene matches the flatness of affect of many of the protagonists. The one person who seems to transcend this treadmill is an old woman who is starting to flash back to her childhood. She turns out to be the key character in the book, as her final task in life is to find her way to the other side. She's the only character the "master" finds interesting, because her interests transcend quotidian details. Even as others think she's crazy or confused, the "master" knows that she's a seeker whose presence signals something ominous.

The pace of these comics is rather languid, but Giandelli's pages are beautiful enough to hold one's eye, and the tension between fantasy and reality is thick enough to keep the reader guessing. It's that tension that makes the book worth reading, because either element alone would make for a rather routine read. The greater mystery of the fantasy element of the series gives the book's voyeuristic quality some depth. That fantasy element is used sparingly and mostly as a framing device, allowing the book to unfold as a series of character studies. There's a stirring beauty to be found here in the essential, profound sadness of so many of its characters. This is a comic with a number of sharp contrasts that don't fully emerge until after it's been digested. It's the story of the lives of the people in the building: quotidian dramas that seem like life and death to them, but seem rather quiet and muted when compared to this mysterious, ominous mythological narrative. The figures are simply but expressively depicted, but the intensity of Giandelli's hatching and shading on each page adds a sort of neurotic underpinning to everyone's lives. Though one sense all along that these characters are doomed, there's never a sense of judgment or contempt on Giandelli's part toward anyone in the book, even the pettiest or most selfish of characters. It's a humane and even gentle approach toward dealing with their very human emotions and reactions, even as the end of the book is shockingly harsh and even funny in its abruptness. Those who were ready to move on knew to leave, but those who were trapped were doomed.

Sequart Reprints: What's Fleener Doing?

Mary Fleener immediately became one of favorite artists upon discovering her work fifteen years ago. Her old SLUTBURGER series for D&Q was in the vanguard of great alt-comics of the 80's; much of it was collected in her LIFE OF THE PARTY collection by Fantagraphics. In the last decade or so, however, Fleener's mostly retreated from the comics world, surfacing here and there in some less-traveled places.

For example, she did a self-titled comic for Matt Groening's Zongo publishing concern that lasted just three issues. She did one issue of a hilarious pornographic series called NIPPLEZ 'N TUM-TUM for Eros after introducing them in the DIRTY STORIES anthology. She popped up with strips in the Comics Journal Specials, and has also contributed work to the Graphic Classics line. She has a standout strip in the new volume of the HOTWIRE anthology, producing a story that could easily have been a SLUTBURGER classic. Fleener's also spent much time in the world of fine art, displaying her paintings in a number of different galleries.

A few years ago, Fleener also started doing a strip for the Surf City Times called Mary-Land. She's collected some of these as ENCINITAS--THE LAST SMALL TOWN ON EARTH, volumes three and four. She also has a fascinating collection of her flyers for rock shows (mostly her own band) called FLYERS BY FLEENER. Fleener is best known for her unusual visual style, a combination of somewhat exaggerated naturalism (punctuated by her use of thick black lines for her character design) and her signature "cubismo", a sort of cubist, distorted technique that serves to hyperexaggerate emotion. By distorting facial features into geometric shapes, it forces the reader into a different interpretive state and heightens the dialogue that's used, especially since it can portray multiple and mixed emotional states simultaneously.

In her Mary-Land strips, Fleener tones down on that sort of stylization for the most part, which is not surprising considering that her stories are mostly observational anecdotes. While she often focuses on the quotidian, she also addresses a number of local political concerns as well. She even comes up some tried-but-true topics that she goes back to more than once, like her "Wish List/Anti-Wish List". The strip understandably has a provincial feel to it, yet it's her very love for her town that makes the strip such an enjoyable read. Like Justin Green's SIGN GAME collection (strips about and for professional sign painters), the minutae of everyday life in Fleener's quirky town is expanded upon with wit, affection and clarity.

Fleener's narrative voice is one of the most distinctive in comics, and it's what initially drew me to her autobiographical stories. Above all else, she has this sort of brassy forthrightness that is both enormously engaging and hilarious. While Mary has seen and done it all, her sense of wonder in finding quirky beauty around her is almost childlike in its enthusiasm. She loves surfing, the art-project mailboxes of her neighbors, her pets and other animals, both wild and domesticated. She uses her strip as a platform to rant against corporate greed and development, hypocritical inspection rules, byzantine regulations, absurd protests (from the left and the right) and obnoxious bicyclists.

It's interesting to see Fleener work in single-page, comic-strip format. It's not something that she's done much of in her career, but she quickly adapted to it and always seemed to have something to say. Fleener did have certain restrictions at play in her strip, especially language as well as sex and drugs references. Indeed, Fleener seemed eager to adapt little anecdotes into strips, the kind of slighter material that she didn't do much of in SLUTBURGER. That said, Fleener excels with longer narratives, and so my favorite story in either volume is "The Landed Immigrant Song", about Mary's childhood years spent in Vancouver after growing up in Southern California. A bit where her mother was distressed that Mary and her brother were using Canadian curse words was especially hilarious. The punchline of that strip, involving an embarrassing incident where Mary was asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance but didn't know it because she grew up in Canada, tied nicely back into her current life.

FLYERS BY FLEENER is a must for any fan of Fleener's art, especially her more decorative aspects. It's a perfect example of her aesthetic: a mix-up of fine art, low art and pop culture detritus, drawn with an enormous amount of skill and verve. From a historical perspective, it was interesting and amusing to see some of her earliest art when she was influenced by Howard the Duck in the late 70's and was trying to "draw 'The Marvel Way'". One can still see her Cubismo sensibilities starting to form even at that time, with one drawing of a superheroic figure taking off his mask to reveal an anthropomorphic guitar-man.

I hold out hope that Fleener will return to comics with a higher-profile project; I know that she has a number of things in the works. She is such a versatile artist that I can see her producing any number of interesting works, from a children's comic for First Second to another autobiographical series to Fantagraphics to something far more abstract and unusual. It's to comics' detriment that she's not currently keeping a higher profile, especially since her visual style is unique, playful and clear. The merging of high and low art techniques and influences in her comics puts her in perfect company with the Kramer's generation while still in line with her underground influences.

Minis: Stripling, Meloro, E.Johnson

The Outliers #1, by Erik T Johnson. Kickstarter can result in some over-the-top embellishments for their final product. In this case, this mini has a color dust jacket, letterpressed covers, high-quality paper and monotone coloring throughout. The covers are particularly striking, as Johnson renders a host of nightmarish and fascinating monsters. This first issue boils down to the story of A Boy And His Bigfoot, as the seemingly mute boy Tsu endures taunts and humiliation from his classmates until a bus wreck brings an eighteen foot tall giant to his side for aid after he speaks a word in what seems to be an unintelligible language. Johnson throws in a sinister monster-man and his killer pet/chauffeur into the mix right away in this nicely-rendered (if occasionally stiff--some of the panel-to-panel transitions don't quite flow smoothly) and moody comic. I get the sense that as Johnson really starts to explore the mysterious forest that's full of monsters, things will get more interesting in a hurry. As it stands, this is a solid monster comic that plays to the artist's strengths as someone who excels in revealing powerful, static images.

Misper #1-3, by Anthony Meloro. These are some crazy comics, screenprinted on what appears to be construction paper and rendered in a crude but powerful style. Ostensibly about missing persons and police procedurals, Meloro immediately takes his comic on a supernatural turn. For example, when one cop is shot by a suspect, he is encouraged by the visions of girls the cop couldn't save to get up. When he manages to do so and makes it to a hospital, the apparitions reappear when the criminal comes to the hospital in an effort to finish him off, warning him away. Another story features a cop angering a group of cultists by accidentally stumbling upon one of the sacred shrines, and he is ultimately chased down by the bulletproof cultists and burned alive. I found these comics to be wonderfully strange and fun, bursting with energy and hastily-scrawled ideas and drawings. It's the opposite of polished storytelling, but it's what minicomics can do so well: create an artifact.

Book of Job #2 and other minis by Scott Stripling. Stripling's comics blend Gary Panter and Jack Kirby in equal measure.  Mixing in elements of War of the Worlds, fantasy and the titular story, this mini follows what is Stripling's most pressing interest: evolution. The hero is subjected to a series of trials, tests and tortures until he floats in a space pod, waiting to emerge as a new being. That fascination with divinity, magic and evolution is also evident in an untitled mini that mimics the Norse myth of Balder, an invulnerable god who is killed by a humble arrow. In the mini, the gods are big and blocky Kirby-style space gods, and the invulnerable god in question is shrugging off power rays before the arrow fells him. In another, more polished and stylish untitled mini, a caveman learns how to kill using weapons, a revelation tainted by the fact that he becomes haunted by ghosts until he's driven into a cave. There, he encounters a crystalline, alien intelligence; presumably, this contact alters the savage (there's a relentless motif of teeth tearing through their prey) forever. Finally, "Shock and Awww" is a quickly-scrawled mini that relates a disgusting anecdote that the wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper witnessed early in his career. There's a rising interest in cartoonists doing comics about 1980s wrestling, which is not surprising given the colorful characters involved in that business. Stripling is clearly still finding his footing as a cartoonist, but I like the ways in which his comics are bursting with energy and ideas.

Minis: Roberts, Viola, May, Fitzpatrick

Powdered Milk #9-10, by Keiler Roberts. Issue #9 of these strips taken from her website focuses in on more anecdotes about her young daughter during her toddler years. As her husband notes, toddlers are walking joke and anecdote generators, and so in one strip he literally tells Keiler that what their daughter just said will be her next strip. Her mentioning him saying this adds another meta level to the strip, something she's done a few times. The last couple of pages feature Keiler and a friend sitting naked in a hot tub at a day spa, with the talk turning to the attractiveness of each other's breasts and her friend's desire to get her entire body rubbed down. Roberts really captures both the sense of ease with which they talk and acknowledges the awkwardness inherent in their conversation. Issue #10 is all about a film she remembers seeing as a child about a man who didn't know how to read and her present-day extrapolation as to how the story might have continued. When she learns that it was a book, not a film, and that she had misstated some of its elements, she rewrote her extrapolation based on that new evidence. This is a hilarious examination of the perils of memory, especially when one tries to create a narrative based on those memories. Roberts is a witty and pithy cartoonist, and she seems to really be hitting her stride as a memorist who mines humor from her dark and light moments alike.

Men's Feelings, by Ted May.May has a knack for delivering sublimely formatted comics and minis. Men's Feelings, a "tears and toilets" comic to use his description, is no exception. Published by Revival House, May is at his best here in depicting the lives of men of varying ages, sending up both their own feelings and how other people view them. For example, "Earthlings" is a hilarious story wherein a number of younger people congregate outside the window of a middle-aged man's house, displaying this football-watching average schlub as though he were in a zoo.May is a master at delivering a lot of information with very little text, and this story is a good example of that. "New Life" is one of those toilet stories, as a guy sits in a coffee shop on top of the world one moment and then on top of a toilet as he has painful diarrhea that seems to last forever, driving him to tears. Another highlight is "Milestones", featuring two guys griping about marriage, children and religion as they stand against a wall at a wedding. When they scatter when they see the priest approaching, it highlights just how toothless their rants really were. "Dimensions" is so knowing regarding the banality of interoffice chatter that it hurts, and I loved the way May inserted the possibility of stopping and literally smelling nature as an almost mystical and incomprehensible act. May is great at depicting schlubs, losers and burnouts, as the band of weirdos in the poker story "Winning" puts on full display. The funniest story is "Token", about a balding man who is constantly choking on all kinds of food until a magician intercedes and the man chokes out a casino token. How magical this man actually is is a central part of the joke. May is an assured storyteller and underrated as a humorist because his stories always have a certain flatness to them that forces the reader to really engage them to see what's really going on, and this mini is a fine example of that humor at work.

Jerry's Journal #2 and Me, by Neil Fitzpatrick.I've critiqued Fitpatrick's comics in the past for being too twee. His musings seemed shallow, as he was more interested in a quip than a genuine moment of understanding. With Jerry's Journal #2 and Me, Fitzpatrick took a hard turn into expressing some hard emotional truths as he tried to make sense of an unraveling relationship that nearly wrecked him. Jerry's Journal is full of rage and bile, a righteous feeling of being burned and the desire to somehow get back. Me abandons the pretense of the Jerry character, laying Fitzpatrick and his feelings totally bare. While he never gets at the specifics of the nature of the betrayal that ended his relationship, it's clear that he felt side-swiped and that her attempts at apology seemed halfhearted at best. Fitzpatrick goes through a lot of grieving in the pages of this comic, alternating between expressing anger and trying to forge a new life and identity for himself. Of course, stating that he's in a new life and actually living it are two different things, as he lapses back into anger and finally a sense of acceptance by the end. It's a pretty bold experiment to expose his emotions so openly (something he also acknowledges in one of the strips), but it seemed key that this needed to be sent out into the world. These comics are a breakthrough for Fitzpatrick, one that I hope keeps up without the pain and rage that fueled them.

Fear of Flowers, by Jason Viola. Viola is generally a gag man, but this trio of stories about cryptic plant behavior is contemplative and philosophical. It also doesn't hurt that his renderings of flowers are beautiful without overwhelming the eye or obscuring his narrative ends. The first story, considering sunflowers mysteriously all turning in one direction when they mature, gets at this sense of the enigmatic quality of nature being overwhelming in the way he renders an entire lea's worth of sunflowers. The second story, about a rare flower called a kadupul, discusses the plant's rare and nocturnal blooming pattern, as though it waited until everything around it was absolutely still before flowering and wilting before anyone could see it. Again, the fact that this is unexplained makes it all the more intriguing. Finally, when considering the orchid, Viola holds forth on the topic of mortality and how we never know when we will die. This final mystery in our lives is what largely motivates are actions, whether we acknowledge this or choose to distract ourselves from this fact. Viola then informs the reader that under the right conditions, the orchid can effectively be immortal. It's a clever final bombshell in a mini that's about nature defying our conventions and expectations, one that's well-matched with its drawings.