Minicomics: Nichols, Cantirino, Remnant, Gfrorer, Reklaw

Flocks, Chapters 2 and 3, by L.Nichols. These are the next two chapters in Nichols' meditation and exploration of faith and growing up as a queer born-again Christian. Each issue tends to cover similar ground, circling back to a variation on a theme. For example, the second issue, subtitled "body of conflict", gets at Nichols' body-image issues, knowing exactly what she wanted to look like as a kid but knowing it "wasn't OK". Using her distinctive rag doll self-caricature, Nichols depicts the forces and pressures she felt as a child and teen using the nomenclature of physics, though those arrows bearing down on her pierced and drew blood. The comic is heartbreaking in that she has a strong sense of identity but prays desperately to change, to conform, to not be a sinner. It never works, and at the end of the issue she goes back out into nature with the animals and woods that provide her so much comfort because they allow her to be herself as she is.

The third issue ("Nature vs Nurture") focuses less on body image and more on faith itself. A constant, running theme throughout this comic is Nichols refusing to demonize faith and religion, despite her experiences. She talks about the feeling of community she frequently felt, the power and mystical intensity of gospel services, and the comfort she felt in the idea that god was all around. At the beginning of this issue, she quotes a pastor quoting the Bible, referring to the "still, small voice of God". This concept made sense to her, that almost Buddhist idea that she was "part of something larger".Once again, that voice was best heard out in nature, where it was easier to see oneself as part of something larger instead of hearing the loud, angry voices decrying homosexuality and sinners. As Nichols notes, those were the voices of man, not God. While Nichols works through a lot of pain in these comics, it's not done in anger, but rather in appreciating beauty. Nichols' approach is to match the hate she felt for herself and the hate she felt from others with gentleness and care. Her use of full color to depict just how vibrant her environment was to her is a key to the success of these comics, because one can sense the joy radiating from those sequences. These comics are not a chance for revenge, but rather a plea for understanding. I hope she keeps going.

Turnpike Divides Part 2, by Sally Cantirino. The first issue sets up a story about a young man returning home to New Jersey to attend the funeral of his best friend, with the strong sense that said friend drove his car deliberately into a pole. This issue picks up on the ramifications of this event, as the man (Alec) tries to gain comfort from his ex-girlfriend (Lily). Cantirino nails the ways in which twenty-somethings relate to each other as they find themselves drifting through life, and this comic takes dead aim at narcissism and self-pity. Alec tries to find ways to blame himself for his friend's death and condemns those around him for not mourning him sufficiently, before Lily reveals a key fact about his death and generally puts him in his place. It's also about no longer being part of a place, about its relevance to one's life being entirely in the past. Cantirino's line is a little on the busy side, making the pages a bit denser to read than they need to be, but she does capture a sense of time and place. She notes that she used a lot of reference to real places for this story, and it's easy to see that; the spaces here look lived-in and well-trod. She also has a real knack for drawing night scenes and snow, which added a lot of atmosphere to the story. A student at the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW), her ambition as a cartoonist is clear.

Blindspot #3, by Joseph Remnant. The latest issue of the talented Remnant's one-man anthology focuses on autobio stories this time around, but each of the four has a very specific tone and purpose. At the same time, each of them fervently questions both himself and the cultural values surrounding him. In "L.A. Coffee Shop", Remnant takes aim at all of the "creative types" who fulfill every LA stereotype one can imagine, both in terms of the way they dress and the things they say. Of course, Remnant takes a step back and aims those barbs for himself as well, letting the other artist he saw in the cafe draw a picture of Remnant looking like an idiot. "Pappy Ron's Pizza" takes dead square aim at the controversy over Papa John's Pizza refusing to comply with the Affordable Healthcare Act because it would eat into their profits and "force" a small increase of the price of pizza. Here, Remnant watches a "news" report from a right-wing TV network that fully supports "Pappy Ron". From there, driving to various locations during con season leads him to choosing that pizza joint...but he just can't quite go through with it. It's a strip where Remnant is literally nauseated by the patter the Pappy Ron employee is forced to spew out, but it's also a story where Remnant follows through on his principles.

"Elevator" finds Remnant confronting his past in the face of an old friend and an odd interaction with him, as well as going back to his old school. This unsettling story then quickly resolves in a way that makes sense, and the jarring ending doesn't feel like a cop-out because of the warning Remnant receives during the course of the narrative.  The story that sort of recapitulates all the others is "You Are Here", which is about depression and how Remnant used meditative hiking up a hill as a form of therapy. Walks have a way of first stirring up bad thoughts and then dissolving them through sheer physical exertion, and Remnant works through his miasma and depression by forcing himself through. It's a story that touches on John Porcellino and his zen comics poetry, using many silent panels to create a rhythm that Remnant feels while walking. The slow, steady progression from panel to panel is modulated by the density of Remnant's cross-hatching, especially when Remnant walks slowly through shadowy parts of a forest. It's interesting to contrast the relative calm and quiet of that darkness to the darkness Remnant wakes up to in "Elevator". As always, Remnant's skill as a cartoonist is superb, with complete control over his line and his page. Like many artists inspired by underground cartoonists, Remnant's layouts are relatively straightforward, though he does something unusual on many pages with a 3-2-3 grid. The reader tends to go to the center of the page in grid set-ups, but Remnant deflects the reader's eye with two central panels in the middle of the page, forcing them to take in both of the central panels as a single image and then the rest of the page. Remnant wants the reader to look at every panel and follow its rhythm to the next, even when there are silent beats and delays. The way he formats the page makes the reader do this if they want to follow the story, and he faithfully puts a lot of clear but detailed information in every panel. Location, mood and body language are all keys in Remnant's comics and it's obvious that he wants the reader to closely follow all three. Even though this issue is autobiographical, Remnant is less interested in being confessional than sharing relatable stories.

Black Light, by Julia Gfrorer. Ever since publishing her first book with Sparkplug, Gfrorer has been creating one astounding, unsettling and frequently erotic story after another. This mini collects four short stories from a variety of sources, and what's remarkable about it is the way she takes tired fantasy and horror tropes (a vampire, Death, a deadly water nymph, and a magical bear) and transforms them into something that's actually frightening and real. That's because while the genre trope is often part of the story's big reveal, it's never the most frightening thing about the story. For example, "River of Tears" starts with the sort of party scene that Gfrorer excels at depicting, but soon segues into a series of texts from a suicidal junkie girlfriend. The horror here is not the Grim Reaper coming to take her away, but rather the mind-rending horror of dealing with that kind of emotional manipulation. "Phosphorus" is horrifying not because there's a monster in a pond, but rather because it's about sexual violence and humiliation."All Is Lost" is a downbeat story because it flips around the expectation of a monster menacing a child and suggests that it's the mother who is really the monster. Finally, "Unclean" and its ultimate monstrous revelation only works because of the way Gfrorer sets up and details the woman's betrayal. Indeed, she even suggests that the vampire is less of a predator than the woman's cheating ex-boyfriend. Her line is scratchy, harsh and dense, all befitting the kinds of stories she tells. Gfrorer is a smart storyteller above all else; one can sense just how much thought goes into each story and how certain elements, once revealed, will resonate for the reader. Her work rewards multiple readings because of its thoughtfulness and attention to detail, as well as her deep understanding of interpersonal dynamics and how they become dysfunctional.

LOVF New York: Destination Crisis., by Jesse Reklaw. This is a harrowing, intense account of Reklaw journeying to New York City and inadvertently going off his meds and becoming homeless for a period of time. Published by Robyn Chapman's Paper Rocket Minicomics, it's a beautiful, full-color minicomic that contains comics, sketches, collaborations with others and tenuous threads of narrative. It's a comic that's as much about the process of making a comic as it is the material itself, because the original pages got rained on at one point and the colors bled into each other. It's a collaboration with the elements as well as other artists, and a document of Reklaw going through a manic phase when he was off his meds. The line between typical member of society and being homeless is shown to be remarkably thin, especially when someone is dealing with mental illness. This comic rewards multiple readings simply because each page is so dense and filled with detail, scrawled jokes, background gags and references to New York. The city plays a huge role, given how unforgiving it is to the poor, but also because Reklaw went to the city to try and do business, even going to the weekly open tryout at The New Yorker. This comic represents a side of Reklaw I've never seen before. He's an artist whose comics are generally neat and ordered, hewing to strict grids and other formal constraints. Here, he's all over the place in spectacular fashion.

Minicomics: Barnett, Henderson, Brunton, Tablegeddon

The Magic Whistle #13, by Sam Henderson. A new issue of Magic Whistle is always cause for celebration, and it's good to see that this is going to be a regularity with the newly-revived Alternative Comics. This is my favorite format for Henderson's work, because it allows him to display his full range as a humorist. There are single-panel gags, longer narratives, long-form callbacks, long-running serial gag features, conceptual jokes, scatological jokes and even funny anecdotes. Henderson excels in all of these areas and is perhaps the most versatile humorist in comics as a result, even as his deliberately crude visual stylings remain the same from strip to strip. This issue's highlights include a very meta Gunther Bumpus strip, wherein he doesn't get stuck in his cat flap and thus doesn't leave his ass hanging, leading to all sorts of angst and the eventual, ineffective intervention of Pickles the Exploding Dog (one of Henderson's best-ever jokes, especially thanks to the very serious and determined expression on the face of the dog). There's also a great Dirty Danny strip, a typically demented Lonely Robot Duckling strip, and a story about a bizarre encounter on a subway. Henderson also features work from the delightfully wacked-out Lizz Hickey, whose diary comics and jokes about being peed on fit right into the proceedings. David Goldin's back cover is drawn very much in Henderson's style. I like this mini-anthology approach, as it reminds me of what Peter Bagge was doing in Hate before he closed up shop on the regular run of the series.

I'm A Horse, Bitch, by Lauren Barnett. This comic begins with a reclining horse that says "Pleased to meet you. I'm a horse. Don't worry, the jealousy you're feeling is normal." Things pretty much go from there, as Barnett takes this concept and runs a mile with it, playing up the hilarious vanity of the horse ("I read books that would confuse you. I'm smart as fuck."; said books include Gravity's Rainbow, Twilight and Ecrits). Every page has a great joke on it, leading to a solid finish. What makes this a big step forward for Barnett is that this comic isn't just conceptually funny, but the drawings themselves lend a lot to the jokes as well. She sells a joke about how embarrassing ponies are with a really cutesy drawing of a pony, for example. From beginning to end, it's a perfectly-realized bit of  humor.

Second Banana, by Tessa Brunton. This is a funny story centering around Brunton's relationship with her brother regarding belief and influences. As the youngest member of her family, Brunton was susceptible to her brother's tendency to pontificate. Sometimes this led to him sharing "the good stuff" with her, like comics, HP Lovecraft, ghost stories and other unexplained phenomena. However, it also led to his point of view being the only correct one, which made it especially tough because he was precociously intelligent and Brunton struggled academically. This was a power imbalance, and Brunton sadly relates how it came between them, even as her brother meant well. This especially came to light when he abandoned his love of the supernatural for rationalism, a move that essentially cut Brunton off from her steady supply of wonder. Brunton's character work is expressive and loose but grabs the reader's eye because of her attention to detail and decorative aspects of her work. She's careful to add hatching and background details like wallpaper patterns and imaginative details like monsters and haunted woods. Her line weight is thin to the point of fragility, a quality that carries over to the emotional qualities of her work, which combines nostalgia and sadness in equal measure.

Tablegeddon, edited by Rob Kirby. Kirby's one of the best editors in comics, and this zine sees him quietly putting together a comic filled with some intriguing names from the world of alt-comics as well as queer comics, two camps that are rapidly converging and sharing energy these days. Everyone who is an exhibitor at a comics or zine festival can certainly sympathize with the stories told here. Beyond the simple fact that everyone featured here is a cartoonist, many of the creators tend to write about how introverted they are and how tough it is for them to deal with crowds. Max Clotfelter's densely-hatched comic is a nice introduction to the anthology, as it details his first friend in comics, his first (awful) show and his first disappointing experience with comics. Sally Carson and Cara Bean's jam comic about meeting & bonding at a CCS workshop and then tabling together at various shows is inspiring and revealing, especially in how they are able to help each other through shared insecurities and encourage the other to work through it. Their lines mesh well, with Bean's stubby self-caricature and Carson's cute, bespectacled figure making a great visual duo. Bean's line is slightly thicker than Carson's which works to help differentiate their figures a bit more, but both are careful to avoid spotting blacks.

Kelly Froh and Carrie McNinch both write about the downside of tabling: a lack of an audience, a room that's too cold or a table that's too windy, and crippling shyness. Along the same lines, Aron Nels Steinke relates a story (told in his anthropomorphic style of drawing) of tabling with a guy he got into making comics who was suddenly getting TV deals and the relentlessness of certain kinds of fans. Kirby, Mark Campos and Justin Hall all talk about specific experiences, as Kirby relates a difficult time at TCAF, Hall talks about a brutal 20 minutes wearing down a customer until he made a sale, and Campos talks about a "mystery comic" he made that had an amusing punchline. The centerpiece of the comic, Gabby Gamboa's depiction of a family of neanderthals having a picnic discussing their comics, is hilarious, as she really gets at the conversations and pettiness that can take place at these sorts of events. John Porcellino's comic about how any theories predicting a show's success or failure tend to be specious at best. Tony Breed and Jason Martin both did strips about the ups and downs of tabling and the feeling of connection one seeks out at events like this. The seriousness and sincerity of those comics is then paired against the weirdness of Matt Moses recalling a belligerent fan at TCAF, a show held at a library and the sweet hilarity of Rick Worley relating his crush on Dash Shaw at one show. In the former strip, drawn by Jess Worby, the bulging eyes of the patron made everyone think that he was surely going to snap and murder them. In the latter, Worley builds up a fantasy of getting married to Shaw until he's brought down to earth by being told that Shaw was attached...to a woman. Worley's "Bottomless Belly Button...bit overrated, don't you think?" made me laugh out loud. It was one of many such moments in this anthology, one designed to entertain fans and draw nods of understanding from other cartoonists regarding experiences both positive and negative interacting with the public and selling one's art.

The Pursuit of Folly: Today Is The Last Day Of The Rest Of Your Life

Ulli Lust's teenage memoir Today Is The Last Day Of The Rest Of Your Life walks a fine line between being a sort of after school special and a glorification of relentlessly irresponsible behavior. It's important to refer back to the title of the book as a sort of totem that explains just why 17-year-old Lust did what she did. She felt bored and trapped by her life in Austria and was inspired by anarchist and punk movements. When a fellow girl she met had the idea to simply hitchhike to Italy with no money and no passports, it seemed the perfect opportunity to cash in on one's youth, to go where the winds and fate took you. Lust is unsparing in detailing the highs and lows of the experience and the increasingly crazy events that overtook her. Like William Blake's line about pursuing folly, Lust ultimately became wise as a result of her experiences. Because fortune loves a fool, she escaped from her circumstances unscathed, mostly through sheer dumb luck but also a fair amount of guile.

The book opens with a disaffected Ulli at a crossroads. Her parents are urging her to go back to school, but she finds more inspiration hanging out with her punk friends. In essence, she simply wants to drop out of a bourgeois society. That's partly a political rejection as she allies herself with anarchism, but it's also an aesthetic lifestyle choice: rather than live a life of deadened sensation, she wants to try a life where every act and experience is a heightened one, every memory seared into one's brain. That's when she takes off with Edi, whom she met the morning after Edie had had sex with one of her friends. Edie had shown some experience hitchhiking, so the duo just started walking until they fumbled across the Austria-Italy border. The early part of the trip found them dodging policemen (a frequent worry) and living off the land, as their migration brought them a number of idyllic moments.

Throughout the book, there are temporary alliances built on a sense of trusting others on the road. Once in Italy, she starts to learn the price of trusting others, especially men. While she and Edie do manage to find a community of hippies, drop-outs and anarchists living in various parks, Ulli makes the mistake of going off with a couple of guys to the coast. One of the book's darker tones is the way in which a homeless 17-year-old girl is essentially a commodity for men, especially in Italy where the application of the male gaze is relentlessly shameless. She comes to realize that every man who wants to "take care" of her, buy her a meal, etc really just wanted to fuck her and then cast her aside. Edie, on the other hand, was happy to fuck anyone with a pulse, an inclination that made it easy for her to get along with others for a while, but it carried its own price. The book takes a harsh turn when Ulli is raped and then attaches herself to her rapist when she is hungry, homeless and doesn't seem to have other options.

The virgin/whore binary that is so common in hypermasculine cultures was certainly at work here, as her "boyfriend" wanted her to dress better and never, ever disagree with him -- especially in public. That reawakened Ulli's inner rugged individualist and offended her burgeoning feminist sensibilities, though she made the mistake of traveling on to Sicily. That portion of the book was the most fascinating and most bizarre, as Ulli steps into a world that feels like something out of a bad story but was quite real. This was the heart of "family" territory, as the mafia ruled the island and the city of Parma in particular. That Italian hypermasculinity was such that prostitutes weren't allowed to operate in the city because they were immoral, but this only meant that young men were even more brazen and brutal in going after single, unattached women. Women like Ulli.

Her luck seems to take a turn for the better when she is reunited with Edie, who was separated from Ulli as part of a scheme by a would-be rapist. However, Edie winds up being a sort of warped mirror image of Ulli. While Ulli saw her as a fellow free spirit, capable of letting fate and chance determine their days, she also thought of her as a loyal friend, someone she could trust. It was one thing to be constantly disappointed by men on her journey, but being betrayed by Edie would be something else. Yet that's precisely what happens after Edie becomes the girlfriend of the son of a mob boss with a severe learning disability, rendering him brutal and especially stupid.

The core of this book and the essence of her experience was learning to retain one's humanity and dignity in the most dehumanizing and alienating of situations. It wasn't just the threat of rape and being viewed solely as a sexual object that was dehumanizing, but also simply trying to live on a day-to-day basis with no money of one's own. Ulli escapes from the situation with her humanity intact even after being part of harrowing situations like escaping from a mob house, something Edie is not capable of when she later goes back and abandons her friend. Edie is drawn sort of like a human switchblade: long, lean, and angular with spiky black hair. She looks sleek but is really dangerous like a switchblade, and she winds up mercilessly cutting off her friend. She's a hedonist with no moral center, no sense of loyalty and no real emotions. While one of her companions relentlessly calls her stupid (another dehumanizing tactic that Ulli does not stand for), her problem was that she was a near-sociopath, a creature of pure id like a toddler that doesn't understand or care about the consequences of her actions. In many respects, she was the example for Ulli of what not to do and what not to become as a human being. Both young women were working in a moral vacuum, but Edie represented total amorality while Ulli represented a more noble sense of morality, a way of navigating the world that wasn't bourgeois but also wasn't purely selfish. For lack of a better term, she discovered a punk ethic the hard way.

I've rarely seen a book where art and story were in such perfect harmony. Lust employs a loose, expressive line that's naturalistic but quite fluid. The looseness of that line aids Lust in her depiction of the funnier moments of the book, like when Ulli and Edie get crabs and have to shave their public hair. Edie breaking down because she "no longer looks like a woman" was funny and especially telling that this book took place in the 80s, before shaving became a more common and even expected trend. Lust's own self-caricature is a wide (and even wild) eyed woman with crazy, unkempt hair and tattered clothing. Lust also captures the staggering beauty of Rome perfectly, as well as illustrating crippling poverty and the anarchist society of the homeless. The two-tone color scheme grounds the work nicely, providing a pleasant warm surface for the reader to embrace throughout the book's more unpleasant moments. Lust embraces her past as a sort of rite of passage, one that was about living her life according to a certain aesthetic. Lust was after beauty above all else: the beauty of travel, the beauty of total freedom from expectations and consumer culture, the beauty of great cities, and the beauty within others. Even if that quest for the beauty in others resulted in a hideous confrontation with inner ugliness, it never dampened her resolve or her hopes to find that sense of beauty in the world, a quest that continues even today  in her career as an artist. Lust may have lost her naivete' in the course of the story, but she never lost her sense of wonder.

Minicomics: Seitchik, Farrell, Skelly, Dinski, Taylor

Brendon and Going Rate, by Greg Farrell. There's no question that these comics are a major step forward for Ferrell. His Yo Burbalino comics had amusing moments, as it was clear that he was a good storyteller with no end of interesting anecdotes to share, but the stories felt rushed and the execution underworked. He also relied on the cheap joke and shock because they were both easy. With Brendon, a story obviously based partly on his own experiences (though it's explicitly noted as a work of fiction), Farrell retains the crude charms of his previous comics with a far greater sense of restraint and subtlety. This is a really sharp story that has a knowing sense of just how pre-teen boys relate to each other. The story revolves around a porn mag that "Greg" trades with the titular Brendon, a Hispanic kid who's become his best friend. Farrell homes in on the frequently homoerotic relationship young boys have with each other, even as there's a hyperawareness about not really being gay. That extends as far as actually performing sexual acts on each other as a sort of way of less expressing real attraction and more as a way of using their bodies. Farrell also relates tales of cruelty, betrayal and confusion, creating a book that is light on nostalgia and heavy on lives as they were lived, warts and all. Farrell keeps his line simple and utilitarian, rarely varying line weight or using many effects. Instead of using a grid, Farrell has an open page layout, which works because of the way memories and experiences bleed into each other.

While Brendon was Farrell's best effort to date, a look at his short story collection, Going Rate, reveals that this change didn't happen in a vacuum. "White Whale" is an interesting account of Farrell's obsession with one particular missing hip-hop album from his collection, and how he feel actually he after acquires it. "Jumbo Jockey" is about the B&H lunch counter in Manhattan, and Farrell does a great job capturing the essence of the place, the kind of food they serve and the sorts of people who eat there. "420" starts out as what seems to be another tedious story about someone's personal drug habits but turns into a story about personal responsibility and being a role model, all without taking on any kind of faux-moral tone. "I Am The Son Of A Small Business Owner" talks about the realities of the internet and corporations destroying small businesses and talks about the only way a small business can survive is to provide knowledgeable and personable customer service for those who happen upon their store. There are other, more-hastily drawn stories in the book, and while they're appropriately expressive, Farrell's line is too loose in those stories.

Children of Divorce and Still Life #1, by Daryl Seitchik. Seitchik is one of my favorite young cartoonists, and she flexes some different aspects of her talents in these two minis. Still Life has strips in the vein of her recent comic Sub: meditations that dip into magical realism and stream of consciousness thinking. Seitchik uses a very simple, fluid line in relaying stories about wanting to be a ghost (and how she suddenly realized that she had become one after getting high), hilariously overreacting to her toe going numb while watching a show in bed, and flashing back to remembering the sound of an ocean she heard in a beloved sea shell while using it as an ashtray while listening to music now. The way Seitchik draws herself as tiny goes beyond simply being short, as exemplified in the strip "Dinner With An Adult", where she draws herself as just a few inches tall, sitting in a gigantic chair opposite someone asking her if she's depressed and where she sees herself in ten years. These are comics about drifting, about the feeling of being betwixt and between. Fortunately for the reader, they are stylishly drawn and quite funny. The strip where the internet gives her possibilities for why her toe is numb is amusingly drawn, as she conflates "inflamed" with "enflamed" and draws herself on fire. In other strips, the way she spots blacks to create dramatic negative space is striking.

Children of Divorce is not quite as assured in terms of the drawing, but Seitchik displays some skill in the ways in which children act cruelly toward each other. The physical version of this comic is in black and white, which actually wound up flattering her character design a bit more than the way she used color online. The main character fancies herself a witch, giving out fortunes. While she's the lead, she's far from sympathetic, as she's jealous of her best friend giving attention to "Medusa", a girl with a lazy eye who is nonetheless one of the popular kids. I loved the way Seitchik drew thin, flailing limbs and skinny legs looping around. Best of all are her exaggerated faces with contortions worthy of Peter Bagge in some panels and subtle, tiny lines that nonetheless are packed with emotion in others. Seitchik will have a comic out with Oily Comics soon, and I imagine she will shine in that format, especially since she seems comfortable with her style and storytelling abilities. I'm interested in seeing what kinds of stories she'll tell from here.

Operation Margarine #2, #3, by Katie Skelly. Skelly seems really at home in this mod-inflected road story about two women whose paths cross in interesting ways. The first issue set things up for Margarine, a rich girl frequently kept in a mental institution by her mother, and Bon-Bon a tough girl on a motorcycle who simply punches out a guy who hassles her after selling her out. These issues set up what Skelly really wants to do: draw images of the open road, introduce mysterious guys with scars and stylish women with different-colored eyes to hassle them. There are motorcycle and arms dealers in the middle of the desert and a funny diner scene wherein a long-suffering waitress is made to look every bit as interesting as the leads. Skelly clearly loves combining glamor and menace, as Bon-Bon pretty much exudes that on every page. She's like a ronin on a motorcycle, waiting for something to do and someone to protect while trying to think about her past as little as possible. Margarine has been broken for so long that she's looking for someone to put her back together in an entirely different environment. Skelly really plays to her strengths as an artist here: character design, gesture and body language. She minimizes background detail in such a way that it's not lacking on the page when needed, but doesn't interfere with the two leads when she wants the reader to zero in on them. This series will be collected by AdHouse and will undoubtedly look great.

Alarm Clock, by Will Dinski. I've been reviewing Will Dinski's comics since I began High-Low over seven years ago, and he continues to produce thought-provoking, funny and occasionally disturbing work. This mini is a grab-bag of shorter work by Dinski, including an extended sketchbook section. The cover, a tribute to Gluyas Williams' work from the 1930s, leads to a hilarious punchline when one opens up the back cover as well. It's a well-designed gag that adds an enormous amount of character detail in the service of pulling the eye in one direction. Even though this is a series of shorts, Dinski manages a callback gag in the last story from the first in two stories that otherwise have nothing else to do with each other. One's a bit of hyperbole about a man who's always late and the extreme measures he takes to try to reset the clock, and the other's a droll bit of satire about a cruel but dim executive who prefers delegating unpleasant tasks to underlings. In general, each of the strips carries the titular quality of nothing happening and then alarms going off; In "Wait", a man is anxious to shake things up, but his friend tells him to sit still despite an ever-escalating series of crazy events, until the craziest event of all is an opportunity to act. "A Fine Job In The Execution" is about a watch and a conversation a man has with himself sitting alone in a room, imagining various men of authority praising his work.It's an inner dementia at work here, an alarmed mind that is stirred by a timepiece and a possible reminiscence of being a state executioner. Dinski uses a variety of color schemes here to reflect the action; the first story employs shockingly bright colors and exaggerated figures, while "Wait" employs a red and green scheme for key phases of the story, with green representing calm and red representing action. This is a fine sample of work from a smart cartoonist with an impeccable sense of design.

Stethoscope Microphone, by Whit Taylor. This is a real change of pace for Taylor, who generally tends to do autobio and semi-autobio comics. This is a comic about the rise and fall of The Doctors, the greatest funk band of all time, and Taylor takes every music trope she can think of, puts them in a blender, and sets it on Space Bass. Taylor throws in elements from Parliament-Funkadelic, Rick James, the Beatles and every other Behind the Music idea and lets the absurdity flow. Taylor works in color here, which gives her very thin line some definition and greater structure, allowing her to pull off the kind of images she needed for the story to work. Taylor isn't afraid to get very silly, making a woman adopting the persona of Betsy Ross as the main love interest of the narrator. Overall, this is a pleasant diversion that's actually quite well-researched in its own way, and fans of funk in particular will enjoys some of the references.

Fantasy Is Reality: Dear Beloved Stranger

Dino Pai's Dear Beloved Stranger (Top Shelf) was one of the final books to receive a Xeric grant. It's a fascinating and complicated story about the ways in which dreams intersect with and obstruct reality, especially with regard to the creative process. Indeed, the story is about a young man (Dino) who has recently graduated from art school and is finally free to work on his own stories. He finds himself drawn to but afraid of connecting with Cathy, a fellow recent graduate who is also drawn to him, mostly by his intense shyness and sense that he has things to say but can't express them. The story slips into that story/dream, involving a boy looking for the source of a beautiful voice. Pai essentially alternates between a quotidian comic about the creative process and the world of creativity as an actual, living force. He links the ability to create closely with the ability to communicate and build connections; when he's stuck on both of them, Pai marvelously depicts the kind of bored, time-wasting trivialities one engages in in an effort to make projects magically fix themselves.

For Pai, there is no such magic. Indeed, in the middle of his dream world project, failure of imagination bring great peril and even oblivion to its hero. At the same time, the difficulties of Pai's avatar take a physical toll on him, as he collapses in front of Cathy during the story's climax. It's only at the end that we discover that the "beloved stranger" Dino writes to is an unreachable object of affection, an unrequited and one-way love affair that fueled his imagination as a younger man and led him to craft this story. When that person became irrevocably unavailable, it damaged Pai's narrative mid-stream, an interruption that's captured throughout the course of this story. So Dear Beloved Stranger is a comic about making a comic that includes the comic that's being made as part of the comic. That meta-comic interacts with reality in interesting and unexpected ways on a psychological level. It's never quite magical realism, but rather a sort of fluid reality where one's fictional constructs feel as though they are real and part of your life. Considering that authors talk about characters dictating story and going in unexpected direction, that's definitely a kind of a magical conjuring space where the author only has so much control over what's going on.

That's very much how things play out here. Pai's own anxieties make it difficult for him to write a comic that must, in order to be successful, precisely capture just what this person means to him and how transcendentally wonderful she is, but do so in a narrative fashion where his being able to meet her is justified in the text. That's the essential conflict here: Pai can't figure out a way or a scenario where he "deserves" to meet her, because she isn't part of his real life. He's not simply writing wish fulfillment, but rather trying to document a feeling and that feeling's ultimate manifestation. He can't get there and can't ever get there, and that realization spurs the climax and allows him to ultimately finish the book. The device of sharing this story with another, real person for whom there might actually be real feelings in real time makes this approach work and prevents it from eating its own tail, as it were. Pai's refusal to slap on a make-shift happy ending or romance gives it another layer of authenticity. This book is a hero's journey that's really a journey of self-discovery. It's a journey that's only completed when the hero realizes that his initial goal wasn't really ever in his grasp to begin with, and that truth is more important than fantasy.

The only real problem I had with the book is that Pai circles back around the same ideas and themes several times before the climax. I think he could have gotten across the same ideas and made the book much more powerful by paring down the middle, which drags quite a bit. Pai's visuals are compelling and powerful, but some of that initial impact is watered down when the same effects are repeated throughout the story. I understand that Pai was trying to convey a certain kind of pacing and ennui at several points throughout the story, but I wish he had had the confidence in his readers to pick up on the subtleties and nuances of his story without having to repeat them multiple times.

At The Zoo: Tune Book 2: Still Life

The second (and hopefully not final) volume of Derek Kirk Kim and Les McClaine's Tune takes its time and really lets the reader marinate in its hero's dilemmas that get crazier and crazier. The first volume introduced art student Andy Go, who quit school anticipating a lucrative career in illustration and instead wound up living with his parents. Kim combined a love story, art school horror stories and spoofing stereotypes about demanding Asian parents while throwing a huge curveball at the readers in the end: the job that Andy gets is as a zoo exhibit in a parallel dimension. Everyone more or less accepts this matter-of-factly, but Andy is frustrated upon learning that his long-time unrequited crush in fact shares her feelings for him but is now apart from her. That's where this volume picks up: watching Andy adjust to life as a zoo exhibit.

This volume is illustrated by McClaine, who seamlessly takes Kim's character designs and makes them just a tad cuter. Otherwise, there's not much of a noticeable change between the two volumes. McClaine's characters are expressive and work well either as simple figures or more naturalistic ones, depending on what Kim calls for. Kim loves to use a lot of exaggeration to express feelings in his characters, and McClaine runs with that nicely, smoothly rendering Andy's frustrations, hopes and dreams. When Kim introduces a premise, he really likes to see just how far he can expound upon it before moving on to the next idea. At the same time, he also slyly lays some hints in what seem to be trivial scenes regarding story concepts that are explained later on. This keeps the reader off-balance in an interesting way. For the first part of this volume Kim explores Andy's solitary existence as a zoo exhibit. He learns to relax and even enjoy the job, thanks to the interdimensional aliens replicating his house exactly and filling it with all his favorite books, music and TV shows.

The first wrinkle thrown at Andy is that he was tricked into signing a contract that wasn't for a year: it was for life. He would never see any of his friends (or more importantly, the girl of his dreams) again. After initially trying to be friendly to the aliens watching him in the zoo, he instead grows angry at them. The next wrinkle is that he learns he can talk to his neighbor, whose advice may well be dubious. The third wrinkle is that he's due to get a female mate. Throw in one of the zookeepers being fascinated by his ability to draw (art is a concept foreign to the aliens), and there are all sorts of plot shenanigans that keep the reader guessing. Every one of those plot twists is earned by Kim's insistence on telling the story slowly, letting the reader get to know Andy warts 'n all. At the same time, some of the ethically dubious things that Andy does (like read his crush's journal to discover that she loves him) wind up getting punished in funny and unexpected ways. The volume ends with Andy and his new roommate plotting an escape and their next-door neighbor making himself known to them in person for mysterious (and probably sleazy) reasons. Whether or not there's a third volume will depend on how well the book sells. Tune was being published as a webcomic (as befits Kim's roots) before being published by First Second (not an uncommon move these days), but Kim is actually paying a real wage to McClaine in order to draw it, which is certainly a refreshing and professional approach in the world of comics. There's been no news that I know of regarding how the first volume did, but I get the sense that Kirk will need a couple of more to finish out this story. I hope he does, considering how adeptly he moves between slice-of-life fiction and science-fiction.

Baited Expectations: The Cute Girl Network

Written by MK Reed & Greg Means and drawn by Joe Flood, The Cute Girl Network (First Second) takes on the notion of what it means to be in a bad relationship. It's about going with one's gut and own two eyes rather than the experiences of others. It's actually remarkably devoid of artificial twists and turns thrown in to give the potential lovers a conflict to battle against. Instead, Jack and Jane both have to battle the titular Network: a group of young, single women in the city of Brookport (a Portland/Brooklyn amalgam) who exchange information on their ex-boyfriends and stage interventions if necessary when they see someone going into a situation lacking what they deem to be crucial knowledge.

Jane is a skater who works in a skate shop, while Jack sells soup at a food court. What's interesting about the thrust of the book is that while neither character is very complicated, it's that very lack of complexity that draws them together. Jane faces rampant sexism at her job and at the skating park, a point hammered home in a sharply-written scene where she chews out a guy who first dismissed her ability to skate and then deigned to hit on her when she proved himself. Jack is lazy, spacy and clumsy. He's also kind, devoted and funny.

Jack's roommates include a true sexist pig of a bro and a devout feminist, but they all somehow get along because they all share their views openly and enjoy berating each other in a playing the dozens kind of way. I'm not precisely sure what the division of labor was between Reed and Means, but dialogue is Reed's specialty and a big strength of the book is its verisimilitude. It's that sense of being true to life that gives what would otherwise be cardboard thin characters some depth and heft. Still, one can't help but sense the writers of the book pushing back at the sheer shrillness of Network leader Harriet and her dogged insistence that she knows what's best for Jane. Jane is given an intervention by the Network and is taken around to meet several of Jack's ex-girlfriends, all of whom share hilarious horror stories about atrocious birthday presents, forgetting to show back up at an apartment for an anniversary dinner, talking to a girlfriend's mother about their sex life in excruciating (if oblivious) detail. Jack is aware that Jane is being fed this information and is on pins and needles regarding Jane's decision. Will she listen to the Network's (in the face of scold Harriet and her friend who also disastrously dated Jack) urges to dump him, or will she ignore the facts and take a chance?

Before and after images by Joe Flood. Note the level of detail.

The answer is not in the least surprising to anyone who read and saw that Jane consistently enjoyed being with Jack and that he made her feel good. Means and Reed suggest that in a way, the Network wound up subverting their own attempts to steer Jane away from Jack. First, Jane's stubborn and contrary nature made it unlikely for her to do something just because someone told her it was for the best, even someone she was friends with. Second, finding out someone's worst qualities from the very beginning can ground a relationship if there's a real attraction there and squash the fantasy construction we might have. Jane herself suggests that just because Jack wasn't right for these other women didn't mean he wouldn't be right for her, because she had little in common with the people she met. For his part, Jack gives an honest accounting of his many screw-ups but also provides context lacking in the horror stories; more to the point, he seemed motivated to try as hard as possible. Reed and Means give the book a romantic ending, but they also notably stay away from showing an epilogue, updating the state of the relationship in later times.

Another thing that makes the book work is the slightly scratchy and messy style of Joe Flood. Better known for drawing monsters and the like, the bit of grit he adds to the proceedings is not only appropriate to the characters, it helps steer the book away from the smooth, cutesy and more typical First Second house style. It especially helped that the book was in black and white, in part because Flood was more than happy to fill up his panels with the detritus and other details of a city. He didn't need bright, happy colors to fill in gaps. Reed and Means do throw him a bone by having him draw some pages from the Twilight-type series that's mocked relentlessly by the female members of the cast (yet secretly liked). I definitely sensed Reed's hand here, since she created a hit fantasy series for her book Americus.

Despite occasional foul language, I still see this falling squarely in a slightly upper level of young adult reading, like the sort of thing a 16 or 17 year old might enjoy. Ultimately, it's a well-crafted book that's not quite as interesting as Reed's prior book for First Second (Americus), even though it tries its best to provide a new, meta wrinkle on the romance comic. Indeed, many classic romance comics have plot twists that reveal how scummy an exciting bad boy really is, and end with the heroine tearfully intoning "If only I had known!" The Cute Girl Network shows how inside knowledge often reveals things that aren't as important to some as they are to others.