31 Days of Short Reviews: The Index

For those who asked about a meta-post containing an index of everything I did during my 31 Days of Short Reviews, here we go:


1. Phil McAndrew.

2. Renaud Dillies

3. Margaret De Heer.

4. David J. Zelman.

5. Lilli Carre' and Thereza Rowe.

6. Batton Lash.

7. Nick Andors.

8. Victor Kerlow.

9. Jeff Zwirek.

10. Veronica Mautner

11. Jimmy Gownley.

12. Joe Infurnari.

13. Josh Simmons.

14. Jason Walz.

15. Caitlin Cass.

16. Mike Maihack.

17. Dark Revelation.

18. Dave Kelly/Laura Antal.

19. Team Society League.

20. Yuichi Yokoyama.

21. Hellbound.

22. Junko Mizuno.

23. Kevin Scalzo.

24. Waller/Worley/Vance.

25. Basil Wolverton.

26. Guido Crepax.

27. Not Your Mother's Meatloaf.

28. Logicomix.

29. Shigeru Sugiura.

30. St Louis Ink & Drink.

31. Seo Kim.

31 Days of Short Reviews #31: Seo Kim

Seo Kim's Cat Person (Koyama Press) is a consistently hilarious debut. Each page features a series of loose, autobiographical gags centering around Kim's cat, life as an artist and person in a long-distance relationship. The first section, about her cat Jimmy, had the potential to be enormously lame and cliched (how many cartoon books about cats do we really need?), but Kim finds ways to elicit genuine laughs thanks to the way she portrays her cat's behavior and because of her drawing style. Anyone who has a cat knows that they are cute, fluffy little fur-shedding murder machines who view the hunt as a form of play. Cats domesticate humans, not the other way around--they expect food, drink and a clean litter box at all times, and then they might deign to interact with you. The first strip in the book features Kim showing her cat a huge bug that she wants him to get rid of. The cat takes his time, plays with his prey, pops it in his mouth, lets it crawl out again and then pops it back in, chewing it up. The final panel shows Kim peeking around the corner, a look of total disgust on her face. Another strip's first panel depicts a beaming Kim holding her cat in a hug, blissed out from the experience. The second panel depicts an equally happy look on the cat's face, only he's buried his claws deep into her back and drawn considerable blood. Her understanding of the weirdness of cat behavior, like mewing frantically because his food bowl doesn't have precisely the right amount of kibble in it, drew another knowing laugh.

Kim's art sells every gag. She basically uses two in this book. The first is a simple, almost stick-figure approach. Those are the strips that rely upon the concept for the gag, with the art there only to support it. The second is a slightly more detailed and more grotesque approach, such as in that gag with her cat eating the bug. She has a way of drawing her face scrunched up in fear, anger or despair that is absolutely hilarious, especially when she adds dabs of red or pink. The way she draws her nose like a set of three knuckles adds to that weird distinctiveness. There's another strip titled "Asian Glow" wherein she turns red after one drink, leading one friend to ask her if she's drunk (which she denies) and then another to scream it at her (which she angrily denies). In that latter scene, Kim's burning red cheeks and exaggerated facial expression once again sell the joke completely. There's nothing especially innovative about any of these strips. Autobio comics about one's cat, solitary existence as an artist and long-distance relationships are pretty much de rigeur, especially on the web. What sets Kim's work apart is her absolute control over her line and use of color and the fact that she is undeniably funny. One gets the sense that no matter what kind of comic she chooses to do next, it will be just as funny, skilled and fun to look at.

31 Days of Short Reviews #30: St. Louis Ink & Drink Anthologies

The St. Louis-based Ink and Drink collective has been publishing a couple of genre-themed anthologies every year since 2010. As one would expect from mostly amateur cartoonists doing genre comics, the results are all over the place. The running serial that somehow appears in every issue involving a teen and the tentacle monster that lives in his comics box, written by Jon Scorfina and drawn by Stephanie Main, feels like bottom-drawer webcomic fodder, mistaking references to pop culture for actual jokes. Then there are the workhorses like Carlos Gabriel Ruiz and writer/editor Jason Green. Their stories are all decent genre stuff; nothing revelatory, but nothing embarrassing either. Ruiz in particular is the one artist who has noticeably improved as a draftsman over the three year period that these books represent. Most of the stories in these books slid out of my consciousness the moment I read them, though a few artists caught my attention and my interest from volume to volume.

First and foremost is cover artist Adam Davenport. Working in the classic pulp/Frank Frazetta style, his covers for the collections are so on-the-nose with regard to the theme that they're tongue-in-cheek. I especially enjoyed the cover of Blasted!, the science fiction anthology. Yes, the "drink" portion of the collective means that every title is alcohol-related: Spirits of St. Louis (horror), Shots In The Dark (crime), Off The Wagon (western) and Hammered (fantasy). His occasional work on interior stories is also study and attractive, though it begged for color. My favorite artists in the anthology in every issue were Sam and Noah Washburn. Sam is the illustrator and Noah the writer, and their mesh of idosyncrasies stand out each time. "Raw Head and Bloody Bones" from the horror anthology is a comic that's stylish and crude, with an unusual use of close-ups and spotting blacks. The story is one of the few that's actually strange and unsettling in that book. "Case 481" in the crime anthology is a nice mix of crime and horror, with a two page spread jammed with disorienting, terrifying panels when we learn what's behind a seemingly routine insurance investigation. The way they suddenly end the hard-boiled narrative of the story's main character is especially inspired. "Alien Attack" is yet another visceral story that highlights the way that S.Washburn can make a panel funny through exaggeration. "Great Moments In Herding History" is just plain funny, as both Washburns quickly abandon the concept to just write and draw wacky stuff. The other interesting artistic find is Christina "Steenz" Stewart, who rapidly improved her cartoony, expressive style between a couple of issues to find her footing as an artist whose work is inspired by animation (and it seems, Kyle Baker in particular) but still maintains its storytelling fluidity. The other artist of note that I wanted to mention is Kevin Wolf. His "Elephant Graveyard Blackjack" is both viscerally unsettling (as a dead man and a dead elephant wager body parts and skin in a game of blackjack) and visually striking with its thick linework and scratchy details. I know that their most recent editions involve romance and stories local to St. Louis; I'll be curious to see if the artists were able to raise their game above the level of standard genre tropes in engaging those subjects.

31 Days of Short Reviews #29: Shigeru Sugiura

Last of the Mohicans, the first (and unfortunately last) book in the "10 Cent Manga" series from the now-defunct PictureBox, is not only an intriguing comic but a fantastic work of scholarship. Editor Ryan Holmberg not only translated this very odd adaptation by popular cartoonist Shigeru Sugiura of the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, he wrote a long essay on the context of the book in terms of Sugiura's career and manga in general. This was actually a comeback book for Sugiura in 1973 after he had done a more cartoony and silly adaptation in 1953. Reading the book before reading the explanatory essay, I was struck by the way that Sugiura dizzyingly switched between bigfoot cartooning, typical wide-eyed manga tropes and naturalistically-depicted characters and lush backgrounds. Sometimes he did this all in the same panel, as he drew quickly-paced and humorous action sequences drizzled with pure comic relief and gritty violence. The mix of Eastern and Western drawing styles is obvious even to a reader such as myself who isn't an expert on the artist or the manga scene at that time.

Holmberg goes into great detail with an incredible wealth of artistic evidence, just how and from where Sugiura drew his inspiration. He looked at a lot of Alex Toth, Jesse Marsh, and Fred Ray Western-genre comics, whose work couldn't have been more different from the traditional manga style. From Toth he adapted the ways bodies moved in space and certain other structural qualities. From Ray he took a lot of action sequences. From Marsh he took the lush backgrounds. He mashed all of this up with his own popular "funny" style (as opposed to the more straight-ahead drawings of Osamu Tezuka), leading to a perfectly composed and visually discordant and anarchic final product that may have relied too much on racial caricatures, but applied those grotesque distortions to whites as well as Native Americans. From Sugiura's perspective, everything was open for that kind of depiction, just as he depicted several of the Native American heroes and villains in a heroic style. Seeing heroic characters side-by-side with wacky caricatures, all in the same cause of trying to kill each other was wonderfully disorienting, an effect that was entirely intentional on Sugiura's part. It was all a part of the way that Japan absorbed American culture and then created something new, weird and wonderful as a result. Hopefully, another smart published will continue the series, because I've never seen the precise appeal of particular manga artists explicated in such a clear and entertaining fashion.

31 Days of Short Reviews #28: Logicomix

Logicomix is an unusual comic given that it's both a biographical comic about a famous logician/philosopher, a comic about the history of logic and an autobiographical comic about the story's creative team debating its approach with regard to its subject. It has moments of being quite gripping and other moments where the creators seem to lose their footing, especially in those autobiographical segments. The premise is an intriguing one: it's about the philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell and his tireless quest to create a logical set of first principles in mathetmatics. At the same time, the principle writer Apostolos Doxiadis is engaged with his friend and theoretical computer scientist Christos H. Papadimitriou regarding key aspects of the story, debating him throughout about the nature of Russell's struggle as well as occasionally clarifying and doing some further explication of the stakes involved in this struggle.

The framing device they used was ingenious: a Russell lecture prior in an American university prior to American involvement in World War II. Russell was known for his pacifism and protests regarding World War I, and he was asked by a number of anti-war protesters to speak out against America joining World War II. He responded with a lecture on "The Role of Logic on Human Affairs" that began with him going over his life's story. That lecture allowed the occasional interruption by the authors and various other segues. The bits about Russell being raised by a stern grandmother who kept the fate of his parents a secret from him until he discovered it on his own were absolutely riveting. Russell's antipathy toward his religious education and immediate excitement upon being taught how to do his first mathematical proof were other interesting biographical markers. I did find it interesting that the authors mostly chose to skip over Russell's loudly avowed atheism, because this to me seemed part of the fuel for his refusal to accept any kind of first principle on faith.

The whole point of Russell's lecture was that reconciling logic and human nature is just as doomed as his quest to provide first principles of mathematics made of unshakable logic. His own logical paradox that he created that obliterated the usefulness of set theory as a potential foundational pillar set him about on a fruitless quest to somehow circumnavigate his own objection. He agreed with his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", in that the most important problems are those that cannot be addressed by logic (and language). A running theme throughout the book is Papadatos wondering out loud why so many logicians' lives ended in madness, paranoia and outright tragedy, as though their descent into pure reason cut them off from their emotional lives. Papadimitriou disagrees, saying that while logic may not have gotten its foundation, its thinkers went in the opposite direction to create the computers that have changed the world for the better.The creative crew tried to dovetail the essential problems of this foundational quest with a performance of Aeschylus' Oresteia, a play that's all about resolving paradoxes with lateral thinking, in much the same way as a computer can be seen as a way of cutting through the suppression of knowledge. It's an interesting idea that is not resolved; instead, it merely serves to tantalize the reader. The problem with Logicomix is that it's neither fish nor fowl. It's not a fleshed-out work of philosophy (indeed, its dependence on the tiresome nature of analytical philosophy and insistence on ignoring continental philosophy or quantum physics got on my nerves). It fails as a biography of Russell, even as it reveals a number of interesting facts about him. The artwork is entirely perfunctory: functional but blandly attractive at every turn, with page compositions that merely support the text rather than add much to it. It's not a successful or fleshed-out debate between Papdatos and Papadimitriou, nor does it do much to advance Papadatos' journalistic interest in the connection between logic and madness. It tries to do too much while resolving too little. Its scope and ambition is impressive, but as a reader I sensed that the book got away from its creators very early on and the resulting product was a kind of failed attempt to get it back under their control--much like Russell and collaborator Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, the failed attempt to reconcile Russell's paradox while providing a foundational theorem.

31 Days of Short Reviews #27: Not Your Mother's Meatloaf

The artists Saiya Miller and Liza Bley set out to make a sex education book based not so much on charts, figures and prescriptive behavior but rather individual experiences. Their idea was to nudge along their own fledgling careers as cartoonists by collecting stories from over fifty writers and cartoonists, divvying them up into appropriate categories. The result is a sort of punk rock version of "Free To Be, You And Me" called Not Your Mother's Meatloaf. Miller and Bley actually do very little cartooning themselves in the book, instead providing just spot illos in their chapters where they talk about their personal experiences with one of their chosen topics. Those include Beginnings, Bodies, Health, Identity, Age, Endings and Personal Best. As a reader, I was disappointed that the 181 page book had so much room devoted to pure text, mostly because the transition was sometimes jarring. There was a certain power in how much Miller and Bley poured their hearts out in a confessional manner throughout the book, but they also tended to repeat themselves a bit at certain intervals. I found myself skimming their commentary that marked the beginning of each chapter in order to get to the comics, which created a somewhat disjointed reading experience.

That said, their choices for contributors for the most part were spot-on, even as the vast majority of them were first-timers or amateurs. The only name I recognized was the excellent Mat Defiler, whose work looked the sharpest and most organized. Defiler's strip about ageism with regard to sex was funny and sharp, pointing out the unfairness of excluding the elderly from the discourse regarding sex. However, the many other strips are crude and raw, both in terms of skill level and content. In the context of this book, that's not a bad thing, because that immediacy, that rawness is exactly what Bley and Miller are going for. And as the book's foreword writer Joyce Farmer notes, "Not everyone will like every story. If this happens to you, just open yourself to a new perspective. Or just turn the page."

Indeed, I found some of the stories to be pretentious and not at all in the spirit of what the editors were trying to accomplish. That was especially true of the pieces that were essentially a single illustration accompanied by a long piece of scrawled-out text. On the other hand, there were a couple of dozen delightful discoveries in this book, some from cartoonists who preferred not to use their full or real names. (It was unfortunate that there was no actual contributor's list for those who did want others to find out more about their comics.) Basha Smolen's anecdote about going to nude beaches as a child was witty and cleverly drawn. Timothy Sinaguglia's story about the excitement yielded when he used to dress up as a girl and stare in the mirror was incredibly intimate and delicately drawn. The artist Kate's "Trouble With My Body" is one of many stories revealing the pain felt in dealing with societal standards and lacking an outlet to express them. The same is true for Jessica Ryan's "The Appointment" (drawn by Nik Masonfield), which is about a horrendous experience at a gynecologist's office, one that was invasive of her personal space and breached trust issues. The book is notable in how many of the stories come from a queer perspective as well as different racial perspectives. The book also goes into detail regarding relationships, giving voice to the various kinds of abuse one can suffer in a toxic relationship--especially emotional abuse. It also talks about kinks and fetishes in a healthy and relaxed manner. Overall, Bley and Miller have created something that is educational but rarely didactic, because so many of the stories are so personal. I can imagine that for queer youth in particular, this book will seem like a miracle. However, for any young person, hearing stories from other young people will be empowering and lead to better sexual and emotional decision-making. It's not a perfect package and it has a lot of rough edges, but the sincerity that went into this book can be felt on every page.

31 Days of Short Reviews #26: Guido Crepax

Guido Crepax's adaptation of Pauline Raege's The Story of O matches up an artist with astounding skills with subject matter I have little interest in. The Italian artist was well-known for his psychedelic/erotic style of art in his Valentina series, but The Story of O takes that to another level. Years before the pedestrian Fifty Shades of Grey series, The Story of O brought bondage & discipline/sado-masochism (BDSM) to public consciousness like a hammer. It is a perfect marriage of text and image, as Crepax correctly focuses on the degradation and humiliation aspects of the sexual transactions rather than emphasize the actual erotic quality of the sexual acts themselves. His women are beautiful but slender and the men range from beautiful to trollish, which in itself is a function of how degrading their floggings, forced penetrations, and general state of being dominated at any given time happen to be. The very spare plot starts with the titular O being "trained" at a house called Roissy, then moves on to her lover sharing her with his half-brother (an even cruel master), then moves on to her seducing another woman into the lifestyle, and concludes with her being branded and experiencing the thrill of total submission. The comic simply illustrates, in loving detail and with a dizzying array of complicated page layouts, every act of pain and humiliation that O experiences. It makes no attempt whatsoever at trying to explain how or why she got into this relationship or why submission is something she wanted so desperately, as the book simply starts off at Roissy. Her lovers indicate that she's free to leave at any time, but if she's to stay with them, she must submit totally. The book's greatest triumph is that it manages to balance its pleasure schedule, so to speak, to both dominants and submissives, as the book is told from the point of view at both at various times. This book unapologetically gets at the heart of BDSM from the very first page and is totally unrelenting. For some, this will be a bonus. For others, this adaptation released multiple times from NBM's Eurotica line will be good reason to stay away.