Silver Sprocket: I. Rotman, J Woodall, Io/Dukes/Warner/Fisher

No Gods, No Dungeon Masters, by Io, Rachel Dukes, Andy Warner & Hannah Fisher. Published by Avi Ehrlich, Silver Sprocket has become a publisher at the intersection of punk culture and geek culture. After years of releasing punk records, Ehrlich slowly made the transition to comics, and their most recent line of comics has cemented this. This mini was reprinted from the Subcultures anthology published a couple of years back, polished up a bit and recolored. The story is very much about a genderqueer person deeply steeped in RPG and geek culture who also identifies as an anarchist and part of punk culture. The story involves them going from a D&D session to helping thwart a police crackdown on a squat ("he just started screaming 'cast magic missile' and throwing bottles"), wondering why this cultural intersection didn't seem as natural to others as it did to them. Dukes was a perfect artist to portray this, as a queer person also deeply rooted in geek culture and punk politics. As such, there's a cheery, bright quality to this comic that carries over into the more political aspects of the story, since they are folded into the main character's fantasy life anywya

Girls, by Jenn Woodall. One of the big questions frequently asked by Silver Sprocket is why women (cis and trans), genderqueer folk and people of color aren't more readily accepted in punk/anarchist communities. Ben Passmore's brilliant Your Black Friend takes down the racial aspects of this in a measured, funny and angry way (he richly deserved his Eisner nomination) and Woodall's Girls, a collection of mostly silent images that scream more than a thousand words each, handles sexism. Often, quite literally with a baseball bat. It's a spiritual twin of Hellen Jo's Frontier #2, only with a different kind of aesthetic and purpose. Above all else, this is a comic about agency actively and forcefully expressing themselves in the world  in a variety of ways, from a variety of perspectives and aesthetics. From the young woman vomiting flowers to the weary astronaut on a moon orbiting Saturn, this is one long howl against discrimination, objectification, rape culture, violence against women and the patriarchy in general. It's also very much an affirmative display of women, not just a reaction. Woodall is a talented illustrator who manages to combine fantastical elements with an expressive naturalism. Every woman is vividly brought to life on their own terms, and Woodall emphasizes that despite a common desire to resist and struggle, the ways in which they do that differ for everyone here. There's also a sense of joy to be found in the righteous anger expressed in this comic, as it's a part of claiming that agency.

Siren School, by Isabella Rotman. This is a perfectly executed series of jokes about mansplaining. Rotman takes the sirens of myth and conceptualizes them having to learn modern techniques on how to lure men, as simply sitting on a rock and looking beautiful doesn't cut it anymore. Instead, each of the sirens develops a patter that flatters and encourages men to mansplain to them about cars, video games, Star Wars, fantasy sports and especially allowing men to think that the sirens don't recognize their own beauty and that only men can bring it out of them. The siren wearing glasses and saying that she plays video games, but not real video games, is a hilarious stab at the heart of the heinous "gamer gate" controversy and the whole "fake geek girl" nonsense that is so prevalent in pop culture. Each page is a single panel that continues to build until the inevitable: a siren showing her teeth, getting ready to reel in her prey. The concept of sirens playing to men's fantasies in an entirely different but modern way is a hilarious one, only Rotman tells the story not so much to emphasize the ways men are weak, but rather the way that their egos blind them to reality as they treat women like the weak-willed and ill-informed objects that the sirens pretend to be. It's smart, funny and just the right length at 22 pages.

Mini-Kus! of the Week #13: M.Ahokoivu, E.Valve, M.Sienczyk

Mini-Kus #10: Otso, by Mari Ahokoivu. This story of a bear astronaut takes a highly surprising turn early on. Ahokoivu mixes a friendly, simple line with a green color pencil wash as to astronaut is told to enter "hypersleep" in order to reach his destination in the stars. That's a clever take on hibernation, of course, but what actually happens is a mix of the strange and horrifying. In hyperspace, his ship is overtaken by a trio of bloodthirsty aliens, who attack him for unknown reasons in a series of visceral, orange-stained pages that are surprisingly disturbing. As always, simplicity and suggestion are far more frightening than complexity of image and gore. The final twist is that the aliens seemed to be there to help the bear fulfill his mission of being out in the stars, just in a way that was simultaneously terrible, beautiful and poetic. This is another one of those issues of mini-Kus! where the length of the story is perfect for the subject matter, as well as the size of the pages. The reader is given a glimpse into the mysteries of the universe, and all we're allowed to see is what's on these very small, mini-comics sized pages.

Mini-Kus #11: All You Need Is Love, by Emmi Valve. This is a charming, visually interesting autobio comic that explores relationships and love outside of romance. Valve uses a thick, chunky line for her hand-drawn panels that reflect the rough, spontaneous nature of her drawing. At the same time, within each panel her line is thin enough to detail delicate aspects of her environment as well as provide cross-hatching. Hers is a heavy world, weighed down by depression and expectation. Like many in that state, basic self-care seems entirely impossible. Fortunately, her platonic friend Joakim stops by to give her encouragement, help and a push in the right direction. They bond over the Beatles, coffee and a trivia quiz, as Joakim essentially engages her in opposite action: healthy activities that make her feel better but are the opposite of what her malaise wants her to do. The watercolors in the piece become subtly bright as the story goes on, reflecting the fact that this isn't a cure, but rather a reprieve. The way Valve focuses on specifics in the story is the key to its success; she doesn't try to make any larger points about love, work or success because doing so would rob the story of its personal power.

Mini-Kus #12: Historyjki, by Maciej Sienczyk. This mini is like reading an especially strange series of vignettes from Ripley's Believe It Or Not. There's the same straight face in presenting the absurd, the same stiff line, and the same total commitment in telling the story. There's a story of a tribe on a small island, a frightening old man with oversized testicles, and a tribe that travels in a formation the shape of the old man. There's a piece about a song made up during sweeping the floor that becomes an epic about a woman whose bra is stolen off of her when she dies, and how horrible this is. There's a robber foiled by touching a piece of food in a man's mouth shaped like the robber surrendering, tall tales surrounding bread and frightening bread fauns that walk around at night, and the boy who could only survive if kept in boiling water. The latter had to wear a suit like an iron lung/pot-bellied stove but managed to have a wife and children! These stories are remarkably dense but short, packing a treasure trove of false facts in just three or four pages each. The colors are deliberately flat, refusing to betray any sense of sensationalism in these otherwise whacked-out stories, as Sienczyk sticks to his shtick relentlessly.

Minis: L.Luna/P.Wishbow, H.Fisher, R.Jordan

Cosmoknights, by Hannah Fisher. This is a great example of how younger creators have completely eradicated the boundaries between genre comics and alternative comics. This is a slice-of-life comic that slowly reveals its more fantastical details about two young women from very different societal castes who develop an intense friendship. Tara, as we learn, is royalty. Pan, her best friend, lives a more hardscrabble existence but is in many ways her friend's connection to the outside world. This comic is all about moments and the ways in which the two characters relate to each other, and as such, it's heavy on body language cues. Fisher has a strong sense of line but an even stronger sense of how to use color as the key element of her emotional narrative. There's one sequence where the friends are at a nighttime, outdoors concert where the blacks, purples and blues provide an emotional backdrop for the friends dancing, and then later Pan shows Tara a spectacular view of the two moons of her planet. (This is when it becomes explicit that this is a science-fiction story.)

When Pan helps her friend escape from how prescribed her fate is about to become, she does it knowing that she will be arrested and will be separated from her friend no matter what. As the back cover notes, a knight can be "the devoted champion of a lady", and that's precisely the role Pan plays for Tara in this first installment of a much longer story. Fisher is able to make this comic a complete story in and of itself, with a fully realized emotional arc. Obviously, there's a longer narrative arc in the offing, but it's clear that the series' emotional arc is its most important component.

Give, by Pam Wishbow/Hunt, by Leigh Luna. This is the last release of the sadly departed Yeti Press, but it's a good one, spotlighting two up-and-coming cartoonists. Wishbow's creepy comic about plumbing the mysteries of the forest uses a sickly green as a spot color as the story's narrator tries to resurrect a dead mouse using various herbs and ephemera she finds in the forest. When she's eventually successful, she learns that getting what she wanted wasn't necessarily what was good for her, as the forest gave and then took it away. Wishbow's art is dynamic and abstracted in the way children's illustrations sometimes are, popping off the page with powerful, stylized compositions. The way Wishbow incorporated text into the art itself made the comic more immersive, creating a world that the reader is drawn into.

Luna's story juxtaposes multiple bright colors against a pitch-black story, as tradition dictates that the mothers of a small town must put their daughters out into the woods with the wolves for a night. Tellingly, there is no reason given as to why the women allow this: it simply happens, because the wolves take them. The most the women can do is prepare them, fixing their hair and putting them in beautiful dresses as a kind of "preparation" that is not actually a safeguard of any kind. The comic is a brutal condemnation of rape culture without once using the word, with the ending featuring the women taking the sons of the wolves to "teach them to be good". The comic goes from a multigenerational commiseration of helplessness and inevitability to a seizing of power and agency. There's a delicacy throughout the comic in terms of the figurework and use of color, and that doesn't change even at the end.

Duane's Big Walk, by Rusty Jordan. This is a kind of catch-all zine for some of Jordan's recent short stories involving his Duane character. Jordan's trademark is exploring various contrasts with blacks and shades of gray, with Duane musing existentially with his bird friend Christian. There's a bizarre puppet/claymation story featuring a TV newswoman whose story starts to hilariously and disturbingly unravel as the comic proceeds. The worlds that Jordan creates are evocative and strange, full of losers, bottom-feeders, hard-travelers and the desperate. "Off The Schneid!" puts them all together in a single story and lets them all intermingle. A lost romance is rekindled. A friendship is repaired. A bar is the setting for all of this, as all of these desperate people become a community of sorts. There is warmth to be found in Jordan's world, even if it's covered up by grime and toil. It's reflected in his grotesque but friendly character design, all lumps and bulging eyes and tufts of hair out of place. These characters are familiar, like on the edge of one's social circle from years ago. There's a lingering sense of absurdity in Jordan's comics and a touch of sadness combined with an unformed but still present sense of hope.

Alex Nall: Let Some Word That Is Heard Be Yours

Let Some Word That Is Heard Be Yours, by Alex Nall. Nall has written a number of comics about teaching that are interesting, but this is an interesting long-form book that he created via fundraiser. There are three narratives that are intertwined here. First is Nall's own narrative as a teacher who is struggling, with one belligerent student in particular being a relentless thorn in his side. Second is Nall's partner, who is also a teacher, struggling trying to teach languages to slightly older kids. The third narrative is a timeline of Fred "Mister" Rogers, the famous children's TV host known for his extraordinary gentleness. (There's a sub-narrative involving Nall talking to a teacher friend of his via computer). The comic is mostly about finding one's path and how to figure out if what you're doing at the moment is what's best for you. Nall struggles at his school with the belligerent kid, Kevin, and he regrets how he loses his temper with him even as Kevin antagonizes and even hits other kids. Nall takes solace in watching reruns of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and finding out more about his life, as Rogers took a long time to figure out his own path.

Nall goes into some detail about Rogers, noting how important it was for him to have a diverse cast and challenge gender roles--but only up to a point, as he didn't want a gay cast member to openly come out and even encouraged him to get married to a woman. Rogers was essentially picking his battles and openly said that he didn't think society is ready, but the cast member (Francois) noted that if he had allowed him to come out, it might have accelerated acceptance in society for an entire generation of children. Nall depicts Rogers as a complex but ultimately loving and accepting person who had a profound impact on not just his viewers, but everyone who worked for him. There's even an amusing sidebar where a young cameraman on his show named George Romero was trying to recruit one of the show's actresses for a certain zombie movie he was making.

Nall mostly sticks to a 2 x 3 grid here, abandoning it from time to time for a splash page for effect. His figurework is rough and cartoony, and there are times his use of color overwhelms individual panels. However, he's able to consistently get across the heart of his story, and the time fracturing of his narrative is effective in blending together several different emotional concerns. Sometimes in the end, Nall implies, someone needs a lucky break in times of difficulty, as he received and Rogers received many times in his career. Sometimes you need a single person to reach out and make what you're doing seem worthwhile, and that can make a tough job worth it. Nall also explicitly says that teaching is a rough road, and that there's nothing wrong with stepping away if it's not for you, as his partner decides to do. Perhaps if she had received the kind of support she needed, she might have stayed. Perhaps not. The point of the story, from Mister Roger's point of view, is that we all have our own paths and our own decisions to make, and we have a right to make them. The other main point of the narratives is that while anger is a natural reaction, the decisions we choose to make with regard to that anger are our own, and there is often an extraordinary opportunity available to turn it into something else.

Virginia Paine's Milkyboots

Virginia Paine has been doing diary comics for quite some time, but she actually stopped after 2012 in favor of other work. At CAKE, she had a couple of other recent diary comics (all in her Milkyboots series) as well as an older issue I hadn't seen. Paine has always worn a lot of hats in comics. She's taught comics, she worked for Dylan Williams at Sparkplug Comic Books and later took over the company when he died. She chose to shutter Sparkplug last year after a solid run that produced several excellent comics, particularly from trans creators.

It's a shame that Paine abandoned diary comics when she did, because Milkyboots #14 reveals a artist who had become really good at them. While she was always adept at writing clearly about her emotions and relationships in a way that was involving to the reader, what changed was her clarity as an artist. She simultaneously grew more confident as a draftsman while mostly simplifying her line, giving her comics both immediacy and clarity. At the same time, her figure drawings of her friends (fellow cartoonists) are exquisitely expressive and naturalistic in a way I hadn't seen from her before. At the same time, her daily observations following a bad breakup are poetic, spare and shattering. There's a sense of flailing around in her observations, going from wondering about her ex to thinking about the things she drinks every day. Paine also writes about going to therapy and how having students as therapists makes for an odd dynamic at times, setting boundaries with her friends while appreciating how much they mean to her, her sadness about the death of Williams, and the ways in which she resonates with music.

Milkyboots #15 was originally a Patreon comic that picked up four years later. It reflects an artist who's in the midst of bringing Sparkplug to an end and trying to figure out her new path. There's a lot of frustration in this comic, as Paine has started to feel burdened by the concept of success and what it means. There's travel, a new girlfriend that she portrays far less intimately than she did the girlfriend portrayed in early issues of the series, and new creative plans. One always gets a sense of motion from Paine, even when she's grappling with depression and uncertainty. Despite the fact that she clearly drew these comics as quickly as possible, her line was bold and confident, even as it was sketchy and especially loose.

Milkyboots #16 was billed as the "food issue", and it was a simple, direct way of connecting certain food experiences with autobiographical experiences. The comic makes lovely use of spot color, using an open-page format instead of a grid. The coloring (from markers?) is vibrant without being intrusive. Paine recalls living in Bolivia as a child, eating flatbread, peaches off a tree and an especially delicious salad. That resonance of food and memory is a powerful one, all the more so when that memory is of something very simple but great tasting because of preparation and freshness. There are other travel memories, but there are also memories of being an adult with no money who was eating dumpstered food. She often depended on the kindness of friends, and the memory of that food donated also resonated with her because of both taste and her life at the time. This comic is in many ways more personally revealing than many of Paine's other comics, as talking about food is something that can only really be done directly, but the common experience of relating that experience makes the narrative a connective one. The consumption of food and the context in which we eat it has meaning and resonance, especially if food is scarce or not taken for granted. There's an easy charm about this issue that doesn't have any figure drawings in it, yet is as personal and revealing as any of Paine's other diary comics.

Greg Farrell's Hipster!

Greg Farrell is the sort of young cartoonist who started self-publishing minis that reflected the ways in which he was very much a work-in-progress. However, his devotion to comics showed in the way he worked relentlessly to become a better draftsman, cartoonist and writer. His On The Books, about his experience as part of a union working for New York's Strand bookstore, was a huge leap forward for him. It reflected a purposefulness that had been largely absent from his meandering earlier comics, and a cartoonist without agency is one who is going to flounder. Farrell's collection of shorter stories, Hipster!, reflects a similar level of maturity even as the subjects are much more familiar. Indeed, much of Farrell's early work focused on gag humor that he never quite got right, but his more personal stories had a raw energy and brutal honesty that was compelling.

Farrell takes that energy, refines it just a bit, and creates a loosely-crafted narrative that connects all of these stories. It begins with Farrell describing a life growing up in the Long Island suburbs and dreaming of moving to New York or Brooklyn. It's a life he describes in great detail, for good and ill. For example, "Plagued Out" describes the reality of living with roaches, mice, rats and other vermin in old apartments, with bedbugs being the most hated pest of all. The energy and immediacy of the city has many trade-offs for someone who is not extremely wealthy, and that includes the frequent necessity for getting flatmates and having to deal with noise from one's upstairs neighbors. None of these are exactly revolutionary subjects, but Farrell's blunt, cynical and funny takes on these subjects makes them worthwhile. Farrell has a slight air of detachment when telling these stories; often, the more upsetting the subject happens to be, the more Farrell makes it seem like it's happening to someone else.

That's true in his story about an abusive, mentally ill ex-girlfriend and their massively dysfunctional, toxic relationship. According to his narrative, she would often initiate physical abuse in her anger after issues threats and insults, and his aim was to diffuse it as much as possible until she calmed down and apologized--and then sex would generally ensue. Farrell is pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing, backing up some of his claims with statistics, even if his is a narrative that's not common in everyday conversation. In many respects, this story is where his art shines. Farrell's art is ugly, blunt and direct. His aim is to tell a story by doing the basics in terms of figure work and not much more. This is a blunt and ugly story, and the grotesque qualities that Farrell brings to his art (the panels where he draws himself with an especially hairy ass stand out) bring out that raw ugliness in a way his more dispassionate prose does not.

Farrell writes lovingly about local restaurants, growing up with video games and the way it bonded him with his brothers, his obsession with a certain rap album, his relationship with marijuana and his experiences dealing with sensitivity to electronics. There's also a brutally on-point comic about the inevitability of humanity's destruction at the hands of climate change that was originally published in World War III Illustrated. Throughout the book, the reader is given a sense of being given a pleasantly rambling tour of Manhattan & Brooklyn as well as Farrell's own life. It's a tour for insiders, with a few popular tourist destinations here and there but mostly about hidden spots that tourists don't know about. Farrell touches on a lot of typical autobio topics, but he also veers off in some interesting directions. The book has an uneven quality at the end, as he starts writing essays (with a few support strips here and there) about teaching comics for the first time. This really merited a full narrative treatment, and I'm not sure why Farrell opted for the essay format. On the other hand, he wrote a fascinating essay about his dealings with legendary (and controversial) small press publisher Microcosm, who published On The Books and from whom he has received no royalties, thanks in part to a bad contract he signed. Cartoonists rarely talk openly about business like this, and once again Farrell's hyperbole-free, matter-of-fact attitude about the experience was interesting, especially in how it led him to crowdfunding this book. In fact, Farrell makes pointed arguments that publishers in general may be completely obsolete from a practical, not just moral position. Farrell is by no means a finished product as an artist, but one can definitely see that he's starting to find his voice.

Mini-Kus! of the Week #12: E.&A. Klavins, Liesmas, D. Sietina

Some more new issues of mini-Kus! have been published, and I also managed to find some older ones I was missing. Without further ado, let's resume, the weekly look at three issues:

mini-Kus! #7: Rainbow Of Pain, by Ernests & Andrejs Klavins. The Klavins use a thick black line to anchor their cartoony and grotesque comics that fill up every bit of negative space with often lurid color. The story's about the worst competitive diver in the world who is taunted by the second-worst diver, grateful that there will always be someone worse. The diver is approached by a mysterious figure who offers to train him, as he claims to be the trainer of the "Ruritania People's Republic". The grotesque and cartoony qualities of the art push and pull at each other, as there's an inherent cuteness to the figures belied by incredibly ugly and twisted faces. Through a special regimen and some mysterious "vitamins", the diver gets better and better. When the diver discovers that his trainer was banned from the sport from using an experimental steroid, he decides to quit taking the pills, only to have his trainer reject him. What results after that is a hilariously nasty ending, involving a fatal car accident, a weighty decision being made, and a grotesque transformation providing a callback to the comic's first scene. The result is a perfect mini-Kus comic, with high visual impact in a short number of pages.

mini-Kus! #8: The Flames, by Liesmas. This is a very simple, straightforward story about a couple of teens visiting the girl's grandmother and finding that where she lives is overrun by a corporation polluting the environment. Liesmas employs a kind of magical realism in showing how the teens managed to find a way to chase out the developers, which included the girl, Maya, being able to talk to tigers and convince them to attack. There's a tremendous amount of warmth and sincerity in Liesmas' line and the story itself, as it's a kind of wish-fulfillment scenario. The tone never wavers away from the sincerity, even as the action starts to become extreme and then absurd. There's a humanistic quality to be found in this comic as well as a sense of hope, even if that hope may be naive. The drawings are basic but functional, the storytelling is clear, and the use of colors is muted and adds variety to the comic without being a distraction.

mini-Kus! #9: Bobis, by Dace Sietina. Like some of the other earlier issues of the series, this comic is in Latvian with an English translation at the bottom of the page. It makes sense, considering how stylized and immersive the original lettering is. Drawn in an open-page format where panels bleed into each other, it tells the story of a man and his dog, the titular Bobis. Sietina drew an ordinary day (with the character repeatedly emphasizing how ordinary it was) in a style that mixed naturalism and a sort of grotesque exaggeration. That mix of fine-line drawing with intense hatching and cross-hatching was somewhat dizzying, especially with the slightly sickening use of yellow as a spot color. When the story shifts into a dream/hallucination, Sietina starts throwing in all kinds of colors, with a lot of angry reds and scribbly blues being added on to the fine-line drawings that continue. This discordant use of styles, still meshed with the narrative but also decorative quality of the lettering, gives the comic multiple layers of impact. There's an encounter with his dead grandmother, a red light in the distance that becomes something he can grab, and a sense that he can't breathe. The reveal at the end is telegraphed but still clever, because Sietina goes all the way with it. This is an immersive comic that is nonetheless easy to follow, in part because the artist leaves so much negative space on each page.