Jason's Upside Dawn

Having read Jason's entire output, I've found that his most interesting comics are those that follow his current cultural influences into ridiculous flights of fancy. The Left Bank Gang (imagining the Lost Generation writers as cartoonists) and Goodnight, Hem (imagining Ernest Hemingway as a sort of real-life action hero) are two of his best, but I've also enjoyed the way he's managed to insert the immortal Musketeer Athos into a number of his comics. The eternally deadpan way he draws his anthropomorphic characters just seems to make more sense when he's riffing on something that interests him. In particular, his delight in mixing high and low art never fails to amuse. 

His newest collection of short stories, Upside Dawn, is a pretty big one, with 17 stories. Jason seems to be working shorter and snappier, not allowing his high concepts to wear out their welcome. The result is maybe my favorite Jason book since I Killed Adolph Hitler and The Left Bank Gang, which had the twin appeal of novelty and sharp conceptual gags. Absurdism is a running theme in this book, and the opening story, "Woman, Man, Bird" is a sort of tribute to absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco. It's a story of a man and woman meeting for a date at a restaurant called "Eugene's," and their small talk is solipsistic to the point of ridiculousness, as neither perceives or responds to what the other says as their visual representations also become increasingly bizarre. One of Ionesco's themes is the impossibility of communication via language, and this piece is a marvelous visual representation of this concept, particularly in the end of his play The Bald Soprano. Speaking of which, in Jason's short story "Ionesco," that play is mistakenly referred to as "The Bald Prima Donna" by a documentarian-type figure, who becomes increasingly irrelevant in the absurd story that revolves around bananas and a shifting, imaginary figure from his past named Bobbie Watson. It's fitting that Jason should be drawn to this play in particular, given that the Romanian Ionesco wrote it while learning English, and of course, English is not Jason's native language. 

The second story, "Perec, PI," imagines the OuLiPo writer and filmmaker known for his use of constraints as a private investigator getting mixed up in a byzantine murder investigation, but his hard-boiled narration is clipped of the endings of the sentences. It's a funny way of thwarting reader expectations in panel after panel. "I Remember" seems to be a bit of self-indulgent nostalgia until it builds into something more far-reaching without breaking stride or changing tone.  "Vampyros Dyslexicos" is a retelling of the old "Carmilla" vampire story that works really hard to get at the gag suggested in the title. Death being frustrated by a juvenile knight (as played by Max von Sydow) in "Seal VII" and storming off is another great gag based on a familiar bit of cinema. Jason mashes up Kafka and The Prisoner, adding a level of tedious bureaucracy to the mysterious goings-on in the Village. 

Mash-ups are a dime-a-dozen, but what sets these apart is his unrelenting commitment to his deadpan style of humor, frequent use of silent pauses, and a highly deliberate and slow pace--even in adventure strips. Some of the stories are reframed versions of classics like "Crime and Punishment," but one of my favorites was reimagining "Ulysses" as a murder mystery thriller. Seeing Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as action heroes was hilarious, while Jason elides actual action scenes with blackout panels labeled things like "fight scene" or "sex scene." Jason is often less interested in the content of particular works and is more interested in form, like in "What Rhymes With Giallo?", a spoof on the bloody Italian horror films of the 70s done with a Dr. Seuss-like rhyming scheme. 

The back part of the book is the most sentimental in many ways, as he digs deep into his oldest pop culture loves. "The City Of Lights, Forever" reimagines the old Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever," only this time it's Spock who travels to Montparnasse in 1925 to become a painter. This era has been one of Jason's running interests for much of his career, and there's kind of a sweet sentimentality in this story about Spock loving cats, painting the famous model Kiki, and a cameo by Athos. "Who Will Kill The Spider?" adds some spot primary colors in what at first seems to be a kids' story but has a punchline that is something entirely different. "One Million And One Years, B.C." is one of the more straightforward entries, notable mostly for Jason drawing dinosaurs. 

"E.C. Come..." and "...E.C. Go" are both tributes to the classic horror and science-fiction comics from EC with frequent twist endings. The former is about a stage magician whose murder of his assistant/wife has unexpected consequences, and the latter is about a crew of astronauts who arrive on a world that surprises them with its (literal) homeyness. These are entirely straightforward stories in this style, just done in Jason's distinctive hand and voice. "From Outer Space" is a classic two-track narrative story. The visual narrative consisted of scenes from the classic B-movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space," but the textual captions were apparently a personal account of a bad acid trip. The effect it created was pleasantly bizarre, given how nonsensical the film is and how an acid trip can scramble meaning and the ability to communicate. Of course, this is a running theme throughout the collection. 

Finally, "Etc." is a collection of one or two-page gags that are a melange of pop music, movies, Athos the Musketeer, and Death. Death hiding from the immortal Athos was an especially funny gag. It's stuff that Jason has been drawing since the beginning of his career and material that he continues to mine for comedic content. What sets this collection apart from his other work is the fact that he left a lot of it behind in favor of branching out to new inspirations while still retaining his core sense of humor. The final image of the book, an absurd image of "Sartre Night Fever," sums Jason up: high and low, absurd and refined, deadpan and silly. 

It's A Vibe: The Comics Of Benji Nate

The key to understanding Benji Nate's intentions as a cartoonist can be found in the introduction to her minicomic Cold Soda #1 (the older one, published by Milk Money Books). It said "Cold Soda is where I dump everything I've been working on including the adventures of a group of friends who do stuff, another group of friends who also do stuff, and of course, Spacedog." Most of her comics can be reduced to "a group of friends who do stuff" with the optional proviso of "and sometimes in a horror setting." Her friend group comics tend to be gag-oriented and highly episodic, with only the occasional strands of a larger narrative. This is especially true of her most popular comic, Girl Juice (Drawn & Quarterly), which was a big success on Instagram and isn't the first time D&Q has published this sort of comic (Aminder Dhaliwal comes to mind). With plot usually being an important part of horror, those comics are more narrative-oriented, even if the vibe of the characters remains exactly the same. 

Indeed, the vibe is exactly what Nate is going for here. The vibe is not a naturalistic one, though Nate is skilled at delivering meaningful dialogue. Instead, everything about Nate's comics is highly stylized and leans heavily into shoujo-style character design and energy. Even in quiet moments, they have a frenetic quality, as every moment tends to be invested with drama (real or imaginary). Cute horror is a mainstay of Silver Sprocket, which is why her books like Hell Phone and Lorna are such a snug fit there. However, a running theme of Nate's work is that they talk about horrific acts or being big sluts, but Nate tends to only want to talk about and around without actually digging into anything. Not that the comics specifically need grisly violence or tons of sex and nudity, but in thinking about a comparable work like Elizabeth Pich's Fungirl, Nate's overuse of restraint adds up to a lot of telling and not enough showing in the storytelling. Taking things a little further (especially in Girl Juice) would have made these comics funnier and/or scarier. 

At the same time, this use of restraint could have been perfectly effective if Nate went a little deeper into her characters. Bunny in Girl Juice is such an overwhelming presence that she borders on caricature, and her roommates feel underwritten at times as a result. The relationship between Sadie and Tula begs for more air time, and Nana's bizarre arc (a cartoonist who is sexually attracted to clowns) is more interesting than Bunny's self-involvement. Of course, Bunny's narcissism is a feature, not a bug, and her ridiculous excesses are the whole point of the appeal. It's just that without some kind of narrative tether, the act gets repetitive. 

Speaking of a narrative tether, Hell Phone (Book One) might be Nate's most effective comic. It introduces us to two best friends (Mona and Sissy) who go on a supernatural odyssey when Sissy discovers a ringing flip phone. The voice on the phone instructs them to go to a particular address, where they discover a dead body killed in some kind of ritual. When they call the cops, they don't find a body and the phone they have isn't activated. That leads them on an increasingly bizarre series of tasks as Nate slowly reveals details about her protagonists. When all of this connects to their friend Trent, the questions that are answered only lead to more questions. The story is contrasted by the ultra-cute character design and bright use of color. 

Lorna is another collection of comics from Webtoon, about a comically murderous young girl. Once again, the contrast of super-cute character design and hints at grisly murder is the attraction, but this is another comic where the gags get repetitive. Halfway through, one could sense Nate getting restless with the premise and crafted a story called "Lorna's First Date," which established her friend group and had a story with an actual plot. The only problem is that Lorna was such a one-note joke character that it felt a little dissonant to attempt to add depth to her. 

The same was true in Girl Juice, where after over a hundred pages of Bunny demanding attention for herself and/or her dog Britney, it suddenly transitions into a sixty-page story called "Tallulah's Demon." It involves youtuber Tula (Tallulah) being haunted by a demonic presence while streaming. It goes to some pretty ridiculous if predictable places, as she becomes possessed by a demon and a priest is called in. Here, Bunny's ridiculous self-absorption has a real target to play against, like referring to the hot priest as "Father Daddy." It doesn't quite come together, but it has the same kind of page-turning quality that made Hell Phone such an enjoyable read. It is funny that Lorna, the horror comic, drifted toward a relationship story at the end, while Girl Juice, a "Sex And The City"-coded comic, drifted toward horror. It reflects how Nate is betwixt and between at this point in her career, but it seems like the eventual answer will be combining the two in a coherent narrative that doesn't lose her sense of humor, charm, and keen understanding of character dynamics, especially for her characters who are women.

Jeffrey Brown's Kids Are Still Weird

It's funny to see where cartoonists wind up in their careers. Jeffrey Brown burst onto the alt-comics scene over 20 years ago with his self-published memoir, Clumsy, which was about losing his virginity. He was one of the central figures of what Tom Spurgeon called "Sad Boy Comics." This term has been subject to parody in later years, but at the time, this was more of an extension of the thoughtful, vulnerable, and even poetic comics of cartoonists like John Porcellino and Dave Kiersh. Brown's comics, especially in his first three books (which he dubbed "The Girlfriend Trilogy"), built on that template and added a structural, narrative solidity that set his work apart. His visual style was a mix of the ratty line typical of the Fort Thunder era that was also informed by Gary Panter and a highly palatable, cartoony simplicity. Jeffrey Brown's figures were and are cute, which at once made them more approachable for a reader but also acted as a distancing device for the more jagged emotional moments of his books. 

However, at heart, Brown was always a humorist. In his many years publishing with Top Shelf, Brown drew a bunch of superhero parodies, Transformers parodies, and other total nonsense. Part of the fun was seeing him draw genre comics in his resolutely anti-commercial style. However, what really made them interesting was Brown's keen instincts as a parodist who genuinely admired these kinds of stories. His first more mainstream humor book was Cat Getting Out Of A Bag And Other Observations, but what really made his career was Darth Vader And Son, an improbably warm and funny use of the arch-villain and young Luke Skywalker. This led to an entirely new career doing these kinds of Star Wars-related comics (Jedi Academy became another one) at around the same time he became a father. He stopped doing memoir comics altogether, perhaps because he was too busy with other work or perhaps because the narratives he had been doing no longer made sense. 

He did, however, do a book called Kids Are Weird, a "kids say the darnedest things"-style collection of observations about his first son, Oscar. Now publishing with NBM, he dipped his toes back into smaller press publishing with Kids Are Still Weird, which is about his younger son, Simon. Brown's ability to create verisimilitude in his dialogue without it feeling clunky or forced has always been one of his best assets, and that particular ear for dialogue is the lynchpin of this book's success. That ear led him to use a variety of compositional structures to highlight the particular gag or feeling expressed by Simon. Sometimes Brown uses his old, trusty four-panel grid. However, he also sometimes uses, on a given page, a gag that's two or three panels (like a comic strip) with a single image below it that is its own separate gag. 

Brown gently depicts Simon's frequently defiant, aggressive, and oppositional energy as a toddler. As a three-year-old, Simon is just starting to push boundaries and assert his agency on the world. Whether it's yelling at the GPS on a phone to stop talking, yelling at his mom during playtime that he's "talking to Daddy," or telling his older brother he doesn't love him, his pugnaciousness is also an expression of his overall curiosity. At the same time, Brown observes him doing ninja moves, debating whether or not he's a "big boy," and declaring that his preferred superpower is to shoot lasers out of his eyes. He also expresses moods and emotions, like saying his brain doesn't feel good, or that he can only come up with horrible stories. Brown creates a pleasant rhythm from comic to comic that doesn't overstay its welcome. Wisely, he doesn't attempt to create a more coherent narrative; instead, he favors little moments in time. Small struggles, tiny triumphs, moments of wisdom, and plenty of just-plain weirdness (as promised!) fill this collection. It's all done in Brown's familiar style, and in color; Brown's overall expressive line is the key to filling these amusing anecdotes with their own sense of life. 

Whit Taylor's Dead Air #1-2

Over on Patreon, Whit Taylor has been serializing her new long-form project, entitled Dead Air. It's the sort of slice-of-life comic that was common in the 90s but has largely fallen out of fashion. It's set at a college in 2002 and follows a frosh named Noe (loosely based on Taylor) who decides to become a DJ at the college radio station. If you're at all familiar with that particular social ecosystem on a college campus, it's a scene that's at once broad-reaching and brimming with potential but also incredibly insular. Taylor mines the particularities of this scene with an incredibly fine sense of detail that creates a rich, albeit wacky, world-building setting. 

One problem with slice-of-life fiction is that it can be meandering and episodic. While the plot is certainly episodic, Taylor smartly establishes key aspects of Noe's character and introduces the key secondary character (a fellow frosh named Nate) within the first three pages of the story. Noe dreams of being a connector, of having something to say and finding a way to say it. Dead Air is a sort of spiritual successor to Taylor's older quasi-autobiographical series Madtown High, another story with a large ensemble cast that celebrates a certain cultural era from the point of view of a protagonist who is an outsider in many ways. 

What Taylor does best here is conjure up a huge cast of outsized personalities with an established pecking order, and slowly reveal details on the nature of their interactions through the eyes of Noe. The first issue goes into a deep dive as to why alternative music is so important to her. It allowed her to express her angst and manage her loneliness and alienation. Taylor once edited an anthology called Sub-Cultures, and she locks into this particular sub-culture in the way that it creates a certain camaraderie even when some of her fellow DJs are insufferable and awful. There is a magic and power to music that Taylor also taps into, as the band she gets free tickets to see creates an experience where Noe says "And just like that, I was transfixed." She wants to be a DJ and become part of the subculture, but she never forgets what music does for her. 

The second issue delves into the specifics of what a DJ does and how they do it, and because the radio station has certain commercial obligations, it is considerably less fun than Noe had hoped. Taylor also established a plot element (each prospective DJ has to make their own ad feature in order to pass their probationary period) and deepened the relationship/friendship between Noe and Nate. The fact that Nate has a girlfriend throws a bit of a roadblock, even if their relationship had been platonic up until that point. That's where the second issue ends, as the narrative starts to build and other key characters are introduced. There is a looseness to the proceedings that's a great deal of fun, as the best slice-of-life stories tend to lend themselves an informal hang-out feel. Taylor focuses on character dynamics and bodies relating in space, which only serves to reinforce this balance of pleasant relationships and witty interactions with the overarching theme of wanting to find a place to belong. 

Tia Roxae's Face Fatigue

Tia Roxae's Face Fatigue is a short (10 pages) but highly effective bit of body horror and social critique & satire. A woman who just turned 21 is obsessed with her youth as her only asset, but is all-too-aware of how men objectify and threaten her when she doesn't make herself available for them as a sexual object. When she develops some mysterious kind of acne. It gets bad enough that she starts wearing a scarf to obscure her face, and there's an over-the-top bit of ridiculousness when her mom shows her a fish her father caught and the young woman screams "I LOOK LIKE IT!" The comic then devolves into revenge, more body horror, and an injury-to-the-eye sequence that would make Dr. Wertham flinch. 

There's a lot to like here. Roxae's mix of pastel pinks and blues is highly effective, especially when pink turns to red with blood. Roxae's use of body distortion veers from simple pimples to monstrous physical changes, even as the affliction is purely on the surface. The murder scene is a total descent into madness and fantasy revenge rolled up into one, and her final facial reveal is a mix of desperation, horror, and social-influencer smile. The face fatigue has a double meaning here--being tired of relying on beauty, then being tired of having it taken away. In both cases, the protagonist was on edge and ready to snap.

Josh, by Bayer, Simmons, Cotter, and Stephens

The Josh anthology is a gimmick in the most fun sense of the word. It features cartoonists Josh Bayer, Josh Cotter, Josh Simmons, and Josh Stephens, all doing their version of horror. I wasn't familiar with Stephens going into this comic, but it's clear by his contributions that he was quite comfortable with the genre. Of course, this is Simmons' wheelhouse, and he doesn't disappoint with his casually deranged contribution. For Cotter and Bayer, both of their work is strange and dense, but they found ways to stay true to their styles while dialing up the tension. 

The image of this collective as a scuzzy Rat King scribbling out assorted perversions is one that's repeated on the title page and end page, and it's a fitting one. The quartet makes a point of repeating the name "Josh" past the point of meaning, and Cotter zeroes in on it for his "Keep On Joshin'." Starting out as a kind of Crumb pastiche and a faux slice-of-life story about a guy hosting some friends at a party, it veers into inexplicable body horror when the friends see the Josh he has in the living and suddenly sprout horrific parasites. The sickly pink shade of the tiny, cartoony "Josh" parasites is genuinely unnerving in the way so much of Cotter's work tends to be. 

Bayer doesn't really do horror per se, but his "Horror Skies" is a typical mix of memoir, fantasy, comics history, urban geography, and lumpy, disturbing body shapes. Bayer's comics on the surface seem to be a swirling mass of crude drawings and scrawled lettering, but these design choices are quite deliberate. A closer look reveals a locked-in 12-panel grid that starts with the premise of Bayer trying to think of an idea for the anthology and quickly shifts his initial idea of recording the lives of the homeless in Penn Station to an investigation of the "murder" of 80s/90s cartoonists like Gerry Shamray, Ted Stearn, and Michael Dougan. Bayer incorporates his girlfriend (the cartoonist Hyena Hell) into it, as she asks him about the "murder" of Harvey Pekar as well. When Bayer is followed by Stearn's creation Pluck (an anthropomorphic chicken), it's all part of the shadowy, strange horror that follows him. Bayer mixes absurd humor with his genuine interest in these artists, along with his typical punk sensibilities and desire to depict the grimy, dirty, and forgotten aspects and people of the city. 

Stephens' "The One And Only" is a slightly more drawn-out version of the story that both Cotter and Simmons did. That is, a figure named Josh proves to be a terrifying force for destructive, absurd evil. In this case, the Josh is a tech-bro cult leader whose bid for world domination through his literal force of personality goes horribly awry. The final, visceral image is a showstopper, as Stephens had mostly avoided horrific violence up until that point. 

Simmons' "To Be Joshed," unsurprisingly takes the cake for absolutely absurd, senseless violence. At a girls' soccer game, an alpha male type named Josh magically appears, hits on soccer moms, and responds with an "I'm just Joshing you" when they express concern. Of course, he soon goes on a rampage and the violence escalates to an immediate, crazed degree and ends with him threatening the reader with a Joshing as he breaks the fourth wall. Simmons' work is notable for his total commitment to gleeful and unhinged nihilism. As a reader, it's a rare example of someone tapping into their id that is actually interesting, as most of those sort of comics tend to be puerile. His undeniable skill as a cartoonist is a big reason why it works. 

It's why the collection works as a whole; one might ask, "What was the point of all this?", and the answer is "No point at all." Only Bayer wrestles with meaning here, because even his most violent and absurd comics wrestle with morality and authenticity. The irony is that while his work looks the most grimy and depraved on the surface, it's the cleaner art of the other three artists that zeroes in on making the self-referential conceptual gag so gleefully, pointlessly, and gloriously unsettling. 

Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Date Book, Volume 3

Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Date Book series, which collects highlights from his sketchbooks, has been a fascinating look into the working process and raw, unfettered emotions of one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Ware's willingness to push himself formally, his dogged work ethic (despite his own self-deprecation about being lazy), and the way he combines spontaneous expression with meticulous craft is unmatched. Of course, his work has always been fiction, some of it thinly veiled, or rather, reimagined scenarios regarding what could have been in his life. Despite his reputation as a miserabilist, Ware's deeply warm and humanistic approach to his characters is more akin to Charles Schulz or Jaime Hernandez. No matter what Schulz put Charlie Brown through, no matter how much misery Hernandez heaps on Maggie, they genuinely love and feel deep empathy for their creations. Some of Ware's best comics have involved giving characters with few redeeming qualities like Woody Brown or Jordan Lint their own sense of humanity, even if it's deeply flawed. Similarly, Ware seems deeply interested in trying to understand and empathize with characters who aren't his obvious stand-ins; Building Stories is the best example of this, but there are parts of Rusty Brown and Jimmy Corrigan where this is true as well. 

Ware reveals a lot about his own mental illness in this book, zeroing in on obsessive-compulsive disorder. As one could see reading John Porcellino's The Hospital Suite, one of the worst things about OCD is that one can logically and rationally understand that the ever-present obsessive thoughts are utter nonsense, yet one can't help but be overwhelmed by them. In Ware's case, it is an unshakeable certainty of his own persistent, consistent worthlessness as a person but especially as an artist. Even as he acknowledges his incredible exhibit at the Pompidou, he is unable to emotionally accept and process it. Ware's frequent insistence at sometimes working so small (especially with regard to lettering) that it strains one's eyes to read it sometimes feels like a symptom of OCD, particularly in this collection. He's still saying difficult things out loud, but the font is so small that perhaps no one will notice, least of all him. This all seems unintentional, as even Ware wonders out loud why he does this.

The new Date Book is worth reading for the many strips about his daughter Clara alone. This could have been its own book, as they are not so much cute observations as they are small moments of awe regarding Clara's own incisive understanding of the world at a very young age. The period of time covered in this book is from 2002-2023. This makes the Clara strips all the more poignant, as he skips back and forth from her childhood to her leaving for college. Clara reads her father so clearly, calling him out for his lack of productivity and generally gently roasting him on any number of other topics. No one can zero in on one's foibles as one's own children, and Clara is every bit as incisive an observer as her father is. Ware also depicts a great deal of affection as well, along with giving her the space she needs to express herself. Ware has long expressed his admiration for Charles Schulz, and I can't help but keeping about Schulz's influence on his diary strips. If Ware is Charlie Brown, then Clara is somewhere between Lucy and Linus--a foil and a wise friend. 

Ware's other diary strips sometimes go into his daily routines, but there's also a sense of middle-aged reflection on his youth. The incredible affection he had for his grandmother Weese and the unflappably sensible things she had to say about life were obvious guiding lights for him. The strips about his youth vary from reflections on loneliness and isolation to moments of perfect aesthetic joy being with his mother and grandparents and reveling in small bits of beauty. His strips as a teenager and young adult are hilarious reflections on grandiosity; he makes fun of himself even as he allows his past self moments of grace that are hard to give to his present-day self. 

The single funniest strip is "Self-Isolating Comics & Stories," which is about the onset of the COVID pandemic and the subsequent quarantine. Predictably, Ware is gleeful at first that "my lifestyle has been vindicated!" until he realizes "maybe this is all just really, really sad" when it sets in that there are a lot of people he might not get to see for years. 

There's plenty of other stuff to look at as well. Ware's figure drawing is unsurprisingly excellent, maintaining a naturalistic approach while rendering figures full of life. There are mock-ups of future projects, including a few that haven't been published in the US. The cover and other introductory pages have the usual, tiny diagrammatic comics that feature Ware's bleak, caustic sense of humor. There are also moments of sheer joy, especially when Ware is doing Frank King strips or drawing other things he finds interesting or pleasurable, like old-time advertisements or European comics. Ware's misgivings about his own work are superceded by his passionate defense of the art object, the sketchbook, and the diary, even if he feels in the modern world of social media that revealing one's inner voice debases it. Like with much of Ware's artistic output, he feels compelled, like Charlie Brown returning to the pitcher's mound every spring. Good ol' Chris Ware may never win, but his audience certainly does, being privy to process, spontaneously-composed and deeply emotional diary strips, and page after page of beautiful art.