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. 

Hate Revisited #2, by Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge is on my shortlist of my favorite cartoonists, and Hate is perhaps my favorite comics series of all time. Since ending the series in 1998, he's periodically returned to these characters in roughly real time, as the series leads Buddy and Lisa had a kid. Bagge has said that Buddy Bradley is a version of him, approximately ten years in the past, so it's been interesting to see him move Buddy into a weird kind of adulthood. Hate was the quintessential Gen-X slacker comic in its day, featuring a rotating cast of lunatics in Seattle right around the time that grunge became a dominant aesthetic. After a certain point midway through the series, Bagge moved Buddy and the cast back to his native New Jersey, where he had to try to figure out what to do with his life instead of just drifting. There was always a restlessness to what Bagge was doing in this series; he could have milked the Seattle scene a lot longer than he did, for example. 

Bagge has done a lot of work since Hate ended, including several series with DC, biographies with Drawn & Quarterly, and tons of political commentary and history. (Founding Fathers Funnies is a particular favorite of mine, as Bagge hilariously cuts through a lot of bullshit in a way that matches the irreverence of Hate at its height.) Hate's always been there, however, and the new Hate Revisted! series is a blend of modern-day Buddy & Lisa (and their now-adult weirdo son Harold) and flashbacks to Seattle and even high school Buddy in New Jersey. 

Looking at issue #2, Bagge returns to perhaps his most memorable character, Leonard "Stinky" Brown. Bagge's perspective on Stinky now from Buddy's point of view is interesting. On the one hand, this delusional loser has an undeniable charisma and almost a sweetness to him, but he's also the kind of loose cannon that as Buddy describes "more often than not, they don't grow up...and that 'charm' wears off fast..They become more of a liability." For Buddy, being around Stinky was a fun adventure, because Stinky had no boundaries and no limits. He was totally unpredictable and capricious, and the first story serves as their first meeting. In the course of the story, Stinky calls in a bomb threat to set up a drug deal, steals two different vehicles, shoplifts half of a record store, and gets stabbed trying to rob someone at knifepoint. But he introduces Buddy to St. Mark's Place, they have a crazy adventure, and Stinky represents this tantalizing sense that anything is possible in an otherwise stultifyingly dull suburban environment. Buddy wanted someone to bring him out of his more cautious tendencies, and Bagge shows how easy it was for Buddy to want to fall in with Stinky.

Of course, the next story sees Buddy in the present day, worried about his son falling in with a Stinky-like character nicknamed "Spam." Spam lives in a tent in a homeless camp, jokes about stealing Buddy's propane, and wants to buy land with Buddy's son Harold. Buddy immediately suspects that he's going to get Harold in trouble the way that Stinky ultimately did. Here, Bagge delves back into one of the more jaw-dropping scenes in Hate: Stinky's accidentally (?) killing himself with a handgun in front of Buddy's younger brother Butch. Even after Stinky's death, shenanigans occurred, as Buddy had to help move Stinky's body multiple times. The entire issue revolves around Stinky, as there are flashbacks to Buddy's old housemates Val and George dealing with him.

This wasn't just a memory lane exercise for Bagge; by centering the story around Stinky, he was able to get at the heart of what made him so appealing and repulsive at the same time. Stealing and lying came as easily to him as breathing, and he never once thought about the consequences of any of his actions. Buddy and Lisa have always been a mix of reactive and impulsive in their actions, and Bagge shows how this hasn't changed even as they've grown older. Buddy's plan to rein in Harold is predictably hair-brained, and Lisa's eventual reaction ("grounding" their adult son) points out her own impulsiveness AND reactiveness. 

Bagge did the flashback stories in black & white and the present-day stories in color. The inking in some of these stories was pretty rough, especially the color sections.  The whole issue has several mistakes, like a misnumbered page and a misspelling, which makes it feel that any editing done here was cursory at best. Still, even if this isn't Bagge's crispest work, his use of body language and the way he arranges particular sets of characters is unlike any other artist. There are many artists who have imitated Bagge's rubbery character design and frantic character expressions, and Bagge's comedic dynamism is as sharp as ever.

Tanya Dorph-Mankey's Count The Lights Preview

Pro wrestling, at its essence, is a kind of carnival theater improv based heavily on audience reactions. Every emotion must be over the top to reach the person sitting in the last row. Every aspect of the story should be told in the ring itself, through the choreographed violence. There's a reason why so many former theater kids become wrestlers these days; the line between burlesque, drag, musical theater, and wrestling is a decidedly thin one. In a musical, a character is moved to break out into song as a reaction a feeling so strong that conventional speech cannot contain; in wrestling, the same is true, except emotion is expressed in violence. 

Cartoonist Tanya Dorph-Mankey understands all of this, and in her preview of her future graphic novel Count The Lights, she immediately introduces us to her principal characters through what else--their first match together. The twist is that this story is also a queer romance, and wrestling has always had a homoerotic subtext (or these days, just plain text) in the most memorable of its feuds. Dorph-Mankey simply takes this out into the open in a classic enemies-to-lovers storyline that has a number of twists and turns. (Full disclosure: I've helped her edit some of this story.)

This preview introduces heel wrestler Alan Jacobs, a member of a faction simply dubbed "Violence." He's an intense prick who's out to prove himself, and he goes up against a funny slacker of a wrestler named Ryan Roberts, who "absolutely hates to put in any effort." His antics are anathema to a sneering heel like Jacobs, as Dorph-Mankey keeps the action of the choreographed matches "kayfabe," meaning that she suspends the disbelief that the wrestlers project toward the audience. Even after Jacobs predictably wins, Roberts notes that it was a good match because it got a big crowd reaction, and then he flirts a little with a fuming Jacobs.

Fans of wrestling will enjoy a number of different easter eggs in here, but what makes the comic compelling is Dorph-Mankey's ability to tell a story through action and impact. She adds an almost expressionist set of backgrounds for hard-hitting sequences, and her understanding of anatomy and the relationship of bodies in space is absolutely crucial in adding stakes for the characters and an emotional connection for the readers. In a story that revolves around a romance, establishing the importance of gesture and body language (albeit in a totally over-the-top manner) early on propels the character narrative without wasting any time. 

mini-kus #112: Gina Wynbrandt's You're The Center Of Attention

As I've said before, when it comes to humor, punching up can feel pretentious, punching down is unseemly, but punching yourself is always funny. Gina Wynbrandt excels at this sort of comedy of self-humiliation, and it's been exciting to see her slowly work herself back into cartooning again after a long break. In I'm The Center Of Attention, Wynbrandt satirizes social media attention-seeking culture in a hilariously blunt manner, interpolating Disney-style platitudes with a magical bug character. 

Wynbrandt uses a kind of cartoony naturalism that borders on the grotesque and exaggerated as a way of emphasizing the artificiality of her environs. The premise of the comic is that she's a contestant on a reality show where she's to be subjected to "a series of silly and embarrassing challenges" in order to win $10,000. Wynbrandt immediately fantasizes that this will lead to worldwide fame, her own TV show, and a harem of guys. She's encouraged by George, a Jiminy Cricket-style talking bug that encourages her. For the initial challenges, she does the chicken dance, acts like a dog, and sings in front of reality show judge Simon Cowell. 

Then she has to read her entire search history (which includes her own name several times and "plus size slut clothes.") Things get worse after this, as one might suspect, but George is there all along--and in the end, he's there for Gina in a way that should have been clear all along. Everything about this comic is unsettling, grotesque, visually disturbing, and hilarious. The use of color is especially off-putting, particularly with regard to the candy-colored backgrounds. Wynbrandt sets herself as the butt of every joke, but it's also a funny series of jabs at every aspect of popular culture, the expectations of society, and the superficiality of desire. Wynbrandt admitting that her own desires are completely base and lazy is the trigger for the final humiliation, but the reality is that she's simply like everyone else. The fact that she gets part of what she wants in the end, albeit in a totally unexpected and over-the-top way, only makes the whole thing funnier. Wynbrandt's satire has only grown sharper as she's become more skilled as a cartoonist and more forward-thinking with her use of color.