High-Low and the Comics Reporter

Tom Spurgeon of the indispensible link & commentary blog The Comics Reporter interviewed me regarding ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY #19 as part of series of discussions about the emblematic comics of the decade. ACME #19 was my pick for best comic of 2008, and it will be a certain top 5 pick for best of the decade. Here's a link to the interview, and I'd like to publicly thank Tom for his kind words about me and the opportunity to think through his interesting and challenging questions.

TCJ Post #12: Various CCS Comics

Here's my review of assorted comics from CCS students Jose-Luis Olivares, Melissa Mendes and GP Bonesteel.

TCJ Post #11: Chuck Forsman's Snake Oil

Here's my review of issues #4 and 5 of Chuck Forsman's series SNAKE OIL.

TCJ Post #10: Only Skin #4 and One Thousand Lies

Rob reviews two new minicomics from CCS folks: Sean Ford's ONLY SKIN #4 and Laura Terry's ONE THOUSAND LIES.

TCJ Post #9: Aaron Cockle's Annotated

Rob reviews issues #3 and #4 of Aaron Cockle's comic ANNOTATED.

TCJ Post #8: Jen Vaughn & Morgan Pielli

In his first CCS review catch-up column, Rob considers the work of Jen Vaughn and Morgan Pielli.

TCJ Post #7: Awesome 2

Here's my 6th Comics Journal blog entry, a review of the anthology AWESOME 2.

Sequart Reprints: TCJ #291

The Comics Journal has been the gold standard for comics writing and journalism for three decades now. Let's check in on the newest issue (#291) and see where the magazine currently stands. The Journal has always been known for three things: no-holds-barred journalism about the comics industry, revealing and thorough interviews, and incisive criticism about the form. At its best, the Journal is a reflection of its editor-in-chief, Gary Groth. Groth has made a lot of enemies over the years by exposing the repugnant business practices of many comics publishers, helping to shame them into doing the right thing. His frequently scorched-earth reviews have also bruised many an ego. As the Journal has grown older and more respected (and Fantagraphics as a publishing concern has expanded), Groth has had less of an obvious presence in each individual issue of the Journal. His writing has become more infrequent, and while his opinions are no less forceful, he seems more interested in creating light than heat these days.

How interesting any particular issue is depends on the philosophy of the managing editor at the time. There's a tension as to what exactly the Journal should be covering. Should it try to cover every aspect of comics, and run the risk of printing interviews and columns that detail inferior genre work? How best to cover manga, children's comics and webcomics? Should the Journal pursue more rarified, idiosyncratic coverage of art comics or should it try to appeal to the average comics fan?

Looking at the terms of the last three editors, it seems that the Journal suffers a dip in quality when it tries to provide a wider appeal. Under Milo George, the Journal interviewed and delved into some incredibly challenging and fascinating creators and comics. As a reader and critic, I learned a lot from these issues and couldn't wait to read the next one. His successor, Dirk Deppey, made it a point to cast a much wider net. However, he often did this in the most confrontational and quirky ways possible, like devoting an entire issue to shojo manga. Deppey did a lot to improve the look of the Journal, with a more appealing format and the welcome addition of classic comics reprints. While I didn't find Deppey's vision of the Journal as compelling as I did George's, that vision was clearly formulated and consistent.

Under current editor Michael Dean, the Journal feels like it's drifting while looking better than ever. It's now being published twice a quarter in an attractive book format. Each issue is lavishly illustrated and has continued to reprint interesting public-domain comics. Dean was the Journal's former news editor, and now that he's managing editor, the news section has dwindled to out-of-date bullet items. The Journal was never about printing it first, it was about getting the details and doing real reporting, and I'm not sure that's a priority anymore.

In issue #291, mainstream artist Tim Sale is featured with a 37-page interview. While Sale has his virtues because of his unusual approach, the interview felt pretty by-the-numbers. A fan of Sale might be interested in specific projects or details like his color-blindness, but it didn't do much for me as a reader who had read little of his work. An interview with up-and-coming artist Josh Simmons is considerably more interesting, in part because Simmons himself has led such a fascinating life. His tales of traveling with a sex circus certainly beats the zillionth question asking artists what kind of pen they use. I think that's a tribute to interviewer Kristi Valenti, who was both knowledgeable about Simmons' career and clever enough to steer the interview in some interesting directions.

This issue's review section was, for the most part, remarkably strong. It was led by the welcome return of Groth, penning an amazing 27-page review of Ralph Steadman's book The Joke's Over. The book details his relationship with the legendary Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Groth's review is an essay that is about as much his own thoughts on Thompson as it is about Steadman's book and career. Thompson was obviously a huge influence on Groth's career, as he was on many modern journalists and writers. Both Groth and Steadman explore Thompson as daring, visionary writer vs. Thompson feeling the need to live up to his own legend--Thompson the drugged-out, violent cartoon character. Groth's conclusion that Steadman in many ways succeeded in true Gonzo journalism as his career went on where Thompson failed is backed up by explorations of several fascinating projects late in his career, as well as this book. Steadman found a way to control his demons in ways that Thompson did not. This article serves as a fantastic primer on both artists, interspersed with bold insights and connections.

Rich Kreiner (always a welcome presence in the Journal) contributes a review of Lat's TOWN BOY that focuses both on its formal qualities and Lat's ability to create a sense of time, place and character. Shaenon Garrity reviews a couple of odd choices: a collection of early Carol Lay stories and a couple of issues of the Bob Burden/Rick Geary (!) GUMBY comic. In the former, she lays out a convincing argument why the IRENE stories of Lay deserve consideration as part of the comics canon, and praises the latter for its weirdness but wonders about its audience. The major misfire in this issue was Jason Rhode's review of Rich Tommaso's MIRIAM. When a review starts with the phrase "Bad art dispenses cheap sincerity like VD gets around a state college", you know that the author is more in love with the sound of their own voice than actually engaging the comic on its own terms.

The comics section focused on Dan Gordon, who was best known for his animation work but did plenty of teen and funny animal comics as well. The comics here were amusing and well-crafted but eminently forgettable. It was interesting to see the work of a popular-but-forgotten artist reprinted, at least. The preview of Danica Novgorodoff's SLOW STORM showed off the artist's moody, expressive style.

R.C. Harvey's column on the controversy about how to award Pulitzer Prizes in editorial cartooning was excellent. While I've never agreed with Harvey's reductionist theories on how to catagorize comics, I've always appreciated his wide-ranging interest in comics in all their forms, but especially editorial and newspaper comics. This is exactly the kind of diversity in covering the form that the Journal can excel in, without pandering to a specific demographic. On the other hand, while Tom Crippen's column on the various changes Marvel has put Spider-Man through was certainly well-written, it seemed to repeat its main points over and over: Marvel has lost track of how to make its characters actually fun.

The Journal shines when its writers discuss ideas about comics that are personal and idiosyncratic. That's why the heartfelt appreciation that William Stout wrote for the just-deceased Dave Stevens was so moving. Stout knew that he couldn't write an all-encompassing article that revealed every detail of Stevens' life; instead, his own anecdotes about Stevens' life paint a rich portrait of his life. I wish a figure as important as Steve Gerber got the same kind of treatment. Again, Crippen got the details right and had some interesting insights, but Tim Hodler had more interesting things to say about Gerber in the pages of COMICS COMICS than Crippen did here--and that wasn't even an appreciation.

At this point, how good the average issue of the Journal will be depends on whether or not Groth writes something in it, the skill of the individual interviewer and how interested one is in the interview subjects chosen. As long as Groth is still involved with the Journal, it will remain a powerful force in the comics world. While the Journal may not be at its most provocative at the moment, it still sets the standard for comics criticism and commentary. It'll be interesting to see how long Dean remains managing editor and if the news division of the Journal is revived.

TCJ Post #6: Comic Diorama

Here's a link to my review of Grant Reynolds' COMIC DIORAMA at The Comics Journal.

Rhythm & Rhyme: Asthma, The Blot & Comics-as-Poetry

Over at the Comics Journal, I've published an essay I'm particularly proud of. It's on what I'm calling Comics-As-Poetry, and I explore this idea in the work of two artists whose work I admire greatly: John Hankiewicz's ASTHMA and Tom Neely's THE BLOT.

Here's a link to part one, part two and part three

TCJ Post #5: Sulk 3

Here's a link to my fifth post at the Comics Journal.

TCJ #4: Sundays 3

My latest TCJ blog post is on Sundays 3.

3rd TCJ Post: Funny Aminals

Here's my third in a series about CCS anthologies at the Comics Journal site: Funny Aminals.

2nd TCJ Post: Dark Corners

Here's a link to my second TCJ column, a review of the CCS anthology DARK CORNERS.

Sequart Reprints: I Am Going To Be Small/Art D'Ecco

Jeffrey Brown is best known for his episodic, autobiographical comics about assorted relationships. While the relationships inevitably go down the tubes for poor Jeffrey, he is often able to mine a lot of humor from his travails. Still, someone who just read Brown's books like CLUMSY, UNLIKELY, ANY EASY INTIMACY, etc. would come away thinking that he's incapable of doing anything but humorously bitter relationship comics. However, anyone who's read one of his many minicomics over the years would see a very different, absurd side of Brown. Nine years worth of these comics was just collected by Top Shelf in I AM GOING TO BE SMALL, a massive brick of a comic with rapid fire, one-off gags on page after page.

New Zealand's Andrew & Roger Langridge, on the other hand, have always been known for their linguistically & visually dense humor. The two were long a well-kept secret in the comics world, as their ART D'ECCO and ZOOT! series were never big sellers. Roger would continue on in comics and illustration, achieving some success with his later FRED THE CLOWN series. However, the writer-artist combo of Andrew & Roger's trio of characters from ART D'ECCO have been collected in one glorious volume by Fantagraphics: THE LOUCHE AND INSALUBRIOUS ESCAPADES OF ART D'ECCO. (That's "disreputable and unwholesome" for those scoring at home.)

Both books are very funny, and while one could say that both are similar in that they are primarily gag books, their approach and execution is completely different. The very experience of reading each book is almost viscerally different. One flies through the breezy gags in Brown's book, while each thick pen line from Roger Langridge and every absurd scenario and painful pun from Andrew Langridge encourages the reader to not only linger on every panel, but to read each story multiple times. While both books enthusiastically mine the absurd, many of Brown's gags are still rather personal. The Langridges, meanwhile, seem to draw their inspiration from a tradition of visual and verbal tomfoolery. While Will Elder's "Chicken Fat" visual style is an obvious influence on Roger, the strip as a whole seems to be more influenced by TV and radio comedy than any comics in particular.

SMALL is a reflection of Brown thinking up and trying to get down gags as quickly as possible, while the ideas are still fresh. It has a sketchbook quality, and it seems like a lot of the quasi-autobiographical gags came from pages he was working on for other projects. His plain, sketchy art style draws the eye from gag to gag quickly. The book is so huge (300 pages plus) and has so many gags that this carpet-bombing strategy works well. If a joke fails, the eye quickly moves on to the next one. The visuals here are mostly in service to the verbal component of the gag. For example, a panel captioned "On Great Sex" had a woman ask a man "Are we too different?" The man replies "No" but is thinking "Yes", but isn't about to admit it. Another panel is a parody of the infamous cat poster "Hang in There"--except that instead of a cat hanging from a branch, the branch is empty. A pimp walks down the street and thinks, "These bitches practically sell themselves". The visuals give just enough information to set up Brown's jokes and wordplay.

Yet Brown is not merely a writer who draws. What makes his comics work is his keen understanding of the rhythms of comics. It's long been his greatest skill as an artist: his ability to set up a situation, set up a beat, set up another beat and then finish up a joke or anecdote with a satisfying conclusion. He's also great at modifying the mood of his panels with subtle facial expressions, especially in his eyes and eyebrows. Even in his more rapidly-produced panels, the expressiveness of his characters is essential to making his jokes work.

Brown's understanding of timing & pacing, his fatalistic sense of humor and his expressive character work are best encapsulated by "Cuticle", an extended section of the book. There are four character: a bunny, a bear, a bird and a cat. The bunny and cat are girls, the bunny and bird are boys. Frolicking out in the woods, Brown puts the four through a parody of every relationship drama he's ever written about, and then some. The bunny tells the bear that she'll go to the concert with him, but "just as friends". There's a silent panel after that (a pause for a beat), and the bear replies "Afterwards, can we have sex just as friends?" Later, bunny wonders to bear why she hooked up with a particular guy, saying that he "exudes this kind of sweetness". Bear replies "yeah", then there's another silent panel, then he adds "Like rotting fruit." Bird is a repulsive character full of fratboy machismo, which is funny because he's tiny compared to the other characters. When Bunny accuses him of being homophobic, he denies it, noting that he owns gay porn. When Bunny rolls her eyes (in yet another silent panel), he indignantly blurts out "What? Girl on girl is still gay."

What's interesting about the Langridge brothers is that while one can spot a host of influences in their work, the end result is entirely unique in the world of comics. Roger Langridge has talked about how important Spike Milligan and the Goon Show were in forming his comedic sensibilities, and one can also see evidence of Monty Python-style absurdity and obscure references in the jokes Andrew throws in. He doesn't care if the average reader gets all of his references, and in truth it doesn't matter. The situation itself is so funny, and the visuals by Roger are so dazzling, that every single panel is still funny on its own. Like a Will Elder comic, each page is so densely packed with visual and verbal jokery that it can take multiple readings to unpack everything. Even then, one may not recognize a reference or two until much later. Despite that, one can follow the surface of the narrative and still thoroughly enjoy it.

That said, this experience can be an exhausting one. Their style of humor can be unrelenting; I found that reading the book in small doses was the best way to fully enjoy it. I mentioned Will Elder before; while the visuals on the page are packed the way Elder is, the way stories play out is more like a Looney Toons creation. The narratives are paper-thin, just frameworks to allow the fun to unfold and to give the characters a place to interact. Everything flows from the main three characters, in various combinations. There's the eponymous star of the book, Art d'Ecco, a white-tuxedo wearing sleazebag who's the amoral straight-man. There's his opposite number, Art Nouveau, a black-tuxedoed creature who's d'Ecco's frequent antagonist and walking Dada event. Lastly there's the Gump, a triangle-shaped pile of naivete, idiocy and sheer filth. Their actions, reactions and retaliations provide the bulk of the first level of humor in the book.

This combination allows the Langridges to go in any number of directions. They can get scatological, absurd, referential, punny or philosophical--sometimes all on the same page. There are several brief stories in the collection, but the meat of the book is in four stories. The first (done for this collection) sees D'Ecco trying to track down back issues of the original comic because someone is paying big money for them on eBay. On one page, we learn that famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma was the original letterer of the comic. When the Gump suggests that d'Ecco could buy a llama if he could find more copies of the comic, Art replies "There's no cause for a llama". Things do not go well for our Mr. d'Ecco when he forks over money to one collector to buy a few.

The story that has the most absurd asides is "No Erect Penises", a tale of d'Ecco simultaneously pursuing a career of writing pornography and leading a censorship campaign. Non-sequitur joke panels pop in out of nowhere, like "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is skiing", and indeed there's a panel where a bunch of blind people are oblivious to a skiier above them. Then there's a laugh-out loud panel of a classic Ditko/Romita Spider-Man pose (when he's dressed as Peter Parker but we "see" half a Spider-Man face to indicate his spider-sense is a-tinglin') and earnestly lamenting "Why are the nice guys always straight?"

The masterpiece of the book is "La Trahison des Images". The title is a reference to the famous Magritte painting of the same name, and its English translation is "The treason of the images". The layman will know it well: it's a drawing of a pipe that underneath it says "This is not a pipe". And of course, it isn't a pipe, it's a painting of a pipe. The image is not reality, and the Langridges take this concept and run away with it. The story concerns d'Ecco's quest to find the Gump after he disappears with his housekey. He later teams up with a woman (who later refers to her new name as (groan) "Eva Prawn") to track him down to a cult leader's fortified compound in the middle of the desert. Said leader turns out to be Art Nouveau, whose awesomely nonsensical "sermons" are the highlight of the story. I especially appreciated the Sly & the Family Stone reference thrown in there.

The most straightforward story set-up is "The Secret History of the World", a desert island tragi-comedy starring the Big Three. Their attempts at setting up governments, economies, alliances and systems of punishment feel the most like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The oily nature of each character prevents them from even noticing that another cast-away has joined them on the island, and she manages to escape without them ever realizing she was ever there.

Roger's style in this book is less decorative than it is in his own Fred the Clown comics. Like Jeffrey Brown, facial expressions drive everything he does. The three stars of the book have a settled, iconic look and it's up to their faces to sell the comedy. Unlike Brown, Langridge uses a lot more exaggeration in his facial expressions. This works especially well with the Gump, whose lack of normal human physical characteristics makes it easy to twist him around like a baloon animal. Even if this book is less lush-looking than his other work, his ink line is astonishingly assured and beautiful to look at. His use of negative space, his panel design, his composition and understanding of panel-to-panel continuity allow the reader to navigate through a lot of detail. His pages are always busy but rarely cluttered, and he just has a way of being able to guide the reader's eye to where it needs to go. About the only other humorist I can think of today who makes comics that are as beautiful to look it is Michael Kupperman.

Reading the Langridges' book, we are immersed in their crazy world. We may not know biographical details about the authors after we have read it, but having an understanding of the mechanics of what they find funny is enlightening on its own terms. With Brown, the biographical details he reveals are incidental and entirely in service to his jokes. It's not that his ego is so staggering that he has to work himself into even his gag work, but rather that this is the medium in which he does it. Humor is often derided in critical circles because of a supposed lack of profundity, but I would argue that for great humorists, the body of their work is often quite revealing of depth. In a documentary made about him before he died, Jacques Derrida made a reference to Heidegger when asked about biographies of philosophers and what should be in them. Heidegger said that the proper biography of a philosopher is as follows: "He was born. He thought. Then he died. The rest is anecdote." What he meant was that the work tells us all we need to know. In much the same way, the Langridges and Brown were born, they made people laugh, and one day they will die. Thankfully, they're still making me laugh.

First TCJ post: Werewolf

My first post for the new Comics Journal website is up, and it's the first in a series about recent anthologies from the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Minicomics from SPX

Rob reviews a number of minicomics he got at SPX. Included are SO BUTTONS #2, by Jonathan Baylis, et al; NOAH VAN SCIVER MINI COMIC, by Noah Van Sciver; THE DAY I KILLED JESUS, by Julia Wertz; JUMBLY JUNKERY #7 & 8, by L.Nichols; BOOK COMIC, by Phil McAndrew; LIMBS OF THE MEGALITH, by Eamon Espey; OTTO ZEPLIN #1, by BT Livermore; THE REGULAR MAN, by Dina Kelberman; MY TERRIBLE TEARABLE HEART, by Sophia Wiedeman; TALES OF GOOD OL' SNOOP DOGGY DOGG, LOSERS WEEPERS and OLD MAN WINTER, by J.T. Yost; and PINSTRIPED BLOODBATH, edited by Jeff Zwirek.

SO BUTTONS #2, by Jonathan Baylis, David Beyer Jr, Tim Ogline & T.J. Kirsch. Baylis collaborated with several different artists for his autobiographical stories, and in general the visuals of this issue were stronger than his first effort. Baylis is at his best with the smallest of observations and recollections. Like many writers who don't draw, these stories are intensely text-heavy, sometimes to the point of overwhelming images. The artists who had the lightest, most cartoony touch were best suited to his work, like T.J. Kirsch on "So...She Married Me Anyway", a lovely story about him taking the wrong train on his wedding day. The material with his wife is the strongest in the book, especially when he tries to lecture her about comedy despite the fact that she's a professional stand-up comedian. On the other hand, his story about his Viet Nam vet uncle visiting the USS Intrepid had a lot stacked against it. Tim Ogline's earnest, naturalistic style demanded a light touch from a writer, but Baylis poured his heart out in talking about a tragedy that affected him. On top of that, the color in this story was distracting and took it further in a maudlin direction. If Baylis is going to continue mining these deeper memories (he had a similarly overwrought story about the Holocaust in his first issue), he'll need to figure out a way to add some restraint. Baylis' work is about memory above all else, and he is simply more effective relating his own, smaller memories (like recollections of listening to the Beatles with his mother) than trying to take on the horrific memories of a different generation. I do like his authorial voice and the easy way he jumps into his memories and finds ways to relate them as bite-sized narratives.

NOAH VAN SCIVER MINI COMIC, by Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is my favorite "miserablist" cartoonist at the moment, humorously relating his own struggles with alienation, depression, ambition and desire for success. The strip that summed all of that up the best was "Walk Home Drunk", a strip that began with Van Sciver being thrown out of a bar, trying to find his way home. Van Sciver's work is in the underground tradition: grotesque figures, an emphasis on the extremes of living (in this strip, puking up blood and the gag reveal that his "home" was a cardboard box), vicious exaggerations (Van Sciver's takedown of scenes and scenesters was hilarious), and a general sense of writing from the id. Van Sciver is still trying to find his voice and isn't quite there yet, but I like how many of his strips are so evocative of time and place. I would recommend his BLAMMO series, but this mini (a compendium of strips that appeared in various publications) is a nice place to start.

THE DAY I KILLED JESUS, by Julia Wertz. This is a split minicomic, backed with "The Legend of Rebob Mountain", an illustrated story that I previously reviewed. The titular story is a funny anecdote from the acerbic Wertz's childhood, where a family custom (of leaving a seat at the table empty for Jesus) was accidentally turned into an event that traumatized her. Wertz's autobio comics are an appealing blend of bitterness and shtick, especially when she looks back on her past as a born-again, prosyletizing Christian. That attitude mixes well with her effectively crude line that emphasizes over-the-top expressiveness. The anger that underlies all of her strips is contrasted by the goofiness of her figures, creating a tension in her work that gives even the silliest of her strips a certain charge. The reader is never distracted by drawings that are so funny that they are taken out of the reading experience. There's a pleasant sloppiness to her work that is partly a deliberate construction, and partly a sharp understanding of her own limitations as a draftsman. This piece was especially effective because she rarely writes longer narratives, but her sharpest work has been that which is a bit more fleshed out.

JUMBLY JUNKERY #7 & #8, by L. Nichols. This has become a consistently interesting grab-bag of stories, rendered in several different styles. Nichols mostly deals in slice-of-life anecdotes, and personal observations, but she also tried her hand at some compelling fiction in these comics as well. Issue #8's "Baxter" is about a kid obsessed with numbers, to the point where his book reports didn't discuss plot or character, but rather the average word lengths and graphs of letter frequency. The eventual reveal of this story took me by surprise, a tribute to Nichols' low-key storytelling style. "Paralyzed" is about a man who woke up, frozen, paralyzed by his own fear of death--a state that led everyone else to declare him dead. One thing I enjoy about her comics is the way her science background pops up in unusual ways, like in discussing entropy, ennui or the body as a mechanism.

Nichols' visual approach continues to evolve. In #7, she used a scratchy line that interlaced hatching and cross-hatching to create her figure and tell the story of Narcissus. Nichols also used color in her comics as a primary means of storytelling, matched up with simplistic stick figures. In other stories, she used a slightly deformed, almost Picasso-esque approach to making her figures. She also employed her standard self-caricature as a rag-doll with button eyes in interesting ways, like one story where literally tore her own stuffing out as an expression of frustration with the quality of her own work. These varied styles made her personal confessions and observations all the more interesting, a true one-person anthology. Nichols has frequently explored issues of identity and gender in her comics, with a refreshing absence of certainty one way or the other about what she believes. "Sisterhood" was a good example of that, a story about waiting for the feeling of "otherness" to disappear when she became an adult, that she'd feel connected to the idea of being a woman, but she feels as much an outsider as ever. The more quotidian observations from Nichols are of lesser interest; to an extent, her self-caricature can sometimes be a distraction in those strips. I'd love to see more fiction and color work from Nichols, and eventually some kind of long-form work. JUMBLY JUNKERY certainly has proven to be a fine training ground for her own development, with each issue showcasing work that's stronger and more daring than previous issues.

BOOK COMIC, by Phil McAndrew. This is less a standard comic than an extended shaggy-dog joke. With a single panel per page, it actually feels more inspired by minimalist animation (complete with silent "pause" panels) than anything else. It's about two people discussing books they've read, with a woman piling more and more over-the-top detail about her book. It turns out to be a fantasy-detective-conspiracy-scifi-ghost-romance-mystery story, becoming more and more unlikely with every detail she reveals. That's really the meat of the book, because the punchline (which is fairly obvious) is a head-slapper. In an effort to get the reader to flip the pages, McAndrew provides funny-looking drawings as his character, which I actually found a little distracting. While McAndrew is a great character designer and the details of the joke are amusing, there was no compelling reason for this to be a comic, per se.

LIMBS OF THE MEGALITH, by Eamon Espey. Everything Espey writes is pretty much a must-read for me, and this collection of very short stories for Bash magazine are no exception. While rendered in his usual grotesque & absurd style, these stories are more accessible and straightforward than much of the material that appeared in WORMDYE. These stories remind me of a weird, alternate version of Ben Katchor's JULIUS KNIPL stories, wherein we are introduced to someone with an unusual profession, an unusual life circumstance, or an unusual place in which they live. What's remarkable about these stories is their compactness, especially since Espey's WORMDYE narratives stretched out in ways that were frequently challenging. Here, Espey introduces us to a world where decreased life spans mean that children marry at age ten; a man whose dog shrunk down to an inch and turned into stone; a woman who lied about going on vacation and who made up weird tales about what she did; and a horseshoe collector who built a time machine. Espey is at the top of his game here, and this is one of the top minicomics of the year.

OTTO ZEPLIN Vol 1, by BT Livermore. This is a funny and well-drawn comic with a slightly weird premise: detailing the epic adventures of a baby whose exploits began right out of the womb. The title character was an actual person who died eight months after birth in the early 1900s, and Livermore, fascinated by the name, extrapolated all sorts of events for young Otto. These are all captioned, single-page gags wherein Otto is visited by the ghost of a pathetic U.S. Grant, hits it big in the stock market and blows it all on candy. What made the comic work was Livermore's crisp and clever character design, which did a nice job of conveying the dryly absurd nature of the humor.

THE REGULAR MAN #4, by Dina Kelberman. Kelberman's IMPORTANT COMICS was a delightful discovery for me this year, a book filled with ultra-minimalist, sardonic strips. This particular comic was about isolation and self-obsession, poking fun at herself while still delving into her own paranoia. Kelberman employs clashing colors in this little two-pager that further get across the sense of cacophony she relates here. Above all else, Kelberman is funny, both with her punchlines and her tiny geometric figures and the impromptu panels she strews across the page.

MY TERRIBLE TEARABLE HEART, by Sophia Wiedeman. Wiedeman excels at mythologizing heartbreak and pain, and this collection of short stories coheres nicely in depicting a set of experiences that form a sort of emotional narrative. "Exploratory Surgery" depicts a young woman carving open her chest and narrating as she went along, noting that if you reach inside, you get a prize. "Space Heart" was a hilariously nasty story about a smiley heart that started talking about how love lifts you up, "higher and higher". As the heart soared above the clouds into outer space, it exploded. Even the slightly maudlin "This Too..." which featured the young woman giving her heart to the Heart Monster, reassuring him that she'd grow another one as she curled up in the fetal position, used a striking sense of absurdity to leaven the outsized nature of the way she depicted pain. The way Wiedeman used dark dots for eyes gave her figures a much-needed sense of distance for the reader, even as the warmth of her line and the way she used grey drew a reader in. Refinement is the next stage for Wiedeman: more simplicity for her figures, greater confidence in her line and less reliance on greyscaling to achieve emotional effects.

LOSERS WEEPERS, TALES OF GOOD OL' SNOOP DOGGY DOGG, and OLD MAN WINTER, by JY Yost. Yost's greatest strength as an artist is his character design, and this serves his frequently amusing slice-of-life stories well. He also has a knack for seizing on a concept or gimmick and taking it in some unusual directions. For example, LOSERS WEEPERS was created when he found a journal written by a woman despairing of her relationship with a crazy boyfriend, an envelope with some explicitly crude writing scrawled on it, and a scrap of paper written in broken English. He pieced these together to create a story about that ex-boyfriend running into his ex-girlfriend, doing an obscene rap at an open-mic night and winding up sleeping under a bridge with fellow junkies. The tone of the piece was both tragic and comedic, which aptly describes much of the rest of his work. SNOOP was a compendium of dream comics and an autobiographical story related to the rapper. These are all amusing, with Snoop appearing as a friend, mentor and occasional supplicant. The last story, where we learn the impact that Snoop's music had on Yost as a child, put the dreams into a different context.
OLD MAN WINTER won a Xeric grant, and it's a collection that very much pushes emotion (and frequently sentiment) to the forefront. The title story exemplifies Yost veering from cartoony figures to naturalistic backgrounds (complete with dense cross-hatching), as we meet an old man whose wife has just died and is nearing the end of his own life. The story's emotional arc is pretty clear from the outset. The most interesting thing about it wasn't the titular character, but rather the way others around him reacted to someone in deep mourning who did as much as possible to hide it. The most effective story was "Logging Sanjay", a funny childhood account of playing pranks on a friend's family that unintentionally went to some darker places. "Roadtrip" was a really well-drawn story comparing the life paths of a human child and a calf that had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It's propaganda in the truest sense of the word, trying to provoke an emotional reaction with the way it juxtaposed its imagery. In that sense, it's quite effective, but propaganda is imagery programmed to provoke a single, particular reaction; this is what I'd consider to be the opposite of art.

PINSTRIPED BLOODBATH, edited by Jeff Zwirek. This is an attractively designed, sharply focused minicomics anthology about organized crime-related stories in Chicago, drawn by Chicagoans. Almost every story is a winner here, with some providing more of a payoff than others. The only dissonant note in the anthology was the story by Neil "Neil Jam" Fitzpatrick, whose stylized art and authorial voice were a bad fit. Nate Beaty and Bernie McGovern use mostly wordless stories to depict historical events; both make the wise decision, in telling stories about massacres, to provide a minimum of context. The details are less relevant than the emotional, visceral nature of the violent acts (especially with McGovern's story about a gangster going out in a blaze) and their aftermath (in Beaty's strip, a woman bloodies her handkerchief as a keepsake).
My favorite stories were editor Zwirek's account of the history of the Thompson submachine gun (the "Tommy gun") and Sam Sharpe's stunning story of his mother's delusion about his connection to a crime family. Zwirek's use of a fractured narrative was quite clever, as was the way he used the inventor's moral struggle with the fact that his invention was being used by criminals as a way of adding emotional & dramatic tension to what was essentially a timeline. Sharpe's story is a clever spin on the way that gangsters have not only become part of American myth, they've become part of American paranoia. His mentally ill mother concocted a story about how he was taken away by the "Sharpe crime family" as a way of explaining to herself how her mental illness (and time in an institution) was the product of a conspiracy. Using Jason-style anthropomorphic figures added just the right level of distance for this story. Zwirek has a sharp eye as an editor, and I hope he attempts something like this again.

High-Low and the Comics Journal

Beginning in December, I'll be part of the new blogging team at the Comics Journal's new, expanded website presence. The site goes live on December 1st, and I'll have new blog entries on Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. TCJ's blog posts are 500 words and under; regular readers of this column know that I'm rarely that terse. So my minicomics reviews will likely be chopped up a bit more, and my longer reviews will be featured on the front page of the new tcj.com. I will continue to post links from here to the new page whenever I have a new article up, and will probably post things here from time to time. Thanks to everyone who has kept up with my writings here and at sequart.com. I'm greatly looking forward to being part of the new TCJ team. One of my first articles I intend to publish will be one I've been shopping around for nearly two years, so I'm excited it'll finally see the light of day.

The Art of Awkwardness: PS Comics

Rob reviews Minty Lewis' collection of stories, PS COMICS (Secret Acres).

Minty Lewis first came to my attention with a funny story in an SPX anthology (the travel-themed edition) about featuring anthropomorphic fruit as her characters. Her PS COMICS minis have alternated between the travails of various fruit-oriented characters and the lives of anthropomorphic terriers. The cuteness of her character design boldly contrasts with the bitter awkwardness of her slice-of-life stories. Lewis mines the humor of cruelty for her characters, especially the office-life set-up for the fruit character stories. It reminds me a bit of the UK version of The Office, in that there are a number of characters who are desperately lonely and unhappy but don't know how to reach out without inflicting pain on others. In Lewis' stories, it's the most pitiable characters who often wind up saying and doing the most awful things. The clarity of her line and the sharpness of her dialogue make this a compelling read. The juxtaposition of her cute drawings (which grab the reader's eye and are just funny drawings) and the nastiness of tone both more effective. A naturalistic style of art would have made these comics feel somewhat leaden, but the simplicity and flow of Lewis' pages help the reader fly across these pages, soaking up the dialogue.

There are a number of highlights here. "'Me' Time" features the simultaneously abrasive and lonely Apple rejecting his obnoxious workmates because he was inspired by a character from a TV show who did the same thing. In a creepy but hilarious sequence, Apple has a running commentary with this character (Lemon), pretending that she was actually with him as though she were her soul mate. When Apple stayed home the next day from work (at the "urging" of Lemon), he was stunned to see a TV interview where she described the character as a loser and used method acting to inhabit the role. Chastened, Apple sought out his coworkers for after-work recreation, even if he still hated them.

"Bitter Fruit" was a stunning account of workplace romances gone horribly wrong, as Pear is rather casually dumped by Banana in favor of Kumquat. Apple stepped in, rather clumsily, in an effort to offer comfort to the bitter Pear (who said things to Kumquat like "Check it out, Apple! The monkey learned to shave its face!"), first insulting her and then trying to advise Pear to start writing. Apple, who felt like someone somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, tried to get Pear to come over to his place to hear him read his script. Faced with that and the possibility of having to hang out with Banana & Kumquat at an after-work get-together, she chose the latter. There were some hilarious images in this story, like the (literally) pear-shaped Pear being thrown out of her ex-boyfriend's apartment wearing sweat pants.

"Out of Season" featured Apple trying to hit on the new temp, Strawberry, only to discover the she was even more unbalanced than he was. She turned out to be the sort of borderline personality disorder person we've all met from time to time, rigidly defining everyone she came into contact with as either friends or enemies. Apple, with his rigid ideas on how to advise others, naturally managed to alienate her even as he was trying to hit on her. The highlight of the story came when the office went to see Pear at an open mic poetry night, which included lines like "And my vagina remembers/what you used to feel like/every morning...there is cereal/but every night...there's just slices". In each story, Apple makes a ridiculous protagonist, someone who is acutely aware that he's at the bottom of the social power structure and hates it, but will press any small advantage he can find. He wants to be "understood", but is such a narcissist that he can't understand other points of view and experiences. He wants to be considered compassionate and understanding, but is completely devoid of empathy. In short, everything he does makes everything worse, and provides a lot of bitter laughs.

I wasn't quite as drawn to Lewis' stories that star Yorkshire Terriers, with the exception of "Yorkie Matrimony". The humor in the other stories isn't quite as biting and the drawing felt a bit more stiff, especially with regard to character interaction. "Yorkie Matrimony" was so over the top yet true to life that it felt agonizingly real. The story involved a pair of female apartment mates, one of whom gets engaged. The other roommate feels betrayed and abandoned, worried that she won't be able to take care of herself. That started a series of passive-aggressive moves on both of their parts, culminating in a bridal shower game of Scrabble that featured insults to the groom.

Lewis has a knack for relating the power struggles at the heart of many relationships and how we choose to engage them. That sense of push-and-pull, where we need intimacy but also have the urge to dominate and control our partners and friends, powers the tension of her stories. The ways in which humans interact with each other, trading in self-deception, is absurd on its face, which makes Lewis' storytelling choices all the more resonant. Humans are ridiculous, so why not portray them as fruit or dogs or salt shakers? It's a way of softening the blow while playing up the humor inherent to the pain of human interaction. This collection, by playing up the connections between stories and characters in subtle ways, actually strengthened the original source material and gave it a surprising coherency for material collected from so many sources. Secret Acres once again provided a public service by getting stories that were once part of minis out to a wider audience.

Public Service Announcement: Monsters

Rob reviews the bracingly personal new comic from Ken Dahl, MONSTERS (Secret Acres).

Ken Dahl's MONSTERS created a sensation when its first few chapters were released as minicomics, winning an Ignatz award. In their original format, the minis were barely-disguised autobiographical comics about a particular relationship he had and how it came crashing down when both partners realized they had herpes--and that he probably gave it to her. The final version, published by outstanding small press concern Secret Acres, changed some of the details and appearances but left the emotional core of the book intact. Dahl, working very much in the tradition of underground comics, created a hilarious but bracing story about living with a disease that by its very nature creates a state of perpetual alienation. The craving for intimacy is permanently balanced by an intense feeling of guilt and self-loathing, a sense of not being worthy of intimacy because of the disease. That feeling is further multiplied by the understanding that while herpes is incurable, it's not especially harmful. There's always the temptation to simply withhold one's diagnosis from potential partners.

After all, as Dahl noted, something like 60% of all adult Americans has herpes in one form or other--but most people don't know it. For a conscientious person, the feeling is akin to shoplifting being the only method one can use to obtain a product. Shoplifting is clearly a crime and an ethical lapse, but the line between right and wrong becomes very thin at that point of desperation and little harm that can be caused.

MONSTERS turned from the dynamics of a particular relationship to the specifics of day-to-day living with what was once euphemistically called a "social disease". Dahl infused the book with a weird tension. It's part confessional, part educational comic, part gag book at his own expense. Living with constant pain in his mouth, and without proper insurance for medication that might help, led to a miserable day-to-day experience. At the same time, Dahl felt guilt for being that miserable, considering that nothing was really "wrong" with him. Of course, the worse part of the experience was the sense that it was not only not possible to experience intimate contact ever again, but that he didn't even deserve intimacy. What separated this book from simple melodrama was two things: Dahl's acidic sense of humor and his virtuostic linework.

Dahl used a clever trick in depicting life with the disease, creating an anthropomorphized version of herpes as a sort of constant companion. Dahl leaned heavily on the comically grotesque in the depiction of his "friend" as well as himself, going over the top on many pages for humorous effect. Crumb was an obvious influence on his line, but there's a bit of Peter Bagge in there too, especially in terms of character design. Any influence he took from others was mostly that of inspiration and boundaries of what was possible in comics--seeing what could subjects could be addressed. Dahl is very much an original, who manages to walk the line between intense rendering and clear page design. His figures went from simplistic to naturalistic to cartoony, sometimes all on the same page.

MONSTERS is a book that has a lot of narrative text, but it's just in support of the intensity of the images on every page. Dahl either employs a funny drawing or grotesque drawing in nearly every panel, powerfully underlining the central theme of unearned alienation. It's a tribute to his skill and sense of humor that this unrelenting intensity doesn't become overwhelming to the reader. It does help that Dahl employed several series of silent pages, including detailed renderings of actual herpes sores, the morning routine of assorted pills and powders and a hilarious sequence where the herpes-ridden finger of god squashes his head.

The central plot arc of this story is a simple one. Dahl goes from oblivious, to denial, to shirking of responsibility and knowledge of herpes, to overobsessing about the details of the disease. The quotidian details of the various "homeopathic" remedies he tried to relieve his oral discomfort dovetailed neatly with several hilarious sequences depicting his job making food at a Whole Foods-style, vegan grocery store. Dahl excels at depicting screaming, pompous & deluded lunatics from all walks of life, but he saved a special sort of venom for the health food fanatics he used to serve. That sequence pointed out that stress tended to trigger his pain, but it also pointed out how much he was beginning to hate a group of people that he theoretically thought of as like-minded folk. Overcoming his fear of humiliating rejection and self-loathing, the feeling that he deserved to be alone, became his biggest task, one that he finally achieved when he acknowledged his need for intimacy with a particular person while being honest with her. When she told him it wasn't really a big deal, Dahl depicted himself as having layers of slime and goo falling away from his skin, revealing just another person. He even had sympathy for the anthropomorphized disease, acknowledging that it was just another form of life trying to get by.

That climax is followed by a twist-ending epilogue that comically took the rug out from under Dahl, rendering five years of his life a "corny sex-ed PSA". It's an ending so unlikely that it has to be true, but it didn't nullify the emotional truth of what he was trying to accomplish with this comic. There are a number of pages of fairly didactic material, but Dahl's skill as an artist (and some truly gross drawings) made these fascinating to read. Slightly less interesting was the time spent on the laundry list of foods he was trying to avoid, and how that clashed with his attempt at the time to be a vegan. The book was at its best when Dahl simply went about his day and tried to figure out how to relate to others.

At its heart, this is a book about ethics in its truest sense: what do we do about others? How do we relate to them, and why do we want to? Do we treat them as objects at hand or as ends unto themselves? Dahl was confronted by a scenario that forced himself to ask these questions every time he wanted to kiss someone, have sex with someone one or initiate any kind of intimate contact. It underlined not only the ways that we take such things for granted, it illuminated the entire issue of how our material needs intersect with our conception of self and other. It also highlighted the ways in which society's taboos on openly discussing sex and sexuality lead to situations where disease is spread. MONSTERS is both a funny confessional story highlighting the mistakes of its protagonist and an attempt to open a dialogue, and it's a rousing success on both counts.

Three Takes On Christmas: The Fir Tree, Gift of the Magi, A Kidnapped Santa Claus

Rob reviews a trio of Christmas story adaptations from Harper Collins' itbooks line. Included are L. Frank Baum's A KIDNAPPED SANTA CLAUS (adapted by Alex Robinson); Hans Christian Andersen's THE FIR-TREE (adapated by Lilli' Carre); and O. Henry's THE GIFT OF THE MAGI (adapted by Joel Priddy).

The itbooks line represents another entry of smartly-designed, attractive and intelligently chosen comics for whatever is left of the book market. Each of the three hardbacks is designed to be held by a younger reader (they're about 4.5 x 7.5), with each book totally roughly 60-70 pages each. They're graphic novellas, really, but they perfectly mesh the sensibilities of modern comics publishing with a throwback attempt at drawing kids back to classic literature. The choice for each of the three stories was inspired, with each volume representing a different range of emotions and experiences. What struck me most about each volume was that despite the fact that each artist was adapting someone else's story, the tone of each comic was very much that of the cartoonist, not the writer.

For example, Alex Robinson adapted the obscure L. Frank Baum story, "A Kidnapped Santa Claus". The story itself was very short and sparing on details, so Robinson had to flesh out a number of characters and situations. His tone for this story was absolutely perfect, a blend of humor, action, horror and Christmas sentiment. I'm guessing the publishers chose him because of the tender and funny way he handled a Christmas story back when BOX OFFICE POISON was still coming out in comics form. Robinson thrived with the constraints he found himself faced with here, and I found this a much more satisfying work than his recent TOO COOL TO BE FORGOTTEN, a book I found predictable and maudlin. With A KIDNAPPED SANTA CLAUS and LOWER REGIONS, Robinson seems to have found a niche with off-kilter genre stories filtered through his slice-of-life storytelling interests.

Baum set Robinson up with Santa living in a valley with all sorts of helpful creatures, near the lair of the demons Selfishness, Envy and Hatred. Robinson turned what could have been a tedious fable into something charming, thanks to his lively character design and focus on character interaction. The demons are all jealous of Santa and first try to trick him into renouncing his good ways (with one of the demons disguising himself as Robinson's own self-caricature, which for someone reason he draws as a morbidly obese man), and then later kidnap him when that fails. The reader gets both the usual Santa-related Christmas ephemera in this story and several pages of fairy vs demon battle action. The inclusion of demons, along with Robinson's heavy reliance on blacks, make this an unusual entry as a Christmas story, but that was all part of the fun. This is the frothiest of the three books, which makes sense given that Robinson's art and approach is the most straightforward of the three artists asked to contribute.

The artist who did the most with the least was Joel Priddy, in his adaptation of O.Henry's THE GIFT OF THE MAGI. This story has been told and re-told so many times that its twist ending (a standard O.Henry trick) is not exactly a well-kept secret. Priddy is not a widely known name in comics circles, but I've been a fan of everything he's published, starting with his sole graphic novel, PULPATOON PILGRIMAGE. Priddy is a remarkably fluid, versatile draftsman who can create naturalistic settings and complex color blurring effects but also draw the reader's eye in with character designs that are cartoonishly simple. Clear-line animation is a big inspiration for the visuals of this book, with sharp, angular facial features, exaggerated expressions and the sweeping movements from panel to panel. The simplicity and clarity of the figures contrasts elegantly with the more naturalistically rendered furniture. His use of color in a key sequence pops off the page, especially the way in which he literally unrolls it on to the page when Della takes her hair down and rolls it back up when she ties it up again.

Priddy's narrative voice is also extremely clever, essentially taking the reader on a voyeur's tour of a couple fallen on hard times who sacrifice their most valuable possessions so as to get the perfect Christmas gift for the other. There's a great page where the husband, Jim, first sees his wife's shorn locks and we see four faces from him in sequence, each one trying to express a different level of surprise, shock and bemusement. The next page, where we see Della (dreading that Jim would reject her) coil her body into a ball, is nicely matched against the next page, where she tries to deflect her anxiety by uncoiling herself and cheerfully trying to reassure her husband. Priddy manages to generate a lot of humor out of an otherwise tense moment thanks to his line.

The book as a whole has a light touch despite its slightly maudlin premise and treacly conclusion. Priddy helps the story earn its earnestness with his characters' body language, turning what seemed to be resentment from Jim into the most earnest kind of admiration. After pages of clever visual turns (like fracturing Della's likeness with multiple looks at a very narrow mirror, or "animating" the ways in which their prize possessions would cause the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon to envy them), Priddy goes back to the images of snow and stars against a black sky, reflecting the wisdom of generosity of the protagonists. THE GIFT OF THE MAGI is admirable both for its charming drawing and the ingenious ways in which Priddy solved storytelling problems.

Of the three adaptations, Lilli Carre's THE FIR-TREE feels the most like the sort of story she might have written on her own. Carre manages to trump Priddy with the ingenuity of her design, weaving text and image together in clever ways. There's a brightness to her design that's an effective and ironic contrast to the relentless grimness of the original Hans Christian Andersen story. Carre's work has always had a magical realist element to it, so a story about a tree with thoughts, hopes and dreams was a natural fit. What was different was how much Carre leaned on the original text; her dialogue and written narration is usually considerably more spare than in this book, preferring to let her images tell the story as much as possible. Here, she embraced the fairy-tale narration to its fullest, but found different ways to make that text visually interesting.

Andersen's story had a punishing way of relaying its moral without actually spelling it out ala Aesop: don't wish to become something else so much that you are incapable of enjoying your life now. The fir tree wanted to become bigger and resented animals jumping over it. It grew tired of its forest and wanted to see the world. It longed for a better world, never satisfied with its own. Of course, when it gets chopped down, it immediately starts to regret its stance, but only begins to learn to enjoy the moment once it's too late. The tree's delusional belief that the glory of Christmas day, when its branches were hung with fruit and candles, would be repeated again and again, was painful to the point of being funny. The book continued to pile on as the tree was thrown into an attic for several months, then taken outside, chopped into pieces and thrown onto the fire, sighing in the end that it wished it could have enjoyed itself while it had the chance.

Visually, Carre's biggest success was making a tree an interesting protagonist. The way the tree's branches bent gave it a subtle anthropomorphic quality and a surprising amount of expressiveness. Carre' used a variety of colors for her word balloons that allowed them to mesh with both image and the narrative text on the page, giving the whole book a fluid, sweeping quality. Despite the fact that the book was in reality more illustrated text than "pure" comic book (there were no traditional panels, for example), that integrative strategy prevented the book from having a static quality. The warmth of her images is an interesting contrast to the formal, almost cold nature of the narration and dialogue. At the same time, that distance is an element that's often present in Carre's work, and it was obvious that the effect was deliberate on her part.

Each of the three books was successful on their own terms. The Robinson book was a character-oriented lark with action elements. The Priddy book showed off the artist's cleverness as a cartoonist. The Carre' book fit neatly into her concerns as an artist, displaying yet another narrative approach while staying true to her overall trajectory of explanation. It felt like each artist was given a lot of leeway, within the bounds of story length (each is a graphic novella of about sixty pages in length) and format (the size and general appearance of each book is roughly the same, though the covers of each book are different colors). It's encouraging when a new imprint feels like a lot of thought has gone into it, and this is certainly true of itbooks. I'll be curious to see what they choose to do next with regard to comics, and if they'll move on from adaptations to original stories.

Artist Introspective, Part 3: Map Of My Heart

Rob reviews John Porcellino's recent King-Cat collection, MAP OF MY HEART (Drawn & Quarterly), as the final entry in a three part series on artists with recent publications that look back on their careers.

John Porcellino's MAP OF MY HEART is the most devastating of the three books I've examined in this series, because here the artist's struggle with self-worth and the desire to create was inextricably tied into his own mental illness. That illness was exacerbated by a life-threatening physical ailment as well as his wife leaving him, leading to full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD often has a strong link to depression as well, leading to a crippling paralysis of will. Porcellino fought through this, in part, through his deepening studies of Buddhism and his unquenched desire to keep producing issues of King-Cat Comics. This was the period where Porcellino went from good to great as an artist, making his style and prose spare & compact. Like with Zak Sally, it was the work that counted, and it acted in some sense as much as a lifeline than as something to conquer. Porcellino supplemented the comics with extensive endnotes, much like Sally. His approach was less a free-flowing essay than a series of fragments: journal entries, unpublished drawings, and detailed context regarding a particular line or strip. This made complete sense, given that one could always "read" Porcellino himself as someone composed of these small moments. He was entirely emotionally transparent simply by what he chose to depict and how he chose to do so.

The book's title, taken from a piece of children's art he saw, is the most accurate way to describe this process. Bit by bit, moment by moment, the reader comes to understand Porcellino's point of view and the nature of his struggle. This is far from typical mopey autobio work, but is instead the one instance where the map and the territory are virtually the same thing. He was in pain and worked through his pain, and from his current vantage point, time did nothing to soften the feelings he experienced. The book ended on an enormously upbeat note, thanks to him meeting his future wife Misun, but in many ways that was less a payoff for the reader than simply another part of the struggle.

There's a surprising cohesiveness to this book as an individual entity, even though it's composed of a number of different issues of King-Cat. The issues are pretty much reprinted in their entirety (including letter columns), with the exception of chapters from stories that would be reprinted elsewhere. The remainders of those issues tended to be meditations on his environment, anecdotes from his past, or spare but aching visual poems that reflect on his divorce obliquely. He also started adapting poems and stories from his Buddhist teachings into comics, a combination that wound up creating some of the most charming stories in the book. Given the success of his THOREAU AT WALDEN adaptation, I'd love to see an expanded collection of Porcellino's Buddhist story adaptations.

The Zen Buddhist influence is key to understanding this collection and the way that Porcellino's style evolved. Porcellino took up Buddhism at perhaps the lowest ebb of his life, a life filled with noise and activity. Buddhism's central tenet is that desire is the cause of suffering, and Porcellino's comics were always about desire, longing and the urge to find one's place in the world. Buddhist art and poetry has always been an attempt to describe the indescribable, the feeling of Zen enlightenment and bliss called satori. I've always felt that the attainment of satori is less an intellectual or emotional process than it is an aesthetic one. The experience of beauty can be described or reduced to familiar emotions, but those descriptions are not the experience, and as such, can't be communicated fully to others. So it's no surprise that Zen teachings are done through poems, paintings or oblique aphorisms--all forms of art that demand intense engagement from the audience. It's entirely up to the audience if they're ready to engage the work and draw meaning from it--and what that meaning is can vary.

In MAP OF MY HEART, Porcellino followed the Zen model when he started to go with less. His line--already a simple, minimalist tool--became even sparer and less fussy. More of his pieces were his own version of Zen poetry, carving away complex emotions and events and leaving only their essence. Porcellino has a fascination with nature that pervaded this volume, from the lives of ants, birds, root hogs and pill bugs to the stillness of bogs and the sound of wind. Zen poetry and art focuses on nature--that which surrounds all of us, is older than us and bigger than us. Considering nature is humbling for any individual who truly ponders their place in the world, and as such is a perfect avenue for teaching the lessons of Zen. While this is true for Porcellino, he also simply delights in his environment. He loves taking walks, listening to the sounds of his neighborhood, blazing trails in places where people don't usually go, and the way the cold air felt. There are also amusing quotidian stories about shopping with his mom and hanging out with friends that showed off his sense of humor.

Above all else, he loved his faithful cat, Maisie Kukoc. Kukoc was an anchor for him in more ways than one. Porcellino was quite frank in his endnotes about his battle with OCD and depression, and the feelings of self-hatred and self-destruction that ensued. At one point, he noted that he avoided suicide only because he worried about who would take care of his cat. It's a stunning low point, but also a triumph of sorts because he was looking for a reason to live, not a reason to die. His struggle was perhaps best reflected in the wrenching story "Forgiveness", a story from his childhood. It was about John exploring an environment and dealing with the human urge to destroy and the enormous feelings of guilt that came about as a result of killing a bird with a slingshot. When a ball went into the basement and the family dog ran after it, John was paralyzed by grief and guilt once again. One almost senses that John's guilt was even greater as an adult than as a child; it felt like he didn't fully process the emotions felt from the experience until he drew the story. There is no pat resolution to the story, just the feeling of remorse and the desire for self-nullification.

Porcellino faced these feelings head-on, forcing himself to experience the guilt and work through it. He attacked the feelings of powerlessness through taking walks, leaving towns, seeking experiences and embracing his relationships with others. Porcellino learned the valuable lesson that one can only make connections when one is open to the risk that such connections entail. It's letting go of one's fears, which are directly related to one's desires for self-protection. Leaving himself open allowed him to embrace the connection that would become meeting his future wife. That relationship alone didn't dissipate his OCD, but it gave him another weapon with which to fight that spiral.

When they began as a long-distance relationship, Porcellino did a strip that obliquely referred to his longing to see her. In many ways, this strip was the essence of what it means to live in the world while trying to follow Zen. One option for being a Buddhist is to withdraw entirely from the world and worldly sensations. Another point of view is that one can't abandon the world but instead must try to view quotidian concerns with a Zen approach. The world exists and we choose to interact with it; the key is not to become obsessed with dominating it. In this strip, Porcellino acknowledged his aching desire and allowed himself to feel it fully in the moment. He didn't curse their separation, but instead acknowledged it while experiencing his environment, noting that it was "the first hot night of the year". It's the page that's the best representative of his work in the book, spotlighting the insight of a man who allows the world to reveal itself to him rather than trying to impose himself on it.

Artist Introspective, Part 2: Like A Dog

Rob reviews Zak Sally's collection of early comics, LIKE A DOG (Fantagraphics), as the second entry in a three part series on artists with recent publications that look back on their careers.

If the mood surrounding Paul Hornschemeier's ALL AND SUNDRY felt a bit chilly and reserved, Zak Sally's collection of his RECIDIVIST material and other works was positively pugillistic in nature. Of course, the battle Sally was fighting was with himself and his place in the world, both as an artist and a person. In republishing his first mature works, Sally went out of his way to directly confront the feelings he was experiencing at the time he was writing these comics and contextualize where he was at the time, both literally and psychologically. The extended endnotes written by Sally were one of the most bracing but inspiring pieces of writing I've ever seen by an artist on their own work. It's a statement of purpose not just as an artist, but as a human being. Sally simply embraced every misstep he committed as an artist, every mistake made as a person, every pang of doubt and self-hatred felt--because in the end, one has no other choice if they're going to continue to create. LIKE A DOG is in many ways a journal of a restless artist drawn to comics and frightened of them at the same time, with these two impulses tearing him apart as his own pattern of constantly uprooting his life reflected this conflict.

Sally was a member of the rock band Low, a group that achieved a certain level of fame and critical regard in the last decade. Being in the band meant a lot of travel and a rootless lifestyle, something that suited the restless Sally just fine when he was younger. At the same time, he found himself drawn to comics as a form of expression very different from his musical career. It was his first love, but a pursuit that left him constantly frustrated. Never allowing himself to have roots was, in a sense, a way to cut off the possibility of having to confront the idea of commitment. Comics, to Sally, represented a very particular kind of relationship and commitment that was especially difficult, yet impossible to deny. The result was the publication of a couple of issues of his elaborate minicomic RECIDIVIST, both of which were reprinted in this volume.

The first issue is rough compared to his later work, with a lot of overrendering and shaky lettering. Still, it's a compelling read because of the way he's able to establish his unique narrative tone. Sally often writes in second person, like in "All My Friends Are Giants", a squirmingly uncomfortable story about a literally tiny person who is a relentless manipulator. His nonstop blather is such that this feels like someone Sally dealt with on a regular basis. "Dresden" dialed back the intensity, both in terms of the visuals (heavy on blacks but otherwise rendered in a more minimal manner) and the story. Sally wisely let the disturbing events he witnessed speak for themselves, an inexplicable scene at a club he was going to perform at involving a striking young woman & what appeared to be a priest. The final story, "Severed" reflected Sally's obsession with the true existence of human beings as bags of meat. This was another story told in second person, as the body alerted the person that they had violated a contracted and that relations (and a tendon) were officially severed. It was a statement of disgust with himself, as well as being unable to live in his own skin as both person and artist.

The second issue was a big leap forward. While this collection wasn't quite able to capture just how intricate it was in terms of its cover, there's a stunning beauty in its design, especially the endpapers. He mentioned writing it, between tours, living in a 10x6 room so compact that every inch of it "had to make sense". I think as a result, this forced a similar sense of structure on his comics, which became at once more ambitious and more disciplined. "You're Going To Fry" was the most over-the-top strip in the issue, a brutal allegory about Hollywood culture written once again in second person. Its tone is less of an imperative one than his other stories of this ilk, but Sally's final visual, showing the film discussed in the strip merely reflecting the hellish reality of life in Los Angeles, spoke volumes.

The highlight of the issue, and the book, was "At The Scaffold", an impeccably researched and intensely moving account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's time spent in prison. Jailed for speaking out against the Tsar (in the mildest of fashions), he spent his time in solitary confinement wracked by pain. Still a young man, he forced himself to focus past the pain and write. The parallels to Sally's own situation were obvious, and Sally was clearly moved and inspired by the letters of the young man who would later go on to be one of the greatest authors of all time. It was also an admonition to himself to stop wasting time, to let go of his past bitterness and self-loathing as an artist. It was fitting that in the first story that Sally wrote that wasn't actually about himself, he wound up revealing more of himself in a direct manner than he had before. It was reminiscent of what Ivan Brunetti would later do in SCHIZO #4, as he wrote biographical stories about famous figures that Brunetti identified with.

Sally's admonition for change was further reflected in "You Won't Let Yourself Be Touched", a dream comic told in first person, but where we never see the narrator. It's a desperate plea to himself to find a place to settle down into, but he wasn't quite ready yet. As Sally himself noted, this story saw him shift into his mature style in terms of his line. The line is expressive & simple, and much less reliant on the use of heavy blacks or intense rendering. It's the first time he showed a great deal of restraint as a draftsman. The story reflected his sense of disgust for how he was living ("like a dog"), that he was somehow less than human, and represented the first step on his road to transformation.

The rest of the book contained short stories from a variety of sources, including MOME and COMIC ART. There are some real stunners here: Sally was down on "The War Back Home" because of its timing around 9/11, but this scratchboard comic was one of my favorites in the book. It's one of the most clever stories about self-destructiveness that I've ever read, as Sally anthropomorphized every item in his apartment in terms of being allies or enemies in a constant battle, concluding with his worries about a potential alliance between the beer and his blank drawing paper. "21" was a hilarious (and as it turns out, autobiographical) story of a waiter who encountered an unusual guest who only ordered orange from room service--but wanted something altogether else from her waiter. "Dread" was a standout story from MOME, one where he incorporated the unusual lettering he'd been developing as a story device that heightened the sense of existential terror the narrator felt. "The Man Who Killed Wally Wood" was Sally at his best in that it was an autobiographical story that revealed a lot of crucial personal details, but did it as a secondary concern to the real story. That story was one of the struggle of the artist against exploitation on top of an everyday battle to gain inspiration, and the EC Comics flourishes in it were a nice touch. This story also displayed Sally's pitch-black sense of humor; despite the relentlessness of his style, Sally is far from being a miserablist.

In his afterword, Sally first provided context for each and every piece and then evaluated them. There's a brutal honesty to his approach that eschewed both a narcissistic sense of self-validation as well as self-negating self-deprecation. Rather than simply declaring all of his old work to be worthless, he treated it as part of a process. Some of the work he was still proud of, some of it he saw as a breakthrough in some way, and some of it was a dead end. All of it had value, because it was documentation of what led him to his current status as an artist. He noted that "somehow, making these comics forced me to work some shit out. And that the process of 'working it out' is real, and it's got value..."

It's obvious that this is true, because while not all of the work here is strong, one can see a voice developing and sound some truly interesting notes. The third issue of RECIDIVIST was one of my top comics of the decade, and his SAMMY THE MOUSE series clearly touches upon a number of events that he experienced as a younger man as well as his older works. Sally quit his band, settled down, bought his own press and has become comfortable with the process of making and publishing comics. He's quick to deflate his own sense of self-satisfaction, along with the idea that anyone's got it figured out. In the end, he says, "it's the work that counts". It's what mattered when comics frightened him, and it's what matters now that he's more settled. While Sally wanted to provide the reader context and his own view on his work (because he liked that sort of thing reading other collections), his opinion about his art was no more or less valid than the reader's.

It's a crucial point, because a difficult part of being an artist is declaring when something is done and can be experienced by others. The work becomes a separate entity, a monument to what the artist has created that has the potential to have an impact on its readers. Whether it's positive or negative is obviously out of the artist's hands and may or may not wind up affecting what the artist does later. There are certainly hard-working artists who have never produced a single worthwhile work, but the point is that unless the artist continues to release work, it is absolutely certain that they will never get better. The work is all that's left after the ephemeral nature of process and emotion fades away. It's the responsibility of the artist to create the best work of which they are capable, to have the courage to publish it, and to have the discernment to figure out how to ge better. I'm reminded of Lynda Barry's Two Questions from WHAT IT IS: if the artist immediately focuses on the questions of "Is this good?" and "Does this suck" instead of their actual inspiration, they will be in a constant state of paralysis. It's a struggle that Sally obviously was afflicted by, but has found a way to overcome it, and LIKE A DOG is a testament both to the struggle and the triumph.