Zero Point and Quinn
Thomson's Comics, by Quinn Thomson. Zero Point is a
self-aware parody of Alien, more or less, employing a mix of line
weights that emphasize different aspects of storytelling. A spaceship
is sent on a rescue mission to an uncharted planet, and there's one
guy in the crew who knows that everything on this “routine”
mission is going to go horribly wrong. The stark blacks in this comic
work well on the slick paper that Thomson chose, and they help
accentuate his excellent work with making his faces expressive in an
exaggerated way. The cartoonish nature of his line made me wish he
had chosen to hand-letter the comic, as the fonts he chose were
distracting. This is a funny comic that gets a lot of mileage out of
its horrifying aspects and the awful decision-making of its
characters. Thomson's portfolio comic shows off his expressive
cartooning in an even better light with comics like “Metro”,
which looks like it could be a short story featured in a French
anthology somewhere. It's about a guy with stringy hair that stands
up (an excellent design) having a miserable time on a subway. There
are bits of over-rendering here and there, but for the most part
Thomson keeps things clear and focuses on the physical humor of the
jokes. In “Bibliomancy” and “Meditation Comic”, Thomson
makes great use of a lively, squiggly line to create a wonderful,
zaftig character in one comic and alternates between heavily spotted
blacks and wonderfully scrawled faces in a deep-sea diving adventure.
There's also a little of Graham Chaffee to his work, in that I could
see him working comfortably in either comics or animation.
Netflix and Chill, Bones Vs.
Tomes and Infernal Nihilism, by Kristen Shull. Shull is
adept at the comedy narrative, as each of her three stories featured
somewhat cynical sense of humor with genre trappings. Bones Vs. Tomes
is a four-pager about a sorcery adept who goes out to the woods to
learn spells instead of studying books to get them like wizards. In
the span of four panels, she sets up the premise and introduces us to
the teenage story of the story. Things go wrong (because of course)
and she accidentally summons up a bunch of skeletons out for blood.
Then there's a page and a half of negotiating the killer skeletons,
until she's saved by a bunch of dickish wizards. The final two panels
offer her wicked revenge for dealing with those bullies. Her line is
decent, looking great when dealing with the main character and a bit
more unsure when drawing other people. That said, her storytelling
fundamentals are solid. There's nothing spectacular-looking about
this comic, but her execution made it memorable.
Infernal
Nihilism
is a take on Dante's trip to hell, done in the Ed Emberley style of
simple geometric shapes. Like much of Shull's work, it is
simultaneously funny and grim. For example, Virgil, Dante's guide,
takes the form of a scotch-drinking, cigarette-smoking giant squid.
The planets of hell that Virgil shows Dante are filled with
inconsiderate people, people who don't clean up after their animals,
and those that feel they're morally superior. When Dante's relieved
that he doesn't fall into any of these categories, Virgil reveals
that the afterlife is all made-up, and that Dante's made his own
hell. The cuteness of the story works effectively in both adding to
the laughs but also making its nihilistic ending all the more stark,
juxtaposed against the art.
Netflix
and Chill
is a great shaggy-dog joke of a comic, wherein a woman is brought out
of a cryogenic sleep six hundred years after she went in and finds
that all of humanity was absorbed by artificial intelligence after
the Singularity occurred. The AI is fascinated by her as one of their
ancestors and wants to keep her happy while studying her. They wind
up throwing in another subject into her cubicle, a handsome guy, and
the punchline swerves away from the common parlance of what “Netflix
and Chill” means (sex) into something much more literal. Shull's
line is pleasing here, working in a mostly naturalistic way but
allowing her faces to be distinct and even slightly exaggerated. In
general, Shull is adept at making short stories memorable, thanks to
her comedic chops and strong sense of storytelling. That said, this
is an artist that I can easily see tackling a long-form comic in the
near future.
Rising, Caged Birds, Flight Club and
Rats, by Eddie J. O'Neill. O'Neill has a distinctive voice
that uses grotesque and distorted images to tackle complex emotions.
In Rats, O'Neill uses a blood-red patina to tell a brief,
horrifying story of a person feeling rats crawling around inside of
them but fearing for them if they get out. The last image is of the
person swallowing the rat, because “I'm not a mother”. The fear
of being an inadequate nurturer of one's own parasitical entities
supersedes the body horror images of the art itself, which I found
fascinating. The pathological fear of losing one's own demons is in
itself a horrible fate. Caged Birds features a a group of
birds-as-mental-patients. They are drawn as birds and more-or-less
act like birds...except some of them are in there for hearing voices,
OCD or other mental illnesses. O'Neill takes this to its logical,
grim but funny extreme when one of the birds tries to escape—and
runs into a window. Once again, O'Neill's images point to
dehumanization and detachment from one's own body.
Flight Club was done as part of
a non-fiction assignment, and it's a highly clever story about
O'Neill's family's history with violent birds of prey. From a pair of
auks at a highly dangerous open-air, walk-through zoo, to some
hopping mad turkeys to ultra-aggressive terns at the beach, there's a
lovely clarity to O'Neill's line that is aided by the
highly-effective placement of spot reds that emphasize the homicidal
nature of these birds. There's one panel comparing the “pure evil”
of all three birds and noting that it's the same despite the size
difference of each—and evil is just blood red on the chart. Rising
uses a thicker line weight in this moving, grim story about a monk
trained in specific sacraments relating to the dead. The monk's job
was to carry the body to a certain place where the bodies would be
eaten by birds, allowing the souls to move on to their next life.
When a group of bandits cut down a child, the monk overcomes
adversity and gets the body to the top of the mountain—only to see
his image burned down. When he returns and he realizes that he can't
move all the bodies, a miracle happens. It's a genuinely joyous and
surprising moment, and O'Neill's careful use of spotting blacks on
the final pages frame the characters in just the right way.
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