Minis: Caitlin Skaalrud, Scotty Gillmer, and Carl Thompson

Caitlin Skaalrud is an artist who I've long felt deserved wider recognition. Her poetic allegory about depression and suicide, Houses Of The Holy, was an excellent debut. Prior to that and currently, she's a minicomics maker. 2nd Birthday is a companion piece of sorts to that longer work, an act of "art-making as a spell of banishment to any ghosts left behind." It is a beautifully complex allegory involving figures, charts, quotes, and a running narrative at the bottom of each page that interacts with the analysis at the top of each page. Skaalrud notes that this is not a moment-for-moment recollection of a chain of events; instead, it's a lyrical impression of them, as she is guided by a beloved dog out of a state of misery.

In the narrative, she is depicted as a lost wanderer, bindle in hand, approaching the sainted dog. In the commentary that dominates each page, she talks about the idea of burning some aspect of the self away as being necessary for growth. It is the trial of the hero, hitting rock bottom for an addict, the dark night of the soul for the searcher. It's also part of a cycle, a necessary step in the journey that is always repeated. In relating this allegory, Skaalrud hits on an important point: we come up with myths as part of our own internal narrative, the one we use to make sense of the world. When that narrative is fractured and seems irreparable, we have to find ways to repair it or at least make sense of it, or risk further damage. For Skaalrud, this involved a ceremony to expunge the negative energy that she feared she was leaving everywhere. In the narrative, this was expunged in the form of a fiery chicken that the dog killed. How did this play out in real life? Her beloved dog was there for her, when she needed him: "You don't thank someone for their love, you love THEM. Anything else is advertising." The dog's love is pure and unconditional, attuned to what she needs emotionally as many animals are. The gantlet was run, the pain endured, wisdom was won, and love eased her through. The second birthday arrived. This was a dizzyingly beautiful account of that pain and slow recovery.

Two Shot, subtitled Comics At The Movies, was written by Skaalrud's husband Scotty Gillmer. One story was drawn by Skaalrud and the other by Gillmer's long-time drawing partner Carl Thompson. "First Person, Plural" was drawn by Thompson, and it's about a group of film critics in 1981 New York. In particular, it's about the relationship between two women: one an older critic, and the other a student still finding her feet. This is an interesting comic clearly written by someone intimately familiar not only with the history of film, but also the history of film criticism. There's a great deal of nuance in this story, as relationships and friendships are hinted at without being explicitly spelled out. That said, there's an emotional catharsis where the younger critic gets an honest critique of something she wrote by the older critic while still getting a confidence boost. Gillmer addresses sexism, the nature of the canon, and a critic's responsibility in this story, while Thompson's lively and expressive figure drawing ably carries the story.

"If You Can" was drawn by Skaalrud, and it's a deeply personal and autobiographical story that also revolves around film. There are parallel narratives at work here: the narrative captions are essentially an essay about the films of Steven Spielberg. In particular, he addresses the tension in Spielberg's films between domesticity and exploring the unknown. He focuses on three films: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Hook, and Catch Me If You Can. The first finds its hero rejecting home for the unknown, the second tries to have it both ways, and the third finds a balance between the two. Meanwhile, the story itself follows the relationship between Gillmer and Skaalrud over time. It goes from a Gillmer who's grappling with depression and in the beginning phases of a long-distance relationship to a Gillmer in a long-term relationship with her. The tension between the two narratives creates an interesting commentary, with the resolution of the essay (favoring compromise and trade-offs as an ultimately healthy response) mirroring the resolution of their lives together. It's very much a love letter of sorts, mediated through a love of both the arts and criticism. Skaalrud's art has a lived-in feel that creates a sense of density. These are "thick" events, and Skaalrud's dense use of gray-scaling shading, hatching, and sturdy line weights all match it. The concept of give-and-take suggested in the essay is reflected in the collaboration between Gillmore and Skaalrud as partners.

Getting Real With GIving Birth: Minis From Meghan Turbitt

Some of the best comics of the past year or so have been about pregnancy and giving birth in particular. Meghan Turbitt adds to this list with two of the best and funniest minis of the year: Meghan Turbitt's Pregnant & Fired and Laughter Birth. Now, Turbitt's stock-in-trade has always been cultural and social satire, with a heavy emphasis on interacting with cultural consumption as well as frank and disarming discussions about her sexuality. All of that is still here in her raw, subversive takes on being pregnant, giving birth, and the terrifying things she experienced in the aftermath of that experience. Indeed, Turbitt's flip, bawdy, and unapologetically scatological point of view is simply aimed at what is usually depicted in gauzy, saccharine terms.

Meghan Turbitt's Pregnant & Fired begins with a letter from her old job firing her. To literally add insult to injury, they note that they don't have to legally tell her why they're firing her, but they do anyway. Stuff about not "maintaining a positive, collaborative work environment" and an "inability to function as a team member" would be hilarious in terms of their insufferable language, if it hadn't meant that she lost her job while she was pregnant. The rest of the mini has one to two-page anecdotes about everything running through her mind. That includes learning to twerk while pregnant, looking for loose change, drawing baby clothes, and being bored enough to try Coconut La Croix. (As always with Turbitt, it's the specificity that is the essence of her wit.) Throughout the comic, Turbitt amusingly uses the tooth-set mascot of her old company as a sort of Greek chorus.

After trying to convince her mom that it was OK to put a soda stream on a baby shower gift registry, Turbitt turns to sex. She wonders if people constantly think of her having sex with her boyfriend now that she's pregnant. She writes about a photo where no one can tell that she peed her pants and notes that she can smell her own vagina all the time now that she's pregnant. Beyond adding several levels of gravity to her usually more flippant satirical critiques, Turbitt's work is different here. Her comics have often had a frenetic quality to them, but in this mini, she's almost nonchalant in how she relates these major, life-changing events. There are subtle call-backs, subversions of what would otherwise be hacky jokes (like with regard to food cravings), and funny visual punchlines that subvert the text. Despite everything, the page of hopes with regard to her future daughter is heartfelt and funny.

If that mini was laid back, then Laughter Birth is intense. It's a loose journal of the last few weeks of her pregnancy and birth story, and it immediately immolates any kind of Hallmark sentimentality with the opening page. That's where Turbitt, with great sincerity and affection, states "The moment I recognized that I wanted to become a mom, is the moment I realized I love the way my cat's asshole smells." Things proceed from there, as Turbitt realizes that as a future mom, she is now the subject of most of internet porn these days. She commiserates with an aunt when she discovers her first hemorrhoid, drawing an image of the "bag of grapes back there" that her aunt so vividly described.

This comic is a fascinating companion piece to Lauren Weinstein's Mother's Walk (from Frontier) and Marnie Galloway's Slightly Plural because all three women have extremely distinct memories of the childbirth process. While Turbitt goes into less detail about that particular aspect of pushing, she does slightly breeze over how difficult it was--requiring oxygen and wet paper towels for her forehead. From the very beginning, she tells the truth about the nature of giving birth, as her daughter Billie "was born along with an explosion of poop." Not only were Turbitt's immediate post-birth thoughts about when she could have sex again, she actually expressed them to her "horrified" mid-wife, who told her to wait six weeks.

While that was all fun, Turbitt then chronicles the frightening realization that she couldn't walk. It took a while for the staff to figure out why, until they realized that she had compressed some nerves during labor. While it was serious and scary, Turbitt always finds a way to subvert the gravity of the situation. For example, her nipples were sore from nursing, so she requested to be topless in the hospital on a near-constant basis. There's a scene where she wants to hug the doctor who tells her that she's going to recover and she demands a hug--but as she's topless, he flinches and says, "That's quite alright." Turbitt then details the assorted indignities involved when one can't stand: having to have nurses pick out bits of toilet paper from your ass, having your mom and boyfriend shower you, and realizing that that horrible smell is your own ass.

The rest of the comic details her recovery, with plenty of light-hearted but sincerely grateful moments regarding her own health. There are plenty of callbacks as well, as when she finally has sex again, as she peppers her boyfriend with all sorts of mood-killing questions until he tells her to "stop talking." When she's getting physical therapy, she asks if she has to wear clothes for it, and the therapist emphatically says yes.  There's a level of specificity and detail in both Turbitt's art (which she has refined and stripped down to its essence over the years) and her writing that gives these short vignettes a surprising level of complexity. This is an epic narrative disguised as a breezy bit of comedy, one fraught with many traumatic moments and uncertainty. It's that breezy veneer and narrative restraint that powers both the comedic and dramatic aspects of Turbitt's story. Drama and comedy complement each other, each making the other kind of moments all the more meaningful.

Minis: Sage Coffey

With a wonderfully thick, loopy line, Sage Coffey's Wine Ghost Orders A Sub is a funny and strange little mini about food and death. Coffey's Wine Ghost character looks a bit like a Pac-Man ghost with rubbery, hairy legs and long eyelashes. All she wants is a sub sandwich with a particular set of ingredients, and this short comic establishes the rules that govern her life. She has to possess a human (willingly) in order to actually get her food (despite her best efforts to attract the attention of the worker at the sub shop), and this otherwise wacky and silly comic has a bittersweet encounter at the end. Coffey's mix of thin and thick line weights add to the sense of both exaggeration and nuance and goes well with the single-tone red that they use throughout.

More Minis From Elise Dietrich

I don't know what it is about the northeast that's producing so many sensitive and thoughtful autobiographical comics, but Elise Dietrich has certainly proven herself to be part of this trend. The Sandwich Shuffle is her shot at an Hourly Comics Day mini, and her winning wit makes this a fun comic to read. Dietrich strikes just the right now in how much she reveals to the audience in a comic that's very much in media res by its very nature. It's a snapshot into a single day of a cartoonist, and if you knew nothing about them going into reading the comic, it's up to them to provide enough information to make sense. In short order, the reader learns that Dietrich has a young daughter, that her husband is away from town, that she has issues with her weight and food, and that she blanches a bit when her mom seems more delighted to visit her brother's new baby than to stay there.

That said, there's a resoluteness to her narrative that's invigorating. Dietrich is always full speed ahead, no matter what. Despite struggling with a cold, she finds ways to do comics, work with clients over the internet, take care of her kid, go to the library and drop off her mom at a bus stop. The art is understandably rough and sloppy, but it clearly reveals her stylistic impulses and how she organizes a page and a panel. There's an orderliness to Dietrich's work that manages to focus both on foreground and background. The reader is always made aware of time and place, even as the people dominate the action.

Making Time is a collection of diary comics, from the first snow of November through February. In Vermont, winter is a powerful entity, and many of these comics revolve around struggles with the weather. Most of them are Kochalka-style: four panels, with a punchline of sorts in the final panel. Dietrich's line is more careful and assured in these comics, but it's clear that spontaneity and expressiveness are her goals. That said, Dietrich jams every panel with detail, hatching, and other decorative details. The result is cluttered but in a good way. One gets the sense of just how her life is cluttered and bursting with happenings. The comics are quiet and meditative, almost as a way of recovering from the frenzy of childcare, workouts, 5K runs, and knitting baby blankets. These comics are frequently funny, like when Dietrich grouses about muzak being played during a yoga session. These comics are engaging because Dietrich has a distinctive authorial voice, and it's clear that she took quickly to comics because she was eager to find a new way of expressing herself.

More Minis From Rachel Scheer

Rachel Scheer's autobiographical comics, while sharing a great deal of personal detail, are interesting for a different reason. She's a keen observer, first and foremost. She thinks and writes less like a diarist and more like a writer interested in providing context and background to everything she thinks and observes. That does add a bit of reserve and distance between herself and the reader, but not in a way that feels false or manufactured. In Around The Neighborhood, Scheer reflects on the minutia of life in Seattle, a city she simply decided to move to apropos of nothing. She didn't know anyone there, relying instead on her intuition that this would be a good place to go. As she notes in the introduction, "place" is exactly what she was going for: a city that had a strong sense of place that she could adapt to and eventually feel a sense of belonging.

Each of these one-page strips keeps the observations mostly light. There are lots of strips about the funny people and places she sees, from the sort of people who show up to a garage sale to avoiding creepy guys at bars to pondering the hat metaphors that other people use. Scheer certainly explores that sense of place, both in the city and in the recreational opportunities that Seattle has to offer. There are strips about finding spots to swim, and hike, and climb. There are strips about cafes and restaurants. Mostly, this mini simply allows the reader to ease into Scheer's whimsical point of view regarding the world, as she thinks about groupings of animals, her favorite snacks and her being mystified at Seattle's football fandom. Scheer's line is still crude in spots, especially with regard to character design, but one can see her start to develop her own style. Her own self-caricature is clever, which is a big key to allowing the audience to lock in on her and her particular style of wit.

By Mom, By Me: A Tale Of Two Childhoods was the first iteration of this comic that she did with her mother, Karen. It's a clever idea, as her mom recalls a particular time period, set of relationships, or places (drawn by Scheer) and then Scheer follows with her own version. It's interesting to see the similarities between the two women, especially in terms of a certain independence and restlessness of spirit. One can see how Scheer improved as an artist from this comic to her latest, as she gives depth and weight to each page with more detailed backgrounds and more use of spotting blacks. She's also a lot more confident with regard to her use of stylization, especially with regard to her character design. This comic explores the influence of their cousins, their experience as kids with summer camps, and what they did on Friday nights as kids. Scheer's mother seemed more gregarious and daring as a child, faking her way to getting free dinner at a hotel and hanging out with bohemians in the Bronx. Scheer spent a lot of time in camp reading and found there was a lot less to do in Arlington as a teen. It's an interesting project because both women are clearly trying to understand each other, even as it's clear that there's a tight bond there.

Liz Valasco's The Adventures Of Moon Pie

Sweetness and existential despair mark Liz Valasco's continuing stories of her character Moon Pie. Her most recent mini, The Adventures Of Moon Pie, see this character with a moon-shaped head wander about a forest with his little robot companion that he built. Valasco blends a fine line, dense cross-hatching, and cartoony character design to create a lived-in world inhabited by these two odd creatures. Moon Pie, as the introduction explains, is an alien sent from space to complete a quest of some kind, but it's taking a long time. Like many vast undertakings, there's a lot of boring downtime, and this comic is an example of what he does on his downtime.

The first page sets up the itinerant character of Moon Pie, as the six panel grid winds up forming a single, beautiful image. Moon Pie's robot is clever and relentlessly curious, and they make a funny duo as they navigate the landscape, looking for mushrooms. Moon Pie finds a "friend" (a skeleton at the bottom of a well) and doesn't understand that it's dead and unresponsive, so desperate is he to find any kind of connections with other. There's also a profound sense of understanding his extremely long life span and wishing it was over until his philosophical robot reminds him of his responsibilities.  Everything from the lettering to the cross-hatching to the actual dialogue is strikingly thoughtful, as Valasco aims to create not so much a story as convey a mood. This is ultimately a story about loneliness, to be sure, but it's also a story about duty and understanding one's place in the world. There's a dull ache one feels when reading it; it's a mixture of melancholy and deep understanding.

Minis: Liz Bolduc's Perishable Goods

Liz Bolduc (aka "Liz Sux") is an autobiographical cartoonist I've been monitoring for a while. Perishable Goods is the first mini I've reviewed from her, and it's an impressively-designed and executed comic about the difficulties of managing toxic families and navigating one's own feelings of worthlessness. Each of these short vignettes is loosely-connected in a roughly chronological fashion. The title plays on this metaphor of short-term worth and inevitable decay with numerous references to food, photos of supermarkets, and old supermarket ads. The stories are about rot, both in terms of thinking about death but also feeling rotten and diseased from a mental standpoint. Bolduc reveals just enough details about her personal life and family life to get the point across. In many ways, the details are less important than the feelings surrounding them.

Some of those details include dealing with a mom whom her therapist noted most likely had borderline personality disorder. That's a disorder wherein boundaries tend to be disintegrated, creating a suffocating amount of dependency. "Anger, fear (and) guilt" are common emotions displayed by someone with BPD toward those whom they've grown dependent upon, and Bolduc has trouble reconciling that reality with her own overwhelming sense of guilt. On the one hand, she recognizes the poisonous nature of this relationship, but she feels driven to maintain it. It's no wonder that everything feels decayed and false to her.

Much of the comic revolves around food. There's a lovely sequence about eating crepes at her grandparents' place after church as a child. When her grandmother died, the new tradition was eating at a diner. Ritual surrounding comfort food is at Bolduc's core--it's a touch of nostalgia that ameliorates the alienation she feels from both mother and father. Eating take-out is another pleasure, one that is comforting in the face of grief and uncertainty. Bolduc's line is mostly light, though she does use heavier line weights in some spots. There's an inkyness in her comics that's eye-catching, with a mix of densely spotted blacks and extensive negative space. There's a touch of the cartoony in her otherwise naturalistic line.

This is also a comic about loneliness, even when surrounded by family. Bolduc depicts herself as being fairly isolated and away from friends (and possibly a partner) throughout much of the comic. This is, I think, partly related to the essential nature of the narrative, which is an existential fear of death. She is terrified of her parents aging because it means their deaths, which she fears will leave her rudderless in the world. It also means that her death is near and inevitable. At the end of the comic, there is an understanding that even if are rotten, we will still be rotting one day. We may be isolated, but we will all return to nature, the perishable goods that we are.

Minis: Jessica Campbell's Chicago Works

Jessica Campbell is a cartoonist who's interested in a number of different kinds of media. She's a talented writer and thinker about comics, but she also just had a multimedia show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was taken from the diary of artist Emily Carr, who lived in British Columbia in the early twentieth century. This minicomic, Chicago Works, is the print version of that show, minus color and with the addition of rearranging the paintings/pieces into a steady six-panel (2x3) grid. It seems as though Campbell knew that something would be lost in translation by making the images so small, which is why publishing the works in black & white (her usual style in comics) made sense. To be sure, however, reading this comic is a different experience than going to see the show. There's less detail, everything is a bit tiny and cramped, and there's more of an emphasis on the writing than the power of the visuals.

That said, there's plenty to look at here. The cover is clever; the main character is seen in profile on both the front and back covers, but if you lie the whole book flat, it turns into a full-face drawing. It's a subtle way of letting the reader know not to take anything for granted in this comic, that things aren't as they seem at face value. Indeed, Carr's text, which is used as captions for each panel, are often at odds with the visuals. This is not a direct adaption of that text, but rather a comic that uses it as inspiration. 

There are times when some of the scenes seem inspired by Carr, although often in an ironic or directly contradictory manner. For example, when we are introduced to the narrator, she talks about her fine manners and English bearing and how that gained her favor in the boarding house she lived in. Campbell instead shows a near-feral young woman who takes a shit on the floor and idly lays on the couch watching television. There's a lot of flirting with this taking place in the past and present, including an extended appearance by Campbell herself. This is a comic about discovery and new experiences, and for Campbell, it seems to include references to moving to Chicago as well as discovering comics for the first time. This is also a comic about loneliness, independence, isolation, and female friendships and how they can be strained. Campbell's inky line and heavy use of black give the comic weight and power, especially in the funnier scenes. The reader is thrown into the middle of all of this with no explanations, but none is really needed thanks to the way Campbell guides the reader through the page. This is a strange, funny project that continues Campbell's project of exploring feminist ideas through deep irony, juxtapositions, and brutal but hilarious truths.