Jonathan Baylis' So Buttons #14

My review of Jonathan Baylis and his collaborators' new issue of So Buttons (#14) comes at a momentous time for the writer, as this issue was just nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Anthology. It's unusual for a self-published minicomic to be nominated for any award, so this is quite an achievement. The funny thing is that while I think it has his single best story to date, the issue as a whole is uneven. Or rather, the content of the first half is jarring compared to the content in the second half. That's understandable, given that the tonal shift occurred because Baylis' mother died while he was making the comic, and he chose to honor her with a memorable story and reprints of stories that featured her. 

The cover, by MariNaomi, is mixed photography and Shrinky-Dinks. It's an eloquent tribute to his mother, the pages of his comic scattered across the ocean. Baylis tries to frame the nature of the issue by framing it as "Life & Death," but as he points out in the afterword, the first part may as well have been called "Starfucker." Essentially, these are extended, amusing name-dropping stories. It wasn't any one story in particular that was bad, it's just that the whole theme, with this many stories, felt excessive and self-indulgent. 

The first story, drawn by Box Brown, was about his love of the Howard Stern show, and the producer, Gary Dell'Abate, in particular. This ties in with Baylis' stint working for the Topps card company, as he dropped off some Pamela Anderson trading cards. The actual anecdote where he meets Gary is exceedingly brief; this story is more a reflection of how much he liked the whole Stern experience. The whole aesthetic (Brown chose a yellow-orange palette that was vaguely nauseating) was off-putting, but then that's part of the Stern experience. 

The second story, with longtime partner T.J. Kirsch, was about how much he loved Chester Brown and how ironic it was that it was his wife, Ophira, who wound up meeting and interviewing him first. This wound up being a more interesting anecdote, as Baylis spotted him riding his bike to TCAF, and Brown slowed down, walked with him, and bought his comic! Kirsch's washed-out brownish hues were perfect for this story, and the whole point (comics is a small world, you should reach out to your heroes) is well-made. 

"So...Ballistic" is a mirror image of the previous story. Drawn by Sophia Glock, it's about Baylis' relative lack of interest toward the classic comic series Love & Rockets (amusingly, with Glock hectoring him about his lack of critical acumen). It's really just an excuse for the punchline of Baylis seeing Jaime Hernandez, asking him to look at a comic, and then being flustered when Jaime walks away with it. At two pages, it's just the right length. His collaboration with Craig Campbell about James Earl Jones was great when it focused on how Baylis was inspired by Jones overcoming his stutter (especially with Campbell putting on a cartooning clinic with multiple art stories and an impressive use of shading) and less so when it focused on Star Wars references (at this point, more than one is one too many). 

The second half of the issue kicks off with a sweet story drawn by Summer Pierre about Baylis teaching his young son about the concept of the "rally cap." Baylis has a real talent for taking a minor anecdote and turning it into either a solid punchline, a poignant moment, or a powerful memory.  Steven Arnold's cartooning for a story about a beloved former comic dealer who died had its moments (the bit where Baylis is drawn wearing his trademark cap at various ages was cute), but Baylis' text overwhelmed it in a way it doesn't usually do with his collaborators. 

"Take A Penny...Leave A Penny" is the piece Baylis wrote about the death of his mother, and it was drawn by Karl Christian Krumpholz. This was an excellent choice, because Krumpholz's dense and expressive style was a perfect match for this story. In the span of two pages, Baylis connected saving a young girl's life thanks to CPR training with seeing his mother suffering a stroke and dying in a way that felt organic and not overly mawkish. Krumpholz's use of dutch angles and thick lines for the opening segment but then decreasing his line weight for the latter part of the story was a nice way of smoothing out the narrative, and the brief flashbacks to previous stories featuring his mom was wonderfully restrained. Baylis let the moments speak for themselves. 

That's followed by reprints of those stories, which reminded the reader of the tenderness of Baylis' relationship to his mother. The final story, "So...Buttons" reveals to the reader the origin of the series' name, as it was something his mother said to him when he was sassing her about cleaning his room. The artist, Ayoko Nito, follows up on this origin story gag with a back cover joke featuring Baylis crouching on a rooftop like Batman. The back half of the issue was as good as anything as Baylis has ever written. Not just because of the subject matter, but because there was a lot less explaining of backstories and more letting things unfold on their own. 

Three New Comics by Iris Yan

I usually do all of my Center for Cartoon Studies reviews all at once, but I'm making some exceptions with the recent batch I've received. It's always a pleasure to get new comics from Iris Yan, whose dry but blunt sense of humor always delivers. Yan is extremely prolific, for good and ill, but when she takes her time, her anthropomorphic figures add a lot to her storytelling.

She also frequently just has a great concept. In Taxi Driver: Wisdom On Wheels, for example, she takes what is low-hanging fruit (stories about cabbies) and focuses on details and her own withering observations to create variations on a set-up that still offers up funny surprises. What's also interesting about this comic is that Yan's whole project has been one long memoir mediated through various gimmicks and devices: her experience having cancer, dating, teaching English, and more. This mini explores Yan's career as a consultant, a lucrative but stressful profession that meant dealing with a lot of weird personalities. Yan wisely approaches this time of her life from different, bite-sized angles with their own narrative hook, like having to take taxis to work. Ultimately, Yan noted that she just wanted to get home safely, which meant humoring some weirdos. 

Yan goes much deeper in her two Studying Traditional Chinese Medicine diaries. Hilariously, she decided to take up TCM after some acupressure helped him with a medical issue, because it seemed like witchcraft and "I've always wanted to be a witch." She was living in Taiwan at the time, and the courses were in China, so off she went. Yan is really adept at breaking down the inherent social absurdities of hierarchical institutions of schools and businesses, bringing the eccentric personalities she encounters to the forefront. Whether it's rigid teachers, flighty students, and concepts in TCM that she can't quite absorb, Yan goes into a great deal of depth with regard to her experience living in a dorm as a woman over forty years old. It's also interesting to see Yan struggle to learn the nuances of the TCM organs, which, while having familiar names like "lung" and "kidney," don't quite match up with their Western equivalents. 

The second volume begins with Yan returning to Taiwan for spring break in 2020, which coincidentally marked the beginning of the global pandemic. Her program was completely unprepared for zoom-style instruction, and so what it took to pass courses became much easier, with lots of open-book exams. As a result, Yan felt she didn't retain much information, except those things that involved children's urine or squirrel feces as part of their makeup. In the end, Yan took a leave while dealing with colon cancer. Each diary issue is close to 100 pages, and the episodic quality of each vignette made this a more uneven reading experience. Yan tried to vary the lessons she learned with bits about her classmates and teachers, but the narrative structure felt a bit overstuffed, as diaries often do. Yan's art and lettering were also uneven, looking rushed at times. The line weight for figures and especially lettering noticeably varied, as it felt like Yan was trying to get this down as quickly as possible. Yan works in a deliberately simple, stripped-down style with anthropomorphic figures because it gives her a lot of freedom to depict sensitive topics. However, I've seen her do this in a much more polished way in earlier comics. Happily, Yan's wit and timing remain as sharp as ever, and that is the main calling card for these comics. 

Eric Haven's Damned #1

Eric Haven's comics exist in this weird liminal state between EC horror comics, 1970s Marvel monster/science-fiction epics, John Stanley comedy, and otherwise uncategorizable pulp fiction. Dating back to his Tales To Demolish days with Sparkplug Comic Books, his publishers have clearly always understood how his comics work on multiple levels and have an appreciation for their pulp aspects. 

There's often an autobiographical component to all of this weirdness, as a lot of his comics feature himself as a bespectacled, stoic observer of the absurd. In his latest comic for Fantagraphics, Damned #1, there are three separate but connected storylines, all told with Haven's trademark unsettling, deadpan style. The first, "Meg Tempera," is a strange romance-style comic featuring the reluctant title character fending off the advances of the cartoonish buffoon Ned (a highly warped version of Haven) who won't take no for an answer and is obsessed with ham. 

The second feature is titled "Deathika," who is a very Golden Age-coded hero who's chasing down an assortment of monsters who yell out "Protective the Collective!" The olive-and-purple hooded outfit is right out of a four-color comic, and the total lack of an explanation (other than killing monsters, of course) is part of the fun. The third story, "Modern Boating," features that oaf Ned somehow driving a high-tech boat, a ham next to him. ("The cured meat, silent, lies beside him on the seat.") This draws the attention of the "Lake Patrol's Elite Killer Shrike Unit," who start shooting at him. Finally, in "Worlds In Collision," Meg discusses her nightmares of being Deathika with a friend, Ned barges in with a ham, and Meg's friend starts going in on a theory about how we need a modern-day figure to "protect the collective." Things are connected but don't entirely make sense. It ends on a non sequitur. There are more questions than answers. There's no guarantee that there will even be a Damned #2. It's all part of the continuing Eric Haven project whose visual appeal is halfway between deliberately stiff and fluidly exciting. You can see Haven deliberately emulating the same kind of flat but curiously compelling 50s art that Dan Clowes does, only Haven genuinely loves playing in this sandbox. The exchange about Ned buying Meg's Micronauts toys but professing that he's really a "Shogun Warriors guy" is hilarious to those who have the same cultural touchstones, but they resonate as absurd even to those who resonate with those references. This comic is a perfect little dose of absurdity.