Adam Meuse's Not The Ocean

Adam Meuse is one of those cartoonists whose body of work has become so solid and self-assured that it's surprising that he's still self-publishing. He's one of the best cartoonists living in North Carolina, and that's for certain. His most recent effort, not the ocean, is another example of his thoughtful meditations on mortality that also touches on the joy of living. The visual touchstone in play is the ocean. How the traffic near his house sounds like the ocean coming through the trees. How sometimes being presented with astonishing natural beauty feels fake because of our attempts to replicate it through media. 

Along the way, Meuse connects these experiences with friends and families, about how we mediate our experiences with the natural world with our own interpretations of these awesome phenomena. For example, there's a beautifully scratchy and scrawled comic about listening to a recording of the ocean while looking at it with his daughter. That comic is about the way our brain fills in holes in our perceptions, and listening to the recording is jarring because it doesn't quite sync up. 

Another strip talks about the abstract-looking paintings that Mondrian did of piers sticking out into ocean, like a forest of little trees or crosses. Seeing that repeated in a hotel carpet was a look of recognition that was an interpretation of an interpretation. Piers all the way down. 

The ocean also reminded him of a friend who used to work in the marine section of a museum, and then learning years later he had drowned, on a boat he had fixed up. Once again, the sea called; capricious, beautiful, destructive, but it also drew his friend closer to Meuse in that moment. The sea is life: the salt flats of Utah with the remains of an ocean; sea gulls surrounding a light house at night; a huge gull outside a hotel room from a night of no sleep with friends. Meuse ponders not only the awe that the ocean inspires but also the ways in which it continues to affect the way we think about the world away from it. It's the closest thing we have to going into outer space on Earth: an awesome, dangerous mystery that engages and soothes. It offers no answers, and neither does Meuse. He's just a witness who does his best in this series of beautifully-scribbled comics and drawings to express the feeling the ocean has given him, rather than the ocean itself. 

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2019

Here's my usual dive into artists that SPX-goers should definitely check out. As always, I try not to repeat names from previous years and other shows.

1. The Triangle's Finest (Table W67) That would be three excellent cartoonists from the Research Triangle in my state of North Carolina: Andrew Neal (Hillsborough), Adam Meuse (Cary), and Max Huffman (Carrboro). Neal is the former owner of the excellent Chapel Hill Comics and the artist behind the hilarious and strange Meeting Comics. Meuse has been producing funny, strange, and touching minis for years, including the classic Sad Animals and Square. Huffman is a fairly recent grad of the School Of Visual Arts, He's a wild stylist with comics like Plaguers Int'l and Garage Island. This will be one of the best tables at the entire show.

2. Lance Ward (Table J9). I've been a fan of Ward's scorched-earth autobio for years, and I'm pleased to see his work get wider recognition. His new book, Blood and Drugs, is a harrowing and honest look at how an injury forced him to adapt to using a scrawled, almost manic style. He'll be at the Birdcage Bottom Books table, but all of his work is highly recommended.

3. ShortBox (Table W8).  The cutting-edge publishing concern of Zainab Akhtar will have a major presence at SPX. Like any smart publisher, she's way ahead of the curve with regard to up-and-coming talents; she was one of the first to become aware of Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, for example. This table will be jam-packed with great comics you may not have seen before. Zainab herself will not be there, but the books will be!

4. Diskette Press (Table I14). Carta Monir & Co. have quickly become a force to be reckoned with on the publishing scene. Come check out the work of Ignatz Award nominees Emma Jayne and Mar Julia in particular, but there's a wide variety of material to choose from.

5. Eleri Harris (Table L9). This Australian and graduate of the Center For Cartoon Studies is also a Nib editor and find historical/editorial cartoonist in her own right. Her historical comics are consistently well-sourced, funny, and fascinating.

6. Rachel Masilamani (Table A6a). I've been following her career since her Xeric Grant days, and her personal, poetic, and sometimes enigmatic work is better than ever. I'm excited that she has a chance to show off her work to a new audience.

7. Kate Lacour (Table H8-9). Her brand-new book Vivisectionary is out from Fantagraphics, and this is an engaging, witty, and visceral bit of body horror. Lacour's dry sense of humor is ever-present in this collection of drawings that were previously published in minicomics form, but the production values on this book make it a bizarre, beautiful art object.

8. Mary Shyne (Table I13a). This recent CCS grad is coming armed with her new book, Get Over It. Shyne's work is a perfect combination of top-notch production design and color, a playful line, and dialogue that mixes fantasy and verisimilitude. This will be one of the best books of the show.

9. Rikke Villadsen (W68-69). One of many Danes attending the show, Villaden's The Sea was a surreal, erotic, and terrifying mix of tropes and genres. Her pencil work, in particular, is dense and visceral. She'll also be at the Fantagraphics table.

10. Breena Nuñez (E11b). Her personal and political comics are playful, expressive, and powerful. Her comics about being Afro-Guatemalan often delve into family stories, but she's just as adept in using dynamic and innovative techniques in talking about injustice.

11. Glom Press (W6). Marc Pearson will be repping this excellent Australian Risograph publisher in their first SPX appearance. Bailey Sharp's My Big Life and Aaron Billings' Mystical Boy Scout #4 are particularly great.

12. Keren Katz (C13b). Katz is one of the most brilliant cartoonists working today. I haven't taken the deep dive into her work that I've wanted (I've only reviewed one book out of her extremely prolific output), but the way she works dance, abstraction, and comics-as-poetry into her narratives is relentlessly fascinating and confounding. There aren't many artists with a more sophisticated color palette, either. Her new book, The Backstage Of A Dishwashing Webshow, will be out from Secret Acres.

Two Minis From Adam Meuse

Adam Meuse is slowly but surely starting to get more attention for his funny, clever and often poignant mini-comics. His recent comic Ball Of Shit has an obviously startlingly scatological title, but the comic itself is actually quite thoughtful and philosophical. It takes the literal action of a man rolling a ball of shit on a beach and pondering what he's doing and connects it to Egyptian mythology and their obsession with scarab beetles. The scarab rolls balls of its dung and their creation god similarly rolled the sun across the sky. On a more literal basis, scarab dung contains scarab eggs, which hatch and eat the dung before emerging. Meuse then ties this back around to the man rolling the ball on the beach, as the hope is to clean the environment and for new life to emerge.

It's a remarkably visceral little comic, printed on thick card stock with approximately 3" x 3" dimensions. It alternates image and text on facing pages and creates a rhythm that doesn't flinch from talking about shit and waste in general as things that must be confronted, understood and even embraced. Meuse doesn't overreach here in terms of his philosophical territory; indeed, the simplicity of his drawing style and the comic's title are designed to keep pretension to a minimum. That said, this fits into his larger project of connecting our most basic belief systems with the biological factors that underlie them, even if those factors are not always taken into account. In other words, Meuse posits that there is no such thing as abstract thought, and that those who think otherwise are kidding themselves. This is not to say that conceptual beauty and thought don't exist, but rather that their agents are always and inevitably embodied.

Faults is a collection of loosely-connected gag strips. Some of them aren't even gags, like his account of the Karl Čapek play Rossum's Universal Robots, which is less about robots as machines than as workers that were exploited because it was assumed they had no souls. Meuse uses an angry red for this color. Immediately following that was a gag regarding the price ballerinas have to pay for dancing in terms of disfigured feet, but in this case her foot was that of a reptile and the guy in the strip says, "Uh..you're a lizard person", with the last panel featuring a long, forked tongue flick into view. There's a strip about fried potatoes which is funny but also reveals a great deal of thought that went into it. There are some dark strips about red blood cells complaining about traffic until it lightens a bit, only to reveal a person who's slit their wrists in the final panel. There's also a truly grisly Dudley Do-Right parody where Nell Fenwick doesn't quite escape from being tied to a log. 

Though a nimble draftsman, Meuse's experiments with color always fascinate me. He uses them for geological purposes in drawing different kinds of faults (i.e., connected to earthquakes), until the last panel reverts to the more familiar meaning of the word "fault". This mini is a good introduction to his work overall, because it's hard to pin him down. He does strips that depend on old cultural references, whimsical studies about food, autobiographical observations and memories, strips featuring insects, animals and microbes, completely silly nonsense and comics-as-poetry. Meuse is simultaneously ambitious and probing as a cartoonist and yet completely unpretentious. He's willing to experiment formally but never for the mere sake of experimentation. Meuse looks at concepts and images with the same lens, as he's fastidious with his drawings qua drawings yet never goes completely abstract. Indeed, exploring the shape of things and thinking about familiar shapes in new, funny ways goes to the heart of his project as an artist. His greatest skill is his ability to understand what formal approach works best with what idea, be it color, shape, line weight or use of negative space. The result is one where concept and drawing complement each other well. 

Minis: A.Meuse, R.Scheer, T.Jones

You're Garbage Fired!, by Adam Meuse. This is a collection of "some post-election sketchbook pages" by the talented and funny Meuse, published by Birdcage Bottom Books. I believe this is the first time Meuse has been published by someone else, and it's certainly well-deserved. The drawings and strips here reflect the rage and despair felt by many in the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidency, and the mini is well-served by being in full-color. That makes the scatological joke of a soiled diaper strongly resembling the shape and color of Trump effective; it's not an especially smart take on Trump, but it certainly does reflect Meuse's visceral rage. His portraits of folks like Steve Bannon and Kelly Conaway have an almost undead feel to them: they are rotting human beings. Mike Pence bleeding from every pore is a genuinely unsettling image, as though he were an antichrist. Angry portraits of the president by his two young daughters and a final strip where he scrolls through the news of the day one last time and goes to bed, saying, "Ok, I sufficiently hate everything and everyone" cap the collection with the same kind of grim but bright humor. Meuse is an incredible caricaturist, but it's the way he captures the essential awfulness of each figure that's really impressive. The only artist doing something comparable is Warren Craghead, who draws grotesque caricatures of Trump and his lackeys every day.

Cats Of The White House and The Hanukkah Fire, 1992, by Rachel Scheer. The first mini was written by Danny Noonan and drawn by Scheer, and it's really an illustrated zine about presidential cats. It's interesting in the way it reveals a side of the presidents that's not widely known historically, even as "First Pets" command a great deal of attention from the press while their owners are in power. The stories about Abraham Lincoln being obsessed by his cats to the point where it annoyed his wife were amusing, as was the account of Teddy Roosevelt forbidding anyone on the White House staff from disturbing his cat at any time.

Scheer works in a stripped-down, cartoony tradition where spotting blacks and slightly exaggerated facial expressions do much of the narrative heavy lifting. That's especially true in the latter comic, a charming memory of a long-ago Hanukkah caught on film and brought back to life here with the use of spot color and photo collage. The incident in question was really an excuse for Scheer to think about her family history and the ways in which ethnic practices supersede religious ones. She notes that her grandfather was a Polish refugee who wound up living in a community in Shanghai, China, which I found fascinating. There was a smooth, easy transition to that family history to the incident in question, in which a home-made menorah catches fire and gets tossed in the sink. It's a memory that's representative of the ways in which Scheer and her family felt Jewish even if they had no religious connection to the faith at all. Here, the gesture of the family trying to go through the ceremony with stuff made by the kids is more important than the actual ceremony itself. Scheer has a strong command over her page design even as her drawings mostly stay in the functional range. Again, she's not trying to dazzle the reader with her draftsmanship; instead, she's trying to clearly tell a story, and she uses a variety of approaches to do so clearly.

22 Tapes, by Toby Jones. I was delighted to see this comic show up in the mail, as Jones has mostly been working on animation projects for the past several years. His Memory Foam minis were some of the most entertaining autobio comics I had ever read, so it was interesting to see him come back to it, albeit in a highly unusual fashion. The premise of the comic is that Jones got a bunch of Hi-8 tapes that he had made in his childhood digitized, and he had the idea of watching them one-by-one and improvise comics with regard to what he remembered and felt of the tapes. He was between 11 and 17 when he made these tapes, and the result was unearthing a lot of increasingly unpleasant memories of his life at that time.

Jones zeroes in on the fact that his younger self was obsessed with the idea of creating entertainment. Whether it was in the form of skits, crude animations or childlike weirdness, his younger self just wanted to be on camera. Jones is unsparing in his commentary on his younger self, but he is happy when he managed to collaborate and put together something that was half-decent. That was especially true of some of those early animations, a few of which even had things like B-stories and callbacks. The comics sometimes went on tangents to discuss the relationships he had with certain friends and why some of those friendships faded.

Eventually, Jones gets around to discussing why he was really doing this comic: after years of working as a professional animator to create a polished mainstream product, he wanted a chance to return to that essential urge to create something just for himself, without caring what anyone else thought of it. He revealed that at the time he was making the videos, he was being bullied in school and had a horrible home life. Those tapes were his only real escape at the time, as they gave him a chance to exercise total control of his environment. Jones gave himself that same kind of relief in doing this comic, only this time it was relief from the pressure of having his work scrutinized, edited and controlled. What's most interesting about this mix of still photos from films and Jones' own drawings is that Jones didn't consciously go into it knowing how emotional and exhausting reliving the past would be. At the same time, the way he wrote about these emotions was hilarious. This was an interesting experiment that bore some fascinating fruit.

Minis: A.Meuse

Taking Up Space, by Adam Meuse. Throughout his career, Meuse's comics have been equal parts amusing whimsy and dark undercurrents. This comic contains two stories that wind up being connected in an unexpected manner. The first, "Grey Cube", is an excellent example of Meuse's idiosyncratic sense of humor, as it recalls an art school experiment that determined the volume of his body; that is, how much space it took up by submerging himself in water, taking measurements, and doing the math. It would up being the equivalent of a 74 liter cube, or a cube with 16.5" dimensions. He turned this into a jokey student gallery show presentation by making cubes with those dimensions and labeling them "my volume standing" and a messed-up one "my volume dancing". The cubes sat next to his apartment until the city came to pick them up. This was a cute but rather inconsequential story.

That is, until you read "Black Box", which grimly (but with a touch of bemused humor) notes that eight years after Meuse's cube experiment, "my brother decided to take up a lot less space" by committing suicide. Meuse's pacing and drawing in the first story was methodical, taking the reader through perhaps more detail than was necessary to get the joke. In this second story, the reprise hits the reader in the gut, as we see how his brother methodically sealed the door, safely created a charcoal fire in a bucket in his sealed-off room, took sleeping pills and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This story is about the three plastic containers that his brother's ashes were placed in, one of which Meuse received. There are no major epiphanies or emotional scenes in this story, yet it's unquestionably a story about grief and mourning. He mixes his brother's ashes into his paints in his art studio shed and paints a portrait of him with those paints. There's a beautiful panel were Meuse muses "I know my brother would have approved" with the image of his brother looking over his shoulder, a very slight smile on his face. The final volume of the painting was 4,600 cubic inches--or 76 liters.

There is a sophisticated layout in this comic for such a relatively simple pair of stories, as both stories essentially mirror each other in terms of placement of splash pages and overall pacing. The question "How much space does a person take up?" is absurd and comical on the face of it, because no one thinks of one's worth in terms of volume; people aren't "precious" in that way in the way a precious metal is. At the same time, in an existential sense, this is exactly the right question to ask. How much space do we take up can mean what impact do we have on the world? What is the mark we leave on it? How will we be remembered. If the first story treats the question like a joke, then the second story treats it quite seriously. Documenting his brother's existence through that painting that contained the literal essence of his brother was clearly a means by which Meuse came to terms with that initial grief. In many respects, this comic that documents that documentation is another way of coping with grief with reverence, with a bit of cheekiness, and love.

Mini-Comics: Pyle, Meuse, King/Vayda, Kerschbaum

Boatfire #1, by Kevin C. Pyle. When you read a comic by Pyle, one can be assured of two things: that it will be thoroughly and impeccably researched, and that it will have a powerfully argued point of view. This one is about death, and in particular its fetishization and cultural impact during certain critical periods during history. Pyle fixates on the idea of the momento mori in art, and how during the Black Plague era in Europe in the 16th century, this kind of imagery became highly prevalent. In essence, the images were reminders that in all aspects of life, death was lurking. Pyle then makes the connection between art created during the plague and how punk rose during an era in the late 70s and early 80s when nuclear annihilation was still considered a real possibility. He also connects punk to 1950s-era nuclear paranoia and how the cultural reaction in the 80s was in many ways a recapitulation of the 50s. By way of fascinating anecdote, he recounts living in Lawrence, KS, during the filming of the landmark TV movie The Day After, which depicts life after nuclear war. Pyle later posits that it was punk's very denial of death through nihilism that allowed him and many others to process the unthinkable and come out the other side. He then connects that to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, two works of art that look squarely into the void and acknowledge what it means. In an incredibly clever panel, he has a group of kids blasting out a loud song on a road trip, only it's the words to The Wasteland ("This is the way the world ends..."). By embracing the idea that the fragile structure of society might one day end, it reduces the anxiety of losing one's hold on that as the foundation of sanity. Pyle is a smart, clever cartoonist in terms of his visuals, depicting himself as an anthropomorphic vulture throughout the comic, because what better animal could there be in terms of circling around death.

Drawing Is Hard, by Adam Meuse. This talented artist from Cary is one I've always thought was deserving of wider recognition. His latest mini is the best distillation of Lynda Barry's "two questions" I've seen with regard to the creative process. The two questions are asked by the artist regarding their work: "Is this good? Does this suck?". In this mini, we see the artist in front of an empty sheet of paper as their brain pulls up a seat beside him. The design of the brain is both cute and grotesque, with eye stalks sticking out of its brain-body and tiny arms and legs. The brain used a subtle but powerfully manipulative and persuasive line of argument that would make Socrates proud, in which he tries to make the artist quit drawing. He even got the heart to come over and tell him he didn't "deserve to make anything good. You're not really a good person." Any doubt that the artist expresses as to what ideas to follow are seized upon by the brain as more reasons why he should quit. The mini ends with the brain going to bed and the heart furtively whispering encouragement. Meuse here gets at the essence of the struggle of the artist, because no one can argue themselves into being creative or feeling their art is worthwhile. While cognition is involved in making art, it's not a cognitive process per se. Instead, it's something more akin to a mystical or subconscious experience, just as experiencing art is. It requires a deliberate choice to make, but once the pen hits the paper and the tactile, visceral experience of drawing begins once again, that's when suspension of judgment (a purely cognitive process) ebbs. As Meuse hints at, the brain can manipulate emotions to trick the artist into not creating, often using the act of creation as a referendum on one's very worthiness as a human being. Meuse notes that this is only a trick, however, and when one can separate feelings from judgment, it's possible to pry oneself away from the two questions. For a simple, cute comic done with an open page format with four panels a page, there's a remarkable amount of complexity to be found here.

Next Week In New York City!, by John Kerschbaum. Kerschbaum is one of my favorite humorists, combining dense hatching with a goofy, cartoony approach to figure design. He uses satire, gross-out humor, wordplay and occasionally oblique imagery in telling his jokes, but it's fair to city that he loves jokes involving city life, and New York City in particular. This mini is a collection of four-panel strips that "predict" upcoming life in NYC, with most of the gags being specific and provincial. So there are jokes about local politicians (the Anthony Weiner joke is pretty clever), alternate side of the street parking and the cicada invasion that require some knowledge of the city, but there are also plenty of gags about social media, pollen and art--along with scatological jokes. Kerschbaum is not at his funniest when given these kinds of constrictions, but he still manages to craft some truly excellent pages, like the gag about sneakers hanging from electrical worries (a familiar image), then an umbrella hanging, then a plastic bag--and closes with a barefoot guy with an armful of groceries getting rained on. Most of the jokes in this mini aren't as good as that, though Kerschbaum compensates by hammering the reader with gags in every panel and even employing some running gags.

Left Empty Book One, by Alan King and Jamie Vayda. The King/Vayda team usually write stories about King's wild days and crazy anecdotes about sex, drugs, drinking and rock 'n roll. Vayda's dense and cartoony line combines heavy stylization (often verging on the grotesque and/or absurd) with thick hatching and cross-hatching that creates a moody but rubbery atmosphere. Usually, this is used to depict scenes of debauchery. In this comic, we follow a clearly upset man coming home and drinking til he blacks out and Th breaking down in tears. The first half of the story follows him dealing with loss and trying to self medicate, and the second half goes a bit further back in time when we learn it's the writer himself, and that his wife suddenly grew ill and died. The exaggerated and even trippy imagery that Vayda uses was put to use illustrating nightmares and emotional breakdowns, and it worked surprisingly well. Beyond a simple expression of loss, this series promises to be about the ways in which grief and even mourning are not one-time experiences, but rather are experienced over and over again--with the pain being fresh each time. Medical bills and old greeting cards are artifacts of that grief, transporting the mourning individual back to the original time and feeling of sadness that is so profound that it is somatic in nature--tremors, wracking sobs, etc.

Three From The Triangle: Adam Meuse, M.R. Trower, Jenny Zervakis

One of the reasons I helped create DICE (Durham Indie Comics Expo) was to spotlight the interesting and diverse range of cartooning talent that's emerged here in what's known as The Triangle portion of North Carolina (Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill). Mineshaft of course publishes out of Durham, and there are long-time cartooning veterans like Eric Knisley (a DICE co-organizer), Kevin Dixon, Mark McMurray and many others. Here, I thought I'd spotlight the work of three cartoonists who had these comics available at DICE last November.

Roh and Eik, by M.R. Trower. Trower is a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and these comics reveal a young cartoonist with an interesting point of view who is rapidly developing. Roh was student work (done in Paul Karasik's class) and there's a lot here that makes that plain. Trower works too small in this comic, with a number of scenes lessened in terms of emotional impact because Trower tried to cram too much onto one page. This is unfortunate, because their linework is quite excellent, with an expressive quality that matches deft draftsmanship along with a fluid understanding of panel-to-panel transitions. Roh follows a high school girl who was born with frog-like creatures who's treated as a freak by her peers, teachers and parents. Only a P.E. coach (herself an "other" because the students think she's a lesbian) see Roh's potential as a track star on the hurdles. I thought that was a nice touch, adding a clever real-life use of her frog-related abilities. When Roh is told to dissect a frog in class or else, she rebels against the teacher, principal and even her parents, who want her to have "the surgery". All of this is, of course, a pretty clear metaphor for queer issues in general and transgender issues in particular. The latter half of the book gets a bit messy, as Roh runs away from home, meets a soul mate, and then encounters an actual demon in human form that tries to kill them. When Roh saves them both, they are provided a deux ex machina out of their entire existence: the opportunity to live on another world where everyone is "strange". This was clearly a wish-fulfillment scenario, one that came out of nowhere, and it took what was an emotionally wrenching and powerful story and gave it an easy way out.

Eik, finished in early 2013, is a more nuanced and interesting story that touches on similar themes. The story once again opens in a school, with a figure named Eik who's a sort of anthropomorphic set of geometric shapes, running for their life. Chased by a mob of slightly different shapes and patterns, they manage to escape underground. From there, Trower takes us on a tour of Eik's world, where children are allowed to change their shapes only up until a certain age, when that shape must harden into a societally-acceptable form that directly informs their role. Be it labor, enforcement or simply "filler", once you line up and take your form, there's no going back. Eik's dilemma was realizing that they were due to become part of the "martyr" class, whose members could help "beat back enemies of society by participating in a noble suicide mission". Trower's work is all about subverting the idea of binaries, fixed roles and the societal pressure that demands this sort of conformity, and Eik's world proved to be a more flexible way of exploring this metaphor than Rho. When Eik literally goes underground and is given a variety of choices that include isolation, surrender and confrontation, they choose confrontation. That leads to a battle with self that results in a sort of blossoming that transforms the whole of society, but not without personal cost. It's an ending that has a utopian quality, only this time it's one where society is transformed instead of escaped. The cartooning is uniformly excellent, as the vagueness of the characters' forms allows Trower a lot of room to invent their own set of cultural norms that are still closely tied to ours. The clear linework is dazzling, especially in the sequences where Eik is trying to negotiate pipes underwater and the populace is transformed; indeed, there seems to be just a touch of the Fort Thunder aesthetic to be found in those pages, only with far greater use of spotting blacks. In these two comics, Trower's already shown an interesting use of genre tropes for metaphors related to identity and oppression and has demonstrated an impressive set of cartooning skills. They promise to be an ambitious and challenging artist as their work continues to mature from a storytelling perspective.

Strange Growths #16, by Jenny Zervakis. John Porcellino has long listed Zervakis as an inspirational figure for his comics; in fact, he will be publishing a collection of her work for his Spit-and-a-Half distro in the near future. It's easy to see why Zervakis, whose output has been greatly slowed in the past decade because of family and work, was such an important figure for Porcellino and others interested in comics-as-poetry in the 90s. In her most recent issue of her series Strange Growths, Zervakis focuses on drawings of her environment, her children, her pets and the simple implications of everyday life and everyday sensory experience. Take "Winter Wonderland", for instance. This is a simple story about a rare snow day in Durham, one that she and her daughters took advantage of by making a trek to the local college campus. With great precision, Zervakis describes the feeling of the air and environment around her. With her scratchy and grey-scaled imagery, she depicts how alien the landscape became covered in snow and ice, most of all getting at the stillness and sense of magic that all three felt.

Zervakis' comics also have a warmth to them thanks to a creator not afraid to fully express her emotions without worrying about a particular kind of payoff or a potential lapse into sentiment. In "I Am Thankful For Betty The Dog", Zervakis transforms a simple story about a lost dog with health issues into an examination of her family structure, the emotional development of her older daughter, and her own feelings when that dog reappears again as though by magic. "Postcards From Ripley's Aquarium" shows the artist ilustrating the weirdness of aquatic creatures, using a fat line and lots of black in a manner that captured something essential about these animals. There's a crude beauty in Zervakis' line; it's not quite as refined as Porcellino, but there's a sense of immediacy and even urgency in the way that she draws her stories, her dreams and the observations of both her children and herself. This is a must-read for any fan of this kind of thoughtful, reserved sort of storytelling.

White Cards, by Adam Meuse. Meuse was a revelation for many at DICE, because while he's fairly well known locally, this hilarious cartoonist doesn't have much of a national profile. The out-of-towners who saw his witty, absurd and frequently filthy cartoons were impressed. While he generally works with a simple and uncluttered line, there's actually a great deal of studied clarity and simplicity to be found in his work that clearly came after a great deal of thought. In White Cards, comics that Meuse drew at work to stave off boredom for him and his co-workers, the opposite was true. These are totally off-the-cuff, disgusting and hilarious gag strips involving him and his co-workers Heather, Tracy and Curtis. They are frequently violent, scatological, sexual and wholly inappropriate. My favorite part of the book was a series of cartoons involving Tracy having a sexual relationship with a giraffe that gets every bit out of this possibility as one can imagine, including a giraffe's neck/cunnilingus joke that had me rolling. Meuse excised the cartoons that were too in-jokey and provides all the necessary information needed to enjoy each series of jokes. Mostly, he expertly captures that sense of frustration and mind-numbing boredom that can lead to shared moments like this, where there's that one co-worker who does something to make one's day more exciting. Meuse just happened to be that co-worker, who was fueled by their interactions to create something memorable.