mini-Kus!: Niewiadomski, Koch, Bulling/Hoffmann

mini-Kus! #59: Share The Love, by Paula Bulling & Nina Hoffmann. This is an unusual mini in that the central characters (Philip and Simone) are represented differently in different segments of the comic. Initially, they are barely sketched-characters with a yellow wash, a man and a woman in a Berlin bar being amusingly harangued by a local who gives them all sorts of unsolicited advice and opinions. The second segment finds them at dinner, this time drawn as anthropomorphic animals, with Simone throwing all sorts of hints at Philip that she'd like to be in a physical relationship with him and him managing to deflect them all (resulting in a hilarious head slap onto the table by Simone). The third segment finds them in bed together, as Simone is trying to negotiate the possibility of sex from someone who's obviously become attached to, and vice-versa, and then switches to Simone at a nude beach with Philip's daughter.

In addition to being a fascinating visual survey that uses its images to reflect the mood of each scene (the funny animal scene reflects the goofy nature of their interaction in the bar, for example), there's a remarkable frankness in the way the comic explores the nature of relationships removed from the romantic ideal that a first marriage brings. Philip celebrates that he no longer is programmed to remember what his ex-wife is wearing when he sees her to exchange custody of their kids, while Simone is hoping for precisely that kind of connection. The final segment sees Simone in that odd maternal/friend role with Philip's child, a different and budding kind of love relationship.

mini-Kus! #61: Daughter, by Aidan Koch. Koch is well known for her use of erasure and a thin line in many of her comics that border on the abstract, but this is a straight-ahead narrative in many ways. Nonetheless, the ever-innovative Koch uses color in a fascinating manner, as a kind of counter to the dull, blue-gray wash of everyday existence in a space satellite colony. In the story, a young girl feels compelled to draw, in the most vivid of colors, things like flowers, insects, trees, and animals. These are things she has never seen, yet she feels divinely inspired to record them. It's as though the collected unconscious of humanity was working through her as a kind of not just playback system, but an interactive studio of creativity. She is discouraged in this endeavor by one of many humans who are all clearly made to look as alike as possible, but the shimmering visions never leave her mind. She can't help but see them in her mind's eye, and Koch draws page after page of subtly gorgeous colors encapsulating familiar forms.

The end of the story presents an opportunity to explore the world outside the satellite, a journey that the protagonist will surely not turn down. There's a luxurious quality to the book's pacing, as there's little in the way in terms of plot or exposition and a number of pages that focus on this vision that is worthwhile to the girl simply because she believes that god is showing it to her. It's a question of aesthetic beliefs over utilitarian needs, and her aesthetics are so finely honed that it becomes her source of psychological and emotional well-being. Being given a chance to put that to the test in a utilitarian environment is both an exciting opportunity as well as opening up the possibility of losing her connection to the beauty of her connection.

mini-Kus! #62: Jonah 2017, by Tomasz Niewiadomski. As noted on the back cover, this trippy story is loosely based on the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. There's a magical undersea kingdom where some fish are played like harps, octopuses and crayfish wonder after robots with hourglasses that measure time and death, and cat-women & hawk-women stand guard. All of that is threatened by some scuba divers looking for the source of some magical disturbance. After multiple dives, the diver discovers a factory producing "harmful sugar cubes of time" that he destroys. Whether or not the diver's mission is in fact beneficial or malignant is unclear; what it is made obvious is that he slaughtered a whole bunch of sea creatures, then flew away to outer space for his next mission. There are a whole lot of funny images and sequences involving the undersea cast of characters, but it's ultimately an unsettling story, as though it were told by a four-year-old who constantly shifted the narrative and abandoned it altogether after blowing it up. It's a story about the destructive potential of storytelling and how capricious it is, rendered in a style that mixes naturalism and the occasional highly cartoony image.

Approaching The Finish Line: Mome #20 and #21

Let's take a look at Mome #20 and #21. Both were decent but mostly unremarkable issues, burdened somewhat by some of the serials that bogged down the newer work.  Let's go artist by artist and examine what was produced.

Dash Shaw: In #20, Shaw continued his recent attempts at adapting trashy dating TV shows like Blind Date (minus the wacky commentary and pop-ups that serve to interrupt the audience's experience of the couple on their date). Shaw's trying a lot of different things here: it's partly an experiment in having color drive the emotional narrative of a story. The subdued sea green wash here befits the low-key nature of the interaction. Shaw also omits the wacky trust-building activity central to each date in favor of simply following the couple around as they drive to their date, walk around and eat dinner. This also reflects his interest in exploring how two people interact in real life and how that translates to a page, while still retaining the staged quality of the TV show. I feel like this is all part of some larger problem-solving activity for Shaw, much like his comic about the making of Jurassic Park in #21. That documentary concerns itself with trying to create a relationship between things on a screen that don't exist (dinosaurs) and actual actors, trying to find ways to make that relationship come alive when seen in a theater. In a sense, this is what Shaw is trying to accomplish by pushing the envelope of multilayered drawings with a different color wash attached to them. He's not trying to create something real; he's trying to create something that feels real in an emotional and apprehensive sense.

Sara Edward-Corbett: In #20, her "The Bird, the Mouse and the Sausage" was one of her best pieces. Her comics have always had the preciseness of certain kinds of children's illustration, and this story is very much in the vein of a fable. Her use of negative space is exquisite, be it the bright white space in nearly every panel or the deep black of her trees, marked only be a series of thin, white vertical lines. As a result, the spot colors she uses really pop out on the page. The story is about an essentially polyamorous (but asexual) trio whose equilibrium is shattered when the bird mates with another bird. An act of jealousy winds up dooming both the mouse and the sausage, who calls into questions its very identity as an anthropomorphic being in the course of the story. Like most of her work, it's funny, sad and a little savage. In #21, "Afraid of the Dark" is a whimsical, delightfully-drawn story about an anthropomorphic desk, umbrella and box kite that leave a classroom late at night to wander the forest and cemetery. The denseness of her hatching and cross-hatching provides an interesting contrast to the benign nature of the story itself. It's a mood piece above all else, but that mood is "whimsical".

Josh Simmons and The Partridge in the Pear Tree: These two issues saw parts two and three of the truly demented serial "The White Rhinoceros". Two people (one of them apparently being 1970s Paul Lynde in full "Uncle Arthur" mode from the TV show Bewitched) find themselves in a terrifying and brightly colored forest full of what a couple of children call "racial magic". What Simmons and collaborator "Shaun Partridge" do here is transpose the most virulent of racial slurs into a fantasy world where those words have a completely different (and usually either neutral or positive) meaning. This world is quite dangerous for the newcomers, who lack the ability to negotiate and understand their new environment, though both try to figure it out as best as they can. I hope that someone is going to pick this serial up, because it's some of Simmons' finest work, with his near-psychedelic use of color in particular being a revelation.

In #21, Simmons also contributed a story called "Mutant", which is more what one would expect from him. Simmons quickly creates a strange scenario: a bunch of people standing outside somewhere at night. Someone gets beaten up, and a guy goes after the responsible party: a tiny demon with a plastic mask. After he stabs the demon to death with desperate gusto, he is told that it is now reborn, mutated and angry. Simmons has a way of generating dread and lingering doom like no one else; the specifics of the story and the reasons why anything are happening are important. What's important is that this guy who felt empowered and righteous one moment is irrevocably fucked, with his doom to come along at any moment. That's why he creates hands-down the most genuinely unsettling horror comics today.

T Edward Bak: These two issues offer the last part of chapter two and the first part of chapter three of his "Wild Man" serial about the explorer and scientist Georg Steller. They mark an interesting transition point in the story, as Bak goes from Steller in Europe with his fiance, passionately having sex with her as well as engaging in clever repartee with her; she is clearly his equal. Of course, the promises he makes to her are all doomed, as chapter three opens with a dream of sex turning into Steller having to deal with wild wolves in a near-Arctic setting. Bak really gets as the desperation and the human drama played out in the wild, the sense that there's no hope but trying to keep on living. A revised version of this story will soon be published by Floating World Comics.

Conor O'Keefe: Issue #20 debuted his new serial, "The Coconut Octopus". O'Keefe is a great example of an artist who really benefited from being part of Mome, as he refined his style noticeably over the past few years. I've come to enjoy his softly penciled and colored blend of Winsor McCay and Maurice Sendak, mixing whimsy and melancholy in equal measure. The titular octopus of the story is a very funny and cute figure, and I hope that O'Keefe can keep up this new story and the continuity of his characters elsewhere.

Nate Neal: Neal may not have the name recognition of some of the other Mome artists, but he was one of the most consistently interesting contributors during its run. "Magpie Inevitability" in #20 feels like a modern take on a Bob Dylan song from the 60s, with a cadence similar to "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". Brightly drawn with a varied color palate, it's typical of Neal in that it focuses on how destructive modern culture is and the ways in which each individual is complicit in this emptiness. The combination really works well here, as the images balance out the stridency of the text. Neal has also been interested in the roots of language and how that ties into how we make images. "Cha-ul Nu Mon-Mon" in #21 is a beautiful, brutal story about a group of cave-dwellers. A young boy named Jani is taught by his mother ("Mon-Mon") how to paint on the walls of the cave; it's a thunderbolt of a moment for a young man who has found his destiny. His mother is young and beautiful and has drawn the jealous ire of her fellow wives of the chieftain; they use him in a plot to kill her. Flashing forward years later, Jani is the tribe recorder, painting another triumphant hunt by his father at his behest. When the story concludes with Jani sneaking off to draw a portrait of his mother, Neal gets at the heart of art's ability to bring to life what is gone and keep it alive forever.

Michael Jada & Derek Von Gieson: Their "Devil Doll" serial, mashing up hard-nosed WWII soldiers wandering into a potentially haunted town and finding madness, dragged in every single segment. Von Gieson is a talented artist, but his storytelling here is murky and difficult to follow, and the story feels bloated and tedious. I enjoyed Von Gieson's previous contributions to Mome, but this story just doesn't suit what he does best.

Steven Weissman: The comics veteran was a welcome addition to Mome, but his first entry in #20 was not what I expected from him. Sure, it was about kids and the ways in which they heap abuse on each other, but it quickly turned into a gruesome horror story with a number of wholly unexpected twists and turns. It's a must for fans of the artist, because he takes expectations and simply mangles them in a way that's emotionally powerful. The end was also unexpected in terms of both its plot twists and ultimate poignancy. #21 featured a number of his hilarious "Barack Hussein Obama" strips that would later go on to get their own collection. These strange and wonderful accounts of Obama and Joe Biden off on adventures, developing superpowers, and generally interacting as somewhat fractious best friends fits in perfectly with his Yikes! material, as the characters here are child-like in their demeanors and emotional states, and they balance that sense of cruelty and kindness that children can express at a moment's notice.Weissman's scratchy line and extensive use of effects like zip-a-tone add to the sense of fantastic, even if the figures are depicted more-or-less naturalistically.

Sergio Ponchione: Ponchione is another slightly odd fit for Mome, given the slightly goofy and bigfoot nature of these stories. That said, they look absolutely terrific in full color, coming on the heels of his excellent Ignatz line series Grotesque. #20 sees "The Grotesque Obsession of Professor Hackensack", a charming prequel to Grotesque. It's got the same manic energy that reflects Ponchione's interest in early American cartooning, with touches of Milt Gross and Rube Goldberg to be found. #21's "Sgnaz" channels Dr Seuss but also gets at the darker parts of the imagination that Ponchione is so fascinated with, especially those memories that are repressed but bubble up in unexpected ways. Without any hope for further Grotesque stories in English, it was a treat to see them in Mome, just like many of the foreign short stories that were translated and published.

Jeremy Tinder: It's a shame that Tinder hopped on to Mome so late in its run, because he really fit right in. "Time and Space" had this sort of Archer Prewitt quality to it that I enjoyed, as the main character was a sort of blobby figure seeking out satori and the ability to practice remote viewing. In a strip with lots of funny drawings and an absurd premise (he succeeds and joins his guru remotely on Mars, where they encounter the giant floating head of god and send out & receive good vibrations), its execution is done with deadly seriousness. There's no punchline, but rather a resolution to a problem posed earlier in the strip. That uncomfortable zone between the serious and the silly gives this strip a charge.

Aidan Koch: Koch's comics always have an elusive and slippery quality to them even as she provides all sorts of visual cues as to potential meanings. "Green House" in #20 is no exception, and its very title offers clues as to what's really going on. A woman brings a man over to her apartment, and he immediately puts the moves on her and they wind up having sex. He leaves early in the morning, and while she does not overtly comment on this, there's a moroseness in her body language that the reader can feel. The title refers directly to all of the plants she keeps in her apartment (which he comments on, baffled as to why she has so many); their growth is essential to her growth. When she offers to trade plants with a girl across the way, it's a way of creating a real connection, as Koch's drawings of the two of them sharing their plants together indicates. Indeed, that drawing has a shadowy circle surrounding them, as the two of them were in a flowerpot together. Having found a connection on her own terms, the guy calls her back, apologetic for leaving and wishing to get together soon; he'll have found her already blossomed. There are few artists who think through every line and its effects the way that Koch does.

Nicolas Mahler: I've always thought Mahler was kind of a curious fit for Mome; that European, cartoony bigfoot thing felt more like something that Kim Thompson would have put into an anthology, not Mome editor Eric Reynolds. However, his autobio short stories display a crackling, straight-ahead sense of humor that is unusual in Mome. "Convention Tension" and "Goodbye, Mr Nibs" in #20 deal with Mahler's experiences at comics shows and teaching, respectively. A cartoonist doing a strip about a con is not exactly a new idea, but I liked the way in which Mahler favorably compared comics nerds to art snobs ("at least the comics nerds have genuine despair going for them"). The second story speaks to the frustration Mahler felt with utterly disinterested students, a frustration that's heightened when a friend of his acts as a substitute for a class and has a great time. In #21's "Moving Pictures", Mahler first vents his spleen against an old art teacher and then goes into hilarious detail about how a government grant helped fund an animated project of his, talking about finding voices, finding an animator and being relentlessly hounded by the government for a final project -- including years after it was actually released! Mahler was never an essential part of Mome, but these shorts acted as an appealing palate cleanser.

Ted Stearn: There's not much more to say about Stearn's "The Moolah Tree" serial (which appeared in #20) other than it's funny, mean and impeccably drawn. It's a slow-moving serial that didn't seem to come close to finishing up by the end of Mome; indeed, it just seemed to get going. Stearn has a knack for making almost every character simultaneously lovable, completely stupid and dangerous to themselves and others.  

Kurt Wolfgang: Wolfgang is another MVP from Mome and is certainly one of the five cartoonists who made the greatest impact in the series. While his early entries in Mome were good, it was his "Nothing Eve" serial that really stands out. As we follow the protagonist of the story, Tommy, around the city on the last day before the end of the world, the reader knows he's trying to find his only real love, a girl named Edie. This chapter reveals that Tommy wasn't always the kindest person, as his reunion with an abandoned friend/fling named Patti reveals. Indeed, this portion of the story finds Tommy taking a hard look at himself for occasionally being a rotten friend. Wolfgang's drawing just gets better and better, mixing rubbery & stylized character designs in with heavy blacks and densely-crosshatched backgrounds.

Tom Kaczynski:  Please see my review of "The Cozy Apocalypse" in my review of Kaczynski's collection of stories, Beta Testing The Apocalypse. Kaczynski was unquestionably one of the best and most productive cartoonists in Mome.

Jon Adams: Adams' delicately drawn and seriously strange strips have mixed naturalism and surreal, violent, nighmarish and cartoony imagery. "Almost Candied Chimera" is typical of his stories, involving a redneck father/son hunting duo, a whimsical creature, a violent death and a horrible fate.The silliness of the action is juxtaposed against the horror of what actually happens.

Nick Thorburn: Thorburn really plays to Reynolds' fondness for the gross, grotesque and silly. His crude strip about an alternate, even bawdier history of Benjamin Franklin deliberately riddled with as many lies as possible in #21 was very funny, revealing a strong influence from underground comics.His other strip was less funny than it was drawn in a lively matter. These strips were another nice palate-cleanser.

Lilli Carre': Carre's carefully designed and constructed figures point to her background in animation, but her stylizations always serve the neuroses, fears and wonders her characters encounter in her stories. In #21's "Marching Band", a woman wakes up one morning to hear a marching band pounding out a tune in her head that only she can hear. She eventually comes to accept this bit of madness until it disappears one day, which makes things even more maddening. Carre' gets at the common fear of being attacked or infested during one's sleep in an absurd way, and then makes a comment about the ways in which we internalize madness. It's a clever short for a cartoonist whose Mome entries were among the best the series had to offer.

Latvian Excellence: S! #11

The Latvian anthology Kus! is so successful that there's a smaller spin-off anthology called S! The 11th issue has the theme of "Artventurous", one that's vague enough for the artists to either totally embrace or ignore. Editors David Schilter and Sanita Muizniece lean heavily on artists from eastern and western Europe, with a smattering of contributors from north and south America. Everything about the anthology is first rate, including the production values and the individual effort from each artist. For many of these artists, it's their first exposure to a wider English-speaking audience, and it's clear that they're doing their best work within the confines of the theme. Schilter & Muizniece have broad tastes, with no particular preference given to artistic styles or fiction vs autobio. The cover, by Latvian artist Leonards Laganovskis, is a beautiful, stunning work that is an intersection of human forms as both functional pieces of furniture and works of art, cascading nonchalantly across the page in a pleasing pastel color scheme.

Some artists, like Martins Zutis, took the theme and reworked epics like The Odyssey into comics form. Betty Liang went in a different mythological direction in her depiction of the Leda and the swan story, which has a very different and grisly outcome in her telling. There's a charming crudeness in the way she uses color, making the pages look constructed as much as they are drawn. Others, like KJ Martinet, ran with the concept and did a story about a distopian future where survivors scavenge and murder in order to "complete" works of art, like adding arms to the Venus de Milo. Nicolo Pelizzon uses a noir style to hint at the conspiracy behind a series of art thefts and forgeries, while Jen Rickert offers up a chilling story of a murderer getting out his madness on canvas. Roman Muradov's "Little Clouds" gets at something else: the idea of aesthetic perfection and aesthetic repulsion and how they can be embodied in the same person when in different environments. There's something appropriately beautiful and elegant about his heavy use of a cartoony clear-line style and the colors red, brown and black.

Aidan Koch unsurprisingly is a standout with her "After The Bath", which is a sequential series of single-page images depicting a form only using colors after a path. It's like looking at a series of paintings done in non-intuitive, bright color patterns, with the watercolors barely coalescing into recognizable forms. Renata Gasiorowska has one of the funniest stories in the book, about a child whose entire family is comprised of artists but has no talents or interest in the arts. Gasiorowska ties the strip back into theme when the child notes that only martial arts interest her, spawning a rant about the uselessness of art. Told at the dinner table, one guest notes how suited she is for performance art, given how "brave and rude" she is! Told in a scrawled line with anthropomorphic characters in black & white, this story stands out from many of the other, slicker entries in the anthology.

Olive Booger details an embarrassing anecdote from his art school days having to do with performance art. A cute girl who shared his studio encouraged him to go to a performance piece where everyone naturally wound up naked and he was tapped to serve as a human table. He (not surprisingly) freaked out over this, causing much humiliation and trauma that obviously continues to trouble him to this day. His garish, grotesque style perfectly captures the awkwardness and strangeness of that situation. Dilraj Mann's take-off on Rear Window has some cheesily exploitative art and a pat narrative, which was unfortunate because his skill at depicting forms and using shadow made the story interesting to look at. Daniel Werneck's "Shoulders of Giants" is a bit too on-the-nose in the way he depicts the constant inspiration of a variety of artists and writers on his work. Much better is Simon Moreton's "Working", a typically restrained story about a man who becomes so obsessed with the beauty of a landscape view that it consumes him until he's able to return at the end of his work week, paints and canvas at the ready as he intensely tries to capture both his feelings and the essence of the environment.

That's a sampling of the pieces that stood out for me, though there are many others that range from gag work to autobio to something close to science-fiction and fantasy. What's most impressive to me is how the editors are able to produce this anthology like clockwork, bringing in new artists for nearly every edition of either S! or Kus!. It's really become the international successor of Mome in terms of spotlighting new and emerging talent across a broad spectrum of styles and influences. It also points to the ways in which art comics are now a truly international phenomenon, with European artists influencing American artists and vice-versa. There are certainly still regional peculiarities and references in some of the stories, but they are all easily recognizable as the kind of art comics that are pushing barriers everywhere. Kus! and S! may not always make a point of spotlighting the most challenging work in every issue, but there's a delicate balance in giving time and attention to cutting edge, avant garde work and more conventional yet still interesting work. This issue is a perfect example of that tension on display, and the way that the stories are sequenced helps heighten that frisson in a manner that works to the benefit of every artist in the book.

Anthologies: Candy or Medicine and Brad Trip

I'll be reviewing a wildly diverse batch of indy anthologies this week. Let's start at the most DIY end of things, with Josh Blair's entry-level anthology Candy or Medicine and the Portland publishers team-up for Free Comic Book Day, Brad Trip.

Candy or Medicine #17. The previous issue was the best of the entire series, which is geared toward new creators looking for a publishing outlet and is printed in classic 5.5 x 4.5 minicomics format. This issue is more typically uneven, with a lot of lightweight, crudely drawn stories. I did enjoy the drawing in Jon Light's "Pizza Bill" strip about an anthropomorphic pizza that winds up splattered against a wall, though it does remind me a bit of the sort of thing that Jon Vermilyea does. Harry Nordlinger's strip about a man demanding to see a woman who had just been buried, only to be directed to a tower, an interminable wait and a potential reunion with her that is highly unpleasant, has a grim but amusing quality. I also liked the frantically scrawled and slightly grotesque covers by Willard Herman, thanks to their slightly awkward charm. The rest of the entries felt slight, especially the two pages that seemed to be little more than an advertisement for a webcomic.  We'll see what sort of comics Blair unearths for his next volume.

Brad Trip. This is the latest of the oddly-titled anthologies co-published by a number of west coast micropublishers.  This year, it's Sparkplug, Revival House, Teenage Dinosaur and the retailer Floating World. Printed on fairly cheap newsprint, the format favors the unusual and striking nature of the artists featured. Aidan Koch opens up with one of her smudgy, oddly paced and formatted pencil-heavy comics. The strip features extreme close-ups between two men meeting on a beach, with extended pans over to a horse frolicking in the surf. Like many of her comics, it's both impenetrable and completely straightforward. Annie Murphy contributes a charmingly creepy story about a young woman traveling to what seems to be Baba Yaga's hut to receive a gift.  The gift is distilled to a flame, which she's ordered to swallow, providing a source of illumination. Once again, this story is entirely straightforward, but the story's symbols are mysterious. This is a search for knowledge, even as it's revealed that the young woman is half-human, half beast.

Constance Hockaday and artist Maria Sputnik go in a different direction, with Sputnik's charmingly ramshackle style being used to illustrate a section of a story about a family that escapes authority by living on a raft made of garbage. Sputnik's design is interesting, as some of the panels are made to look as though they were torn directly out of a sketchbook, with part of one page flipping upside-down. Kinoko Evans' story about two sphinxes eating a stereotypical hipster is cute but lightweight and disposable. Virginia Paine's story about a girl waiting on another girl indifferent to her affections is one of her best to date. She captures the quiet passion of the girl pursuing someone she clearly has deep feelings for; even as she's rejected, she expresses no emotion, with Paine letting the Childish Gambino song speak for her. It's a well-designed, emotionally ambiguous story that has a strong sense of place and character. Dunja Jankovic closes out the issue with one of her increasingly abstract and psychedelic comics that coalesces into a coherent form only at the end. The way she plays with shapes and patterns suggests a journey looking inward or an extreme close-up that is by nature highly distorted.  All told, this is a visually striking anthology that moves from strength to strength and style to style with its stable of young artists.