The CRAM Index

Here's a quick-link index to my six-part feature on CRAM Books.

1. Andrew Alexander's minicomics

2. CRAM #1

3. CRAM #2

4. CRAM #3

5. Allee Errico's Froggie World

6. Angela Fanche's Me & Night

CRAM, Part 4: CRAM #3

CRAM #3 has one of the funniest covers I've ever seen for an anthology. In an image that encompasses both front and back covers, artist Laura Lannes (her work is missed!) has a fairly familiar image on the right-hand (front) side: a young woman, lying down, reading a comic. It's something out of NON from some years ago. However, a closer look reveals that the image is...odd. Her legs are up in the air and there's a random hand on her left thigh. Opening the whole thing up reveals that someone is going down on her while the cover woman's attention is on the comic. It's a solid gag. 

There's the usual array of vastly different styles on display here, Alexander doesn't have any art in this issue, which isn't surprising, considering how hard putting together an anthology is. Angela Fanche opens up the issue on the inside front cover with a short comic; it's a good space for this kind of tightly-compacted storytelling. Her style continues to evolve, going from more basic diary comics to this slightly fantastical anecdote about a memory that acts as a song stuck in her head. She plays on this metaphor until it transforms into music and nearly suffocates her partner. Fanche's drawing is so delightfully scratchy and spare in some panels, and then she swoops in with big swathes of black patterns in others. It's a fascinating strip to attempt to decode. 

Steve Grove's "Potboilers" is done in the sort of unfussy, slightly cartoony naturalism that I see in a lot of comics these days. It's the kind of story where the characters have one narrative, but there's another narrative at play with the visuals and backgrounds, in particular. The premise of the story is that there's an agency that will send someone over to boil water for you so when you arrive back home, you have a boiling pot of water ready to go for cooking. While this is an absurd and funny idea, the premise is far less interesting than the interplay between the employees. The strident Peggy, trying to make a sale over the phone, has to deal with the distraction of boil specialist Bumphus' failure out in the field. She loses the sale, he goes off the deep end, and she does a "reset" by looking at violent imagery on the internet and then fantasizing about him being killed in a variety of ways. All around them, the house they're working out of is mysteriously dilapidated, and the final scene sees Bumphus on the sidewalk, slumped over after he's clearly slit his wrists with a broken bottle. Everything about this story is off-kilter and anxious in a way that requires multiple readings to absorb its nuances. 

Audra Stang's short comic features a couple of her "Star Valley" characters cozily watching a fantasy show of some kind. In pages with a 20-panel grid, Stang offers pieces of the show with no dialogue, creating a sort of bubble of fascination for the duo that's broken when a commercial comes on and they make a crude joke about it. Stang has an uncanny sense of recreating that sense of mundane magic felt at that age when two friends can share a common obsession together; it's a sort of ritual that still lets them be teens. 

Jack Lloyd's cartoony "Pickles" fantasy story reminds me a lot of Vaughn Bode's stuff, down to the color scheme and eccentric character design. It also has a touch of futuristic urban stories that touch on graffitti as a cornerstone aesthetic. It's one of many stories in the anthology where that aesthetic is more important than the actual narrative. Michelle Kwon's "Autobio" is another such story and self-consciously so. She starts off by declaring that she's tired of drawing herself and so chooses to draw herself as a sort of cute anthropomorphic animal. This is after she turns down other potential character designs, as though she's building a character in a video game. The comic itself is all about treasuring memories on her travels despite her anxiety about the future, and the cute characters turn what is otherwise a routine diary comic into something that's fun to look at visually. 

Steven Christie's "Punchline Sinker" might be my favorite story in this issue. It's a sci-fi story abot a young woman named Zander who recalls her first job, which was a fulfillment center in a satellite orbiting Earth. She worked the job with her friend Peanut, and at first the story seems like a pleasant bit of slice-of-life fiction. She announces to Peanut that she's going to quit in order to get married at precisely the same time Peanut's girlfriend breaks up with her. This leads Peanut to snap as she comes up with a theory: whenever something goes well for one of them, something bad happens to the other. This leads to a surprising and clever turn of events, which turns the story from slice-of-life to a tense action story. Christie uses a classic 9-panel grid to create a particular tempo, and then stays with it as the tension ramps up, but the reader (and protagonist) are unclear on where this is all going. Christie's thin line and limited pallette all help play into this aesthetic repetition. 

After the first half of the issue was mostly conventional narrative, Alexander returned to the weird stuff in the second half. Nicole Rodrigues' "We Hold On To Things" is a colorful bit of comics poetry, using an open page layout and a narrative mostly told in captions that illustrate the feelings of the narrator. She's depicted as a monarch in her own mind, even as she has to fend off her own destructive feelings. The textual meter sets the pacing in this comic, as opposed to a truly integrative approach between word and image. Grayson Bear's "Relatable Richard" is a lampoon of diary comics, featuring a lisping protagonist who sets off on a date, only to slip on a banana peel, fall down a mountain, and get sliced to pieces. The Riso colors are all jacked up to neon levels in four pages of pain hilariously piled on its protagonist. 

After non-traditional-narratives, Sam Sharpe offers "Annie and Alex at the Heartland Cafe." It's one of those narratives that appears to be one thing at first, then quickly becomes something else. A waiter is having a normal day at his job until a man and woman dine at a table outside. It quickly becomes apparent that he's autistic and she's his aide, taking him out for a meal. However, he's disregulated, which manifests as shouting, then throwing his food on the ground, and then eventually punching his aide in the face. All of this is being seen from the waiter's point of view, who is at a loss at what to do, until the aide tells him pointedly: "Don't get involved and do not touch him!" She calms him down, they pay, and then leave. What makes the story interesting is that the waiter can't let this go, and when he sees the woman at the train station, he expresses his remorse for not doing anything. She reminds him that it had nothing to do with him--all of his machismo, all of his need to be a main character (so to speak), was irrelevant. Sharpe's cartooning is top notch as always, blending a slightly cartooning quality into what is otherwise naturalistic work. 

The anthology ends with a trio of stories that are more about sensory impressions than story. "Rangers," by Ethan Means & Ashton Carless, is a gritty black & white war story that may be in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting. A group of soldiers (or prisoners?) sets out to tag things with bright yellow happy faces, until they try and head back. Brendan Leach (a welcome presence!) offers up "Storm and Stress," about a violenist who sees one of her colleagues menaced by a guy on a subway car, but she winds up looking away despite her colleague's pleading eyes. The bright splashes of color contrasted with the black & white images of her anxiety lead to a loose, free-floating sense of guilt and despair. Finally, Aidan Fitzgerald's "Contestants" uses deliberately crude, 8-bit digitally-created color images of contestants in some bizarre game show. The game is about slowly rising while recounting a memory, with that memory being judged by a panel. Fitzgerald is riffing on the public distillation of memory and identity (on social media, presumably) but doing it in a way that doesn't repeat the obvious downsides to social media participation. 

Alexander seems determined to never do the same issue twice, and the result is an anthology that's greater than the sum of its parts. The pieces by Bear, Rodrigues, Means/Carless are somewhat slight on their own, but they make a great deal of sense within the context of the issue. Alexander is adept at pairing more conventional (if odd!) narratives with more experimental pieces, resulting in an anthology that's challenging at points but also entirely readable. 

CRAM, Part 3: CRAM #2

Editing and publishing one anthology is hard. Doing multiple issues is a thankless task that requires equal parts vision and determination. It's clear that Andrew Alexander has both, because CRAM #2 once again is on the cutting edge of up-and-coming cartoonists. Alexander takes a step back and only provides the cover, with a mix of colors that highlights how vivid and beautiful the Risograph process can look if you are careful with color separations. Way too often, Riso comics are sloppy and off-grade, and it can be distracting. Alexander is careful to make the anthology as intentional as possible in terms of its production values. 

Alexander wisely starts this issue off with "Herpes Outbreak," by Allee Errico. Errico would later publish her first collection with CRAM, but I'll get to that later. She and fellow CRAM artist Angela Fanche are two of the most compelling autobiographical cartoonists working today, and it's not because of any particular formal innovations. Indeed, both often use the tried-and-true diary comics format that's tedious in the hands of many other cartoonists. What sets Errico apart is a clear affinity for a highly personal, sloppy, and even smeared line and use of color. This is the lens she uses to express her clear, direct, questioning, and impassioned point of view. Like fellow young memoirist Juliette Collet, Errico seems to owe a lot more to late 80s and early 90s alternative & underground artists like Julie Doucet, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and perhaps Dori Seda than most comics that have come out in the past 20 years. One of her teachers was Lauren Weinstein, and you can see that same painterly mix of grotesque character designs, expressive cartoooning, and highly intuitive storytelling. Weinstein didn't care much about doing things "right," even as she brought new skills to bear in her first major work "Girl Stories," but she somehow made it feel right. Errico is quite similar.

This story is about waking up with an oral herpes outbreak and a recollection of how she contracted it in the first place back in high school. Errico looks like she used charcoal and pastels here, and her line varies from detailed and naturalistic to cartoony, depending on what was needed. Her visual approach is so compelling that she's able to cram in twelve panels on a page with a ton of dialogue without it feeling cramped. Indeed, the mix of her solid lettering, understanding of the relationship between bodies in space, and overall pacing give the pages an almost propulsive feel. Errico approaches the issue of herpes with her typical and unaffected candor, casting aside shame as she understands just how common herpes is. Indeed, this isn't so much a PSA or rant on herpes as it is mourning a particularly complicated relationship. Then Errico turns that around with a couple of funny side observations about her boyfriend accidentally giving her a backpack with a gun and then segueing into the modern day where she talks about this with other cartoonists. She does a funny drawing of monstrous little herpes sores about to burst through the skin of her lips and then compares them to memories, saying "the past is right here in the beautiful present." It's just an exquisite ending that ties up a lot of different emotional threads and adds a sense of resonance to a story about gossip, shame, teenage drama, and human connection. 

CRAM then pivots to Cedar Van Tassel's "Pleistocene Dreams," a story that is unlike Errico's in nearly every conceivable way. Van Tassel's images and use of color are designed to flatten everything, including affect. Van Tassel makes extensive use of negative space in this autobiographical story about him picking up a friend at an airport and nattering on about the effects of the ice age on Minnesota. Using light pastels (the one piece of continuity with Errico), Van Tassel and his friend have an interesting exchange about why the Pleistocene Era was so interesting and why some people turn this into a deeper thought in their place in civilization today. The story ends with a hilarious, disgusting swerve involving overfed vultures that turns what had been a talking heads story into a gag sequence with thematic resonance. 

Caroline Cash continues the previous story's visual aesthetic with her clear and cartoony style that meshes cartoony exaggeration with solid naturalistic elements to create a polished, breezy diary comic. Indeed, it's an example of Hourly Comics Day, which tends to generate highly forgettable and indulgent anecdotes. Cash plays around with the form, taking advantage of the generous page space to create expansive and exaggerated compositions that usually tend to look much smaller in typical presentations of these sorts of diary strips. As usual in a Cash story, there are equal parts sincere and smart-ass, with nuggets addressing deeper feelings mixed with silly anecdotes. This story feels especially breezy, reveling in moments of mundane amusement. 

Next up is A.T. Pratt, taking the anthology in a dramatically different direction. In an extended parody of te famous "Toronto Three" cartoonist friend group of Joe Matt, Seth, and Chester Brown, Pratt obliterates the clean graphic design style of those three with chaotic, nightmarish, and grossly visceral visuals that pack as many as twenty panels on a page. This story is about as inside baseball as it gets with regard to how much of the humor is based on a reader's familiarity with those cartoonists, but it's clear that Pratt couldn't care less. It's really a story that's about (literally) destroying idols and this kind of chummy best-friends-artists storytelling that is sometimes seen in the work of Matt in particular. The Toronto Three all die grisly, horrible, and funny deaths (I imagine this was done before Matt's actual death) in the story, which doesn't seem to bother Pratt's stand-in all that much. 

The chaotic, cluttered approach continues in the next two stories, starting with Nick Bunch of Reptile House. It's a highly clever way of dealing with two variations on the same gag surrounded by visual clutter that is smartly contextualized by the nature of the joke. As two young women walk to their job at a diner in the city, one of them endlessly natters on about whether or not the whales were saved and then if the rainforest was saved. Her friend has no time for her nonsense as these two brightly-colored figures are surrounded by dense (jungle-like) clutter that's colored a bit more dimly. Bunch's character design is deliberately flat and cartoonish, matching the stylized action on the page. Everything is exaggerated, dense, and over the top in service to a familiar gag of an authority figure being frustrated by the cluelessness of young people. 

Floyd Tangeman (editor of dense underground anthology Tinfoil Comix) brings this dense, cartoony progression to its logical end, as his "Projection Dance" interpolates the 23rd Psalm into a four-panel grid featuring a grotesque, constantly changing and mutating figure that never reaches a goal despite being shown walking left to right in every single panel. The gritty use of pastels induces cognitive dissonance in every panel while never disrupting the overall flow of the story. 

Pete Faecke reverses this trend in the final story while committing to the totally nonsensical quality of the back half of this issue of CRAM with a story about Mr. Bimbo. This was an invisible, unseen character who supposedly lived on Fozzie the Bear's index finger in the film Muppet Treasure Island. The character of Mr. Bimbo is strong, talented, and capable were Fozzie is a goofball. In this story, set in the old west (???) Mr. Bimbo has a feud with another "eligible bachelor" named Tim Timbers. The story concludes with Mr. Bimbo playing Ramones and Lou Reed songs for a group of admiring women. What I like best about this bit of total nonsense is Faecke's absolute commitment to the aesthetics and details of the bit, no matter how silly it is. Indeed, it's that commitment that makes it funny, similar to the sort of thing that Rick Altergott does.

The subtitle of this issue is "casual conversations for brain-fog drunks," and the back half of the issue feels increasingly like the stories becoming increasingly (but deliberately) intoxicated and incoherent, while still never leaving the realm of readability. Nothing here matches Errico's opening story in terms of overall impact and artistry, but it all makes sense together. 

CRAM, Part 2: CRAM #1

The underground/alternative comics anthology is a tradition dating back close to sixty years that has birthed movements and introduced exciting new talent to a larger audience. Beginning with Zap!, Bijou Funnies, Wimmen's Comix, and Arcade, future decades saw Heavy Metal, Buzzard, Gay Comix, RAW, Weirdo, Zero Zero, Drawn & Quarterly, Action Girl Comics, Kramer's Ergot, MOME, and NOW (among others) as significant and fairly long-running anthologies that highlighted all of the significant talent of their eras.

The younger underground cartoonists emerging now are an interesting bunch. They seem much more influenced (as a whole) in work from the late 80s and early 90s than any of the trends from the last 20 or 30 years. Fascinating new anthologies have emerged like Reptile House, Jaywalk, Datura Magazine, Vacuum Decay, Clusterfux, Tinfoil, Poison Pill, Death Spark and others, but the most interesting at the moment is CRAM, edited by Andrew Alexander. CRAM seems to be both a culmination and a distillation of the entire Risograph comics movement that started about a decade ago. It featured an intense DIY work ethic, often focusing on the comic more as an art object than in its actual content. Formal innovation has often been a hallmark of cutting-edge anthologies (Kramer's and RAW are good examples), and the best of them have always found a way to bring it back 'round to narrative. CRAM is very much in this vein. 

The cover is a real statement of intent. It's by RAW and Blab veteran David Sandlin, and it's got a lighthearted Riso spirit in its use of color amidst the undersea monsters and decay. Reaching back to the past, with a prominent New York artist, no less, also lets the reader know that this is a statement by a set of (mostly) New York cartoonists. There's a single-page piece by Stipan Tadić, a Croatian painter and cartoonist that's set in a most familiar setting: an Uber ride in New York. Replacing the more familiar New York taxi ride, this strip crams 24 panels into a single page and loads them up with text. It's a deliberately intimate and slightly suffocating visual experience that works because Tadić provides just enough breathing room while spinning a funny conversation between a Croatian and a native of India. It's a great story because it captures something specific about the immigrant experience in New York, as the driver launches on a rant about American women even as he reveals that he studies pick-up artist material. There's no judgment--it's just another experience. It's also an introduction to the wildly disparate visual aesthetics that Alexander is about to throw at the reader. 

Alexander's own piece is an excerpt from a longer story. I normally hate this kind of thing in anthologies, but Alexander provides enough context in this story about him and a friend attending a state fair in New York to allow it to stand on its own. Alexander's use of color is varied but still restrained, which isn't always true of many Riso comics that are trying to draw in eyeballs. Alexander's figurework is the most interesting aspect of his comics, as he loves using distorted scales and perspectives as his characters navigate their environment. There's one great panel where a goat rushes by him and his eyeballs are on one side of his face like a Cubist image. Alexander's stand-in character has this twitchy, anxious energy that's almost awkward to read, but he reins it in before it derails the story. The highlight is when the couple attends a demolition derby event, with two pages of glorious open-page layouts and a filthy kaleidoscope's array of colors. It's much like Alexander's other memoir stuff: sweaty, nervous, but ultimately open to intense experiences. 

Kade McClement's "The Freelancer" feels like some bizarre 80s story that Jason Levian might unearth for a Floating World comic. The weird and frequently off-kilter lettering and strange character design that looks inspired by weird Golden Age comics with their grotesque and rushed-looking qualities. The crazy story about a freelancer art courier who gets mixed up with murder, a bandaged crime boss's wife and other foolishness feels like a more modern touch, but it's got all the noir qualities of a Jack Cole crime comic. Putting this in a beautiful Riso comic feels almost like a deliberate act of comic provocation. 

Max Huffman and Alexander have worked together for some time, including on other anthologies. Huffman also has an excerpt here, and it also works well on its own. Like a lot of younger cartoonists, Huffman rejects easy categorization in terms of his style, especially with regard to his contemporaries. If anything, his use of flat shapes and simple colors is reminiscient of Gene Deitch and the UPA school of animation. This excerpt is part of what seems to be a sci-fi caper or espionage story involving a man trying to sneak through security. To throw authorities off his trail, he infects the man ahead of him with a "clout virus" that gains him entrance--but the man in front of him is reduced to liquid. Huffman has done a lot of short-form work, so seeing a part of a longer narrative will be interesting, especially with the denseness of his narrative style. 

Clair Gunther's "Cecilia & Rebecca" is a visual and narrative palate-cleanser after several intensely colored stories. Simply rendered with a sort of metallic gold-brown background, it's about a piano teacher whose lessons with a kid named Bridget is interrupted by her titular little sisters. Hoping to add them as a clients, she mentions it to their mother, who nervously says she'll ask them. When the mother later tells the teacher they'd rather do dance, it leads to a wholly unexpected and strange twist that is nonetheless deeply felt. Gunther smartly takes what seems to be a fairly straight-ahead narrative in a 12-panel grid and turns it into something beautifully odd. 

The first issue ends with Alexander Laird's totally bonkers "Goblin 64." Laird has his own publishing shingle with Frog Farm (and he does regular events with other cartoonists), but this story is a demented cross between aspects of Paper Rad's cultural raids and shitty video game magazines from the 80s. It took me a minute to see what Laird was doing here, in this article by "Caleb Humus" about a game called Maze Goblin, done precisely in the style of those magazines, down to the grainy images of the games that are supposed to be mind-blowing but look badly antiquated by today's standards. The drawings Laird makes of this imaginary game featuring a character named Ebubobo the Goblin are very funny and fit so totally into the aesthetic that I was hooked for a moment. The gameplay slowly gets stranger and stranger as it's clear this demo the author is playing has sinister overtones until the piece pivots into a review of a game called "Caleb," reviewed by Ebubobo the Goblin! It's a fantastic concept piece that works because of the attention to detail paid to its source material and the wild swerve that nonetheless makes sense. 

It's a wild way to conclude the issue, but it demonstrates rather definitively that anything goes with CRAM and what Alexander is willing to do with regard to publishing different narrative styles. Wisely, Alexander steers away from excerpts in future issues, but there's just a wonderful sense of freshness in this anthology. Alexander isn't necessarily trying to reinvent the wheel or challenge the very concept of narrative the way that Sammy Harkham did in Kramer's. Instead, Alexander is more concerned with the very best production values supporting the aims of some disparate narrative styles. 

CRAM, Part 1: Andrew Alexander

One of the most interesting new publishers is CRAM Books, helmed by Andrew Alexander. To date, he's published three volumes of his CRAM anthology, as well as minis by himself, Angela Fanche, and Allee Errico. These are exciting comics that rework traditional forms like the diary comic into something much more interesting and push the medium in other ways. 

First up are two older diary comic zines from Alexander, DECMBR 2018 and SEVENTH OF MAY 2019.  l liked both of these quite a bit, in part because Alexander immediately starts questioning exactly what he's going after in these comics. DCEMBR 2018 is a traditional daily diary collection done in something resembling the traditional four-panel format. Alexander frequently blurs the composition, as some panels flow into each other in interesting ways. Alexander's drawing is wonderfully raw, grotesque, and expressive, and his character designs are consistently interesting. While there's plenty of written scrawl in most of these strips, it's his drawing that really stands out. He manages to pack a lot of action in these strips with exaggerated perspectives and anatomy, varying line weights to create different expressions, and relating awkward anecdotes where he's in uncomfortable situations, like visiting his family. Alexander does another interesting thing, where his commentary about life starts to tangent away from the actual situations he's drawing, creating some two-track narratives. He's an unreliable narrator and he wants you to know it. 

SEVENTH OF MAY 2019, as one might expect, covers the events of a busy day. It's thankfully not formatted in the style of hourly comics day, but rather simply flows with an introduction that lets the reader know that he's already tired, working a lot at a RISO print shop, trying to draw, and still have a social life. All of this is just a set-up for the real through-line of the first half of the comic: a phone argument with his mother. The argument sees Alexander walking the streets of New York, cutting to his mother driving around. The substance is absurd: his mother is telling him about a friend of hers that she's mad at because her friend was using a holistic trauma healing technique without proper training. Once again, the facial expressions drive everything here, and Alexander manages to add clarity to some text-heavy pages by smartly employing an open-page layout. 

The second half features a weary Alexander delivering a piece and then being cajoled into going out drinking with his client. It's a perfect set of story beats: his friend inviting him out to drinks at a fancy bar over the clear protests of his girlfriend, borrowing a suit in order to fit in, meeting assorted weirdos and posers along the way, and then being met with a big surprise in the form of the bill. It's an interesting set of events on their own, but Alexander's character design once again is his secret weapon, helping add to the sense of absurd momentum that sometimes happens when you're out on the town. Weird things just start to happen around you, and you have to go with it. The final images of Alexander drunk and exhausted on a subway car are the perfect capper to a story that relies on energy derived purely from adrenaline. These two comics are what I would call minor works compared to Alexander's larger project as an editor and publisher, but it shows how his aesthetic as a cartoonist is entirely in line with those he chooses to publish. 

Minis From Andrew Alexander

Andrew Alexander is an interesting young cartoonist who works very much in the Gary Panter "ratty line" tradition. Dead Dog Daze #1 is a perfect example of this, with the distorted faces and heads mixing that Panter aesthetic with a sort of distorted Archie-by-way-of-Clowes concept. This first issue begins with a drug dealing kid named Anthony who calls his recluse friend Henri because he discovers a dog that's been hanged on a football goal post with some strange symbols carved in it. The comic switches first-person perspectives with a large cast of high school (and slightly older) kids and their connections with the crime and with each other. Alexander's ear for dialogue and willingness to go deep into the darkest aspects of his characters made this a riveting read. That was especially true as his grotesque, exaggerated character design was in some ways a parody of Archie (Anthony bore a resemblance to Jughead, for example) but in other ways it represented making each character's appearance reflective of their self-image or inner character.

There are a lot of levels of story here. One interesting diversion in the story is when Anthony goes to visit his supplier Heff (a shut-in obsessed with chess), and Heff tells him that everyone in town plays a role like a piece on the chessboard. Henri is the detective and Anthony is the orphan, and that observation fuels the rest of the issue, as Anthony starts wondering about his life in an existential sense. For the reader, it becomes clear that detective really is Henri's role and that this is a twisting detective mystery with a rogue's gallery worth of suspects. There's even a haunting detail from the past in that Henri was the one who discovered the body of his friend Wren in the forest, an event that clearly altered the course of his life and not in a positive way. There are muscle-headed football players (including one with stitches on his head that make him look like Frankenstein's monster), popularity-seeking girls, and concerned grandmas (one whose face consists entirely of wrinkles, like she's the Dick Tracy villain Pruneface). I'll be curious to see how Alexander resolves this.

Headfirst #2 (as Alex Dicker) is a collection of Alexander's short stories. They are more scribbly and less ambitious than Dead Dog Daze, but they are certainly still interesting. The first story involves a road trip and a quartet of life-long friends going in very different directions. This one is all about the ways in which aggression goes hand-in-hand with friendship and communication, and how different life choices cause that level of intimacy to fracture. The pivotal character in the story is Ralph, who has moved away from California and his friends, and that resentment is palpable even as he finds it hard to relate to his old life. That's especially true when it's revealed along the way that the purpose of the trip is a drug deal, and Ralph actually fantasizes about busting up the deal when he imagines he sees a cop. The constantly sleepy character instead simply dreamed this intervention, and the deal (financing his friend getting his and girlfriend's upcoming baby) was all to set up a new life, one even further removed from his. The other stories involve a post-Civil War narrative about a returning soldier always in search of the next fight, and sees him being manipulated into hunting down Native Americans by the neighbors of his family. That one's a bit on the convoluted side, and the lack of clear storytelling doesn't help. There's a funny bit of autobio involving rebellion and connection at an older age, and there's also a clever story about a living toy who's constantly being torn apart by his owner. This mini shows a restless mind at work with some solid characterization, but it doesn't quite cohere. The difference between this 2014 comic and the 2016 comic reviewed above clearly shows Alexander's development, and it's obvious that he's going in the right direction.