The Shirley Jackson Project

Rob Kirby's anthologies are always interesting at the very least, in large part because he only takes on projects as an editor that are personally important to him. Passion alone does not a great anthology make, however, and it's Kirby's other skills as an editor that tend to make his anthologies so satisfying to read. He has an uncanny sense of which artists to use for a given project, how to get the best out of them and how to sequence their stories. Sequential flow is the most important quality of any given anthology and is easily botched by editors who don't quite understand what they're doing. Even in an anthology with more than one weak piece, Kirby manages to use them as buffers or palate-cleansers. Even when Kirby was editing anthologies featuring only queer cartoonists, he always carefully thought through the artists he asked to participate in an effort to come up with the best balance of styles, themes and visual approaches. That was especially true in his excellent Three anthology, but he's carried that through in his recent series of anthologies that smartly mixed artists from the queer comics world and the alt-comics world (a line that has thankfully become far less relevant) to provide a diversity of experiences, points of view and styles. After putting together the massive QU33R anthology, he went back to doing smaller anthologies that mixed artists as I noted to address topics like accidental, self-inflicted injuries (Pratfall) and astrology (What's Your Sign, Girl?).

Kirby will surely earn some degree-of-difficult points with his The Shirley Jackson Project, an anthology featuring "comics inspired by her life and work". Jackson has been dead for nearly fifty years, but her influence on modern psychological horror remains as strong as ever. A new biography that's just been released has also stirred up more attention to the novelist and short story writer as well. Simply put, this was a passion project for Kirby, who was delighted and surprised to find as many Jackson fans in the alt-comics world as he did who were willing to contribute to this book. I did some research on Jackson's works prior to reviewing the anthology, having only read the famous short story "The Lottery" and her hilarious book about parenting, Life Among The Savages. Most of the stories were inspired by The Haunting of Hill House (the prototypical psychological haunted house story) and We Have Always Lived In The Castle (an especially creepy family thriller). Kirby's task here was to sequence a group of stories that focused almost entirely on her horror stories in a wa that wasn't repetitive.

For the most part, he succeeded. In an anthology full of deep, personal stories with a distinctly dark tone, it was crucial that Kirby was able to lighten the mood from time to time (much as Jackson did herself in her otherwise psychologically tense writing). The major pieces in the book tend to fall into one of two categories: autobiographical reflections on Jackson's work and its relation to the lives of the artists, and fiction pieces that incorporate aspects and/or themes of Jackson's work. Kirby starts off with Annie Murphy, a mainstay in the Kirby anthology stable. This theme couldn't be any deeper in Murphy's wheelhouse, as her first major comic was about a spiritualist that wove in autobiographical details. With black backgrounds and white, cursive lettering, Murphy conjures up a story weaving in her own history of living in haunted places with Jackson's own history of both dealing with haunted places and coping with an abusive mother, elegantly addressing issues surrounding fear and guilt that drive our deepest sense of terror.

Ivan Velez and Jon Macy tell similar stories, with Velez noting how often he would see apparitions of just-deceased relatives at bedside and Macy focusing instead on how many of Jackson's characters' tendency to have rich inner lives in order to combat the world around them. He perceptively notes that this is a metaphor for dealing with abusive parents and describes his own harrowing life story of dealing with a physically and psychologically cruel parent and how he used his own fantasy worlds to escape. What I liked best about Macy's story is its sense of restraint; there was a sense of quiet but seething fury underlining his words, while his art was crisp & smart but hinted at things more than it made things explicit. In that sense, it was very much like Jackson's work.

The husband-wife team of Asher & Lillie Craw did an analysis of Jackson's use of buildings and foods as highly charged objects in her stories. In many respects, it's a comics form of literary analysis, going straight to the original source to back up their theories regarding how Jackson turns what is comfortable and familiar into something eerie and threatening. The brightness and simplicity of their art is in direct opposition to the subject matter, creating one of many unusual juxtapositions in the book. Gabrielle Gamboa looks at food from a different perspective, addressing the ways in which Jackson turned comfort food into deadly threats and then looking at real-life events in which food has mysteriously killed others. Kirby's own imprint is all over the book, with several short pieces including another analytical story where he examines common Jackson character archetypes, illustrated in scratchy form by Michael Fahy.

In terms of the fictional pieces, the two show-stoppers use radically different approaches. Maggie Umber's "The Tooth" is an adaptation of the short story told entirely in shadowy images. Considering that the original story is about a woman's journey to the city to get her tooth removed, only to slowly descend into total ego loss and deterioration of self, Umber cleverly begins the story with a number of concrete images and slowly starts to iconify and even abstract the visuals, as the reader is compelled to start the see the world as she does. Eric Orner's piece about the crumbling relationship between two long-distance friends is chilling in the way the narrator slowly begins to understand his own self-absorption. Orner's balance of text and image in each panel is designed to whip the reader through the story quickly, anticipating with dread what might happen in the friendship. It can be argued, I think, that Jackson's stories are about the ways in which isolation can lead to toxic behavior, which then often supersedes concepts like empathy and kindness.

The other stories act mostly as effective buffers and palate cleansers. Colleen Frakes' story about listening to a radio reading of "The Lottery" as a child and freaking out points to the ways in which some stories really strike a negative chord with their readers, and that authors just have to deal with it. Katie Fricas' gloriously scrawled drawings try to capture individual, self-destructive urges described in Jackson's stories and is a perfect transition piece as it's right between two stories drawn in a fairly naturalistic style. Kirby's own "Cabinet of Blood" is a funny but dark anecdote about Jackson that provides a short rest for the reader after long pieces by Orner and Jennifer Camper. Camper combines elements from a number of different Jackson stories to once again write about identity lost. It doesn't quite cohere, just like Dan Mazur's imagining Jackson herself as a persecuted witch in the woods feels more silly than anything else. W. Woods' imagining a character from We Have Always Lived In The Castle recovering scraps from her burned house goes on a few pages too long, and it's the only piece in the book that feels more like fan fiction than something original. Robert Triptow's adaptation of The Haunting Of Hill House, on the other hand, is clever because of its first person perspective and recapitulation of the idea of haunting as a metaphor for abuse. Triptow keeps it short and simple, moving quickly from a powerful set of frightening images to the prospect of hope and escape.

At over 120 pages, this anthology isn't as tightly edited as Kirby's best anthologies. There were several stories that could have been weeded, and even some good stories being left out might have made a stronger, more cohesive project. That said, the best pieces in the book are as good as anything I've read in any anthology this year. Umber, Murphy and Orner in particular all used radically different approaches to create stories I won't soon forget. Kirby took risks in seeing what would stick and almost pulled it off, as the book doesn't lose steam until the end. Even the misfires are interesting in their own way and every piece is reflective of the profound influence Jackson has had on them as well as the way she expressed things in her work that spoke loudly to the experience of others, be it directly related to the supernatural or else the messages behind the metaphors she employed.

Thirty Days of CCS #14: Annie Murphy

Annie Murphy has long been one of the most thoughtful and intelligent cartoonists in comics. She has a particular talent for relating biography to larger cultural, spiritual and political issues. Her latest project, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, is a biography both of the city of Portland itself as well as key figures who passed in and out of the Rose City. Murphy's voice is a rare one in that she spends a great deal of time processing and synthesizing facts and history, making interesting and bold connections and challenging the reader with forceful opinions based on this synthesis. Murphy is that seemingly-rare animal: a native of Portland. (I can relate to this as I am a native of Miami, another "weird" city with a transient population and a dubious history of racism, exploitation and an inflated sense of its own identity.) As such, she has little time for Portlandia quirkiness and instead delves into Portland's secret, dark past and murky present.

The first issue, "My Own Private Portland", spends a great deal of time talking about the actor River Phoenix and his death in 1994. The first eleven pages are essentially a glowing evaluation of Phoenix's impact as an actor, especially on her as she was growing up. Then she makes the connection: he was born in Oregon and lived in Portland during the filming of Gus Van Sant's film My Own Private Idaho. That was a movie based in part on Phoenix's own life, as a young hustler and busker who used his youth and intense charisma in order to survive and support his family. Murphy neatly lines up the dots: Van Sant was fascinated by lost young boys with secrets, the openly bisexual Phoenix made for a magnetic lead, especially opposite Keanu Reaves, and Portland's relatively pleasant weather drew a lot of homeless kids from the Northwest. Van Sant was white and wealthy, dabbling in the lives of kids from the streets and letting them stay in his big house. Murphy also points out certain racist aspects of Van Sant's films while noting that Portland's long had a history of an underground sex industry--particular one that had young "straight-looking and acting" men selling their bodies to older men.

From there, Murphy connects other dots: Van Sant fancying himself a modern-day William S. Burroughs (without considering the negative connotations of what that meant), the introduction of heroin into street culture, and Van Sant's favorite "hunting ground" for finding street boys to put into his movies, which just so happened to be Murphy's own high school. There's an amazing passage, set to drawings of high school yearbook photos, that describes their fates: "Many never made it out of Portland. They wound up in the Willamette River, or under the Suicide Bridge...on a gurney with a swollen arm, in front of a speeding train". Murphy ends the issue by calling out Van Sant for depicting heroin use as a "blissful, sub-urban dream" when the reality was convulsions and death. She also connects another dot: the protagonist of Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy was based on a neo-nazi friend of his named Ken Death.

That leads into the second issue, "Ken Death Is Dead". Murphy relates the deaths of Phoenix ("my Kurt") and Kurt Cobain (just three months apart) to each other, and then goes into more details about Phoenix's life as a child. In particular, she relates the way he was sexually exploited from a very early age, thanks to the cult his parents were a member of. It gave him hard-won lessons that made him keenly aware of life's bullshit, but they took a brutal emotional toll. Murphy talks about his experiences making the film Stand By Me (including the incredible story of Rob Reiner asking him if an adult ever let him down and betrayed him before a particular scene, resulting in raw emotion in the next take) and how it was the first time he had a circle of friends who truly accept him for who he was. And then she fast-forwards to Portland and Phoenix hanging out with Keanu Reaves during the filming of My Own Private Idaho, as part of this sort of utopian Portlandia.

Then Murphy talks about a brutal, racially-motivated murder perpetrated by skinheads, one of whom was Ken Death. She doesn't go into detail about this, but Oregon was initially founded as a white utopia, with African-Americans not welcome or invited in. As such, the lack of racial diversity in the state and in Portland in general was deliberately engineered, and when immigrants started to arrive their presence was not welcome. Indeed, immigrants and young men entering the city were often forcibly introduced into the city's thriving underground sex trade. She then draws up all the lines connected by the dots and talks very specifically about how Oregon is a "goldmine" for white supremacist movement recruitment, drawing a comparison between that recruitment of young men and the way abusers select their marks. She also points to something else: giving media attention to white supremacists by way of the trial didn't make them pariahs; instead, it made them heroes and martyrs. The result of the trial was irrelevant, because the movement in laid-back, liberal Portland was now given extensive free advertising.

In her account of this history, Murphy is in turns academic, impassioned, despondent and sardonic. These are not comics per se; they are instead half-page images with her own cursive scrips on the bottom half, written on lined paper. The fact that it's scrawled in her hand-writing is an important aspect of the overall work, adding to the warmth of each page. It's history as though it came from Murphy's own secret diary, and her own swirling, muddy drawings add to the overall intimacy of the project. These are drawings of things that Murphy knows only too well: people and places she loves as well as people and places she despises for what they represent. Murphy's really going somewhere in this series, and it will be interesting to see her continue to widen the scope of her inquiries.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 26: Annie Murphy, Adam Whittier, Jon Chad, Sean Ford, Rachel Dukes

This CCS entry will focus on odds and ends, things that are more illustration than comics, and a few extra comics that arrived after I wrote an article about the cartoonist.

Adam Whittier's Snake Rapunzel (published by Charlie Clark Books of Portland) is yet another update of the Rapunzel myth. It's a book written and illustrated by Whittier, though it's not a comic. It's not quite a kids' book either, as there are hints of bawdiness throughout. Whittier quickly turns the book from a passive story of waiting to be rescued into an active story of scheming and counter-scheming. On one side is the witch imprisoning Rapunzel. On the other is an unscrupulous grifter who's pretending to be a prince. Then there's poor naive Rapunzel herself, who quickly wises up and displays a remarkable talent at the beauty contest that sits at the story's climax: the ability to drink any man under the table. Finally, there's Belinda the snake and Luther the porcupine, who intersect with all of these characters in unusual and amusing ways. Whittier spins a charming and even exciting story out of this character cloth, with the illustrations looking influenced by Dr Seuss and the prose influenced by Jules Feiffer. It's a combo that works well, as the story carries both traditional and modern touches.

A Cartoonist's Story Unfolding, by Jon Chad. Chad wasn't a CCS student, but he was a lab tech and later on the school's faculty. He may not have been a student there, but he certainly received an education in comics that helped lead him to having multiple books published for different audiences. This is the new recruiting pamphlet for CCS, and it's one of the best. Chad is a formalist who loves making the reader turn books upside down in order to read them and poke through eye pops to get bonus images. As one goes chronologically through Chad's career at CCS, the reader opens up the folded-up comic, flips it upside down and finds both his world as a cartoonist and the comic itself getting bigger and bigger. As with all of Chad's work, it's clever, accessible, funny and extremely well-designed.

Symbology, by Annie Murphy. This is an A-Z compendium of "archetypes and epiphanies", based in part on Murphy's career-long study of pre-patriarchal myths, symbols and rituals related to our understanding of the world. What's remarkable about this comic, and Murphy's comics in general, is the way she's able to make transcultural connections, delving deep into history and then drawing lines to symbols that appear in mythology and sources like the Tarot. One of the key and constant links was the way that feminine symbols and the import of feminine symbols were subverted either into becoming less important than masculine symbols or else transformed into masculine symbols. Murphy's aim here is not to denigrate the masculine, but rather to point out the frequently false binary created in positing the superiority of one over the other. Her "Androgyne" points to an ancient and primordial goddess figure who was both male and female, something that Aristotle also wrote about. (It's also explored in the Gnostic-inspired film/play Hedwig And The Angry Inch). Most of the entries are brief and boldly illustrated, with white text on black paper, until the rune "hagalaz" popped up. She ties this into ancient Germanic runes, Norse mythology, Sumerian goddesses and how they morphed into the archetypical "lady of the three faces" (virgin, mother, crone), witchcraft, modern medicine, Nazi appropriation of ancient peace symbols and the tarot. This is extended comics section was the best thing here, making me wish that more of the comic was similarly integrated into a single narrative, but Murphy does her best to draw connections wherever possible. Murphy's already helped construct a new Tarot (the Collective Tarot), but I'd love to see her bring a narrative to life involving what she knows about the cards.

Shadow Hills #5, by Sean Ford. This seems to be a pivotal issue in terms of setting up conflicts. The town is stricken by the terrifyingly-depicted 'black ink" attacks, but Ford draws back from that after reminding the reader that this is happening, focusing on the back story of a key character and a big decision she makes as she literally climbs into a huge void of a hole to look for another key character who had been swallowed up by the hole. Finally, the odd boy from the first issue takes mushrooms with his protector, and they descend into another hole. Ford's just on point in this comic, using visual cues to set up bold thematic parallels. This comic is all about not just messing with the unknown, but the unknown messing back, but more than the horror of the of "black ink" is the horror of human indifference. I'm eager to see how this one finishes up.

Frankie Comics Issue Three, by Rachel Dukes. More cat comics from Dukes, whose stripped down but expressive line is perfect for preserving the cute content that she's going for here. The comics about trying to give her cat a bath are especially amusing, as the first sees the cat miraculously leap her way out of a shower stall while the second sees her happily sinking into a tub. These strips are less about trying to draw a punchline about cats every time and more about the quotidian details that having a beloved pet engenders. These strange, annoying and delightful animals (they contain multitudes, they contradict themselves) are beings we spend a lot of time with, but Dukes has a special skill with regard to telling stories about her cat that are true to life and delightful but also quite realistic as to how animals behave. Soon she'll have a book full of these cartoons, and I predict that book will be quite successful.

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.