Minis: Asher Z. and Lillie Craw

Dickless, by Asher Z. Craw. Craw's thin and delicate line paired with dense cross-hatching and themes related to body horror and psychosexual themes have always reminded me of Julia Gfrörer's comics. Craw's comics are not quite as visceral in the same way and go in different directions. For example, Dickless creates a mythology about teeth as the source of one's power. Losing them may mean a personal weakness that causes one's teeth to reject you, or simply a loss of power by losing the tooth that brings about weakness. In any event, Craw segues from that starting point into a young man losing a tooth, and per the narrator's advice, consulting a professional. Amusingly, that professional is a mysterious shopkeeper (pointedly next door to a dentist's office) who goes through a series of steps that include grinding the tooth up. When the client agrees to ingest it, it inspires the shopkeeper to say "Not as dickless as I took you for", implying any number of things: the danger involved in the process (he sees the future as a result), his decreased masculinity as a result of losing the tooth, his bland appearance, etc. Craw opens the reader up to a craft (in every sense of the word) surrounding teeth, where the shopkeeper recalls an earlier time when she sold tools in exchange for a human head full of teeth. This is a comic filled with hints of deep, lost knowledge and an understanding of the order of things known only to a few. That sense of being influenced by forces beyond our understanding is a running theme in all of Craw's comics.

#Blessed, Part One, was written by Craw's wife Lillie and illustrated by Craw himself. This is a brutal satire of celebrity culture where almost all the characters are animals. The comic purports to be the biography of one Party Twink, a former model from The Glitterverse who mooches off his boyfriend/sugar daddy Money Bear. The first half of the comic is a series of illustrations with text on the opposite page that explain each character and their motivations, all of which are 100% awful. The second half is a comic that has the Craws break into the narrative in clarifying precisely how Money Bear's mansion was a recreation of Marie Antoinette's mansion. The comic is a hilarious study of how privilege warps and distorts one's needs in absurd ways, how narcissism is a black hole, and how codependence enables this kind of behavior.

Zebediah Part III, by Asher Z Craw. This can best be described as Craw's magical realist autobiography. This is a remarkably clever and heartbreaking comic, building on the first two issues in unexpected ways while maintaining the tone and theme of the story throughout. The first part followed a couple named Zebediah and Eula-Lee, taking time to fully develop their quirks and obvious connection as well as subtly introduce the magical realist portions of the story in talking animals and mysterious religious figures commenting on them. The second part introduces the idea that after their deaths, Zebediah and Eula-Lee continued to live on in the forms of Asher and Lillie, except that Asher was in the body of a woman. This also introduces the reader to Asher's own autobiographical account of feeling like a stranger in his own body and wanting to die before his transition. Along the way, they are helped by various animals who have been urged by supernatural forces to save them, and they show kindness to all sorts of animals, including a family of possums. The second issue ended with Zebediah and Eula-Lee starting to remember their past lives and fully inhabit the bodies of Asher and Lillie, all while having to deal with a looming evil.

The third and final chapter opens with the couple in bed, trying to cope with the strange, new world in which they were living. While their faith was deep and abiding, they didn't know to what extent they were being protected or pursued by the forces of good and evil. Most of the issue is a game of cat and mouse as they are told to leave Portland and go out to the woods by the forces of good, and the Devil uses his form as a swarm of mosquitoes to subtly push people into attacking, endangering or otherwise dislodging the pair. When they are finally confronted by the Devil, they rely on their faith but mostly in their unwillingness to harm the innocent souls of Asher and Lillie and thwart evil through their selflessness. Every element of the comic is precisely well-constructed in terms of both plot and its visual elements, and it's all anchored by the vivid characterization of its heroes. Zebediah works on a number of levels at once: a supernatural story, a story of faith, a metaphor for being trans and above all else, a love story.

Craw makes a number of interesting decisions regarding page composition, switching between a steady six-panel grid for most of the action and an open-page, dreamy layout when supernatural forces are arrayed. There's a lot of white space involved here when there are talking heads sequences, which makes sense considering that the characters are the focus of the story. When it switches to an action shot, Craw flips again and draws detailed, heavily hatched and cross-hatched backgrounds and dense underbrush. Pose is more important than movement in this comic, as the figures are actually on the stiff side on the page, but that's once again a function of the narrative. The characters are well-aligned with each other in terms of space and body language, but Craw prefers to linger on each image rather than zip the audience along to the next panel. Indeed, that sense of appreciating stillness and each heartbeat & story beat is an essential element of the comic, especially given its twists and forays into the supernatural. Hopefully, this comic will be collected by someone soon.

Foxing Reprints #5: Asher Z. Craw

Hungry Summer, by Asher Z. Craw (Sparkplug Comic Books). Continuing my reviews of Sparkplug Minis, the mini this week is Asher Z. Craw's Hungry Summer. Craw's quasi-autobiographical comic Zebediah, was an unpredictable, absorbing and ultimately humane fantasy account of how he came to understand his nature as a trans person. Hungry Summer covers some of the same territory with regard to gender and identity through magical realism, but this time the focus is entirely different. The main character of the comic is a bike-riding, shape-changing Baba Yaga, the Eastern European supernatural figure. Always an ambiguous figure, encounters with her would often result in both good and ill. At the start of this comic, a bunch of dudes heckle her as she rides her bike, which results in her spitting on the loudest and rudest detractor. That spit renders him entirely immaterial and forgotten, as a ghost who did not actually die. Ghosts are at least remembered, but in his case, it's as though he never existed. A woman named Yolanda who helps Baba Yaga is "gifted" with continuously coughing up expensive jewelry. When she later complains to Baba Yaga about this gift, she is gifted with coughing up extremely valuable and rare lizards instead..

The rude guy winds up in a boarding house for ghosts, led there by a man who turns into a woman when he walks into the house. Yolanda winds up back at Baba Yaga's house yet again, and this time the house (always on chicken legs) picks up and leaves with both of them in it. Meanwhile, the ghost, in search of Baba Yaga (ironically so that she could remove the very curse she laid on him, unbeknownst to him) is left behind. With a slightly ratty line that adds additional ambiguity to every panel, this is a story about visibility, agency and transformation. Here, the visibility and agency of the unnamed ghost are abruptly taken away from him after a lifetime of presumed privilege. Even as he's invited into a ghost house (in part to relieve him of his money), he is uninterested in actually reflecting on his own life or considering any kind of atonement; instead, he takes what he thinks is the easy way out at first opportunity. 

For Yolanda, her relationship with this trickster agent of change is far more complicated. Drawn to Baba Yaga, she is told to carry her bag to her hut. Yolanda is portrayed as a seeker of something, but Craw makes exactly what ambiguous. Baba Yaga's transformative gifts all have a price, as the wealth Yolanda receives from the jewelry is obviously outweighed by the toll it takes on her life, and the same is true for the lizards. I found this an interesting commentary on material possessions and wealth, especially since Yolanda never actually asked for a reward or money. Instead, the gift she receives at the end, when she finds Baba Yaga yet again, is the chance to run off with her, to permanently leave her life behind and transform it through the act of giving of her presence rather than asking for something. It's the gift of establishing one's own identity and creating a space of self-integrity, even in the face of total societal abandonment. Craw challenges the reader to think about gender, privilege and identity without making the importance of these ideas explicit. Indeed, the fabulist nature of Craw's storytelling actively deflects any sort of polemical quality his comics have without losing any of their thematic bite.