2dcloud: Austin English's Gulag Casual

Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. This column closes out the 2dcloud feature.

Austin English is truly a singular cartoonist. While he favors a dense, immersive style that doesn't use negative space in the panels themselves, his style of drawing and his use of color forces the reader to reconsider the rulebook regarding gesture, character design and the ways in which bodies interact in space. To describe his drawings as crude misses the point entirely, because his work isn't a failed attempt at drawing something "normal" or a compensating by overdrawing with a lot of lines for a drawing that didn't look right. Instead, we're seeing shapes and forms entirely from the artist's imagination, and the effect evokes an emotional reaction on page after page, even if the source of that emotion can't be adequately explained. In that respect, English has more in common with painters like Pablo Picasso (warped figures depicting simultaneity of motion and emotions laid bare) or Mark Rothko (with a calculated desire to make color fields evoke certain emotional reactions) than any cartoonist I can think of, with the possible exception of Gary Panter. While Panter's ability as a draftsman is more traditionally refined than English's approach, Panter also clearly approaches his work uninterested in conventional rules and draws to please himself above all else.

The irony of his new collection, Gulag Casual, is that it was clearly pleasurable to draw and mold for English, while at the same time so many of the stories are about being made to feel uncomfortable, even in spaces one once thought were safe. English's comics make the familiar seem strange, the friendly seem threatening and upset notions of stability and sometimes even consensus reality. It's very much a series of stories set in a city, with all of the anxiety that living in a city can bring. Throughout the book, there are unwelcome door-crashers and intruders, people listening in on private conversations and then judging others for the content of their speech, and the particularly unpredictable threat of people who have clearly lost their minds. English taps into the kind of paranoia that someone on drugs might feel, that things are not only no longer safe and familiar, but that the world is starting to actively cave in on you or conspire against you. Everything looks and feels strange as a result.

Consider "A New York Story". This is English's most recent story and the most beautifully drawn, even if the images are warped and odd. Indeed, the image of one character bent over on the sidewalk as he recovers from a verbal thrashing is both funny and disquieting. The story follows someone talking about a person named Melo and then being confronted about what he said by a pair of perfect strangers on the street. That kind of public confrontation in a tight city space is hellish to think about, which is why English zeroes in on that feeling and magnifies it.

"The Disgusting Room", on the other hand, sees English burst free from all restraints as an artist, using paint, fabric, marker, pencil and construction paper to create a narrative of sorts about an expanding series of relationships. This is all about disturbing equilibrium as well as the concept of alienation in tight spaces. The main character seeks to be "good" as she takes on more and more responsibility, only to snap and abandon all of her responsibilities and relationships. It's also a story about mental illness (a running through-line in the book) and its "othering" qualities, both for those who are ill as well as those who are their caretakers.

"My Friend Perry" is all about violations of personal and emotional space as well as the ways in which intimate bonds can be shattered. In it, the main character seeks comfort from his strange and lazy best friend, only to learn that his sister (whom he lives with) has been traumatized by someone breaking into their apartment. This story has English's most expressive figurework, even if his figures resemble lumps and blobs. Despite that visual approach, English draws out fear, anger, affection, paranoia and dread through the ways his figures interact in space as well as his idiosyncratic use of color. "Here I Am" takes that idea of home invasion a step further, as a stranger initially welcomed by a family becomes deranged and threatening, even as English implies that the stranger is imaginary, a metaphor for guilt. Finally, "Freddy's Dead" takes all of that paranoia and strangeness and ratchets them up, as a pair of friends are separated and both wind up hanging around dangerous, unpleasant people they're not sure how to ditch.

The last two stories were done in pencil and hinted, along with the first story, of English starting to slowly refine and gain better control over his style. While "The Disgusting Room" throws the entire visual kitchen sink at the reader with no respite, English starts to focus more on bulbous, warped facial features in his later stories, and there's a strong emotional resonance to them as a result. "A New York Story" also uses negative space in the form of white space around a panel or two on a page, which allowed the story to breathe and encouraged reader identification while still heightening tension. The awkwardness, tenderness, intimacy and tension of human interaction in cramped environments is what English does best, and his evolving approach is only heightening those tendencies.

Sequart Reprints: Windy Corner 2

The following article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007. Austin is now the publisher of Domino Books. Please consider buying one of the many excellent works he's released, especially since he's losing his base of operations (the legendary Cartoon House). Get the first five Domino books for just 26 bucks, with free shipping. All of them are quite good and unlike most comics you've ever seen.
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My favorite kinds of publications about comics, as I have noted in this series, are those that reflect the idiosyncrasies and passions of its editors. Windy Corner Magazine (WCM) is an exemplar of such a publication. I am particularly drawn to WCM because I share some of editor Austin English's more eccentric tastes, and he does little to buffer or prepare the average reader for them. It's a tact that can be a little demanding on a reader not familiar with English's approach to comics and criticism. The focus of WCM is artists writing about and talking to other artists, an approach that makes sense given English's status as an artist and critic.

I like the give-and-take collaborative feel of WCM. Lis Timpone designed a clever table of contents. Molly Goldstrom opened up the magazine with an odd two-page strip where a man prattling on about his love of bricks fails to notice his companion turn into a tree. Juliacks contributed the back cover, a typically dense collage of image, tone and text with a certain wistful quality.

English continues his autobiographical series of comics with a couple of evocative entries. The emphasis of these stories is on his earliest childhood memories, and I love the way he homes in on tactile sensations from memory, like the feel of the chair he sat in, the distress he felt upon hearing the sound and flash of a star "explode", and the soothing sound of the planetarium show's narrator. In "Movie", his memory is as much about the way he interacted with his parents before and after a movie he saw as the movie itself. The former story looks like it was done in colored pencil, and the decorative quality of the colors he uses to balance out his panels is striking. It balances the panels and actually draws the eye in, something lacking in the second story. That sort of pleasantly ramshackle design quality of his works nicely in his second "Life of Francis" episode, which is almost expressionistic in the way it depicts feeling and emotion. Fiona Logusch's "Entangled Relationships" reminds me a bit of Jules Feiffer's work, both in terms of the way she moves her characters around and the rawness of the emotions she portrays.

The feature article on children's book illustrator Lois Lenski was positively inspiring. English is unusual for a critic in that he seems to have an intuitive sense in how to discuss the formal qualities of a work in such a way as to bring it alive for the reader. I knew nothing about Lenski's work going into this article, and English probably would have been well-served to have at least some sort of introduction to her work. That said, I appreciate his enthusiasm about the subject and the way he quickly immerses the reader in the formal and aesthetic qualities of Lenski's art.

The interview in this issue was one of the most enlightening I've ever read with a cartoonist. John Hankiewicz, creator of enigmatic & beautiful comics in minicomics and the collection Asthma, was interviewed by cartoonist Onsmith. Hankiewicz reveals much about his working process, the way he approaches doing comics, why he loves printmaking, the specifics of certain stories and his general aesthetic outlook. Onsmith uses his deep knowledge and appreciation of Hankiewicz's work to take the conversation to some interesting places, but he always allows Hankiewicz room to expand on his thoughts.

The standout feature in an issue filled with great features is Dylan Williams's strip about Alex Toth. It's a series of stand-alone images done in what looks like colored chalk, each accompanied by a caption loosely associated with (almost interpreting) the text. It's a wistful piece dedicated to Toth and the intermittent correspondence that Williams had with him over the years. It's also about relationships and friendships and the way Williams approached them and how his feelings about them changed. It ends with a statement of purpose that connects his feelings about being an artist, about Toth, about comics and about long-distance friendships. I can only imagine this piece running in a magazine like Windy Corner , and that's why Austin English's indulgence in his aesthetic passions winds up as a gift to readers.

Sequart Reprints: Windy Corner 1

This review was originally published in 2007 for sequart.com
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Reading Windy Corner Magazine #1 was a special pleasure, because I've always found Austin English's taste to be impeccable as a critic and now as an editor. It was a bonus to see so much of his new work as an artist as well. What makes this publication distinctive is its focus on artists and their experiences as artists--how they feel about drawing as much as technical or biographical information. To that end, English has an interview with Andrice Arp, Steve Lafler writes about an anecdote from his art school days, Paula Salemme contributes a few pages from her sketchbook and Richard Hahn has a comic about his thoughts on Saul Steinberg.

I often speak of artists who discuss the pleasurable sensation of drawing, and English is a prime example of this. His draftsmanship has always been primitive, even childlike, but he makes this style work for him with sophisticated composition and a huge bag of storytelling tricks. He has two different storylines in this issue: "Life of Francis", about a girl growing up in the midwest, and "My Earliest Memory Comics", which are self-explanatory. The two different stories feel connected thematically, as Francis grows up poor but becomes an artist. Along the way, she discovers her father's infidelity to her mother, an event fraught with profound significance. We later see him out of the picture as we delve into another memory, and that's what this multipart story is: a series of memories, presented as vignettes. There's one telling page where Francis is drawing and telling her infant brother about the experience. "It's so hard to draw but also so much fun. I can't draw the way I want...but I like the way it feels, the way my arm feels". Drawing as a sensual experience is exactly what English is all about, and when someone asks to buy one of Francis' drawings, we see a twinkle in her eye that suggests a lifetime of balancing the pleasure of drawing with its mercenary and popular aspects.

This story directly segues into English's memory stories, where we see him tagging along with his mother (an artist) at a gallery opening. It's not made explicit, but it's strongly implied that Francis was in fact his mother (or at least the inspiration for same), and Austin is seeing the world of art through her eyes now. English is especially dynamic in telling his story here, with breathless stream-of-consciousness narration applied to each individual panel, forcing the reader through his memories as fast as one can speed through the word balloon. The narration is not exactly done the way a child would describe it; instead, English is clearly trying to reach back to that memory and describe it as an adult, but filtered through the emotions he remembers of that event.

His second memory story, "North Beach", sees him spending time with his father. It's clear that their relationship is very different than with Austin and his mother. There's obviously still a great deal of affection but perhaps not the same kind of closeness, and his memory of going to Chinese New Year with his father ("he knew what a little kid would like he knew this was something I would like") was simultaneously delightful and tinged with danger.

The last story, "Red Balloon", was the sort of small event that can stick in a child's memory for a long time--just a little anecdote about seeing a film in a library with his mother that for some reason lingered on. It's not surprising to see English plunder his memory for materials in these stories, because he always seems obsessed with connecting the emotions one feels as a child with how one engages the world as an adult. It's a theme that rang true in Christina and Charles and certainly is at play here. This is not to say that his comics are simplistic or juvenile--quite the contrary, there's an enormous complexity to his work, as English understands that actually capturing these emotions and experiences is extremely difficult. There's a disconnect between experiencing an event, having a memory of that event, and creating a narrative related to that event--they are all discrete activities that are often conflated as one and the same thing. English seems to understand this and uses a strategy that makes each of these three components as transparent as possible for both himself and the reader. This can be somewhat disconcerting for those who aren't used to seeing the mechanics of autobiographical storytelling laid bare, but the result is a story that is rich with depth and meaning.

The sketchbook paintings of New York's Lower East Side fit smoothly with English's comics. The vivid, almost garish colors of the buildings are almost characters unto themselves. English is generous in the full-color images he reproduces for the Arp interview. As noted earlier, the questions are very much of the sort an artist might wonder about another artist: does she see writing and drawing as the same thing? Is drawing pleasurable? Can you recall your first memory of drawing? How do you modify your drawings to make it understandable for an audience? What's your drawing set-up like, and how much do you draw in a day? What is the benefit of spending time with other artists? English drew out Arp nicely, and the interview was clearly interesting to him because her approach was very different from his. This is where English's status as artist/critic comes into play: though he has a specific approach to his art, he's fascinated by how and why others work. The combination of his understanding the artistic process with a genuine intellectual curiousity is why I've always been interested in both his art and critiques.

Anyone who's ever read any of Steve Lafler's prose knows that he's hilarious. His story of his Advanced Drawing professor in art school torturing the students with seemingly-impossible assignments was a nice counterpoint to the more sober entries in the book. At the same time, Lafler was trying to prove a point about learning not just how to draw but how to see the world in a different way. It was as critically relevant as anything else in this issue, just done from Lafler's off-beat perspective. I hope that Lafler will continue to contribute to Windy Corner, especially now that he's moved to Mexico.

Finally, Richard Hahn (an enormously underrated artist) contributed a startling comics essay of sorts. It's much looser than his normally tight, angular work, giving the sometimes=mysterious images room to breathe and play with each other. The comic seemed to be both a further continuation of the empty city-scapes Hahn is known for exploring along with a commentary on Saul Steinberg's New Yorker cartoons.
Sparkplug Comic Books fills an interesting niche in the world of comics. The work that Dylan Williams publishes is hard to reduce down to a particular type or genre, yet at the same time as a whole is very different from any other publishing concern. It makes sense that he's publishing a comics magazine that's dedicated to featuring artists who get overlooked and discussing ideas not explored in other publications. Each new book by Sparkplug reveals a comic that you didn't know that you needed to read until someone handed it to you. Williams has an ambitious 2007 publishing schedule, which is only great news for the world of comics.

Sequart Reprints: Project Romantic

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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Design is growing to become increasingly important for comics as they continue to move into the bookstore market. In addition to having great stories, comics have to come in an attractive package. My favorite designer in comics is Chris Pitzer, the publisher behind AdHouse Books. The comics he publishes and edits are, without exception, absolutely gorgeous. I hesitate to call them “art objects” because while attractive, the covers and layouts are in service to the work. What I like best about Pitzer's eye is his understanding of simplicity in design. He has the spare eye of someone like an engineer, trying to build something that brings out the most in the form and function of a work. That lack of fussiness and business allows the reader to relax into the work and gives each artist a chance to have their work read on their terms.

Nowhere is that made clearer than in the three anthologies that Pitzer edited for AdHouse. The first, Project: Telstar, was printed in a sort of metallic blue ink and had science-fiction themes. The second, Project: Superior, was about superheroes. Project: Romantic takes on the romance genre with a number of different twists. In general, much of the work that Pitzer publishes falls into the category of “new mainstream.” Narrative takes precedence over thematic concerns, and that narrative is fairly straightforward. A lot of the comics that Pitzer has published have been “indy” takes on genre subjects, meaning that the usual narrative concerns have been subverted for other goals. That was especially true in the first two “project” anthologies, both of which were quite pleasant to look at and read but didn't linger for very long in one's memory. Part of that I think was due to the limitations of the sci-fi and superhero genres. I don't think either genre is elastic enough to work when stretched too far from their original constraints, especially when the nuts and bolts of superheroes or sci-fi are ignored in favor of other concerns.

This is why Project: Romantic is such a success, because of the elasticity of the romance genre. In fact, the artists in the book take the somewhat vague notion of what a “romance” story is and many of them attach genre trappings to them. My favorite submission by far was that of Joel Priddy's. He's published far too few comics since his stunningly beautiful debut Pulpatoon Pilgrimage a few years ago, but he does contribute a series of stories called “Sweetie 'n Me”. He takes standard romance tropes like couples talking alike, jealousy over past lovers and special birthday dinners and attaches them to a couple who happen to be mad scientists. Priddy makes great use of color for these little 3-4 page vignettes, which are perfectly designed and executed. I could read a book full of these strips and not tire of them.

Another reason why this book is so successful is that Pitzer took great pains to use artists with as many different styles as possible. From Scott Morse's animation-inspired expressionism to Austin English's primitivism, from Junko Mizuno's manga stylings to the Ditko-inspired strip by Adam McGovern & Paolo Leandri , there's something in here to appeal to every taste. As a result, not every strip will be equally effective for every reader, but I found them all to at least be pleasant. One of the more clever stories is “When I Was A Slut”, by emerging talent Hope Larson. It's an intricately constructed story about a young woman hoping that one of her online contacts will truly desire her, and the unusual twists and turns that occur as a result. T Edward Bak's “Trouble” is another slice-of-life story, this time about a pair of teenage girls. One is clearly in love with the other, who is thinking of leaving town with a sleazy guy. The dialogue is pitch-perfect and the garishness of the colors is a nice match for the melodrama of the situation.

The best adventure-related story is “Sewer Girls”, by Kaz Strzepek. Strzepek's stuff reminds me a bit of Brian Ralph's in terms of its content, feel, and non-ironic treatment of its subject matter. This story is about a post-apocalyptic world where all of the woman have turned into mutants and the remaining men are slowly going insane. When one boy finds one normal girl and they go on a date, it seems like a happy ending for everyone. It wound up being a grisly ending instead, in a grimly hilarious fashion. Another entertaining story about love gone wrong is “Hello, Eddie” by Roger Petersen. It's about a young woman who becomes obsessed with the Chicago Cubs' first baseman who becomes heartbroken when he's traded to the Phillies. She winds up shooting him in his hotel room when the Phillies come to down, but not for the reason you might think. Petersen's clear-line character design is enormously appealing, and his use of color was quite clever: it was Cubs' blue when the player was in Chicago, and Phillies' red when he was traded. It didn't hurt that the bright red perfectly matched the anger of the woman, the blood on the player's chest when he's shot, etc. It's a perfect little confection of a story, precisely the sort of story that's such a pleasure to discover in an anthology.

 There are four humorous stories worth mentioning. MK Reed's “Mrs Jeremy Dellorso” is a ridiculous story about a woman whose boyfriend literally turns into a bear one day. After he mauls everyone the night he meets her parents, she absurdly declares “Oh Jeremy, I can't stay mad at you.” What I love about this strip is that it takes the cliches of wedding stories and changes just one element to make it hilarious. Evan Larson's “Cupid's Day Off” is exactly what it sounds like. Except that it's not really about Cupid (he mostly gets drunk off-panel), but rather his assistant, who goes crazy with his bow and arrow. Suddenly, all sorts of crazy matchups are made: a dog & a cat, a man and a tree, another man and his sandwich, an alien & a football, and a mummy & a leprechaun are all immediately seized by lust. Best of all was Batman and a roll of toilet paper. When Cupid catches up with her and is about to fire her, she fires on him and the inevitable happens—they wind up married in the next panel, with all of the couples she helped get together in attendance. “Even Monkeys Know About Love After A Hundred Years”, by Randall Christopher, is essentially an illustrated stand-up routine about love that's a series of funny non-sequiturs. A typical line is “And when you're in love does not the sun shine brighter? Does not music sound so much sweeter? Does not Pantera start to sound like John Mayer? And John Mayer like Burt Bacharach? And if you're stupid enough to put on Burt Bacharach will you not find yourself wearing a silk robe, lying prostrate, and weeping before a gilded altar of Cupid?” Finally, Josh Cotter's comic timing was superb in four one-page strips about dating in the animal kingdom. The best is a hare and a tortoise. The hare talks about what a great time she had on their date and wondered if they could do it again sometime. After three silent panels, the tortoise finally says “I feel like maybe we're moving too fast.”

Project: Romantic doesn't push the envelope of comics and isn't in any way cutting edge. There's not much profundity to be found in these stories, and in fact many of the stories that go in that direction fall flat. The anthology is just pure entertainment, coming at the reader in a dizzying variety of styles & approaches, and edited by a designer with a great eye. Most of the entries leave the reader wanting more instead of saying “Is that it?”, which to me is the mark of a good anthology. For a book that's so much fun, there was a lot of substance here instead of mere style, which is my difficulty with anthologies like Flight. I attribute this to Pitzer, who seemed to work hard to have a lot of stories that had the strong hand of a writer rather than just a lot of visual pyrotechnics.

TCJ Post #15: Comics Youth

Rob reviews the Blaise Larmee-edited comics zine COMICS YOUTH #1 over at The Comics Journal.

Memory and Form: Windy Corner Magazine #3

Rob reviews the latest issue of Austin English's comics/criticism project, WINDY CORNER MAGAZINE #3 (Sparkplug Comic Books).


What I like best about Austin English's ongoing WINDY CORNER MAGAZINE is that it seeks to clarify the artist's relationship with memory and the narrative that we form from our memories, and how this is different from nostalgia. That theme was particularly evident in this issue, given features like Frank Santoro writing about Gipi's GARAGE BAND, memoirist Vanessa Davis interviewing memoirist Carol Tyler, as was as English's own explorations of his past. Of course, there's a wonderful quirkiness to this magazine that sets it apart from other comics-related publications. That quirkiness is not a pose, but rather an expression of the many hats English wears. He's a cartoonist whose style continues to evolve from issue to issue. He's an editor managing submissions, but also a curator of sorts who looks to add just the right piece to create the desired aesthetic effect. He's a critic who seeks to understand and illuminate what art means to him. Above all else, the mission of WINDY CORNER is to get artists thinking about other works of art and how it affects them, as well as the processes of other artists.


English seems to be shifting his style from crude figurework to a blockier style defined by color patterns more than line. A lot of the art in this issue leaned heavily on decorative touches as opposed to a more stripped-down narrative. That was certainly true of the introductory illustrations by Lilli Carre' and the comics-as-poetry inspired table of contents by Molly O'Connell. Carre's use of tiny blasts of color on a white page, culminating in a single figure talking on the phone with her hair on fire, created the sense of a mind gone haywire. O'Connell worked in purple ink, using the most conservative line in the entire issue for her figures that wrapped around the contents. In English's own "Life Of Francis" series, that heavy use of blocky/blobby images dominates this entry, giving a certain sense of frightening solidity to Francis now becoming an adult and living on her own. I don't think English is doing any favors to this slow-moving story by serializing it; it would likely be a more interesting reading experience taken in one shot.

On the other hand, his ongoing exploration of his earliest memories proved to be a highlight. Done in a very loose line and filled in with crayon, "Drawing" really got at the heart of his struggle with drawing, wishing that he could be like one of his friends, whose "hands always knew which line to draw next". "Bernal Heights" is another exploration of living with his family as a child, remembering odd things about the next-door neighbors as only a child might. Of particular interest was "In The Museum", a black & white piece that employed that blocky/blobby style for a story about a father's recollection of a day out with his daughter. This is an emotionally intense story, one where he's trying to figure how to communicate with her and feels constant frustration. I've always liked the direct way English deals with emotion, and the way he intermingles ambivalence and affection with his characters.

The other comics in this issue varied wildly in approach. Sakura Maku's "You Turn My Lights Into Rays" is an intense assault of color, mixed media and calligraphic effect. The way that Maku slips between painting and cartooning and song is dizzying yet exhilarating, reminiscent a bit of Souther Salazar's work. Jason Miles' interpretation of a letter received by Windy Corner uses tiny panels, blotchy art and splotchy colors in an effort to get across the sense of cartoon fellowship the letter-writer felt with English. Both comics are meant to be looked at as much as read, a reflection of the more painterly nature of the magazine. Indeed, the back cover is a painting by Joseph Hart, an assembled piece with different color and textural elements juxtaposed against each other in a way that's hard to take one's eye off of it.

As much as I'm interested in WINDY CORNER's comics, it's the analysis and interviews that engaged me the most. English once again used his intuitive, personal critical style to look at the work of children's book illustrator Garth Williams. This is the most personal essay I've read to date from English, noting that Williams' drawings had enormous power despite their simplicity. Not only in terms of what looking at them meant to him, but in terms of possibilities in terms of making marks. He singles out Williams as the biggest earliest influenced he had in becoming an artist and loving art.

Deceptive simplicity was a running theme throughout the issue's analyses, as Frank Santoro turned his brand of from-the-hip commentary on the pauses and rests of Gipi's GARAGE BAND. Santoro is very much a critic/reader who demands that Something Happen in a narrative framework, yet he found much to love in a story that was entirely driven by character beats both overt and subtle. In particular, he talked about "the synthesis of drawing, color, narrative and symbolism" and how each element informed the other in turn. The color of the skies reflected emotion and possibility, while the elements drawn in each panel reflected the theme of family, both biological and acquired. I loved the way Santoro went chapter by chapter and not only broke down what he saw, but related how they affected him emotionally.

That running theme of how a work affected an artist echoed through Vanessa Davis' interview with Carol Tyler. Davis' free-flowing approach to creating memoir comics owes much to Tyler, and it's clear that the interview touched on a number of Davis' own concerns as an artist: the appearance of productivity, the use of a painterly (as opposed to clear-line) style in comics, the responsibility of the artist when writing about others, and whether or not autobio in general is a worthwhile pursuit. There's an intimacy to this interview that made it feel as more like an intriguing conversation that interested readers would want to eavesdrop in on than a formal discussion. At the same time, Davis managed to zero in on the heart of Tyler's work in terms of both art and artist that I hadn't seen in other interviews. The only problem I have with the interviews in WINDY CORNER is that they seem too short. While the their airm is not a career-spanning blow-by-blow, I wish I could hear a bit more of these conversations.

Even the sloppier elements of WINDY CORNER (smudges, smears, spelling errors, odd fonts, a lack of page numbers) are somehow endearing and sum up what English is all about. Translating what he sees in his mind onto the page has obviously been a career-long struggle for him, yet he continues to push forward and find ways around this problem through sheer effort and love of the form. He's sort of a younger version of Art Spiegelman in that respect--an artist with a deep love and understanding of the history of comics whose brain and eye are far more developed than his hands. Despite that difficulty, both artists soldier on. English may not be at a juncture in comics history when he can dazzle with formal inventions (ala BREAKDOWNS), but he does somehow manage to be two steps ahead of other observers when it comes to sniffing out new talent and movements in comics. English looks to the past like Spiegelman, but seeks out a different set of inspirations--and from sources even more unusual. Poetry, painting and certain kinds of film provide a framework for English's goals as much as comics do, and the observer can see the presence of each discipline start to slowly shape his work. English has a long way to go before he reaches his mature stage as an artist, but his curiosity and determination to push himself and comics in general mark him as an artist to follow.

A Trip To Forbidden Planet, NYC

Wherein a visit to the fabulous minicomics aisle of one of New York's best comics shops is described and said minicomics purchased are discussed.



During my last trip to Manhattan, I wanted to be sure to drop by Forbidden Planet because I knew that Austin English was ordering for and stocking their minicomics aisle. English is an interesting cartoonist, critic and editor; his WINDY CORNER MAGAZINE combines all three impulses in a quirky, personal package. As a critic, he's introduced me to a number of artists that would later become favorites of mine (Juliacks and Lilli Carre', to name two). As such, I was curious to see what he might recommend for me to read from FP's huge selection. The aisle is organized by title and would take at least a solid hour to go through from top to bottom as a browser.



Dropping by on a busy Saturday afternoon (the already-cramped store was practically shoulder-to-shoulder in some spots), I was lucky enough to spot Austin right away. He was gracious enough to take the time to be my personal minicomics shopper: if he recommended it, I was buying it. There were some things that he recommended that I already had (like an old Megan Kelso mini or various issues of PAPERCUTTER), but I wound up with a nice stack of comics mostly by cartoonists I had never heard of. What follows is a set of brief impressions of the comics that Austin suggested for me.



RATTLETRAP #1 and #2, by Jerry Smith. This was one of my favorite discoveries of this batch. Smith crams dozens of panels on a page with minimalist artwork (barely even stick figures for most of it) as he relates mostly funny stories from his everyday life. Once you adjust to the rhythms of this comic, it becomes almost hypnotizing: one wants to read more and more. These comics' biggest highlights come when Smith and his wife talk to, tease and/or yell at each other. It's amazing how much affection one feels on the page for these characters despite their ultra-simplified depiction.



Romero Burruel's EMPTY #3, by John Frizzelle. This is a fascinatingly scratchy will-to-power of a comic. The main character is a down-and-out artist struggling to find reasons to keep going and rediscover discipline and passion regarding his art. After an initial dream, the comic shares his internal monologue on his tour through his distractions and excuses until he stands at a point where he's out of time and has to make a decision on what he's really all about. What I thought was interesting was his struggle with the conflation of being an artist with being bourgeois. Were the two inseparable? He eventually rejects the only idea of authenticity as living under a bridge, completely divorced from consumer culture, and comes to an uneasy internal truce. I'm curious if the other issues all deal with the same ideas, or if it's something different every time. I quite liked the way Frizzelle shifted between his scratchy art for his characters and the paintings the character created.



ASBESTOS WICK, by Eamon Espey. The cartoonist behind WORMDYE was one of my favorite discoveries last year. This mini is a collection of nightmarish, hallucinatory yet ultimately funny images depicting worship, dismemberment, ritual sex, myths, and rollicking high adventure. There's not a narrative, per se, but there is a disturbing internal logic that draws the eye to slowly peruse every corner of every page for all of the weird details. I'd recommend reading WORMDYE--and thoroughly absorbing its less straightforward sections--before reading this comic.



TALES OF BLARG #9, by Janelle Hessig. This is a jam-packed, old-school, rock'n'roll sort of zine. Hessig and friends expound hilariously on sex (best is "Ugly People I Wanna Do It To"), drugs, exhibitionism, weird desires, weird people they've met, people from bands they like, hipsters, crusties and much more about the world that surrounds them in Berkeley. It's a very personal zine that still seeks to entertain and/or disgust on every page--the perfect antidote to the more cloying personal zines of people like Nicole Georges. It's rare to read a zine that reveals so many embarrassing personal details that doesn't feel like tedious navel-gazing or whining. Hessig is someone who laughs at the world no matter the situation, and that's how things play out in her comics.



RAMBLE ON!, by Calvin Wong. This is another entry in the new school of alt-fantasy/gamer comics that includes stuff like DUNGEON, Alex Robinson's delightful LOWER REGIONS comic, Jesse Reklaw's BLUEFUZZ, the ELFWORLD anthology, etc. The hallmark of that school is a genuine affection for fantasy tropes and narratives, a good-faith effort at establishing same, and the sort of mockery for this genre that can only come from an insider. RAMBLE ON! succeeds on all three fronts, and throws in video-game tropes as well. The bard-like protagonist seeks membership in a band, has a guitar battle with an Ent that resembles Guitar Hero as much as anything else, and finally gains entrance. The backup story, about the quotidian affairs of an evil sorceror, was even funnier. Wong's art works because he's so deft at character design & interaction, as well as panel-to-panel transitions. The scratchy nature of his line adds some nice texture to these pages--not unlike illustrations from an old Monster Manual.



ESCHEW #1, by Robert Sergel. Simplicity is the key to this comic's success. Sergel uses a stark, bold style that reminds me a bit of John Hankiewicz's line, minus the cross-hatching. Sergel uses a clear, thin line in all of his work, and gives it depth in some strips by contrasting it with a lot of blacks and lightness in others by removing blacks altogether. The stories are funny vignettes that appear to be autobiographical, with "Thirteen Bad Experiences Involving Water" being the centerpiece of the issue. There's a dry sense of humor in each strip as Sergel never forces a punchline or ever uses a funny drawing; indeed, the source info for the gags is often in the title of the strip. There's nothing revolutionary about this comic, but it is a fine read by an artist who has very quickly found his voice.



NIGHT BUSINESS #2, by Benjamin Marra. Austin mentioned that Sammy Harkham told him how much he liked this one. Reading this book felt like someone had dropped a slapped-off comic from the black & white explosion of the 80s in my lap, and it's either a brilliantly deadpan parody of 80's erotic thriller cliches or an unabashedly gleeful celebration of same. Honestly, I don't want to know. It is pretty funny, in a crudely-executed way, but isn't the sort of joke I'd care to hear again and again.



PANPIPES #3, by Jesse McManus. This was my "what the hell is this" experience of this batch, not having read McManus's stuff before. These are weird fairy tales of sorts featuring goblins, odd children, anthropomorphic animals and other such creatures engaging in all sorts of violent shenanigans. This is a fascinating-looking series of drawings of characters in constant motion, with the slight sheen of someone who seems as though they're at home with animation as well as comics. There's a slickness to the weirdness, a clean line used for dirty purposes, not unlike a Kevin Scalzo. I found my eye falling off the page a bit because it was so slick, but it was sure fun to look at.


IN THE TALL GRASS #3, by Tessa Brunton. Brunton writes and draws some sharply funny autobio stories, told somewhere inbetween the style of Vanessa Davis and Julia Wertz. There's a great page called "Comix Fer Yer Wall" that pleasingly stacks a bunch of short strips of varying length (ranging between 2 and 8 panels), with subjects ranging from a crackhead's persistent phone calls to a memory of her "telepathic" babysitter to her dog's to-do list. Brunton uses shifting vantage points to her advantage: strips about dating, embarrassing anecdotes from her past, the perils of city life and what it's like to be a young person with no particular attachments. Brunton uses a scratchy style that focuses on her very expressive faces--eyes and mouths in particular.

CROOKED TEETH #2, by Nate Doyle. This is a mish-mash of brief stories, drawings, ramblings and other ephemera by an artist with a great deal of potential. Doyle's line is a bit rough and ramshackle at times, but the spontaneity of his line leaps off the page. A few things in particular stand out: the way he balances character against background (especially panoramic shots); the way he spots blacks to manipulate a story's tone; and the way he draws gesture, body language & character interaction. It's interesting to look at his work now, but I think it will be downright exciting to see it five years from now. Doyle is a fellow employee of Forbidden Planet, by the way.


WARMER, by Aidan Koch. Koch's smudgy style brings an almost uncomfortable intimacy and immediacy to the page. There's a deliberate awkwardness to the way she juxtaposes word and image that forces the reader to slow down and consider each image and the way they unfold over time. Koch's art is emotionally evocative as well; in this case, expressing exasperation and claustrophobia.

EGO, by Dunja Jankovic. Jankovic's star has risen rather quickly in the world of alt-comics, with a book just published by Sparkplug. She brings a fine artist's eye to her work, varying her visual approach from panel to panel: sometimes a stick-figure sketch, sometimes a cartoonish figure, and sometimes figures with naturalistic musculature. In "Addiction", that musculature proves to be an important part of the story as we meet a woman who hoards words and hauls them around; eventually the panel structure becomes part of the story as she "wins" a game of tic-tac-toe. "Plastic Bags" is even more striking, as it deals with a nightmarish scenario where a woman's own paranoia threatens to do her in. Jankovic dips slightly into Immersive Comics territory in terms of the way her art needs to be read, but not quite to the same degree given that text is still very separate from story. Anyone one looks at this mini, there's no question that Jankovic is a great cartoonist.

Miscellaneous Mini-Comic Round-Up

Rob reviews a number of minicomics that are hard to classify. Included arebcomics by Lydia Conklin, Shawn Cheng, Molly Lawless, Ed Piskor, Austin English, Matt Wiegle, Falynn Koch, JB, Renee French, and Jonas Madden-Connor.


FLYING MACHINE and MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN, by Lydia Conklin). Every once in a while, I receive a submission for review by an artist I've never heard of that stops me in my tracks. Lydia Conklin's minicomics fall into that category. The visual approach is simultaneously crude (reminiscent of David Heatley in many respects) and sophisticated as she depicts the lives and dreams of children. MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN is a matter-of-fact account of a young girl named Nanette who hates everyone but her dog, whom she declares must marry her. She reasons that this must be done in the middle of the ocean, where she finds a number of other people who are also married to their dogs. There's a flatness of affect to this story that contrasts with the nature of the play/fantasy that is revealed to the reader. As Lynda Barry notes, play is a serious thing for children and so are fantasies. Even as Nanette makes faces and rolls around with her dog, her fantasy of falling in love with her dog is told in a straightforward, unironic manner.

MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN is a similarly straightforward story, though this time it seems to be at least somewhat autobiographical. It's an unromanticized account of how children interact with each other in pursuit of play. Young Lydia and her friend Elisabeth hit on a plan to create a "flying machine" but have to cajole tiny Brianna to be their guinea pig. She accedes, but only if the other girls refer to her as Purple Star Rainbow. Tension is added when Brianna's bully older sister, Erica, has to be kept out of the loop. The "machine" is a box lifted up by jump ropes, and naturally the bottom of the box falls out when she's lifted up. The epilogue, detailing Erica's death eight years later, is an interesting coda that shows how this incident tapped into Lydia's sense of guilt. She knew what she was doing was somehow "wrong", yet felt compelled to do it.

Conklin uses the crudeness of her figure drawing as a strength in these stories. Her figures are expressive, especially in the way she draws eyes and mouths, and she has a real understanding of gesture and body language. That comes from her background as a painter, I would guess, but her paintings I've seen by her have always had a narrative element. Technically speaking, the one distracting element of her primitive style is her lettering and word balloon placement. However, she works big (no more than two panels on a page) and gives her characters a lot of space to breathe in her panels. I noted a similarity to David Heatley's work, but I think perhaps Lauren Weinstein is a more apt comparison. They share similar sensibilities, backgrounds and even subject matter. I'll be quite interested to see how she develops as a cartoonist.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN, by Shawn Cheng. In many ways, Cheng is the most visually dazzling member of the Partyka comics collective, and this comic is a perfect display of his formal pyrotechnics. The story is simple: a traveler finds a giant beast/man lying covered in rocks and takes steps to try and help him, first with water, then with raw meat. The final punchline is a great one, revealed only when Cheng pulls back and lets us see a bit more of the bigger picture. It's a clever gag, but what makes this such an appealing comic is the way Cheng constructs it as much as draws it. The swaths of color he uses on the salmon-colored construction paper are bold and distinctive, especially the pale white of the wind and the beast and the burnt orange used to decorate the title character and his speed lines. There's an almost visceral quality to Cheng's coloring technique. This is an older comic (2004), and while it's not as meticulously drawn as his later comics, one can see him already taking a number of formal risks. The story he collaborated on with Sara Edward-Corbett that was reprinted in BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2008 is a step in the right direction of getting him the wider recognition that he deserves.

OCHRE ELLIPSE #1 and #2, by Jonas Madden-Connor. Issue two of this series was nominated for an Ignatz and just won the Isotope award, and both honors are well-deserved. That said, both of these comics have the feel of an artist just warming up and figuring things out as he goes along, trying to contain a score of ideas whirring about his head. Madden-Connor tells stories about people in motion that are circular in nature, as one portion of the stories segues into something completely different only to come back around to the original theme or motif in unexpected ways. The first issue starts with a strip featuring Aristotle talking about birds. We pull back to see that Madden-Connor's stand-in (an anthropomorphic mynah bird) is reading this story. He then becomes a giant, smashes out of his house, goes on a rampage and grows large enough to see an airplane--where it's revealed that he is in fact a passenger on this plane having a daydream. He has another daydream where he starts talking to clouds and finally starts reading a book--a book whose text takes over the rest of the comic. That story is a sort of metacommentary on the daydreams in this issue as well as a reference to Jonathan Swift, and that joke is concluded on the last page, when he shrinks.

Madden-Connor's line has a ragged, sketchbook quality in the first issue that seems ill-suited to the kind of formalistic fireworks he's playing with here. His line becomes much clearer and his background choices far bolder in the second issue, which expands on a number of ideas and techniques he used in the first issue. This issue loops its characters and stories in unexpected ways, made all the more interesting in the use of certain formal techniques. For example, the contents and even the word balloons in the first story in the issue are placed at 45 degree angles--tilted. It grid panels themselves are standard squares and rectangles, making the read crawl up or down a panel to read it. It really puts us into the head-space of the character Spot, who has a crush on the checkout girl at a supermarket. The page where he "talks" to her through the logos of assorted products and is "answered" in the form of receipts is funny and clever, one of many visually striking things about this section. Above all else, Madden-Connor's line here is clean, with the occasional thicker line used for emphasis.

The story segues into Madden-Connor's mynah alter-ego going to the same store and meeting the same girl, with a very different outcome that appears to bleed into the sort of surreal imagery of the first imagery. Instead, we stop right in the middle to reveal that Madden-Connor is in fact showing Spot this very story in his sketchbook, and goes on to tell a story about what turns out to be the checkout girl trying to find if she's actually related to a discredited scientist. Before we reach the answer, Spot changes trains (not really wanting to talk to Madden-Connor) and sees the girl again, contemplating whether or not he should wake her up on her train. This issue is remarkably well-designed and executed, and has many moments of quiet humor. His character design was simple but striking, and his use of gesture was much more sophisticated in this issue. I see Madden-Connor as an artist who perhaps needs to pare his line down even more, because his ideas really shine when his pages have room to breathe and make use of white space. If these comics are his debut, then it's clear he has a bright future ahead of him. I would love to see him really address a particular feeling or emotion in his next comic and build his ambitious framework around exploring that idea. The emotional exploration he makes in the first two issues is a cursory one, even as Madden-Connor concentrates on a motif or theme from an intellectual standpoint. It will be interesting to see him really flesh out human emotion in future issues.

WATER FLIES, by Renee French. No one draws creepy better than Renee French, who is especially good at turning something that seems cute at first into something enormously unsettling. In a matter of just a couple of pages, French introduces us to a humanoid who loves feeding carnivorous water flies outside his aquatic home. Fascinated by their lives, the person can't resist trying to interact with them under water in their natural habitat. This of course leads to disaster in ways that could not be foreseen; suffice it to say that the flies were much more intelligent than the person suspected--and quite malevolent. The comic was drawn in French's simplified (for her) art style; spare but still possessing a certain lushness and playfulness. There's a final punchline in the comic that reveals the sort of food that the flies really wanted that is a perfect summation of French's macabre sense of humor.

THE RUMOR, THE DIVIDE and PIE, by Falynn Koch. Koch certainly has great chops as a cartoonist, but these minis feel more like something one would see in a sketchbook than fully-formed ideas. THE DIVIDE is a very cleverly presented short mini about the skies opening up and separating a couple and them finding a way to get back together. PIE is about an interloper winning a pie-making contest and the blowback she gets from the other jealous participants. THE RUMOR is an intricately design mini about how rumor solidifies to become fact in the minds of many after it's spread around enough times. PIE and THE DIVIDE are nicely designed and presented but fairly forgettable. THE RUMOR is extremely intricately assembled with expressive and striking character design and a clever concept as the rumor is spread from place to place in a house. The little pouch the comic comes in looks silkscreened and is certainly striking, but the contents are no less painstakingly drawn. It seems clear that Koch is a developing talent trying different avenues to find her voice as an artist. THE RUMOR shows that she has some ambition and is trying to find the best way to harness it. She's someone to keep an eye on.

WHY DID I PUT THIS TOWN ON MY FACE?, by Matt Weigle. Weigle, another of the Partyka artists, draws comics that are funny and slightly unsettling. This is a collection of short stories that appeared in various anthologies, and there are some clever gag strips here. "A Story" uses a static visual grid (with a minor change in one panel) to deliver a gag; it's a nice introduction to his brand of humor. Weigle often combines a conceptual punchline or twist with the most scatological of situations; most of his stories also tend to center around the passage of time as a key component of the set-up. "The Salt Lick" has a grim and visceral punchline to the concept of someone putting up a lure for deer, eventually leading them right into a butcher shop. "The Omega Dome" takes us from an apocalyptic War of the Worlds scenario to a farting contest to determine world supremacy--except that it's a meta-commentary on fart jokes. "Your Career Is Not Working Out Like What You Had Planned" shows us the unfortunate but predictable deaths of three people in particular professions--and the out-of-left field death of a fourth in a home run of a punchline. There's a restless playfulness in Weigle's work as he balances intellectual, aesthetic and humorous concerns. While his line his completely different, his work reminds me a bit of John Kerschbaum's in its nastiness, occasional obliqueness and willingness to go to silly extremes to get across a punchline. He's certainly an artist deserving of wider recognition.

SWEETHEART COMICS #1-3, by Austin English. These comics feature the sort of memory strips and unusually skewed stories of growing up that English does in his WINDY CORNER MAGAZINE. It's unclear which (if any) of these anecdotes is supposed to be autobiographical (other than some being from first-person perspective), but that information isn't really pertinent. The strips are less about events than they are feelings about these events. Sometimes those feelings are direct and obvious, like "I was happy to be a part of it", but in others it's as though he's trying to get record the experience of deja vu'. His art is extremely crude but has an immediacy to it that manages to capture those thoughts and feelings. There's also a sense of distortion to his figures (and his comics are dominated by figures as opposed to a sense of place) that's both disorienting and warm.

I missed the idiosyncratic use of color that's a hallmark of his WINDY CORNER strips. That changed a bit with the standout issue of the bunch, #3. His account of someone named Laurie and her troubled relationships, along with the story "Joel and Me", about a dialogue with and eventual surrender to one's own inner darkness, were both notable in the way he used black. His line got much thicker and as a result his figures were more solid in his panel design; they "held space" better than thinner-lined figures that blurred into the rest of the panel. That was true of issue #2 as well; the first story where we meet Austin's friends has a number of appealingly chunky figures. I didn't like the single panel-per-page set-up in #2 because it hurt the intimacy that English seemed to be driving at. The way he layered panels in unusual way in #3 added to that sense of immediacy. I like the way that English is constantly pushing himself in an effort to create clearer lines of expression and the way he balances editing and assembling a magazine with his own development as an artist.

CURIO CABINET #3, by JB. This was a comic I had heard about but not yet read until I picked up a copy at SPX. This is a collection of densely rendered but cartoony strips with a surreal slant. The first strip, "Human Again" details the day spent by a sentient hatchet that tries to commit suicide over the love of an anthropomorphic teapot by jumping off a building. The ax accidentally kill a bystander when it reaches bottom and winds up in lockup--in this case, a tool shed. Another strip details the horror felt by a man on a car ride in the desert with a friend as time fractures. One man is swatted out of the car by the end of god (in the form of a giant dog's paw) and the other repeatedly experiences this before managing to call some confused policemen. Another story finds a dinosaur summoned by a bagpipe player that winds up melting a field of soldiers with its sonic breath.

The stories are silent and have the feeling of dream logic combined with a certain well-defined set of personal symbols and characters. Each story has its own internal logic as JB isn't interested in "explaining" these images; they really speak for themselves. Indeed, one of the chief virtues of his comic is the clarity of JB's storytelling. We may be asked to swallow weird premises (like the metaphorically sentient ax) or accept bizarre endings (like godlike dogs watching over the world), but the way the story flows is crystal clear. JB actually uses a fairly naturalistic approach to character design, with his dense pencil work giving each panel and drawing a certain heft. His work reminds me a little of Eric Haven's, in that genre conventions, non sequiturs, oblique symbology random outbursts of violence and blunt moments of humor all blend together in take-it-or-leave-it fashion. It's the very definition of "cult comic".

WIZZYWIG #1.5, by Ed Piskor. This is a dense, 32-page preview of the second volume of Piskor's story about a composite of early computer hackers. As in the first volume, Piskor uses a variety of narrative techniques to keep the reader off-balance. He uses flashbacks, an omniscient narrator, a friend of the main character broadcasting on his own radio show, immersive action with no narration, talking heads and more. It's clear that Piskor absorbed a lot of lessons from working with Harvey Pekar in that he goes to great lengths to provide visual variety on his pages for a story that's mostly just people sitting around and talking. With his slightly exaggerated character design (ao many of his characters are gloriously ugly) and grab-back of narrative techniques, a potentially static subject becomes dynamic in Piskor's hands. I'm eager to see the rest of volume 2 when it arrives.

INFANDUM! #3, by Molly Lawless. This 8 page, 8 1/2 x 11 comic is more of the same from Lawless--which is a very good thing. There are more tales from baseball's often inglorious past, more stories about her sometimes dubious exploits as a long-distance runner, and more cheerfully disdainful advice and commentary on relationships. As always, her baseball strips are her best comics, a smooth combination of diligent research and irreverence. One of the strips is about Roger Connor, baseball's career home run record-holder prior to Babe Ruth--a record that no one knew or cared about until Ruth made home runs popular. It's a strip as much about the stats geekery surrounding baseball as it is about Connor himself. Another strip, about Wally Pipp, the man Lou Gehrig legendarily replaced in the Yankees lineup, is told from Gehrig's point of view and is both charming and witty.

Lawless packs a lot of detail into her pages, and each one is designed rather oddly. Her panels are of irregulas size and shape, word baloons and captions spill out of her grid, and her figures are both rendered with great detail and cartoonily expressive. Her pages wobble but seldom break, as the reader is whipped from panel to panel. Lawless is skilled at keeping the reader's eye on task in the way she places captions and word balloons, making each panel and page easy to follow. It doesn't hurt that she balances anecdotes with bon mots and assorted smart-ass remarks in support of her art. Lawless makes clutter work for her, and in fact her more visually cluttered pages are more fun to look at than her cleaner, simpler pages.