Thirty Days of CCS #25: Max Mose, Rio Aubry Taylor, Casey Bohn, Bill Bedard

Max Mose's recent comic The Grove is another of his sci-fi/horror commentaries on capitalism and culture at large. With a beautiful and disturbing silkscreened cover, this full-color piece (printed on a risograph, perhaps?) is one of his most striking works. Working in similar waters as Matthew Thurber, the story concerns a rapacious city literally draining the inspiration out of its artists for the benefit of its corporate classes, overseen by a sort of magical deity of capitalism. When one of the city's citizens rebels, he's shot out of a cannon into the nearby forest. Of course, when he messes with the "unnatural" order of things, a reprisal is ordered and the book's final conflict occurs. Mose leavens this critique with absurd imagery, jokes, self-aware critiques of his critiques and a general sense of awareness that the state of nature is no more welcoming or just than humanity's need to construct and eventually exploit its resources and then each other. Mose's pencils have become much sharper and cleaner while still retaining the grotesque and frequently bug-eyed quality that makes his pages pop. His use of color has been a big boost in getting him to make his pages cleaner and simpler, but he also seems to have found just the right groove and sense of confidence in letting go of clutter and over-rendering. That new simplicity only makes the images we do see all the more powerful, weird and funny.

Bill "Billage" Bedard is another CCS cartoonist whose work I only saw for the first time at SPX. Coffee Hunters represents the silly, sketchy side of the artist. With cartoony characters and stick figure warriors that are heavy on gesture and body language in telling their story, this mythological spoof features a tribe hunting for wild coffee. Rife with coffee and bean puns, this scratchy little mini is packed with eye pops and other visual jokes as well. It's dopey and good-natured, understanding that this is a bit of entertaining fluff that's nonetheless prepared with care and affection. On the other hand, his full adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic lyrical poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner represents the serious, delicate side of the artist. Bedard truly engages the poem, using a thin line but a lot of grey-scale shading to add a bit of depth. Still, the whole story conveys the ethereal, monstrous, fantastic and spiritual aspects of the poem, with the Mariner's spectacles giving him a further sense of removal from his crew and the reader as well. The nightmarish qualities of the poem translate quite well to comics, with a number of lines leaving Bedard plenty of room for visual interpretation regarding violence, spirits and storms. In other, more still scenes, Bedard captures that deathly tranquility as well, his illustrations a fine counter-point to Taylor's rich and evocative language. Bedard's natural sketchy, grungy style eventually takes over the story, which is all for the better for this comic, as it's not a neat or comforting tale.

Rio Aubry Taylor's first issue of the moving and unsettling Love, Currently sees him break new ground as an artist.Told in a distinctive white-on-black page with various color fields and patterns popping into panels, it's a story of a man named Lan who fails to come to terms with his own anger and fear after the death of his daughter. First his marriage disintegrates, and then his life in general goes to hell. This is a first-person account of his own attempt at self-destruction and abandonment of his faith in the world, god and humanity. Taylor's art is haunting and evocative, as the way he often likes to use abstract patterns, light fields and dense cross-hatching serves a narrative purpose as a reflection of Lan's consciousness and emotional state. At just eight pages, it's Taylor's most coherent, dense and emotional work; I am eager to see where he will be going with this series.

Casey Bohn is one of the more distinctive stylists I've seen from CCS. His comics have tended toward loopy science-fiction that is conversant in all of the genre's tropes yet subtly commenting on its cliches and tendency toward obvious metaphors. It's a gentle nudging to be sure, as Bohn's art both celebrates its Jack Kirby influence with its bold, almost abstract use of thick lines and odd angles and is well aware of the silliness of its imagery. President X concerns an astronaut who becomes aware that aliens are about to invade Earth and establish a puppet president (the titular President X, who barely appears in this comic despite his distinctive appearance--it's a sort of shaggy dog element). It takes him years to get back, and no one believes him but a hilariously depicted group of hippies. Of course, they prove to be crucial allies, but Bohn plays up the violence vs non-violence angle in an amusing, heightened manner. The climactic fight is absolutely hilarious, as the eyeball-shaped alien is thwarted by its own digestive juices ("I'm eating myself! I...I'm delicious!"). Bohn represents the sort of humorist whose knowledge of and ability to work within a genre sharpens the humor within the piece while providing a credible, enjoyable story.

Thirty Days of CCS #23: Bingo Baby

Bingo Baby is touted as an "experimental collaborative comic book" at its home site, Penny Lantern. The script was the result of a collaborative role-playing game called Fiasco, which aims to be a RPG version of a Coen Brothers movie, where you play characters with "powerful ambition and poor impulse control". The players included CCS alums like Amelia Onorato, Denis St John, Donna Almendrala, Joseph Lambert, and Bill Bedard, along with professor Jason Lutes. After recording the game and turning it into a script, the group parceled out storytelling responsibilities in a mainstream "assembly-line" style. Onorato drew the characters and some backgrounds. Bedard, Lutes and St. John drew other background details. Almendrala inked the whole thing to give it page-to-page consistency. Bedard and Lambert did the colors, while Alemendrala and Lutes lettered it. The results are interesting, if uneven.

The story concerns a handful of intersecting characters in a small town, each with their own set of obsessions and delusions. Carol Anne is sensible but obsessed with playing Bingo, the central metaphor of the book. Her (technically) ex-husband Rob is a dreamer who fancies himself an actor. His brother Jake is a petty drug dealer living with his elderly relative Nan, and he's trying to find money that she may have hidden inside her house after winning a big bet on a horse race as a young woman. There's Missy, who's trying to negotiate being a single mother after being thrown out by her parents, and Goldie, a drug-addled older man who fancies himself the father of her baby. Each of the characters has dreams that directly or indirectly interfere with the others, which seems to be a product in part of the game's mechanics. It also conveniently lays down a plot as the players/writers try to find a voice for each of the characters.

The problem with the book is that some of the characters don't escape the confines of the game. Rob is a key character, connected in many ways to several other characters, but he feels more like a twitching pile of scribbled-down character traits than an actual person. The same goes for Jake, who at least is written as a sort of darkly comedic, incompetent character in the Coen Brothers tradition. Of all the characters in the book, only Missy operates on a level that approaches logical, calculating desperation, and it's fitting that she winds up as the only real "winner" in the story. The problem with many of the other characters is that unlike in a Coen Brothers or caper movie, where ordinary people are thrust into desperate situations, Bingo Baby features characters with more outlandish personalities (or non-existent personalities) who have things happen to them. Indeed, the real "action" of this story occurs when one character accidentally burns down the house of another; the only other true actions taken are by Missy. Yet Missy isn't thrust into the spotlight quite as boisterously as the story does the crazy Goldie or scheming Jake. That makes the story's climax more interesting but results in some wheel-spinning along the way. Visually, the team does a good job of maintaining page-to-page continuity, with Almendrala in particular doing a great job at designing distinctive-looking characters. There's a frequent dearth of background details, but the Lambert/Bedard coloring team helps make up for that by constantly varying background hues. There was definitely a strong group mind behind the concept of the book; just like in the game Bingo, things had to line up somewhat at random and fortuitously for Missy to make her getaway. Hopefully, future iterations of this experiment will yield more nuanced characterizations.