Quarantine Comics From Caitlin Cass and Glenn Wilkinson

The global pandemic and its subsequent quarantine has had and continues to have a profound effect on artists all around the world. That was especially true during the period of March and April, where most people were actually obeying the constraints of the quarantine instead of pretending that science doesn't exist. That global sense of isolation moved many artists to dig deep into this feeling.

Caitlin Cass's Notes From Quarantine (Vol 10, #5 of her long-running postal constituency comics series) is something of a departure for her: these are single panel, New Yorker-style gag comics about quarantine life. Cass has actually had several strips published in the New Yorker, but it's clear that these quarantine strips are meant in part to satirize the dry, comedy-of-manners quality that one normally associates with that publication. In other words, COVID-19 and the quarantine have rendered that kind of wry satire irrelevant. Making quips about (relatively privileged) quotidian concerns without referencing the quarantine is like writing fiction.

Cass leans into that, combining the droll punchlines of this genre with brutally cutting observations. In one strip, a woman faces away from an older relative in a wheelchair, saying "Oh no, it's someone I know and love." A nurse walks by an apartment building on the way to work and admonishes its residents for staring at her. A school valedictorian gives her speech on the computer, noting that her generation can't mess up any worse than this one. Using a mix of soft grayscale shading and pastels, Cass delivers sharp barbs in a comforting form. The confidence and steadiness of her line is a great deal sharper than it was earlier in her career, making this kind of pastiche all the more effective as a result.

UK cartoonist Glenn Wilkinson's Quarantine Comics takes a different tack. These are three fantasy/sci-fi tinged short-stories done while in quarantine, but they aren't actually about quarantine. Although there are some thematic similarities. For example, "Once a wizard, now a pleb" is about a father and daughter going down to the market in ancient Rome. The magic that they understand is passing out of the world, and he's at first outraged that she's selling it for Roman currency, until he's made to realize that they are obsolete.

All of the stories are about a sense of loss and mourning with regard to something in society. In the second story, a Dr. Who-like character is outraged that the Daleks were created at the whim of an alien race that mistreated them. He winds up marrying the last Dalek, only his attempt at being a savior goes awry. The third story is about a man trying to fix his brain to keep up to date with current standards of goodness, only "goodness" is revealed to be a brutal accounting of personal hatreds and scores to settle. There's a profound cynicism at work in each of these stories: magic is fading from the world, heroes can't solve problems, and like in a Yeats poem, "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Wilkinson's work is in full color and looks like it's either been painted or made to look like it was painted. The figures are crude but effective. The overall aesthetic works for what he's trying to achieve.   
   

Catching Up With Caitlin Cass

Let's catch up with some recent work by Caitlin Cass, one of the most original and prolific artists working in minicomics today. Her Postal Constituency service offers a subscription to her comics, and she puts something out every couple of months. The comics vary in terms of length, size, content, and ambition. However, she frequently writes about history, philosophy, culture, and politics.

Pre-History (Volume 8, Issue #6 of the P.C.) is a nice example of her work. It's a folded, small square comic that makes great use of its format by showing, one page/panel at a time, how various species evolved and were then wiped out by something. Cass has a snappy sense of humor and keeps things moving as she also alternates text and image on some of the pages. On other pages, she uses multiple unfoldings to tell a story.

"Give People Light And They Will Find A Way" (V9, #4) is a more straightforward story done in a standard format. Indeed, the comic was adapted from a presentation she gave at the school at which she teaches. Using a mostly open-page layout instead of a grid, the comic focuses on the women of the Civil Rights Movement. Cass noted that historically, women of color are usually at the forefront of every resistance movement but tend to get less credit than the men. This comic is both a remedy to that and a simple history. She talks about Jo Ann Robinson, who was the leader of the Alabama bus boycott. Using a simple, effective line, she relates the history of Ella Baker, who was one of the key founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That organization would be key in pushing for the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Finally, Fannie Lou Hamer was brought to life in discussing her role in getting people registered for the vote and the violence she faced in doing so.

Rest Stop Brochures For The Not-So-Distant Future (V9, #1) finds Cass working a gimmick for comic effect. This is indeed a group of brochures in comics form, bound by a light cardboard sleeve. This is Cass at her most conceptual, with gags like "Digital Red Tape," which is an app that makes it difficult to use one's phone; it's designed to help with phone addiction. "The Forum" is a brochure for an app that provides a crowd that will cheer you on publicly, no matter what you have to say. It's the ultimate echo chamber effect. "Rainbow Boat Tours" offers people a chance to sail through garbage, picking out plastic stuff one might have some affection for. "Drone Eyes" allows people to see the world through a drone's camera, while "Amazon Truck Share" spoofs the fact that most trucks are half empty, and it offers a free trip to a mystery location. The brochures range from silly to brutally satirical, but every brochure speaks to the ways in which we consume and regurgitate information and resources.

Finally, Myths (V9, #2) sees Cass using a slightly bigger format, slick brown paper and full color in conjuring up modern myths. One story is about a tear in the sky that people tried to sew up, paint over, protest against, and patch over. It turned about to be a funny metaphor for the ways in which crises (existential and otherwise) are treated by those who have money and those who don't. Another story was about people who refused to give offerings to those In Charge, and they were put in a window, depending on the generosity of others for food. It's a clever metaphor for those who choose to live apart from being ruled by capitalism (like many artists) depending on the whims of others for support--until it's all too much and one wastes away. There's a whimsical quality to all of the stories here, but it's ultimately a grim comic that's fatalistic with regard to our fate in society.

Minis: M.Hoey & P.Hoey, C.Cass, W.Taylor

Time for some more mini talk:

Coin Op: Project Gemini (Musical Twins) and Coin Op: Chuck Berry's Revenge (Afro-Futurist Re-Mix), by Peter & Maria Hoey. The Hoey siblings have always been interesting in exploring music on the comics page, and their "45 RPM comics" are shaped like the old 45 sleeves: an aesthetically pleasing square. Project Gemini is one of their comics that combines historical research and straight-up illustration, juxtaposing interesting anecdotes about famous musical twins with vintage imagery of casinos, countrysides and gas stations that all use a twin theme.

On the other hand, Chuck Berry's Revenge is hilariously deranged, working in themes, quotes and lyrics from a number of artists into this unexpected sequel to Back To The Future. As you may recall, Marty McFly passes off Chuck Berry's work as his own, to the point where Chuck's "cousin" Marvin plays him some of the music. We see the other end of that conversation, as a furious Chuck slams the phone into the wall. However, he seeks out avant garde jazz maestro Sun Ra, who sends rock pioneer Ike Turner with him to alter the course of history. Turner kills Henry Ford, uses his assembly line idea, and becomes America's premier industrialist, only with a diverse workforce. Chuck goes back to 1955 and seduces Marty's mom ("she's too cute to be a minute over seventeen"), causing Marty to disappear. This twelve-page comic features an avalanche of ideas, jokes, references, puns and history, and it's astonishing just how much havoc the Hoeys wreaked in the course of the story. The mix of naturalism and psychedelia (the "Afro-Futurist Remake") were perfectly balanced for a comics story, as both made sense right away, given the story's absurd premise.

The Once Great Auk, by Caitlin Cass. As far as Cass's comics go, this one is pretty grimly straightforward. The Great Auk was a bird that had no natural fear of man, was plentifully found on small islands, and exceedingly easy to kill. It was like they were a litmus test for humanity's capacity for mercy that it wildly failed. With each page a single panel, Cass zeroes in on the escalating hilarious and horrible circumstances surrounding the eventual total extinction of this species. Cass indulges in some detailed cross-hatching in this comic, emphasizing the utterly benign quality of the bird and its utter lack of a survival instinct. From an evolutionary perspective, it's a simple case of a species getting wiped out because it had no way of dealing with its predator. From a human perspective, it's an extreme example of the way we take advantage of nature without fully thinking of the consequences, like an exceedingly long game of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Fizzle #1, by Whit Taylor. Taylor has really come into her own in the past year or two doing autobiography and journalism. This series represents her best slice-of-life work to date, and she really stands out in terms of character design and expression. Always great at drawing side-eye and creating expressions with scrunched-up mouths, Taylor really goes to town with those expressions in this comic in panel after panel. In a story that's mostly a series of talking heads, Taylor creates action and tension in each panel because of the frequently seething and hidden character of emotions that are hinted at by facial expressions. This story follows a young woman named Claire who is questioning her life's choices. She has a stoner boyfriend with a rich family that he's rebelling against, finding him complaining about having to hang out with his dad and brother at a posh steakhouse. She has a job at a boutique tea "lounge" with a hilariously obnoxious boss named Poppy who is obsessively focused with her business. Her glasses and sort of mop-top haircut are a great example of the way Taylor used character design to sum up her characters without saying a word. This is a character who isn't suffering: she has a job, a relatively cushy life and a boyfriend--yet it's clear that she's deeply depressed, her life the titular "fizzle" as she has no creative outlet. The verisimilitude of the dialogue and the story's tiniest details are elements that help it stand out, as well as variations in page design that reflect Claire's disorientation and ennui. The cover image reflects the overall cleverness of the comic. It's exciting to see how Taylor has come into her mature style as an artist and is doing it across the board with all of her various projects.

Catching Up With Caitlin Cass, Part 3

Closing out my look at Caitlin Cass's Postal Constituent comics...

R.R. Whitehead (Volume 7, #2). Following a month spent at the Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY, Cass wrote this very cheeky account of its co-founder, R.R. Whitehead. A dreamer from a young age, he had enormous family wealth that allowed him to act on his dreams. Cass portrayed him as both pliable and impressionable in terms of ideas but also rigid and dictatorial with regard to how he put his ideals of a utopian artists's colony into practice. On the one hand, women had freedoms that were totally unheard of in the colony, including openly accepted lesbian relationships. On the other hand, he drove off members of the colony by refusing to compromise on how things were run on a day-to-day basis. He was also obsessed with rejecting anything resembling modern manufacturing or making money, which stopped printmaking and similar arts at Byrdcliffe. Whitehead was certainly not immune from criticism, as the artists (including his wife!) used to draw him as a figure with an enormously long neck (his head in the clouds) in everything they did, which is a very funny running joke. Cass always shares some sympathy for dreamer-types like Whitehead, admiring their iconoclastic character as much as their failed ambitions.

Cassie Chadwick: Queen Of Cleveland (Volume 7, #3). Cass loves dreamers but also loves schemers and grifters who have style. This funny comic about a woman who went through multiple husbands, multiple identities and a couple of stints in prison in the early 20th century also speaks to something else: women trying to find ways to escape their inevitable fate as either near-slave laborers or else entirely dependent on their husbands. Chadwick cleverly took advantage of people's willingness to trade in on the reputations of the rich, as the rumor she herself started that she was the illegitimate daughter of tycoon Andrew Carnegie allowed her to walk into banks and just receive piles of money. She spent the money as fast as she got it, both for her own personal delight and also to keep up appearances as someone who is ridiculously rich. The single-tone light pink Cass used her was a perfect way of introducing a lot of negative space into the piece, allowing her to focus on character.

Mill Girls (Volume 7, #4). This is a full-color fantasy piece where Cass once again focuses in on the oppressed more than the ideas of an oppressor. It's a short comic that imagines the hard-working and exploited mill worker women going on strike against the men exploiting them, cutting open the men's cotton-cocoons and finding money sewn inside. It's a remarkable image, as justice is achieved until it isn't, and the monstrous industrialists grow huge and literally crush them. It's a story that played out often during the 19th and 20th centuries, as labor sought to assert their rights against an owner's relentless exploitation. It's just a story that's now out of fashion and no longer celebrated. That's thanks in parts to later corruption and incompetence on the part of many unions, but it's also due to corporations trying to scale back those gains over time. Cass painted this comic, and that quality lent it some of its magical realist qualities as things went in a strange direction very quickly, but it made sense in the formal continuity of the story.

Ivy Lee: Founder of Public Relations (Volume 7, #5). This is another short comic from Cass that's a short biography of a man with a questionable legacy: the founder of public relations. He was there who helped changed John D. Rockefeller from a man whose actions killed miners and their families into a folksy, "man of the people" type in the public eye. The concept of image being more important than substance is obviously frighteningly relevant today, and the person who controls their own image controls information and often public opinion. The cardstock and folding accordion formal qualities of the comic give it a little value added for this story of moral relativism.

Rock Thoughts, Volume Two (Volume 7, #6). Cass takes a different approach in this volume of the thinking rock. It's full color, one panel per page, with the story taking up the whole issue. It's a meditation on existence itself. The rock wonders ahead to when all life on earth will end and it will just be rocks again. Taking this kind of long view, where the rock considers time from a geological point of view and looks at life as a kind of short, fascinating but ultimately unsatisfying blip is another way of looking at consciousness, humanity and the urge to be remembered as ultimately futile and pointless thing that we do. It's pointless, yet the rock (and Cass) can't help but have a fondness for existence and consciousness, and the rock doth protest too much.

Burning Rivers (Volume 8, #1). Most everyone has heard about Cleveland's Cuyahoga River catching on fire in the late 60s as a symbol of both the dawn of the environmental movement and the decline of Cleveland. In this comic, Cass colorfully and dutifully records the many other times that not only Cleveland's main river caught on fire, but also those of Chicago, Buffalo, and Detroit. They were all industrial cities who dumped waste, oil and alcohol into the nearby river without thinking twice, so it wasn't surprising that they caught on fire multiple times. The comic is as much about the movement as it is the fires, as people figured out how to clean the rivers and even bring back fish. Cass suggests that technology is neither good nor evil on its own, but rather that what's important is understanding it in a purely ethical sense: how does using this technology affect others, with "others" including the entire ecosystem?

Catching Up With Caitlin Cass: Part 2

Continuing my look at Caitlin Cass' minis:

Rock Thoughts Volume One (Volume 6, #1). This is a funny comic about a rock that somehow attains consciousness but is otherwise just a rock. It's Cass' take on the mind-body split and identity. It also gave her a chance to use a thin line and a nine-panel grid in order to do gag strips. The rock goes through all sorts of stages of emotional well-being, starting off with "positive visualization" (which ends with a seagull shitting on him), feeling self-conscious and needy, feeling defiant and then eventually zeroing in on consciousness itself. It wonders if "the other rocks are playing a 1.7 billion year prank on me" by not having consciousness and then concluding "This consciousness thing is bullshit." Cass is exploring the idea that consciousness without agency plus incredibly expansive time is essentially torture, no matter how one tries to think one's way out of it. Even the end, when the rock has been put in a hamster cage and the rock finds comfort in the hamster and her constant motion in a wheel is thwarted when the hamster drops dead, puncturing yet another soliloquy with random cruelty. Obviously drawing a rock isn't that difficult, but it's the fine, little details that Cass adds to the comic that help add a degree of naturalism. The scenes she's creating, if devoid of the rock's word balloons, would look just like scenes of stillness in panel after panel. Adding a nicely-drawn child's hand or a fastidiously-detailed hamster wheel brings the reader into the rock's world and perspective. Cass is also making fun of rhetoric and speech-making in this comic, as a fancy speech or theory without an audience is essentially meaningless.

Portals (Volume 6, #2). This is a none-too-subtle parable about a woman who stared into readily available portals all day long. Portals "into teacup auctions...obscure historical events,...alternative lives...", etc. When she got upset one day, she flew "to the place where portals become objects", called "the cacophany (sic) of things". She was charmed by the singular nature of each object she saw until she saw a weird guy go by, and she flew back, frightened. Of course, this is a story about the internet, television and our modern obsession with screens in general. Cass is arguing that despite the wonder this technology inspires, the amazing things it can show us, it also cuts us off from human contact. While the present-ness of having a thing in one's possession is part of that experience that's lost, it's really negotiating a world full of others and having to face ethical questions that makes us more than mere rocks on a shoreline. Cass notes that uncontrolled, an addiction to screens can permanently impair our ability to negotiate the world in a meaningful way that has the capacity to bring joy that simply watching something cannot. Her use of an open-page format gives it the feeling of a child's fairy tale book, a sense of reality being fluid.


Poking The Bubble (Volume 6, #3). This is a rare autobio comic by Cass, wherein she talks about her project to date, her current activities as a teacher, and some doubts about the nature of her project. Cass went to St. John's College in Baltimore, whose curriculum was the Great Books of the Western World. In other words, she spent a long time studying the works of dead (mostly white) males. She notes that her project has been humorously pointing out the failures of the ideas of these figures, for anyone steeped in philosophy knows that its history is one system replacing another ad infinitum, until theories arise that look to wipe out philosophy at its very root. That said, there's a telling panel in this open-page layout where Cass yells at the Great Books: "Ha ha, you're gonna fail even though you tried!" and the books respond "Ha ha, you can't say anything without referencing us first." It's a compelling argument that dawns on Cass, as she's set up her project in opposition to thoughts generated within a patriarchal bubble. It's only through teaching at an all-girls' school that exploring ideas doesn't have to be in opposition to anything. Instead of poking that titular bubble of the patriarchy, she realizes that she can have hope that her students find new and innovative ways of looking at the world. It's a beautiful moment of self-actualization.

Effie Stevens (Volume 6, #6). The expanded version of this story is a beautiful, full-color comic. It's about an entirely forgotten woman in a small town who left no mark on the world save one: a huge, expansive quilt wherein she drew every single person she could remember going about their day, as well as their name. This is a beautiful, poetic comic that really comes to life with color. It's also smartly arranged in small vignettes that capture aspects of the quilt and her life as though one were considering facets of a gem. The quilt gave her purpose in a life that was otherwise meaningless and unconnected, though Cass notes that while it helped, it was not a substitute for real human contact. The quilt outlived her, however, as it was found, displayed as a local object of wonder, and eventually cut up and sold to become part of other family's traditions. It's a fascinating meditation on memory and how quickly the influence of any life has within generations of its disappearance. The color on each patch of the quilt pops off the page, giving life to the beautiful object that Stevens was creating. Cass raised another question here: the difference between art and craft, and if there is a meaningful difference.


Little Mister (Volume 7, #1). This is a story about how one's creation can be perverted and exploited, especially when men have an opportunity to do so with regard to women. It's about a cartoonist/writer who creates a despicable character called "Little Mister" who "always comes out on top" and "takes from the less deserving." Starting as a satire on women's roles in society, it got turned into a literal celebration of men's rightful place as being dominant and even a fetish item for good luck and fortune. When it got further twisted into white nationalist propaganda (ala Pete and Matt Furie), the artist essentially swore off men and moved away, but the ideas followed her. This is a nasty, trenchant and oh-so-realistic story that's told with Cass' old-timey flair, as she's especially adept at drawing late 19th century and early 20th century buildings and fashions.

Catching Up With Caitlin Cass, Part 1

Let's catch up with one of my favorite cartoonist-historians, Caitlin Cass. She's a remarkably prolific cartoonist, as she's managed to stick with her Postal Constituent mail-order minicomic service for years, now going into an eighth volume. Her ongoing series, Great Moments In Western Civilization, is a monument to her formal creativity, unceasing curiosity, wry sense of humor and intellectual rigor as a historian. Let's take a quick look at each of these minis to see where her interests wandered:

The Seven Liberal Arts. (Volume 4, #6). This small mini is an expansion of a highly compressed diagram on its first page, as the practitioners of the titular liberal arts all essentially get gags in, either at their own expense or that of others. The Geometry department re-abstracts their ideas in an effort to trick the Astronomy team a level above them to "convince themselves that they see us in the stars". Philosophy is at the top, of course, and it winds up being an elaborate ski lift for the other liberal arts, which is as good a metaphor as I've ever heard for it. The imagery, which is reminiscent of something approaching Dante's vision of hell, is clever in how Cass uses cutaways and incomplete data to give the reader just a glimpse of what's happening.

Great American Inventions (Volume 5, #3) is a poster folded down to mini size. Folded back out, this white-on-black series of drawings features Cass' sardonic comments on items like The TV Dinner, the Machine Gun, and the Cotton Gin ("A New Reason to Enslave People!"). This poster falls into Cass' larger project of critiquing notions like progress, especially when paired with capitalism. In other words, innovation and capitalism on their own have no moral compass and shouldn't be celebrated simply for being new, efficient and money-making.

The Index, #6 (Volume 5, #4) is the latest issue of Cass' subseries about meaning and purpose, where a man and a woman argue about the best way to go about it. Susan collects blank note cards that reflect the potential of a single person. Richard fills the cards with his thoughts and starts indexing them. The series has introduced magical realist elements, like the couple summoning the library of Alexandria, indexer Paul Otlet, and the philosopher Diogenes. This issue introduces Virginia Woolf into the equation, as Susan attacks Richard's argument by saying that one's works cannot be reduced to a single sentence. Instead, it's the small details of a life lived that give a person worth. What I love about this issue is that the way Cass is willing to subvert arguments with the very rhetorical devices that have been introduced. In this case, it's Woolf herself that questions looking to her as an inspiration on how to live, given that she wound up killing herself. Like with every other issue, nothing is resolved with regard to the philosophical argument, even as Cass' line grows ever more confident and even elaborate at times.

Benjamin Rathbun Builds Buffalo is a folded broadsheet talking about the con man whose ability to scam others got a number of important buildings created in Buffalo, NY, including the very jail that he was sentenced to. What's funny about this story is that it's a familiar and relevant one even today: a visionary in search of start-up capital. In his case, he simply forged the names of other people in order to get loans. Cass works big on the page here, and it suits her work, especially with regard to the way she spots blacks. The main problem with her smaller comics is that her line is not yet fine or flexible enough to fully breathe given those space constraints. Cass obviously has some affection for the con man's vision, as she later depicts his effort to build what is essentially modern-day Niagara Falls.

Bestiary Of Ordinary Americans (Volume 5, #6) is almost a response from Susan (from The Index), although it's an unrelated project. A bestiary is a compendium of mythical creatures, often with a moralizing tone. In Cass' hands, it's a quotidian detail about a number of different people, yet it's a detail that reveals something important in some way. Whether it's Sarah's hatred for ballet, Glenna inexplicably buying boxes of cereal despite hating cereal, or Amy's internet addiction, every anecdote is revealing as it shows the reader the true nature of each person, many of whom wish they could be different people or make different decisions--yet they feel compelled to do otherwise. These are some of Cass' warmest drawings, but it's a shame she couldn't print the whole issue in color, because it looks like she may have been working with colored pencil here.

31 Days of Short Reviews #15: Caitlin Cass

Caitlin Cass continues to make comics about the classics in an irreverent yet critically clever and forthright manner. Comics about philosophers are inexplicably in vogue these days, but only Cass has the actual training in philosophy and eye as a humorist to create comics that fully explore the possibilities behind both the people behind the ideas and the implications of the ideas themselves. In Those Indolent Greeks, Cass shows off her talents as an illustrator, as each page features a different Greek thinker, done in blue tones and designed to reflect the images of these men as is known but also attempting to soften their features. Each of the lines of dialog is reflective of what the thinker is known for, expressed in terms of their regrets, their fears and their secret desires to do anything but be a philosopher. With Euclid saying things like "I don't even like geometry" and Socrates saying "So it turns out that knowing you know nothing leads to crippling self-doubt and eventual death by the state...oh well!", Cass strikes at the heart of the doubt that afflicts every artist and thinker.

In the fifth issue of what seems to be a 20+ issue story, The Index, the antagonists (Susan and John) explore the Library of Alexandria that seems to have magically appeared. Talking to the great critic Diogenes, Susan looks through the scrolls and sees they're filled with snippets of books that she has read. Slowly, she understands that they've discovered an imaginary environment, one that's entirely "in our heads". This series is consistently odd and funny, as it seems to be Cass' own inner argument regarding truth, meaning, purpose and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Her sequential storytelling is less interesting to look at than her static illustrations, as there are times when she tries to make up for a lack of cartooning skill by drawing extra lines. Her panel-to-panel transitions aren't especially fluid and her characters still look a bit stiff. On the other hand, the quirky, almost decorative quality of her lettering adds a lot to the visual presentation of her comics. The ideas are more interesting to look at than the art, all told, but this is such a fascinating premise and Cass' visual strengths are so unique that the series can't help but gain momentum as it proceeds, becoming her longest and most developed work to date.

Minicomics: Taylor, Jordan/Smith, Cass, Keeper Steinke

Tabe #11, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Labeled "an abstract comic about community", Taylor's latest is a fascinating series of drawings that packs a surprising emotional punch. There are varying types of abstract shapes: squiggles, straight line patterns, hair-like tangles of lines, blotches, grey shapes that look like torn pieces of paper glued to the page, and things that operate as captions that contain "text" that looks like an alien language. There are moments where the page explodes like a supernova against a night sky, and then it fades back into what looks like a drawing of the circulatory system. There are pages where the drawings seem to be in harmony and others where the drawings look to be in opposition. What makes the comic work so well is Taylor's sense of rhythm and balance on the page, creating a sense of independent intelligence in each drawing while never creating anything that's directly figurative.

History In Ruins #1-2, by Rusty Jordan and Andrew Smith.Both of these comics are just twelve pages long, but they pack a truly bizarre punch in each installment.The main character, Duane Fields, is the sort of greasy loser that is not unfamiliar to alt-comics fans, a Clowesian character who works part time at a drug store and shoplifts on the way out. I'm not sure what the division of labor is here in terms of story and art, but the figure work has a sweaty, rubbery quality to it. There's an almost clownish, Skip Williamson quality to these odd-looking characters that makes this feel like it could have been published forty years ago in an issue of Arcade. That's especially true because the second issue takes us away from the more alt-comics narrative of the deluded loser and brings us to far weirder territory. Living in the basement of his mother's house with a near-sentient mouse and assorted "experiments", he spies upon his mother (wearing inappropriately sexy clothes around her son, though she still treats him like he's a toddler) being threatened by a gang of thugs. When she is later kidnapped, the story is transformed into a wacky revenge narrative. I have no idea where things are headed next (I get the sense that much of this comic is improvised), but each page is a visual treat and full of surprises.

Mr Wolf #2, by Aron Nels Steinke. In Steinke's autobio series, Big Plans, his Mr Wolf character is usually an expression of his range. It's interesting that he's chosen to rework it as an uncertain authority figure to reflect his status as a first and second grade teacher, transforming all of the characters into anthropomorphic animals. These fictionalized strips obviously draw heavily from his real life experiences and encounters, and I'd imagine that many of the characters are composites rather than outright fictions. These strips are the best comics of Steinke's career in my opinion, because it balances his need to constantly scrutinize and microanalyze his decision-making and emotions with actually having to deal with the emotions and minds of dozens of children. His observations about the kids are warm and knowing without descending into saccharine sweetness or sentimentality. Indeed, there's something raw and real about his observations and how in many ways he's more like one of them than he is like many of the adults, even if he is an authority figure whom many of the children respect and admire. It also helps that this strip is very funny, with Steinke no doubt curating the funniest things he's experienced or heard other teachers relate to him. His drawing is simple, cute and powerfully expressive, getting across the emotions and mental states of the kids with greater facility than if he had used a more realistic approach. Comics about teaching are still fairly rare, and I hope Steinke continues to develop his observations and witty, humane approach to discussing the children under his tutelage.

The Drowning Ring and Uh Oh Dojo, by Mike Keeper. I couldn't find any website info for these idiosyncratic zine/comics fusions. The Drowning Ring is a small booklet that is absolutely jam-packed with trivia, comics, ephemera and a narrative about being a lifeguard in a particular beach community. There's something remarkably knowing about the gags, the language and the weirdness of being part of lifeguard culture that Keeper brings to life. His actual comics have a surprising level of careful detail when he chooses to illustrate something in a naturalistic style, but he mostly prefers quicker, cruder renderings and iconic drawings. I have no idea how many of the details he throws at the reader are actually true, and I prefer to keep it that way. It's like reading a Leon Beyond comic, where one knows that Leon is mostly feeding you lies, but they are so enjoyable that one wants more and more. The whole thing is a very appealing mess, as the layout is frequently sloppy and slapped together, but it's an obvious labor of love. Uh Oh Dojo is a short and magazine-sized comic that's just eight pages long, but packed with comics and repurposed photos. It's about Keeper hearing about the death of his former karate sensei (teacher) and the likelihood that he had killed himself. It spurs Keeper to think about suicide in general, while circling back to the history of karate, to his own life and the things he learned in karate. It's a comic with no pat answers or lessons, just many questions solemnly asked in an unusual package. It's Keeper's attention to fine details while making sure to get across the essential emotions of a situation that make these comics worth reading.

The Index #4, by Caitlin Cass. Cass's deeply introspective series about insignificance, meaning and knowledge has now taken a firm turn into the realm of fantasy. After raising the specter of indexer Paul Otlet and zipping everyone to a fairly intact library of Alexandria, Diogenes wanders into the proceedings of this issue. He's the antithesis of Otlet, who spends his time with words and writings; Diogenes viewed anything less than a total lifestyle commitment to one's ideas as a kind of inauthentic living. As the cast of this comic has expanded, Cass has juggled a new character into every issue to likewise expand the nature of the ideas at work. One of the leads, Susan, kept blank cards because their potentiality and nothingness comforted her equally, balancing her own sense of nothingness.  When the other lead, John, started writing ideas on them willy-nilly it was as a way of rejecting his former career as a graduate student trying to get words to do his bidding. Otlet's index of ideas was the impossible task of trying to categorize all universal knowledge using a finite and clumsy set-up. Cass is careful to keep the non-apparitions in the story close to their somatic roots, giving them hunger and restlessness as they drift away from the performative spaces of the ghosts. This was a fascinating issue that betrays no particular allegiance to any of these points of view, which is what makes it so interesting. Her drawings are functional if unremarkable, sloppily but accurately getting across her points of view quickly and directly.

Minicomics Round-Up: White, Drawdoer, Gamboa, Enrico, Cass, Wiedeman

We Will Remain, by Andrew White.The theme of this comic is the journey. Some of these journeys were to a particular geographical location, some to states of being, and others concern journeys through time around a single object. A graduate of the Frank Santoro course, White uses the grid to interesting effect in several different ways. In "The Deep End", a story of a young boy watching an older woman swim at a public swimming pool, he uses a strict nine-panel grid. Every center grid is an action panel--usually the woman swimming, or leaving a wake, or emerging from water. On page three of the story, White deviates from this with a four panel grid on the second tier of the page: the middle of the page summarizes the action of the story as noted in the captions on either side of these silent images: "She swims. He watches." Those two center images set up the dynamic for the rest of the story, a relationship whose motives are deliberately vague. The final page is a kind of metaphor for the boy's thoughts and fantasies mirroring hers: a crossover into adulthood. White uses a sort of smudged pencil effect in this story that's meant to simulate the murkiness of being underwater.

"Travel" is a narrative about an astronaut dematerializing across space, except that we only see what is being seen on the journey: stars, Kirby effects, etc. The actual character drops away, other than his narrative captions. Some of the images are close to abstractions, but they are given context by the reader's understanding of the story. "As Leaves Change Color" superimposes loosely-rendered but inked figures over smudgy penciled backgrounds, an effect that places our eye on the characters as they are both part of but removed from their environments. This effect is useful, as the story is about a woman feeling displaced after an accident who discovers a hidden garden. The story flips back and forth in time, as we discover that there's someone in the woman's life steering her toward recovery (including magically creating the garden) who is also trying to repair the woman's relationship with her brother. The title story returns to that nine-panel grid and the technique of superimposed inked figures over a lighter background. This time, however, the background image takes up the entire page, with the figures operating through time and space in the grid. It's a clever technique that tells the story of a single, unusual space through thousands of years. When a statue is built out of the area's rock, it has the effect of inspiring devotion, awe and eventually madness. Without explaining the hows and whys of the statue, White gets across the message that something about the area inspires a connection to this concept of an eternal thing that one may as well call god. Every one of these journeys that White depicts is a mysterious one, though one that each adventurer feels inexplicably and inexorably drawn to. In this Retrofit comic, White neatly ties together a number of complex ideas while leaving the essentially meaning of each story up to the reader, though he is careful to leave many clues.

Miss Lonely Hearts 2, by Gabrielle Gamboa . This second issue of Gamboa's adaptation of the 1931 novel by Nathanael West doesn't dip into the same kind of cartoony well as the first issue did. Instead, this issue features two stories dealing with the main character's existential despair as it relates to his belief in Christ. As the story begins, the Miss Lonelyhearts writer is despondent from reading letters from the desperate all day long and retires to a speakeasy after work, where he is accosted by a dandy friend of his who won't stop talking about all sorts of nonsense, which is clearly what Miss Lonelyhearts craved. A bizarre tableau follows, as the dandy engages his girlfriend and Miss Lonelyhearts in some hilarious babble about religion (a constant running throughline in the series), carnal concerns and how one man was using an adding machine as a means of prayer for a man condemned to be executed. The second story involves MLH in bed, praying to his crucifix and chanting "Jesus Christ", having a dream about a drunken collegiate romp with a pair of Humpty-Dumpties that leads to sacrificing a lamb. With all of its crazy events, the second chapter was far more interesting to look at than the first, despite Gamboa's best efforts to use a number of different shading effects to draw in the reader's eye. In both chapters, it starts to become clear that MLH has an uneasy relationship with the rest of humanity. He wants to be able to love all people but finds them just too much to bear. He wishes to be carefree and hedonistic but is weighed down by his own sense of guilt and propriety. Even in his own dreams, a day of drunken fun turns into a gruesome animal sacrifice, as MLH is forced to batter the lamb's head in with a rock: MLH feels so guilty about his desires that he imagines that he's killing Jesus' stand-in himself. Gamboa's figures are a little stiff at times and her panel-to-panel narrative flow can be a little creaky, but she's a solid storyteller overall who's taking a piece that's obviously difficult to translate into comics and bringing a lot of her own personal style to the task, which I hope she's able to complete.

Jam In The Band 3, #3, by Robin Enrico. Enrico is starting to veer toward the conclusion of this series and finally gives the reader a bit of hope with regard to Bianca, the former lead singer of the band Pitch Girl, whose adventures comprised the first two volumes of this series.What this comic is really about and what the series has really become is a story about writer's block and the dark places that paralysis can lead to, as well as growing older and growing up (which aren't necessarily the same thing). If the second volume of the book was about the things that distract from the pure joy of creating and the camaraderie that creates, the third volume is about rediscovering the joy of simply making music with your friends as a fun thing to do, as opposed to be rich and famous. The parallels with making comics are so obvious that I don't think I need to draw them out. The other former Pitch Girl bandmates Tiara and Corbin were able to rediscover that simple sense of joy together in their new projects, something that Bianca was able to rediscover in this issue, even as her friends were getting married and having children. Enrico wisely depicts each of these decisions as trade-offs in terms of how one's freedom becomes limited by marriage and children but how much can be gained in the process. Enrico's greatest character, hedonist musician/philosopher Becky Vice, spells all of this out pretty clearly as she accepts Bianca because they've shared the same kind of despair and the same disinterest in family. I'll be curious to see where Bianca ends up in the final issue.

The Lettuce Girl #3, by Sophia Wiedeman. Wiedeman reminds me a bit of Julia Gfrorer in the way she reimagines fairy tales in a wider cultural context. The third issue of this new take on the story of Rapunzel (grown in a lettuce patch by a witch) adds in another element: the story of Hansel and Gretel. The girl in question finally escapes from her tower, only to find the warnings of her "mother' to be surprisingly accurate: the world is a cold, dark and dangerous place. Each issue of the series is slowly paced, as Wiedeman is interested in establishing place and mood in great detail. Wiedeman's rendering has become quite good; her characters remain slightly blank and cartoony in the best sense, while her backgrounds have become lush and dense, with lots of crosshatching acting as a counter-balance to the simplicity of her character's line. There's a certain grimness to this story about the darker side of motherhood that makes one wonder about the ultimate fate of these characters. The witch literally creates her children for sinister ends, yet raises and nurtures them up to a point. Is she evil, selfish or merely controlling? Wiedeman adds further complexity to this question by introducing the carnivorous witch who treats the girl sweetly and feeds her sweets in order to fatten her up for her oven. It's hard to tell just where Wiedeman is going to ultimately take this story, but the richness of her storytelling and unsettling imagery make this a consistently intriguing read.

The Index #3, The Text, The Salon, by Caitlin Cass. The Text expands upon Cass's life-long obsession with and fear of texts. In this mini, she explores the history of language and her uneasy relationship with its dogmatic control over meaning. What something "really" means and what it meant to be an informed person were questions that vexed her so fiercely that she went to St. John's College, where the "Great Books" of the Western World are taught in their original form. It's interesting that her drawings (and even her spelling, something else she rails against as a dogmatic concept) are so fuzzy and tossed-off; it's like comics became her escape hatch from this curse of needing to conform to the reality of the text as she understood it. Comics are a kind of way of communicating at a more basic, intuitive and even poetic level (at times), though Cass' own comics's writing style tends to be more direct rather than poetic.

Despite her discomfort with the text, she is fascinated by ideas and thinkers in particular. The Salon is a spread of famous thinkers and writers all trying to come to terms with what they have created and achieve immortality in the own ways and with varying degrees of success. Each thinker is in their own (literal) frame on this oversized, cardstock  For example, Adam Smith is despondent looking upon his works, because he realized "that no one ever read past the first chapter of his book", and he sees capitalism run amok. Isaac Newton used only "ink and geometry" to "create a ladder to infinity". Cass cleverly draws the thinkers as men dealing with ink, books, words and the detritus of ideas; it's one of her best pieces.

I have mixed feelings regarding the third issue of The Index.I love this series as a crazy mix of ideas, with the text-phobic nature of Susan clashing with the need to order and index everything that John possesses. I enjoyed the side trips the series takes and how it introduced the index writer Otlet into the cast of characters, summoning him from a fire as they all mused about the library at Alexandria. Cass notes how the library became more useless the more information that was stuffed into it, as there was little regard as to the quality of that information. The problem I had with this issue in particular is that Cass overstuffed it with ideas, characters, and information; there's hardly any room for the reader to breathe. There's also the problem of the drawing itself; while Cass is undeniably improving as a draftsman, she's over-rendering too many of her pages when a more simple approach might have been more appropriate. Her lettering and word balloon placement also drive me crazy at times, as words are squeezed into balloons and sometimes spill out. It doesn't seem to be a deliberate effect (if it is, it's distracting). The real issue I had is that after three issues, I'm starting to lose track of the characters qua characters, as opposed to mouthpieces for certain states of mind. These is the first story of hers that I've read with original and fictional characters, and it seems like she's still trying to find the right balance between concept and character. That said, she continues to take the ideas of the series in fascinating directions.


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Be The Love, Be The Comics, Buck, and Drawdoer's Best American Comics 2013, by Jon Drawdoer. This large array of comics are mostly of the gag variety. Be The Comics is a series of gag strips headlined by the title story, which is a tongue-in-cheek exploration of why one should become a cartoonist. It should be said up front that Drawdoer is not a great draftsman and few of his jokes land because of his visual sense. However, he can draw well enough to tell a story and shape his jokes, which makes lines like "Not many people know this, but every so often, when they reach a certain age, Los Bros [Hernandez] hold open auditions for a new brother" really stand out. Drawdoer likes drawing distinctions between high and low, like making a joke about pubic hair with regard to Downton Abbey. Buck is a different look at the 1980s TV version of Buck Rogers interpolated with The Shining; there are some decent gags here, but the crudity of the work distracts from the references he's trying to get the audience to understand. Be The Love #1 saw Drawdoer start to refine his line a bit, trying different line weights and textures in different stories. He also continues a story begun in Be The Comics about "Chubby Meltdowns": the phenomenon wherein children have a meltdown when children have Chubby Checker's music taken away from them. There's also a hilarious strip about being on the wrong side of history throughout history. The Chubby Checker saga is continued in Best American Comics, as Drawdoer also makes an extended pun on the awful movie B.A.P.S., with B.A.P.S.tist churches proliferating and sermons ending with statements like "We must all serve the plot!". This issue really starts to get impressively self-reflexive and complex, as the cultural references start warping into something other than simple and cheap gags. He's starting to get at something here, but his ambition is still outstripping his ability in terms of what he wants to depict on the page. That said, he's come a long way in a short period of time, especially since he seems to be publishing a minicomic a month.

Catching Up With Caitlin Cass

Caitlin Cass continues to crank out comics inspired by the life of the mind. Her Postal Constituency and its schedule means that something comes a reader's way every couple of months, even if it's not directly related to the story at hand. She's doing her first extended series, called The Index, which is a sort of synthesis of the ideas she's presented in her other comics in the context of a relationship. The story is about a man and a woman living together (platonically, the reader is to assume). She has vast amounts of blank index cards that she keeps as a soothing reminder of her own insignificance. He starts to fill them out because it reminds him of his own inability to finish anything. The second issue finds him soothing himself by filling the cards with anything; the content is irrelevant because his project is to fill them with everything. Thus, any content at all counts. She is driven crazy by her nice white cards suddenly being filled up and strikes back by giving him a card telling the story of Paul Otlet, a functionary who seized upon the idea of coming up with an organizational system of Everything, spending his time answering questions about organization and indices.

Cass depicts that idea as a kind of virus that infects the man's thinking, making him start to organize his index cards. While she hoped this would deter him from continuing, he simply transfers the idea from a sort of nihilistic gathering of information to his own model of his consciousness. Cass reminds us in a card that's Volume 3, #10 of the Constituency that we are stuck between the infinitely small and infinitely large; a gigantic fulcrum point experienced by every individual. It's titled "Lest We Forget" and also refers back to the man's project as hopeless. Of course, the very hopelessness of the project is why he draws comfort from it. Knowing that he could never draw near to finishing it means he won't ever have to confront his inability to finish anything. Like Xeno, he's never able to let his arrow fly from bow to target, seeing that gulf as an infinite divide. That's why the woman is content to stupidly gaze into the infinite, not worrying that her life is not an exceptional one because no experience is exceptional in the face of the infinite."Infinite Regress", #9 of the Constituency, is a construction where the reader is asked to tape together the comic in such a way that it forms a cuboid object. Where one starts and where one ends is arbitrary once the comic is read, but it addresses what is not spoken of in the comic: how the two relate to each other as humans and how their mutual decisions to overintellectualize their daily lives serves as an infinite buffer to emotions.

Continuing on that theme in the book of etchings Contribution, Cass' art is at her most beautiful. Generally, her figure drawing is functional at best, but she really went out of her way to create something beautiful here. This silent story features familiar imagery for Cass: academics working in primordial muck and ooze in an effort to create new ideas or at least crank out work. It's a hellish factory grind of a world that has a number of casualties, yet the nimble of mind can persist and break free. It's a fascinating comic because Cass is clearly as suspicious of her background wherein she was taught directly from the Great Books of the Western World as she is taken by it. Anyone who's spent time in grad school knows that the "school" part is a small component of the overall grind. As an artist, Cass is getting better as she continues to simplify her line and concentrate on making individual images come alive. The Index is a project worthy of her extended time and attention, and I suspect she'll be a different artist when she comes out the other side.

Minicomics Round-Up: Willberg, Vasile, Shiveley, Stiner, White, Cass, Gustavson/Peck

Trackrabbit #5, by Geoff Vasile. Jesse Reklaw has long listed this series as one of his favorites, and this crazy first issue that I read does not disappoint. Subtitled "Guy and Kylie's Tiny Dinosaurs", it posits a slightly different America where the nightmarish idea of Sarah Palin as president has come to pass, forcing a geneticist named Guy out of a job. Guy has a bone-dry sense of humor and a sense of ethics that is gray at best, making his new job as head of a home for developmentally disabled adults all the more hilarious a match. Paired up with a hippie caretaker named Kylie, his main conflict in the issue is to come up with a way of deflecting the hatred the residents of the home aim at him after he puts their pet dog outside, leading to its death at the hands of a couple of deranged teenaged kids. Guy's background as a geneticist mixed, his access to a lab and the residents' need for pets inspires him to create the titular tiny dinosaurs, which the residents name things like "Batman", "Santa Claus" and "Paul Bunyan". Vasile's clear line and lack of fussiness in designing his pages allows him to put the pieces he builds into play with some darkly comic results. For example, the scene where the residents take the dinosaurs (which are incredibly cute, yet obviously dangerous) out for a walk results in one dinosaur eating a cloth flower off of a little girl's dress, a triceratops chasing a panicked dog, and a pteranodon munching on someone's kite.

When Guy finally has to get rid of the dinosaurs, his solution (breeding a flesh-hungry mini-T-Rex) is as demented as it is brilliant, though this leads to his eventual exit from the home. In Vasile's world, life and death come at a pretty cheap price, as does loyalty, considering that Guy winds up being forced to work for the government in order to breed more tiny dinosaurs for military purposes. Just as cold is Guy's dismissal of the highly deluded Kylie, who had fallen in love with the highly unavailable Guy (as he hints: "Don't ask, don't tell") and is brushed aside. The essence of Vasile's work is its light-hearted nature, even when it touches on violence and morally questionable acts. None of the characters in the book are meant to be especially likeable or easy to identify with, but that constant deflection of audience identification is what gives this book its comedic charge. I wasn't crazy about Vasile's slightly bland character design, but I suspect that choice was made in part to point the reader toward the real stars of the issue in terms of pure drawing: the dinosaurs. They were just exquisitely drawn and a constant source of both action and sight gagsin a comic whose humor otherwise was either dry bon mots from Guy or else a broad send-up of crunchy-types in Kyle.

A Guide To Injury Prevention For Cartoonists, by Kriota Willberg. Willberg is a professional massage therapist as well as an artist and teacher. This 56-page mini is frankly a public service for all cartoonists, given the way that it not only addresses all of the ways in which cartooning is not only debilitating because it's a sedentary activity, it's harmful because it can encourage poor posture and muscle damage. On top of that, Willberg provides a battery of stretches and muscle-strengthening exercises designed specifically for cartoonists and even provides a couple of sample routines that artists might follow. The mini is obviously copiously illustrated with her own clean-line cartoons, many of which are quite funny. That's especially true of the running motif of a cartoonist working til her arm falls off. Even as a non-cartoonist, there were bits of the mini that made me check my posture and how I stretched my muscles; she notes that improper care of one's muscles can literally shrink a person down as muscles shrink. I'd especially recommend this mini to young artists who are just starting to develop their work habits that will no doubt follow them for life. They may well be less likely to listen to pain or go to doctors, so the advice given in this comic could be quite important for a long time. Willberg's key point to cartoonists is to think of themselves as athletes and to train as athletes, given that they are involved in a very specific kind of intense physical activity on a daily basis. That's a simple but effective technique in getting artists (many of whom lead very interior lives) to think of their bodies before they start thinking about their pages.

March 29, 1912, by Jordan Shiveley. The date is the giveaway on this comic: it's about the end of the ill-fated Robert Scott expedition in the Antarctic. It's quite literally about the end, as Shiveley provides clues about the desperation of the four men in this crew: the cans of food were all eaten, the bones of whatever small animals they could capture are long picked-over, and the inadequate tents reveal that most of the party is dead. The last member (presumably Scott himself) desperately trudges out into the snow before keeling over, as the unforgiving night falls on him, only to reveal the haunting beauty of the aurora australis. This is a slight yet beautiful-looking little comic, done in landscape to accentuate the hugeness and hopelessness of Scott's quest.

Underwater Crystal Zone, by Daniel Thing Stiner. This is a small collection of playfully psychedelic comics originally published on the web whose look is somewhere between Skip Williamson and Fort Thunder. That is, the figures in this book are clearly designed if somewhat loopy-looking, with lots of long and exaggerated limbs and bizarre character designs, but the comic itself is very much an exploration of environment for its own sake. The taste that we get in this mini features a lot of clean and attractively-designed characters going about their business: finding underwater gems, playing music, building "reindeer machiens", and interacting with Mayan gods from the past/future. The comic feels more like a variation on a theme than something truly original, but that variation is still enjoyable.

The Index #1, by Caitlin Cass. Cass, best known for her Great Moments In Western Civilization Postal Consituent, takes a stab at long-form narrative with this first issue. There are certainly traces of her Great Books-inspired series to be found here in the story of two people whose pathology is that there's nothing wrong with them. Susan's totally bland life devoid of conflict was only given comfort thanks to buying several thousand blank index cards; for her, they represented the hopes and struggles of everyone who had hopes and struggles--she could project the lives of others on them. Her ex-grad school boyfriend John was crippled with the inability to finish any endeavor, getting 75 pages into his dissertation before he realized he had no thesis, and so he set out to fill up the cards. That's where the issue ends, setting up a non-conflict conflict for two passive-aggressive individuals who might well have thrived if they simply had a conflict that needed to be overcome and resolved to completion. The couple is essentially reduced to the philosopher's dream of living a life of the mind, but neither has anything to say or anything to think, until their own conflict begins. It never even occurred to them to create their own chaos as a way of alleviating boredom until John felt compelled to do so. Cass' line continues to improve, which is crucial given the way she relies so much on facial expressions in this comic. She still has a way to go to truly refine her line to the point where its crispness would be a perfect match for her dry, refined storytelling tendencies, but she's getting there. I'll be curious to see just how far she takes this series.

Territory, by Andrew White.White, an artist whose work I know through working with Brian John Mitchell's Silber comics, drew this mini working with Frank Santoro's comics correspondence course, and White credits Santoro as the editor. It's got Santoro's influence all over it mainly through the way White uses color (and color contrasts in particular) to drive both the story narrative and emotional narrative. This 16-page story is very simple but also completely enigmatic: a young man goes off to the woods under false pretenses, leaving behind his partner. He's there to play an unspecified strategy game against an unseen opponent, something he keeps hidden from his partner for unknown reasons. The comic is told using a time-fractured scheme, something that is only revealed with the appearance of a beard on his chin. Blue in the story represents the tether he has with his partner; her scenes are done entirely in blue and he's colored in blue when he's talking to her on the phone. Red represents the game, fire, danger and alienation. Yellow is a neutral color here, and the hidden connector to the sight of the forest as it actually might look, since yellow and blue combined make green. The title of the book refers to territory won and lost during and because of the game, as he makes a phone call to her in a panel where the phone keypad looks like the game board. The man, talking out loud to his unknown opponent, at one point understands that his mere appearance there was part of a larger game that he played into in order to try to make some kind of sense out of his life. White leaves it vague as to whether he is able to truly leave the game and go back to his partner, or if the moves he's made have trapped him forever.

Mogman, Prologue and Chapter 1-3, by Henry Gustavson and Tyler Peck. This is a very odd comic that flirts with horror but instead is simply enigmatic and strange. It follows a man with a disfigured face who lives in an abandoned factory with a Frankenstein doll that talks to him and what he does with his night. Early on, the reader's perspective is that of a new security guard at the factory, who is frightened by the monstrous presence of the man before realizing and understanding that while enigmatic, he seems essentially harmless. After the guard goes away, the man and the doll have an extended argument, capped by the man going out for a walk and seeing what sort of reactions he might get. There's a funny scene where he silently walks up to a woman outside her house, ignores her questions and then simply says "Do you know what it feels like to die?" before she goes back into her house.  Later, he admonishes himself for saying something so dumb--the monster having second thoughts. The third issue ends with him being assaulted and left on the ground by a homeless man, who steals the doll. This is a slowly unfolding comic that is extremely heavy on atmosphere, shadows, wrinkles, and thick lines in general. The artists aren't afraid to go off on long, strange visual tangents, like the man staring at his hand and causing it to break up into first a cubist form and then an abstract one. The artists list Bernie Wrightson as an influence and one can see them try to create an almost Gothic atmosphere for a story that otherwise feels quite modern and even quotidian, despite its strange trappings. At the same time, each issue does significantly advance the story, even if the story itself still seems rather shapeless. I have no idea where this is going, which in itself is intriguing.

New Comics From Caitlin Cass

One of the common threads in Caitlin Cass's Great Moments In Western Civilization Postal Constituent series is a fascination with failure. The dominant narrative of Western civilization is one of progress through time, a sense that things get ever better as one success leads to another. Cass concerns herself instead with the ways in which the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge was either met by utter indifference or total disaster. In this, her third volume of minicomics dealing with famous historical, literary, scientific and philosophical figures, Cass depicts the struggle to obtain knowledge as a battle that is not always won, nor is a successful outcome necessarily desirable. With an increasingly expressive but still occasionally over-fussy line, Cass' visual imagination explodes off the page with a variety of clever designs for her ideas.

Volume 3, #2 is "Nabokov's Butterflies", a fascinating account of the author's obsession with the colorful insects. Cass notes, in a series of lovingly-rendered and bright images, that the author loved them because of their mimicry markings that went beyond natural selection into pure beauty, the sort of beauty that only a human mind could appreciate. That capacity for beauty in a crazy world gave him a tether of sanity, leading him to a compulsion to study and understand them as a scientist might. Of course, his methods were old-fashioned and his results largely ignored, even as he became a literary superstar. He never achieved the respect he sought from the scientific community, despite a number of unique insights that later received some notice after his death.

#4, "A Brief History of Failure", is a clever folding comic that can be read from the top down or the bottom up. It's a parody of the nation of "Western progress", noting how opposable thumbs led to opening Pandora's Box, how the writings of a saint led to a bloody war, to how the printing press disseminated information but also spread "fanaticism at an alarming rate". From the beginning of civilization, our technology has outstripped our capacity to handle it without it leading to further pointless violence. The "tower of history" Cass constructs here teeters and tilts periously, and it's topped by the ultimate instrument of pure rationality: the guillotine.

Finally, issue #3 is "Patterns and the Abyss". It's an allegorical comic about a couple of writers who manage to pull themselves up out of the abyss thanks to the strength of their ideas literally becoming objects they can hold on to and climb upon. They are of course doomed to be knocked back down into the abyss by a bullying intellectual force. Battles can be won for knowledge, but the war goes ever on. This is the one story where I thought Cass' chops were not up to the task of clearly illustrating her ideas in a dynamic fashion. The line is too scribbly and many of the images look smudged, especially when she introduces color. Still, it's a clever idea and the cardstock the comic is printed on really allows the screenprinting to pop. They are certainly my favorite comics about philosophy, and one can sense that Cass will slowly find her way to the style that works best for her soon.

Checking In With Caitlin Cass

Caitlin Cass is a young cartoonist mining territory not unlike that of Kate Beaton. In my review of some comics of hers from 2010, I noted that "As she figures out her style, her already-sharp wit will be better served by clearer, more dynamic and simpler images." It's clear that this is precisely what she has done in her most recent work, part of a series of minicomics she sends out in the mail. (The series is called "Great Moments In Western Civilization Postal Constituent"). Design and details like lettering have become much crisper, more powerful and fluid. Her wit remains intact, but she's directing that in a more coherent fashion as well. Beaton's work is primarily comedic, using her knowledge of history and literature as a framework for jokes. While humor is also an important element of Cass' work, it's frequently more subdued and less gag-oriented. It's clear that she's still steeped in her unusual corner of academic obsessions, which is not surprising considering her training at St John's College, an institution devoted to studying the Great Books of the Western World.


What Cass learned from her earlier comics is that it's not enough to simply make references to philosophers and hope the reader gets something out of it. She learned to synthesize her particular and personal ruminations regarding the work of certain thinkers with a visual approach that's engaging for the reader and fairly fully-realized. Take V2 #12 of the Postal Constituent; it's all about Friedrich Nietzsche. This was done on cardstock with duo-tone blues. That's eye-catching on its own, but her character design is simple and striking. The story focuses on Nietzsche's last days, when he was faced with the logical endpoint of his philosophy and lived it all the way through. Claiming "I am god. This farce is my creation." is as close as possible a bridge between what would become existentialism and humanism, yet that path led to madness. Feeling oneself responsible for all of the evils of the world is the logical extreme for Nietzsche's particular brand of megalomania.



"A Thing About Things" (V2, #4), is a huge illustration on a single sheet of paper that also unfolds. It evokes a certain 19th century feel in terms of the way the illustration is carefully designed, constructed and labeled. It's a quasi-farcical history of "things" and man's relationship to them. Cass still doesn't quite have the chops to pull off the complexity of this illustration (her drafting skills are a little wobbly), but it's an ambitious attempt. "Relics" (V2, #1) is a more personal story about the hermeneutics of discovering a shard from a plate as a child. It was found at the site of the first building in her town, and the mere possession of it led to Cass creating creating connections between the shard and its potential history and ramifications. The shard can only be understood in terms of its larger historical context, but that history is brought to life but discovering the artifact. One can see the leap Cass made as an artist between this issue and later issues, both in terms of simple drawing ability and the ambitiousness of her design.



Finally, "The Arabian Babbler" (V2, #8) is a standard minicomic distinguished by some striking illustrations and the boldness of her lettering style. This is the only one of the comics here that deals explicitly with another one of her interests, which is the history of science. That particular field of study is closely linked to philosophy because it is based so heavily on theory, as the works of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper demonstrate. This comic is a more light-hearted but no less pointed critique of the ways in which science can become rigid and its conclusions applied in misguided ways that can be harmful. In it, a scientist comes to certain conclusions about human nature because of a species of bird that gave things to other birds for no good reason. He concluded (certainly not the first conclusion sound reached with a faulty premise) that altruism was counter-evolutionary and we should stop doing it--until he observed a bird stealing something. He experienced not so much a paradigm shift as a paradigm shattering. Cass's drawings of birds make this a distinctive and beautiful comic, especially in the way she combines word and image. Cass is starting to become an artist well worth taking notice of, and I'm excited at the possibilities of a longer-form work from her at some point.