Gag Comic Round-Up: Garrison, Stewart, Staveley, Canini/Baxter

Onion Puss #1, by Chris Garrison. The artist behind Jakey The Jerk comes up with another predictable but solid series of jokes surroundingg its bulbous, off-putting titular hero. Garrison's agreeably cartoony style is well-suited for his gags and his onion-faced main character. He's a compendium of socially awkward, offensive tics who is nonetheless a sort of innocent in the face of his abiding crush on a skinny redhead named Priscilla. The short gags featuring OP stalking her in a video store and using offensive language while trying to mirror her evangelism were OK, but the real attraction in this issue is the long story "Ghost of a Chance". It's an extended riff on "Ghost Hunters" type-nonsense, with OP being treated as a sort of loveable scamp who winds up being seduced by a real ghost and saved by a buxom blonde who tries to overlook his many, many faults by saying "We'll have to work on that". When they set up a date at the end and she says something incredibly racist, OP can only say "We'll have to work on that." Garrison is an assured draftsman who uses an exaggerated line to great effect, and the result is a solid, well-crafted joke comic.The premise of the strip and the general nature of the jokes are both silly to the point of fluff, so it's a credit to his skill that he makes this material work as well as it does.

Odd Comics #1-2, by Scott Stewart. Stewart is an accomplished style mimic who pays tribute to a deep roster of cartoonists in this series of gags, homages, puns, eye-pops and other such silliness. Early R.Crumb is his most indelible influence, especially in the series of ridiculous puns in his "Euripedes Pants" stories. Of course, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's MAD is another stated influence in bits like "The Halfway House On Haunted Hill", a very funny story that puts monsters in therapeutic settings. In a more modern context, Stewart reminds me of a slightly less accomplished version of Roger Langridge. His line isn't as clean nor his mimicry as impeccable, but he shares Langridge's sheer relentlessness on the page. Hardly a panel goes by without at least three different jokes, funny drawings or puns in it. He goes deep in his homages and parodies, with "The Moon-Faced Monarch of Matzohville" being a take-off on George Carlson's "Pie-Faced Prince of Old Pretzelburg". It works as homage, but like everything Stewart does, is still very much in his own straightforward, joke-soaked style.

Issue #2 features a long homage to the characters in the comic-book based film from the 1950s, Artists and Models. It includes Stewart's imagining of the ultra-violent character shown in the movie and even includes an Alter-Ego style interview with the artist behind the strip (played in the film by Dean Martin, hence Stewart throws down tons of Martin & Lewis references in the story). While most of the stories center around getting to punchlines (as "Bad Jokes for English Majors" and "Bad Jokes for Philosophy Majors" might indicate), there's also an enigmatic, extended homage to Moebius by way of Shelley. Seeing Stewart strip down his line to a sparse minimum was interesting after seeing him go big and broad for everything else he does. The story seemed to me to be an ode to the poem "Ozymandias", only the explorer in the desert this time has the opportunity to interact with the monument, deeming it wise to simply walk away in the end. Stewart is not an innovator as a humorist; everything here feels like it's directly linked to a vast network of influences. This is not to say that these comics aren't entertaining or well-crafted. Indeed, there's a great deal of pure pleasure to be gained from looking at his drawings and connecting the dots to his many and often obscure references. I'd gladly read another issue of this comic, if only to see what Stewart is keen to mine next.

Anxious Robot Funnies #1-2, Mitt Romney Meets James Brown, by Jotham Staveley. Staveley is a relative newcomer to comics, but I find his energy and approach to be quite appealing, and he shows great promise as an artist whose sense of humor resides between pitch-black and absurd. His shtick is drawing robots and monsters in a crude, slightly over-rendered style and having them discuss issues that range from the banal to the emotional. "Battle To The Death", for example, is a conversation about one guy telling another guy that he's not going to invite him over to Thanksgiving because he and his wife are keeping it low-key. The action, however,  is that of a man battling a sort of shadowy monster in a brutal fistfight. The second issue sees the titular anxious robot putting out a tip jar for his trumpet busking performance, only to be interrupted by a male and female giant monster couple getting into a fight, then wrecking the city, then getting disintegrated by a giant robot. Staveley makes the intensity of his rendering work for him even if it lacks clarity at times, thanks to the sheer ridiculousness of what he's drawing as well as the simplicity of his figures. His Romney/JB comic is very funny, with the Godfather coming back the dead ("I'm just laying low") to slap Romney around and pound some sense into him. Staveley clearly knows his JB mythology and captures his iconic, charismatic presence. These minis are all very short (I believe they were the product of a workshop at the Center for Cartoon Studies), but it's obvious that Staveley already has a voice and style all his own; all he needs from here on out is to refine them. His short, untitled booklet of sketches (with CD!) reveals an artist bursting with ideas.

Drunken Cat Comics Anniversary and Ruffians 1-7, by Brian Canini and Derek Baxter. Canini (with occasional writing partner Baxter) has been drawing for over eleven years, and the Drunken Cat comic collects representative work from this period. Ruffians is a heavily Dave Sim-influenced series about funny animal mob hitmen, with a gorilla framing a short bear that wears boxing gloves. Neither held much interest for me; it all seemed to be material that I've seen better-written and better-drawn elsewhere. The strip about the Devil going to his high school reunion felt like a paint-by-numbers affair, as the jokes were easy to predict from beginning to end. Ruffians is an obvious labor of love whose tone is discordant from the very beginning. Like Sim's Cerebus, only a couple of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, which makes following the action a bit strange because it's almost entirely devoid of humor. Indeed, the mob and prison cliches feel pretty rote, though there are a few interesting twists and turns (like the main character, Scar, getting his Kilgore Trout moment when he meets his creator in a fumetti dream sequence). Canini's storytelling lacks clarity and style and just looks messy. Even his more recent work has a simple, bland quality that serves to move the story along and little else. His work does look better in color on his website, however.

From Web to Print: Tyrell, Poland, Garrison, Stipetic

Today's column will focus in on book collections of a variety of webcomics, from gags to continuing series.

Gary #1 and #2, by Tyrell Cannon. This is a comic told from the point of view of the memories of Gary Ridgway, the "Green River Killer". The comic is told without other commentary or judgment, letting the images and memories speak for themselves. Cannon's essential point here is that while Ridgway was a serial killer, he also carried out a normal routine and engaged in what seemed to be loving relationships. He was a divorced father who spent time with his son, though it's strongly implied that their relationship wasn't exactly close. He remarried to a woman who was clearly in love with him, possibly because she was drwn to the fact that he was quiet and unassuming while she had a big and loud personality. Cannon doesn't speculate as to what led Ridgway to brutally rape and murder prostitutes and then dump their bodies by the river. Instead, he implies that Ridgway was always filled with this enormous rage connected to what he saw as a series of humiliations, a rage that he sublimated without finding proper release. Killing provided some kind of bizarre release for him, a release he didn't find anywhere else, and that seems to be the key to his pathology. As a psychopath, he could fake having feelings and acting like a relatively normal human being, but it seems clear that he never actually felt these things in actuality. Cannon does seem to say that at certain points, the psychosis was more pronounced than at other times. He may well have experienced something approaching actual happiness in being with his second wife, but the urge to kill never truly receded. Cannon is unflinching in portraying violence in this comic, which is crucial because to shy away from it would tempt the reader into sympathizing with the book's main character. However, Cannon is also careful not to portray Ridgway as a monster or a super-villain or to make him an exciting character in any way, shape or form. He's a defective human being whose essential flaw was hard to detect. Whether that flaw was genetic or something caused him to snap is the question, because Cannon suggests that the line between human and predator can be surprisingly thin, and that it's not always easy to tell which is which. His realistic art is functional if plain, fitting squarely into his unsensationalistic approach in telling this story.

Robbie and Bobby, by Jason Poland. Poland's been drawing this "robot and his boy" for nearly a decade now, and the actual webcomic uses a variety of color and GIF effects to punch up his work. Lacking that in this collection of new comics and some archival material, Poland's cartooning just isn't strong enough to sustain an entire collection. His line is inconsistent from strip to strip, with some looking hastily scratched out and others more polished. In terms of the humor, the feeling that I couldn't shake was that Poland was trying too hard to be whimsical and charming, and I frequently found the strip to be grating. The bottom line is that too many punchlines were duds, and the promised warmth between the two characters seemed stilted and artificial. I didn't see either of them as real characters, but rather as simple joke-delivery devices, and their weren't enough good jokes. The one exception was the little girl nemesis of the boy Bobby; the strip inevitably got meaner when she was around, and that meanness seems to be Poland's strength as a writer.

Jakey The Jerk, by Chris Garrison. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this comic. Most "funny" webcomics tend to leave me cold, and the title of its original source material (Zoo Laffs) didn't fill me with a lot of confidence. However, Garrison is a talented cartoonist with strong fundamentals, and he really knows how to draw a funny picture as well as design a memorable character. I see a little of Sergio Aragonnesin his character design, and like the master he has the ability to create funny images while maintaining solid composition as well as a sense of gesture and character interaction. This is also a cleverly-written comic, featuring a muscular and tempestuous little ram trying to score with women and failing because of his absurd displays of machismo, until getting a gig with a famous folk singer who wants to go on a mountain hike. This is the best story in this collection of shorts, with some genuinely lovely cartooning complementing the jokes and the actual chemistry that these two have with each other. This is good solid, humor work that pays attention to both the craft of cartooning as well as the craft of humor that stays close to its premise and livens it up with a number of flourishes.

14 Nights, Volume 1, by Kristina Stipetic. This is truly a unique romance comic, and while there's other things at work other than romance, there's no question that this book is about a particular relationship. The reason why it works so well is that Stipetic takes her time in establishing the lead characters and their quirks, but she's careful not to simply make them walking piles of odd behaviors. There's a specificity about their personalities that goes a long way in creating vivid, memorable portraits of the main couple in question. The main character is a surly Russian immigrant named Nikita. He works at a lab but in many ways is dependent upon his sister. There's a wonderful combination of near-Asperberger's tone-deafness about him combined with a simple natural bluntness. He has a prosthetic hand, is overweight and is relentlessly sarcastic. Stipetic also embues him with a certain naive sweetness; this character is filled with anger but also has a lot of love to give. He breaks up with his boyfriend Danny, whose being closeted becomes a problem for the out-and-proud Nikita. At his job, he meets the quiet and unassuming Lucian and goads him into going out with him, despite a significant secret.

That secret is the heart of the series: Lucian does not want to have sex. He had bad experiences with it when he was married to a woman and is afraid to deal with it again even as a relatively out gay man. This book is about the initial meeting and courtship between the two characters, the angry fallout when Lucian tells Nikita about his disinterest in sex, and the messy way they manage to make up. The result is a first volume that tells a satisfying chunk of story with a lively, scratchy and occasionally grotesque line. The lumpy Nikita is a character that Stipetic obviously loves drawing, given the way his glasses droop down his nose, the way his teeth curl into smiles or snarls that are equally alarming, and the bold way he simply occupies space that's almost a challenge to anyone who dares approach him. Lucian is drawn constantly looking down or away, his angular face often hidden in shadow. There's a striking verisimilitude about this story, even given the unusual coupling and backgrounds of its leads, which is a tribute to Stipetic's ability to create a sense of time and place. Though it first appeared on the web, the comic looks great in print and very much looks like something designed to appear in a book, rather than simply collected in print. The book ends on a significant cliffhanger, with no real hints as to how it might be resolved, which adds a bit of poignancy to an introductory volume of comics.