Foxing Reprints #15: Oily Comics-- Stein, Zettwoch, Campbell, Runk

[Editor's note: this column first appeared two years ago, and the information about the grant below is no longer relevant.] 

In a bit of neat synchronicity, Chuck Forsman is seeking out a grant from Mission Main Street at precisely the same time I decided to write about his Oily Comics publishing concern for Mini-Sweep. This grant apparently gets decided by popular vote, so please click here (https://www.missionmainstreetgrants.com/business/detail/43895) to vote. Aside from being a talented cartoonist, Forsman has done impressive things with Oily. Most individual issues are just a dollar and are twelve pages long in traditional minicomics format. He's published a combination of well-known names and up-and-coming cartoonists, as well as more obscure favorites he deemed worthy of getting greater exposure.  October will be dedicated to taking a look at a number of Oily Comics.

Cut-Away Comics #1 and #2, by Dan Zettwoch. Zettwoch is a great example of a well-established cartoonist who was curious to take advantage of the Oily format for a short series. It's also fitting for Zettwoch, given his long history of self-publishing and a DIY point of view. A student of history and 19th century American history in particular, this comic follows a particular episode in the life of (as Zettwoch describes him) "woodsman/dandy/ornithologist" John James Audubon. He was fascinated in particular by a bird called the Chimney Swallow, and he discovered a huge, dead tree that served as the nest for hundreds of the birds. As always, Zettwoch is drawn to peculiar details of eccentric and inventive personalities, and Audubon certainly fit that bill on both counts. Zettwoch mixes his cartoony and exaggerated character design with his wonderfully precise cut-away diagrams of trees, the digestive system of swallows and lots of other information. It's a delightful examination of both a legendary figure in the field of ornithology as well as a clever series of solutions to finding out just how swallows lived in that tree. 

My Sincerest Apologies and Mrs. Connie Dutton, by Jessica Campbell. Campbell is a former employee of Drawn & Quarterly, and Forsman told me that she had a fantastic sense of humor. That's certainly on display in these two comics. My Sincerest Apologies is more a zine with pictures than a comic, but the lushness of her cursive script gives the zine a strong decorative quality with killer story-punchlines like "I'm sorry I told everyone that your new girlfriend is a child bride that you ordered off of the internet". The accompanying illustration is a google page with someone typing out the word "loneliness" on the screen. The "apologies" go ever further over the top in terms of both cruelty and ridiculousness.

Mrs. Connie Dutton's subtitle is "an adaptation of Spam". It's about a woman who goes to Nigeria after getting swindled out of money by a spammer and receives 1.5 million dollars from "Barrister George Alex of the Compensating Committee". Campbell's lettering her is a sort of fake digital font; it's all hand-lettered by made to look like a computer put it together. The writing has that same cadence, and her illustrations are wonderfully stiff. Once again, the Oily format is perfect for a short, punchy set of ideas that work best as individual objects. 

The Desk, by Leslie Stein. Stein is one of my favorite cartoonists, and I'm especially enjoying her more explicitly autobiographical stories about her childhood. The Desk is more of a brief, funny anecdote than something that evokes her usual themes of attempts at connection and continuous alienation. Yet, this story of her young autobio stand-in "Larry" building a reception desk in front of her room's doorway at home is just the sort of odd thing that young Larry is shown doing in Stein's other comics, especially as she cheerily says "Hello! Larry's room! Can I help you?" when someone approaches. This is all scuttled when she has to rush to the bathroom, though she puts away her components with a shrug and a smile. The tiny, three panel back-up strips featuring "Normal Folks" and "Weird Kid" are every bit as good, depicting the horror of banality and the wonders of kids being allowed to dance to the beats of their own drummers. Stein's character design is, as always, unique; her stippling technique is used sparingly but her eye for detail is astounding and key to establishing mood. 

Not A Horse Girl, by Marian Runk. ​It's hard to believe that this dense, warm and multi-layered comic is only twelve pages. The comic revolves around music and Runk's growing love of singing and playing the guitar, but she touches on her childhood, her personal relationships, her sexuality, her friendships, her attempts at songwriting and even throws in several funny anecdotes for good measure. She does more in twelve pages of memoir than most cartoonists do in a hundred. The repeated use of the phrase "buttery-soft" to describe chaps and later lingerie is both evocative and amusingly uncomfortable, especially with the wistful looks on the faces of the women recalling their items of clothing. Runk's line is simple but marvelously expressive, focusing mostly on facial expressions and the use of gesture. Runk's memories of her father (a symphony musician) not listening to any music around the house, going to weekly concerts and such as a force that shaped her relationship to music is recalled with no resentment but rather a sense of bemusement. The comic concludes with Runk writing her own song and sharing it with a fellow music-loving friend, with a URL provided to listen to it. 

Thirty Days of CCS #26: Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights 4

Awesome Sound is an anthology published by Sean Knickerbocker. The low-fi cover belies the beautiful contents within, which look like they were printed on a risograph. DW's endpapers, which forcefully push both text and image to the point of violent distortion, are fitting for a comic that's so visceral and unsettling. Dan Rinylo's "Beast" is told with an Ernie Bushmiller-style simplicity, as the young boy's face here is two big black dots for eyes, a black line for a nose and a mouth that goes from black line to black oval, depending on his emotions. Using a nine-panel grid after an initial splash page that establishes the boy at the edge of a forest, each page is interesting because the central panel is almost always a scene of stillness: we see the boy looking, see him smiling, see him in the middle of walking and then see him running from right to left when wild dogs start chasing him. That sets the story from amusing to frenetic, but the final middle panel is an image of an empty street--right before a wild dog who is chasing the boy is run over by a car. It's both dark and comedic, given the x over the dog's eye and the generally cartoony nature of the story, but the bright red blood on a page that's mostly black and white adds a level of terror to the proceedings.

Knickerbocker's "Do You Still Feel Alone?" begins with a brother and sister in the woods, on the run from something unseen. The way he throws the reader right into a chase scene propels the story right along, heightening its tension from the very beginning. That tension is ramped up when they are assaulted by a nude man, who is stabbed to death by the sister. Knickerbocker pulls back further, revealing that this is an island where a plane has crashed, its inhabitants reduced to life-and-death struggle. It's a brutal, unforgiving little tableau that has no pat ending, and the fact that it's drawn in that cartoony style reminiscent of Chuck Forsman and Sammy Harkham makes it all the more unsettling. Indeed, the later story where a young couple sets themselves on fire in a house (revealing a pentagram on the floor) is a sort of cousin to the sort of thing Forsman did in The End Of The Fucking World. Finally, Juan Fernadez's red ink two-pager is a perfect fit, as his scribbled-out faces go through a progression of consumption. This mini is short but every image packs a punch.

Can't Lose is an old-fashioned fanzine dedicated to the TV show Friday Night Lights. It's everything a fanzine should be: in-jokey, craft-conscious, and gently mocking in a reverent manner. "Coached" by superfan Melissa Mendes, this zine has an interesting sprinkling of well-known cartoonists. Popular topics include the Christian speed-metal band that the character Landry starts ("Crucifictorious"), the comically awful Billy, younger brother of lead character Tim (Henry Eudy does a fine job of pointing out just how weaselly he is while Nomi Kane posits a magical night the two share in the desert), and how doubters often come around to becoming obsessed with the show. Jon Shaw's "Friday Nightlife" speaks to this, as a character who mocks a couple mourning the last episode starts to watch it and eventually enters his own weird world of living out other, self-imagined seasons. Sam Spina actually made me laugh out loud in a strip where he and his wife are asked why South Carolinians are buying Texas beer, and they reply in unison "Texas forever". My favorite strips were Dan Zettwoch's hilarious story about Dillon getting routed because Saracen used photocopies from the playbook to hang up Crucifictorious flyers (lovingly designed and drawn by Zettwoch, of course) and Jeff Lok's tale of escalating terrible behavior being excused "They're good kids". Can't Lose even has a cut-out Tim Riggins paper doll. While bits of it might me mystifying to those in the dark, the premise is laid out clearly enough for the jokes to land.

Stranger Knights 4 was published, as always by Bill Volk. This light-hearted fantasy/sci-fi/superhero anthology has always been on the uneven and amateurish side. This issue is the first to look good from cover-to-cover, and each story is funny to boot. Volk's "Brega and Snurrd" sees him use a cleaned-up, simplified version of his line that emphasizes character expressiveness above all else. The story follows familiar Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy tropes, but it's really about the relationship between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Of course, the mother here is a bearded dwarf and her daughter is trying to pass as human at her wizarding school. When the mother demands the presence of her daughter for an adventure (ie, bonding session), tension arises in an amusing manner. This is a crisply-paced story that actually gets across real feelings in its fantasy context. I'd love to see more from these characters and their world. The Volk-written "Thousand Year Grudge" (drawn by Bryan Stone) is a denser, grittier story involving anthropomorphic animals, thievery, romances gone bad and multiple double-crosses. The thickness of Stone's line is coupled with cross-hatching, lots of spotted blacks and other noir visual effects to counter the funny animals and the wonderfully ludicrous character of Maggie, the young bird who decides to be a thief. Ann Lewis' "Headless" is a bit on the cruder side in terms of rendering, but her use of humorous body language in telling a story about an empty but animated suit of armor sells it effectively. Finally, the Volk-Mary Soper continuing collaboration "Incantrix X" continues to be a reliably amusing story with idiosyncratic character design and odd design choices.

That Is All: Amazing Facts and Beyond

Kevin Huizenga and Dan Zettwoch (along with occasional contributions from their other USS Catastrophe crewmember, Ted May) did something quite unusual in this day and age for alternative cartoonists. They actually had a successful and long-running comic strip in an alt-weekly (the St Louis Riverfront Times). Both of them manage to combine their different cartooning sensibilities in a strip that is a combination of Ripley's Believe Or Not and John Hodgman's fake trivia books in describing the anecdotes and adventures of one Leon Beyond, trivia master. One can immediately tell which artist is handling the strip on a given page, and it's not just because Huizenga and Zettwoch's art styles are so different. Zettwoch treats each Leon strip like he does all of his comics: as an excuse to indulge in his love of comics-as-diagrams. Huizenga's strips are more sparse and more like a Ripley strip, but they're also more deliberately funny than Zettwoch's manically detailed entries. Both artists share in shaping the personality of Leon, creating a ridiculous mythology surrounding him and the world of trivia.

That mythology is partly a lampoon of sports, partly a lampoon of secret societies and part Wimbledon Green-esque absurdity. What makes the strip work so well is that it's mostly played with a straight face, as Huizenga and Zettwoch (abbreviated Wu-Tang Clan style as HZA and DZA at one point) never come out and say that these "facts" are false. They also add enough true tidbits here and there to make readers think twice about some of Leon's claims.Indeed, I really wanted Zettwoch's strip about certain abandoned water towers in St Louis being used to store alcohol during prohibition to be true, especially the detail about hobos huffing alcohol fumes from them to this day. While much of Zettwoch's work is lighthearted to begin with, the real revelation in this book is Huizenga. He's mostly known for his philosophical, experimental and formally ambitious work in places like Ganges and Or Else. However, Huizenga always managed to inject sly and dry bits of humor in those books. Furthermore, he's done plenty of minicomics that had funny and strange overtones, like his "Fight or Run?" series of strips. A look at Huizenga's blog reveals that he's a fan and student of classic newspaper comic strips. Given that, it's not surprising to see him try his hand at writing a gag comic, albeit one where the laugh is generated less by a punchline and more by an accumulation of details.

At over 200 pages (including a color reprint of the story "The 66-Year Stink"), this is a very dense read. The Zettwoch strips in particular are absolutely crammed with details and eye-pops, Uncivilized Books publisher Tom Kaczynksi keeps things simple in terms of design, as the authors wisely chose to arrange the strips roughly by subject. This results in some sections being dominated by one cartoonist, like Zettwoch and sports, but it also results in amusing single-entry chapters like "Chainsaws". The collection also has the original covers to the earlier Beyond collections, including one of the greatest titles of all times, Back That Fact Up.I greatly admire Huizenga and & Zettwoch's relentless commitment to their gag, as the best Leon strips were the ones where he was off on some trivia-related adventure or event, or else refining or explaining his personal brain space and how he used it. I thought the more meta strips, like "reader correction" emails and the occasional presence of Huizenga or Zettwoch themselves in the strips (they are, after all, merely illustrating Mr Beyond's factoids) served as needed palate-cleansers for the book. Even as crazy as some of the strips got, there was a sameness to them that never quite reached formulaic, but got close from time to time. That said, this is a book that should be read slowly and in small chunks for maximum enjoyment. The longform stories included here are excellent, as they allow the gags a bit more room to breathe while at the same time doubling and tripling down on the initial concepts as the two cartoonists wring every bit of humor imaginable out of  them. If the artists ever choose to do anything more with Leon, I'd hope it would be in that sort of format, like an old-fashioned 22-page comic book.

Amazing Adventures: Emberley Galaxy

Rob reviews EMBERLEY GALAXY, an anthology designed as a tribute to children's illustrator Ed Emberley.

I've read a lot of themed anthologies and comics textbooks, but I've never read anything quite like EMBERLEY GALAXY, edited by Joe Kuth. It's a tribute to illustrator Ed Emberley, best known for his long series of innovative how-to-draw books for children. The genius of his approach was to start with a simple series of shapes that anyone could draw and add elements one-by-one until the image was complete. This anthology paid more than mere lip service as a tribute, given an extended introduction and demonstration of the technique, along with providing an annotated bibliography. Every artist who contributed based their strip on a particular Emberley book or set of techniques, but even those unfamiliar with the artist will find something to enjoy.

The anthology is also wise not to overstay its welcome, clocking in at just 60 pages. Some of the biggest alt-comics stars make appearances, including Jeffrey Brown, Dan Zettwoch, Dave Kiersh, Sam Henderson and Warren Craghead, among many others. One of my favorite pieces was from Rina Ayuyang, who was inspired by Emberley's thumbprint/fingerprint comics. It's also the only color piece in the book, as Ayuyang used her fingerprints to form most of the framework of the figures and buildings in a story about how living in paradise is harder than one might think. This was a beautiful-looking entry that worked both as a comic and a children's story, especially in the way that she integrated text and image.

Stefan Gruber contributed what may have been the single most clever entry in the anthology, using Emberley's panel-at-a-time additive drawing technique to create a clever series of punchlines. Every strip stays true to the spirit of Emberley's technique while turning it into an opportunity for conceptual humor. Along the same lines, Craghead employed his thin line while imagining Emberley's shapes as sentient beings that are slapped together and magically transformed into building blocks. In this instance, they were used to magically create a pencil, which in turn created more triangle-shaped beings. This is a beautiful piece, perfectly executed, that would be an outstanding entry in any anthology. Brown used the technique to draw himself (naturally), but threw in a self-deprecatory job as he drew himself sulking. Alex Holden created a narrative around a shipbuilder needing triangles and finding ways to improvise using the material at hand (rectangles, squiggles, etc)--a clever way to wrap a gag around the concept.

Henderson and Kiersh's work in general was a perfect fit for an Emberley tribute. Indeed, Henderson's page looked like a variation on his own sketchbook doodles. Here, he added a bit of narration on his quest to find Emberley books for reference, with each of the monsters acting as his mouthpieces. Kiersh's work has always had a bit of a childlike quality to it, and here he directly talked to children about music, and then featureed a page of nothing but Emberley-inspired drawings. There were a few such entries of nothing but drawings, mostly eschewing narrative. Jack Fraley's take on this was reproduced so small as to look like little but chicken scratch. Kuth and David Paleo's monster matchups, on the other hand, , were a playful delight. Paleo, known mostly for grotesque drawings, was quite adept at doing something much more playful.

The biggest standout strip in the anthology was Zettwoch's epic "Big Orange Vs Purple". Given his obsession with schematics and the building blocks of things, it should be no surprise that Zettwoch masterfully carried out a story dealing with the building blocks of drawing itself. This strip was inspired by his own obsession with a couple of Emberley's books as a child and had him set up a huge sea battle between the forces of Orange and Purple. Fans of Zettwoch's classic minicomic IRONCLAD (name-checked in the strip) will be delighted to see him mount a steadily-escalating battle with both sides steadily constructing their weapons, only to have it dashed at the last moment by a giant shark and giant ape. About the only thing this strip lacked was color, though Zettwoch's thorough exploration of Emberley's mark-making was still a lot of fun to look at. What I liked best about this strip was the childlike way Zettwoch went about building up each side's forces. This was done as a child might--with a great deal of seriousness and exacting detail, since play is very serious stuff.

There's an almost meditative quality to Emberley's technique. The more you do it, the more you want to do it. The technique is also quite empowering; even someone who can't draw can still create sturdy figures. That empowerment undoubtedly encouraged so many children to keep drawing even past the age when a lot of children with lesser skill might choose to give it up. The technique is also flexible enough to allow for greater complexity later on, as Zettwoch demonstrated in his strip. At the same time, it was never so prescriptive as to box children in to drawing in just one way, inhibiting creativity. EMBERLEY GALAXY is a tribute to Emberley giving children tools to draw and doing it as a form of narrative. The simplicity of the technique gave it its power and appeal, opening up a world of self-expression that many of the artists here still draw upon as adults.

Huizenga Bonanza

Rob reviews a batch of comics by Kevin Huizenga (and friends). Included are THE FACTOIDS OF LIFE, OR ELSE #5 (Drawn & Quarterly), FIGHT OR RUN: SHADOW OF THE CHOPPER (Buenaventura Press) and NEW CONSTRUCTION #2.


Kevin Huizenga is a hard cartoonist to pin down. In an era when most cartoonists are looking toward book deals, Huizenga's new work came in the form of four simultaneously published minicomics. Each one shows a different face of perhaps the most important cartoonist to emerge so far in the 21st century. Huizenga owes a lot to classic cartooning, especially in terms of his figure work. He also looks at comics as a sort of diagram, constantly exploring form and structure. The themes of his comics run the gamut from metaphysics to sheer whimsy. One story might be a complex phenomenological exploration of time and space, another might be a video-game inspired series of iconic character battles, and a third might be a gag strip involving a fake trivia maven. In every one of his comics, one can sense a probing intellect, a restless problem solver and a dry, sharp sense of humor. Huizenga's spontaneous-looking line manages to bring an understated quality to his work, even stories that are heavy on formal pyrotechnics. That restless quality seems to be a big key in why he chooses to do a number of smaller projects rather than gear up for The Big Book. While none of his individual comics this year are quite in the same class as the new releases by Chris Ware or Lynda Barry, when one considers his work as a whole it's clear that he had as good a year as any cartoonist in 2008.

NEW CONSTRUCTION is a fascinating peek into the working process of Huizenga and the other USS Catastrophe artists (Dan Zettwoch and Ted May). This mini features thumbnails from all three artists of familiar work, in an effort to display just how useful thumbnailing can be for an artist. Like Barry, who urges drawing and doodling as a means to unlock one's muse, Huizenga enthuses over the use of thumbnails as a way of getting started and creating a quick visual layout. What's great about this comic is that we see three very different visions of what a thumbnail sketch is. For May, it's a fast, loose and sloppy way to lay out his story, throw in dialogue and generally get down gesture and composition. For Huizenga, it seems like panel design and structure is key; he mostly sticks to stick figures. For Zettwoch, it's a scribbly, messy page that simply serves as a source of information and a rough compositional outline. If I were teaching a course about comics, this mini would be my reference for teaching the importance of thumbnails.

The USS Catastrophe artists have been collaborating on a ridiculous fake trivia strip for a local St Louis newspaper called AMAZING FACTS...AND BEYOND! The first collection of these strips, THE FACTOIDS OF LIFE, is a delightfully assembled, complete with a list of other (non-existent) volumes in the series, like "Underwater Facts!" and "Facts On A Plane". Each artist sticks to their strengths here: May's strips tend to be less in a "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" format and more absurd vignettes, like "Cell Phones". This strip posits that cell phones trigger an imaginary veil of privacy in their users (letting them talk at top volume about intimate details), and then notes that scientists developed a drug that did the same thing to ease anxiety--causing people to talk out loud to no one in particular. (One passerby yelling "What do you not understand about Planet of the Apes" had me laughing out loud.)

Zettwoch's strips invariably involved some kind of complicated gizmo or process, almost like a Rube Goldberg strip. His strip about how the basketball game of H-O-R-S-E originated with the Aztecs was both hilarious and disgusting, while "High Spirits" intricately describes how bootleg liquor was kept in abandoned St. Louis water towers. Huizenga goes in some truly strange directions, like his "Bible Fu" strip that imagines a missionary mixing the Bible with Shaolin kung-fu stories, creating "Fight Or Run" style matchups between the likes of Ruth & Leviticus (armed with a Scroll of Unclean Discharge). The single funniest strip is "Cat Calendars", telling of the secret history of cat calendars, like Joseph McCarthy going after communist sympathizer calendars such as "Revolution of Preciousness". This minicomic sees these artists at their most accessible, yet totally within their own wheelhouses in terms of interests and style. It's clear that all three are having a ball coming up with gags.

FIGHT OR RUN features a series of short strips not unlike the first part of GANGES #2--a comic book representation of video game-style fights to the death. There are hints of influences from sources as diverse as Mortal Kombat, EC Segar's POPEYE, Mad's Spy vs Spy feature and Mat Brinkman's flowing, rambling adventure strips. The simple format of two odd-looking characters meeting and a decision made to fight or run actually opened up a huge range of formal possibilities for Huizenga. Some strips are straightforward fights, others are more meta (like "F" battling "R"). Some strips are intricate, like a battle between Duck and Rabbit (two characters who look exactly alike until you consider them within their named contexts), while others are stick-figure extravaganzas (cute-girl McSkulls vs everyone). The strips in this book are a relentlessly delightful exploration of cartoon problem-solving. Huizenga starts from a premise and finds ways to take that idea to an ultimate, logical extreme. While well-drawn, there's a spontaneity to Huizenga's line here that gives each page a lot of pop and energy. FIGHT OR RUN is just as instructive in its own way as NEW CONSTRUCTION in how to maintain spontaneity and build structure.

OR ELSE #5 is the most wide-ranging of these comics in terms of content. It's funny that even though this is a release from preeminent art comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, it looks like a very nicely-designed minicomic. This comic consists of quietly personal anecdotes, a sweeping, post-apocalyptic story featuring Huizenga everyman Glenn Ganges, and more abstruse strips like "The 100 Most People In America", "Profiles" and "Which Sentences Are We Diagramming?" "Profiles" is a remarkably clever strip that uses the size and abstract symbolic content of word balloons to create a coherent narrative despite the fact that no recognizable words are used. Tongue firmly in cheek, Huizenga then gives us a "preview" of the next 19 issues of "Or Else", spanning the next dozen or so years. In addition to assorted adventures, furniture refinishing, and interviews with wise celebrities, the last issue promises a "description of a new world and way of life"...plus reviews. Perhaps the oddest thing in the issue is what appears to be a scathing parody ad for something real: a seminar on "Revelation Offers Hope In A World of Terror". Belief and metaphysics has always been a running theme in Huizenga's comics, and this ad parody is a pretty vicious take on what he obviously views as exploitative fearmongering.

Huizenga's work is so effective because of the way he's able to balance a number of seeming contradictions. His line appears to be free and spontaneous, yet his thumbnails reveal a meticulous planner. His approach ranges from enigmatic to easily accessible, often in the same comic. He's daring but not ostentatious, quietly providing eye-popping surprises and (at times) big laughs. There's a thoughtfulness to his work but also a sense of whimsy. His comics sneak up on you, rewarding multiple readings. While one can spot his influences, he's not beholden to any singular artist or style. He's an exciting artist to watch because it's difficult to predict what he'll eventually evolve into as he matures.