Sweet Home Miami: Spiny Orb Weaver #1 & Sun And Sand

Modern narratives about Miami are often about drug violence, glitzy nightclubs, and excessive & conspicuous consumption. And that's all true to an extent. I am a rare beast: a native of the Magic City, born when great swathes of unincorporated Dade county were still just strawberry fields. Miami isn't a city that produces anything; it processes things. It is reliant on tourists and suckers. It's where grifts are hatched and schemes are dashed. There are two overarching narratives about Miami that tend to go untold: it's a place where you can easily create a new persona and it's a place that's one major event away from being reclaimed by the swamp. 

If you live in a tropical paradise, who has time to create art? In spite of that, the arts have stubbornly been a part of the city's culture since its inception, especially tied to its historically strong sense of gay culture. One thing Miami has lacked is a strong comics culture. There are reasons for that. Miami is a highly decentralized place. Even former arts enclaves like Coconut Grove succumbed to hipster development that priced out the actual artists long ago. For a big city, Miami is deeply suburban. It's hard to put together a scene in a city when there aren't natural gathering places. Hard, but not impossible.

Thanks in part to Neil Brideau putting intentionality to work in creating pop-up shops with his Radiator Comics publishing concern, as well as various comics-making events, a community has begun to coalesce and publish. The best way to showcase young talent in a city like this is the tried-and-true method of the comics anthology. For Free Comic Book Day in 2020, Radiator Comics teamed with another powerful young publishing force in Miami, Jamila Rowser's Black Josei Press, to put together a free anthology titled Sun And Sand. 

Sure, that's an easy play on Miami's beach culture image, and that culture is certainly real. However, the comics themselves dive much deeper than that. I appreciated that in the credits, the authors were very specific about what part of South Florida they lived in. Miami is laid out as a grid in three different quadrants (the fourth quadrant is in the ocean, essentially), and so it's easy to know where someone lives based on an address or the particular sub-city, like Hialeah, Miami Beach, North Miami, etc. Culturally, there are areas of Miami that are remarkably self-contained; there are huge swathes where all businesses and even media are conducted and expressed in Spanish, for example. The result is that there are many Miamis and thus many potential stories. 

Carina Vo's "Mango Season" amusingly gets at a number of Miami truths. It is exceedingly easy to have your own tropical fruit tree in your yard, although it can be hard to keep track of them when the fruit starts to fall from the tree. Who "owns" the fruit is a matter of little interest to the abundant flora in the area, and Vo's clear line and spot reds amplify this. Jessica "Miss Jaws" Garcia has that big, bulky Johnny Negron/Michael DeForge-style character design in her story debating the superiority of the swimming pool vs the beach, with the potential wildlife in the latter being unnerving. Garcia makes effective use of extreme close-ups in this witty story.

Estrella Vega's story speaks to my earlier reference of Miami being close to returning to swampland, given the right set of events. Her illustrations juxtaposing daily life in Miami with a ghost level of flooding and corresponding invasion of critters is a sobering one. There was a reason why we weren't allowed to play near canals as children. Isai Oviedo's story about purloined croquetas played on the many crime stories set in Miami as well as amusing stereotypes of the sort of people who live there. Oviedo gets across the greasy deliciousness of that particular snack; Cuban food has a particular stick-to-the-bones quality to it. 

I've followed Drew Lerman's career for a while, and his Roy & Dav characters were particularly delightful in this anthology, channelling the golden age of cartooning in terms of their speech patterns and ragged-line. Brideu's "Critters" was interesting to read because for a transplanted Miami like him, the preponderance of fauna not found in other parts of the country can be overwhelming. I miss the friendly gecko lizards, personally. Miriam Rae-Silver's "HOA" speaks to both that fauna, including the invincible, omnipresent gators, as well as Miami's obsession with wealth and appearances. P.C. de la Cruz's fantasy of his uncle being attacked by a python on a fishing trip speaks to a real presence of these snakes who have no natural predators infiltrating the Everglades. 

Horror artist Jorge Lantigua's "Colada" combines his cartoony but menacing line in depicting the bewitching power of this particular Cuban coffee. Jamilla Rowser wrote and Vo drew a lovely story about snorkeling and the astounding worlds that await just below the ocean's surface. It's a lovely capper to an anthology that understands the essence of its city and the people who live there, as opposed to its image.

The Brideau-edited anthology Spiny Orb Weaver #1 plays on his fascination with the local creatures, as this is a spider that spins beautiful, intricate webs. It's a fitting metaphor for cartoonists. There are three features. The first is a long story by Jessica "Miss Jaws" Garcia titled "Just A Walk Around The Block." Her character design is superb, as her female lead has a powerful presence that provides visual irony given how socially anxious she is. The story is a dialogue between her and her dog, who chastises her inability to make friends and allow him to to get to interact with the world. When he later loses control when he sees another dog, he reveals that he was never socialized with other dogs and is afraid of them...much like she is. In the final scene, where she makes friends with someone who pets her dog, Garcia pulls back. After a story full of fairly tight close-ups that illustrated how closed-off her world was, that final scene framed her as part of the larger world. 

Garcia's subsequent interview is revealing, as she discusses her training in illustration and animation and how this led her to comics. It was telling that she revealed that she's from Palm Beach county, which is two hours away from Miami. It's still South Florida and separate from the rest of the state, but it's also different from the wilder aspect of Miami. She also talks a lot about isolation, rejection, and trying to find a local scene. Tana Oshima's illustrated essay on paradise was fascinating as it compared her time living in Miami to living in Japan, bringing up the concept of asking for permission to be in certain spaces. Once again, Oshima is an artist who recognized Miami's almost feral, wild qualities that many people pretend aren't there in favor of luxury. Oshima's use of stark black and white contrasts speaks to the raw contrasts in poverty and luxury in Miami, going neighborhood by neighborhood. Even in the poorest of neighborhoods, however, there is a flowering abundance of hope and imagination. It's Brideau's mission, I believe, to highlight this abundance as an editor, publisher, creator, and enthusiast of comics.

Minis: Mardou, Drew Lerman

Some Day My Witch Will Come, by Mardou. Sacha Mardou rarely does autobio comics, though it's obvious that her slice-of-life comics have always had an autobiographical bent to them, be it through adapting direct experience or adapting the experiences of others she knows. This comic is about Mardou turning forty years old two years ago, and in most respects, it was a great time. Her first book was published, she has a wonderful family, and stability. Despite all of this, she was feeling a nameless anxiety and was suffering from acne out of the blue. What followed was a journey that reminded me of a less severe version of John Porcellino's The Hospital Suite, as Mardou went from one homeopathic cure to another in order to fix her acne and eventually realized that she had hit upon a well of trauma that she had never dealt with.

Trauma is an odd thing. It can lie dormant for years as one can consciously push it down, but it will always emerge eventually and frequently has a somatic component as well as an emotional component. When she was getting acupuncture for her acne, she started bursting into huge, wracking sobs for no apparent reason; what was actually happening was Mardou allowing that trauma to start to escape, a little at a time. Or rather, that trauma forced itself to the surface and exploded, especially when she started to try meditation. Mardou zeroes in on facing the witch archetype and how she initially feared it (in part because of the trauma surrounding her religious background). Learning to accept that archetype as always being present in her life and to embrace it as a way of navigating that trauma was a fascinating tool that Mardou started to use, as well as being more aware of her dreams and what they were trying to tell her. She notes one dream where she's at a wedding where two young teens are getting hitched but the flower girl was throwing a fit. She reached out to comfort her and felt a sense of happiness. It wasn't until later that she understood the dream--her parents were teens when they were married and the little girl was her--and she was able to comfort herself.

That's a powerful image. In a therapeutic setting where a patient has a hard time forgiving themselves or loving themselves after going through extreme trauma at a young age, it's not unusual for a therapist to ask if the young version of them was worth saving. Coming to terms with that truth, where one is able to return love to oneself as a child unconditionally is an unbelievably powerful feeling akin to that of the feeling one has for their own children. In Mardou's case, communicating with her inner child meant wanting to play with her young daughter, and that she was able to play with her in the same way she would play as a child only added to that sense of healing and joy. Mardou's layout choices were interesting--open page layout with stacked horizontal panels, anywhere from two to four of them. The looseness of the format contrasts the tightness of her drawings. Certainly, Mardou always maintains a certain ratty looseness in her drawings as part of her style, but there was a boldness and confidence in her line here that made everything look crisper and more fully-realized. I wouldn't say that I'd equate this comic with therapy, but it is a vivid recreation of a therapeutic experience that packs a wallop.

Milk Debt & Boucher's House, by Drew Lerman. Lerman is a rarity: an alternative comics cartoonist from my hometown of Miami, which has never had a discernible scene. He's done Frank Santoro's correspondence course and his work has obviously been strongly both by the grid and the vivid use of color so many Rowhouse students like to employ. In Milk Debt, Lerman tells the story of some fourth graders who speak in a remarkably florid style, the most interesting of which is Hector, a psychopathic bully who has a demon living in his chest. At the same time, Lerman, creating a grotesque atmosphere both in terms of character design and his lurid use of color, skillfully depicts the notion of "fairness" that obsesses children of that age. Rules, deals, and promises have a powerful sense of meaning for them, and trying to retract same has horrible repercussions. That's true in this comic, as when one friend bets another $20 that he'll never French kiss a particular girl. His friend does kiss the girl, who immediately wants a gift (that later turns out not to exist). That sets off a chain of events that leads Hector to buy the debt and punish the kid who owed the $20, only to have his skin ripped open and the demon freed.

This comic works on a number of levels. There may be an eight-panel grid (constantly recentering the page), but it's an open-page format, so there's more of a sense of bleed between the panels and events. Lerman's use of children reminds me a bit of Steve Weissman's, where there's a sense of extreme exaggeration but also a great deal of accuracy with regard to the way children truly interact with each other. There's also the sense of how each child is very much not only in their own world, but actively narrating their stories until they get interrupted by someone else's narrative, often with disastrous consequences. The kids in this story don't so much interact as they do cross paths and engage in power struggles for the right to impose their version of reality on the world.

Boucher's House keeps the eight-panel grid but smashes the panels together to instantly create a sense of suffocation for the reader. The coloring, which was crisp and neat in Milk Debt, is splattered and expressionist, more along the lines of what Dash Shaw does. This comic is a satire of fragile masculinity, as an older man with a young wife is constantly jealous and paranoid that she's out to get him somehow. Whereas it's obvious that she's loving and patient with his frequently toxic but ultimately impotent gestures. I wish there had been a bit more to her character than the patient sex bomb, but I understood what Lerman was getting at in this satire, especially in the hilarious scene where the titular Boucher visits a friend to earn some sympathy and is dealt back the same kind of macho nonsense. Lerman's sense of humor is at once exaggerated and bone-dry, and his line matches those qualities.