Last Hurrah: Runner Runner #4

After shuttering his excellent and long-running minicomics anthology Papercutter, Greg "Clutch" Means has been doing an annual, free anthology for Free Comic Book Day. Titled Runner Runner, the fourth issue (from 2015) was unfortunately also its last, but it certainly went out with a bang, with the usual mix of ten page stories and single page entries from a wide swath of cartoonists with different styles.

Sam Sharpe's "The Woman From Tuesday" is absolutely top-notch storytelling from a cartoonist who deserves much more recognition. The concept is simple at first: a man talks about him going on dates nearly every night with someone from the internet, interspersed with a memory from an old comic character: Cognito The Super Spy. The latter character essentially recapitulates the history of mysterious, adventurers, from Mandrake to the Shadow to Batman to Rorschach. The theme of the story is shifting identities and disguises, and the ways in which one can forget one's own identity by spending so much time as someone else.

Turns out the guy, named David, classifies each date by type--Deconstructionist (those who talk about the structure of dates on a date), Formalist (asking specific questions in a specific order), etc. Unmentioned but very clearly visible is the fact that David changes his appearance to match that of each date. He wears the same kind of ski hat and scarf as his first date, and puts on a curly wig and glasses to match his second date. The asides to old issues of Cognito perfectly match key moments of his dates in funny ways, especially when he starts thinking about Cognito's boy sidekick, Hypno.
Things get weird when a woman he dates on Thursday turns out to be the woman from Tuesday, in disguise (like he is). From there, the postmodern twists and turns of latter-day Cognito continue to get further wrapped up in the way this man and woman interact and the ouroboros swallows its own tail in a very amusing way. Sharpe's facility for drawing faces and sticking with a steady grid allows him to nimbly go from drawing superheroes to regular folks without jarring the reader once.

Evan Palmer's "The Godins: The Last Meal" is a fantasy story with lots of gray wash used to create mood. It's a flashback to one character's mentor, a hard-as-nails chef who always keeps her eyes on the prize with regard to serving the intimidating masters of the realm, dressed and armed to the teeth. His mentor saves his life when she takes up a sword to help a squadron instead of allowing him to go to certain death. The jarring transition makes the reader think for a moment that it's a reverie that's being interrupted instead of a flashback, which adds to the excitement of the story, until he snaps back in the future. Palmer's figure design is idiosyncratic (especially the odd noses) but smooth, with a clear and crisp line.

If you've ever wondered what one of Joey Alison Sayers' Thingpart strips might look like expanded to full length, then "Silly Town" is for you. It's a fabulously demented tale about a children's music singer named "Jenny Rainbow" who sings the sort of cloying, catchy songs for kids that adults hate. Jenny sings a "concert" for some kids in an alley in a post-apocalyptic city, with her husband reminding her (and filling in the reader) that the government rounded up all the adults, leaving kids to fend for themselves. The bummer-proof Jenny takes that as an opportunity to become the biggest band ever. From there, things get even more absurd, as Paul had actually packed three oboes to take on his survivalist mission. When they get captured, the President himself sentences them to hard labor, but one of their songs has its own revenge on him. The structure of this story is quite clever but the best thing about it was the Jenny character, whose delusional qualities completely took over the strip.

Finally, Andrice Arp has a one-pager making literal the mess in her head when she finishes a project and how sometimes it's best to create in a state of chaos. I've missed her beautiful, detailed line and inventive use of angles and anthropomorphic creatures, bridging naturalism and mythology. Farel Dalrymple does a strip from his Pop Gun War world about a vicious cat, detailing what he's killed while wondering how something so cute can be such a killer. It's effective both as a stand-alone store and a palate cleanser for other Pop Gun War stories. I wish Means had the funding to do a bigger anthology, because he has an uncanny sense of pacing as an editor, knowing just how to create a smooth flow from story to story. Not everything he's published has been great, but it always fit in the context of the anthology at hand, inviting the reader in no matter what its subject matter or style might be.

Fantasy Minis: Gordon Harris, Evan Palmer

Let's take a look at some minis steeped in fantasy tropes:

Ainulindale, by Evan Palmer. This is an adaptation of the first part of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Silmarillion, which is Tolkein's lyrical creation myth story that begins with the god-figure Illuvatar and his creations the Ainur. One of the difficulties with The Silmarillion, and with this chapter in particular, is that it lacks the kind of world-building detail found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. There are also no characters with which we can learn more about what's going on slowly. Instead, Tolkein dumps a lot of abstract myth-making on the reader, making it a bit of a slog--especially since this material was released posthumously by his son Christopher and much of which was not entirely finished. Evan Palmer cleverly stepped in and turned the abstract into beautiful sequential images that trimmed as much of the text as possible and instead used pictures to explain the rising and falling musical themes of Illuvitar and his creations ("the offspring of his thought"). Paralleling the story of Lucifer in John Milton's Paradise Lost, there arose one of the Ainur (Melkor) who chose to rebel against his creator. This chapter reveals how Illuvitar sought to try to discipline Melkor at first and attempted to convince him to participate in the themes of creation, but Melkor only sought to destroy everything put in front of him. Palmer's use of color really sells the story, as his blues and deep purples in depicting the Ainur when they're abstract make sense. Later, he uses a lot of silhouettes and simple but colorful character designs for the Ainur when they choose physical form, giving the comic a certain playfulness that the text lacks. About the only negative regarding this adaptation is that it probably needed to be three times as big to cover the full majesty of the story and Palmer's imagery; things feel a bit cramped as they stand. I'd love to see him try to adapt later chapters as well, especially the bits that are actually character-oriented.

The Secret Origin of the Dust Elves #1, by Gordon Harris. This beautifully-printed little mini is a hybrid of comics, prose and illustrated text. Harris is able to make that combination work because of a united aesthetic, with a midnight blue wash and matching decorative patterns that mark each prose page. It's a good strategy because at this stage, Harris is a better illustrator than he is a cartoonist. By that I mean that his panel-to-panel transitions are sometimes a bit stiff and his figures lack general fluidity of motion. Given that the first part of the book is a chase scene, this is a vital aspect of the work that's not quite up to snuff. That said, the illustrated prose is clever, in part because it signals a different kind of storytelling as part of the narrative. The story concerns the titular Dust Elves who are essentially resigning their position, only one of them gets noticed by one of the girls in whose room he sometimes travels. The problem is that she asks the questions "Where do they come from?", which apparently is the one question they cannot abide. So they sit down at a computer to write their "secret origin", which naturally turns out to be a lot of nonsense, before the issue ends. This section of the book is drawn as a comic, only instead of using the warm, handwritten style of lettering, it uses a computerized font to mimic the artificial nature of what they're writing on the computer. The wash here is purple, perhaps to indicate purple prose. It's a highly effective and funny metastory, and one can sense that Harris will continue to make it even sillier as the issues go on.