Foxing Reprints #16: Oily Comics--Winslow-Yost/Rae-Grant, Burkett

Noise 1-2, by Billy Burkert. These comics contain loosely connected, odd vignettes that start and stop with no warning. The first one, "Stand Up Comics", is about a weirdo's open-mic stand-up routine. Using a series of uncomfortable, off-kilter close-ups with a slightly grainy but cartoony approach, Burkert makes the reader feel the awkwardness of the situation. That awkwardness is not so much from him bombing on stage, but for the sheer weirdness of his approach, like a scene where he starts pulling on his cheek and murmurs "If you could just remove all your flesh.." when doing a bit about summer. Then he segues into a surprisingly smooth follow-up joke, belying what seemed to be a psychotic breakdown or a stroke.

The second story, "Departure Patterns", sees a man in an outdoor labyrinth go through a complicated series of tasks in order to discover what seems to be a magical portal--and then steps through it. Drawings of the portal appear in the third story, where the artist who drew them is slammed by a critic. The artist's apartment accidentally catches on fire, leading to major burns on his body. When he starts to peel of charred flesh from his arms, they clump in interesting and beautiful patterns; he's able to produce enough of them to create another art show and get respect once again. Burkert excels at using body horror elements in the service of comedy while also genuinely exploring the aesthetic virtues of weird found objects and bodily parts. 

Tiger Man #2, by Gabriel Winslow-Yost & Michael Rae-Grant. The team of GWY and MRG specializes in highly stylized updates of public domain superheroes from comics' Golden Age. This time around, it's Tiger Man who gets the treatment, with a narrative that ruminates on his origins ("I got some Tiger Blood, so I bought a Tiger Car") and motivations ("I believe in action, I believe in love"). The actual imagery is angular, frenetic and visually disorienting. There are huge swaths of zip-a-tone of various grades, grey-scaling and distorted, grotesque figures. There's a pleasing geometry to these comics, as many figures resolve as circles, triangles and squares, but GWY and MRG also create a frenetic sense of motion. This is all done deadpan, with humor generated by the tensions between concept, narrative and images. 

Oddball Minis: Winslow-Yost/Rae-Grant, Dugan, Mitchell/White, Phelan, Bong

Popcorn Muscles #1, by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Michael Rae-Grant. The duo behind the deranged Steel Sterling comic once again takes Golden Age superheroes and villains like TNT Todd, Iron Skull, Master Mystic and Airmale & Stampy and does odd things with them. Using a day-glo color scheme that recalls the greatest excesses of Paper Rad as well as the deliberately posed and stilted character designs of Michael DeForge, this comic explores some different areas than their first effort, which was both more comedic and more kinetic. For example, Airmale and Stampy here are retired heroes and lovers who must use all sorts of devices to prevent themselves from floating away in their civilian lives. An extended sequence where Stampy is trying to take a shower and Airmale trying to prevent his lover from hurting himself. Stampy is tired of living like a freak, which leads to a surprisingly poignant ending that's revealed by a pot full of wilted flowers. Pink, yellow and blue are the dominant colors here, and their assault is so prominent that the conventionality of the set-up and the emotional rawness of the piece are both considerably muted, leaving the reader to sort and sift through it.

The Iron Skull sequence is a series of three identical images of a bizarre character with an irregularly-shaped head waiting to hear thoughts in his head from someone else. Like in the first strip, there's a lingering sadness at work in the wake of the clashing, psychedelic colors; it seems to be about someone losing his mind. The story of TNT Todd gets at the heart of what GWY and MRG seem to be after, which is the transparency of the constituent elements of their art. That is, they want the reader to see that this was drawn by computer, that it's constructed of very simple geometric elements, that its intelligibility is entirely dependent on the reader's ability to make connections in what they see. The mangled use of language, the out-of-panel asides to iconic images like his "g-man badge",  and the increasingly psychedelic and nonsensical flow of images almost make this feel like this is a story being told (or read) by someone with an aphasia. That said, there are enough clues that make this feel like an extreme, abstracted "cover version" of an original Golden Age story, one where the title character is indeed captured by skull creatures, encounters thieves wearing gas masks, is gassed and shot at and finally triumphs by shooting everyone with lightning. The last few pages are a particularly intense read with the bright red background initially obscuring the other colors on the page until one's eye learns to process it. The simplicity (and frequently, sheer stupidity) of the original stories and characters gives the artists some interesting material to work with, especially since they manage to channel the original frenzied energy that went into the Golden Age characters and turn it into something quite different. I am once again curious to see how they will follow this particular comic, though the #1 on the cover seems to indicate that this may be their new two-man anthology for the near future.

After The Gold Rush, by Dave Dugan. This is a genuine comics/zine oddity. Published in a manila folder with an untitled doodle, this is a collage of paper scraps, drawings by Dugan, and band announcements for his friend Nate Solod. Solod was a drummer and singer for a variety of funk bands as well as a roadie for the band G.Love and Special Sauce. The narrative, such as it is, is carried along by Dugan paraphrasing the Neil Young song "Tonight's The Night", which is about a roadie friend who died due to a drug overdose. During the course of the comic, Dugan reveals that Solod committed suicide. There are some neat lyrical symmetries; for example, in the original, there's a line about "playing guitar with a shaky hand". That's changed to "pound the drums with a shakyfoot"; "Shakyfoot" happened to be one of Solod's many projects, and Dugan designed a logo for it. There's an amazing sequence halfway through the zine where a vicodin wrapper is altered with Dugan's drawing and various words highlighted and circled ("depression", "overdose", "drug addiction"). stapled to it is the back of a cane sugar bag with a drawing of a woman that says "kisses sweeter than wine". That's what I enjoyed most about this comic: the total, frenetic commitment to its concept. There are other touches, like blank doctor's physical examination forms being used to draw on but also partly filled out in clever, telling ways. This comic is beautiful, strange, moving and psychedelic all at once. It is no more and no less a tribute to a friend, one designed to honor a friendship and history of collaboration entirely in the language of the nature of that collaboration: comics and music. If some of ideas seem a bit on the nose at times, the sheer sincerity and handmade effort of what is most assuredly an art object won me over.

REH #5 by Brian John Mitchell and Andrew White and Lost Kisses #25, by Brian John Mitchell. Mitchell has been producing his weird little micro-mini comics (2" x 2 1/8") for years. Many of them are skewed takes on genres from sci-fi to horror to westerns to the supernatural, done with artists with a wide range of skill. My favorite two series are represented in this latest batch. Lost Kisses is drawn in stick figures by Mitchell himself. There's a narrative box (usually at the bottom of each page) and a figure in each panel, with the figure saying something that's either in support of or at odds with the narrative caption. What started with just a series of somewhat despondent/ironic takes on life has morphed into something futuristic. Taking a page from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, his unnamed character has become "unstuck in time", popping up in a post-apocalyptic future. It's a typically, funny weird and strange comic that's as much about cringe humor as it is about a particular plot. REH features the private writing of the author Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. Taken from when he was taking care of his mother and trying to scratch out a career as a writer (and get paid for the stuff he got published), White's spare and moody pencil work is a perfect complement to Howard as filtered through Mitchell. With just a single image available per page, White has to buckle down and waste no lines in creating atmosphere, as he must get across a single idea in dramatic fashion. It's a great series about writing and the writing process, as well as a window into another era.

St Packrat's ABC and Alice B. Toeclip's Stay-in-bed Yoga Ritual, by Jacquie Phelan. These are self-described as "chapbooks", and they are micro-minicomics that feature drawings and text pasted in. Phelan is an interesting character; she's a former road and cyclocross bike racer and was a giant in her sport. These comics reveal a whimsical and philosophical soul, one whose spiritual investigations are leavened with a great deal of humor and self-deprecation. The ABC mini is a primer that talks about a mouse character's proclivity for hoarding and how it affects her life--and how it's also a symptom and manifestation of depression. The Yoga mini is a funny series of diagrams that detail her routines for doing yoga while still in bed, with positions like "cinnamon roll". It is at once deadly serious and light-hearted. The minis themselves are at the crudest possible level of technical ability; the photocopying is badly done, and Phelan had to pencil in by hand words and images that got deleted from the copies. Her drawing is rudimentary at best. That said, if Phelan can improve the technical aspects of her comics, she has the potential to be a very interesting artist. As someone who's led a rich and interesting life, I imagine there's a lot she could talk about regarding her experiences. Beyond simply expanding on things that she's done, her sense of humor and point of view are both huge positives regarding potential future work.

World of Bong, by D.R. Bong.  This is a short, black and white mini that's essentially meant as a teaser for the webcomic. It is a self-consciously goofy, crudely-computer drawn strip. Everything about this strip is awkward and stilted and not in a way that's funny. It's the sort of comic that relies on the idea of a Spanglish-speaking protagonist named "Mustachio" is inherently funny. The crude drawings don't even have the advantage of a human hand being directly behind them, and the awkwardness of their creation on the page and the inability of Bong to draw figures that relate to each other in space in a way that makes sense further dims whatever small, absurdist appeal the comic might have had.

Minicomics Round-Up: Stanton, Rae-Grant/Winslow-Yost, Kyle, Lee, Five True Fans, Bird

Gnartoons #1, by James T. Stanton.Stanton is great at drawing monsters, robots and monster-robot hybrids. He then accentuates these highly detailed, almost manic drawings with bright, lurid colors that almost overpower the reader before one adjusts. That's certainly true of the lead story in this one-man anthology, "Subterfuge", where a pet robot and its owner are ambushed by a huge network of threatening machines. Stanton can stop on a dime and go back to black & white for a story about an aggrieved classroom pet being accosted by a band of crazed kids, emphasizing the barbaric and grotesque nature of children who are let loose in packs without adult supervision. Stanton then pauses to consider his own obsession with drawing monsters, wondering if it's something he gets out of his head or if that obsession is leading somewhere darker, all on a cleverly-designed page designed to keep the reader off-balance with triangular panels and sickly colors. Stanton really throws the kitchen sink at the reader in this sampler, using highly realistic drawings in one disgusting strip about San Francisco and varying his color schemes in a more poetic strip. Stanton has the potential to be a major talent, and these minicomics offerings are an interesting way for him to warm up in public.

Steel Sterling, by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Michael Rae-Grant. This is the first comic by this writer-artist duo, and it's an impressive debut. Riffing on Charles Biro's Golden Age creation, Steel Sterling is a lab-created hero who goes on a psychedelic spreed of mayhem. There are three different operating levels in this comic. First, there's the constant, kinetic, left-to-right ass-kicking of the protagonist, who wades through ninjas, robots, grid-covered rooms, strange animals, axe-handed mustachioed-men sitting on toilets and other such nonsense, all in lurid, day-glo colors. Second, there's the earnest narrative captions that follow him around, commenting on his fights, offering advice and evaluating the evil of his opponents. Finally, there's the static, languid scenes of arch-foe the Black Knight (done in green as a counterpoint to the preponderance of red found in this comic), who counter-intuitively gets the center grid on every single page. This is counter-intuitive because as Frank Santoro would tell us, the center grid is where the eye goes to first, looking to balance the other figures. By inserting a very slow-moving narrative as the center of our attention on every single page, GWY and MRG subvert both reader expectations and the implied narrative of the story, telling the reader that the hyper-violent adventures of the hero are less important than this green-lined figure eating breakfast. This helps set up the final-page gag while foreshadowing the treadmill nature of Steel Sterling's mission. This is definitely a modern take on Golden Age tropes, as the authors seem to borrow as much from Michael DeForge as they do from Biro or even iconoclasts like Fletcher Hanks. I'd be fascinated to see what this pair of artists comes up with next.

Bird Brain Comix #1, by Bird. The otherwise anonymous Bird's comic is the first I've seen from Tom Hart's Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, Fl. It's the first comic of any kind I've received from my home state, which is not exactly a hotbed for alt-comics talent. In a spectacular explosion of self-deprecation, the artist notes (on the cover, no less) that this comic is "overly designed, inarticulate and poorly drawn". Of course, this issue is none of those things, even if it's obvious that this is an early effort in the artist's career. Instead, this comic owes a lot to long-form improv, with the added advantage that because Bird's not explicitly going for laughs in every strip, certain comics that stand on their own as serious statements are later revisited for both tragic and humorous results. Of course, in this comic, the "jokes" come at the expense of downtrodden characters victimized by unfeeling teenagers out to get wasted and violent. There's a matter-of-factness running through this comic as a robot separated from his body and the roadside assistance of Sasquatch are treated fairly nonchalantly. The one thing that drove me crazy about this comic was Bird's insistence on using a thin line and leaving a lot of white space without spotting a lot of blacks or varying his line thickness.  He also winds up relying too much on effects like zip-a-tone to fill in some of those big white spaces, and the effect is a greyish, unattractive page. Still, there's an interesting mind at work here, one that just needs to get back to the drawing board and continue to experiment.

Them's The Breaks, Kid., by Cassie J. Sneider, MariNaomi, Ric Carrasquillo and Tessa Brunton. This anthology is by the Five True Fans collective, and the theme of this one is essentially misfortune. This is a mix of comics and illustrated essays, most of which are quite personal. The cover is hand-stamped with an image from each story, which is one of those crazy yet endearing things about minicomic-makers insane work ethic. Sneider's "Bad Decisions" is a sound choice for lead-off story, given that it's grim but hilarious. The grim part regards Sneider's life-long near-poverty, meaning she's rarely had access to things like health or dental insurance. There's a bit where she's left to wait in a dentist's office with a painfully bad tooth for hours, until she decided to steal something from the exam room for every ten minutes she was kept waiting. That led her to possess some novacaine, which led her to ingest it into her face because she thought it might arrest an allergic reaction to antibiotics. It's a horrifying but undeniably hilarious image.

MariNaomi kicks in yet another variation on a story she's written about an ex-boyfriend who disappeared years earlier, this time including an epilogue about seeing his best friend as a homeless person and trying to ignore him as he now seemed clearly out of his mind. This set up the tragic end of the man killing himself by throwing himself in front of a subway car. The essence of her section dwells on being haunted by once-powerful connections suddenly disappearing forever, an event that has a powerful effect on one's memories of the original events. Carrasquillo's cartoony line focuses on the ways in which marketing is subverted by children, by how faux-humble introductions to one's heroes masks seething jealousy, and a gag where appealing to the true force behind the water bill is an imposing process. His contributions were well-drawn and cute, but seemed radically out of step with the rest of the artists in the book; if anything, they felt slight compared to them.

My favorite part of the book was by Tessa Brunton, who did a number of crisply-drawn comics about her battle not only with chronic fatigue syndrome, but the emotions and self-hatred that often accompanies a disease whose main symptom involves an inability to summon the energy needed to deal with a standard person's day. There's one powerful strip about her desire to give into her bitterness, her anger, her desperation and her hatred of her own body. Then she owns up to the real reason why she tries to stay positive: because "bitterness is repellent" and "I don't want them [her friends and family] to all go away." That's a powerful statement, but Brunton also notes that simply drawing these feelings and printing them is a kind of emotional therapy, one that certainly draws other people to give her sympathy but mostly makes her understand that others do care. Brunton's lack of relentless cheerfulness about her condition is refreshing and funny, giving her license to make some pretty dark jokes. (When an internet support group scolds her and tells her she can do whatever you put your mind to, she replies "Indeed I can" as she holds a gun to her head.) Between this suite of strips and her comic Passage, Brunton's beautiful and light penciling style and sharply sardonic wit have made her a talent to watch.

Distance Movers #1 and #2, by Patrick Kyle. This is straight-ahead surrealism, as Kyle puts together a comic that for all intents and purposes is a genre science fiction comic, yet doesn't conform to standard fantasy tropes. Instead, Kyle's drawings (all printed in color ink, one color at a time) are rubbery, highly simple but stylized and mostly static on the page. The sort of lumpy surrealism that flows from the Marc Bell tradition in Canada is present in this work, though this story of Mr. Earth visiting a backwoods village and later taking one of its denizens to a hyper-advanced big city zips readers through an increasingly complex plot that's more like Matthew Thurber. There are some wonderfully abstract sequences of pure, non-narrative shapes that represent a sort of virtual art gallery that fit snugly in with the rich and warm visuals in the rest of the comic, as the color printing (done on the highly versatile Risograph) simply grabs the eye and doesn't let go. Kyle combines simplicity and clarity of line with complexity of design and narrative to creative a beautiful new series.

Temple, by Jun K. Lee. This is a quiet, poetic story about a man finding god in another man's ear and a sort of phenomenology of what this experience is like. Lee's sparse, thin line reminds me a bit of Souther Salazar's delicate, almost fragile images, and Lee's equally delicate lettering has a strong visual impact as well. The lettering is just a little scrawled--it's entirely legible, but it's small and requires a bit of concentration to parse it. That actually folds in nicely with the increasingly strange images we're presented with in this 8-page comic, as the narrator focuses his attention on a small dot that provides a direct line between him and god. The end of the comic raises the issue of who is entitled to see god and for how long, especially since the narrator steals the ear to keep for himself. This brief story doesn't wear out its welcome and is remarkably clear and coherent, given the strange places it goes to.