Minicomics Round-Up: White, Drawdoer, Gamboa, Enrico, Cass, Wiedeman

We Will Remain, by Andrew White.The theme of this comic is the journey. Some of these journeys were to a particular geographical location, some to states of being, and others concern journeys through time around a single object. A graduate of the Frank Santoro course, White uses the grid to interesting effect in several different ways. In "The Deep End", a story of a young boy watching an older woman swim at a public swimming pool, he uses a strict nine-panel grid. Every center grid is an action panel--usually the woman swimming, or leaving a wake, or emerging from water. On page three of the story, White deviates from this with a four panel grid on the second tier of the page: the middle of the page summarizes the action of the story as noted in the captions on either side of these silent images: "She swims. He watches." Those two center images set up the dynamic for the rest of the story, a relationship whose motives are deliberately vague. The final page is a kind of metaphor for the boy's thoughts and fantasies mirroring hers: a crossover into adulthood. White uses a sort of smudged pencil effect in this story that's meant to simulate the murkiness of being underwater.

"Travel" is a narrative about an astronaut dematerializing across space, except that we only see what is being seen on the journey: stars, Kirby effects, etc. The actual character drops away, other than his narrative captions. Some of the images are close to abstractions, but they are given context by the reader's understanding of the story. "As Leaves Change Color" superimposes loosely-rendered but inked figures over smudgy penciled backgrounds, an effect that places our eye on the characters as they are both part of but removed from their environments. This effect is useful, as the story is about a woman feeling displaced after an accident who discovers a hidden garden. The story flips back and forth in time, as we discover that there's someone in the woman's life steering her toward recovery (including magically creating the garden) who is also trying to repair the woman's relationship with her brother. The title story returns to that nine-panel grid and the technique of superimposed inked figures over a lighter background. This time, however, the background image takes up the entire page, with the figures operating through time and space in the grid. It's a clever technique that tells the story of a single, unusual space through thousands of years. When a statue is built out of the area's rock, it has the effect of inspiring devotion, awe and eventually madness. Without explaining the hows and whys of the statue, White gets across the message that something about the area inspires a connection to this concept of an eternal thing that one may as well call god. Every one of these journeys that White depicts is a mysterious one, though one that each adventurer feels inexplicably and inexorably drawn to. In this Retrofit comic, White neatly ties together a number of complex ideas while leaving the essentially meaning of each story up to the reader, though he is careful to leave many clues.

Miss Lonely Hearts 2, by Gabrielle Gamboa . This second issue of Gamboa's adaptation of the 1931 novel by Nathanael West doesn't dip into the same kind of cartoony well as the first issue did. Instead, this issue features two stories dealing with the main character's existential despair as it relates to his belief in Christ. As the story begins, the Miss Lonelyhearts writer is despondent from reading letters from the desperate all day long and retires to a speakeasy after work, where he is accosted by a dandy friend of his who won't stop talking about all sorts of nonsense, which is clearly what Miss Lonelyhearts craved. A bizarre tableau follows, as the dandy engages his girlfriend and Miss Lonelyhearts in some hilarious babble about religion (a constant running throughline in the series), carnal concerns and how one man was using an adding machine as a means of prayer for a man condemned to be executed. The second story involves MLH in bed, praying to his crucifix and chanting "Jesus Christ", having a dream about a drunken collegiate romp with a pair of Humpty-Dumpties that leads to sacrificing a lamb. With all of its crazy events, the second chapter was far more interesting to look at than the first, despite Gamboa's best efforts to use a number of different shading effects to draw in the reader's eye. In both chapters, it starts to become clear that MLH has an uneasy relationship with the rest of humanity. He wants to be able to love all people but finds them just too much to bear. He wishes to be carefree and hedonistic but is weighed down by his own sense of guilt and propriety. Even in his own dreams, a day of drunken fun turns into a gruesome animal sacrifice, as MLH is forced to batter the lamb's head in with a rock: MLH feels so guilty about his desires that he imagines that he's killing Jesus' stand-in himself. Gamboa's figures are a little stiff at times and her panel-to-panel narrative flow can be a little creaky, but she's a solid storyteller overall who's taking a piece that's obviously difficult to translate into comics and bringing a lot of her own personal style to the task, which I hope she's able to complete.

Jam In The Band 3, #3, by Robin Enrico. Enrico is starting to veer toward the conclusion of this series and finally gives the reader a bit of hope with regard to Bianca, the former lead singer of the band Pitch Girl, whose adventures comprised the first two volumes of this series.What this comic is really about and what the series has really become is a story about writer's block and the dark places that paralysis can lead to, as well as growing older and growing up (which aren't necessarily the same thing). If the second volume of the book was about the things that distract from the pure joy of creating and the camaraderie that creates, the third volume is about rediscovering the joy of simply making music with your friends as a fun thing to do, as opposed to be rich and famous. The parallels with making comics are so obvious that I don't think I need to draw them out. The other former Pitch Girl bandmates Tiara and Corbin were able to rediscover that simple sense of joy together in their new projects, something that Bianca was able to rediscover in this issue, even as her friends were getting married and having children. Enrico wisely depicts each of these decisions as trade-offs in terms of how one's freedom becomes limited by marriage and children but how much can be gained in the process. Enrico's greatest character, hedonist musician/philosopher Becky Vice, spells all of this out pretty clearly as she accepts Bianca because they've shared the same kind of despair and the same disinterest in family. I'll be curious to see where Bianca ends up in the final issue.

The Lettuce Girl #3, by Sophia Wiedeman. Wiedeman reminds me a bit of Julia Gfrorer in the way she reimagines fairy tales in a wider cultural context. The third issue of this new take on the story of Rapunzel (grown in a lettuce patch by a witch) adds in another element: the story of Hansel and Gretel. The girl in question finally escapes from her tower, only to find the warnings of her "mother' to be surprisingly accurate: the world is a cold, dark and dangerous place. Each issue of the series is slowly paced, as Wiedeman is interested in establishing place and mood in great detail. Wiedeman's rendering has become quite good; her characters remain slightly blank and cartoony in the best sense, while her backgrounds have become lush and dense, with lots of crosshatching acting as a counter-balance to the simplicity of her character's line. There's a certain grimness to this story about the darker side of motherhood that makes one wonder about the ultimate fate of these characters. The witch literally creates her children for sinister ends, yet raises and nurtures them up to a point. Is she evil, selfish or merely controlling? Wiedeman adds further complexity to this question by introducing the carnivorous witch who treats the girl sweetly and feeds her sweets in order to fatten her up for her oven. It's hard to tell just where Wiedeman is going to ultimately take this story, but the richness of her storytelling and unsettling imagery make this a consistently intriguing read.

The Index #3, The Text, The Salon, by Caitlin Cass. The Text expands upon Cass's life-long obsession with and fear of texts. In this mini, she explores the history of language and her uneasy relationship with its dogmatic control over meaning. What something "really" means and what it meant to be an informed person were questions that vexed her so fiercely that she went to St. John's College, where the "Great Books" of the Western World are taught in their original form. It's interesting that her drawings (and even her spelling, something else she rails against as a dogmatic concept) are so fuzzy and tossed-off; it's like comics became her escape hatch from this curse of needing to conform to the reality of the text as she understood it. Comics are a kind of way of communicating at a more basic, intuitive and even poetic level (at times), though Cass' own comics's writing style tends to be more direct rather than poetic.

Despite her discomfort with the text, she is fascinated by ideas and thinkers in particular. The Salon is a spread of famous thinkers and writers all trying to come to terms with what they have created and achieve immortality in the own ways and with varying degrees of success. Each thinker is in their own (literal) frame on this oversized, cardstock  For example, Adam Smith is despondent looking upon his works, because he realized "that no one ever read past the first chapter of his book", and he sees capitalism run amok. Isaac Newton used only "ink and geometry" to "create a ladder to infinity". Cass cleverly draws the thinkers as men dealing with ink, books, words and the detritus of ideas; it's one of her best pieces.

I have mixed feelings regarding the third issue of The Index.I love this series as a crazy mix of ideas, with the text-phobic nature of Susan clashing with the need to order and index everything that John possesses. I enjoyed the side trips the series takes and how it introduced the index writer Otlet into the cast of characters, summoning him from a fire as they all mused about the library at Alexandria. Cass notes how the library became more useless the more information that was stuffed into it, as there was little regard as to the quality of that information. The problem I had with this issue in particular is that Cass overstuffed it with ideas, characters, and information; there's hardly any room for the reader to breathe. There's also the problem of the drawing itself; while Cass is undeniably improving as a draftsman, she's over-rendering too many of her pages when a more simple approach might have been more appropriate. Her lettering and word balloon placement also drive me crazy at times, as words are squeezed into balloons and sometimes spill out. It doesn't seem to be a deliberate effect (if it is, it's distracting). The real issue I had is that after three issues, I'm starting to lose track of the characters qua characters, as opposed to mouthpieces for certain states of mind. These is the first story of hers that I've read with original and fictional characters, and it seems like she's still trying to find the right balance between concept and character. That said, she continues to take the ideas of the series in fascinating directions.


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Be The Love, Be The Comics, Buck, and Drawdoer's Best American Comics 2013, by Jon Drawdoer. This large array of comics are mostly of the gag variety. Be The Comics is a series of gag strips headlined by the title story, which is a tongue-in-cheek exploration of why one should become a cartoonist. It should be said up front that Drawdoer is not a great draftsman and few of his jokes land because of his visual sense. However, he can draw well enough to tell a story and shape his jokes, which makes lines like "Not many people know this, but every so often, when they reach a certain age, Los Bros [Hernandez] hold open auditions for a new brother" really stand out. Drawdoer likes drawing distinctions between high and low, like making a joke about pubic hair with regard to Downton Abbey. Buck is a different look at the 1980s TV version of Buck Rogers interpolated with The Shining; there are some decent gags here, but the crudity of the work distracts from the references he's trying to get the audience to understand. Be The Love #1 saw Drawdoer start to refine his line a bit, trying different line weights and textures in different stories. He also continues a story begun in Be The Comics about "Chubby Meltdowns": the phenomenon wherein children have a meltdown when children have Chubby Checker's music taken away from them. There's also a hilarious strip about being on the wrong side of history throughout history. The Chubby Checker saga is continued in Best American Comics, as Drawdoer also makes an extended pun on the awful movie B.A.P.S., with B.A.P.S.tist churches proliferating and sermons ending with statements like "We must all serve the plot!". This issue really starts to get impressively self-reflexive and complex, as the cultural references start warping into something other than simple and cheap gags. He's starting to get at something here, but his ambition is still outstripping his ability in terms of what he wants to depict on the page. That said, he's come a long way in a short period of time, especially since he seems to be publishing a minicomic a month.

Cartoonist Utopia: Breakers

Breakers is less an anthology than a snapshot of what was obviously a magical experience for a number of cartoonists. Every other year, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in the barely-there town of New Smyrna Beach, FL invites a couple of dozen cartoonists for a three week arts residency, with three master artists selected to run individual groups. This year's master cartoonists were Dean Haspiel, Megan Kelso and Ellen Forney--three cartoonists with very different approaches to the art of comics. Breakers is divided into comics done by cartoonists in each of the three groups. Each of the leaders wanted different things from those under their instruction. For example, Forney wanted everyone to keep a comics diary and perhaps try a different formal approach than they usually use; in her case, it was adding more dialogue and using fewer narrative captions. Most of the comics here are really just snippets, exercises and sketchbook work. Don't read this comic as you would most anthologies, where an editor carefully constructs the flow of the work to manage the narrative thrust of each entry. Breakers is more about the way our work reflects our surroundings and co-workers.

The Forney group, "Team Zeppelin", is not unlike the others in that the group's common experiences and in-jokes shaped their work. A day at a nude beach where an elderly man approached them and started questioning them was used by almost everyone on her team as a touchstone. Forney really pushed her team to draw that incident and the bodies they saw at the beach in general, and that was obviously a clear bonding moment that pushed individual boundaries of comfort in a positive way. Lara Antal, the editor of this collection, leads off with a long, personal story about her career that's formally very ambitious in terms of the way she sets up panels, uses negative space and creates detailed close-ups that are emotionally powerful.  Rebecca Case's smudgy and cute style is all about the use of shapes rather than lines to tell a story, but they're no less expressive than Antal's more naturalistic style. Jean Chen's simple line in her one-page, punchline heavy strips is also quite appealing and makes for a nice contrast. Julie Condon's story "Married to Dick" looks a bit like the sort of thing Liz Baillie used to do and is hands-down the funniest story in the book. It's one long nightmare/fantasy where the artist and a friend see this kind of douchey-looking guy at a fruit stand and she imagines what life would be like if she was married to him. The stakes grow continuously hire and more ridiculous as the story proceeds, perfectly amping up the ridiculousness of it all. From the concrete we move to the abstract, as Gabrielle Greenlee's painted account of diving underwater is all about waves and motion. Boum and Lynda May both share simple stories of their Florida experiences from entirely different points of view: passive (Boum was pregnant and unable to do things like go on hikes) and active (May was constantly on her bicycle). K-Fai Steele rounds out the group with an interesting childhood strip, a story about a runaway monkey and her own take on the beach and the encounter with the naked old man. Forney's own strips are very stripped down and even scrawled out in comparison to her more refined typical line.

I'm not sure if it was because the Forney group was Antal's group, but that section was by far the most cohesive and interesting in the book. Kelso's group ("The Field House Gang") had some fine veteran cartoonists in it like Lark Pien and Gabrielle Gamboa) features some intriguing glimpses of work (especially from Nusha Ashjaee's haunting story of an encounter in a forest), but most of the cartoonists here submitted just one or two pages each. The reader only gets a taste of their experience as a group. Kelso's own strips, on the other hand, are absolutely superb. They're very much in Kelso's cartoony, long-limbed style, but there's a dynamic looseness in her line and in these stories about connections, beauty and lust that's not usually present in her work. What she emphasized to her group was trying to regain the simple pleasure of drawing once again, and it does seem clear that there's a looseness as a group with her artists.

Dean Haspiel's "Team YOLO" played on his interests in formal experimentation and collaboration. He gave his team an assignment to draw, in whatever fashion they saw fit, a story with his text called "A Letter Lasts Longer". Christa Cassano's take on it was very clever, using a honeycombing approach to panels that contained memories with the text alongside them. What I thought was interesting was how many of the cartoonists went to exactly the same narrative well: revealing that the letter being read was at a gravestone or funeral in the final panel. It made some of the strips in this section a bit repetitive, feeling like the exercises they were. An exception was Meghan Lands, whose anthropomorphic rabbits and landscape drawings were pitch-perfect for Haspiel's text.  On the other hand, the strips involving the "Shifty Goth", a character they made up and shared, were absolutely hilarious--especially Haspiel's account of the SG in prison. JP Pollard's sci-fi vision of "Shifty Godth" was also amusing.All told, Breakers allows a reader to get an understanding of what that experience must have been like for the artists while providing a wide-ranging and ambitious number of styles and approaches to making comics.

Minicomics Adaptations: Choy, Gamboa, Stripling

Three intriguing minis this time around, all of which use the language of comics to adapt works of literature.

The Book of Job #1, by Scott Stripling. The artist was new to me, and there's no contact information in the comic. From the way that the book's panels were hand-drawn and out of alignment to the sketchy nature of his line, this comic feels like a sketchbook job done by a beginner. Nonetheless, Stripling packs a lot of interesting detail into this slightly modernized retelling of the biblical story of a virtuous man named Job who is beset by all manner of woes by God as a test of faith, though God is egged on by the Devil. What's interesting about this version is that God appears to be more of a concerned bystander who reacts with alarm to Job's woes but is seemingly powerless to stop him from losing all he has or to prevent his wife from running off with the pool boy. Job dies and goes to hell, but then emerges to much worse: a real accounting of his sins. Stripling implies that the supernatural force judging him is his own consciousness, or perhaps a part of him related to a sort of superconsciousness. The end of this issue sees Job struggling to figure out what questions to ask, and the result is something closer to Zen Buddhism than traditional Western ideas, though mixed with a carnival barker's patter. This is an odd little comic that's a big jumbled and disorganized, as though the ideas and images came faster than the artist could record them, but I'd be curious to see more.

Ed Choy Draws James Joyce, by Ed Choy. Choy is one of my favorite young artists but still seems to be slowly experimenting in public as he refines his chops and his style. Choy obviously takes great delight in exploring just how vulgar and scatological the great Joyce was, as his stream-of-consciousness writing frequently zeroed in on sexual obsession. Here, Choy chooses to tackle a couple of Joyce's more conventional works ("Araby" from Dubliners, and an excerpt from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), while teasing out some anecdotes from Joyce's life on the cover.  I could have read an entire comic's worth of these hilarious three and four panel strips, as Choy really plugs them into the language of comics. In "7 Words", for example, when Joyce delivers the punchline that he doesn't know what order the seven words he wrote that day go in, the person he's talking to does an old-fashioned plop take. It's all fun and games, but Choy also gets at something here, even in the hilarious four-panel strip where Joyce writes a love letter and talks about how much he loves his girlfriend's farts. He gets at the total immediacy, that total indulgence in the id that Joyce represents and that is quite familiar to an alternative/underground cartoonist.

 

The short stories look beautiful (this was printed on a risograph and really make the dark blue and pink hues he selected pop on every page) and flatter Choy's line and figure drawing, which is becoming ever-more assured. "Araby" sees a young man with a crush on a woman come to terms with the unreality of his desires, and it's a rather conventional adaptation. His excerpt from Portrait is more interesting, using a fuzzy zip-a-tone effect to create a dreamy atmosphere that befits the story lingering on school days. All told, Choy continues to push himself formally and experiment in new and interesting ways as he explores culture and finds new ways to interpret it. I like how deliberately he's working through his ideas, though I'd love to see him become more prolific as he gets better in public.

Miss Lonelyhearts #1, by Gabrielle Gamboa. Gamboa is a familiar name to alt-comics fans from the 90s, and she's returned to doing comics after a nearly eight-year absence. This Kickstarter-funded comic is an adaptation of the Nathanael West novel from the 1930s, and Gamboa uses a number of interesting visual tricks to add a vein of pitch-black humor to the grim nature of this story. A young man is given the task of writing the "Miss Lonelyhearts" column for a newspaper in the 1930s. These sequences in the book are drawn in a grey-scaled, naturalistic manner, echoing the somber nature of the story. While trying to figure out which letters he should chose for response so as to beat a deadline, the young man reads three tales of woe, each more brutal than the next. The twist that Gamboa provides is illustrating each of the three letters in the style of a different comic strip artist. The sad story of a Catholic woman whose unfeeling husband keeps getting her pregnant despite a very serious health risk is drawn as Popeye and Olive Oyl. The letter from a teenaged girl pondering suicide because of her deformed nose is done in the style of Little Orphan Annie. Finally, the story of a teenaged boy worrying about his deaf-mute sister's well-being after she was raped while enduring an abusive mother is done as the duo were Nancy and Sluggo.

Gamboa is not a style mimic a la R.Sikoryak or Roger Langridge, but she gets her point across with these visual approximations. The fact that they aren't exact reproductions actually works in her favor, allowing her to go a little more grotesque, like an image of the "Popeye" character looming with a disgusting leer on his face as he has sex with "Olive". Another example is the touch of pathos she adds to "Nancy" and "Sluggo", making them feel more real than the impenetrable Ernie Bushmiller originals. It's a bit of a gimmick to be sure, but one that works within the context of the story as West's prose is truly bleak, as his protagonist faces the most desperate of pleas for help. The fact that the protagonist's boss comes along and dictates a heap of platitudes for him to expand upon makes his task all the more grim. I'll be curious to see where Gamboa takes this series visually as she continues to adapt the novel.