Back to Zero (Zero): Mome #16

Rob reviews the 16th volume of Fantagraphics' flagship anthology, MOME, edited by Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth.

I had noted in my last review of MOME that it was starting to become a callback series to Fantagraphics anthologies of the past. In particular, we're starting to see more contributions from artists who submitted work to ZERO ZERO, a series that had some outstanding and unusual work from a variety of artists before getting canceled. This issue brought us new work from Archer Prewitt, Ted Stearn and Renee French. Prewitt contributed a "Funny Bunny" strip that was a bit more restrained than usual, but set the tone for the rest of the issue in terms of its raw, visceral qualities. There wasn't a lot that was delicate in this issue of MOME, and the few strips in that vein felt a bit out of place. The strips that stood out were either vicious, gritty or even borderline garish in presentation. Aesthetically, it made this issue of MOME different from the rest. Indeed, each of the issues post #10 or so have all stood out as individual statements, as opposed to the anthology's initial identity as an incubator for a select group of young talents. While that paradigm hasn't been in effect for quite some time, issue #16 felt like more like an issue of BUZZARD (a 90s anthology noted for weird juxtapositions) than any past issue of MOME.

For example, the Stearn piece (the first chapter of a graphic novel that will run in the anthology) was a classic Fuzz & Pluck story. The chicken and stuffed-bear duo are trapped on a boat, starving and antagonizing each other. When Pluck cuts off a bit of his own tail to use as bait, it leads to Fuzz nodding off and dreaming of a horrible scenario wherein Pluck keeps cutting off bits of himself and bleeding out, and Fuzz having all of his stuffing pulled out. It's a sequence that's simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and added some gruesome laughs in a volume that mostly avoided that direction.

French's piece, also part one of a larger story, introduced us to a young boy living in a bizarre environment. With his sunken eyes and bowl haircut, he's a typically droopy and slightly grotesque French protagonist. This part of the story saw him walk to what appeared to be a cafe built into a giant, dead worm propped up on columns. He buys a poster that seems part-worm, part-mandala and ponders the existence of tendrils arising from water. No one is better at creating oblique environments that immediately shunt readers into new ways of seeing than French, and the first part of this story is no exception. She combined her usual fastidious, pointilist style with a looseness of line with regard to the character, giving him a sort of fragility not unlike her Edison Steelhead character from THE TICKING.

Todd Bak, in the second part of his epic storyline about Georg Steller, employed a similarly visceral storytelling style, with white on a black background helping to depict the desolate and hopeless Arctic landscape the explorer and his men found themselves in. The strip is part straight history (especially in the flashbacks), part philosophical musing and part mystical conflict with one's environment. Bak's comics are all about exploring environments that are at once beautiful, mysterious and relentlessly hostile. There's an interesting element of fatalism to them as well, as the characters feel inextricably drawn to their adventures, even when they know it could be their end.

The COLD HEAT strips, by Ben Jones, Frank Santoro and Jon Vermilyea, all leaned on the inscrutable side, forcing the reader to simply accept the images laid out before them and follow them as best as possible. The first strip, about a girl luring a jock to a sexual encounter with a demonic creature, keeps the audience off-balance by working entirely in shades of brown, pink and dark pink. When the jock is drugged, the way that pink and white were interspersed in the panels was dizzying, creating a desired hallucinatory effect. In the second strip, which is essentially a slice-of-life strip involving two aliens, the dullness of their daily life on a mission is juxtaposed against the garish colors of their environment. It feels alien, with the colors clashing so as to create dissonance for the reader. We're viewing someone's home, where they are comfortable--but the reader is made to feel decidedly uncomfortable.

That sense of discomfort can also be felt in the strips by Laura Park and Sara Edward-Corbett. Park tackles the horrific feeling of social anxiety in this strip head-on, as every encounter with anyone she meets winds up with her hearing the ways in which she is a failure, an asshole, an awful person. When it extends to her beloved pets and even animistically to objects in her apartment, she reveals that all she can hope to do is ride the feeling out. The blue-grey wash she used was a perfect way to illustrate these OCD & depressive thoughts. Edward-Corbett's contributions to date in MOME had been amusing but comparatively lightweight. This issue saw her submit some interesting autobiographical material from her childhood, recontextualizing her older strips about children. There's a coldness to her line that informs her strips that are about the ways in which children are cruel to each other, and that certainly held true for these matter-of-fact reminiscences. She simply presented a series of anecdotes that clearly held some meaning for her, but did so with no additional layering of sentiment. While both of these strips were comparatively restrained visually to the rest of the weirdness in this volume, they were no less visceral or harsh.

The three other color strips had different intents and effects. Conor o'Keefe did an extended take on his Winsor McCay riffs, deliberately attempting to evoke classic cartooning with the washed-out colors and simple line. His strips in MOME have mostly been a colorful contrast to other works, but they haven't really stood out until we got to see him flesh out his world a bit more in this issue. He also worked a bit bigger in this issue, with larger panels and bigger characters. He's not necessarily an artist whose work I turn to first when I read MOME, but he's occupying a very specific niche that works well when considering the issue as a whole.

Nate Neal has quietly been doing all sorts of interesting visually things during his tenure at MOME (his first strip in particular was a deconstruction of quotidian comics), and this issue found him creating a new sort of iconography for language. "Mindforkin'" was just that--a man thinking of various things he could do in a given day, the various events that could occur as a result of his actions, and his varied responses to those events. They are all told in a cartoony style that leaned heavily on color to provide mood and help the reader decode the symbology. The symbols he chose were not arbitrary; indeed, he created a language for this strip, and one can decipher bits and pieces of it both from repetition, a partial key on the first page and visual context.

Dash Shaw had the third color piece, a comic strip adaptation of an episode of the crassly comedic TV show Blind Date. That's a show that depicts a blind date and runs all sort of pop-up commentary along the way at the expense of the daters. Shaw took that formula, softened it with a sea-green wash, and stripped it of the snark. The result left only the pathos of the experience, with two people desperately looking for a connection but having vastly different ideas of what that connection might mean. That became especially clear at the end, when the woman is taken by the man, but he said he didn't feel a spark that he had vaguely defined earlier in the story. Shaw makes heavy use of shadow in this story, almost as if the reader is seeing the characters through a thick window. The effect is both distancing and yet strangely intimate, as though the reader was spying on a couple they cared about. This is a comparatively minor Shaw story in terms of scope and ambition, but it certainly fits into his recent interest in the use of color to drive narrative in different ways.

The stories that felt like odd fits were Nicolas Mahler's "Is This Art" and Lilli Carre's "It Was Too Hot To Sleep Indoors". Which is not to say that they weren't good stories, but rather that their presence here was jarring. That was especially true of Mahler's charming, minimalist story about being an cartoonist and having to prove to an IRS agent's satisfaction that this meant he was an artist. On the other hand, Carre's story was yet another home run in a series of home runs she's swatted as a cartoonist in the last couple of years. It's as though she and Shaw are in some kind of competition to become Most Exciting Young Artist, because the two of them love playing around with the language of comics, finding new and interesting ways to explore their themes of interest. In this issue, Carre's story is a quiet one about the yearning of a teenaged boy and the mysterious presence of an older girl hanging around him at some sort of beachside house. Carre's stories always have an element of mystery to them, as though there's a secret the reader is not quite privy to but we nonetheless experience during the course of the story. The mystery in this story was embodied in literally shedding skins due to sunburn, and the way we leave marks on others without understanding what we've done. The final image of a story done in greyscale is a striking one, with burnt-pink legs revealing the extent of a prank indicative of deep feelings.

One of the best things about MOME is that, as a reader, I feel like I'm getting work from each artist that's their "A" material. Carre' and Shaw have many other outlets for publication, but it's clear that they take a special delight in having an outlet for their short story ideas. Neal and Kurt Wolfgang have MOME as their primary outlet for publication, and clearly go all-out in every story. If early MOME had a flaw, it was that some of the artists were phoning in some of their contributions because they had so many irons in the fire. I'd like to see young artists like o'Keefe and Edward-Corbett grow more ambitious and perhaps even serialize a story in the anthology. Of course, seeing outstanding work from old favorites along with translated short stories of European artists has been another welcome trend for what continues to be a must-read book, issue after issue.

Beginnings & Endings: Mome 15

Rob reviews the fifteenth issue of MOME, edited by Eric Reynolds & Gary Groth (Fantagraphics).


MOME 15 felt like another transitional issue, given the number of serials that either ended or reached their penultimate chapter. Tim Hensley's deranged WALLY GROPIUS series wrapped up here as the titular hero was double-crossed by his would-be crush Jillian Banks in the most bizarre and hilarious manner possible. Hensley's flattened figures and John Stanley-inspired character design & color choices immediately throw a reader off-balance as they enter a carefully-crafted world with its own rigid internal logic. The most surprising aspect of this story was that there was a deeper master plot that explained some of the serial's weirder moments (like Jillian and her "father" engaging in rough sex in an earlier issue). Hensley ends it with an out-of-nowhere bit of weirdness that nonetheless touched upon a seemingly random series of bits throughout the series. Hensley's introduction to MOME in #5 was a key moment for the anthology, because he represented a level of absurdity and a cartoony sensibility that had been absent from the series. It represented MOME's first big risk and first sign that they were abandoning their more literary but mainstream model aimed at drawing in non-comics readers.



Speaking of endings, this issue featured the penultimate chapter of Paul Hornschemeier's "Life With Mr Dangerous" serial. The story had been appearing in dribs and drabs for over four years and will require a longer look once it's finally been completed. It's been a story about stasis, as the story's female protagonist feels completely stuck in her life and relationships, and explored them through her particular set of pop-culture obsessions. For Hornschemeier, the story's use of color and its formal pyrotechnics are a bit more muted than usual. This chapter revealed a pertinent bit of information about her vaguely-defined relationship with a long-distance friend, a revelation that proved to be devastating for her (portrayed in a typically emotionally distanced, slightly bumbling manner). The flatness of color and affect in this story often made it an awkward fit in MOME throughout its serialization, especially when the anthology started to go in more challenging directions. That's why I'm eager to reread the story in a different context.

Gilbert Shelton and Pic's "Last Gig in Shnagrlig" also wrapped up after a three-issue run. My distaste for Shelton's work has been recorded elsewhere, but one can't deny Shelton's talent as a cartoonist and the sheer craft on display in this story. I find the humor to be a bit corny and dated, but the influence it had on future cartoonists is undeniable. There's no question that Shelton's work ethic, caricature design and skill at depicting slapstick are all top-notch. When he plays to those strengths, the story is at its best. When he's attempting to deliver political satire, the story falls flat.



As always, series editors Eric Reynolds & Gary Groth intersperse serials with shorter pieces that are interesting in their own right but also provide a balance of color, content and approach. Andrice Arp's paintings of Japanese mythological characters were an interesting choice to kick off the issue; her unusual and curvy stylized drawings are one of the most distinctive in the world of comics, though I'm eager to see more actual comics from her. The first half of the issue is heavy on brightly-colored comics, like Sara Edward-Corbett's delightfully drawn child adventures. There's a viciousness in the way her characters interact that reminds me a bit of Steven Weissman, and a flatness to her composition that makes an interesting companion piece to the Wally Gropius stories that preceded it in this issue. Ray Fenwick's palette is more muted in one of his text/illustration pieces, a narrative that is a tutorial on a craft project involving finger and toenail clippings that exposes the neuroses of the narrator. Fenwick has been another key figure in MOME, given his unique visual approach and sardonic sense of humor. The underrated Conor O'Keefe closed out the color section with another of his Winsor McKay-inspired meditations. O'Keefe also employs a muted color palette that focuses in on dark greens as the narrator mused on ducks, water and the way nature flows.

The main events of the issue (other than Hensley's stories) were a new short story by Dash Shaw, the first part of an intriguing new serial by T. Edward Bak and a bound-in minicomic from Spanish artist Max. Shaw's "My Entire High School...Sinking Into the Sea!" is another in a series of unusual color experiments from the artist. The story is a cross between a Steve Ditko homage and the film "Titanic", as the story is otherwise self-explanatory. Shaw draws himself back in high school as it's being swept away and he's desperately trying to stay alive. Shaw bleeds color across panels in an expressionistic manner, mixing them like watercolors in a tray to evoke extremes of emotion. It's an enormously clever experiment, mixed in with Ditko-style stiff character poses and an ending that mixes the end of "Titanic" with Captain America's 60s origin story.



The first chapter of Bak's "Steller" detailed an ill-fated expedition to Kamchatka in his signature black-on-white style that mimics woodcuts. The story alternates between flashbacks to Georg Steller's education and the development of his interest in botany, mineralogy and exploration, and an eerie, visceral account of the expedition that ended his life. Bak captured the stark, alien beauty of that environment with his line drawings while alternating it with frighteningly intense but cartoony drawings that resembled cave drawings as much as they do comics. There's always a harsh but epic sweep to Bak's comics, a journey across an bleak landscape that leads to inevitable hardship. Seeing his work serialized in MOME just adds another unique approach to a deep roster.

Max's "The Confederacy of Villains" was originally printed in Spanish in 1987, and appears in MOME in its intended format. It seems to be a noir/conspiracy story involving secret cabals and Hollywood mysteries, but it's really an affectionate ode to character actors of eras gone by and a condemnation of McCarthyism. It's drawn in a bigfoot style in a minicomics format, bound into the back of the issue (a clever solution to a publishing problem) and dominated by cerulean and aubergine color tones. The story is interspersed by black & white pin-up pages of classic, villainous character actors and is the sort of obscure nugget that's distinguished MOME throughout its run.


Of the remaining stories, Noah Van Sciver's "The True Tale of the Denver Spider-Man" stood out the most. It's perhaps Van Sciver's best career effort to date, a creepy true story of a man who killed an ex-benefactor and lived in a tiny crawlspace. Van Sciver's scratchy, nervous line nicely captured the account of this killer with a sad and twisted life story. Nate Neal's "Delia's Love" is not unlike his most recent MOME contribution in that it's about a character recalling a series of seedy encounters. This story reminded me a bit of Dennis Eichorn's stuff: hard-drinking, hard-living people in the weirdest of circumstances. Neal drew his characters as slightly grotesque: lumpy, pimply, saggy and worn down by the world. What was unusual about this story was the end, where the stories told lead to a fracturing of a relationship. Finally, Robert Goodin contributed another of his folk tale adaptations that was exquisitely drawn but a bit disposable. It's a bit of pleasant fluff that doesn't detract from the issue but doesn't add much beyond a few nicely-drawn pages.



MOME seems to go through transition points every five issues or so. I suspect the next issue will be yet another changing of the guard, with a number of new artists and perhaps even some surprises along that line. The key to the anthology's continued success has been flexibility regarding its mission. It's still a place where young artists are sought out and spotlighted; the inclusion of Van Sciver this issue is a prime example of that commitment, but contributors like O'Keefe, Edward-Corbett, Laura Park, et al also demonstrate this. It's also a place where key foreign comics can find a home. For a piece like Lewis Trondheim's "At Loose Ends", MOME was a perfect home for it because it was too obscure to risk as a regular release, but it also drew big-time Trondheim fans to the anthology. Lastly, it's a place where great American cartoonists can publish their short stories, like Shelton and Jim Woodring. This variety of approaches helps keep the anthology coming out on a regular schedule (a big key in helping to drum up a regular readership) and positions it as a sort of descendant of WEIRDO and RAW. It may not represent the absolute cutting edge of comics the way that KRAMER'S ERGOT does, but it's still the widest available survey of alt-comics in publication and will be increasingly valuable in that regard as it continues to evolve.

Delightful Ambiguity: Mome 14

Rob reviews the 14th volume of Fantagraphics' flagship anthology, MOME.


If MOME #13 felt a bit all over the place, #14 went much further with that sense of fragmentation, juxtaposing stories with ambiguous images and endings to create a dizzying and fascinating array of visual styles. The interstitial pieces by Derek Von Gieson add flavor and color throughout the issue, acting as a sort of visual palate cleanser between stories. These are open-ended, one page narratives that vary between first person accounts of post-apocalyptic landscapes or embarrassingly intimate details regarding a busted-up wedding to third-person accounts of a boy and his vicious parasites. What they all have in common is that they thrust the reader into the middle of a narrative with little context and no backstory and deal in quotidian details. That matter-of-factness extends to the weirdest of circumstances, adding to the sense of both enigma and familiarity the reader feels with each snippet. That sense of mystery, dread and resignation pervades much of the entire issue, giving it a thematic cohesion that wasn't always seen in past volumes.


Laura Park's second MOME offering, "Office 32F", felt a bit more substantive than her first contribution. It's a whimsical tale of paranoia and awareness, slipping in and out of autobiography as she writes a journal about her discovery that she was under surveillance by a tiny group of spies. The level of quirky detail she provides (like finding a tiny pair of saltines in her celphone, or finding a tiny pair of mittens in a spider web, bleaching them and then flushing them down the toilet) speaks to the way that she was simultaneously alarmed and comforted by the spies in her life. Her actions took on the bearing of ritual, both in the sense of daily actions that we engage in as a sort of comfortable groove as well as an active ceremony designed to evoke a particular desired outcome. When she learned that she was no longer being watched and may not have been the real subject at any time, there was more than a twinge of disappointment--as well as a wink to the audience. That seemed to indicate her simultaneous unease and excitement of having her work (much of it autobiographical) viewed and judged by an audience, creating an invisible relationship that nonetheless had a significant impact.



Olivier Schwauren's second entry to MOME has the feel of an unearthed artifact, bursting with a crude energy reminiscent of a Golden Age comic. If this story had been published fifty years ago, Dan Nadel would have already reprinted it. The washed-out sepia tones give the story that sense of being of a different era, and the deliberate lack of detail he provides in framing his stories of single-minded obsession further tantalize the reader. It's a room full of men engaged in some activity--is it a parlor? a bar? an mental institution? It's impossible to say. There are power hierarchies here even as some men strive to break out of their tedium. In this instance, one man shows another a crudely-drawn dungeon adventure page that he says is a sort of game and cajoles someone else into trying it. After being mocked, the protagonist loses it and his dragged away, but it's left open as to what kind of impact his game has on his friend. Schwauren's strips have their own loony internal logic that evokes a certain delight when followed. The only cartoonist I can think of that does anything remotely similar in intent is Gerald Jablonski, though both men are so idiosyncratic as cartoonists that their output is completely different.



There are a number of stories here whose appeal is primarily visual, leaving it up to the reader to make connections or draw conclusions. The Ben Jones/Frank Santoro/Jon Vermilyea team-up for a Cold Heat episode was the most striking of these, as aliens observe a rock star being consumed by a swirling demon whose reach apparently threatens the entire world. It's a wordless piece that slides us from image to image, never stopping to explain the hows and whys of the situation, instead forcing the reader to accept the information provided on the page and react to it. Vermilyea also continued his motif of homicidal, anthropomorphic food items with a strip about Kool-Aid Man crashing through a wall to give kids some "special" Kool-Aid...and then gruesomely pick up the pieces. That touch of the grotesque and the absurd was a great find by editor Eric Reynolds and makes for a great contrast with the more austere and inward-looking pieces publishing in MOME. That's also true of Josh Simmons, whose "Funny Pages" is an Ivan Brunetti-esque hijacking of a standard page of comic strips, turning them into something more brutal or coarse.



Stories by Dash Shaw, Sara Edward-Corbett and Conor O'Keefe are also striking in their use of visuals in very different ways. O'Keefe's story is a cross between Winsor McKay (in terms of the quality of his line) and EC Segar (in terms of story content). Like both of those cartoonists, this story has the feel of animation, with exaggerated action as a boat manned by an unusual cry is buffetted by the waves. Edward-Corbett's story is similarly slight and short but stands out because of her beautiful line work and bold use of color in a retelling of the tortoise and the hare. Shaw's use of color in "Scenes from the Abyss" is absolutely stunning. It's a simple story about an ambitious but banal young screenwriter trying to get his project made and impress those around him. Each segment of the story is introduced with a large panel dominated by a circular structure: a lamp, a tank of water containing a stage, a hot tub, a reel of film, etc. There's a sleazy sense of fakeness to this character, who in every stage of the story is finding a different way to distort reality, a practice reflected in the way Shaw blurs and distorts light and color in this strip.


There's plenty of straight-out humor in this issue, some of which is more effective than others. Ray Fenwick continues his funny "Truth Bear" series and the Stick's quest for truth takes an unusual turn when a non-omniscient creator shows up. Fenwick's work is pretty much an examplar of idiosyncratic, valuing both words and drawings equally in terms of their plastic qualities. Hernan Migoya and Juaco Vizuete check in from Spain (keeping up MOME's tradition of introducing American audiences to foreign cartoonists) with a bawdy story about a hard-luck Peruvian who winds up with a job as a gofer for a popular but monstrous popular singer. It's not exactly subtle in the punches it throws, but the cartooning is so weird and elastic that it's compelling. Speaking of a lack of subtlety, Emile Bravo's "Wild West Winging It" is a parable about current American politics down as a Western. While it was interesting to get a Frenchman's perspective on the 2008 election, the hits he lands are all too obvious. The same goes for the second installment of Gilbert Shelton's Not Quite Dead story. I will say that this segment was funnier than the first, thanks to getting much of the ham-handed approach to religion of politics being thrust to the side and a preponderance of funny drawings taking the forefront here.


The centerpiece story in this issue of MOME is Lilli Carre's "Carnival". Carre' in some respects is a perfect replacement for Gabrielle Bell in MOME (though Bell may contribute some more stories in the future, she will be far from a regular). Her line is somewhat similar, though Carre's work is a bit more stylized, especially in her character design. Like Bell, Carre' went through a period of rapid improvement and is not publishing some striking stories. "Carnival" is a blend of magical realism and heartbreaking loneliness played out as a sort of emotional deadening. The Carre' stories I've read tend to be about longing denied or somehow frustrated. This story concerns a man who can't make lasting connections (we're tipped off by his profession of car salesman) who nonetheless feels the void in his life encountering a free-spirited single mother at a carnival. Their potential connection goes awry on both their parts for different reasons and both of them are left with fantasy as their only real outlet.



The variety of visual approaches and storytelling styles, along with the international flavor of the anthology, have transformed MOME from a showcase for a handful of young artists to a sort of latter-day RAW. Obviously, it's not the sort of sui generis creation that RAW was, but it's appealing to the same sort of sensibilities. It no longer seems to be aiming to be an entry-level comics anthology for highly literate audiences; instead, it's now assuming that those literate audiences are quite capable of handling any number of styles. MOME might also become a place where work that was going to be printed in comic books that are no longer being published due to industry & economic concerns might now find a home. The balance struck by editors Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth between unpublished, up-and-coming artists, alt-comics legends with short stories to publish and international stars with stellar work that needed translation has been a delicate one, but when everything comes together just so (especially in issues 12 and this issue), then MOME becomes a crucial component in understanding alt-comics as they stand today.

Fragments: Mome #13

Rob reviews the latest volume of Fantagraphics' premier anthology, MOME.



The last few volumes of MOME have brought in a startling number of new contributors as the original lineup is mostly phasing itself out or going to a more irregular contribution schedule. Only Kurt Wolfgang remained in this issue from the original group as he continues his "Nothing Eve" serial. I love the increasing density of his line and his irresistible character design. The way he draws his main character's best friend (and unrequited love) Edie is in a ragged, exaggerated manner that makes the reader fall in love with her just like Tom, the protagonist. It's interesting that in a story about the end of the world, the real core of the story turns out to be this romance with loose ends. One gets the sense that all of Tom's adventures prior to recounting his relationship with Edie were just distractions until he could force himself to think about her, see her and get some kind of final closure. Wolfgang is a nice fit for this anthology because his sensibility has always been somewhere between Peter Bagge-style shenanigans and unabashed romanticism.

Volume 12 of MOME was the best of the series in part because of how loaded its "veteran" contributor lineup was. With translated stories by David B, Killoffer and Olivier Schrauwen, MOME had some stunning work from the first rank of European avant-garde cartoonists. These longer pieces are MOME's anchors for the shorter works of newer cartoonists. MOME 13 has the first part of a story by underground legend Gilbert Shelton (with Pic) and a short story by scratchboard artist Thomas Ott. Both of these stories fell completely flat. Ott is a pulp/horror artist whose work has a certain nervous energy but is ultimately pretty shallow. The story here, about an astronaut lured by a space siren, wouldn't have been out of place in either an EC comic or Heavy Metal.

Shelton's work has never done much for me, perhaps because the taboos he breaks (especially with regard to drug humor) seem pretty tame today. There's a certain manic nature to his panels and page design and a loving level of detail, but it all seems so ham-fisted and obvious. The satire he employs is of the most obvious kind and the situations he puts "the world's least famous rock band", Not Quite Dead, all seem rather familiar. I can see Shelton as an influence on many modern cartoonists (Terry Laban comes to mind) but his work seems very much anchored to a particular time and place and didn't grow in the way that Crumb's did.

David Greenberger's contributions felt a bit out of place. I love Ray Fenwick's text-based comics, but Greenberger's (known strictly as a writer, not an artist) list of albums seemed like a weak way of getting into MOME. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing something more substantive by him in the pages of this anthology.



These grips aside, this issue of MOME featured the single best story published in its pages: Dash Shaw's "Satellite CMYK". Shaw of late has been digging into color as a formal storytelling tool, experimenting with its eye-grabbing qualities to either anchor the narrative, guide the reader or else depict clashing or contradicting ideas in a clever manner. This story is about deception and identity, as a man is depicted at three different ages in three different identities. He is tossed around by a group of rebels in a huge satellite where people living on certain levels believe they are at the lowest level, whereas the rebels know there are lower levels and keep trying to smuggle people down to them and give them new identities. Of course, our protagonist has no interest in being part of this struggle--he just wants to live his life, and resents having his loved ones and memories taken away from him.

The clever thing about the story is that each identity is represented by a different color from the offset printing scaled of CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. That entire world is in that one color (and even goes in that CMYK order), with that "subtractive color" a handy stand-in for that subtracted series of memories. The final page, where the protagonist is literally in the dark before seeing a brand new image when the lights are turned on, is a perfect demonstration of the way offset printing works to create new colors through combining plates, just as the protagonist is now living on a level where he is allowed to keep his memories. It's an incredibly clever idea that could really only be done in comics, and on print in particular.



This volume of MOME seems to have much more eye candy in it than past volumes; that is, stories that one just loves to look at as much as read. For example, Laura Park's ruminations about sleep and why she has always avoided it look gorgeous in color and carry that perfect combination of cuteness and despair that permeates all of her work. There's a bit of muddiness to be found here that is mitigated by the sheer commitment she has to her images; these are watercolor impressions of life, not detailed reproductions.



Sara Edward-Corbett's color work is precisely the opposite of Park's: high-contrast, sharp lines and a formal playfulness that demands the reader follow along as the story beckons on the page. "Hunting For Blueberries" is a charming bit of formal experimentation as Edward-Corbett fools around with both page and panel design, weaving objects & characters into and out of each other's way by breaking across panels. The slow, anchoring series of panels at the bottom of the page not only deflate the main action of the story, they serve to off-handedly answer a riddle asked at the beginning.

Then there's the ever-hilarious Tim Hensley's deliberately flat color work as he continues his wacked-out Wally Gropius story. His John Stanley-esque character design pushed against punchlines both warped (like suicidal girls falling for Wally) and surreal (like the baseball accoutrement in a recording studio) make for one of the weirdest and most wonderful comics experiences of the past few years. It was also more than a little disturbing to see Wally being grilled by his wannabe girlfriend's father after the out-of-nowhere and violent sex scene they had a couple of issues ago. As a reader, always make sure to study every detail of every panel of what Hensley's doing--you will be rewarded.



The last really visually striking piece was the latest scratchy, watercolor piece by Derek Von Giesen, titled "The Marriage Tree". It's a series of dark vignettes as two sisters each murder the husbands they are stuck with in an arranged marriage, and resent the fact that their other sister seems to be having a perfectly good time with her new husband. It's less a story than a series of ideas and images, and Von Giesen's blotchy style lends itself to a lot of ambiguity. If I'm not as crazy about his work as I am about some of the other stories in this book, I am happy to see a completely different visual approach being used.

More out of left field than Ott's space-horror story is Josh Simmons' "Jesus Christ", which imagines the savior as a gigantic creature that crashes to earth like a meteorite and rises to wreak bloody and violent havoc on the world. The loving level of detail Simmons pours into this story as the centaur-like divine being gets its bearings, belches fire and pulls a fiery sword out of its own throat is more funny than horrific, as though the world is getting its just desserts in wishing for miraculous beings to return.

Conor o'Keefe's "Bums In Love" is a comparatively modest entry compared to the pyrotechnics we see in this issue. His style here owes more to children's book illustration than alt-comics, though his sharp critique of consumer culture and values is in full effect. There's also a little Winsor McCay whimsy and fragility in his drawings, which makes for an interesting contrast with the distance and acidity of his commentary.



Lastly is the most straightforward story in the book, Nate Neal's "An Interview With Minnie Moverman". It's exactly what it sounds like: an interview with a woman who had a particular kind of music career--selling songs for TV shows. This is as much a story about the myths surrounding life in New York as it is the story of the subject, as well as trying to sell out and failing. The world-weariness of Minnie makes her a funny subject, even if some of angst of the anecdotes she's recalling don't quite seem well-earned.

All told, the highs of this issue were as good as anything published in MOME. It's remarkable that through its run, there have been very few artists whose work immediately turned me off for a variety of reasons. Shelton is just the biggest name where this was the case, but anyone who's a fan of his work will need to check out this story. I'm always excited to see where MOME is headed next as it continues to evolve into an anthology that showcases the best of the past and future.

Game-Changer: Mome #12

Rob reviews the twelfth volume of Fantagraphics' flagship anthology, MOME.

(This article originally appeared at sequart.com)


I've been reviewing the MOME anthology in bundles thus far. I'm reviewing volume twelve on its own because it's a stand-alone edition in every respect. None of the serials currently running through MOME appear in this issue. In fact, of the original MOME roster of artists, only Sophie Crumb and Paul Hornschemeier appear in this issue--and neither one really does comics in this issue.

This issue seems to complete a slow but steady transformation of the anthology. Originally conceived as a means to nurture a particular set of young cartoonists, many of the original members dropped out after a few issues. While series editors Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds continue to bring in new talent (five new contributors alone in this issue), the nature of that talent has shifted. Beginning with David B, MOME has also become a place for great artists to publish shorter work. #12 has the greatest concentration of such talent, with stories by David B, Killoffer and Belgian artist Olivier Schrauwen. There's a broader mix of narrative styles and intents, and more work that's purely decorative. New contributor Kaela Graham's crude, charming incidental illustrations are an interesting contrast to Sophie Crumb's ultra-detailed portraits. Al Columbia's "Invasion" is three pages of blue cats roaming through an eerily silent town, perhaps at dawn.

Nate Neal returns with another epic series of interrelated stories. These stories are a spoof of "serious" comics and the urge to create same; given that he's obviously been influenced by the id-first nature of underground comics, it's no surprise that he pokes fun at this greater cultural interest in comics. He goes from a cartoony character forced to face "reality" to "Reality Comics" that consist of single panels involving the most mundane activities imaginable (down to clipping toenails). In "Reality Apart", Neal switches to a third person narrative style to tell the hilariously warped story of a doomed relationship. Neal ties all three strips together by using the same color scheme. Neal walks the line between landing funny blows and belaboring the obvious. His criticisms aren't exactly novel, but he at least is funny in presenting them.

That humorous approach is something that's grown in MOME, which was much drier in its early issues. The addition of Ray Fenwick was a key moment in making MOME funnier, and he continues to get more into straight cartooning with another Bear & Truth Stick series of strips. While his lettering/calligraphy still dominates the strip, his panel-to-panel transitions show excellent comic timing. Jon Vermilyea joins MOME with a hilariously, shockingly violent story called "The Breakfast Crew". It begins with a bunch of bored kids complaining about their breakfasts and being stunned to see a gang of giant, anthropomorphic breakfast items smash through their wall. They become even more terrified when a rival breakfast gang (The Breakfast Bunch) bursts in, leading to a visceral and vicious showdown. Seeing an anthropomorphic creature have its eyes gouged out or getting disemboweled was quite a sight, and Vermilyea's tight line and flat layout give the strip a look that resembles a commercial. That familiarity is what makes the strip creepy and funny.

Sara Edward-Corbett is another newcomer to MOME. A member of the Partyka comics collective, Edward-Corbett's chops are sterling and her sense of humor is dry. She likes doing strips about children (the characters in her story in this volume are from her See-Saw series) and the horrible things they do to each other in school. The result is something lighter than most of the rest of this volume, but still retaining a certain tartness as well. Her work reminds me a little of Steven "Ribs" Weissman.

Dash Shaw and another MOME newcomer, Derek Von Gieson, both contribute slightly less straightforward stories. Von Gieson's "Paralleograms" is a silent, splotchy, black-dominated story about a certain woman on a park bench and her rather predatory nature. The story flashes between parallel narratives involving the same woman over a number of different years and her eerie appeal to young men. Shaw's "Train" begins with a therapist working with a young girl with some kind of neurological/ psychological disorder (an entirely cerebral process) to that therapist being determined to jog in the middle of the city. Arriving at a graveyard, she sees a train crash spectacularly into the middle of the graveyard. The survivors rush at her until she realizes that they're not really there. The shift from trying to understand the girl's world and perspective to a completely physical experience and back to trying to understand her own unexplainable hallucination is exactly the kind of whipcrack transition that Shaw employs so well.

Tom Kaczynski is the kind of artist that MOME was created to spotlight. He's grabbed that opportunity with astonishing story after astonishing story about humanity's relationship with its technology and the spaces it inhabits. When his work is finally collected into one volume, it's going to cause a bit of a stir in the comics world because of the way he speaks to the collective neuroses of the new millennium. There's no one quite like him in terms of his perspective and narrative voice. In #12, Kaczynski contributes three superb one-page stories about sound. In "Noise: A History", Kaczynski boils down the history of the world in terms of random events and how many decibels it measured out to, from the big bang to the falling of rustling leaves. He links past to present through the use of that measure of sound, providing an interesting shorthand for understanding the world in its greatest, worst and most indifferent moments. "Hotel Silencio" is about a man who creates a hotel that employs sound-baffling technology, creating a sensation that quickly abates after its inhabitants go crazy with the lack of sound. "100 Decibels" is about how the perception of sound can be quite subjective in its own way. It's a perfectly-executed and arranged suite of stories that fit right into the ideas he's been exploring all along in MOME.

The main event of this issue was the trio of foreign heavyweights. Schrauwen's bizarre "Hair Types" is his first story translated into English, and it's unlike anything I've ever read. The color in the story looks faded, as though the strip were decades old. That fits in with this story about the pseudoscientific classification of personality as a function of hair, a sort of follicular phrenology. Schrauwen intercuts the central conflict of the story with diagrams explaining the "theory" behind the hair type theory. In the mind of the protagonist, the diagrams of the "crazy hair" brain morph from words describing it (inertia, idiocy, laziness) to pictorial figures embodying the concepts. The concepts then break out of their compartments to interact with each other in an explosive manner. The story concludes with one of the members of the "hair salon" modeling different kinds of hair and showing off different drawings of the same girl--an imagining of external, arbitrary roots for artistic choices and inspirations. This is a story about self-fulfilling prophecy and the way categorization is often prescriptive, not descriptive.

Killoffer's "Dirty Family Laundry" is true to its title: an escalating series of scatological neuroses that Killoffer relates to a lover in bed. It's hilarious and horrifying as his quite literal anal-retentive tendencies play out in increasingly awful ways. His mother, depicted as a sort of cubist nightmare creature, is unbalanced in abusive in a shocking manner. The panel at the end of the story, showing his lover's stunned expression, is priceless. David B's "The Drum Who Fell In Love" is another in a series of stories creating an alternate, fabulist version of Christianity combining magic, war, dreams, art and sex. It's about a sect leader who dies but is brought back to life as a war drum that his followers create. He falls in love with a girl, tired of being used strictly for bloodshed, but their love is doomed. David B excels at these sorts of fantastic war scenes, creating a new kind of fairy tale.

This issue of MOME was far more visceral, scatological and funny than any previous volume. Given Gilbert Shelton's upcoming contributions to the anthology, I suspect that MOME will continue to evolve in this direction, at least for now. The quirkier, more organic editing touch that Groth & Reynolds are using to select contributors has aided the anthology's evolution; they're very much letting the talent drive the anthology rather than trying to box it in too much. There's no other anthology that's as aggressive in terms of translating the work of non-American masters while maintaining a commitment to find and grow younger talent. It continues to be essential reading.