mini-Kus!: GG, A.Magan, P.Kyle, E.Androutsopoulos

I missed a recent early round of recent releases from our friends from Latvia:

mini-Kus! #55: Valley, by GG. The artist creates narratives out of contrasts and atmosphere. A story by GG inevitably becomes a lost world of some kind, a desire to cross a threshold that should not be crossed. In this story, a young woman gets a text from a friend that she and others are camping in a nearby valley but ran out of food. She asks her friend to bring them food so they can stick around. Of course, when the young woman arrives at the valley, her phone has no service and a dense fog has rolled in. In a series of light, airy panels, she negotiates the terrain, a driving downpour and hallucinating that a nearby volcanic steam opening was talking to her. She gets lost in all of this but calmly reacts by going for a swim. It's obvious that her coming out alone to rescue her friends was ill-considered, to say the least, which leads one to think about her motives. GG hints at her wanting to disappear but still wanting an overall goal to rein her back in. When her friend texts her that they decided to leave after all, she has nothing left to do, leaving her in an existential quandary as much as she's in a geographic one. GG's line is delicate to the point of disappearing on the page at times, in order to push color to the forefront. The ending is less downbeat than it is open-ended, with the main character's fate and path yet to be written.                               

mini-Kus! #56: A Friend, by Andres Magan. Done in a deliberately stiff style that emphasizes line above all else, this story is about a man and his missing dog. There are levels within levels at play here, and it’s unclear if those levels are all in the man’s mind or if they play out at all in real life. There’s a sense in which him losing his dog and reporting it to a police officer in the park is a cataclysmic event for the man, an event that triggers a lifetime’s worth of guilt and judgment. When he goes home after having lost his dog, a rock crashes through his wind with a note that says “Where is your dog?”. He accidentally (?) cuts himself on the glass when he picks it up, but the day seems to be saved when the policeman brings by his dog.

However, he rejects the dog out of hand; but is it because he has rejected his identity and the key relationship that defines it, or because he believes that is not his dog? The dog asks him “Where is your dog?” and we flash to his father, mother and sister all asking him the same question. Again, there is a collection of guilt that builds up to another rock coming through the window, this time with a card that matches the cuts he received on his hand. As though it were stigmata, his hand starts bleeding profusely all over the place, until we cut back to the park. The only difference this time is that the man expresses to the officer just how much the dog means to him. The dog had become the receptacle for all of his feelings, something he had to come to grips with lest guilt consume him. Whether or not his dog is found isn’t important; what’s important is that this emotionally stunted person was able to express his emotions in a positive way.

mini-Kus! #57: Night Door, by Patrick Kyle. Kyle’s warped, cartoony line requires careful attention, because there’s a clear narrative here underneath the extreme and cartoony stylization. Thematically, it’s a case of being careful of what you wish for, because you might just get it. A creature (looking like some sort of Disney nightmare) approaches the titular door, seeking admittance. He finds a tube sticking out of the door, and some sort of gas is emitted from it that allows him to go in. Through various twists and turns, he makes it through the underground maze until he comes to what seems to be a dead end as he’s neck-deep in water. He grabs for an object that lifts him, reduces him to a gas, and is captured in a pump. We see a man with a pump then push its contents through a certain tube. Kyle’s entire project has involved the subversion of the hero’s journey, and this is another take on the circularity and fruitlessness of the heroic quest. Kyle also writes a lot about isolation and how maddening it is, and this comic is thus a reflection and rejection of that quest as a means for an individual to somehow obtain greater knowledge or power.

mini-Kus! #58: Eviction, by Evangelos Androutsopoulos. This is a story about a man who heard a story from a man who became involved with a group of politically active squatters near the docks. It is implied that a number of them may be immigrants. It’s a story consumed by atmosphere by way of the balance between the shifting colors against a strong line but stripped-down character design. That atmosphere helps convey the vagaries of memory and how those details are possibly warped in the retelling. The original story is quite emotional, as the man believes his courage is insufficient and that he’s kind of a fake, unlike those who actually live in the squat. Eventually, the squat is broken up as the police use violence to clear it out. The man narrating the story to the reader visits the place and tries to square his idea of the place with the actual place—just as the reader tries to square fact and fiction. There’s no indication that this is based on a true story, yet it’s entirely believable. Just as the narrator is unable to put himself into the prior narrative, so too is the reader left on the outside, wondering.

Koyama: GG's I'm Not Here

I'm Not Here was my first real exposure to the work of the Canadian artist gg, other than an anthology story here and there. There's something vertiginous about reading her comics, thanks to a push-and-pull in style and tone. On the one hand, her naturalistic style is so precisely rendered that there's never any question about what the reader is looking at. At the same time she draws the reader in, she simultaneously pushes them away by creating a cold environment that defies inspection from the reader. The story itself is very simple: a nameless young woman is taking care of her emotionally abusive mother and also trying to take care of her father, who seems increasingly addled by dementia but also incredibly mean-spirited. The young woman has photography as a hobby, and one day she takes a photo of a young woman who looks very much like her, in front of an apartment complex. She goes to the apartment complex and gets let in by the elderly landlady, who mistakes her for the actual tenant, who was supposed to be out of town. She luxuriates in the apartment, even sleeping in her doppelganger's bed. She has a series of horrible dreams/reminiscences.At the very end, her landlady offers her a chance to extend her lease.

The cold, almost sterile drawing style of gg is a deliberate tactic for this story. This is the story of a woman who had learned to push her emotions all the way down and numbed herself to the way her mother so nonchalantly and unrelentingly put her down. At the same time, she is trapped, with seemingly no way out. It's the "life of quiet desperation" that Thoreau talks about. Everything about this comic relates to seeing and being seen, and the panel-to-panel transitions more closely resemble a series of photographs than a more typical comics-oriented transition that's more fluid. The page-to-page transitions have more to do with film than comics: lots of fade-ins and fade-outs, blackouts, the camera lingering on a single image. The opening two pages provide a number of clues, we fade-in on the young woman methodically putting her hair up, her back to the reader's gaze. Even when we first see her face, it's mediated through the surface of a mirror. There is then a quote about "to live is to be somebody else", meaning that we must change on a day-to-day basis in order to be able to feel.

Later, when a street vendor questions her about her photography hobby, she responds that she's trying to capture how things are. His reply is that how things are is always changing; in other words, attempting to capture that sense of change by freezing it is foolish. That's when she sees her "double" and she begins to think about this other person, this other world. That feeling is accentuated when her mother essentially tells her that she's a failure, unlike her younger sister, in the most blase' tones possible. Then she encounters her father driving around at night, confused and belligerent. The photos she takes aren't really to capture how things are, but rather to capture an idealized version of how things are that don't truly exist. It's her refuge.

Receiving an invitation into someone's life is a kind of continuation of that refuge, and it's in that escape that she's able to not only confront years worth of abuse, she's able to cry because of it. There are multiple fade-ins and fade-outs to painful memories (drawn with a lighter tone of wash than the present-day events, which are by nature more solid), including one where she finally moved to act after being berated by her mother. gg leaves the story open-ended; she's essentially given an opportunity to be this other woman (where she went is unknown is unclear: did she move to escape her own life as well). Given a chance to truly confront her feelings and learning that her double was more of an opposite than a twin makes that choice far more difficult than one would think. The cover itself provides a clue, as the other woman wears her hair down (a symbol, perhaps of her more carefree but uncaring nature) and the two hairstyle are lined up, but upside down from each other. It's not just a mirror image, but almost a mutation or transformation, at work here. She's left to wonder not just what kind of person she wants to be, but also what kind of world she wants to live in, as the book fades to black. This is the kind of book that reveals itself to the reader slowly, and over multiple attempts; but once it does, it is a treasure trove of ideas related to family, identity, duty and ethics.