Personal Comics: Foss, Shapiro, McGovern

Haiku Revue and Empty Bed, by Rachel Foss. Foss was due to enroll at the Center for Cartoon Studies, but various circumstances never allowed that to happen. She still lived in White River Junction for a year and clearly spent her time wisely, because both of these comics are fine early efforts for a young cartoonist. Haiku Revue is a sort of combination of journal comic and formal experiment, as Foss writes an autobiographical haiku on every page to go with her comic. On each page, Foss deliberately tries to change something about its composition or form: changing up panel sequencing, using greyscaling, using different drawing styles, using silent panels, writing pages without her on them, etc. There's a wonderful frankness and openness about the sort of things that Foss shares; these comics are about taking a risk and learning to cope with loneliness and distance, but there's also a carnal component to them that's presented in a forthright but unsensational manner. Foss's draftsmanship also goes from shaky to confident over the course of that year as she quickly learned to play to her strengths as much as possible while developing her own style.

That certainly plays out in her most recent comic, Empty Bed. In its earliest pages, one can see how much more adept she is at things like cross-hatching and effective page design. However, the real draw is the way she draws faces and depicts body language. Using a simple but distinct line that makes the most out of the negative space around it (especially in the way she spots blacks to make her characters stand out), Foss generates an understated narrative about a lonely woman separated from someone who may be a former lover in a new place. An act of simple good will she performs early in the story winds up having enormously positive benefits (in every sense of the word) later on, as she actively fights against that sense of isolation that surrounds her. Foss still has work to do in terms of perfecting the way she draws characters other than her own stand-in as well as maintaining that polish for the duration of a story, but this is another honest, affecting and well-told story by a young cartoonist who seems eager to rapidly improve. The fact that she's able to get across so much emotion with a minimum of narrative excess points to a bright future, especially because she's adept at writing stories that are at once deeply personal but immediately recognizable.


Crushable: John Doe and 3 Comics, by Janice Shapiro. These are more amusing and self-deprecating autobio comics by Shapiro. Crushable: John Doe is novel because she actually knew the musician and actor at the very start of his career, when they were still working in a bookstore together. This one's especially funny because it takes us into her young adult life and into the present. Her tales of the viciousness of film school were hilarious, especially in the way everyone would react like vipers when someone achieved a measure of success. What I like best about this comic is the way it presents this sort of unrequited attraction as something that dominated her perceptions of him until they were able to find some common ground years later when they were both parents, living on the same block. This story is all about having huge dreams as a creative person, finding oneself falling completely short of achieving them and learning how to move on from this failure and create different kinds of meaning in one's life. Her arc of working as a screenwriter or director paralleled her feelings toward seeing Doe: being around a walking dream, never to be fulfilled, and eventually coming to terms with this.

3 Comics is much more light-hearted, as she explores her relationship with the film Red River, the weather and her fantasy of being on the game show Jeopardy!. There's a subtext of being uncomfortable with aging and doubting one's taste and beliefs as a younger person, a sense of wanting to reevaluate everything. The story also speaks to her wonderful expressiveness as a cartoonist even with a crude line; like her most direct influence, Lynda Barry, Shapiro has a lot of control over how a reader will experience her story through things like lettering and the body language of her characters. Brrrrrr! documents her life-long fear of cold weather, pinned mostly on worrying about being pinned to a single location and being forced to go out with her dog in the snow and ice. The sensation of being a prisoner to elements beyond one's control tie back into that fear of aging. The Jeopardy story is pure wish fulfillment, as Shapiro gets categories like "The Life and Times of Iggy Pop" and steamrolls her competitors.

Demongunz and Demondust #12-17, by Bernie McGovern. This is both prequel and sequel to McGovern's recovery comic DemonTears, which I thought was a generally bold and interesting take on the subject, especially because of McGovern's willingness to employ magical realism. These books are unusual in that they are journals of recovery, both in terms of the physical and psychological toll that addiction takes but also in terms of the artist recovering his creative spark. Indeed, the series involves from DemonGun to DemonDust as his alcoholism starts to become a more distant event in his past and the more violent and direct metaphor of a soul-splicing gun is no longer needed.This is still very much a journal, as McGovern is writing to a small but specific audience regarding news of the creative aspects of his life while slowly revealing aspects of his post-recovery self. The initial images are quite jarring, especially if one hasn't read DemonTears. McGovern fancies himself as literally growing another version of himself, from the brain and spinal cord up to an entire other body by the end of the first ten issues. What is obvious is that his practicing zen meditation has an enormously positive and centering effect, even in the face of tragedy like his grandmother dying and other of life's travails. The difference is that he has a different focus and different ways to cope with pain and sadness. By the very end of the collection, McGovern and his brain avatar are auditioning new characters to play with as stand-ins.

The individual minis (#12-17) are much more lighthearted and playful than the preceding stories, as each issue features one or more of the new avatars exploring new ideas. Some of the stories are philosophical gags (like the moon crushing a recalcitrant tortoise), some are breezy (like an elf and pumpkin-headed character cracking jokes and getting pumpkins to decorate), while others reflect McGovern's fears as a creator (a light-bulb headed character who is quite a potent metaphor), a character who doesn't quite work as a mouthpiece, the Karate Kid as an avatar of spring and renewal and the pumpkin-headed character (Bram Bones) on vacation.  The sense I get reading these comics is that even when McGovern is covering a heavy topic, nothing he's going through is as bad as being an alcoholic and then going through withdrawal and rehab. It almost feels like his comics offer him a little release for his darker feelings while in real life he knows he has to stay upbeat, which is reflected in his statement at the end of each issue. This series also gives him the opportunity to goof around and experiment with his art and characters. With no particular plot or direction, McGovern allows his characters to play around on the page in a spontaneous manner while trying new tricks, such as his tribute to Moebius. The result is a rare tour through an artist's mental playground as he tries to find out what works and what doesn't (sometimes stopping a story right in the middle when it's going nowhere) while trying to apply the same lessons to his own life. It's all a bit ratty and unsteady at times, but this is the mark of an artist unafraid to express as much as he can as often as he can, knowing he almost lost that ability for good.

Minicomics round-up: Viola, Echavarria, Fitzpatrick, Shapiro, Cullum

Rabbit Shadows, by Jason Viola. I've always preferred Viola's side projects to his gag-oriented Herman the Manatee webcomic, and this silent comic is no exception. It's about an anthropomorphic rabbit leading a humdrum, lonely life who is somehow able to freeze and isolate his shadow, which he uses to become a famous artist. When his one gimmick is rejected by the public for being passe' and he's accused of being washed up, he retreats in despair to the forest, where he accidentally finds new inspiration. This is perhaps a statement about working on the same strip for a long time and finding one's inspiration drying up, as well as the sheer joy of being in that moment where creativity starts to flow again. In that moment in the forest, Viola suggests, is the purest form of being an artist: creating for its own sake, without consideration of audience, fame or money. Viola's drawing is lovely here, as it's a bit fuzzier and denser than his webcomics, giving it a warmer overall atmosphere.

Jerry's Journal, by Neil Fitzpatrick. This is a single-page gag version of Fitzpatrick's quasi-philosophical musings, done off-the-cuff in his sketchbook. This is a format that flatters Fitzpatrick's art and writing. His line at this stage of his career is fully formed, and he does a nice job using thick but simple black lines to quickly set up his cartoon bird for a series of gags. This comic is mostly about loneliness, the sort of cutesy navel-gazing that James Kochalka might have done if he hadn't had a girlfriend/wife. Fortunately, Fitzpatrick doesn't seem to mind mocking his own character's self-absorption, as in one funny strip when Jerry starts droning about how he's "into stickers right now" and the giant words "NO ONE CARES" appear in the sky. The one page format allows Fitzpatrick to quickly move on from the gags that don't land without miring the reader in a nonsensical narrative that's going nowhere. At the same time, there's just enough continuity between strips to make the whole thing cohesive, if very slight.

How Do I Know Who I Am If I Forget?, by Luis Echavarria.I reviewed a bunch of Echavarria's earlier comics in a High-Low piece.This comic is a big leap forward in terms of writing, characterization, depth, subtlety and overall skill. Echavarria dials way back on the gimmicks that marked his earlier work, presenting the reader with a simple, beautiful silkscreen cover of a young woman as a cutaway drawing of her insides. It's a funny, creepy story about an introverted teenage girl named Camila who is trying to connect to the world in her own bizarre way. The comic starts innocently enough, as the slightly OCD Camila fastidiously tends to her aquarium and all its inhabitants, spending hours staring at them. Echavarria slowly reveals increasingly strange details about her, like staring at her own excrement, "just like a crime scene investigator would examine a piece of evidence". Her boyfriend breaks up with her after she suggests they try drinking each other's blood. (That scene was cleverly staged against the couple watching the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is all about memory and identity.) Finally, when one of her "eel-shaped fishes" dies, she swallows it whole. Shortly thereafter, she winds up in the emergency room, where all is revealed as to her bizarre behavior, which has an internal logic all its own. Echavarria does a fine job of mixing the mundane with the strange, as Camila is very much an innocent scientist looking for the best way to establish her own identity while connecting to the world. The alienating way she goes about this gives the comic its narrative charge, especially since she's not deliberately trying to freak anyone out; her methods simply seem to be logical for her socially tone-deaf mind. This is a great character study by an artist who's hitting his stride, and the lush, naturalistic style he employs adds a lot to the proceedings. Some of the pages look a little rougher than others (especially in the beginning), but he pulls it all together quickly to create a horror book without any supernatural content or violence.

Hotel Le Jolie, by Jared Cullum.This is a sweet, low-key comic that takes its time in unraveling the ways in which a man and woman missed out on a number of opportunities to connect as children. Cullum somewhat heavy-handedly has the woman as a girl give him a love note, asking for a drawing. He responds by giving her the drawing in public next to her friends, who ridicule him--and she feels forced to go along with it. Years later, peer pressure causes the boy to do the same. Now at a conference and finding her at the front desk, he once again has a choice to make. I liked the structure of the comic and the character details, even if it all seemed a little familiar. Cullum is a decent enough craftsman working in a naturalist style, but there are lots of tell-tale tics that betray a lack of experience: over-rendering in some panels, under-rendering in others, a shaky understanding of how bodies interact in space. Cullum has a lot of potential, especially thanks to his command over dialogue and solid storytelling skills. This is simply a case of an artist needing to get back out there and continue to draw more comics in order to get a better feel for their own style.

"Popular", Crushable: Mary Tyler Moore and  Crushable: Neil Young, by Janice Shapiro.I've greatly enjoyed the various episodes of Shapiro's autobio-by-anecdote "Crushable" minicomics. A smart way to do autobio is to parcel it out or mediate it through something other than the author; in this case, it's a list of the pop culture figures Shapiro had a crush on. The Mary Tyler Moore comic is hilarious because Moore represented this idealized figure of perfection, one that she dreamed of emulating until the cool girls came around and pressured her into drinking, doing drugs, etc. Seeing teenaged Shapiro literally wearing a Moore-style turtleneck and scarf and then seeing them disappear in a cloud of smoke was funny and effective. The Neil Young comic is even more deranged, because it involves a complex plot to become Neil Young's girlfriend by way of her best friend becoming Jackson Browne's girlfriend (note: both were fifteen years old at the time) after seeing the latter in concert. The epilogue to the story is even more embarrassing, detailing the fleeting moment Shapiro actually did get to meet Neil Young years later and what a disaster that was. "Popular" is about the way popularity as a teen shifted from being nice and clean-cut in the early 60s to detached and slovenly in the early 70s. In her typically self-deprecatory style, Shapiro notes that she had the slovenly and nice parts down pat, but couldn't make the transition into being a good 70s cool girl because of her innate dorkiness. Shapiro's line is crude, but she's undaunted in the way she attacks the page, even if drawing certain figures and things is out of her reach as a draftsman. She makes it work because of her scribbly style and distinct voice as a writer. Indeed, her scrawl is a confident extension of her own handwriting. I'd love to see her continue to refine this.

Autobio Minis: Shapiro, Harbin, Coovert, Baylis

Crushable: Ricky Nelson, Crushable: John Lennon, and The Hand Game, by Janice Shapiro. I read the first iteration of Shapiro's Crushable series in an online anthology, and it's a clever twist on the sort of sexual history comics that MariNaomi and David Heatley have done. It's a history of the crushes she's had on a variety of pop cultural figures from her girlhood to the present, which is an interesting method of getting at other formative events in her life over the years. Shapiro's line is scribbly and messy, leaning toward simplicity when depicting herself or her sister but more toward a scratchy realism when depicting her idols. In Ricky Nelson, six year old Janice crushes on the squeaky-clean TV and pop star, and that crush is a gateway toward discovering that her older sister's best friend loved Nelson as well. That gave her the in she needed to essentially take over that friendship, so long as Ricky Nelson was involved. Shapiro depicts this miraculous, almost utopic time when the two of them danced to Nelson's records and sat arm-in-arm when he was on TV, earning Janice the right to even get invite over to her friend's house. When Janice accidentally destroys the speaker of her parents' "hi-fi", so too is the friendship dissolved without that cultural medium. Shapiro notes that her crush was essentially transferred from Nelson to her friend, and when that ended, so too did her cultural infatuation.

John Lennon speaks to a different phenomenon. When the Beatles broke in America, Paul McCartney ("the cute Beatle") was the most beloved member of the group amongst teenage girls, and John was the least adored. Not so for Shapiro, who loved John but was forced by peer pressure to renounce that affection in favor of Paul. Shapiro muses on why she felt that connection, from sensing his leadership & intelligence, to the first sign of possessing a masochistic personality to an existential understanding of the darkness that lies at the heart of everything--but ultimately seems to chalk it up to the notion of the fact that we can't control whom we happen to fall in love with on any level. What's interesting is the shame she felt in later years for lying about it, a lie that betrayed her aesthetic sensibilities as much as anything. Speaking of masochism, The Hand Game is an interesting anecdote about playing this particular slap game with her father. The game is one where both parties hold out their hands and one person puts their hands on top of the other person's. They then try to slap one of the other person's hands as hard and fast as possible. If they miss, then it's the other person's turn. What was fascinating about this anecdote was that her father was considerably better at it than she was but refused to take it easy, leaving her hands bright red from slaps, even when she asked him if he'd take it easy. At the same time, each time he offered her a chance to end the game, she refused. Afterwards, her sister demanded to play the game with him. This was an interesting metaphor for the things we do to get attention from our parents as children, no matter how painful it might be.Shapiro reminds me a bit of Lynda Barry, both in terms of the crude but enthusiastic nature of their lines and the wistfulness with which they discuss the children in their stories.

Diary Comics #4, by Dustin Harbin. When Harbin handed me a copy of Diary Comics #4, I told him, "I thought you said you were done with diary comics." He replied, "I had something to say." Indeed he did. Rather than the simple exercise in daily comics making (and a slow, tentative reveal of Harbin's inner demons) that marked his first three entries, Harbin here tentpoles a harder look at himself and the way he interacts with the world around events that force him to interact with others, namely comic-book conventions. Harbin's self-image as he presents it in the strips in the first half of the book is earnest, slightly goofy and self-deprecatory, often setting himself up for a gag. That all changes with "Boxes", a five-part series of strips that takes up the second half of the collection.

"Boxes" is by far Harbin's densest, harshest self-examination and it's probably the best thing he's done as an artist so far. The first three sections deal with the long break in autobio strips, the vagaries of the passage of time, a brief reprise of the funny and perceptive report he did about Canada's Doug Wright Awards at the Toronto Comics & Arts Festival (TCAF), and a brief recapitulation of the sort of strip he likes to do about conventions. At the end of each part, he stops the story cold and alerts the reader that this is a diversion and isn't what he really wanted to talk about. That in itself is an interesting meta-device that clues the reader in that Harbin is avoiding something. In the fourth part, we get to spend a lot of time in Harbin's head as he prepares to go do a post-awards dinner with many of his comics idols. Harbin is self-conscious to a degree where it's no longer so much about saying something stupid or offensive, but rather doubting the very possibility of communication itself. Harbin very cleverly plays around with time, space and point of view in this strip, eventually fading into Kevin Huizenga-style pastoral scenes as a way of representing his drifting mind, popping back into dinner at various intervals. I laughed when he started talking about dinner going well despite his feeling stressed in a regular word balloon (rather than a narrative caption or thought balloon), only to have Chester Brown interrupt him by saying, "Dustin, we can hear you.".

The last part of "Boxes" focuses on a review that Tom Spurgeon gave him on Diary Comics #3, where he says "The result is a comic about a life being lived for the sake of presenting amusing comics". I'm not sure I entirely agree with that point of view, given Harbin's strips about dealing with depression and other insights into his own feelings. I do agree that Harbin is almost afraid to talk about the way he perceives the feelings of others. Harbin's reaction was to agree with the review to an interesting extreme: he says "One thing I've learned, in the process of doing these comics, is that I'm fake, very fake..fake like 'pretend to be...something' then forget that you're pretending." In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Even as Harbin writes that he sometimes has trouble making real connections to people because of the way he has constructed their personae in his mind, the self he projects is kind, curious, self-reflective, funny, goofy and awkward in a sort of endearing way. Sartre has said much the same thing about identity in that the masks we think we wear are who we are in a real sense, or at least part of who we are. Harbin seems not so much fake but unmoored, as the self-image he projects is built on the shifting sands of depression. That's a harsh realization he shares on the last page of the comic, where he understands that he's stuck with the arduous task of recreating his self on a moment-to-moment basis or else find a way to fix his foundation. The latter is an even more arduous task, in part because the "how" in doing so is elusive (therapy? medication?) and mysterious even before trying to do so. That realization goes beyond the kind of deflective self-deprecation of earlier strips to the essence of a problem that goes far beyond the ability of self-expression on the page to handle. Leaving the comic without a pat answer for himself or the reader is an act of courage and an eloquent, if perhaps not consciously intended, response to Spurgeon's critique. As a reader, it was the first time that Harbin's used his top-notch rendering skills to provide a counterbalance to weightier matters, and for the first time I find myself drawn to Harbin's work for something other than its sheer charm. I wasn't wrong in my last review when I mentioned that Harbin seemed ready to move on to something more substantial than his preceding Diary output; I just didn't expect that substance to come in the form of another autobio comic.

So Buttons #5, by Jonathan Baylis and various artists. Baylis continues to improve both as a writer and a self-publisher, as this comic looks attractive without being too slick. The eye-catching cover by Tom Scioli, dramatizing a pet-related anecdote, is funny because it allows Scioli to do his usual kinetic shtick ("covering" Jack Kirby) with an an otherwise quiet comic. The actual story, "So...Extracted" was drawn by Paul Westover in a full-color, slightly cartoony style that didn't take away Baylis' anxiety about his pet getting some dental work done, but it did take away some of potential melodrama from the strip. "So...Caffeinated" was simply a great yarn of an anecdote, drawn sketchily by the also-developing Thomas Boatwright. What Baylis is starting to do well is give his illustrators space to have fun with his scripts; Boatwright's exaggerated figurework and the way he uses colors helps exaggerate the humor of the piece.

Switching gears, "So...Escalated" is almost entirely in black & white and contains an excellent gag about Schindler's List. Drawn by Noah Van Sciver in his trademark scratchy, heavily cross-hatched style, Baylis balances the intense gravity of having seen the film with a friend in a theater with a joke that out of necessity lightens the mood. Finally, "So...Brisk", drawn by Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg, once again takes a fairly lightweight anecdote and gives it weight and structure with confident characterization and allowing the artist to do what she does best: pleasant, simple and expressive character work. The light purple wash balances the linework nicely, a nice complement to the story about Baylis initially ignoring what seems to be hokey advice from his mother, only to find that mom knows best (sometimes). Baylis made sure to assign stories that played to the strengths of the artists he worked with, something that Harvey Pekar did so well for so long.

Salad Days, and Simple Routines #14-15, by J.P. Coovert.If Shapiro's work is about revealing bigger truths about herself through anecdotes, Harbin's are about how hard it is to communicate in a meaningful way, and Baylis' are a way of expanding anecdotes into vignettes, then Coovert's comics have are largely about being present and expressing gratitude for those moments that inspire joy. Coovert hasn't drawn nearly as much attention as other grads of the Center for Cartoon Studies, in part because his output has been steady but simple. His work isn't boundary-pushing or revolutionary, but rather focuses in on craft, character and the electric feeling of aesthetic & personal connections. Coovert gives the reader that in small doses in Simple Routines, which mirrors Harbin's work in the way it details going to conventions, visiting friends and amusing interactions with his wife. Coovert doesn't use comics as a form of therapy or a way of venting frustrations; instead, this is a graphic document of the ways in which his life is fun and rewarding in any number of ways. There's an utter lack of pretentiousness as Coovert flits from anecdote to anecdote: he's a happy, well-adjusted guy who loves his wife, accepts his limitations and tries to patiently expand his horizons as an artist.

At the same time, there's an almost child-like glee with how he sees the world, even as the understanding creeps in that he's not a kid anymore. That feeling is explored in Salad Days, a story about spending a weekend with a childhood friend, with the idea that they'll spend the weekend eating pizza, playing video games and drinking soda. The comic is rife with asides about the compromises they're making in their everyday, responsible lives while wishing they could do exactly what they want to do, all the time. Wistfulness begins to dominate the discourse of the comic until Coovert's character decides that they should tip over a port-a-john as a nod to their days together as boys when they used to get into mischief. That leads to an inadvertent, frantic scamper away from a passing police cruiser, with Coovert realizing that he can't get in trouble for something so dumb. They manage to get away with it, literally reaching for the stars as they hide out by a river, only to find them out of reach. It's a sweet moment that brings presentness into their friendship, taking them out of pure nostalgia and creating a new, thrilling moment of connection. Sure, that moment came about through a juvenile act, but that act was a symbolic corrective for nostalgia. As always, Coovert's simple line and clear design sense made these and his journal comics quite pleasant to look at; his use of color in Salad Days is crisp and understated. I'm not precisely sure what kind of cartoonist he's going to evolve into at this point; I know he'll be illustrating some work for First Second, but I'm not quite sure what sort of writer he's going to be. It's obvious that he'll apply his finely-honed craft to whatever he does.