Minis: K.Wirick, J.Zwirek, J.D.Woods

Jimmy Plays The Drums and A Natural Family, by John Dermot Woods. These are interesting, enigmatic comics that play a lot on the grid (the first is a product of Frank Santoro's correspondence course) and on very differing uses of color. Jimmy Plays The Drums is a story about expression and elusiveness, told in a time-fractured style over a long period of time. The entire story is done in bright CMYK in virtually every panel (with the black simply being the lines delineating the characters and the lettering), with the characters and backgrounds flipping colors in each panel. It's an interesting visual effect that forces the reader to reorient themselves on a constant basis as we figure out why the bespectacled Jimmy drummer is constantly trying to escape (from childhood) an older man. The people Jimmy hangs with and his peculiar abilities are only hinted at, but what is made clear is that his parents never allowed him to leave his penthouse home, and he only had the gardener as company--the man chasing him. It's a story about chosen family, a love of art that was not allowed or encouraged, and a slightly magical world that's given life but Woods' almost-exclusive use of colored pencil.

A Natural Family is more conventional in some respects. The use of color is purely functional and even bland. It presents with an unusual occurrence: a brother and sister (both adults) living alone in their family house, with the sister having fallen asleep for two straight days. It's told from the perspective of the brother, with a film crew, the police being brought in to observe the phenomenon and (presumably) have someone do something about it--to no avail. Woods then time-jumps back to the siblings, three days earlier, and reveals that a once-boisterous and happy familial relationship had been reduced to silence, and the suggestion by the brother that one of them leave the house to explore "missed opportunities" leads her to fall asleep in response--a move that prevents him from leaving. Much is left unsaid in this comic. What, precisely, was the nature of their relationship beyond being familial? There's a panel of the man in bed with a presumed sexual partner in the morning, seemingly ready to kick her out. The last page reveals that she went to bed naked, but it's clear that he put a dressing gown on her before he invited in the media. Is her escape into sleep a way of protesting her brother abandoning her, or is it something more? In both of his minis, Woods provides a lot of clues but ultimately leaves a lot of the answers up to the reader.

Stand-Up Comic, by Jeff Zwirek. Zwirek's one of my favorite comics formalists, especially in terms of the actual physical construction of his comics. This short mini about a stand-up comedian is made in such a way as to literally have a stand in the back, as though it were for display. It features a deeply schlubby comedian named Buster Guts, a pear-shaped fellow with a face that looks like it was arranged by Picasso. Zwirek starts off in a four-panel grid that falls away to an open page format as Buster Guts actually proves himself to be a top-notch, self-deprecating comedian whose gags go from tired to genuinely funny. This comic is a nice combination of gimmick and gags, with one grabbing the reader's attention and the latter standing on their own but aided by the mere sight of the comedian.

Nervenkrank #1, by Katherine K. Wirick. This is the first chapter of a much longer work about the life of German Dada artist John Heartfield, born as Helmut Herzfeld. There has been a proliferation of comics biographies as of late, mostly coming out of Europe, and they have a tendency to be pretty to look at but largely mundane. Wirick's work has a chance to be an exception, as Nervenkrank is clearly a passion project, not just a project researched for a contract. Heartfield's work is obviously important to her on a deep level, and it shows in the intensity of the rendering on each page and the emphasis on a slow narrative pace that establishes his emotional state as a soldier. The story opens in 1915, in the middle of World War I. Heartfield is a hospitalized soldier, clearly traumatized by what he's seen. Wirick emphasizes that by noting that his roommate literally won't come out from under the bed, another patient can't stop screaming about being bombed, etc. Returning to his boarding house, he is presented with compassion by the wife of the owner and contempt by the owner himself.

Wirick depicts the stuttering Heartfield as delicate and sensitive but not weak. He steals the German flag flying outside his room and burns it. Dada was born in large part as a reaction to the pointless stupidity and brutality of World War I as the people were sent to die for no good reason, and this issue emphasizes all of these issues. Wirick is a skilled naturalistic artist who masterfully uses greyscale to balance depth and density in each panel. It's clear that she thoughtfully and carefully resolves issues like negative space, character interaction in space and how to make her realistically-rendered characters still manage to appear alive on the page. Her page design is functional, relying more on her figure drawing than on an innovative approach, but it's clear that this story is meant to appear in a larger format. This mini came out nearly four years ago and I haven't seen another issue since, but I hope she continues to persevere on this project.

Minis: J.Zwirek, D.Williams, C.Lanasa

Chinga, by Coryn Lanasa. This slender mini is an invocation of sorts, with delicate line art illustrating branches and text talking about how the branches should be prepared. The narration indicates that this will be the foundation of a particular woman's nest, summoning her eventual lover. There's a striking image of an eagle-headed man with an erect penis, with the image of a woman from behind on the next page. Both images are cut off in the mirror, as though they were framed by a window or perhaps an art frame pinning those images to the page. It's evocative and haunting, adding a layer of delicacy and reserve to a story dedicated to pure, carnal desire.

BlackStar 6, by Jeff Zwirek. Zwirek is really starting to round into form as he's fully absorbed his Ivan Brunetti influence and is starting to go in a very different direction. This sharply-designed one-man anthology collects a number of different short stories in a variety of formats. The stand-out is "Sales", a silent story which cleverly has a salesman confidently selling big word balloons. It's a device that's so insanely clever that I'm amazed that I haven't seen it used as extensively as Zwirek did here. As time goes on and his pitch is no longer quite as buoyant, his deflated word balloons are pushed away by his wife's indignantly angry balloons growing larger and literally pushing him out of the house. The sad but inevitable ending has its own clever poignancy, as he floats away with much difficulty. "Cuckoo" picks up the visual metaphor baton from the previous story, with a giant grandfather clock constantly haunting the protagonist. No matter what she does, the clock appears when it's not wanted, reminding her with an incessant "tik tik" that her time is limited and seemingly always running out. In the end, it's revealed that wasting time is something she does regularly, taking her away from beloved hobbies. "Caveman Eat" is a fold-out gag that requires a great deal of set-up and labor to get to its mildly amusing punchline, while "Capsize" tells the story of a guy who tumbles out of a capsized boat, requiring the reader to turn the page upside down to see how the story changes when told from a different perspective. "Leper" is as effective a story about fear as I've ever seen, featuring a shoe-shine man who becomes paralyzed by fear after a near-death experience--so much so that's he split into two. He's only able to trick himself into being able to live and act again by literally putting on that face of fear.

We, The Odd, #0 and #1, by Delicia Williams. Williams is another illustrator with a delicate touch, The story follows an exterminator who stumbles into a world of fairies and other magical creatures in a city setting, reminding me a bit of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. The zero issue features a fairy godmother who finds she has competition with dark forces over a baby, as well as that exterminator who falls from a vent into a building's sewer where she encounters hooded cultists and a huge frog that may or may not have eaten them. The #1 issue picks up with a box-headed creature chasing her until she manages to escape. No one believes her tale of weirdness until she bumps into a guy on a park bench at the end. This is really a slip of a sketch of a story at this point, more memorable for Williams' pencils and a few striking images than the story itself. That said, her The Grimm Files: How To Bake A Murder Cake demonstrates that she has an interesting way of inverting fairy tale cliches. Packaged in a clever manilla folder-style cover, it tells the familiar story of Hansel & Gretel from a different perspective. This time, it's the witch who's the innocent one, offering them food, only to find that the ravenous children wanted meat more than candy. The art here is a bit sketchier, mixing the spontaneity of an energetically scribbled line with some more worked-over spotting of blacks that felt a bit jarring. All of this feels like a warm-up for Williams.

31 Days of Short Reviews #9: Jeff Zwirek

Jeff Zwirek's Kickstarter-powered collection of his Burning Building Comix minicomics series deftly takes on the challenge of "stacking" the original comics in a manner that makes the reading experience of it unique. It's a book that's formatted landscape style, but is meant to be read sideways, and from the bottom up. Each row represents a different tenant on a different floor in an apartment building that catches on fire. The reader is meant to start at the bottom "floor", reading left to right as they turn the pages, and then turn back to the beginning and start at the next floor. Each story is self-contained, as they describe how each tenant manages to escape and the perils they face in doing so, but some stories are more closely linked than others.

Zwirek's figure drawing is straight out of the playbook conceived of by fellow Chicago residents Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti. Brunetti's influence is especially pronounced, with the squat characters with oversized heads and generally cartoony, exaggerated forms. Brunetti is an acknowledged friend and mentor of Zwirek, but beyond the easy figure comparison, Brunetti's more profound influence is that of silent problem-solving on the page. Each of the character's stories is told without using dialog or caption, with the exception of pictorial word balloons. It's an excellent method, because it strips away all that is unnecessary on the page and allows the reader to figure out what's happening in each story before and as each apartment catches on fire. It's especially effective because the physical action in each panel is propulsive and panicky, a combination that leads to a number of funny sight gags. At the same time, Zwirek puts in an astonishing amount of background detail in every panel as a way of offering clues as to each character's life and even possible connections to other tenants in the building.

Most of the strips rely on easy-to-understand sight gag jokes, like the dog trying to rouse his sleeping elderly owner or the obese man trying to squeeze out of the apartment. The bit where he hopes on a long-abandoned exercise bike in order to desperately lose a pound or two to slide out of the apartment was especially amusing. The tale of a Satanist trying with a gas-masked topped goat's head on his wall is even funnier, as he thinks he's summoned real hellfire after a ritual fizzled out, and the masks of the firemen build a truly inspired visual gag. Zwirek ties everything together with a love story in the final two "stories" of the building, as two people in relationships that have just failed realize that they're in love with each other when the fire builds--and both run to save the other, only to find the other isn't there. It's propulsive screwball comedy at its best, and the thicker panel weights indicating a flashback (which Zwirek helpfully points out in the book's notes) seamlessly lead the reader along this narrative path. The book is one long formal gimmick, but it's an inspired gimmick that's perfectly designed and executed. That includes the use of color in this edition, which is restrained, tasteful and attractive--a perfect complement to the frantic nature of the narrative itself.

Minicomics Round-Up: Nichols, Zwirek, Puppyteeth

I'm still poking through the minicomic riches I received at SPX, and today's batch yields some interesting gems:


! and A Shadow And Its Source, by L.Nichols. There's a restlessness to Nichols' work that I enjoy, as she's constantly flipping between genres and formal elements in her narratives. !, for example is a 24-hour comic that's a sci-fi story about a mad scientist whose experiments defy the ruling theocracy. The comic details the "Shadows" sent to hunt him down and the efforts he takes to retaliate. Nichols uses a fat, bold line that is perhaps meant to imitate a Kirby-style of powerful genre storytelling. This comic is obviously a lark, but it's a successful experiment in that she manages to create tension and depict action in a fluid manner. There are also plenty of drawings that are simply nice to look at. A Shadow And Its Source is the polar opposite of ! in that it's comics-as-poetry. It's a meditation on the work of artist & filmmaker William Kentridge, known for creating images built on erasure and repetition of images regarding his native South Africa. Nichols connects the pain expressed in his work with pain that she feels, both as an individual and an American. Flipping between Kentridge's photorealism and her own more whimsical style creates an interesting tension between the two, as Nichols doubts her own ability to communicate even as she creates striking images.


Blackstar #5 and Leper, by Jeff Zwirek. Zwirek's debt to the Brunetti school of figure drawing based on geometrical structures is obvious, but he goes in a lot of narrative directions with it. This issue of his anthology series Blackstar features a wide variety of genres and formal approaches. "The Lost Plumgrove" is a full-color fantasy story involving shenanigans between a couple of poor travelers and a vicious guard. Zwirek's work really takes nicely to color, and he makes some bold choices here to help tell his story. "Chicago Typewriter" was featured in his own Pinstriped Bloodbath gangster anthology, and it's one of his best stories. It's about the history of the Thompson sub-machine gun and how a weapon designed for American soldiers became the weapon of choice for gangland massacres. The other stories in the anthology are less remarkable; I found his Mario Brothers-inspired story to be difficult to understand and his pharaoh story to be dull. However, "The Reason", an attractive one-pager about fatherhood, was clever because of the use of color to depict the protagonist's dwindling reserves of energy throughout the day--until he got home. Leper is an odd but beautifully-designed mini about being a victim of violence & trauma, how it wreaks havoc on one's everyday life, and how one can help combat this trauma. Zwirek is a bold visual storyteller and his best comics are usually the wordless ones, and this mini is no exception.


Puppyteeth, edited by Kevin Czapiewski and Liz Suburbia. In terms of design and format, this is a bare-bones anthology photocopied somewhat haphazardly. In terms of content, this showcase for young and relatively unknown artists is understandably uneven. Suburbia's story "Our Lady Of The Bridge" opened the book and turned out to be the strongest story in the anthology, detailing two kids and their near-fatal encounter with a shadowy creature. It's a genuinely suspenseful story leavened by a bit of unexpected humor toward the end, and its effectiveness is owed to the expressiveness and clarity of Suburbia's line. Darryl Ayo contributes a handful of strong one-page pieces done with his usual piercing wit and increasingly confident line. Matt Czapiewski's story about an extremely old minor-league baseball player was hilarious both in terms of his thick, exaggerated line and his understanding of the psyches of sports fans. At the other end of the art spectrum, Jess Wheelock's collage-and-pencil meditation on curmudgeonly Statler & Waldorf characters from The Muppet Show was clever and touching. On the other hand, Martinez E Garcias' "Sex Zombies From Outer Space" was one of the single worst stories I've read in a long time. Worse than the hackneyed premise was that Garcias spelled out the entire plot (such as it was) with the very title of the piece! Alex Martin's "Gotcha" was trying to be clever in its attempt at meshing game and story but wound up as difficult to parse. The other stories were mostly forgettable, which is not all that surprising for what promises to be a loosely-affiliated comics collective that will keep roughly the same lineup from issue to issue in an attempt to get better in public.

Another Worthy Kickstarter Effort: Jeff Zwirek

I greatly enjoyed Jeff Zwirek's innovative minicomics series, Burning Building Comix, though unfortunately I don't have a link to my original review. Using Kickstarter, he intends to collect this set of comics that physically built on top of each using an equally innovative and complex unfolding design. I believe that if he's able to complete this project, the result will be a beautiful art object. Please consider contributing, if you are able.

High-Low At SPX and 12 Artists To Seek Out

I will be at SPX, perhaps the premier alt-comics event, this Saturday, September 26th in Bethesda, MD. I'll be part of the Critics' Roundtable at 3:30pm in the Brookside Conference Room, along with Gary Groth, Douglas Wolk, Sean T. Collins, Chris Mautner, Tucker Stone and Joe "Jog" McCulloch and moderator Bill Kartalopolous. I really enjoyed last year's panel and I'm looking forward to having a discussion with so many esteemed critics. I'll also be hosting a Debut Cartoonists panel, spotlighting new work by Hans Rickheit (THE SQUIRREL MACHINE), Eleanor Davis (THE SECRET SCIENCE ALLIANCE), Ken Dahl (MONSTERS), and the great Zak Sally (LIKE A DOG).

Here's my annual list of artists to seek out at the con. This is obviously not any sort of exhaustive list of artists that I like or will seek out on my own. Consider it a survey of new artists, significant artists making their first appearance at SPX, artists with interesting new releases, artists deserving greater exposure and folks whose work I simply admire.

1. John Porcellino. One of the greatest exemplars of minicomics as a viable format of their own, separate from potential collections. He'll have not just a collection of KING-CAT out from Drawn & Quarterly called MAP OF MY HEART, he'll also have a brand-new issue of the series. SPX is one of the first stops on his extensive book tour of the country celebrating his 20th anniversary of his career. His extremely spare line is a testament to how one can be devastatingly expressive using a minimalist style. Porcellino will also have original art for sale. This is his first appearance at the con since 1997, and a generation of cartoonists has been strongly influenced by his approach. He will have a 2pm spotlight on Saturday in the White Flint Amphitheater and will be signing at the D&Q table on Saturday from 11:30-1pm and Sunday from 1-3pm. Sally will moderate the spotlight session, and I should note that he's most certainly another artist to seek out.

2. Colleen Frakes. One of my favorite graduates from the Center For Cartoon Studies (along with Chuck Forsman, Sean Ford and the rest of the Sundays gang), Frakes' recent WOMAN KING was simultaneously lovely and disturbing. I'd also seek out her older TRAGIC RELIEF minicomics.

3. Carol Tyler. One of the greatest working cartoonists makes her SPX debut. Her YOU'LL NEVER KNOW is my top comic of the year. She'll be signing at the Fantagraphics booth on Saturday from 12-2pm and Sunday from 2-4pm. Tyler is also a delightful storyteller, so be sure to check out her spotlight on Sunday at 1pm in the White Flint Amphitheater.

4. Josh Neufeld. This long-time SPX attendee is basking in the glow of the well-earned acclaim that his AD: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE has received. One of the best books of the year, Neufeld will have his own spotlight panel on Sunday at 2pm. Neufeld is a perfect example of a generation of cartoonists whose career dovetailed with SPX, going from self-published minis to illustrating Harvey Pekar to his own series with small publishers to a book deal with Pantheon.

5. Ken Dahl. Also known as Gabby Schulz, Ken Dahl has an acidic sense of humor and stunning chops. He will be debuting MONSTERS, a collection of stories about herpes, at the show, and will be on the panel I mentioned above. Simply put, Dahl is one of the best cartoonists to emerge from this decade.

6 Dina Kelberman. IMPORTANT COMICS was one of the weirder and more compelling minis I read this year. Her comics have a sort of absurdist quality that I admire, and the way she uses unusual page & panel compositions with a minimalist line is unusual. She'll be part of the Aesthetics of Mini-Comics panel on Sunday at 4:30pm.

7. Ed Piskor. Piskor is unusual in that he's a young artist heavily influenced by the underground generation (as opposed to the alt-cartoonists of the 80s and 90s). He's also had an opportunity to work with legends like Jay Lynch and Harvey Pekar, but his own voice is unique. He's taken his underground sensibilities to write about another underground culture: hackers. Seek out the first two volumes of his WIZZYWIG and watch him on his Source-Based Comics panel at 1:30pm on Saturday.

8. Eleanor Davis. Davis is another artist on my short list of "best emerging talents of the decade" thanks to her compelling minicomics and short stories in MOME. Her Toon Books entry, STINKY, was one of the best comics of last year. Her new book, THE SECRET SCIENCE ALLIANCE, is aimed at older kids, which makes sense given her style of art.

9. Jon Vermilyea. Eric Reynolds discovered his minicomics at San Diego a few years ago, and his subsequent comics for MOME have been simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Like Dahl, Vermilyea has incredible chops and a flair for the grotesque.

10. Jeff Zwirek. His BURNING BUILDING COMIX, an Ivan Brunetti-inspired work, was one of the more clever comics I read last year. I'd recommend getting every issue to fully appreciate the level of detail he puts into his gag work.

11. Will Dinski. Dinski gets my vote for best currently self-published artist. His new comic, COVERED IN CONFUSION, is typical of his recent remarkable hot streak: funny, dark, tragic and uniquely formatted. Someone needs to give him a book deal.

12. Matthew Thurber. Thurber's 1-800-MICE is one of the best comics of the decade. That about sums it up. It's an exemplar of comics that have a lot of genre elements, humor, deeper themes, dense plots, absurdist elements and unforgettable characters. Seek him out at the Picturebox booth.