Minis from Jep

Jepcomix #5 and #7 are by the cartoonist Jep (Jeff Clayton) and they are mostly four-panel autobio comics that originally appeared on the web. Issue #5, however, is mostly fiction. Using a crude, mostly stick-figure style for his stories, Jep emphasizes exaggerated gestures above all else. In the story of a mouse and a sentient ball of some kind (complete with oversized eyes and teeth), Jep's characters are in constant motion as they seek to raid the bounty of a picnic table. The cartoonist keeps details to a minimum while using a gray wash to add a bit of weight to the page. The result is a funny, clearly told story that moves along at a pleasant pace. The visual formula is repeated to a different effect in a funny reinterpretation of Jesus' pleas to God in the garden of Gethsemane. Here, Jesus talks to God in the form of a cloud and amusingly forces god to come up with good reasons why he has to die. In the end, Jesus is threatened with being dismissed altogether, so he plays along. What I like about this is that Jep is engaging in some solid theological debate in addressing some very basic assumptions.

Jepcomix #7 is a very long look at Jep's life with fighting as the narrative structure. He describes each of the encounters he had in school, where he lost every fight. There's no wistfulness or regret here, as he recognizes why kids interacted the way they did and how utterly pointless it was. This also led to a series of strips where he was followed by dolts who called him homophobic slurs. By this point, Jep was deliberately a pacifist, so he had to rely on luck and his brains in order to get out of those situations. Much of the rest of the comic is concerned with the world and his emotional state after Trump was elected. It's fascinating to read, because on the one hand Jep had done a lot of work confronting his own anger issues. Responding to a situation with blind rage was no longer his modus operandi. So Trump being elected (despite Jep being Canadian) was in many ways the ultimate test of his attempts to find tranquility.

Indeed, much of this issue focuses on tiny but steadily growing changes he sees in the world around him in terms of greater hostility, as well as his own inability to deal with his own outrage at the result of the electoral shift. He deals with this via meditation and even avoiding the internet for a couple of days. The comics in this volume are quite wordy and Jep is well aware of that, and he tries to vary formats on different days, emphasizing an image or two filling up panels with a minimum of verbiage. It all forms a curious sort of tension, as Jep acknowledges his own unresolved anger problems and his attempts at seeing the viewpoint of others while at the same time still having a short fuse and a loud mouth. This level of honesty and self-awareness, along with a commitment to engaging with the world, is unusual for this kind of autobio comic. The art becomes mostly a means to an end here despite his best efforts; it's a delivery system for his thoughts and not too much more. What he's talking about simply doesn't lend itself to stretching himself more in terms of the visuals, or at least, it doesn't lend itself to being a visual problem for Jep to solve. He gets his points across, and there's an almost frantic quality to his line and even his letter, as though he was slashing at the page as quickly as possible. These comics certainly stand out against most autobio comics of this type.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Autobio: Jep, Hayden, Nichols, Bean/Viola

Jep Comix 4, by Jep. The cartoonist draws slice-of-life autobio vignettes featuring a stripped-down self-caricature and frequent anthropomorphic versions of friends. These are comics featuring small but pointed moments, like a memory from high school spent playing a video game, avoiding his father. Another interesting bit was one where the cartoonist has a number of awkward interactions with a man from across the street who weirdly hits on him after he tells him he's getting married. Even a talking head strip featuring him talking to his sister about flooding basements and Moses parting the Red Sea is interesting because of his thick, simple line that's not unlike a Sam Brown figure. These comics are modest, charming and utterly lacking in pretension.

Rushes, by Jennifer Hayden. This is a collection of good ol' four-panel diary comics. They remind me a bit of Jesse Reklaw's strips in that the reader is more or less dropped in media res into Hayden's life and expected to figure things out as she goes along and that it's a process strip. That is, it's Hayden recording her progress finishing a long book about her experience with breast cancer (The Story Of My Tits, out in September from IDW/Top Shelf), as well as a document of everyday family life. This particular volume is also an account of the preparations for as well as an actual trip to London and Paris, so that gives the reader a bit of value-added above simply watching Hayden draw comics or talk on the phone for several panels. Hayden's voice is distinct and powerful, and it's well-matched to her stripped-down but still dense style of cartooning. Her use of negative space in particular is impressive in depicting a busy, cluttered and full life with comics, her family, playing music and a clear identity as the family organizer. Allowing the reader to fill in some lines allows her comics some space to breathe, letting the eye pass quicker from panel to panel without getting bogged down in each panel's details. The personal details are mostly of a quotidian nature, with occasional reminders about her surviving cancer; in these strips, Hayden is more interested in getting down the basics than reflecting too long on what it all means. That immediacy is what makes the strip-to-strip flow so effective.

Heart Farts, by Cara Bean and Rebecca & Jason Viola. This is a two-woman anthology featuring Bean and R.Viola (comics drawn by her husband Jason). The strips are pleasant and lightweight, featuring topics like dreams about Tom Brady and the satisfaction received in creating bento boxes for others' lunches. One of the bigger treats here is a chance to see more of Bean's classroom comics and her bean-shaped self-caricature; one of the strips is about being a teacher and trying to get her students to love what she's teaching as much as she does, getting away from the feeling that she's torturing them. The Violas' bento box strip is about how having an opportunity to make something unique and nourishing for someone else is in itself a nourishing activity. Bean's classroom strip addressed the idea of "flow": how purposeful, creative activity creates positive energy not only for oneself, but for one's associates as well. While Viola's comic doesn't address this explicitly, there's no question that her comic is a demonstration of this idea in action. That synergy of ideas makes the mini greater than the sum of its parts, as it features slightly diverging points of view on the same set of ideas. The versatility of Jason Viola meant that Rebecca could write about anything and the result would inevitably look great.

Flocks 4, by L.Nichols.This is the most powerful chapter yet in Nichols' account of growing up queer and Christian. In this issue, Nichols lays out why simply excoriating her parents and others in their rural Louisiana community for condemning homosexuality isn't so simple. Their parents, teachers and people in their church, who made Nichols' life hellish in some respects, were the same people who encouraged them to excel in school. Being an intellectual of size in school made Nichols an easy target, and that support from adults turned out to be a crucial factor in becoming a success and realizing their dream of attending MIT. In one sense, Flocks is a document about pain: the pain of not fitting in, the pain of knowing that those people you love might not love you for what you truly are.

In another sense, Flocks is about pressure and balance, cleverly represented through mathematical notations. It's about the pressures that all of the various groups of whom we are a member put on us, for good ("you can do it!") and ill ("nerd!", "queer!", etc) and how to balance the negative pressures with the positive support. Nichols describes how they "fit in enough not to be rejected" and "fit in enough to gain support when needed" in hopes that "everything would get better one day". However, this wasn't simply a matter of things getting better by means of escape. Rather, things got better in part because of Nichols' amazing ability to take what nourished them and discard the rest. Even now, the even-handedness regarding faith, family and Nichols' upbringing is remarkable, considering how easy it would to be bitter. As per usual, Nichols' self-caricature as a sort of rag doll remains one of my favorites in autobio comics; it's a figure that's both capable of absorbing a tremendous amount of abuse as well as a tremendous amount of love, often from the same person. Though each issue stood on its own well, the cumulative effect really pays off in this issue in particular, since Nichols so wisely lays out that relationships are far more complicated than they seem on the surface and that the same person can give out support in one way and unwittingly undermine you in another.