Fantagraphics: LOVF, by Jesse Reklaw

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the book-length version of Jesse Reklaw's diary of madness, LOVF. One chapter was published as a minicomic by Robyn Chapman's Paper Rocket, and the effect of that mini was truly that of an all-out assault on the senses. This isn't really a comic in the traditional sense, though there are some comics sequences. Instead, it's what it purports to be on the cover: "The illustrated diary of a man literally losing his mind." There are two things has to consider when reading this book: the visual approach and the actual timeline. The timeline follows Reklaw's relationships in his residence of Portland starting to crumble, until one shattering day when he's brutally beaten by a guy after he stopped to try to help the woman the perpetrator was assaulting. That led Reklaw to New York, where he learned that his Medicare was stated-based, meaning that he couldn't get his psych meds since he had no money. That meant being homeless in New York, then managing to get himself to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and finally back to Portland again. Each city is roughly demarcated as a chapter and marked off as such by a different color of paper.

Visually, Reklaw collaborated with a host of guest artists (including some he was involved with romantically) and used a dense, dark mixture of colors on each page. There was also a side narrative involving an adventurer named Koldor that was the most visually interesting and funny part of the book; it was done very much in the spirit of Reklaw's Bluefuzz the Hero mini, which was meant to work both as a straightforward adventure, as a metacommentary about role playing games, and as a partly autobiographical series. There's also plenty in the way of eye-pops and other visual easter eggs on each page, but they were more in the spirit of a sketchbook jam than anything resembling a real narrative. The autobiographical story is told through Reklaw's hand-painted text, and the images are there more to reflect his state of mind than support the text with images that make it clearer.

Reklaw, in his career doing his strip Slow Wave and autobio projects, always struck me as an artist who thrived on creating order out of chaos. In transcribing the dreams of others, he put them in a solid grid and used a fairly naturalistic style to make sense of them. There was a solidity to be found there, just like in his diary strip Ten Thousand Things To Do and most of his Couch Tag book. Lurking underneath that order was the bubbling chaos of being in constant pain and dealing with the PTSD of a difficult childhood, along with other mental and emotional issues. He built structures to contain all of these things, and LOVF reveals what happens when the emotional and personal scaffolding of one's life is removed: total collapse. Tonally, what was odd about this book (and much of his other work) is how distant it all felt, like he was describing something happening to someone else. Reklaw's strategy in his autobio work was also to use a mundane and quotidian approach that the reader (and he) could latch on to, which allowed him to slip in the real roots of trauma or experience of depression or debilitating pain. He doesn't close such events in a big reveal moment; it simply comes up almost incidentally, as he frequently buries the lede with regard to his own life. There's no drama built-in to his work, which is not to say that there's no trauma.

What Reklaw describes in a matter-of-fact kind of way (giving away most of his possessions and leaving town) is actually pretty startling stuff, and the tone of the scene where he's beaten is almost bemused. There's a sense of almost denial that something could be causing him pain that eventually comes out in his behavior, like drinking to excess, saying hurtful and obnoxious things to others, and trying the patience of his friends. He's in and out relationships, charming and alienating people he meets, flirting with financial success and then having no money at all. At the end of the book he reveals what precipitated his initial journey to New York: a trip with his mom and siblings where Reklaw had a breakdown and walked away, eventually winding up in a nearby stream where the cops pulled him out. He was locked up, escaped from lock-up (!) and eventually got sent to a mental hospital. In other words, he started the book on a foundation of shifting sand to begin with, and without his meds that became quicksand. Reklaw is philosophical about it all, as he knows he could have killed himself or been killed in any number of ways, but it didn't quite seem to be his fate.

This is a difficult book to navigate. There are fascinating visuals and surprising twists and turns, but the restraint that has marked Reklaw's books in the past obviously went out the window, replaced instead with that strange disconnect that even Reklaw noted is something that he doesn't understand or relate to at this point in his life. Reklaw said it feels like someone else hijacked his life for a while and did this book, unconcerned with consequences and instead more interested in trying on different personae every day. It's a book about losing touch with reality and repeatedly self-inflicting wounds and burning bridges. Really, its main attraction as a comic to read is that secondary fantasy narrative that I wish had been fleshed out more in lieu of the book that we got, because it seemed to illustrate the chaos surrounding his life better than the other actual illustrations did. This is less an artistic masterpiece than an extended warning to himself and expulsion of toxins, a perilous journey with some dark but occasionally fascinating roadside attractions.

Once Removed: Couch Tag

Jesse Reklaw's Couch Tag is an example of what I call mediated autobiography. In each of the five chapters of the book, Reklaw uses a particular narrative structure and an accompanying aesthetic & decorative strategy in order to get at certain deep, painful feelings and events in his life. Much like in his highly-structured, year-long daily memoir comic Ten Thousand Things To Do, Reklaw uses these structures as a kind of safe space and even distraction that allows him to get at powerful, formative memories and how they relate to his current life. The core question that eats away at him is identity and how it is created relative to one's friends and family, and what the state of his identity is as he struggles with mental illness. The rawness of his emotions, especially as the book winds on to its conclusion, tend to spill over and swamp his structure, leading to some narrative and pictorial unevenness as his current mental state at the time of drawing the stories about his past has everything to do with how the story appears on the page.

In the first chapter, "Thirteen Cats of My Childhood", Reklaw introduces the reader to his family by way of listing every cat they had as pets. This is an ideal device, given the way people tend to project their emotions and fears onto their pets and use them as an outlet for affection, especially when that affection is difficult to come by at home. While Reklaw stays within this framework, the emotions and fears immediately come spilling out, as he reveals how his father's tempo frightened him as a child and how his family completely disintegrated when his mother divorced his father and his sister moved out of the house at the same time. The breakdown of his family is disguised by the trope of the Cute Cat Strip, complete with each cat getting its own personal logo and quips on either side of that logo. One of the repeated themes of the book is how Reklaw's young mind was unable to fully process and understand the chaos occurring around him, leading him to the the family "nothing" (in the words of his sister). The only way to get to these feelings, even now, is to trick them by capturing them with these literary devices.

The way each chapter addresses slightly different but overlapping concerns leads to some repetition in the memoir, but only in the sense that certain events and people are viewed from differing perspectives from chapter to chapter. For example, the second chapter, "Toys I Loved", rewinds from the divorce discussed at the end of chapter one and examines his family and life growing up yet again. The first chapter also established how many times Reklaw's family moved and how he often felt rootless and lonely as a result. The second chapter, with each section compartmentalized with a memory of a particular beloved toy, is all about his experiences in each of these locations, focusing on his young sexual history, as well as the way sex in general was brought up in his house growing up. With hippie parents who established few boundaries but also declined to make the world less mysterious, Reklaw was bombarded by a lot of information that was difficult to process. Some of that played out in terms of the "dirty" games he enjoyed playing with some of his friends, but he mostly portrays that as simple childhood pleasures that are rarely discussed as opposed to something pathological. This chapter is also about power and hierarchy, and how he often felt powerless against his older sister when he fought and the time he whipped a friend with a belt just to understand what that sensation felt like. The writer Michel Foucault explicitly connects power and sex in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, and this chapter very much plays out this way, as sex and sexuality are used and abused with regard to children based on hierarchy, power, familial superiority and other exploitative ways.

The third chapter, "The Fred Robinson Story" is about the ways in which friendships, especially male friendships that don't always allow for open expressions of affection and intimacy as children, are often mediated through activities like play and sports. In Reklaw's case with his friend Brendan, this chapter is a kind of love letter to the history of their friendship that was mediated through games, creative projects and music. It's also a love letter to comics in general, both the superhero comics of Reklaw's youth that obsessed him and the possibilities that comics opened up to him as a creative person and a collaborator. It's a chapter that intersects with the rest of the book in terms of talking about his family and interests, but it's also a chapter that very much works entirely on its own. It's tonally different than the other chapters, which tend to wind up being more downbeat and more explicitly about disintegration, decay and disarray. This is also the funniest chapter, as it details all sorts of collaborative pranks and shenanigans that wound up being a kind of special language spoken by Reklaw and his friend Brendan. There is a kind of bittersweet tone at the end as the friendship faded a little over time, but it concludes in the present day and notes that the friendship has endured.

The fourth chapter, "The Stacked Deck" is a family history in the form of all of the card games Reklaw learned to play as a child. Each anecdote starts with the rules of the game, a quick story about learning to play it, and then a family story related to the game. Once again, the chapter jumps back and forth but is roughly in chronological order. Some of the games mentioned (especially games involving working with a partner) resonate with the anecdote discussed, while others feel like a more cursory attempt to stick with the chapter's high concept and then move on to the story he really wanted to tell. Reklaw cleverly connects the element of chance in the games he played with the random element we must face when dealing with our extended families; the vagaries of genetics often lead to strange, seemingly arbitrary connections. At the same time, the deck was stacked against Reklaw growing both because of genetics but also the family history itself. Reklaw also talks about his regrets in not doing more to get to know his beloved grandparents in a real way as an adult, in part because he wanted little to do with so many of his crazy aunts and uncles. It's the first time the book touches on mortality, as this chapter turns characters in Reklaw's own internal narrative into real people who disappear and are unknowable.

Finally, "Lessoned" really gets to the heart of the matter in this memoir. It's a chapter about mental illness in his family and himself, told in the form of an A to Z primer.  The style of art here is the collaborative, rough, full color and sketchbook-style seen in his minicomic LOVF. The above gif is from his girlfriend Hazel Newlevant's blog, as she did the underlying blue pencils and Reklaw added the rest. It's fitting that even in his own memoir, Reklaw sought out others to work with him. This is a difficult chapter to process in many ways because it's so viscerally concerned with pain. If Reklaw's entire life was marked by chaos, a lack of structure and disorder, then many of his comics bear the mark of someone using a tidy, neat grid and a restrained, relaxed line. That's certainly true of the earlier chapters in this book, which are unusually smooth-looking even for Reklaw. However, all of that chaos simply spills over as Reklaw can no longer contain that pain, or perhaps is no longer interested in trying to conceal it. The book ends with an anecdote from his youth where he talks about an extended illness and a simple decision to no longer be sick. Couch Tag similarly is an exercise in personal agency. Designated as "the nothing" by his sister--a passive bystander who still managed to suck up emotional energy--his entire career as an artist can be seen as Reklaw creating something out of nothing. It's a portrait of an artist creating his own portrait that begins with formalist tricks, as though Reklaw is trying to trick himself into writing about these things by removing their immediacy by making them about something else on the surface. By the end of the book, that artifice is only superficially present as Reklaw's acknowledgment of his own struggles goes hand in hand with asserting his worthiness as a human being, all mediated and assisted by the way he creates art. If the book is uneven in tone and feels like it loses its way narratively at times, it's a side effect of artistic and personal freedom and agency. That raw self-discovery and revelation more than makes up for the book's rougher edges.

Minicomics: Nichols, Cantirino, Remnant, Gfrorer, Reklaw

Flocks, Chapters 2 and 3, by L.Nichols. These are the next two chapters in Nichols' meditation and exploration of faith and growing up as a queer born-again Christian. Each issue tends to cover similar ground, circling back to a variation on a theme. For example, the second issue, subtitled "body of conflict", gets at Nichols' body-image issues, knowing exactly what she wanted to look like as a kid but knowing it "wasn't OK". Using her distinctive rag doll self-caricature, Nichols depicts the forces and pressures she felt as a child and teen using the nomenclature of physics, though those arrows bearing down on her pierced and drew blood. The comic is heartbreaking in that she has a strong sense of identity but prays desperately to change, to conform, to not be a sinner. It never works, and at the end of the issue she goes back out into nature with the animals and woods that provide her so much comfort because they allow her to be herself as she is.

The third issue ("Nature vs Nurture") focuses less on body image and more on faith itself. A constant, running theme throughout this comic is Nichols refusing to demonize faith and religion, despite her experiences. She talks about the feeling of community she frequently felt, the power and mystical intensity of gospel services, and the comfort she felt in the idea that god was all around. At the beginning of this issue, she quotes a pastor quoting the Bible, referring to the "still, small voice of God". This concept made sense to her, that almost Buddhist idea that she was "part of something larger".Once again, that voice was best heard out in nature, where it was easier to see oneself as part of something larger instead of hearing the loud, angry voices decrying homosexuality and sinners. As Nichols notes, those were the voices of man, not God. While Nichols works through a lot of pain in these comics, it's not done in anger, but rather in appreciating beauty. Nichols' approach is to match the hate she felt for herself and the hate she felt from others with gentleness and care. Her use of full color to depict just how vibrant her environment was to her is a key to the success of these comics, because one can sense the joy radiating from those sequences. These comics are not a chance for revenge, but rather a plea for understanding. I hope she keeps going.

Turnpike Divides Part 2, by Sally Cantirino. The first issue sets up a story about a young man returning home to New Jersey to attend the funeral of his best friend, with the strong sense that said friend drove his car deliberately into a pole. This issue picks up on the ramifications of this event, as the man (Alec) tries to gain comfort from his ex-girlfriend (Lily). Cantirino nails the ways in which twenty-somethings relate to each other as they find themselves drifting through life, and this comic takes dead aim at narcissism and self-pity. Alec tries to find ways to blame himself for his friend's death and condemns those around him for not mourning him sufficiently, before Lily reveals a key fact about his death and generally puts him in his place. It's also about no longer being part of a place, about its relevance to one's life being entirely in the past. Cantirino's line is a little on the busy side, making the pages a bit denser to read than they need to be, but she does capture a sense of time and place. She notes that she used a lot of reference to real places for this story, and it's easy to see that; the spaces here look lived-in and well-trod. She also has a real knack for drawing night scenes and snow, which added a lot of atmosphere to the story. A student at the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW), her ambition as a cartoonist is clear.

Blindspot #3, by Joseph Remnant. The latest issue of the talented Remnant's one-man anthology focuses on autobio stories this time around, but each of the four has a very specific tone and purpose. At the same time, each of them fervently questions both himself and the cultural values surrounding him. In "L.A. Coffee Shop", Remnant takes aim at all of the "creative types" who fulfill every LA stereotype one can imagine, both in terms of the way they dress and the things they say. Of course, Remnant takes a step back and aims those barbs for himself as well, letting the other artist he saw in the cafe draw a picture of Remnant looking like an idiot. "Pappy Ron's Pizza" takes dead square aim at the controversy over Papa John's Pizza refusing to comply with the Affordable Healthcare Act because it would eat into their profits and "force" a small increase of the price of pizza. Here, Remnant watches a "news" report from a right-wing TV network that fully supports "Pappy Ron". From there, driving to various locations during con season leads him to choosing that pizza joint...but he just can't quite go through with it. It's a strip where Remnant is literally nauseated by the patter the Pappy Ron employee is forced to spew out, but it's also a story where Remnant follows through on his principles.

"Elevator" finds Remnant confronting his past in the face of an old friend and an odd interaction with him, as well as going back to his old school. This unsettling story then quickly resolves in a way that makes sense, and the jarring ending doesn't feel like a cop-out because of the warning Remnant receives during the course of the narrative.  The story that sort of recapitulates all the others is "You Are Here", which is about depression and how Remnant used meditative hiking up a hill as a form of therapy. Walks have a way of first stirring up bad thoughts and then dissolving them through sheer physical exertion, and Remnant works through his miasma and depression by forcing himself through. It's a story that touches on John Porcellino and his zen comics poetry, using many silent panels to create a rhythm that Remnant feels while walking. The slow, steady progression from panel to panel is modulated by the density of Remnant's cross-hatching, especially when Remnant walks slowly through shadowy parts of a forest. It's interesting to contrast the relative calm and quiet of that darkness to the darkness Remnant wakes up to in "Elevator". As always, Remnant's skill as a cartoonist is superb, with complete control over his line and his page. Like many artists inspired by underground cartoonists, Remnant's layouts are relatively straightforward, though he does something unusual on many pages with a 3-2-3 grid. The reader tends to go to the center of the page in grid set-ups, but Remnant deflects the reader's eye with two central panels in the middle of the page, forcing them to take in both of the central panels as a single image and then the rest of the page. Remnant wants the reader to look at every panel and follow its rhythm to the next, even when there are silent beats and delays. The way he formats the page makes the reader do this if they want to follow the story, and he faithfully puts a lot of clear but detailed information in every panel. Location, mood and body language are all keys in Remnant's comics and it's obvious that he wants the reader to closely follow all three. Even though this issue is autobiographical, Remnant is less interested in being confessional than sharing relatable stories.

Black Light, by Julia Gfrorer. Ever since publishing her first book with Sparkplug, Gfrorer has been creating one astounding, unsettling and frequently erotic story after another. This mini collects four short stories from a variety of sources, and what's remarkable about it is the way she takes tired fantasy and horror tropes (a vampire, Death, a deadly water nymph, and a magical bear) and transforms them into something that's actually frightening and real. That's because while the genre trope is often part of the story's big reveal, it's never the most frightening thing about the story. For example, "River of Tears" starts with the sort of party scene that Gfrorer excels at depicting, but soon segues into a series of texts from a suicidal junkie girlfriend. The horror here is not the Grim Reaper coming to take her away, but rather the mind-rending horror of dealing with that kind of emotional manipulation. "Phosphorus" is horrifying not because there's a monster in a pond, but rather because it's about sexual violence and humiliation."All Is Lost" is a downbeat story because it flips around the expectation of a monster menacing a child and suggests that it's the mother who is really the monster. Finally, "Unclean" and its ultimate monstrous revelation only works because of the way Gfrorer sets up and details the woman's betrayal. Indeed, she even suggests that the vampire is less of a predator than the woman's cheating ex-boyfriend. Her line is scratchy, harsh and dense, all befitting the kinds of stories she tells. Gfrorer is a smart storyteller above all else; one can sense just how much thought goes into each story and how certain elements, once revealed, will resonate for the reader. Her work rewards multiple readings because of its thoughtfulness and attention to detail, as well as her deep understanding of interpersonal dynamics and how they become dysfunctional.

LOVF New York: Destination Crisis., by Jesse Reklaw. This is a harrowing, intense account of Reklaw journeying to New York City and inadvertently going off his meds and becoming homeless for a period of time. Published by Robyn Chapman's Paper Rocket Minicomics, it's a beautiful, full-color minicomic that contains comics, sketches, collaborations with others and tenuous threads of narrative. It's a comic that's as much about the process of making a comic as it is the material itself, because the original pages got rained on at one point and the colors bled into each other. It's a collaboration with the elements as well as other artists, and a document of Reklaw going through a manic phase when he was off his meds. The line between typical member of society and being homeless is shown to be remarkably thin, especially when someone is dealing with mental illness. This comic rewards multiple readings simply because each page is so dense and filled with detail, scrawled jokes, background gags and references to New York. The city plays a huge role, given how unforgiving it is to the poor, but also because Reklaw went to the city to try and do business, even going to the weekly open tryout at The New Yorker. This comic represents a side of Reklaw I've never seen before. He's an artist whose comics are generally neat and ordered, hewing to strict grids and other formal constraints. Here, he's all over the place in spectacular fashion.

Sequart Reprints: 10 Great Minis From MoCCA 2005

This article was originally published in 2005 at sequart.com. It was my first-ever column on minicomics.
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Readers only vaguely familiar with the concept of mini-comics will be relieved to know that it's nearly impossible to pin down what is and isn't a mini-comic. Generally, they are small (but not always), usually relatively brief (anywhere between 8 and 80 pages), hand-made, frequently self-published, and often with personal touches like silk-screened covers, hand-stitched bindings, etc. Often, they serve as a sort of proving ground for young and/or inexperienced artists, though there are several accomplished artists who publish nothing but minicomics. The line between minicomics and zines is often blurred, but they often share similar content, a similar aesthetic, and the same sort of autobiographical self-expression.

The ten mini-comics I picked for this list were chosen based on how substantial they were (I skipped over some worthy 8-12 page minis simply because there wasn't enough "there" there), notable aesthetic or narrative qualities (preferably both), and formal elements unique to the world of minicomics. The artists range from absolute newcomers to those who have books from major publishers.

1. VAGABONDS #1.5: OF TWO MINDS, by Josh Neufeld (http://www.JoshComix.com). $2, 16 pages. Neufeld recently won a Xeric grant for A FEW PERFECT HOURS, distributed by Alternative. It's a collection of travel comics he had done over the years in his two-man anthology, KEYHOLE, and various other places. But Neufeld is also well known for doing a number of collaborative works (AMERICAN SPLENDOR the highest profile), and this mini is an exceptional collection of such stories. Neufeld adapts the poetry of several authors to comics, the most notable being "Time of Arrival". This is a single page with a 4x6 panel grid arrangement. The entire grid taken as a whole is an airplane, and Neufeld chops up the words of the poem into individual panels that comprise the plane. It's a clever formal trick and an effective means of getting across the poem's intent. Neufeld also did a story drawn with his non-dominant hand, imagining that such a person existed in his mirror and setting the story from the point of view of that character, and also draws a page using dialogue from an issue of Superman and completely recontextualizes its meaning with his new art. The mini is attractively packaged and extensively notated.

2. SATISFACTORY COMICS #6, by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe (isaac.cates@aya.yale.edu). $3, 28 pages plus extras. Full disclosure: Mike Wenthe is a long-time friend of mine. However, the work that he and his partner have produced speaks for itself. The duo has long thrived on experimentation with the form for their attractive minis, with other participants drawing panels for inclusion, providing built-in story constraints or throwing in random elements for the Cates-Wenthe team to work into their stories. As one might expect, jam comics are frequently better in theory than in practice, and some of their stories suffer from a lack of narrative cohesion. However, their output in the last year or so has shown considerable and sustained growth. Their latest effort is so jam-packed with different kinds of stories, ideas and clever geegaws that the result is a sort of miniature version of the comics issue of McSweeney's that Chris Ware edited. This issue features two comics based on a map created by a group of creators; an autobiographical story about online game addiction; a detective story wherein each page must mirror the form of a stanza of a sestina; an adaptation of Job 41, and a minicomic tucked into the front cover and a random shuffle comic paperclipped into the back.

3. NO PUNCHBACKS, by Kelly Denato & Christine Nimocks (http://www.nopunchbacks.com). $5, 28 pages. Amazingly, this is the debut comic for this duo, although initially No Punchbacks Press contained more contributors. Denato is an animator by trade, and it shows in her story, "Nanni-Nanni Boo-Boo". It's a wordless tale about a man who buys a bird and a fish from a pet shop whom are already friends, and how the fish is taken away. Her style resembles CHUNKY RICE-era Craig Thompson and Sara Varon, with a clean, assured line creating a cartoony world. Nimocks is a fine artist whose style and content is radically different than Denato's. She employs a scribbly line and deals with more autobiographical subjects, including internet dating. This is a remarkably accomplished first comic, with attractive packaging and smart storytelling. Interestingly, the duo was inspired by past visits to MoCCA to create their own comic.

4. SEE SAW, by Sara Edward-Corbett (http://www.greenfog.com, http://www.partykausa.com). $8, 35 pages plus extras. The artist is the most impressive member of the Partyka collective, and her strips here are reprinted from the New York Press. She uses a thin, precise line but balances this with heavy blacks and cross-hatching, giving these tales of schoolchildren an extra weight. The strips are about brother & sister Georgie & Olga, psychopathic Chucky and lovesick Meals. Georgie is an ultra-intelligent little nebbish, while his sister is constantly paranoid. Her dreams of being killed by a gangster octopus (complete with mask) are vivid, and while we feel her fear, the whole set-up is still hilarious. The comic is hand-stitched, with a "cootie-catcher" enclosed in the back.

5. APOLLO ASTRO #9: JOURNEY OF GEORGE, by Jack Turnbull. (http://www.jackturnbull.com). $5, 30 pages. Turnbull abandons his anthology-style for his mini and devotes an issue to his Walking George Potato character. The simplicity of the George and Veggie characters are balanced by Turnbull's lavish backgrounds and the Dreaded Bellpepper Storm Toucan, not to mention a gorgeous silkscreened cover It's a simple story, well-told, that owes as much to Dr Seuss as it does to Chris Ware. Turnbull's biggest strength is his ability to draw out every ounce of expression from his characters using just a few lines. He took a chance using characters that had mostly inhabited one-off strips and plugged them into a larger narrative, and it worked well. This issue is part one of a larger story.

6. COUCH TAG #2, by Jesse Reklaw. (http://www.hobocomics.com). $2, 20 pages. Reklaw is the artist of the syndicated dream strip, SLOW WAVE. This mini has a simple premise: it's about the thirteen different cats Reklaw had during his childhood. What makes this such a great read is that this is really an autobiographical account of his family, but telling it through the device of when certain pets were around and making that the focus of the narrative makes the side details all the more intriguing. Little touches like designing different logos for each cat's introduction and skipping long periods of time between pets make this a great read.

7. THESE THINGS THESE THINGS, by Jeffrey Brown. (http://www.theholyconsumption.com). $4, 36 pages. Brown's scratchy art style and his focus on his love life in his major works for Top Shelf have made him a love him or leave him sort of artist. Personally, I can't get enough of his comics and their lack of adornment when dealing with major drama. Beyond his graphic novels, his minis are often just as compelling for very different reasons. Brown lets his sense of humor show more in his minis, and tells different kinds of stories. This mini deals with some of the events in ANY EASY INTIMACY, providing a sort of closure as Brown deals with yet another broken relationship, the quest to find the artist who performed a particular song, and a book tour with some fellow artists.

8. SUMMA CUM LAUDE, by Eve Englezos & Josh Moutray. (http://www.icecreamlandia.com). 10 pages. The comics that this duo creates are unlike anything else out there today. This latest work, a little bridge between issues of the sublimely strange Icecreamlandia, is designed to look like a minature diploma case. As you open it up, the pages fold out accordian-style, revealing a bizarre science fair. For some reason, the adults are all in 18th century aristocratic dress (complete with powdered wigs and corsets). The dialogue follows from this absurd set-up ("Why, yes, it seems pretty obvious to me now that the dinosaurs were in 3-D.") As always, the realistic, clear-line art belies the insanity of the set-up.

9. A CASE IN TOKYO, by Damien Jay. $10, 22 pages. This comic wins the "most beautiful mini" award, hands-down. Printed on a heavy cardstock and hand-assembled, the coloring process used to illustrate this creepy little story makes the whole thing feel like a children's book gone horribly wrong. The story describes a mental patient who in fact may be possessed, and the momentary clarity she displayed in this state. Her clarity was so incisive that everyone couldn't stand to be around her, until the spell faded and "she became a stupid person once again." While a very quick read, the visuals alone make this a worthwhile purchase. Jay gets the most out of the minicomic format, using every hand-crafted trick in the book.

10. ISOLATION CHAMBER #2, by Ed Piskor (wimpyrutherford@hotmail.com). $1.50, 16 pages. Of the comics on this list, this is the only diary strip. Diary strips (much like personal zines or blogs) can get boring quickly if the author simply devotes it to standard quotidian concerns. It's important to establish some sort of angle early on to differentiate it from other kinds of autobiography. Piskor does this through establishing his voice loud and clear in the early going: he's a curmudgeon who knows a lot of strange people, and isn't afraid to dish. He manages to inject sincerity into his description of his relationship with his baby sister without seeming overly sentimental. He struggles with what to put in his journal and what to censor, some interesting interactions with his parents, and a local group of comics creators. There are weird stories about his interactions with junkies, talks with Harvey Pekar and his feelings about becoming semi-famous. At the end, Piskor announces that the cartoon journal took up all of his time and discontinued it--an interesting statement in itself. Piskor is a real talent and has an interesting voice; it'll be interesting to see what he does after he finishes up his work with Harvey Pekar.

Sequart #62: Elfworld

Elfworld was first conceived of by Jeffrey Brown, best known for his autobiographical comics. Fans of Brown will also know that he's fond of doing skewed takes on genre conventions as well. His Bighead is his version of a superhero character (adapted from stuff he used to do as a kid), and his upcoming Incredible Change-Bots does the same for The Transformers. On the Comics Journal message board back in 2004, he solicited entries for an anthology dealing with sword-and-sorcery type fantasy tales from fellow indy artists, to be called Elfworld. For a variety of reasons, he abandoned the project, but it was taken up by San Francisco artist Francois Vigneault, who started his own publishing concern (Family Style) for this and other projects. Most of the entries in this volume came from that original solicitation by Brown, in a nice-looking package edited by Vigneault and designed by Jonas Madden-Connor.

It's clear that the audience for this book is supposed to be indy-comics fans, and there are a few big names in here, like Brown, Martin Cendreda, Souther Salazar and Ron Rege'. It's unfortunate that their contributions are among the weakest in the book--single or two-page strips that don't really go anywhere. The problem with doing this kind of story is that a straight-up parody is going to be as tedious as one that slavishly adheres to the trappings of the genre. Cendreda does a parody of indy comics with his, with an elf character falling into the same kind of "lonely-boy" loser situations as one might see in some typical autobiographical comics. Even at just four pages, it feels like the joke was beaten to death in the first panel or two. The same went for Ansis Purins' "Gnome Gathering", which tried to meld fantasy with Freak Brothers-style humor. While the final joke about eagles was clever, this was another story that beat the same concept into the ground on page after page.

The stories that work best here are the sort that take after Lewis Trondheim's approach in Dungeon. There, the sword-and-sorcery stories are ridiculous but told with a straight face, and the humor comes out of the situations that arise rather than with easy parodic targets. Walking the line between understanding what makes the genre work and how to transcend its limitations isn't easy, and only a few of the artists in Elfworld got it right to my eyes.

The best stories by far were "Adventures In Mead", by Matt Wiegle, "Basilisk" by Kaz Strzepek, and an untitled story by K. Thor Jensen. Wiegle's story is spaced interstially throughout the story, and involves a drunk fighter with an uncanny knack for killing everything in his path. As we learn as the story proceeds, this ability isn't necessarily helpful. Wiegle's art is beautifully scratchy and cartoony, a nice balance between the strip's violence and its goofiness.

Jensen's story is familiar: a group of adventurers in an underground cavern looking for a fabulous lost city. This tale has a lot going for it. First, Jensen's art style resembles classic Elzie (Popeye) Segar here--a perfect model to emulate in terms of melding humor with adventure. Jensen's secret weapon here is his spot-on dialogue, especially with one member of the party whose constant complaining and skepticism about everything winds up saving them. This was one of the few stories in the book where the characters and situation were interesting enough for me to want to see more of them. Jensen takes the adventure seriously, but his funny art lightens up the action. It's a perfect compromise between the two sensibilities seen so often in this book.

"Basilisk" is a fantastic story about a smart-ass researcher trying to find the legendary basilisk near a small town. The creature is supposedly part-bird and has the power to turn anything it gazes upon into stone. The researcher talks a kobold in a bar to take him to the where his party encountered the creature so he could draw it. The basilisk turns out to be both more and less than what was expected, and the story's ending has a delightful twist. This story has it all--humor, a deep vein of D&D/fantasy references (I especially liked the appearance of a beholder), and a liveliness to its line. It's both funny and exciting, with a great final punchline. I don't think it was a coincidence that Strzepek was able to succeed here because of his comfort with stories that deal with fantastic elements. It was clear which artists were in their element and which weren't in this volume.

There are several other stories that pretty much took on a serious approach to the subject that didn't do enough to entertain as pure genre stories, or else tried to inject a "poignant moment" into fantasy settings. The one other story I did want to note was Erik Nebel & Jesse Reklaw's "The Little People", about a sort of blob-couple. The male is always off on some kind of quest, leaving his mate behind, and never gives her any details. Years later, when she and their son finally leave them, the real reason for his vagueness came out and it's not clear if he's a raving paranoid or had good reason for his actions. It's not quite as accomplished or interesting as the best stories in this book, but it's still clever and visually interesting. The story is quite grim, but it's balanced by the fact that the blobs are funny-looking.

Overall, this book falls prey to some of the traps that indy books tackling genre subjects fall into, but there are several stories that transcend these difficulties. When dealing with the same topic, story after story, there's a certain numbing effect that can take over for the reader. At the same time, the stories that manage to capture the theme in a unique manner are all the more memorable. Writing genre fiction creates a certain set of limitations and expectations for an artist, and it's a testament to an artist's skill if they can create something truly memorable given a reduced palette of storytelling options. There will be a second volume of Elfworld in 2008, and it'll be interesting to see which artists return and what new voices Vigneault brings in. While I appreciate Vigneault's attempt to bring a variety of approaches (serious and otherwise), the next volume may work better as a whole if every artist successfully walks the line between genre fantasy and playfulness. The book was solicited through Diamond and is also available at Family Style's website at http://www.family-style.com

Sequart Reprints: Lower Regions, Bluefuzz

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
*****

An interesting new trend I've noticed is alt-comics cartoonists approaching some old-fashioned genre stories with a great deal of affection. The most familiar example of this sort of storytelling is the Lewis Trondheim/Joann Sfar Dungeon series. They manage to take the hoary old sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic (reflected back and towards Dungeons and Dragons in particular) and tell stories that both celebrate and poke fun at genre conventions. Best of all, they do it with a straight face, allowing the inherent ridiculousness of fantasy tropes (and our inherent familiarity with them) to carry the humor, all while relishing the opportunity to engage in this sort of storytelling.

Alex Robinson is best known for his slice-of-life storytelling in Box Office Poison and Tricked! Of course, anyone who's read his comics will find that they're littered with genre and pop-culture references. His friend Tim Krieder, an alt-weekly cartoonist best known for his political cartoons, talked to him about fighting through cartooning ruts. When he asked Robinson what he really wanted to draw, he noted that he'd love to draw a sword-and-sorcery story that had the feel of an old D&D adventure: hack and slash fights, trudging through a dungeon, meeting weird monsters, etc. In essence, the goal was pure cartooning fun.

With Lower Regions, Robinson did just that. This book is entirely straightforward: a female fighter armed with a battle-axe walks into an underground lair with a companion on some sort of quest, fights all sorts of nasty monsters, and eventually completes her journey. The fact that the title of the book is a double-entendre shows that Robinson is approaching the subject with a bit of whimsy, yet the story itself isn't a parody. There are moments of humor, like when the companion is fried by a giant, fire-breathing cat and is brought back to life with a healing potion--and then flattened by a huge barrel. The sense of humor here is not unlike a group of gamers at a table coming up with ridiculous solutions to scenarios the game-master is throwing at them. There's a lightness in this work that's very appealing, where one can sense Robinson really throwing himself into the work and come up with a compelling, kinetic and visceral story. The storytelling problems inherent in fantasy fiction are completely different than the usual ones he faces, and one can see him relishing a very different kind of challenge, entirely on his own terms. The end result is slight and even disposable (it doesn't beg for multiple readings), but it was obvious that Robinson wasn't going for a lasting Statement--he was going for fun. It was a pleasure to see him stretch his cartooning muscles a bit, and it'll be interesting to see if this has an impact on his upcoming projects.

Jesse Reklaw's one of the most clever cartoonists working today. From his alt-weekly dream comic Slow Wave to his innovative autobio minicomics, Reklaw excels at subverting expectations. He finds humor in serious situations, and can lace a seemingly light-hearted premise (like telling the story of all the cats his family has owned) with memories of bittersweet and even traumatic events. So it's no surprise that his take on D&D-type storytelling, Bluefuzz The Hero, is somehow both a straightforward adventure with lots of cool twists and turns and a sarcastic take on same.

While Reklaw approaches the fantasy genre with the same kind of affection and intimate knowledge that Robinson does, his storytelling decisions are entirely different. Robinson doesn't use dialogue, relying entirely on his art to carry the story and especially its humor. He uses a style that's relatively realistic, at least to those familiar with fantasy art. Reklaw mixes an omniscient narrator with dialogue, and employs a loose, sketchy style to get across his action. His character designs are stripped-down and silly, but don't step into cheap parody. Reklaw has the narrator tell the story of heroic Bluefuzz as though we were already familiar with his most famous exploits, and instead opts to present a behind-the-scenes look at his story. Instead of a single flowing narrative, Reklaw chooses to chop up his story into smaller segments, each announcing a different episode of Bluefuzz's grand adventure. Bluefuzz himself has a blobby blue tone with a fuzzy head--the very opposite of a typical, muscular sword 'n sorcery hero.

There are two things in particular that I love about this mini. The first is the sardonic but matter-of-fact narration, as though it were told by a stoner. The second are intermittent, full-color splash pages that aren't part of the narrative, but rather are illustrative of a single scene--much like in a D&D Monster Manual. Bluefuzz himself is the sort of "brick" hero so prevalent in fantasy stories, a well-meaning oaf who can't be stopped. I noted earlier that Reklaw excels at subverting expectations. In each adventure, things don't turn out as the reader would expect: Bluefuzz is an oaf who only becomes a hero after being drubbed out of town, and the eventual conclusion to his adventures is a series of anticlimaxes. Even his heroics are a bit off-kilter: in a two-page spread where his most "famous" adventures take place, one of them has Bluefuzz playing an electric guitar attached to an amp.

It's a testament to Reklaw's talent that even this bit of fluffy fun is packed with great ideas, clever visuals and a lot of laughs. Though he's been around comics for awhile, it seems like he's really been taking his work to another level in the past couple of years. I hope to see him really bust out with a long-form work in the near future, because he certainly has the chops to pull it off.

Sequart Reprints: 12 Great Minis From SPX 2006

This article was originally published in 2006.
*****
One of the highlights of any alt-comics events is the opportunity to take a look at a new crop of mini-comics. Some of them are by established artists who have regular, professional publishing outlets. They often make minis just to have something new to show at conventions, or do it as a way of publishing chapters of new, long-form works. Other minis are by young artists looking to establish themselves, and yet others do minis purely as an end unto themselves. Some are elaborate, with die-cut or silk-screened covers; while others are humble Xeroxed efforts. The minis I included in this article were those that were my favorites. There were a number of other minis that I enjoyed as well, but the minis I wanted to include here were a bit more substantive -- both in terms of content and page length. Without further ado...

1. My Affliction, by Gabrielle Bell. Bell was giving out copies of this mini, a return to the weirder, magical realist stories of her earlier work. The title affliction is actually summed up by Gabrielle's stand-in character: "I'm always falling in love with guys who aren't good for me." One would expect a story built around that statement to be a typical melodrama. Instead, Bell starts off the story being picked up by a giant and finding herself stopping in mid-air when he dropped her. Things get stranger from there, as she finds herself in a neurologist's office after getting attacked by a gang of dogs. He tells her that that she must transfer her feelings of love to someone safer, and gives her a wooden token named Charlie. After she drops it into a river, he comes to life and they live together on a houseboat. Gabrielle finds herself unable to fall in love with him, and in fact fell in love with everyone but him. A panel where a UPS delivery man asking for her name for a signature is hilarious, as she suggestively replies "What's your name?"

Things get even weirder from there, as she winds up with a brutish thug who was the original owner of her foul-mouthed parrot. She gets abandoned by her new boyfriend and winds up getting a ride from a suicidal man and careens off a cliff. Winding up in a cage in the home of the original behemoth, she manages an escape attempt with her new cagemate and her rescuing boyfriend, and must worry about her dog winding up in a giant rat trap. As always, Bell plays all of this wackiness with a straight face. Her deadpan narration provides a bit of distance, but its flatness actually draws out the absurdity of the scenarios Gabrielle winds up in. That craziness is given warmth by Bell's loose and lively line. This mini is the latest in a series of triumphs by Bell and an interesting change of pace from her autobiographical work in her new book Lucky, as well as the conventional stories in Mome. While we've seen some fantasy elements creep back into her work recently, it's been awhile since we saw an all-out flight of fancy from Bell. It's a welcome return and makes me wonder if we'll see a long-form work of this nature from her in the future.

2. Becky and Friend, by Lauren R. Weinstein. This mini includes the story "Horse Camp", which was  published in the Viking anthology Stuck in the Middle.. A story much like her work in Girl Stories, this is a hilarious but awful account of Becky and her summer at what is supposed to be a horseback riding camp. Weinstein possesses the uncanny ability to depict the narcissism, self-loathing, giddiness and melodrama of the teenaged years. The funniest bits in the story are the over-the-top letters of woe Becky writes to her parents, despite the fact that she does finally manage to spend a few rapturous hours riding a horse. As always, Weinstein's style is an exaggerated one, to the point where some of the figures are almost grotesque. Her teenaged stand-in is memorably goofy--the scene where she tries to start dancing with her horse (singing Salt 'n Pepa's "Push It") is ridiculous, especially when some other girls catch her, mortified. Despite these exaggerated touches throughout the story, what makes it so effective is how remarkably (and embarrassingly) true she makes the episode seem. The distortions are played straight, which makes them both funny and real. A nice addition for the mini was the presence of grade school poetry about a similar experience, which was as over-the-top as one might expect for a child.

3. Couch Tag #3, by Jesse Reklaw. Reklaw's previous issue was one of the more compelling comics of 2005, and I was happy to see it included in The Best American Comics, 2005. Reklaw's skill as an autobiographical artist is to relay one series of anecdotes that are of interest to a general audience, but doing so in a manner that subtly reveals more profound emotional truths. In Couch Tag #2, Reklaw discussed the cats he had as childhood pets, but he was really telling the story of how his family disintegrated. In #3, the hook is the series of pranks and artistic projects he and his friend collaborated on over the years, but the underlying story is about different kinds of communication and the ways they can break down.

The best comparison I can think of is the relationship between Becky & Enid in Ghost World. Jesse and his friend Brandon went through ups and downs as friends, but when they were close, that friendship was expressed through a series of artistic collaborations and pranks. That culminated in a comic they did together about a man named Fred Robinson. He was someone random they picked to make into sort of their own everyman character--except that they'd leave him weird objects, set up stolen traffic signs repainted to say "Fred Robinson Crossing" across from his house and even send him comics they did about him. This communication through activity and in-jokes is not unusual for many men, especially those who have trouble expressing their feelings otherwise.

A telling scene in the story is when Jesse gets a letter from Brandon, who is living in Norway at the time. All of the things that had never been said between the two of them as friends just spilled out--and were never said again in the same way when they reunited. That letter became especially poignant when we see their friendship splintering apart because they aren't capable of talking about it. That poignancy is prevented from becoming schmaltz by the shenanigans depicted throughout the rest of the issue. My favorite sequence is when they make up a stencil template and use spraypaint to turn street signs that look like this <- -> into the Batman signal. Reklaw is becoming an increasingly skilled and versatile artist, capable of doing straight-up humor pieces, dream interpretation strips, autobio and much more.

4. Krayon's Ego, by various. In the tradition of Low-Jinx and Johnny Ryan's nasty parodies, a variety of artists take on comics in the Kramer's Ergot vein. Parodies of Craig Thompson and James Kochalka, while both funny, don't really have much to do with the Kramer's aesthetic. Still, the hilarious parody of Blankets (involving an extremely inappropriate use of a crucifix) was a hoot, and the mimicking of Thompson's angular style was uncanny. Spoofing Kochalka's cloying sweetness is like shooting fish in a barrel, but the "American Elf 2030" strips here were extremely clever. The thought of Kochalka continuing his strip into old age, while visiting his son in prison and selling his song "It's My Dink" for a Viagra ad were all good gags. However, the Tom Gauld-esque looking strips satirizing Sammy Harkham, Souther Salazar, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones and Gabrielle Bell were nasty fun. The fifth strip, involving Harkham finding a discarded strip by Mr T and Harkham declaring him "another naïve master of sequential art!" The other strips poke fun at the creators by portraying them as their opposites: Jones as a wheeler-dealer businessman, Bell as a superhero, Harkham as a junkie who pretends to bow out of activities for religious reasons, etc. My favorite strip was probably "Why Johnny Can't Satirize", a send-up of Johnny Ryan's crude parodies: "It's like he takes a great comic and then puts a dick or fart joke at the end." "Brilliant!" This mini is clearly a series of inside jokes for the alt-comics crowd, but it's still quite amusing. Contributors include Karen Sneider, Marc Campos, Clutch, Josh Frankel, Tom Neely, Jesse Reklaw and Sara Oleksyk.

5. Morbus, by Star St. Germain. St. Germain is primarily an illustrator whose style is somewhat reminiscent of Phoebe Gloeckner. Both have an astonishing facility with anatomical drawings put to new purposes. This short mini is a stylized catalogue of "various diseases, illnesses, and syndromes that my body has collected over the years". Each page's design is beautiful, with an illustration of conditions like scoliosis and carpal tunnel paired with medical descriptions that have been mostly erased. The final image of the mini, where she opens up her dress to reveal an anatomical diagram perfectly captures the evocative nature of her work. The disappearing text evokes the imperfection of how medical lingo captures the effect that pain and sickness can inflict--theimage, combining her normal features and the anatomical dialogues, perfectly conveys these feelings.

6. Various minis by Drew Weing & Eleanor Davis. Both are graduates of the Savannah College of Art & Design and are two of the most promising talents in comics. All four of the minis reviewed here are beautiful art objects on their own, with die-cut covers, innovative cover designs and beautiful uses of color.

Weing is best known for his Journal Comic and Pup, both of which drew a lot of attention when they were originally published on the web. Weing is an amazing draftsman and designer, merging a light cartoony sensibility with lush backgrounds. His solo effort here, Blar, is a straight-ahead tale of a barbarian who kills everything in his path. Feeling a bit like Trondheim & Sfar's Dungeon, Weing plays the action straight but ups the ante with ever-more ridiculous opponents and situations. Each story ends with an unexpected punchline, as Weing paces each strip with great skill. This is a modest but delightful comic.

Davis is a bit more under the radar at the moment, but not for long. Her comics often have fantastic themes but a melancholy tone; she reminds me a bit of Megan Kelso in that regard. The Beast Mother is a masterpiece in the use of negative space as Davis details the life of a female monster with dozens of children. When a hunter starts stalking her, our assumptions and expectations are quickly challenged. Even after the big reveal, there's a sadness to the story that lingers. Mattie and Dodi is a very different sort of strip that evokes the same kind of feelings. It concerns a pair of sisters, the older of whom is taking care of both her dying grandfather and her younger sister, an extremely shy girl. This story is all about roles and responsibilities, as Mattie struggles to deal with her grandfather, her boyfriend (who wants her to sell the house), and Dodi, who is enormously uncomfortable with the outside world. While not as visually striking as The Beast Mother, it's every bit as powerful. The final two panels, as we see the sister in very different places emotionally, gives the reader a number of clues as to where their stories might go next.

Davis and Weing collected several of their short stories in a mini called Bugbear. Life and death are the overriding themes in this mini. Weing does an odd story based on a dream he had after his father died, where his father comes back to life in a "soy-based" body. In the dream, Drew realizes that he can bring Eleanor back to life in the same manner. Davis has a story in which a young girl screams that there's been a mistake and ventures with a creature to the local graveyard, where her dead grandfather is revived. The themes are similar, but there's always an added distance present in Davis' stories.

Both artists are self-publishing, but don't look for that to last much longer. The only question is what kind of stories they'll want to tell given the resources of a publisher. I sense that Weing has several big stories that he wants to tell, but Davis' future might lie in being a short story specialist like Bell or Kelso. 

7. Husky #1 & #2, by Alex Robinson & Tony Consiglio. Two of my favorite "new-mainstream" creators are serializing their new long-form stories. Consiglio (whose  110PerCent was quite enjoyable) contributes "Titanius", a surprisingly hard-boiled, straight-laced noir involving a guy in a metal suit and his quest to get his son back. The humor here is told with a straight face as Consiglio conforms to certain genre conventions. However, the increasingly-convoluted plot (involving cures for herpes, evil pharmaceutical companies, killing enemies with lamps and more) reveals that Consiglio is winking at the whole story with his cartoony art style and over-the-top scenarios.

Meanwhile, Robinson's new story is called "2 Cool 2B 4gotten". The high concept is quite simple: a 40-year old man undergoing hypnosis to cure him of smoking is somehow sent back in time to high school--and in his 16 year old body. While he initially thinks he has an opportunity to ask that girl out he always wanted to and perhaps never start smoking as a youngster, it's clear that there's some deeper problem that he's repressed and has only started to bubble up. As always, Robinson's grasp on relationships and facility with dialogue makes him a pleasure to read. I like his work best when it deals with the most painful of human emotions; he has a way of evoking desperation that's almost visceral. While there's plenty of 80's name-checking here, Robinson keeps the nostalgia to a minimum and in service to the story. Robinson in the past has tended to write huge, sprawling stories; in Box Office Poison, they sometimes lost focus. That was due in part to the periodical nature of that story, but I think he was also perhaps a bit overambitious. The tighter focus in this story bodes well for this new project's development.

8. The Egoists, by Kelli Nelson. Another SCAD grad, Nelson's blocky computer-designed line provides the right amount of emotional distance needed for this story of her trip back to her hometown for her parents' divorce. The story itself has enough lurid and painful moments to be interesting without any further elaboration by Nelson, but she makes a number of clever formal and narrative choices that lead to some unexpected results. First off, the emotional distance created by her line is reflected in other choices. Nelson begins the story by introducing us to her hometown, leading us at last to the courthouse where her parents are divorcing. While the story is told in real time, Nelson tells us the story from a first-person future perspective. This choice again filters out the emotions she felt at the time; even as she tries to describe how she felt, it's all through her present perspective. The obvious absurdity of the moment and the meaninglessness of many of her interactions are emphasized by her choosing to put so much of the dialogue in empty word balloons--including all of her non-narrative, real-time dialogue. The most interesting question that Nelson asks is of herself: why did she attend? To support her mother, or get back at her father? Or worse--was it to get material for another comic? None of these questions are answered, but this isn't a story about answers. It's a story about a process, one that didn't make sense at the time of the events and clearly still didn't make much sense when Nelson wrote it. The irony is that only Nelson herself seems capable of asking questions, self-doubt and seeing perspectives other than her own.

9. Hey, 4-Eyes! #2, edited by Robyn Chapman. A delightful combination of zine and comics, this new paean to eyeglasses is a stylishly quirky read. This is the sort of esoteric zine that's clearly a labor of love and unapologetic about its obsession. What makes it so enjoyable is Chapman's sense of style and the variety of material she presents. From articles on how to purchase vintage glasses, to profiles on fellow zinesters and photo features on the "Miss (and Mister) Specs Appeal", Chapman gets down to the nuts and bolts of why she finds glasses so appealing. The best bit was "Eyeglasses Trading Cards" featuring profiles and D&D-style characteristics of the likes of Harry Potter, Lisa Loeb, Enid Coleslaw and Woody Allen, among others. Of course, there are also a number of top-notch comics in here as well. Chapman herself contributes a strip where she hits on these two guys who look like personal crush Harry Potter but instead gets shot down. The Icecreamlandia duo of Eve Engelos & Josh Moutray have their usual painfully gorgeous linework combined with bizarre one-page monologues, all centering around characters with glasses, goggles, monocles, etc. Also enjoyable is Damien Jay's take on being forced to wear glasses. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in the topic or just frothy fun.

10. Phase 7 #006 & 010, by Alec Longstreth. Longstreth is a hurricane of comics enthusiasm. These two minis tell very different kinds of stories, one the next chapter of his serial "Basewood" and the other an autobiographical account of his obsession with comics. "Basewood" is a story simply told, about a young man who wakes up in the middle of a mysterious, dangerous forest with no memory of how he got there. In this chapter, he becomes friends with Argus, an older man who had lived in a forest treehouse for years. We learn that Argus moved there with his wife, who was killed by a monster. The two become friends, but our amnesiac protagonist is haunted by dreams of monsters devouring him. The issue ends on a cliffhanger.

While the story itself is not especially ground-breaking, it's told simply and beautifully. Longstreth keeps his figures simple and iconic but provides lavishly cross-hatched backgrounds. He almost completely eschews the use of blank space, and the imbues each panel with a sort of nervous energy. Despite the heavy uses of blacks and shading, none of his pages feel claustrophobic or overstuffed. Instead there's a richness to his art that draws the eye in, aided by his fine storytelling skills and page design.

PHASE 007 #010 is something completely different. The story starts by Alec going to a therapist of some kind to tell him that "my comic book is really stressing me out!" That leads into Longstreth discussing how he became so devoted to comics. While Disney comics and Bone were huge early influences (there are touches of both in "Basewood"), it was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics that blew his mind. Combined with Dave Sim's preachings on self-publishing, Longstreth knew that he wanted to make, teach and think about comics for the rest of his life.

One gets the sense when reading some of his comics that he wishes some of his stories could just come pouring out of him. We don't actually get to the root of his frustration in this issue, but I would suspect that he hates that he can't get his ideas down on paper fast enough. Longstreth's story is notable for his reaction when introduced to new concepts and ideas--he becomes so absorbed by them that he forgoes everything else to fulfill them. After being exposed to art comics, he read everything his libraries had in stock within a couple of weeks. Sim's writing encouraged him to draw some form of comics every day of his life. When he compares this to "a commitment on the same level as marriage", it's clear that this intensity is going to bring a lot of highs and lows as an artist. There's a total lack of cynicism in his approach, a purity and naivete that comes through clearly on the page. Longstreth is not only obsessed with the form, but he's also trying to figure out why he is obsessed. That mania, as Longstreth struggles with his own personal blind spots, is almost as interesting to follow as his actual comics.

11. How To Start Thinking About Learning How to Draw Comics, by Kevin Huizenga. This mini, designed as a guidebook for the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, offers rewards on every page both as promotional material and as a comics-reading experience. I can't think of someone more suited to do this sort of comic than Huizenga, other than perhaps fellow USS Catastrophe stablemate Dan Zettwoch. Huizenga's fascination with structure and patterns meshed perfectly with the flights of fancy that inform his best work in this catalog-as-comic. My favorite bits are the how-to tips and "secrets" of comics, like the absurd series of visual cues for mood that he came up with, like "Fiery Shoulder" for a "feeling of regret", or "Waltzing Duck" as "The ghost of carefree days".

What Huizenga captures best here are the joys and frustrations of a cartoonist's life. In a strip called "Vermont Winter: Cartooning Season", we see the CCS student hole up in his room for four months working on his comic as snow piles up outside his window. Upon emerging, he proudly hands a completed comic to a friend. Twenty minutes later, the friend completely finishes reading it. That's the struggle of the cartoonist in a nutshell: months of tedious labor that is consumed in mere minutes.

The booklet is also just plain funny and knowing about comics. Lesson 113: "The Types of Cartoonists" is an accurate bit of smart-assery, as Huizenga tels us about the "Retro Retentive (Motto: 'Sigh')", the "Mad Comedian (Motto: 'F*** all this boring artsy s***')", and "Autobiographical (Motto: 'That would make a good comic')". There are also plenty of Huizenga's diagrams--some useful (like neck & back exercises for cartoonists) and some whimsical (such as deliberately over-complicated model of approaches to comics, an amusing job at Scott McCloud's attempts to reduce comics down to easily categorizable forms). 

12. Pony Up, by Karen Sneider. Sneider is a stand-up comedian whose comics come all-too-infrequently. This comic appears to be an autobiographical tale from her youth, somewhat in the vein of Lauren Weinstein. Only wanting to ride her friend's horse, our heroine instead talks herself into drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. Desperate to look cool for her fashionable friend (I love the touch of her friend wearing an off-the-shoulder Flashdance-style shirt), our heroine can only ask "Is this what adults do all the time?" The bonus story, where our heroine learns how to pop a pimple, is a bit more light-hearted. I like the way Sneider deals with the melodrama of her teenage years with a lighthearted illustration style. I'm used to stories from Sneider that are purely comedic, but I enjoyed this change of pace and style.

Passing It Down: N.Y.D.I #1

Jesse Reklaw has been making zines and minicomics for over twenty years along with his best-known work, Slow Wave. The latter still has a home at a few alt-weeklies, but it mostly lives these days on the web and in collected form. As such, Reklaw knows as well as anyone how much time, energy and devotion it takes to see one's work get published--especially when one is forced to do it alone. It's one thing to do that as a young twenty-something with boundless energy, but quite another to sustain this level of production. Reklaw's astounding work ethic has led to him not just sustaining an enviable production schedule in terms of his own work, it's enabled his pursuits in teaching as well. At the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, he teaches a Comics Storytelling Workshop as part of their Comics/Graphic Novel track. It's in that spirit that he's started a new minicomics series, N.Y.D.I. Billed as "a history in publishing", it's part-autobio and part instructional manual.



The title is a gag on DYI ("do it yourself"), the traditional zine mantra, replacing it with "No, You Do It." Reklaw is a master of utilizing unusual structures for autobiographical comics. His Couch Tag stories frame deeper personal details around a list of the cats his family owned or the games that he and his friends created. The excellent Ten Thousand Things To Do is a diary strip that integrates his daily personal and social routines with the real physical and emotional pain he feels on a constant basis. N.Y.D.I slips in details about his father's post-divorce reinvention as a cross-dressing slam poet, his girlfriend's perspective on him becoming a published author and how actually sitting down to draw is a cheering activity. Those details add a richness to his primary narrative framework: a breakdown of how he managed to get various of his comics published over the years.



This comic's aim is not to tell people how to publish. Rather, it's one man's experiences both as a self-publisher and under contract with a variety of comics & book publishers. Reklaw breaks down the process of how he went about self-publishing with a helpful flowchart and later provides charts on format vs cost and the tasks, risks and titles of everyone involved in comic book production, publication and consumption. As an aside, one reason why the charts are so useful and easy to read is that Reklaw is a superb letterer. His lettering is clear, attractive, and the characters are slightly larger than that of the average letterer. While Reklaw uses a lot of hatching and cross-hatching in his drawings to provide a bit of weight, his strips are always composed in such a way as to provide for maximum, immediate clarity.

Reklaw also throws in funny asides, where his publishing and promotional selves are personified and engage in arguments with his artistic self. One of the most important tidbits Reklaw drops is that when he was a younger artist, he was delusional as to how much demand there would be for his work. He notes that being delusional is a good thing, because "a little delusion helps you have the perseverance to keep developing". It's a variation on the old mantra of "it takes a thousand pages before you draw your first good one"; if you don't think what you're doing is worthwhile in some way, then why bother at all? Reklaw concludes that working with a "real" publisher after a career doing zines doesn't mean that you're a sell-out. It means that you're trying to find a way to get your work out there with and to as many "kindred spirits" as possible. In other words, "I say: don't sell out...buy in." This issue serves as an initial manifesto as well as a brief & personal history; I'll be curious to see what publishing concepts he addresses in future issues.