Means of Production: Living Things & Oscar

One advantage to working in the minicomics world is that it's so democratic. Anyone with a pencil or pen and access to a photocopier can make and publish them. As cartoonists grow more ambitious, the main obstacle in front of them tends to be publishing. In particular, how can they make a comic that looks just how they want it and afford to publish it? In the rapidly shrinking world of print publishing, alt-comics have taken on a status not unlike vinyl in the music industry. A small but highly dedicated niche audience keeps vinyl alive as a distribution point for music, as well as a small network of independent record shops that tend to ally with music venues. Networks of networks, connected by the internet, have led to a small but thriving scene. In much the same way, networks of cartoonists, fans and retailers have started to form. The comics shops that will survive are those that have already diversified beyond the standard superhero comics. Regional alt-comics shows are springing up everywhere, allowing cartoonists to sell comics and merchandise to a focused and motivated group of fans. Most interesting to me is the recent trend that's seeing cartoonists finding new ways to control the means of production.

Zak Sally, for example, has his own printing press. Then there's the case of Emily Wismer. A former zinester turned teacher, she moved from Chicago to Asheville, NC to set up her own print shop with an old tabletop Pilot press. She hand-makes cards, invitations, etc. and recently published a new minicomic by Jeffrey Brown called Oscar. It's simply beautiful to hold, with each page just soaking up ink. Running one's fingers over each page allows one to feel the the grooves that the ink creates, which is heaven for anyone who's a print junkie. The comic comes in a brown paper envelope that acts as its cover. The cover itself quickly reveals what this comic is about: little pearls of humor from Brown's young son Oscar, as recorded by "Oscar's dad". While cute in the way that one would expect a comic about a little kid would be, Brown has an ear for some of Oscar's weirder and more outrageous quotes. There's one page where Oscar pretends to dial a phone and says "Hello? Yes, Mommy's crazy." It's the usual string of funny Brown observations done in a format that I suspect many cartoonists will find appealing.

Little Otsu is a publishing concern, like Ladypilot Letterpress, that focuses on printing cards, calendars and other paper-based products as well as comics. As such, their comics all have careful attention paid to them so as to present them as art objects. Their Living Things series fits into their paradigm of comics and other printed matter related to nature. Each of the four issues published to date has the same trade dress and logo, even as each issue has featured a radically different style of art. The first issue, featuring Lizzy Stewart, purports to be "A Guide to Eastern European Wildlife" that begins with naturalistic depictions of bears, wolves and owls but slowly becomes more whimsical, with fur hat-wearing rodents and a moose with a clothesline hanging from its antlers.

The second issue features Jo Dery and is about pheromones. This is an inventive and charming comic, with each page setting up a different visual challenge and solving each one with a variety of color schemes. Dery switches between full-color pages (done in colored pencil, perhaps?) and single-color pages (a forest green) with more detailed line art. Hannah Waldron is featured in the third issue, titled "The City". This one's all about lines, with a young man entering a brownstone and experiencing his environment as a series of horizontal lines (through a shade) and diagonal lines (as the city becomes abstract). Waldron alternates close-ups of small objects and fade-outs of the city itself, creating a number of pages that resemble a study for a Mondrian painting. Like the other comics in this series, there's not much of a narrative to speak of, but it's a beautiful and intriguing thing to look at.

The best of the four issues, not surprisingly, is by Lilli Carre'. The talented artist contributes "Shifting Shadows", which puts her off-kilter sense of humor on full display. The concept is simple: shadows coming to life in unusual ways apart from their original source. In some of the images, the shadows are living images drawn from an unusual arrangement of objects. In others, the shadows reflect the true emotional natures of their source, like the wild, ecstatic flailings of shadows coming from a row of office workers trudging toward their jobs. This is a delightfully witty series of variations on a theme by an artist who takes full advantage of the production values provided to her by a publisher committed to creating beautiful objects.

Short Reviews: Jo Dery, Sleazy Slice, Grady Klein

Short takes on a few works: QUIETLY SURE--LIKE THE KEEPER OF A GREAT SECRET, by Jo Dery; SLEAZY SLICE #3, edited by Robin Bougie; and THE LOST COLONY VOL 3, by Grady Klein.


QUIETLY SURE--LIKE THE KEEPER OF A GREAT SECRET, by Jo Dery. This is another beautiful book from Little Otsu: well-crafted, well-designed and lovely to look at. Dery's art has a slightly immersive quality (not unlike Theo Ellsworth's approach) but also makes the reader look at the page perhaps more than read it. There's a loose narrative about a series of creatures searching for meaning or solutions to their woes, all of which wind up eventually crossing over into each other. There are actually some quite clever narrative touches to be found that coalesce after a couple of readings that evoke a certain wistfulness. Dery has the rare skill of being able to modulate the story's emotional content purely through her use of decorative flourishes. A shadow here, a lonely tree there and a set of background designs all serve to move the reader's feelings rather than just one's eye. This is a book about seeking what's missing in one's life: sight, a true home, knowledge, and how finding them is sometimes a matter of letting them find you. This is a book that in many ways is incredibly slight and manipulative by turns, yet is ultimately redeemed by an almost palpable sincerity that matches the artist's skill.



SLEAZY SLICE #3, edited by Robin Bougie. It's a Robin Bougie-led project, which means three things: 1) It will be impeccably drawn, with an emphasis on detailed linework; 2) It will have lots of sex; 3) It will be incredibly violent. Bougie's "Human Cows" gleefully shatters any number of taboos with this story of women used to pump milk to feed to cows in a world where cows are dying and the rich still need meat. Like most of the stories in this comic, there's a real bleakness and cynicism regarding sex and human relations. The brutal ending of this story reminded me a bit of what the Marquis DeSade used to do in his stories, but the upbeat Bougie still manages a nod and a wink in acknowledging the source material for this particular kink. Josh Simmons' "Cockbone" is no less brutal a story, but is filtered through his own surreal sensibility. Simmons creates worlds with his story that run on dark magic and dream logic as much as they do on rationality. He especially loves to play out twisted, hillbilly family dynamics in the form of a Candide-like innocent forced to run a gauntlet of misery. The story I enjoyed most was husband-wife team SCAR's "Wild Bessi", a bizarre and hilarious mix of wild west tropes and pornapocalyptic weirdness. A man on the run in the wild west encounters all sorts of weird and dangerous sex-related creatures: cowgirls who are part cow and part girl, centaur women with multiple genitalia, sex-crazed horses, dickworms, etc. It's the funniest story in the book, in large part because it plays it straight. Like most of the things Bougie publishes, the audience for this one is largely self-selecting: one look, and you'll know whether or not it's for you.



THE LOST COLONY, VOLUME 3, by Grady Klein. I hadn't read the first two volumes of this series and was prepared to be baffled and/or disinterested. Klein is also an animator by trade and it shows in his exaggerated character design, thickness of line and dependence on color for storytelling. When I often see a comic done by an animator, it's usually too slick-looking for my eyes to latch onto. I didn't find that to be the case with Klein's work, however, in part because of the eccentricity of his characters and the surprisingly dark story that he tells here. It's sort of like BONE meets NAT TURNER in this comic, dealing with a mysterious, hidden land teeming with secrets that happens to be a haven for escaped slaves, mystics and other outsiders. Like BONE, the central character is an innocent with a strong will who has some unusual connections to her home. However, the racial tensions in the story are always simmering and come to a head at the end of this story.

Klein pulls it off because of the way he positions Birdy, the little girl who is central to the story. Like most of the story's protagonists, she is not entirely sympathetic as a character, even though her heart's in the right place. She has a certain Dennis the Menace quality to her, especially when Klein draws her flitting all over the landscape in a single panel, as though she had clones of herself. The last connection to BONE is actually a connection to Jeff Smith's twin inspirations of Walt Kelly & Carl Barks. Like Kelly, the island swampland is its own character of sorts, informing the lives of every character. Like Barks, there's a constant propulsiveness to the cartooning, especially with regard to Birdy but with other characters as well. Klein transcends his influences with his own unique mythology and grounding of the fantasy elements of the story in history.