Joe Decie's Collecting Sticks

Joe Decie's quotidian memoir strips have always tended to be more on the comedic than serious side, and his fractured use of time makes it easy to set up his gags as very short vignettes. His first graphic memoir, Collecting Sticks (Jonathan Cape), doubles down on his gag work as the driving element of a single, extended narrative. Every aspect of the story is played for laughs from beginning to end, even as the subtext is that of a loving family with certain tics that play out on the page. Decie has the hairbrained idea of going camping with his wife and son for a cheap holiday, but his wife remembers all too well how miserable it was to stay in a tent for several days and was never going to do it again.

So when Decie, with puppy-like enthusiasm, not only suggests camping again but also says that they had fun doing it before, his wife seized hold of the narrative. She booked them for "glamping" ("glamorous camping") before he could even object to its price or ask to think it over. Throughout the book, his wife Steph acts mostly as the straight woman, his son Sam is a sort of wild force of nature, and he's the well-meaning bumbler. Decie has such a dry sense of humor that he's able to get away with this for a book's length, though it does wear from time to time on the reader. The book is essentially an inventory of things that went wrong but that didn't spoil their good time, like Decie's OCD taking forever for them to get out of the house or his son's reluctance to get dressed and do anything but play with Legos. When Decie passed on the responsibility of packing to his son (very much a kid thing to do), his son packed up a bunch of sticks, a recurrent activity for him in the book.

Decie goes to great lengths to portray himself as a fool, from his hilariously awful abilities as a navigator to his inability to create a fire, as he says things like "Getting lost is fun!" and pulls out graph paper from a D&D set to create a new map. There are times when going this broad starts to wear thin, as though he was advised to amp up the comedy as much as possible instead of Decie's occasional forays into more meditative fare. That said, his juxtaposition of bone-dry narrative and wacky visual antics made the gags that much more effective, as did the sober but expressive nature of his grey wash and fragile line.

Once they get to the cabin, things pick up, and by that I mean absolutely nothing of real interest happens, but Decie manages to make it funny anyway. A walk to find a quaint local market for supplies winds up being an expedition to a big-box grocery store, where they got essentials like smoked paprika. Though it's disguised in a series of generational disconnects, the central relationship explored in the book is between Decie and Sam, as they wander off together being very silly. There are funny bits about the cautious Decie having to reel in his daredevil and inquisitive son in from time to time, but it goes unsaid just how satisfying it is for Decie to spend this kind of extended time with his child.

Decie starts to throw in some funny bits to enhance the humor, like a sign at the beach that says "No Photography/No Sketching" after he and Steph had been doing both for hours. Sam is only at the very edge of being whiny, knowing just when to stop (like complaining about going to the pub because it's boring and then remembering he can get a drink with a straw there). There's also the droll, loving relationship between Decie and Steph, both of whom have the same dry and slightly absurd sense of humor, with Steph being just a step ahead at nearly all times. There are also moments when Decie jokingly brings up his very real problems with anxiety that are played straight but also treated with humor, as he fully understands how much of a problem it is even as he's helpless to indulge in it.

This is a lightweight book, by design. It's meant to capture one's attention and keep it with funny bits at the expense of the protagonist, and the grey wash helps the reader quickly fall into the story's rhythms and quirks. It doesn't feel overly long or like there's too much filler, because honestly, the whole story is filler. It's a book that has a handle on its non-essential qualities and invites the reader to hang out anyway. The result is a pleasant journey and a better understanding of Decie through his humor, because framing reality through that lens is what makes the family comedy effective. 

Joe Decie's Comfortable Schlubbiness

Joe Decie's latest humor-driven collection of autobio strips, The Listening Agent (Blank Slate Books), is not so much a diary of daily events or a record of significant moments in the lives of Decie and his family. Instead, it's a sort of clearing-house for his brain. Some of the bits of weirdness that float out of his brain are indeed personal and even touching (like one where he and his young son are eating cheap sandwiches on the street and his son says "Well Daddy, this is the life"), but many of them are just gags that he can't wait to unleash on the world in the same restrained, pithy and even lazy manner as he does with his more personal observations.

Of course, the ease in reading his comics belies the amount of labor Decie puts into them. His grey-washed, realistic style is highly expressive and even lovely to look at. His understanding of body language and use of gesture is key to making strips that feature very little in the way of movement nonetheless come alive. The other key to this book's success is simply that Decie is not only hilarious, but is quite skilled at the craft of setting up a joke. In a strip entitled "Parents Tips No. 95: Relax", we see Decie and his son play with Decie's old Star Wars toys, the reader expects Decie to talk about letting his son play rough with his toys. Instead, he's outraged that his son isn't "playing right" with R2-D2. Another example includes Decie's odd behavior at his office, only to reveal in the final panel that he doesn't work in an office but does enjoy daily trips to the "office furniture megastore".

That dry sense of restraint powers strips after strip, allowing Decie to pull the rug out from under readers more than once. He frequently zigs when the reader expects him to zag, like in a strip where he's complaining about the dangers of his house (spiders, asbestos, lead in the pipes, a boiler potentially exploding) that ends in a panel that reads "And who left all these dirty needles in the shower?" Decie sometimes goes for the absurd joke or situation, but keeps his material grounded enough to be directly relatable as a series of strips about being a father. Despite his material being joke-oriented, Decie reveals a great deal about himself and his family in his work precisely because jokes and humor are such an essential part of his life.

Brit Comics: The Hic & Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humour: Volume 2

The Hic & Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humour Volume Two: The United Kingdom, is a follow-up to the publisher's first volume of humorists from the United States. One of the reasons why Hic & Hoc is one of my favorite new publishers is Matt Moses' dedication to printing actual humor comics, something that had gone out of style for many publishers over time. This volume, edited by Lizz Lunney and Joe List, focuses on quick-punch single page stories for the most part. A few key contributors have multiple strips throughout the book, giving it a nice rhythm while varying the style of humor. Some of the pieces are outright gags, while others are more humorous slice-of-life stories. I'm going to go creator by creator and focus on the most interesting strips in the book.

Luke Pearson: The NoBrow star is better known as being whimsical rather than out-and-out funny. In this book, however, he goes to all sorts of extremes. His first strip is a gross-out effort built around the expectation of a different punchline, subverting the comedy of manners that is the explicit punchline. His second strip once again subverts an initial interaction and goes in a far more absurd direction, as a man ends up in a romantic relationship with a robin and winds up falling out of what turns out to be a tree after sex. His third strip borrows from the Michael DeForge playbook, as what appears to be a personal ad written by a cartoonist is in fact written by a horrifying monster that's a DeForgian nightmare. The fourth strip also plays with his style in a different way, looking more like something out of Paper Rad, as a snooping roommate looks at someone's internet cache and finds some rather distressing search histories. Pearson really stretches his cartooning muscles here rather than do what is expected of him, and as a result he shines the brightest here. 

Lizz Lunney: Lunney's "Alternative Greeting Cards" are one of the funniest things in the book, with entries like "Congratulations on finding your long lost father/commiserations on finding out he's dead" being one of the darker and funnier bits. She uses a simple line to get across her humor that ranges from the absurd to the morbid.

Joe Decie: The autobio cartoonist consistently delivers the laughs here, whether he's talking about the "untidy Decie DNA" that afflicts three generations of slobs, a gag about his brain needing a system update, burying a remote battery and digging it up a week later to gain the satisfaction of having a working remote again, and (best of all) advising the reader to sell things to door-to-door solicitors as a means of driving them away. That's an especially artfully delivered strip, even with the backfire of having one of the salesmen enjoy the comic that Decie tries to sell to him. As always, Decie's slightly scratchy and naturalistic style and extensive use of greys creates a dreamy, pleasant atmosphere for the reader to latch on to.

Philippa Rice: Her strips about sisters are pleasantly grotesque and knowing about familial relationships; here, two sisters try to trick each other into putting raw eggs into tea and cereal. Rice employs a scribbly, scrawled style here where those scribbles filling in space are meant to be apparent. These are funny drawings meant to be looked at as drawings that nonetheless get across a certain kind of familial emotional truth.

Kristyna Baczynski: Her strips about aliens shopping and fossils arguing about whose eternal view is worse are mildly funny, but they are exceptionally well-drawn. Her funny and exaggerated style sells most of the jokes in both cases.

There are some strange strips that aren't conventionally funny, but they are of interest because of their sheer weirdness. Becky Barnicoat's entry about a bear who tries to make friends with children is lovingly rendered with a level of detail not unlike Anders Nilsen; the poor bear makes bizarre statues of children that partly frighten them but mostly drive the brats to get their parents to drive the bear away. James Downing's story of a demented child's show host who has a woman on to recite Pi is the single weirdest story, as she fails and goes on to hide on a mountain for a hundred years. The exaggerated character design and absurd (and occasionally non sequitur nature of the jokes) remind me a lot of Paper Rad. Donya Todd's story about crash landing on a planet is along the same lines visually, leaning toward more DeForge-style use of tiny, squiggly arms in what turns out to be a romp. Isaac Lenkiewicz has an anthropomorphic walrus attacked by naked children, creating a weird atmosphere where they accuse him of being a pervert. It's a story without a pat resolution that is nonetheless absurd in the most anxiety-provoking sense of the word, aided by his clean, beautiful line.

There are silly and less interesting gags as well, like Fred Blunt's scrawled monkey & elephant story where they take turns hurling things at each other, Jonathan Edwards' nonsensical story about onion curses, and Gary Northfield's extended sci-fi ass joke. The two outstanding slice-of-life bits both revolve around popular internet memes/games. Timothy Winchester turns a moment of appreciating nature into a typically demented game of "Would you rather?", expertly turning a rant of protest into a clever resolution thanks to a well-placed story beat panel. Stephen Collins' strip about a teenage boy trying to get over on a girl with a game of "Zombie Bunker Apocalypse" is funny and knowing, especially since the boy doesn't come close to getting over. The other really notable strip belongs to Gareth Brookes, even if it is a bit meta: he lists any number of stupid suggestions for comics people have given him over the years, with one example being the only two worthwhile topics: Chelsea and Chelsea Under-21s. The rest either don't really have much of a punchline or fall into the absurd or parody categories. The anthology clocks in at a tight seventy pages but easily could have been fifty pages and had more of an impact. It was nonetheless a solid effort that spotlights a number of young British cartoonists.

Brit Comics: Collins/Laurie, Lunney, Cowdry, Decie

Metrodome and Crawl Hole, by Craig Collins and Iain Laurie. This macabre and darkly humorous duo continue to be a perfect writer/artist pairing. In Metrodome, the Scottish creators cleverly created super-powered/monstrous characters by combining random words from a local free newspaper, spawning such combatants as "Leaking Anger", "Blood Fog" and "Sex Axe". They combatants were then thrown into a city setting and there was much carnage, as Laurie channeled his inner Rob Leifeld ni the way he employed an excess of lines, grotesquely contorted mouths, and exaggerated figures. Collins and Laurie then channeled their inner Johnny Ryan (by way of Prison Pit) in developing plot-free, visceral, bloody and funny scenes of violence. It's essentially two artists playing around but committing to a premise with great enthusiasm and seriousness. Crawl Hole is a collection of short stories. "House of Mercy" is a bewildering story of a man bringing his father to a place where he has to fight masked men until he is eventually rent limb from limb; it winds up being an elaborate and grisly form of assisted suicide. "The Quiet Burden" is about an elderly man living a mundane existence, except for when he gets a call about the "vengabus", which are Lovecraftian creatures that live in his basement. Then he must don a mask and chop them up with an axe. Once again, Laurie's ink-spattered, lively visuals and interesting page design complement Collins' ideas perfectly. "Regression Artifact" combines the awkwardness of seeing an ex at a party with the secret knowledge that they are demonic/fantasy creatures who played out their conflicts on a battlefield. At four pages, it's perfectly paced and boasts a great punchline as well. That's a big reason for their success: they understand how to pace a story for maximum effect, allowing Laurie's visuals to pound the reader without becoming repetitive. Their take on horror is smart, funny and genuinely unsettling.

At The End Of Your Garden and At The Theme Park, by Lizz Lunney. Reading these Lunney comics is like watching a long-form improv performance. Bits of random strangeness turn out to be running gags that provide structure, like "The Girl With The Lion In Her Hair" in Garden. With a simple but expressive line, green ink and jokes that center around vegetation, we get advice from a chicken that's being prepared for an oven, follow two indolent cats as they buy items to delight themselves, listen to a talking tattoo make its recipient regret getting it, and ponder what it would be like if things like baking and interpretive dance were our dominant forms of communication. With a simple, clean line, Lunney neatly arranges what are essentially sketchbook gags into a minicomics format where their tenuous connections add to the humor of each individual joke; here the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In Theme Park, we follow the cats around as they wait endlessly for various theme park rides, encounter mysterious "foodz", and make jokes about a "ten hour build-up for ten seconds of intense pleasure" and connect that to golf. There are wistful autobiographical tidbits as well, as Lunney explores the nature of a theme park's mandatory fun with stories about her past and wishes that she could simply ignore anxiety. Mixed in with the same kind of silly sketchbook jokes as in Garden, and you have a short yet reliably amusing package that doesn't outstay its welcome.

Down Town, by Richard Cowdry. These bleak, cruel and funny comics are sort of like if Bazooka Joe became homeless and was relentlessly tormented by the police and the dregs of society. The simple line, classic comic strip character design and surprisingly dark and brutal violence makes for a stew that's both hilarious and slightly nauseating. Cowdry makes it work by following a sort of gag-strip code, full of characters slipping each other dynamite, abusive clowns who desperately need their victims in order to be happy, and deliberately unseemly gags about alcoholics. Because it's all in a familiar rhythm and structure, Cowdry can go as dark or silly as he wants and it all makes sense. Whether it's a couple of "boys will be boys" terrorizing a neighborhood, only to be sold off to a sailor, or a mentally ill person being taken off their government benefits and given a "portable living unit" (ie, a barrel) to "maximize the flexibility of your job search". The strip is ruthlessly satirical, mining some of the same territory as Ruben Bolling's Tom The Dancing Bug but adding a more visceral, slapstick quality to his comics. Punch and Judy get turned into a much meaner and more hopeless version of Andy Capp, while a homophobic and racist man gets emasculated by his wife thanks to a classic "pants-falling-down" gag. I could have easily read a book full of these strips, and their mix of social & political commentary and flawless comedic timing make them unusual in the world of comics.

Pocket Full Of Coffee, by Joe Decie. Decie is the rare memoirist whose of humor tends to drive his comics. His comics are almost doggedly quotidian in terms of the sort of details he explores, but he is careful to avoid hackneyed observations as a means of eliciting a quick laugh. Instead, his comics are set to a low comedic burn, as every detail of both his writing and drawing has a dry, droll quality.Observations about his scruffy appearance by way of his young son's merciless judgment are a good example of this; his son tells him that he looks "really scruffy". Decie takes off a wrinkled shirt and asks if that's better, but he knows "even when I try really hard, I impress no one". The drawings in this sequence find his son bouncing from room to room and Decie standing still; his use of grey here adds a great deal of life to his character drawings and gives the backgrounds of sense of solidity. One of my favorite features of a Decie comic comes when he goes for a walk; in this comic, his observations are peppered with assorted outbursts from his son, including "Can I have a sister?" Decie then reveals his painfully ordinary to-do list, which includes ego-boosters like "Write to-do list" but also includes the momentous "Propose to Steph", an item which was checked off but not seen or even mentioned as an event in the comic. Decie even mocks his own "gentle observations" at the end of the book with a bathroom humor joke, but the truth is that he does have that poetic autobio touch of a John Porcellino turned to mostly comedic and lighthearted ends.

New and Old : Hive #5

The fifth volume of Jordan Shiveley's anthology of new and old material, Hive, is unsurprisingly hit and miss. However, Shiveley is to be commended for the sheer breadth and depth of the material in the book, as many of the cartoonists here are relatively new to me and show exciting potential. Let me start with Cole Closser, a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies whose "Finnegan Frog" stories channel both the style and spirit of golden age comic strip cartoonists like EC Segar or (especially) Billy DeBeck. The ways in which the poor title character gets beaten down by life in strip after strip is hilarious and evocative of later work (Chris Ware crossed with Tony Millionaire, perhaps). What makes Closser's work great is the organic nature of his line. He's not simply doing a pastiche but rather looks to have achieved his own style after much trial and error after looking at a lot of different kinds of comics. I could read a book full of these gags.

Shiveley did a nice job in getting a number of non-US cartoonists for this anthology, and these artists in particular piqued my attention. German artist Lilli Loge's darkly humorous "Make The Most Of It" plasters that platitude atop a number of funny and grim situations in which a wheelchair-bound woman goes out of her way to overachieve in the most ridiculous of situations. I enjoyed her bleak but absurd sensibility in this strip and found myself wanting to see more, which is certainly the mission of a good anthology. Liliana Velez wrote and Paola Gavira drew Velez's  story "Naked In The City", a straightforward account of a provocative act done with no thoughts toward eroticism, but rather a way of truly inhabiting (and forcing others to confront) the sense in which we are embodied. It's a fact that we literally cover up as people, a fact that is eroticized or shamed but that is always present. Her plaintive cry of "Don't they have a body?" as she is mocked, scolded and/or leered at rings true. Gavira's nervous line reminds me a bit of Julie Doucet in the way it wavers and is slightly on the grotesque side, a factor that helps ground the nudity in the story.

There's a lot in here that I've already seen, but I'm guessing many American readers haven't. Comics by Joe Decie, David Zggy Greene, Craig Collins &Iain Laurie come to mind in that department, representing diary comics, gags, and skewed horror, respectively. There was also an excerpt from Noah Van Sciver's excellent comic The Hypo published long before that book debuted. The tone and subjects of this anthology are really all over the place and have no particular flow; really, it's less an anthology than a sampler of work that Shiveley happens to like, published in a highly attractive package. (The hand-printed vellum dustcover is a beautiful little art object.) That said, Shiveley publishes work by artists not usually seen by wider audiences, like Hawk Krall's excellent comics about being a chef or Danny Hellman's lovingly-rendered exercises in hilarious filth that he drew a number of years ago.There's a couple of amusing Jonathan Baylis stories from his minis and lightweight but well done pieces from Lauren Barnett and Annie Mok (the former Ed Choy Moorman). Generally speaking, there's simply less dross in this volume than in the prior one. The comics in general look better and are visually distinctive. There's less genre tedium (not to say that all genre work is tedious, but there's nothing more tedious than bad genre work) and more risk-taking in the sort of storytelling approaches that are attempted. Even the most conventional of stories, like Paul O'Connell's by-the-numbers stories about jazz musicians and other cultural figures from the 1950s, are at least readable and competently done. I can't help but think that Shiveley is on the verge of being able to make Hive uniformly excellent, but that may require a rethinking of the way he gathers some of his material. There's no question that he has a knack for identifying talent and anticipating its rise.