Minis: The Yeah Dude Comics Box

Philadelphia's Pat Aulisio has been steadily publishing his own work as well as the work of others for quite a while. The beautifully constructed cardboard box that houses the Yeah Dude Comics mini-sampler is quite the attention-getter for a variety of comics. Aulisio essentially constructed a portable mini-library for these comics.

Most of them are very short and raw. Going in order of the table of contents, Josh Bayer leads off with Hot Desert Fever. It's one of his riffs on Sylvester Stallone and Stan Lee, as he imagines Stallone desperately wanting to write comic books like Lee. The resulting Human Torch story is a classic Bayer parody: altered character design (the Torch wears a helmet and carries a gas can), scatological humor, and visceral violence. Bayer's ability to fully inhabit the minds of these hyper-masculine, ridiculous characters and somehow make them come alive on the page is one of his greatest talents. Even in a story as absurd as this one, where Stallone has a butler that he names as Jarvis or Alfred, depending on the panel, and where he grows a tiny version of himself as Rocky to give him advice and encouragement, Bayer's always working within an internal set of logical rules.

Ian Harker's Face Force is a parody of 90s era Image Comics, with Rob Liefeld in particular being a touchstone. Nothing much actually happens in this comic, which makes it a particularly apt satire. McDonald's National Cemetary (sic), by Michael Gerkovich, is a series of strange images and clip art surrounding the idea of McDonald's going back to ancient Egypt, and to imagine what one would find if a site was excavated. Some of them riff off McDonald's iconography, like a Hamburglar looking through a telescope or a pharaoh having Ronald McDonald makeup on. The actual images match the meaningless absurdity of the concept itself, and Gerkovich gleefully runs with it. Josh Burggraf's International Geographic cleverly takes the you-are-there anthropological premise of the source material it's parodying with similar shots of nature, candid shots of "native" life, and the rituals from an alien world that are as baffling to the reader here as indigenous societies are to western societies. Burggraf's skill as an illustrator sells the joke, which is short enough to not outstay its welcome.        

         
Aulisio's Diabolik! is a parody of the Italian anti-hero, and he nails the way the narrative in the comic spells everything out. Getting pushed aside by his girlfriend Eva was also amusing in the way he puts everything in annoyingly modern speech patterns. The use of shadows and effects like zip-a-tone also made it reminiscent of its source material. Tara Booth's Daily Routine reminded me a lot of Jerry Smith's Rattletrap: extremely crudely-drawn comics, printed at tiny size, that hilariously and disgustingly address quotidian issues. Booth holds absolutely nothing back, like an early strip where she's over at a friends' place, falls asleep on her couch and accidentally urinates on it while asleep. When she wakes up, she leaves as fast as possible, as the caption "Run away from pee couch" indicated with a combination of shame and glee. Booth isn't afraid to get absurd or exaggerated, like in her strip where her face resembles two eggs and bacon, another where her dog licked her face off, and a truly disgusting entry where she gives birth to a "food baby". The cheery wave the food baby gives is what puts the strip over the top. There's an essential sweetness to these strips despite the frequently disgusting and scatological subject matter, and that sweetness ties in to her willingness to confront issues that normally are couched in terms of shame. She forgives herself and allows herself to be human, and that shines on every scrawled page.

Issue one of Box Brown's Softcore is something I have reviewed elsewhere, Skuds McKinley's Korgok is straight-up, visceral sword-and-sorcery. After an epic-establishing introduction, the actual comic is all highly-detailed violence. Keenan Marshall Keller's The Goiter #1 is another standout in this collection. Keller's work is not unlike Ben Marra's in that he uses hyperviolent and exaggerated situations for humorous intent, only that humor is bone-dry and at times indistinguishable from the actual genre comics and movies that he is paying homage to. In this case, Keller starts out doing a story about stoners and transforms it into a supernatural/horror story, as a young man who's working for an elderly woman hears a voice coming from the enormous tumor on her head. Keller leaves open the possibility that the young man is insane & hallucinating, which makes the scene where he "frees" the tumor by cutting it off, leaving her body spurting blood, all the more disturbing (and yet hilarious because of its ridiculous nature). Keller goes over the top in his figure work, deliberately overdrawing and cluttering up his page in an effort to keep the reader off-balance.

Finally, Erika Davidson's enigmatic Hadaka is a dreamy, surreal version of the Japanese festival where a minimal amount of clothing is worn. All the figures here are women, as they walk into rooms filled with or filled up by various women's erogenous zones. It's a brief mini whose mission seems to have been getting down those images on paper, of putting something that came from dream logic and fantasy and making it partially tangible. Thomas Toye's Entering A Room Full Of People is another visceral horror story, this time involving a frightening, serpentine home intruder who encounters a voracious plant that has killed the family living in the home. This almost entirely silent comic is typical of the works found in this box: rough, visceral, iconoclastic, visually distinctive, uncompromising and entertaining. The actual quality of each comic varies, as does its ability to sustain interest after a single read, but this was a great sample of a particular kind of comics aesthetic that a number of artists are currently pursuing.

Minis: J.Burggraf/V.Kerlow, A.Stoehr, P.Cline

Pyramid Scheme 2: This Time It's On The Beach, by Josh Burggraf and Victor Kerlow (Birdcage Bottom Books). These two illustrators did a two-man improvisational jam, taking some characters they made up together and alternating writing and drawing each page. The result is entirely unsubstantial, but that's no, but t really the point. The point is two distinctive stylists riffing off each other and having a bit of fun in what they decided to draw. The anthropomorphic dog/young man/robot trio has a picnic at a nude beach, and it's interesting to see what each chose to focus on. Kerlow's comics generally have copious amounts of nudity, but he almost completely avoided the use of nudity outside of the main three characters in the comic. On the other hand, Burggraf's sci-fi comics don't often have much nudity, and he essentially went for it on every one of his pages here, drawing all sorts of idealized body types on the beach. The most interesting thing about the comic is watching the way Burggraf and Kerlow bounce off of each other in terms of illustration choices. In some drawings, Burggraf's interest in drawing the eye to certain parts on the page through the use of black is made really obvious when Kerlow completely eschews such an approach. On the other hand, there are pages were Burggraf matches the scratchy approach of Kerlow, and other pages where Kerlow matches the more angular style of Burggraf. This is a comic made more to be looked at, rather than read.

I Dreamt Of You Touching Me, by Alice Stoehr. Being given a copy of Stoehr's comic at SPX is the essence of what I love about that show: being exposed to new, young talent as they're starting out. That's certainly true of Stoehr's mini, which uses a six panel grid and stick figures to tell its stories about relationships, anxiety, self-consciousness, rage and loneliness. While Stoehr's line is crude, that doesn't stop her from some inventive and clever drawings that have a dramatic impact on each strip's emotional content. Indeed, the drawings aren't there simply to have something to connect to a text-heavy comic (like many other stripped-down comics I've read), they actually shape and define the emotional narrative of these strips more than the text. For example, there's on strip where cruel words come out as a word balloon with teeth that devours the other person, which is a fantastic depiction of when simply saying "I'm sorry" just isn't enough to undo damage that is done. Not all of the strips are quite that raw; indeed, there are many moments of tenderness, warmth and humanity depicted as well. There are moments of regret because of a lost chance at connection as well as moments of gratitude that a connection is maintained against all odds. The one thing I wished I could have seen was Stoehr work a little bigger, giving her figures a little more room to explore the page. Some of the strips felt cramped and overstuffed, in part because the figures at times were so small that it was hard to make out expressions. That wasn't true of every strip, as Stoehr generally did a fine job of balancing the elements of each panel, but there were definitely ideas presented on the page that would have benefited from a different format.

...and the Gatepost, by Peter Cline. Cline uses simple geometric shapes and a jarring use of color in the tradition of Ivan Brunetti, Chris Ware and Jon McNaught. Another touchstone is Seth's recent stripped-down style in books like Wimbledon Green, where characters are literally a triangle attached to a circle in their essence. It's a cold style in terms of function, which is designed to contrast against the actual emotions of the piece. There's a great, weird tension throughout most of it, as two kids haunt an older man for unclear reasons, until the object of interest is finally revealed at the end. It's a comic about mysteries, the exotic and sympathy for both of the former. Visually, Cline goes all out with a color assault that features different colors of paper stock, riso coloring (either as spot coloring or in one or two tone strips), which adds a bit to the overall sense of mystery.

Weird Worlds: Biggs/Bakki, Miller, Graham/Eisenhower, Turner, Burggraf

Poor Thing #1, by Drew Miller. This is a comic from another micropublisher, Neoglyphic Media. Miller is an excellent ballpoint pen artist, using grotesquely funny figures not unlike Francesca Ghermandi or Zak Sally. Indeed, this comic feels like Sammy The Mouse's second cousin, as it follows the inhabitants of a bizarre, vaguely hellish world and zeroes in on their emotions above all of the other horrible things happening to them. The longest story, "Witchin' Hours", involves a witchdoctor named Doctor Eli and his miserable patient Eli, whose head and neck are distorted in a disgusting, lovingly-detailed manner. Miller takes special care to draw extensive facial lines, body hair, unpleasant veins and other aspects that remind the reader of just how revolting it is to be embodied, if one looks just a bit too closely. After assuring his patient that he doesn't have "heart weevils" (a truly nasty interlude involving bugs riding bugs and building a hive in one's heart), he reveals that Eli is sick with loneliness. He "cures" him by giving him a hilariously sloppy makeover (a Supertramp t-shirt means that he has "threads that say 'hey, I'm back in the game!'"), but poor Eli mistakes a dating simulator for the real thing. The main backup is a gag involving two workers, one worrying the other has a "goblin sandwich" for lunch. This gag is taken to its logical, disgusting and wonderfully-drawn extreme. Miller is a talented, confident draftsman who's clearly synthesized a number of influences and is quite comfortable drawing stories that are fairly conventional in terms of set-up, but viscerally powerful in terms of their delivery.

Scaffold, I-XXII and XXIII - XLIV, by VA Graham and  JA Eisenhower. This is a fascinating puzzle of a comic, requiring the reader to do a lot of side-scrolling as they follow small figures across and down the page of an elaborate hexagonal structure that's not unlike a beehive. As we follow figures up and down ladders, through slanting floors, across crowded rooms and into wide-open spaces, it's slowly revealed that this is a decaying society. They're living in a structure designed to keep out light, which has harmful properties for its inhabitants. Each page is designed as much as drawn, with heavy use of zip-a-tone and negative space that tells the story of what's really happening in this society apart from the plot and dialogue. The Scaffold, as the structure is known, really is its own character, one that every inhabitant must negotiate and navigate in order to take care of business in their sector of society. It's a clever commentary on the ways in which geography determine destiny and sometimes social caste. Indeed, the figures are little more than sketchily-rendered stick figures. We don't see character close-ups or really get expressions other than the basics of body language, as the Scaffold dominates everything to a suffocating degree. In the second issue, we begin to get a sense of what happens when the system begins to break down, and the vegetation that its inhabitants depend on begins to get ideas of its own. I'll be curious to see how the world continues to break down in this series and how its protagonist (a young child sent on a mission he was ill-equipped to finish) fares as things start to get worse.

Farm School, by Jason Turner. This is yet another post-apocalyptic story, but it's one where the world is not quite a total loss. There is savagery and the opportunity for "adventure", but there are also libraries, bakeries and children playing. This comic is all about restraint and in-between spaces. A stocky, powerfully built woman named Hester goes about her day, negotiating a past she doesn't wish to discuss while trying to do good deeds. Turner uses restraint to great effect in this story, revealing bits and pieces of Hester's history while strongly implying certain things about it through her actions. This is a very quiet comic, and deliberately so. Violence, adventure and action are part of Hester's past, a past she tries to disabuse a young teenaged girl about when the girl is offered a chance at adventure. At the same time, Hester was affected enough by the experience so as to be uncomfortable being a joiner in any sense, as she chooses to live alone in the forest. The only thing that seems to give her meaning, as Turner implies with his squat, sketchy drawings, is helping others. It's fitting that the final scene, where she offers to help some kids only to discover they were playing, is sort of the world's way of paying her back.

Kid Space Heater 2, by Josh Burggraf. Burggraf is a talented artist who didn't have much of a story to tell beyond the story's high concept in the first issue of this series. The story involves a young man in a squalid, futuristic city accidentally getting his hands on an intelligent weapon that bonds with him. In the second issue, Burggraf spends a lot of time setting up his characters and their relationships while tying it into a more complicated plot. It seems clear that he's taken notes from both Brandon Graham's King City as well as some of Jack Kirby's wilder 70s comics.  Burggraf perhaps lays on the socioeconomic commentary a bit thick, as the Kid's firebrand friend Celia is a sort of walking polemic-spewing device in a manner that doesn't feel earned. That said, Burggraf's dynamic layouts and slightly ragged line certainly deliver on its visceral potential, as he tops himself on page after page with crazier images. His bright and even lurid use of color is another highlight of this comic, bringing to mind a sort of Heavy Metal aesthetic.I would have liked to have seen a little more of the relationship between the protagonist and his gun (what kind of influence do they have on each other? does the gun have unknown motives?), but this is a pleasant, tightly paced adventure story with memorable visuals.

Bearlands #1, by Jeremy Biggs and Bakki. This is a Walking Dead-style zombie story, one where the zombies are less important than the breakdown of society around them. The main difference is that all of the characters are very cute anthropomorphic bears. Thanks to Thai artist Bakki, this is all much better than it sounds. The story by Biggs is strictly (and deliberately) boilerplate: a Bear With No Name is wandering the desert, looking for survivors of his clan. He's haunted by his lost love in his dreams. He encounters random zombies on the road as he roads on his motorcyle, and winds up in a city surrounded by crazy and corrupt bears, wanting to get at the honey he possesses and how they can get more. Other than the honey angle (which is a macguffin; it could stand for any food or drug), it's like any other post-apocalyptic zombie story. What sets it apart is Bakki's insanely cute visual storytelling. It's simply funny to watch the Bear kill zombies with a katana or ride a motorcycle, in part because none of this is directly played for laughs. Certainly, Biggs has this jarring juxtaposition in mind when writing the story, knowing that the style of the art would tweak the genre. However, the fact that he restrains himself and doesn't try to add any shtick, that he lets the art do the heavy lifting both in telling the story (there's not much in the way of excess verbiage) and making it funny shows that he has a keen understanding of what makes a comic effective. It's fluff, but tasty fluff.