Josh, by Bayer, Simmons, Cotter, and Stephens

The Josh anthology is a gimmick in the most fun sense of the word. It features cartoonists Josh Bayer, Josh Cotter, Josh Simmons, and Josh Stephens, all doing their version of horror. I wasn't familiar with Stephens going into this comic, but it's clear by his contributions that he was quite comfortable with the genre. Of course, this is Simmons' wheelhouse, and he doesn't disappoint with his casually deranged contribution. For Cotter and Bayer, both of their work is strange and dense, but they found ways to stay true to their styles while dialing up the tension. 

The image of this collective as a scuzzy Rat King scribbling out assorted perversions is one that's repeated on the title page and end page, and it's a fitting one. The quartet makes a point of repeating the name "Josh" past the point of meaning, and Cotter zeroes in on it for his "Keep On Joshin'." Starting out as a kind of Crumb pastiche and a faux slice-of-life story about a guy hosting some friends at a party, it veers into inexplicable body horror when the friends see the Josh he has in the living and suddenly sprout horrific parasites. The sickly pink shade of the tiny, cartoony "Josh" parasites is genuinely unnerving in the way so much of Cotter's work tends to be. 

Bayer doesn't really do horror per se, but his "Horror Skies" is a typical mix of memoir, fantasy, comics history, urban geography, and lumpy, disturbing body shapes. Bayer's comics on the surface seem to be a swirling mass of crude drawings and scrawled lettering, but these design choices are quite deliberate. A closer look reveals a locked-in 12-panel grid that starts with the premise of Bayer trying to think of an idea for the anthology and quickly shifts his initial idea of recording the lives of the homeless in Penn Station to an investigation of the "murder" of 80s/90s cartoonists like Gerry Shamray, Ted Stearn, and Michael Dougan. Bayer incorporates his girlfriend (the cartoonist Hyena Hell) into it, as she asks him about the "murder" of Harvey Pekar as well. When Bayer is followed by Stearn's creation Pluck (an anthropomorphic chicken), it's all part of the shadowy, strange horror that follows him. Bayer mixes absurd humor with his genuine interest in these artists, along with his typical punk sensibilities and desire to depict the grimy, dirty, and forgotten aspects and people of the city. 

Stephens' "The One And Only" is a slightly more drawn-out version of the story that both Cotter and Simmons did. That is, a figure named Josh proves to be a terrifying force for destructive, absurd evil. In this case, the Josh is a tech-bro cult leader whose bid for world domination through his literal force of personality goes horribly awry. The final, visceral image is a showstopper, as Stephens had mostly avoided horrific violence up until that point. 

Simmons' "To Be Joshed," unsurprisingly takes the cake for absolutely absurd, senseless violence. At a girls' soccer game, an alpha male type named Josh magically appears, hits on soccer moms, and responds with an "I'm just Joshing you" when they express concern. Of course, he soon goes on a rampage and the violence escalates to an immediate, crazed degree and ends with him threatening the reader with a Joshing as he breaks the fourth wall. Simmons' work is notable for his total commitment to gleeful and unhinged nihilism. As a reader, it's a rare example of someone tapping into their id that is actually interesting, as most of those sort of comics tend to be puerile. His undeniable skill as a cartoonist is a big reason why it works. 

It's why the collection works as a whole; one might ask, "What was the point of all this?", and the answer is "No point at all." Only Bayer wrestles with meaning here, because even his most violent and absurd comics wrestle with morality and authenticity. The irony is that while his work looks the most grimy and depraved on the surface, it's the cleaner art of the other three artists that zeroes in on making the self-referential conceptual gag so gleefully, pointlessly, and gloriously unsettling. 

Foxing Reprints #17:Oily Comics: Josh Simmons, James Hindle

Flayed Corpse, by Josh Simmons. One thing I've enjoyed about Chuck Forsman's tastes as a publisher is how wide-ranging they are. From coming-of-age stories to humor to all-out body horror, his aesthetic is less about genre and more about a certain gritty feel with regard to the work of each artist. In the case of Josh Simmons, Forsman attracted him to Oily thanks once again for the opportunity to do very short pieces that nonetheless are highly and supported with great enthusiasm. 

Simmons' comics have become increasingly brutal and nihilistic, even as he's become increasingly restrained with the more extreme trappings of his comics. At the same time, his absolutely pitch-black sense of humor is at his sharpest. This mini is a good example, as a group of doctors gathering around a mutilated corpse in order to determine the cause of death. The doctors are hilariously cold and clinical in the increasingly absurd number of ways the corpse died, leading to a first climax of everyone being right about how the person died. That leads to a discussion of theology, wherein Simmons doesn't let atheists off the hook either, as the final argument is that while there is no god, the man's agony "echoed out and was absorbed into a universe already sick with pain". There may be no meaning to life, but the phenomenon of suffering is not merely clinical, either.

Training, by Josh Simmons.  Speaking of suffering, this mini is effective because it's so concise. Simmons is totally uninterested in backstory or why a character has arrived at a particular moment of excruciating pain and hopelessness. The "training" here being forced upon a young man seeking a kind of unstated help is to inflict unrelenting pain in order to eventually make them not only "strong", but essentially closed off and desensitized to pain and any other emotions. It reads as a person undeservedly being punished in attempting to seek help, but I also see it as a brutal satire of how corporal punishment and institutionalized brainwashing of any kind can destroy an individual's spirit. Simmons' line is once again spare and even cartoony; the main antagonist vaguely resembles Gary Panter's character Jimbo. 

Close Your Eyes When You Let Go #3, by James Hindle. This is one of the more conventional series published by Oily, and yet it fits in with Simmons in the way the main character is obsessed with fear and the things that could happen to his young son. Unlike Simmons, Hindle gives his protagonist an out when he refrains from almost accidentally killing his son when he hears a strange noise at night and goes to investigate. It's an ending that fits, given the tone and emotional sensitivity of the strip. A tragic ending would have felt maudlin. Much better to see the father slowly try to get better, as he takes his son to the "dangerous" playground and just asks his boy to go slowly. There's something beautifully understated about Hindle's drawing that sells the emotion as well. His line is spare and doesn't vary in terms of line weight; the spareness and space he provides in each panel allow his fears to fester and then breathe. 

31 Days of Short Reviews #13: Josh Simmons

Moreso than any other horror artist I can think of, Josh Simmons draws comics that are genuinely upsetting. At the same time, his comics can be funny, poignant and deeply strange. Chuck Forsman's Oily Comics imprint published its first "giant-size" mini in publishing an anthology of Simmons' work in Habit #1. An anthology of Simmons' work at a size that flatters his intricate linework and knockout images was one of Forsman's best ideas as a publisher, and this was one of the best minicomics of 2013.

The first story, "Seaside Home", is an example of Simmons' use of character and environmental detail as a kind of misdirection for something awful, inexplicable and lethal occurring, like in his book House. The sadness of the little girl who's the protagonist of the story, the callousness of her parents and the majesty of their seaside home are all subject to the random and inexorable forces of nature and the suffocating, unrelenting qualities of water. This story is a gut punch because Simmons makes the readers care about the little girl in the span of just a few panels before unleashing the unthinkable.

Habit also includes the latest episodes of his serials "The White Rhinoceros" and "Jessica Farm". The former serial appeared in the pages of Mome, while the latter has been published by both Fantagraphics and by Simmons himself. "The White Rhinoceros" is written by "The Partridge in a Pear Tree" and is a crazy fantasy story wherein Paul Lynde and Rosie o'Donnell (never named but fairly explicitly referenced) wind up in Racelandia, confronted by a cute baby pink Polack and a young boy in search of "racial magic". It's a hilarious, over-the-top exploration of racial and ethnic stereotypes repurposed such that the meaning of each word has been totally altered and put in a fantasy context. Horrible slurs become monsters or harmless creatures, and a cup of racism is a life-giving drink. A bit of history and context is provided in this issue, but the hows and whys of Racelandia are still unexplained. The delicacy and even cuteness of Simmons' line is absolutely perfect for the bizarre and disorienting storyline and satire. This episode of "Jessica Farm", on the other hand, sees Simmons at his most visceral. He mixes whimsical character design with cringe-worthy gore and violence, as what seems to be a magical world for its protagonist is in fact filled with great danger. The other stories, "Behemoth" and "The Choice Is Clear" (illustrated by Wendy Chin), see Simmons creating an atmosphere of creepy mystery that may be malevolent or just simply strange. This mini is a showcase for Simmons' talent and the variety of material he's interested in as an artist.

Approaching The Finish Line: Mome #20 and #21

Let's take a look at Mome #20 and #21. Both were decent but mostly unremarkable issues, burdened somewhat by some of the serials that bogged down the newer work.  Let's go artist by artist and examine what was produced.

Dash Shaw: In #20, Shaw continued his recent attempts at adapting trashy dating TV shows like Blind Date (minus the wacky commentary and pop-ups that serve to interrupt the audience's experience of the couple on their date). Shaw's trying a lot of different things here: it's partly an experiment in having color drive the emotional narrative of a story. The subdued sea green wash here befits the low-key nature of the interaction. Shaw also omits the wacky trust-building activity central to each date in favor of simply following the couple around as they drive to their date, walk around and eat dinner. This also reflects his interest in exploring how two people interact in real life and how that translates to a page, while still retaining the staged quality of the TV show. I feel like this is all part of some larger problem-solving activity for Shaw, much like his comic about the making of Jurassic Park in #21. That documentary concerns itself with trying to create a relationship between things on a screen that don't exist (dinosaurs) and actual actors, trying to find ways to make that relationship come alive when seen in a theater. In a sense, this is what Shaw is trying to accomplish by pushing the envelope of multilayered drawings with a different color wash attached to them. He's not trying to create something real; he's trying to create something that feels real in an emotional and apprehensive sense.

Sara Edward-Corbett: In #20, her "The Bird, the Mouse and the Sausage" was one of her best pieces. Her comics have always had the preciseness of certain kinds of children's illustration, and this story is very much in the vein of a fable. Her use of negative space is exquisite, be it the bright white space in nearly every panel or the deep black of her trees, marked only be a series of thin, white vertical lines. As a result, the spot colors she uses really pop out on the page. The story is about an essentially polyamorous (but asexual) trio whose equilibrium is shattered when the bird mates with another bird. An act of jealousy winds up dooming both the mouse and the sausage, who calls into questions its very identity as an anthropomorphic being in the course of the story. Like most of her work, it's funny, sad and a little savage. In #21, "Afraid of the Dark" is a whimsical, delightfully-drawn story about an anthropomorphic desk, umbrella and box kite that leave a classroom late at night to wander the forest and cemetery. The denseness of her hatching and cross-hatching provides an interesting contrast to the benign nature of the story itself. It's a mood piece above all else, but that mood is "whimsical".

Josh Simmons and The Partridge in the Pear Tree: These two issues saw parts two and three of the truly demented serial "The White Rhinoceros". Two people (one of them apparently being 1970s Paul Lynde in full "Uncle Arthur" mode from the TV show Bewitched) find themselves in a terrifying and brightly colored forest full of what a couple of children call "racial magic". What Simmons and collaborator "Shaun Partridge" do here is transpose the most virulent of racial slurs into a fantasy world where those words have a completely different (and usually either neutral or positive) meaning. This world is quite dangerous for the newcomers, who lack the ability to negotiate and understand their new environment, though both try to figure it out as best as they can. I hope that someone is going to pick this serial up, because it's some of Simmons' finest work, with his near-psychedelic use of color in particular being a revelation.

In #21, Simmons also contributed a story called "Mutant", which is more what one would expect from him. Simmons quickly creates a strange scenario: a bunch of people standing outside somewhere at night. Someone gets beaten up, and a guy goes after the responsible party: a tiny demon with a plastic mask. After he stabs the demon to death with desperate gusto, he is told that it is now reborn, mutated and angry. Simmons has a way of generating dread and lingering doom like no one else; the specifics of the story and the reasons why anything are happening are important. What's important is that this guy who felt empowered and righteous one moment is irrevocably fucked, with his doom to come along at any moment. That's why he creates hands-down the most genuinely unsettling horror comics today.

T Edward Bak: These two issues offer the last part of chapter two and the first part of chapter three of his "Wild Man" serial about the explorer and scientist Georg Steller. They mark an interesting transition point in the story, as Bak goes from Steller in Europe with his fiance, passionately having sex with her as well as engaging in clever repartee with her; she is clearly his equal. Of course, the promises he makes to her are all doomed, as chapter three opens with a dream of sex turning into Steller having to deal with wild wolves in a near-Arctic setting. Bak really gets as the desperation and the human drama played out in the wild, the sense that there's no hope but trying to keep on living. A revised version of this story will soon be published by Floating World Comics.

Conor O'Keefe: Issue #20 debuted his new serial, "The Coconut Octopus". O'Keefe is a great example of an artist who really benefited from being part of Mome, as he refined his style noticeably over the past few years. I've come to enjoy his softly penciled and colored blend of Winsor McCay and Maurice Sendak, mixing whimsy and melancholy in equal measure. The titular octopus of the story is a very funny and cute figure, and I hope that O'Keefe can keep up this new story and the continuity of his characters elsewhere.

Nate Neal: Neal may not have the name recognition of some of the other Mome artists, but he was one of the most consistently interesting contributors during its run. "Magpie Inevitability" in #20 feels like a modern take on a Bob Dylan song from the 60s, with a cadence similar to "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". Brightly drawn with a varied color palate, it's typical of Neal in that it focuses on how destructive modern culture is and the ways in which each individual is complicit in this emptiness. The combination really works well here, as the images balance out the stridency of the text. Neal has also been interested in the roots of language and how that ties into how we make images. "Cha-ul Nu Mon-Mon" in #21 is a beautiful, brutal story about a group of cave-dwellers. A young boy named Jani is taught by his mother ("Mon-Mon") how to paint on the walls of the cave; it's a thunderbolt of a moment for a young man who has found his destiny. His mother is young and beautiful and has drawn the jealous ire of her fellow wives of the chieftain; they use him in a plot to kill her. Flashing forward years later, Jani is the tribe recorder, painting another triumphant hunt by his father at his behest. When the story concludes with Jani sneaking off to draw a portrait of his mother, Neal gets at the heart of art's ability to bring to life what is gone and keep it alive forever.

Michael Jada & Derek Von Gieson: Their "Devil Doll" serial, mashing up hard-nosed WWII soldiers wandering into a potentially haunted town and finding madness, dragged in every single segment. Von Gieson is a talented artist, but his storytelling here is murky and difficult to follow, and the story feels bloated and tedious. I enjoyed Von Gieson's previous contributions to Mome, but this story just doesn't suit what he does best.

Steven Weissman: The comics veteran was a welcome addition to Mome, but his first entry in #20 was not what I expected from him. Sure, it was about kids and the ways in which they heap abuse on each other, but it quickly turned into a gruesome horror story with a number of wholly unexpected twists and turns. It's a must for fans of the artist, because he takes expectations and simply mangles them in a way that's emotionally powerful. The end was also unexpected in terms of both its plot twists and ultimate poignancy. #21 featured a number of his hilarious "Barack Hussein Obama" strips that would later go on to get their own collection. These strange and wonderful accounts of Obama and Joe Biden off on adventures, developing superpowers, and generally interacting as somewhat fractious best friends fits in perfectly with his Yikes! material, as the characters here are child-like in their demeanors and emotional states, and they balance that sense of cruelty and kindness that children can express at a moment's notice.Weissman's scratchy line and extensive use of effects like zip-a-tone add to the sense of fantastic, even if the figures are depicted more-or-less naturalistically.

Sergio Ponchione: Ponchione is another slightly odd fit for Mome, given the slightly goofy and bigfoot nature of these stories. That said, they look absolutely terrific in full color, coming on the heels of his excellent Ignatz line series Grotesque. #20 sees "The Grotesque Obsession of Professor Hackensack", a charming prequel to Grotesque. It's got the same manic energy that reflects Ponchione's interest in early American cartooning, with touches of Milt Gross and Rube Goldberg to be found. #21's "Sgnaz" channels Dr Seuss but also gets at the darker parts of the imagination that Ponchione is so fascinated with, especially those memories that are repressed but bubble up in unexpected ways. Without any hope for further Grotesque stories in English, it was a treat to see them in Mome, just like many of the foreign short stories that were translated and published.

Jeremy Tinder: It's a shame that Tinder hopped on to Mome so late in its run, because he really fit right in. "Time and Space" had this sort of Archer Prewitt quality to it that I enjoyed, as the main character was a sort of blobby figure seeking out satori and the ability to practice remote viewing. In a strip with lots of funny drawings and an absurd premise (he succeeds and joins his guru remotely on Mars, where they encounter the giant floating head of god and send out & receive good vibrations), its execution is done with deadly seriousness. There's no punchline, but rather a resolution to a problem posed earlier in the strip. That uncomfortable zone between the serious and the silly gives this strip a charge.

Aidan Koch: Koch's comics always have an elusive and slippery quality to them even as she provides all sorts of visual cues as to potential meanings. "Green House" in #20 is no exception, and its very title offers clues as to what's really going on. A woman brings a man over to her apartment, and he immediately puts the moves on her and they wind up having sex. He leaves early in the morning, and while she does not overtly comment on this, there's a moroseness in her body language that the reader can feel. The title refers directly to all of the plants she keeps in her apartment (which he comments on, baffled as to why she has so many); their growth is essential to her growth. When she offers to trade plants with a girl across the way, it's a way of creating a real connection, as Koch's drawings of the two of them sharing their plants together indicates. Indeed, that drawing has a shadowy circle surrounding them, as the two of them were in a flowerpot together. Having found a connection on her own terms, the guy calls her back, apologetic for leaving and wishing to get together soon; he'll have found her already blossomed. There are few artists who think through every line and its effects the way that Koch does.

Nicolas Mahler: I've always thought Mahler was kind of a curious fit for Mome; that European, cartoony bigfoot thing felt more like something that Kim Thompson would have put into an anthology, not Mome editor Eric Reynolds. However, his autobio short stories display a crackling, straight-ahead sense of humor that is unusual in Mome. "Convention Tension" and "Goodbye, Mr Nibs" in #20 deal with Mahler's experiences at comics shows and teaching, respectively. A cartoonist doing a strip about a con is not exactly a new idea, but I liked the way in which Mahler favorably compared comics nerds to art snobs ("at least the comics nerds have genuine despair going for them"). The second story speaks to the frustration Mahler felt with utterly disinterested students, a frustration that's heightened when a friend of his acts as a substitute for a class and has a great time. In #21's "Moving Pictures", Mahler first vents his spleen against an old art teacher and then goes into hilarious detail about how a government grant helped fund an animated project of his, talking about finding voices, finding an animator and being relentlessly hounded by the government for a final project -- including years after it was actually released! Mahler was never an essential part of Mome, but these shorts acted as an appealing palate cleanser.

Ted Stearn: There's not much more to say about Stearn's "The Moolah Tree" serial (which appeared in #20) other than it's funny, mean and impeccably drawn. It's a slow-moving serial that didn't seem to come close to finishing up by the end of Mome; indeed, it just seemed to get going. Stearn has a knack for making almost every character simultaneously lovable, completely stupid and dangerous to themselves and others.  

Kurt Wolfgang: Wolfgang is another MVP from Mome and is certainly one of the five cartoonists who made the greatest impact in the series. While his early entries in Mome were good, it was his "Nothing Eve" serial that really stands out. As we follow the protagonist of the story, Tommy, around the city on the last day before the end of the world, the reader knows he's trying to find his only real love, a girl named Edie. This chapter reveals that Tommy wasn't always the kindest person, as his reunion with an abandoned friend/fling named Patti reveals. Indeed, this portion of the story finds Tommy taking a hard look at himself for occasionally being a rotten friend. Wolfgang's drawing just gets better and better, mixing rubbery & stylized character designs in with heavy blacks and densely-crosshatched backgrounds.

Tom Kaczynski:  Please see my review of "The Cozy Apocalypse" in my review of Kaczynski's collection of stories, Beta Testing The Apocalypse. Kaczynski was unquestionably one of the best and most productive cartoonists in Mome.

Jon Adams: Adams' delicately drawn and seriously strange strips have mixed naturalism and surreal, violent, nighmarish and cartoony imagery. "Almost Candied Chimera" is typical of his stories, involving a redneck father/son hunting duo, a whimsical creature, a violent death and a horrible fate.The silliness of the action is juxtaposed against the horror of what actually happens.

Nick Thorburn: Thorburn really plays to Reynolds' fondness for the gross, grotesque and silly. His crude strip about an alternate, even bawdier history of Benjamin Franklin deliberately riddled with as many lies as possible in #21 was very funny, revealing a strong influence from underground comics.His other strip was less funny than it was drawn in a lively matter. These strips were another nice palate-cleanser.

Lilli Carre': Carre's carefully designed and constructed figures point to her background in animation, but her stylizations always serve the neuroses, fears and wonders her characters encounter in her stories. In #21's "Marching Band", a woman wakes up one morning to hear a marching band pounding out a tune in her head that only she can hear. She eventually comes to accept this bit of madness until it disappears one day, which makes things even more maddening. Carre' gets at the common fear of being attacked or infested during one's sleep in an absurd way, and then makes a comment about the ways in which we internalize madness. It's a clever short for a cartoonist whose Mome entries were among the best the series had to offer.

Sequart Reprints: Leah Hayes, Josh Simmons, Dupuy

In this column, we'll be looking at three comics that deal with the life of the mind and the delights & terrors within. First up is Phillipe Dupuy's Haunted, a book that's part dream journal and part sketchbook. A loose narrative forms around the trope of our narrator (Dupuy) starting to job in the morning. In each of the "Run Movie" segments, Dupuy encounters an unusual creature that illuminates a particular aspect of his struggle as he's jogging along. In the other stories, we meet a character who is also struggling with something. In his comic, I viewed his running as a metaphor for drawing, and drawing alone in particular. Accustomed as he was to working with a partner (Charles Berberian), I saw this comic as his commentary on working alone, and feeling the urge to scribble down his thoughts as quickly as possible.

There's an almost feverish quality to his work here, as his usual elegant style is jettisoned in favor of quick, expressive sketchwork. The stories all have a grotesquely visceral quality to them, as the struggles portrayed are concrete, physical difficulties. For example, in "The Dog", a dog whose leg is trapped gnaws it off, eats the leg, vomits it and walks until it can't walk anymore. It dies and is frozen in the snow until a bird comes by and plucks an eye out of its corpse. This is the frequent inevitability and futility of life, where even a heroic struggle against all odds winds up for naught. At the same time, it was clear that this story was burning in Dupuy's mind, and he had to draw it as quickly as possible to retain the power of his original thoughts.

One "Run Movie" segment features a dream where Dupuy helplessly watches a number of people in a city square act foolishly until disaster strikes. Not all the dreams are nightmarish--in one "Run Movie" segment, he stumbles upon an empty museum dedicated to his own future works, guarded by a friendly talking dog. After stumbling into a hole, he gets out of trouble with the dog's help by running again. This was the clearest use of the metaphor of running-as-drawing in the book. Later, he meets a talking duck whom he helps out of a funk. The duck's struggle is one of identity crisis--he used travel and the acquisition of material objects as the answer to his existential dread and found that solution lacking. By suggesting giving away the objects as gifts, Dupuy helped him lighten his load.

There's a shaggy dog story about an artist told that he overdraws his portraits trying to figure out how "negative space" works by trying to drink the empty part of a glass of wine, have sex by touching the parts of the body that aren't there, etc. Only by literally having nothing left in his life and having no materials to work with save a piece of paper evicting him from his flat is he able to finally understand how to paint empty space. Another story called "Forest Friends" features more anthropomorphic animals. This group is trying to deal with dog-like friend of theirs who lost an arm (a retelling of the first story in the book, perhaps?). This is a sort of warped companion piece to the slice-of-life stories Dupuy creates with Berberian in their Monsieur Jean stories, only much more visceral and a bit more desperate. Desperation also follows the story of a Mexican wrestler who encounters the one foe he cannot fight and a minotaur who is trapped in a labyrinth and can't die or feel any kind of fulfillment.

The most nightmarish story concerns Dupuy himself. "The Rats" sees him renovating a house and accidentally swallowing a rat. Soon, rats fill up his entire body, unbeknownst to him until one night he vomits the scratchy, black blobs up one by one. Purged, he leaves them behind. This was another story, like "The Dog", that had a frantic quality in its penciling. The idea seemed to have an obsessive quality that he couldn't let go of until it was on the page and out of his system.

Perhaps the key to understanding the whole book is the "Run Movie" segment called "The Old Lady and the Turtle". Meeting a blind woman, she forces him to close his eyes and they drift off to a number of locations. Dupuy obsesses over blindness and losing one's hands in this book, because these are the things that would prevent him from drawing. Ultimately, she advises him to "Learn to lose yourself. You'll stop wondering where you are. And you'll never feel lost again..." This is how Haunted seems to function for Dupuy: as a vehicle for confronting his fears, confronting his nightmares and tackling them head-on where he's at his strongest: on the comics page. He loses himself in these stories, allowing his line to stay loose, lively and scribbly, and winds up, in the last segment, coming to terms with his creations, his fears. This is a bold, remarkable book, especially for an artist who usually creates much more straight-ahead narratives.

Josh Simmons' Jessica Farm is an equally personal narrative project, though it's told very differently. This story is literally Simmons' life's work, as he plans to draw a page a month for 42 years, until he's amassed a 96-page volume every 8 years. The story, about a young woman named Jessica and her sometimes dreamy, sometimes nightmarish series of encounters in her spooky house, feels like both stream-of-consciousness and a coherent narrative. Each page feels like its own entity, as Jessica awakes to a magical Christmas morning only to encounter the looming specter of her sinister father. As she showers, she's serenaded by a miniature band, and then is dragged between the walls of the house to see a number of creatures that she's ignored and who are living in squalor. This book is all about the power--both positive and negative--of imagination and fantasy. Creatures that she dreamed up but stopped thinking about have a life of their own, but a pathetic one.

As the story proceeds, Jessica listens to a concert, goes to the top of a tower with her fantasy friends (where she reveals that she's worried about her father beating her) and breaks the heart of "the captain", a ridiculous sexual fantasy character who starts weeping when she reveals that she doesn't want to be with him all the time. Visually, Simmons excels at depicting both the glee and horror that Jessica experiences. He's a master at crosshatching shadows that loom over a page, and his rubbery penciling style is ideal at depicting the kind of cartoony action featured here.

Simmons keeps the story moving at a dizzying rate--Jessica goes back to her room to see her monkey friend murdered, is attacked by a bizarre creature, winds up in her benevolent grandparents' house, and is charged to go on a quest to "the barn" with a naked stud named Mr Sugarcock. That duo breathlessly manages to dodge her father and get to the barn to deliver a message to the mysterious, wolflike "Smiths". We leave this volume as Jessica prepares to talk to Papa Smith.

Jessica Farm is cartooning in its purest form. It reads like the kind of comics a kid would come up with in the way it flows, but with all the skill and concerns of a mature artist. This is Simmons' kitchen sink of comics, as he manages to throw in all of his storytelling concerns: sex (especially deviant sexuality), adventure, fantasy, horror, terror and absurdity. The fusion of genre and underground sensibilities has always marked Simmons' best work, and Jessica Farm is the ultimate expression of this urge.

Leah Hayes' Funeral of the Heart presents her own darkly comedic vision in this short story collection. This doesn't really function as a comic per se, but is a synthesis of story, lettering and image on the page that combine to create an oppressive atmosphere. It's all done on scratchboard, a medium that is inherently creepy and dark. The illustrations are stark and spare, with Hayes' eccentric lettering style adding as much to the effect as the illustrations. "The Bathroom" is a story about how guilt consumed a couple and manifested itself in the form of a room that they discovered and wound up as their grave. "Whoreson" is both the sweetest and saddest story in the collection, detailing the life of a man covered in fur who goes on to become a famous writer & teacher and later is accidentally killed by his own child. "The Change" is another heart-breaker, about a man who nearly loses his love and the way it hardens him. "The Needle" is about two young women who suspect sinister motives from a nurse who attended her care when she was dying. "The Hair" is the most upbeat story in the book, about two twin girls who were born connected by their hair. One twin decides that she wants to be separated and leaves in the dead of night, a decision that breaks the heart of her sister. How they reconcile is both heartwarming and slightly unnerving.

In general, that's not a bad way to describe Hayes' work. It's not exactly horrific in the way a scratchboard Thomas Ott story would be, but it's disquieting and disturbing. At the same time, it also has a strangely endearing quality. Her features have the feel of bedtime stories for adults, creepy fairy tales where happy endings are a rarity. They are perhaps not as personal as the stories in Haunted or as stream-of-consciousness as Jessica Farm, but they are certainly as revealing in their own way.

Sequart Reprints: Living and the Dead, Grave Robber's Daughter, House, HWY 115

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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Fantagraphics isn't exactly known as the go-to publisher for horror or suspense comics. Yet they've released a number of comics over the years that fall into these categories, albeit usually in a skewed or off-beat manner. Thomas Ott's scratchboard comics can't be considered anything but horror comics. Richard Sala works entirely within the mystery/horror realm, albeit with an eccentric sense of humor. Even Charles Burns' Black Hole explicitly uses monster-movie trappings to get at its deeper meanings. The fact is, Fantagraphics has never been afraid to publish genre comics, just so long as the works are intelligent and the result of an author's personal vision.

In recent months, Fantagraphics has published several comics that all lie in the horror-suspense continuum. However, each volume is completely different in terms of tone, style and intent. They range from zombie romance comedies to killer clown mysteries to the exploration of a spooky old house to detectives trying to track down a serial killer in a very strange world. Notably, all of them are in black-and-white; this is no surprise because there's no better way to get across the starkness of terror than by depicting it in the starkest of terms. Where each artist excels is in how they compose the page to guide the story, and the sort of linework they employ.

Let's begin with the most lighthearted of the four comics I'll be discussing, Jason's The Living And The Dead. This is a clever little tale by the fantastic Norwegian cartoonist, for whom genre boundaries don't seem to exist. No matter what kind of story he tells, he always uses his stripped-down, clear-line, funny-animal style in his comics. Amazingly, it works every time, acting as a very quick shorthand for the reader to instantly understand any situation. For his funny comics, his standard characters often wind up interacting with more outlandish caricatures (like Darth Vader, Indiana Jones or the Terminator). In his serious comics, their deadpan nature keeps the audience on edge. For a tale of zombies, it's perfect.

Like most good zombie stories, this book is really about something else. In a brilliant opening page when we're trying to find out who the protagonist is, we see a couple dining at a restaurant. We then see a waiter and the next panel focuses on him, so we learn the couple is not important. The waiter walks into a kitchen, past some cooks—it's not their story, either. Finally, we settle upon the dishwasher, who is clearly not happy to be there, and we learn that the story focuses on him. Walking home, he encounters a sweet-seeming prostitute whom he immediately falls for. Working up the courage to talk to her another night, he realizes that he won't have the money to pay for her services for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, a meterorite falls to earth in a graveyard and the dead walk again—just as our hero was ready to see his woman.

From there, he saves her from a zombie in the nick of time, and they run around town trying to get away from the undead. There are small moments of grim humor to go with whacking zombies in the head with axes or setting them on fire. The climax of the story is too good to give away, but suffice it to say that romance lives on even beyond the grave. The story overall is a nice confection: it doesn't linger in one's imagination as long as some of Jason's best work (especially his recent The Left Bank Gang), but it's still fun. While there are plenty of zombie-munching scenes, Jason's open layout and wit allows the reader to laugh at the scenes easily. He only uses 6 panels a page (with one notable exception towards the end), an approach that allows the reader to easily approach the work and almost race across each page.

Richard Sala's The Grave Robber's Daughter is a nasty comic with periodic moments of comic relief thanks to its heroine, Judy Drood. This young detective with a foul mouth accidentally stumbles upon a small town that seems eerily empty. It's empty with the exception of the town carnival, where she stumbles upon some extra-creepy clowns and smartassed teenagers. Nothing seems to make much sense until she runs into Nellie, a young girl on the run who's trying to dodge the clowns. Seems as though one night they rode into town, hypnotized every adult into coming to the fairgrounds...and then made them disappear. Nellie gets kidnapped when Judy nods off, and Judy is left to deal with one of the grotesque clowns. Judy clubs the thing in the head with a shovel and the remains of a corpse are revealed.

The story takes several twists and turns after that as we learn what the clowns really are, who brought them to life and why, and the ultimate fate of the town and Nellie. Witchcraft, curses, soul reanimation and teen angst gone amok are all involved, but the creepiest page of all is the final one, as we see Nellie changing into something very disturbing—and clearly influenced in part by Judy's own bad habits. Sala's panel design is an important part of the storytelling. The use of just a couple of panels a page in the early going, often catty-corner to each other, is a nice reflection of the town's isolation and Judy's disorientation. Like Jason, Sala also uses a stripped-down style, but this book resembles the art in a child's adventure book: the faces range from simple and iconic (often with dots for i's) to grotesque and cartoonish. This makes for some jarring moments when we are presented with grisly acts of violence. What I like most about this comic is that while mysteries are revealed and the case is "solved", there's no real resolution. The eccentricities in Sala's style and the Judy Drood character in particular are a perfect match for the horrors he reveals. The reader is never quite sure whether to laugh, cringe or both.

Josh Simmons' House is in many ways the most straightforward of the works reviewed in this article. There's no overt element of the supernatural at work here, and Simmons further restricts himself by making the story entirely wordless. I've been reading Simmons' minicomics and associated series for some years now. The best way to describe them is earthy: they're bawdy and often dedicated to exploring the lives of those on society's fringes. In House, he plugs in a teenage love triangle into an increasingly claustrophobic scenario that's a masterpiece of page design. More than any of the other books reviewed here, House could only work as a comic.

The opening sequence is quite memorable: a teenage boy comes across a ramshackle house in a forest clearing. After looking at it for a moment, he walks away from it to meet his friends at the real "house" in the story: a huge, magnificent relic of a building. Simmons takes a couple of pages to let the reader see just how impressive a structure it is. Meeting two female friends of his, the trio seems quite prepared for an adventure: they have headlamps and backpacks with supplies. Going through the ruins of the house, they discover that part of it is completely underwater. It's a spectacular scene, and loves blossoms between the boy and one of the girls—much to the chagrin of the other girl.

This long exposition sets up the action in the second part of the story. One of the girls almost falls down a flight of stairs in the dark, but the boy saves her in the nick of time. That save is yet another false take, as the stairs collapse under the weight of another girl. It's not long before the trio is separated—partly by circumstance, partly by jealousy, and partly by hallucination (or is it something else?). Simmons draws the reader into the ultimate nightmarishness of the scenario through his composition and use of black. The story starts off brightly, often with single-page splash panels. As the adventure begins, it goes into 3 panels per page—until we reach the secret passage that precedes the collapse of the stairs, when it becomes a 6-panel grid. When the characters are separated, it changes into a 9-panel grid. Towards the very end, as the characters are alone and in the dark, it becomes a 12-panel grid. By that time, every panel is engulfed in darkness, reflecting the desperation and hopelessness of the situation. This is a comic that's tautly and cleverly constructed. Its goals are modest in terms of narrative and themes, but it's a pleasure to see how Simmons takes a familiar set of elements and wrings real desperation out of them.

Finally, there's Matthias Lehmann's disturbing HWY 115. We are thrust right into the plot on the story's first page: there's a serial killer on the loose named Robert Illot who has escaped from his psychiatric hospital. His MO for killing his victims is to stuff unusual objects down their throats. He's already struck again, having forced a roast chicken down some unfortunate person's gullet. We then meet our hero, a detective who's trying to find Illot on Hwy 115, his choice of locale for his killings. The detective picks up a woman who's also looking for Illot, and she has a notebook filled with contacts. The whole book has a feverish sort of dream logic from the very beginning, as its never explained how the woman got this notebook or why she was on the side of the road. From there, they travel from place to place in order to talk to people who knew Illot at the institution. Two things happen in every case: we are told of a story that Illot told them where he's a young boy alone in a house, and someone is killed by means of some device that the detective had just heard about in that segment of the story. In particular, these items provided comfort to the young boy in the story, odd as they were. And without exception, they were stuffed down throats of their victims: a stapler, a bunch of lightbulbs, a huge beetle, a sock, etc.

The story has a curiously static feel to it. The detective is constantly in the dark even as he does all the legwork. He starts to wonder where talking to all of these people is leading to but feels compelled to keep doing it. The people he meets grow progressively more disturbing, until he finally meets the last person on the list. He tells the detective the last part of the little boy's story that Illot told him, and at that moment the two narratives converge suddenly, unexpectedly and violently. This leads to a final twist that is never explained but rather strongly hinted at throughout the story, making us question the sanity of more than one character and reality as it is presented in the narrative.

The tension in the story is ratcheted up through the use of Lehmann's manic scratchboard style. This gives each panel a sort of frenzied & neurotic energy, heightened even further by the unsettling events that Lehmann depicts. This story is about loops and feedback, and the new realities that result from such feedback. Lehmann is fascinated by the grotesque, and it's no coincidence that we never see Illot actually do anything bad until the end of the story. Instead, we relive the gruesome killings of those who knew him, each of them driven to kill by the circumstance of their own insanity (or so it seems). Lehmann is able to get some humor out of some of the situations (like a driver who picks up the detective and the woman), but the story is really just one long nightmare—and it's not clear that anyone gets to wake up from it.

That nightmare reality, the transformation of everyday reality into something horrible, is what these books are about. In The Living and the Dead, the protagonist embraces the nightmare. In The Grave Robber's Daughter, one character escapes from the nightmare and another character becomes it. In House, all three characters struggle but have to limply succumb to darkness. In HWY 115, the trick is not knowing where the nightmare starts and reality stops, because the ground shifts constantly for our hero. All of the artists involved are quite adept in manipulating fear for their audience.

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.