Thirty One Days Of CCS #7: J.P. Coovert, Robyn Smith

Simple Routines, Volume #7, by J.P. Coovert. For his daily, 4-panel autobio comics, Coovert channels his sense of joy and positivity into each one. Even for sad strips like where his beloved dog London dies, Coovert just lets it all out there on the page. The strength of this comic is the strength of Coovert's cartooning: it's clear, fluid and strong. Even as Coovert uses a simplified style of character design, the actual drawings themselves are not only bold and confident, they are filled with life. His drawings of his dogs in particular are not only cute as images, they come to life on the page with a few strokes of his pen, thanks in part to his understanding of how objects interact in space. Coovert works mostly as an illustrator, but it's clear that he is really a cartoonist. These comics clearly serve to keep his head in the game while riffing on the things and the people he loves.

His comics with and about his wife Jacie are particular treats, as are those comics where he gets together with one of his friends. There's an undercurrent of sadness in his strips sometimes, as the various moves around the country have cut off some of his friendships. There's also the sadness of being away from childhood and college friends, and the intensity of those reunions in his comics is tinged by the sense that it's something that won't last. That said, one can frequently see Coovert circle around and remember the good things about his life and concentrate on them, and it seems clear that these comics aid in that as well. Simple Routines in many respects is an exercise in finding the positive by writing about the positive, and the results are uplifting for the reader as well.

Wash Day, by Jamila Rowser & Robyn Smith. There are any number of striking and beautiful images in this comic drawn by CCS alum Smith, but the most striking is the second panel on the first page. The main character of the story, Kimana, is coming home off the subway and walking to her apartment. That second panel shows her with her keys splayed out of her fingers like miniature knives, as her best form of defense in case she's harassed or worse. This is a comic both about the essential dignity of black women and the ways in which men seek to tear it down. In both instances, there is great restraint and subtlety in exploring both ideas. Kimana is endlessly calm and patient in the face of catcalls and insults on the street as well as dealing with a trifling man sending her endless texts, apologizing for something he did.

As she explains at the end, this was not a day to deal with annoying lovers or give the time of day to a catcaller: it was wash day. Smith shined throughout the comic in terms of giving us a full understanding of Kimana's personality strictly through he body language and the way she relates to other people. Obviously, the images of Kimana slowly and methodically washing her hair, adding conditioner, brushing it out and putting it in clips is compelling and fascinating to watch. There's a specificity regarding what is clearly an important ritual that is striking in the sequence, one rarely seen or discussed in pop culture that is still overwhelmingly white. While those images are striking, Smith's drawing Kimana going about her morning as she walks to the local bodega, interacting with the manager as a regular and then passing the time with her flatmate Cookie are equally important in their own way. This is the story of a black woman giving herself permission to negotiate that particular day on her own terms, no matter what.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #9: J.P. Coovert

JP Coovert's most prominent trait as a storyteller is a relentlessly upbeat tone. Even when he's discussing personal travails in his long-running diary comic, Simple Routines, he manages to find ways to not just emphasize the positive, but rather to demonstrate how he copes with those problems and how he seeks support. In the most recent volume of Simple Routines (#5), Coovert deals with not only the medical implications of what turns out to be prostatitis, he also admits how difficult it is for him to confront the embarrassing nature of his problems, even to his beloved wife Jacie. There's a sense where simply getting that down on paper worked through a lot of those issues for him, even if there wasn't a neat solution. Indeed, most of Coovert's autobio comics, even though they follow the four-panel rhythm of gag strips, don't tend to have a neat resolution or a punchline. Many of them don't even pretend to be funny, or comprise complete thoughts.

What he does express is how much he enjoys being around his dogs, and his simple, clean style is absolutely ideal for drawing animals. He talks about culture that inspires him. There's an almost childlike glee that he evinces when a friend comes into town to visit him, or when he travels to see a childhood friend. Coovert, who turned thirty during the course of doing these comics, actually cops to not quite feeling like an adult. In his case, that translates to not wanting to lose the feeling of childlike wonder and enthusiasm he so often displays, because he demonstrates maturity in a number of different ways. That includes his career working as a graphic designer for Target as well as his decision to quit to pursue freelance work, but it also includes the seriousness with which he takes his marriage and the effort he puts in to communicate. There are plenty of moments of that childlike glee, like when the life-long Star Wars fan gets to visit a huge collection for work, staying up late to play video games with friends, and rekindling friendships at comics shows. The intimacy he creates with the reader is not forced or fake, but rather a function of his skill as a storyteller and his guileless honesty.

The first installment of Coovert's YA fantasy story, Arc Dogs, is similarly upbeat, smooth and fun. It combines tropes from Harry Potter (the kids all go to a school for magic) with the sort of propulsive teen adventure stories featured in movies like The Goonies. That one of the kids is a dog and another is a bird is simply part of the premise, as a group of four kids stumbles upon a treasure map that reveals its path one step at a time. Coovert's line is smooth and simple (he hardly ever varies line weight), but he prevents his images from floating off the page with a judicious use of shading on every page. It's telling that he hardly ever uses a lot of black to fill in his backgrounds, because that would alter the overall atmosphere of his stories. Instead, Coovert adds weight to his compositions with that greyscaling, and he creates enough negative space to make every panel pop. Coovert doesn't a grid, but instead prefers to vary the composition of each page, in part as a way to keep the reader as off-balance as his characters. The action sequences are direct and Coovert lets the images do the talking, as those panels are silent. This is a well-executed opening chapter for the story, lacking only in firm differentiation between each of the characters. Certainly, their appearances all differ, but there's not much else to indicate personality or temperament issues as of yet. Considering that this episode wasn't especially character-centric, it's not surprising to see that lack of development, as Coovert was trying to establish his world and its rules. There's a lot of potential for a YA adventure here that could be aimed at a slightly younger crowd than most, both in terms of subject matter and storytelling style.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 10: J.P. Coovert, Melissa Mendes, Rachel Dukes

Frankie Comics #2, by Rachel Dukes. This is a collection of Dukes' elegant and sparely-drawn strips about her cat. Dukes became momentarily famous when her strip "Life With/Out A Cat" was stolen from her website and used elsewhere without her permission, pointing to the sheer, naked piracy that occurs on an everyday basis on the internet. Dukes, of course, is a comics lifer who's been making ambitious anthologies like Side A and Side B while still a teenager. No one every went broke by making comics about cats, and many smart cartoonists like B.Kliban and Jeffrey Brown have had mass-market success with their cat comics. Dukes' Frankie comics are clear, well-drawn, and (most importantly) funny. Building off video game tropes in some strips and quotidian activities in others, Dukes alternates between quick-hitting gags (like a Cat vs Human fight) and slow-burn gags that build to a single punchline (like letting the cat manipulate her into increasingly difficult and annoying requests). This black & white comic adds zip-a-tone to give it depth and weight, but they look far better using the two-tone approach seen on her website or even the full color treatment she's used in some anthologies. At some point, I hope she collects enough of these to present to a publisher.

Joey, Lou #17 and A Very Special Lou, by Melissa Mendes. If there's a running theme connecting the three artists in this column today, it's that all three have a genuine sense of warmth and empathy that shows through on the page. Mendes has slowly built up a body of work about the lives of children, from comics about a version of her own life to new series like Lou that deal with similar stories of outsider tomboy types. The last issue of her Oily miniseries Lou found her exploring unfamiliar territory: putting her characters into actual danger. The events that led up to the younger brother character getting a gun pointed to his head in an abandoned building are complicated, but they're all a byproduct of what Mendes does best: family dynamics, family conflicts and the relationship between families and their pets. I'm not sure she quite stuck the landing in this issue, as she seemed to struggle with providing a happy ending with creating dramatic tension. The way she created the latter almost seemed gratuitous and random, and these are qualities I never associate with her work. A Very Special Lou, a follow-up to the series, finds her on more sure ground. It's about the contentious relationship between Lou and her younger brother, John. On his birthday, the one thing he really wants is some kind of input from Lou, who seems put off by him. When he finally gets it after an otherwise idyllic birthday (complete with attending a local wrestling card), it's clearly the gift he values most. Mendes adds a single-tone red accent to this comic that doesn't quite show up right on many of the pages (there's lots of bleed), but it's interesting to see her experiment with color after relying solely on her scribbly, expressive line.

As such, Joey is a big step up, both in terms of content and form. It's more reminiscent of a Max de Radigues comic than her prior material in that it deals with a kid who's having a lot of trouble at school and at home with constantly arguing parents. His only ally is his older sister, who at one point buys him a wolf mask. Given the opportunity to be someone else, and someone scary and powerful to boot, he naturally never takes the thing off until he's confronted by bullies. When this happens, there's no chance for solace from his parents, who are too busy screaming at each other to notice that he's not there. There are several lovely grace notes at the end of this comic, which has what can be called an ambiguously happy ending. Adding that level of ambiguity gives this comic a different quality than her prior stories, even as the rigid 2 x 4 grid keeps the story on a steady pace. I'm enjoying the restless quality of Mendes' comics, as it indicates a cartoonist who's trying to grow and expand.

Simple Routines Volume 3 and Broken Summer, by J.P. Coovert. Coovert's a member of the great 2008 graduation class at CCS, and he's been slowly cranking out gentle, warm comics for a number of years. His autobio/journal series, Simple Routines, is always a welcome presence because of that warmth, optimism and general decency that emanates from him and his comics. I don't generally consider the works of an artist as a referendum on their lives or personalities, but it's hard to not like the Coovert that we see in these pages. He's someone who's not afraid of his emotions, as the strips about graduating from CCS show in some detail. Most of all, he talks about his friendships and the way that they keep him connected to his past, and the lengths he goes to in order to keep them fresh. The strips about missing his fiance' (and later wife) Jacie are equally touching. Not everything is sunshine and roses, as there is real desperation in the strips where he's looking for a job and worrying about his worthiness as a person .His spare and lovely line that is as expressive as Duke's is laid out in classic Kochalka-style four-panel grids, and he alternates between strips with punchlines and strips with memorable and more serious final moments. There's nothing ground-breaking about his work here; it's simply an excellent example of the form.

Broken Summer is, in many ways, what cartoonists should aspire to do from time to time: make a comic that literally includes all of your favorite activities. This is about a magical world where monsters, kids and anthropomorphic animals all hang around and play video games, ride skateboards and go to concerts. It incorporates Harry Potter-style magic in a library as well as body-image issues in one neat package, making it a perfect all-ages comic. The stories are episodic and slightly aimless, but Coovert has a few through-lines that connect the characters and their activities together. All-ages comics seem to be Coovert's calling, as he infuses them with an easy charm that still has a little bite and sadness to it.

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Ford, Forsman, Coovert, Kim, Martin, Gaskin

Let's take a look at some short comics from the remarkable graduating class of 2008 from CCS, many of whom spent time editing the Sundays anthology.

Simple Routines #18, by J.P. Coovert. Coovert's been honing his craft as an autobio cartoonist for some time now, and his most recent results have been increasingly poignant and poetic. That includes his line, which he has simplified thanks to the choice of using a thin weight (exactly the same as the weight he uses for his lettering), which gives each panel a sense of compositional unity. Considering that he uses a narrative caption for most of his panels, this is the biggest key to their success. His figures are simple and iconic without sacrificing clarity or expressiveness, which is important because Coovert explores the emotions he feels for his wife, friends and parents in many of the anecdotes described here. The final story, where he remembers playing with a sick kid as a child as a formative moment for how he views life, is poignant without being maudlin or too self-important. Through sheer hard work and repetition, Coovert has made the daily diary strip more than just an artist's exercise.

Teen Creeps #1 and Working On The End Of The Fucking World, by Chuck Forsman. Forsman is one of the smartest and most thoughtful cartoonists working today, with an intellectual curiosity about process and themes that reflects his status as cartoonist, editor and publisher. That curiosity has led to Forsman publishing several interview zines through his Oily Comics concern, as well as the Working On... zine that's comprised of commentary, an interview, sketches and thumbnails from his most well-known comic that began as a series of eight-page minis. Forsman notes that it's mainly an excuse to "play with 2 color printing", and he sounds a bit anxious about being pretentious in the interview, but it's clear that this is something he takes seriously, and rightly so. Documenting that process in a manner that's visually interesting and challenging was obviously a puzzle of its own for him. Teen Creeps is his new series of short stories involving "loosely connected" characters over time. The first issue starts a story featuring Hilary and her bad-ass friend Dawn. Hilary is slut-shamed by a jock at a high school when she won't put out after he goes down on her. When Dawn catches wind of this, she kicks the kid spreading a rumor about Hilary in the groin, ignoring the inevitable lecture from school officials. Forsman's specialty is teenage characters, and this comic features him tackling the subject from a different perspective. It's not just that the lead characters are girls (a rarity for Forsman), it's that he's examining a different set of character dynamics than usual. This set of Teen Creeps story seems like it's going to focus in on the friendship between Dawn and Hilary, and the ways in which that friendship blurs and strains. As always, Forsman's character design is cartoony and grotesque in a manner that feels real, from Hilary's pointy nose and long, stringy hair to a kid's flat-top, spiky haircut.

Shadow Hills #1, by Sean Ford. It's a brand new series for Ford after working on Only Skin for several years. This time around, the focus seems to be on a couple of children: a mute boy who collapses near a small forest town, and a girl who fancies herself a would-be detective who discovers him. Told in retrospect by the girl, it hints at ominous, strange events that seem to indicate that the boy was far from ordinary. Ford seems to have varied his line weight a bit here, giving his line a more fragile, tremulous quality. Ford also sets up the stakes of this story more rapidly than in Only Skin, with its narrative structure immediately instilling a sense of menace and foreboding from the very beginning. It was a bit strange to see Ford work this small, after seeing the wide-open vistas of his last book, but he may be going for something more claustrophobic here.

Timber Run 1 and Dumpling King 1, 2 by Alex Kim. If you were to ask me about a particularly underrated cartoonist, Kim would be one of the first names I'd consider. His idiosyncratic and piercingly angular character design, his lush use of backgrounds, and his quirky sense of humor all punctuate his status as an outstanding writer of suspense and horror comics. Dumpling King, published by Oily Comics, promises to be a creepily-paced breakout work that brings him deserved attention. It's remarkable how quickly he's able to establish the premise and setting of this comic, as a prospective dumpling making decides to abandon his tutelage in favor of being the store's delivery man after the former holder of that spot kills himself. He wants to investigate for himself the mysterious Grace Chang and her sinister family despite the protestations of his mentor. Kim quickly sets up steam and fog as recurring visual motifs, painstakingly rendered in a stippled line that gives the vapor a density that looks dangerous. The changing covers are also carefully considered, as we switch from character to character in each issue and the moon slowly sets. This is beautiful and meticulous cartooning that's in total service to the demands of the immediately engrossing story. Kim draws the reader into his world with pointy noses and wrinkled faces. Timber Run is the first part of a horror comic that features one of Kim's favorite motifs: the cabin in the woods. The reader is slowly drawn into a family drama, an abandoned relative and his sister's family attempts to find him. If the horror here is perhaps more conventional, Kim plays around with expectations by putting the family's drama out front until the monster is revealed in gloriously over-the-top style. Kim leaves the reader on a nasty cliffhanger, making it clear that a happy ending is not guaranteed.

Gnomes, by Sam Gaskin. This is a bit of smudgy silliness from a cartoonist who has always used fantasy and pop-culture tropes and images to fuel his humor. The strips here range between quotidian activities to out-and-out gags, like a gnome tricking a troll into falling into a hole and then pissing on him. Many of them are more like "tickle fight", which involves two gnomes tickling each other with the tagline "everybody wins!" This is a deliberately lo-fi, bawdy version of the famous 1977 book of illustrations that set off the gnome craze, one where plot and character are less relevant than world-building. Of course, the world-building here mostly involves gnomes getting drunk on mead and eating pumpkin bread. It's an amusing concept that's as sloppily drawn as the original book was fastidious.

Gagger 1, by Dane Martin. Martin has long been a cartoonist who's mashed together influences from the golden age of cartooning like EZ Segar with more modern influences like Tony Millionaire and Mark Beyer. Martin's comics have a feverish, nightmarish quality, even as they follow the adventures of cartoon birds who happen to be artists, animators and gagsmiths. There's a mix between characters that have a deliberate, energetic crudeness in terms of their rendering and a carefully-crafted set of backgrounds that feature intricate patterns and furiously-dashed marks. The eye doesn't rest on a Dane Martin page; instead, it dashes anxiously from image to image, never being allowed to relax or find comfort in any of the drawings. It's an anxiousness that's not unlike what Michael DeForge does on his pages, only cranked up to a more uncomfortable level. The main character here is a gag writer for "Uncle Saul" who's out of inspiration and ideas who takes a walk, only to reveal how useless and impotent he is a sentient creature, one completely unable and unwilling to help others. Of course, the character is ridden by guilt, because all of his emotions must center around his own negative conception of self no matter what. It's a powerful, bracing little comic that promises some fascinating insights into human interaction.

Sequart Reprints: Yet More MoCCA minis

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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There's always been a strong relationship between minicomics culture and zine culture. Indeed, one could make the argument that minicomics are one of the most vibrant subtypes of zines these days. Beyond the fact that they're relatively cheap and easy to make, minis also allow cartoonists to turn comics into art objects if they so desire. Another connection is that many personal zines tend to be autobiographical musings of the author, and that tradition is certainly prevalent in the minicomics scene. This article will examine a number of minis that are either autobiographical or deal with slice-of-life narratives. I'm going to try to resist giving detailed plot descriptions and instead focus on character and characterization, along with the specific look of the comic and what kind of impact it makes on characterization.

CROSS-COUNTRY, by MK Reed. MK Reed's newest feels like a screenplay, but she puts in enough comics-only flourishes to give the comic weight and substance. This one's about a cross-country road trip with a young guy who's part of a family of Wal-Mart-like stores, and an employee. Greg, the boss, is a boorish frat boy type whom Ben, the employee, despises. Greg is a vacant sleazeball and Ben is conflicted about being there--it's a summer job and he needs the money. Greg loves to sleep with young girls, and this first issue ends with Ben being forced to drive home a waitress that Greg slept with--to school, because she's only 15 years old.

Greg is actually the more interesting of the two lead characters, because he's so unrepentently awful and banal. Ben clearly hates himself in more ways than one, and is stewing over an old girlfriend. He obviously thinks he's morally superior to Greg, but the fact that he's enabling his boss' bad behavior makes him worse in some ways. I like this ambiguity in Reed's characters here, as well as the unusual page and panel composition she uses. That includes panels at odd angles like diagonals, eschewing a grid on certain pages, using diary-style narration in print outside the panels, and going to unusual close-ups. Reed's figure-work is crude but she continues to play to her strengths, focusing on gesture, body language and facial expressions. Reed's definitely one of my favorite mini-comics artists who specializes in the lives of young people; I'm glad that she's moved on to a slightly older age demographic after mostly writing about teenagers.

MATCHING JACKETS and SOURPUSS 1 by Robyn Chapman. Chapman is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design whose work I've been following for many years. She's one of the co-editors of the fascinating TRUE PORN anthologies as well as the driving force behind the enormously entertaining HEY, FOUR-EYES! zine. This pair of minis are obviously very personal and intimate; one is explicitly autobiographical and the other inspired by autobiographical events.

MATCHING JACKETS is a compilation of stories about old boyfriends. "Something's Wrong" is from TRUE PORN, and is a devastatingly personal account of her problems with sex with one particular boyfriend, and how this turned into an irreparable barrier. What I liked most about this story was the disconnect between "Robyn's" emotions and her physical reactions as a sexual being. When she reveals that it may be related to her evolving sexuality (being attracted to women), it's a painful moment, one where all further communication is impossible. A cheerier story is "Comfortable", a John Porcellino-style story where Chapman merges text and image in a free-flowing manner, abandoning panel gridlines altogether. This one retells a clearly-doomed but still-pleasant relationship from college, and is told in Chapman's sparer, cleaner line from her recent works. The nature of the narrative will feel familiar to anyone who recalls their first love from college, but it's her compositon that makes this the best story in the book. There's one page where she describes the first time she and her boyfriend told each other that they loved each other. The way she makes the eye follow her boyfriend laying in the grass, to the narrative, to an overhead view of a park, to Chapman in the bottom right hand corner, is a perfect example of assured and creative storytelling, neatly solving several visual problems.

SOURPUSS is the first chapter of a high school story, and it takes place in Chapman's native rural Alaska. There's a Chapman stand-in in Doris, an artist who hangs around with some nerd friends and can't relate to anyone else around in her redneck town. This comic is a well done but quite familiar account of teen alienation. In the first chapter, the dynamic between Doris and her friends is fairly predictable, down to her jealousy over one of them getting a girlfriend. Chapman's character design is the main attraction of this mini, along with her understanding of expression. I'll be curious to see where the story winds up going.

JAM IN THE BAND and PARTY @ HORROR BEACH, by Robin Enrico. Enrico's specialty is conjuring up atmospheres of particular youth scenes, and he creates that verisimilitude thanks to witty dialogue. JAM IN THE BAND is a short preview of a much longer work, and it had echoes of Brian Lee O'Malley's SCOTT PILGRIM and Jaime Hernandez' LOVE AND ROCKETS. It's about a music writer in New York who's about to see a well-known, all-female indy rock band--one that he knew quite well in the small college town they came out of. It's got that same indy rock vibe as SCOTT PILGRIM but uses the time-jumping techniques in those Locas stories. Despite those influences, Enrico has his own voice. His cartooning is simple, iconic and stylized, with a number of decorative flourishes. He's careful to keep his panels uncluttered, even when he's trying to get across a lot of information through visual cues. The small taste we get of the characters in this issue wasn't quite enough to get lost in their stories quite yet, but it does lay out the tensions nicely. I look forward to the larger work that's yet to come.

PARTY @ HORROR BEACH has several semi-auto-bio stories, some of which read like inside jokes. "Trapped In The Closet", however, put together a string of ridiculous situations and sustained them nicely as one coherent, funny narrative. It's about a Halloween party that Enrico's stand-in character attends, where he comes as a "Big Stupid Box" on a dare. There's a funny aside where two women note that since it's Halloween, they're required to dress in something Sexy--so one chooses to be Sexy Abe Lincoln and the other comes as Sexy John Wilkes Booth. He winds up fooling around with a woman (with a boyfriend) whom he had slept with before (at a drunken party) in a closet. When he's told that the woman is now engaged, and that her fiance was at this very party, he finds himself stuck in a closet for the night, hiding out. Enrico manages to play a sordid encounter for laughs, mostly at his own expense. What I like about this is the extreme short-sightedness of every character; the woman he sleeps with has no problem cheating on her fiance, until he gets wise and takes away their engagement ring, while Robin knows it isn't a good idea but does it anyway. Enrico's skill at humor is what distinguishes this autobio mini from others of its kind, along with that amusingly cartoony art (which greatly aides in evoking laughs).

DISCO MAXX by Katie Skelly  This brief mini has a mylar cover with a different design on every copy. While this is an autobiographical story, it's not really a narrative or even an anecodote, really. Instead, it's a series of memories as images, flowing together on a night when Skelly and a friend DJ'd a party at Syracuse. Skelly's style is spare and simplistic, emphasizing expression over form. It's a sweet, unambiguous account of a night where everything went magically right. It was the sort of night where one could sense great things happening as they unfolded, and the result is a series of memories that burned themselves into one's mind's eye quite vividly. Skelly's panel composition can be slightly cluttered; if anything, I'd like to see her simplify things even further. Still, I enjoy the way she presents memories and encounters on a page, especially how she constructs dialogue. Though this story was very sweet, she actually has a tart and witty voice, and I'd like to continue to see that fleshed out in longer narratives.

MY BRAIN HURTS #6, by Liz Baillie  Enrico and Skelly distance the reader from the emotional content of the material, either through humor (Enrico), narrative ambiguity (Skelly) or a cartoony drawing style. Liz Baillie, whose work I've reviewed here previously, goes in a different direction. She plunges us head-first into her characters' tumultuous emotional lives, and does so with dense, detail-packed panels. Her actual line is fairly thin, which lessens the punch of each particular panel (different from Robyn Chapman, who uses fairly thick blacks for her lines), but she adds mood to her panels with the heavy use of shadow, cross-hatching, blacks in a panel, etc.

All of this is in service to her story, and this particular issue deals with some unusual difficulties regarding young love for a teenaged lesbian. Baillie perfectly captures the awkwardness of an attempted sexual encounter, especially when her girlfriend paradoxically clings to her Catholic upbringing. Baillie gets this across in a page where the panels sit at odd angles to each other, overlapping and zooming in and out of intimate close-ups. It's a great page, one of several in the book where the page design has a direct influence on the book's emotional content. By the end of the issue, we have a real sense of the main character feeling as though she's hit rock bottom, with nowhere to belong. Baillie's become more adventurous as an artist as the series has proceeded, and the interesting choices she's made have deepened the book's emotional impact.

NO IN-BETWEEN #1-6, by Marion Vitus  I remember buying the first issue of this series at SPX several years ago, and was struck at how ambitious it seemed for a young artist to undertake a sprawling travelogue as their first work. It's obvious that this story, described as "fiction with autobiographical inspiration" (what Dean Haspiel calls "semi-auto-bio"), was a life-changing and enormously meaningful event for Vitus. The plot can be described simply: an aspiring artist is stuck in a dead-end job, awaiting a backpacking trip to Europe with her long-distance boyfriend as the catalyst needed to get her out of a rut. When he unexpectedly dumps her, she decides to go anyway--by herself. I like that Vitus took a sharp turn away from standard 20-something romance drama and went in a very different direction. It's clear that this isn't just a series of observations on travel, but rather an attempt at using travel as a means of finding out what she really wants in life, and how to get it.

The fact that it took Vitus nearly four years to produce six 8-page minis just points to how much of a struggle it can be for a working artist to find the time to concentrate on their personal projects. Among other things, this mini is obviously Vitus' laboratory in attempting to grow as an artist. She changed her rendering style twice before settling on a look that seems to be a good fit. The first issue was a pretty clear-line affair; there weren't many blacks used, and she kept her figures fairly simple. I also noticed that Vitus loves to play with gesture, posture and expression as emotional cues; there's a squirminess to her stand-in character that reflects her own discomfort with the world, and at times, herself.

The second issue, which takes place in Italy, was much more heavily rendered than the first. At times, it was over-rendered. That killed a lot of the spontaneity on the page and made her figures look stiff. By the end of the third issue, she loosened up a bit, especially on a page where she gets goosed on a subway. In the sixth issue, Vitus does a nice job of keeping that spontaneity going while still getting across the beauty of the surrounding countryside. It's fitting that in a story about transformation, growth and becoming comfortable with oneself, Vitus the artist continues to grow and struggle with the lessons she learned as Vitus the character. The difference is that the story crystalized that moment into a series of epiphanies. The struggle to hold onto those feelings of self-discovery and relay it on paper continues to inform the way Vitus is slowly unfolding the story.

THE ROSIE STORIES, by Diana Tamblyn  As a storyteller, Tamblyn is clear, restrained, matter-of-fact and has an assured, bold line. After reading a number of stories involving teens or young adults, it was an interesting change of pace to read stories about becoming a mother. Tamblyn's tone is gushingly emotional and joyful; there's no attempt or thought of an attempt to put any distance between her plain feelings and the reader. She ameliorates that bluntness by using a couple of different techniques in these stories about her daughter. Tamblyn either tenderly narrates her stories in a realistic style, or else simplifies her line for stories told from her daughter's point of view. It's a more cartoony, John Stanley-esque style that's very appealing. Throughout the comic, there's a genuine warmth that comes across on each page. At times, it's a bit overwhelming for a reader.

While I can certainly appreciate how much a new mother loves her child, there's not much going on in the first story other than an expression of that love, along with trying to capture perfect moments. It felt more like something you'd send out to your relatives than work for the general public. The Rosie-as-narrator stories work a bit better, especially when Tamblyn introduces some light elements of conflict. The last story, where Tamblyn relates her paranoia regarding her child's safety and her own desire to become a better person, is the most interesting by far. There's a lot of skill and sincerity in this comic, but one senses that Tamblyn isn't sufficiently distanced from the initial event to write a compelling narrative about her experiences. I'd like to see her take cues from the last story in the mini and add a bit of perspective to what is obviously an amazing, life-changing odyssey.

DUMB JERSEY WHITE BOY #3, by Mark McMurray McMurray is a very strong storyteller, using a variety of approaches to give a powerful sense of time and place. His stories usually mix comic and horrific real-life events, and this issue is no exception. It's a collection of short stories about his father from various points in his life. The most accomplished is a short story he submitted to the SPX anthology some years back, and it's a beautifully-illustrated memory of his childhood. Young Mark is obsessed with the new Fantastic Four cartoon, which his father interrupts by talking about his failing marriage. While he weeps and holds his son, young Mark can only think that Jack Kirby was definitely involved in the cartoon! The stage is set for the other stories in the book, where McMurray displays a combination of ambivalence and bemused affection for his father. The latter stories were originally done as correspondence, and have the vibrancy that a quick sketchbook drawing possesses. McMurray has a very assured line and an excellent eye, and augments these skills with a keen sense of when to exaggerate and when to reel things in. As a writer, McMurray keeps a layer of humorous distance up when discussing his father--he talks about what his father has done or said, but never spells out his own feelings. He prefers to let the anecdotes speak for themselves, a tactic that works to his advantage.

PHASE 7 #11, by Alec Longstreth. This is a follow-up to PHASE 7 #10, wherein Longstreth starts to lay out his entire history of comics involvement. This issue picks up with Longstreth deciding to make creating comic books his life. The last issue was all about how he became immersed in comics and came to start drawing them, but this one focuses on how he developed his working method, the ways in which he started interacting (and drawing strength from) fellow cartoonists, and how he came to terms with his own publishing schedule. Longstreth uses a cute framing device to explain why he published issues out of order, giving a long and very specific autobiographical story some structure. What I find interesting about Longstreth is that while he acknowledges the huge debt he owes to those cartoonists who inspired him over the years, he doesn't seem to be quite aware yet of his own role in inspiring his peers. Simply put, it's rare to see an artist this completely devoted to his art, who thinks about it in terms of the years that are ahead of him, and who provides such a steadfast example of hard work being its own reward. The fact that he has such an enormous appetite for different kinds of storytelling and doesn't seem to favor one over another is also interesting; he's very much an "in-between" sort of artist. He lists BONE as his favorite comic ever, but is also a big fan of Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. Likewise, his comics go from gags to autobio to adventure, and his art ranges from stick-figure (inspired by Matt Feazell) to intensely cross-hatched and detailed; he refuses to impose limits on what he can do.

Even though he's already published quite a few comics, I get the sense that he's still working through his influences. As solid a craftsman and storyteller as he is, Longstreth is not yet an innovator or visionary as an artist. He's an artist that I think will plow through a series of "steady-states", wherein he will master a storytelling or artistic technique, and then face either a new problem to solve or influence to absorb and then adapt that into his routine. Eventually, these years of internalizing these adaptations through sheer hard work will coalesce into something we've never seen before. Until that time, his audience will have a great many unusual, enjoyable comics to read.

ANTELOPE EATER, by Juliacks. This is an intensely stylized, painful story of a young boy struggling with his mother's illness and her resentment towards him. What's most striking about this is the sophistication of the page design, coupled with raw, primitive art. The way Juliacks combines text and image on a page, such that the text should be seen both as part of the image and as a separate message, makes for an intimate, almost suffocating experience as a reader. The images are not pleasant, because the experience of watching one's mother die as she wishes you had never been born is certainly not pleasant. The boy retreats into fantasy, becoming a superhero who can save her. The images switch from purely grotesque to fanciful, though the tiny text reminds us of the painfulness of the experience. The last page, with a number of small panels that intersperse her vitals with images of a heart (acting as both literal and metaphorical agent), is shattering--especially, once again, with the way she integrates text into the image. Juliacks has a powerful voice, and the multitude of influences on her art (see her website) point to someone who can do some very interesting things in the world of comics.

THE OTHERS, by Matt Madden. Madden is well-known for his formalist experiments, devising whole stories around clever storytelling constructions. He seems endlessly interested in taking the basic format of comics--panel, page, images, letters, panel-to-panel transitions, point of view--and scrambling them so as to force the audience to see what's happening "backstage", so to speak. At the same time, he's able to imbue this interest with enough humanity to make these more than mere technical exercises. THE OTHERS is a brief, circular exercise in switching points-of-view. It reminds me a bit of the Richard Linklater film SLACKER in that we are privy to a character's narrative for a few moments, and then we sail off into another character's narrative when their paths cross. The difference is that as a comics audience, Madden gives us access to their interior, running monologue. Each character happens to be studying the next character, wondering about their histories and motivations. Starting with one young man in a cafe, we zip from character to character until we arrive back at the original character--and an attempt to make contact. "Other" here refers to our essential isolation as human beings, and how difficult (and often startling) it can be to try to genuinely break through that layer of alienation. Madden's line is as loose and sketchy as ever; I sense that he prefers that his work should look a bit fuzzy so as to provide less of a shock to the reader when he starts shuffling his formalist deck. Madden really found his voice doing these sorts of comics, and they're always satisfying to read--though they'll never have the emotional impact of more personal work.

THE OTHER SIDE and DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES, by JP Coovert and Hope Larson. These comics have modest ambitions, but the ambiguity in both made them linger a bit. THE OTHER SIDE is a seemingly simple look at a sleepover with two boys who are best friends. They scamper around their neighborhood at night in a carefree manner, peeking into the windows of various people. Until one of them spies a couple having sex--one of the boys is fixated, and the other gets nervous and wants to leave. This leads to an argument, accusations of being gay, and then an attempt to pretend the whole thing didn't happen. While never apologizing, I liked the way Coovert found ways for the characters to nonetheless reconnect without language--especially through the use of physical contact.

DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES is a beautifully-designed mini (black cover, black-embossed lettering, and 2 yellow lines to represent the highway) where Coovert and Hope Larson collaborated. Both stories reflect on each other, as they're both about the briefness of life and the painful awareness that it can be taken away at any time. Larson's story has her coming upon a rabbit that had been struck by a car . As she tried to comfort it, she noticed that the rabbit's mate saw them near the edge of the highway. The rabbit she held died, but the other was shooed away to safety, despite the obvious urge to search for his mate. Not for long, however--the rabbit returned, only to meet his own death on the highway, joining his mate. "Driving In The Rain" is about Coovert wondering where his better half is and getting a phone call from her that she'd been in a wreck. He raced to get her, worst-case scenarios burning through his thoughts, until he found her OK--and presented him with a touching romantic gesture. The sentiment of the story is a nice balance to the downbeat ending of Larson's half of the mini. It's the nature of mortality, that we're all essentially living on borrowed time, and this mini eloquently gets at that truth in just ten pages. Visually, Larson punctuates her bold black line with all sorts of decorative touches that act as narrative clues, while Coovert keeps things clear and simple. His art is all about economy of line and advancing the emotional narrative of his story with a minimum of fuss.

NEW CONSTRUCTION #1, by Kevin Huizenga Huizenga is a fast-rising star in the world of comics, with an Ignatz book (GANGES) from Fantagraphics and his own series (OR ELSE) and a collection (CURSES) from Drawn & Quarterly. However, he got his start with his minicomics series SUPERMONSTER, and he continues to make minis to work out ideas, provide anecdotes, and show off some interesting work from his sketchbook. There's a sense that this is autobiographical, because it's displaying ephemera and sketches straight from the cartoonists' pen, and a number of the pages are about his working methods.

A number of the strips here were "deleted scenes" from GANGES #1. I have no idea if he actually meant to include these scenes but didn't have room, drew them but decided they didn't fit, or did them after the fact as a lark, but they're all a hoot. That issue depicts the life of a couple at home, focusing on minutiae and moment-to-moment beats & rhythms. Both of the scenes depicted here were a lot more light-hearted than what we saw in the actual comic, and I can see why they weren't included. Still, it was fun to see Wendy Ganges tell Glenn to stop thinking sexualized thoughts about her, or see her fall on the floor laughing because of a trick Glenn was pulling with snacks. I also rather enjoyed the very odd "The Hundred Most People In America", a riff on celebrity and other such lists featuring a number of oddball characters and descriptions. Any fan of Huizenga should track down a copy.

ECLIPSE and THE ANATOMY OF US, by Karla Krupala. Krupala has serious chops as an artist. ANATOMY OF US is less a story than a self-described "work in progress", where she "sketched various relationships in states of disorder". The results are very interesting in this mini, but they've obviously not resulted in a coherent whole as of yet. Krupala likes static images and using them in unexpected ways. On one page, we see the back of a skeleton as a means of conveying a conveying a dialogue, doubling as an anatomical chart. On another page, we see a woman's legs, and her shadow is formed out of the word "take" repeated multiple times. Krupala seems to be emphasizing our essential aloneness and the near-impossibility of communication. In particular, words not only fail in trying to connect people together, they inevitably serve as weapons. ECLIPSE is a story set in outer space, but the themes are similar: loneliness, the possibility of connection, and the nature of that connection. I felt tantalized by these two minis, wanting to see more by the artist. I especially wanted to see her themes fleshed out a bit more in longer stories. Her development as an artist over the span of a year was remarkable, especially in terms of her figures. They became more assured and bolder in ANATOMY, though her composition in both comics was striking.

ALICE IN NEW YORK #4, by Henry Chamberlain. I reviewed the first two issues of this series in entry #10 of this column, and was happy to see this issue pop up in my mailbox. I missed #3, but it was easy to catch up with what happened. This is the conclusion of Chamberlain's love letter to New York and Lewis Carroll, and it's interesting to see how his art has matured. He uses a thick line but is nice and loose with his figures. There's a pleasing, sketchy quality to them that meshes well for the slightly dreamy quality he embues in his story. The theme of the story is allowing oneself to become open to an awakening of imagination and the possibilities therein. The Henry character is guarded and uncertain, but clearly wants to find ways to break out. This issue is essentially one long battle of wits with the object of his affection, a woman who challenges him to break free of his self-imposed, over-intellectualized restraints and assumptions. This issue is very talk-heavy, but Chamberlain counters that with big panels that are well-composed. The central conceit of the series, that characters from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND are secretly aiding Henry in opening himself up to a new world, is kept mostly to the edges of the story, allowing the issue's central dialogue to take precedence. It's a smart decision, because there was definitely a danger in those fantasy elements overwhelming the emotional thrust of the story. Instead, Chamberlain was able to present the story of a character who overthinks things a little too much, who was able to find a way to lose himself to the immediacy of experience.

THE HOOKAH GIRL VOLUME 1, by Marguerite Dabaie. The subtitle of this comic is "Growing Up Christian Palestinian In America", and Dabaie wastes little time in addressing some very sticky points about this subject. She cleverly begins this collection of brief stories and anecdotes with "Should/Am", which is a series of paper-doll cutouts. Dabaie goes from stereotype to stereotype, boldly drawing humor out of a cut-out of "Martyr" ("NOT in Israel To Sight-See!"), alongside "Muslim", "Seductress" (a harem girl costume), "Revolutionary" and finally "Hungry Artist". It's a direct shot across the bow to start a collection, and Dabaie makes her bluntness work by using dark humor and the convention of a child's activity.

The rest of the stories in the book range from light-hearted memories as a child to pointed observations on today's political climate. A story about her family stealing grape leaves from wine orchards (prefaced by the technique on how to roll a grape-leaf) was funny, as was a story about the ways in which Palestinian-Americans go to extremes in connecting with their culture. It's clear that Dabaie is conflicted on a number of matters relating to the Palestinian cause. In a story about hijacker Leila Khaled, it's obvious that Dabaie is drawn to her because she was a woman who acted boldly in the Arab world, and not just because she drew media attention to the Palestinian cause. There's another story called "The BestEST Joke" where someone tells her a Palestinian joke (not knowing that she was half-Palestinian), and she doesn't know how to react.
My favorite story in the collection was "NOW", an acidic critique of Americans using the kaffiyeh, a traditional piece of cloth, as a fashion statement. ("Go against 'the man' Now. In style!") I think Dabaie is currently most skilled as a satirist; she has an elegant thin-line in those drawings that really brings out the cutting humor in her concepts. I also admire her simplified, stripped-down style that she used in "The BestEST Joke" and the grape leaf story. The stories using thicker blacks are somewhat less successful visually, feeling slightly over-rendered and drawn with a less confident hand. Still, Dabaie was bold in trying so many different styles for her first collection of work, and she has a strong storytelling voice. Her point of view and experiences are also obviously unusual in the world of comics, but it's not just that point of view that makes her distinctive as an artist. Her brains, sense of humor, and graphic design sense are the engine that manages to link her memories and opinions in such a bold presentation. I'm eager to see how she grows as an artist.

STABBED! and BERNIE, by Cheryl Gladstone. These autobiographical comics score major points for being really funny. Gladstone uses her background to generate laughs out of family drama, thanks mostly to the outsized personality that is her mom, Bernie. She's a "Jewlipino", a rare person who is both Jewish and Filipino. In BERNIE, Gladstone does a series of one-page gag strips with Bernie's point of view on all sorts of things. My favorite is Bernie telling young Cheryl that she was adopted, even though she wasn't. Another strip, "Motherly Advice" has Bernie offering dating advice to Cheryl's sister: "No blowjobs!" STABBED! relates another crazy anecodte: Cheryl's brother and mother both threaten to kill themselves as a means of trying to one-up each other. Her brother finally tops her by impulsively stabbing himself in the leg, which is a cold dose of reality for everyone. That bit of insanity leads everyone to cope the best they can: Bernie starts organizing her shoe closet, Cheryl starts writing in her livejournal, and her sister goes shopping. BERNIE is the later mini, and it shows. Gladstone's line is both bolder and simpler. It's much more assured, with better panel composition. STABBED! loses some of its comedic impact simply because the figures are shakier, and Gladstone tries to compensate by overrendering the backgrounds. BERNIE is more successful on a visual level simply because Gladstone makes sure to emphasize her characters above all else. She has a strong comedic voice and manages to evoke humor from a situation without relying on distancing herself from the reader. Reading these two comics made me want to see more from her.

KING-CAT #66, by John Porcellino. To say that John Porcellino is a revered figure in minicomics circles is an understatement. He long ago mastered an economy of line that strips away everything but what is essential, especially in terms of emotional content. His stories range from standard narratives to wisps of memory to story poems, all grasping at getting across the sublime on paper. "Football Weather" is a lighthearted story about playing football with the neighborhood kids, with more funny moments than the usual Porcellino story. I especially liked the revulsion he felt at the possibility of having to play on a team called "The Packers", given his status as a life-long Bears fan. I love the way this story looks--the stripped-down lines still depicting action and motion so well, various emotions shown with just a line or squiggle, and the way he creates a rainy fall atmosphere. It's beautiful and evocative. This issue is like a Porcellino primer, because he goes from a straight-ahead story like "Football Weather" to an illustrated poem in "Blue Light" to an almost wordless meditation on scenery in "Freeman Kame". Porcellino writes many of his stories on a small scale--a memory here, an anecdote or observation there. It's that very scale that creates an intimacy and warmth for a reader, that slowly lets us understand Porcellino's point of view instead of him jamming it into our faces. The urge to create autobiographical work is often a narcissistic one, wherein the creator is the most important "character" in their story. Porcellino manages to side-step that tendency by neither overselling nor underselling himself, but rather by revealing himself to be a small but not insignificant part of the world--just like everyone and everything else.

Autobio Minis: Shapiro, Harbin, Coovert, Baylis

Crushable: Ricky Nelson, Crushable: John Lennon, and The Hand Game, by Janice Shapiro. I read the first iteration of Shapiro's Crushable series in an online anthology, and it's a clever twist on the sort of sexual history comics that MariNaomi and David Heatley have done. It's a history of the crushes she's had on a variety of pop cultural figures from her girlhood to the present, which is an interesting method of getting at other formative events in her life over the years. Shapiro's line is scribbly and messy, leaning toward simplicity when depicting herself or her sister but more toward a scratchy realism when depicting her idols. In Ricky Nelson, six year old Janice crushes on the squeaky-clean TV and pop star, and that crush is a gateway toward discovering that her older sister's best friend loved Nelson as well. That gave her the in she needed to essentially take over that friendship, so long as Ricky Nelson was involved. Shapiro depicts this miraculous, almost utopic time when the two of them danced to Nelson's records and sat arm-in-arm when he was on TV, earning Janice the right to even get invite over to her friend's house. When Janice accidentally destroys the speaker of her parents' "hi-fi", so too is the friendship dissolved without that cultural medium. Shapiro notes that her crush was essentially transferred from Nelson to her friend, and when that ended, so too did her cultural infatuation.

John Lennon speaks to a different phenomenon. When the Beatles broke in America, Paul McCartney ("the cute Beatle") was the most beloved member of the group amongst teenage girls, and John was the least adored. Not so for Shapiro, who loved John but was forced by peer pressure to renounce that affection in favor of Paul. Shapiro muses on why she felt that connection, from sensing his leadership & intelligence, to the first sign of possessing a masochistic personality to an existential understanding of the darkness that lies at the heart of everything--but ultimately seems to chalk it up to the notion of the fact that we can't control whom we happen to fall in love with on any level. What's interesting is the shame she felt in later years for lying about it, a lie that betrayed her aesthetic sensibilities as much as anything. Speaking of masochism, The Hand Game is an interesting anecdote about playing this particular slap game with her father. The game is one where both parties hold out their hands and one person puts their hands on top of the other person's. They then try to slap one of the other person's hands as hard and fast as possible. If they miss, then it's the other person's turn. What was fascinating about this anecdote was that her father was considerably better at it than she was but refused to take it easy, leaving her hands bright red from slaps, even when she asked him if he'd take it easy. At the same time, each time he offered her a chance to end the game, she refused. Afterwards, her sister demanded to play the game with him. This was an interesting metaphor for the things we do to get attention from our parents as children, no matter how painful it might be.Shapiro reminds me a bit of Lynda Barry, both in terms of the crude but enthusiastic nature of their lines and the wistfulness with which they discuss the children in their stories.

Diary Comics #4, by Dustin Harbin. When Harbin handed me a copy of Diary Comics #4, I told him, "I thought you said you were done with diary comics." He replied, "I had something to say." Indeed he did. Rather than the simple exercise in daily comics making (and a slow, tentative reveal of Harbin's inner demons) that marked his first three entries, Harbin here tentpoles a harder look at himself and the way he interacts with the world around events that force him to interact with others, namely comic-book conventions. Harbin's self-image as he presents it in the strips in the first half of the book is earnest, slightly goofy and self-deprecatory, often setting himself up for a gag. That all changes with "Boxes", a five-part series of strips that takes up the second half of the collection.

"Boxes" is by far Harbin's densest, harshest self-examination and it's probably the best thing he's done as an artist so far. The first three sections deal with the long break in autobio strips, the vagaries of the passage of time, a brief reprise of the funny and perceptive report he did about Canada's Doug Wright Awards at the Toronto Comics & Arts Festival (TCAF), and a brief recapitulation of the sort of strip he likes to do about conventions. At the end of each part, he stops the story cold and alerts the reader that this is a diversion and isn't what he really wanted to talk about. That in itself is an interesting meta-device that clues the reader in that Harbin is avoiding something. In the fourth part, we get to spend a lot of time in Harbin's head as he prepares to go do a post-awards dinner with many of his comics idols. Harbin is self-conscious to a degree where it's no longer so much about saying something stupid or offensive, but rather doubting the very possibility of communication itself. Harbin very cleverly plays around with time, space and point of view in this strip, eventually fading into Kevin Huizenga-style pastoral scenes as a way of representing his drifting mind, popping back into dinner at various intervals. I laughed when he started talking about dinner going well despite his feeling stressed in a regular word balloon (rather than a narrative caption or thought balloon), only to have Chester Brown interrupt him by saying, "Dustin, we can hear you.".

The last part of "Boxes" focuses on a review that Tom Spurgeon gave him on Diary Comics #3, where he says "The result is a comic about a life being lived for the sake of presenting amusing comics". I'm not sure I entirely agree with that point of view, given Harbin's strips about dealing with depression and other insights into his own feelings. I do agree that Harbin is almost afraid to talk about the way he perceives the feelings of others. Harbin's reaction was to agree with the review to an interesting extreme: he says "One thing I've learned, in the process of doing these comics, is that I'm fake, very fake..fake like 'pretend to be...something' then forget that you're pretending." In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Even as Harbin writes that he sometimes has trouble making real connections to people because of the way he has constructed their personae in his mind, the self he projects is kind, curious, self-reflective, funny, goofy and awkward in a sort of endearing way. Sartre has said much the same thing about identity in that the masks we think we wear are who we are in a real sense, or at least part of who we are. Harbin seems not so much fake but unmoored, as the self-image he projects is built on the shifting sands of depression. That's a harsh realization he shares on the last page of the comic, where he understands that he's stuck with the arduous task of recreating his self on a moment-to-moment basis or else find a way to fix his foundation. The latter is an even more arduous task, in part because the "how" in doing so is elusive (therapy? medication?) and mysterious even before trying to do so. That realization goes beyond the kind of deflective self-deprecation of earlier strips to the essence of a problem that goes far beyond the ability of self-expression on the page to handle. Leaving the comic without a pat answer for himself or the reader is an act of courage and an eloquent, if perhaps not consciously intended, response to Spurgeon's critique. As a reader, it was the first time that Harbin's used his top-notch rendering skills to provide a counterbalance to weightier matters, and for the first time I find myself drawn to Harbin's work for something other than its sheer charm. I wasn't wrong in my last review when I mentioned that Harbin seemed ready to move on to something more substantial than his preceding Diary output; I just didn't expect that substance to come in the form of another autobio comic.

So Buttons #5, by Jonathan Baylis and various artists. Baylis continues to improve both as a writer and a self-publisher, as this comic looks attractive without being too slick. The eye-catching cover by Tom Scioli, dramatizing a pet-related anecdote, is funny because it allows Scioli to do his usual kinetic shtick ("covering" Jack Kirby) with an an otherwise quiet comic. The actual story, "So...Extracted" was drawn by Paul Westover in a full-color, slightly cartoony style that didn't take away Baylis' anxiety about his pet getting some dental work done, but it did take away some of potential melodrama from the strip. "So...Caffeinated" was simply a great yarn of an anecdote, drawn sketchily by the also-developing Thomas Boatwright. What Baylis is starting to do well is give his illustrators space to have fun with his scripts; Boatwright's exaggerated figurework and the way he uses colors helps exaggerate the humor of the piece.

Switching gears, "So...Escalated" is almost entirely in black & white and contains an excellent gag about Schindler's List. Drawn by Noah Van Sciver in his trademark scratchy, heavily cross-hatched style, Baylis balances the intense gravity of having seen the film with a friend in a theater with a joke that out of necessity lightens the mood. Finally, "So...Brisk", drawn by Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg, once again takes a fairly lightweight anecdote and gives it weight and structure with confident characterization and allowing the artist to do what she does best: pleasant, simple and expressive character work. The light purple wash balances the linework nicely, a nice complement to the story about Baylis initially ignoring what seems to be hokey advice from his mother, only to find that mom knows best (sometimes). Baylis made sure to assign stories that played to the strengths of the artists he worked with, something that Harvey Pekar did so well for so long.

Salad Days, and Simple Routines #14-15, by J.P. Coovert.If Shapiro's work is about revealing bigger truths about herself through anecdotes, Harbin's are about how hard it is to communicate in a meaningful way, and Baylis' are a way of expanding anecdotes into vignettes, then Coovert's comics have are largely about being present and expressing gratitude for those moments that inspire joy. Coovert hasn't drawn nearly as much attention as other grads of the Center for Cartoon Studies, in part because his output has been steady but simple. His work isn't boundary-pushing or revolutionary, but rather focuses in on craft, character and the electric feeling of aesthetic & personal connections. Coovert gives the reader that in small doses in Simple Routines, which mirrors Harbin's work in the way it details going to conventions, visiting friends and amusing interactions with his wife. Coovert doesn't use comics as a form of therapy or a way of venting frustrations; instead, this is a graphic document of the ways in which his life is fun and rewarding in any number of ways. There's an utter lack of pretentiousness as Coovert flits from anecdote to anecdote: he's a happy, well-adjusted guy who loves his wife, accepts his limitations and tries to patiently expand his horizons as an artist.

At the same time, there's an almost child-like glee with how he sees the world, even as the understanding creeps in that he's not a kid anymore. That feeling is explored in Salad Days, a story about spending a weekend with a childhood friend, with the idea that they'll spend the weekend eating pizza, playing video games and drinking soda. The comic is rife with asides about the compromises they're making in their everyday, responsible lives while wishing they could do exactly what they want to do, all the time. Wistfulness begins to dominate the discourse of the comic until Coovert's character decides that they should tip over a port-a-john as a nod to their days together as boys when they used to get into mischief. That leads to an inadvertent, frantic scamper away from a passing police cruiser, with Coovert realizing that he can't get in trouble for something so dumb. They manage to get away with it, literally reaching for the stars as they hide out by a river, only to find them out of reach. It's a sweet moment that brings presentness into their friendship, taking them out of pure nostalgia and creating a new, thrilling moment of connection. Sure, that moment came about through a juvenile act, but that act was a symbolic corrective for nostalgia. As always, Coovert's simple line and clear design sense made these and his journal comics quite pleasant to look at; his use of color in Salad Days is crisp and understated. I'm not precisely sure what kind of cartoonist he's going to evolve into at this point; I know he'll be illustrating some work for First Second, but I'm not quite sure what sort of writer he's going to be. It's obvious that he'll apply his finely-honed craft to whatever he does.

CCS: Off-Beat Advisors

This is a companion piece to my article "Cartoonists Leading Cartoonists", which will appear in the epic issue #301 of The Comics Journal. I interviewed nearly three dozen students, alumni, mentors and faculty from the Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT regarding how the mentoring process works for second-year students. These students spend the year working on their thesis, turning to their advisors for guidance, suggestions, and critique. The nature of that relationship differed from student to student and advisor to advisor. I didn't have room to include every interesting response in my article, so I will be publishing some bonus material here at High-Low. This article will focus on some advisor choices that were off the beaten path, given that two of them work on kid-oriented, highly mainstream properties and another is best known as a publisher.

Holly Foltz, '10

The Comics Journal: Who was your thesis advisor?

Holly Foltz: Jim Lawson (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Planet Racers, Paleo)


TCJ: Why did you choose this individual as your advisor?

HF: Jim is both a writer and an artist and has been working on one of my favorite comics since their humble beginnings in the 80s. Looking at his work, he's really a master of his craft. His experience is really well-rounded and he knows how to work the comics medium to its full storytelling potential.


TCJ: Before you started working with your advisor, what was your understanding of what the thesis process would be like?

HF: I thought the thesis process itself would be a lot easier than it turned out to be. I hoped to have very frequent interactions (via Skype and maybe in person) with Jim.


TCJ: What was the process of working with Lawson like? How hands-on was he?

HF: Jim was very encouraging. He always told me what was working and what I was doing well in addition to what needed improvement. One story of mine went through several edits before I got to the thumbnailing stage, and Jim was really helpful in that editing process. He was a great problem solver,too, so if something (for example, too much text in a small panel) wasn't working, he'd have a solution (break up the text in a couple panels or simply fill the whole panel with words, with a small character head on the bottom).


TCJ: How much of an influence do you feel he had on you as an artist and in what ways?

HF: Unfortunately, I didn't send Jim a whole lot of finished art, because I was struggling with one story for long, but what art he did see, he liked. I'm not sure if my style changed at all, but it was validating to hear from Jim that he enjoyed it.


TCJ: How much of that influence was pre-existing, and how much came as a result of how he worked with you on your thesis?

HF: I definitely entered the student-advisor relationship with stars in my eyes, as I've been an admirer of Jim's for awhile. I might have been influenced just from reading and enjoying his work. After having him as an advisor, I pay a lot more attention to detail and the small things that can make a comic stand out.


TCJ: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

HF: I learned that my work can hold its own, which was something I doubted for a long time. I really gained a lot of confidence.


TCJ: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with your advisor?

HF: I probably didn't take advantage of Jim as a resource as much as I could have. Our communications weren't too frequent and I think I could have gotten more out of our relationship than I did.


TCJ: Was the experience all that you had hoped it would be?

HF: My experience was different than what I anticipated, and I do regret not taking more initiative when it came to asking advice from my advisor, but I still learned and gained a lot and having him as my advisor made a difference in my work.


TCJ: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

HF: I would advise other cartoonists to request someone with a lot of experience who has seen success in the business for a long time. If someone's work has held up for years and been consistently well-read and received, they must be doing something right!


Jim Lawson, Foltz' Advisor:

TCJ: What was it about this role that appealed to you enough to take it on, given your busy schedule?

Jim Lawson: I think that I’ve been a frustrated teacher. I even looked into going back to school a few years back, to get my teaching certificate.

However, mostly I probably have to blame it on this girl, Maddi Yale. I met Maddi and her family here at the studio two years ago, easily. Maddi was a sweet kid- in high school at the time and one of the most hardcore Turtle fans that I’ve ever met. The meeting was pretty normal but after Maddi returned to California she contacted me with a request. For her senior project, she asked me if I would mentor her in the creation of a comic book. I agreed, and for that year, we established between us a teacher/student relationship towards the goal of completing that book. That experience was a very positive one for me, so when Holly approached me with basically the same request, it was pretty much a no-brainer.


TCJ: What did you see as your role with regard to the student, or did you leave that up to each individual?

JL: Because I was a working comic artist at the time, I must admit that I was pretty much hands off. I was here for questions or to provide feedback when Holly asked for it. However, the responsibility to make creative decisions or to get the work done on time was up to her. It’s a tricky thing; for instance, when Holly decided which story that she wanted to go with, I had a suggestion that there was just too much content, and that we begin the story at another point and try to fill in some of the backstory through a series of flashbacks. I don’t know if this helped her, as it seemed to cause a new set of problems as to how to do that. I think Holly had a certain vision in her head about how her story would unfold and I messed with that—it caused us to get bogged down.


TCJ: What was your understanding of what the mentor role would entail when you
agreed to participate, and how has that changed over time?

JL: No change really. I’ve only mentored twice though, so my experience here might be somewhat limited. In both instances, the students would email me scripts or art, and I would review it and give feedback. Maddi, my first student, was very much a beginner. She was particularly anxious about her drawing-- everything from her characters to her panel layouts to what to use for her borders. Holly, on the other hand, was more experienced, and seemed to have all her fundamentals down. I think with Holly, my job was basically telling her how good she was, hah.


TCJ: What has been the most satisfying part of being a mentor?

JL: These kids are doing it because they love comics. As tough a business as this is to get work in, they’re in it for the love of it, and that’s what’s going to get them through the tough times.

It helps me to be around people like that. I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to have a career where I get to draw every day and work with characters that I love- I’ve been blessed. If I can somehow help someone else to realize their dreams then that’s a pretty special thing.


TCJ: What has been the most frustrating part of being a mentor?

JL: It’s got to be getting the work done. I think there’s an underestimation of how much actual work that goes into a comic. That and getting stuck on all the little details. For example, get the entire book laid out. If you have issues with some of the thumbnails, you can always go back later and fix some of the pages that you might not like. I think that it’s easy to lose momentum or to become overwhelmed. There’s nothing an Editor hates more than a late artist.


RANDALL DREW, ‘10

TCJ: Who was your thesis advisor?

Randall Drew: Tracy Yardley! Penciler/Cover artist for Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Universe monthly series.


TCJ: Why did you choose this individual as your advisor?

RD: He was actually my third choice. I chose him because I've followed his work with Archie Comics since he came on in 2005 and immediately saw he was bringing a unique experience and style to a comic that was drifting between many artists at the time.


TCJ: Before you started working with your advisor, what was your understanding of what the thesis process would be like?

RD: My understanding was that the thesis was to be an entirely self-developed and driven project, and that the advisor was to work closely with you in critiquing and guiding your work, helping you to keep focused and set goals.


TCJ: What was the process of working with this person like? How hands-on was he?

RD: Tracy and I communicated almost exclusively through email, tho we did speak on the phone a few times. I would send him work I had completed and wait for a response. Unfortunately, Tracy is working on several books a month, raising a newborn and in the proccess of buying a house...he's a very busy guy. It took, at times, a lot of effort on my end to get a timely response out of him, occasionally forging ahead without his input.


TCJ: How much of an influence do you feel he had on you as an artist and in what ways?

RD: I was always intrigued by Tracy's panel layouts. They were different, exciting, full of angles and lines that moved your eye around the page. Each one felt like it matched the needs of the story at that moment in time perfectly. I've tried often to emulate this.


TCJ: How much of that influence was pre-existing, and how much came as a result of how he worked with you on your thesis?

RD: Most of that specific influence was pre-existing. Tracy sort of let me move on with my project in whatever direction I wanted to go, allowing me to feel out what was wrong and right about the development of my pages.


TCJ: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

RD: Patience with the early stages. He helped me mostly slow down my process into a few more stages than I would have gone normally.


TCJ: Was the experience all that you had hoped it would be?

RD: Not entirely, but it's hard to judge how exactly these things are supposed to go. Over all I'm pleased with the effort Tracy made to advise me, despite his hectic schedule. I'll probably continue to send him my work long after CCS.


TCJ: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

RD: Be patient with your advisor, they have lives to live as well. Also, don't be afraid to ask your questions, that's why you're here at CCS in the first place.



JP Coovert ‘09


TCJ: Who was your thesis advisor?

J.P. COOVERT: Chris Staros, co-publisher of Top Shelf Comix


TCJ: Why did you choose this individual as your advisor?

JPC: I entered my second year at CCS with my fiancee moving away to Minneapolis to pursue a career. I thought this would be my chance to work hard and make comics my career (my original thought was to become a teacher of comics.) I chose Chris mainly because he has always been a big supporter of my comics, but also because I thought he would be able to help me craft my book into a better and more saleable piece of literature.


TCJ: Before you started working with your advisor, what was your understanding of
what the thesis process would be like?

JPC: My plan was to work on a graphic novel, getting Chris' input along the way. My idea was to spend a year getting an outline, then thumbnails, and the first chapter (basically a book proposal) finished.


TCJ: What was the process of working with Staros like? How hands-on was he?

JPC: I talked on the phone with Chris 3 or 4 times throughout the year after mailing him thumbnails. I thought it was best to send him large chunks of work and then really dig in. Chris was extremely thoughtful in his criticism. Thinking back, he gave just the right balance of constructive criticism and encouragement to keep me moving forward.


TCJ: How much of an influence do you feel he had on you as an artist and in what ways?

JPC: I think there is a pretty significant influence. I believe Chris and I share a somewhat similar taste in storytelling and I think that especially rubbed off on me working on my thesis project.


TCJ: How much of that influence was pre-existing, and how much came as a result of how he worked with you on your thesis?

JPC: Being able to talk to Chris about my project at length really provided a great insight into what he looks for as a publisher and reader. It's hard work constructing a longer story, be he was able to get me pointed in the right direction.


TCJ: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

JPC: As I was working on the project, interesting characters were paramount. Later I realized that trying to work on a book as a stepping stone to a career in comics is the worst possible way to move forward in a positive way on a project. He never spoke to me directly about this, but I think my short time talking to Chris helped me snap out of that mentality.


TCJ: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with your advisor?

JPC: I wish I could have sat down with him face to face at least a couple of times to talk comics. He seems like a rad dude to hang out with!


TCJ: Was the experience all that you had hoped it would be?

JPC: It was! He definitely held up his end of the bargain. If there was one regret I had, it would have to be that I didn't take enough advantage of his willingness to help me write and craft an awesome story!


TCJ: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

JPC: Take FULL advantage of your advisor. The wonderful thing about CCS is all the amazing talent and knowledge that is attracted to the school. They want to help, so let them! Ask them to!