Short Mini Reviews: D.Zender, T.Yamamoto, R.Van Ingram, J.T. Yost

Giving In, by Daniel Zender. This is a beautiful comic that looks as constructed as it is drawn. It looks painted and I can see brush strokes on some pages, but it also looks like MS Paint may have been used to fill in some parts of the page. Regardless, this a beautiful comic to look at, and it's well-designed enough to be effective as a silent comic. Indeed, with the striking use of pinks, greens, midnight blues and reds helping to code emotion, Zender didn't need text to tell this story about love, loneliness and accepting a brand new status quo when finding love. The story follows a young woman who goes on a camping trip with her friends. She's obviously depressed and lonely, thanks to her body language and some of the things she does in her apartment before the trip. Late at night, as she makes her way into the forest to pee, she encounters some strange pink lights. Intrigued instead of frightened, she makes her way into a tree, where she encounters some kind of tree spirit who is obviously every bit as lonely as she is. The story is marked by the silent decision she must make: stay in this weird environment where she's found a soulmate, or go back to her familiar world. In the end, she chooses to embrace the mystery of both her new environment and being in love. There is beauty and grace to be found in this comic, but there's also sadness as well, because the story notes that there's always a price to be paid for getting what we want.

The Rule, by Tetsuya Yamamoto. This is from Japan's BigUglyRobot, which publishes all sorts of odd comics in English. It follows a young man who visits some kind of vast repository of information, as he inquires after a small (nearly invisible) object that he finds in order to return it to its rightful owners. That snowballs into a wild, apocalyptic story where the young man encounters a race of aliens that originally owned the object, the other alien that had been hunting them down in order to get the object, and a hilarious final battle that devolves into an absurd Pokemon battle. It all makes sense in context, and Yamamoto's clever meta-storytelling provides all sorts of twists and turns along the way. One of those twists is going from a loose, sketchy style to an 8-bit video game style in the final battle. The looseness and fluidity of that earlier style stood in stark contrast to the deliberately stiff art during the battle scene, making that battle even funnier despite the fact that the stakes were no laughing matter. The title refers to how the protagonist was able to take advantage of extremely rigid thinking on the part of his opponent by changing the rules of reality (including having things like Microsoft Excel in his Pokeball) instead of trying to match the opponent on his own terms. Yamamoto manages to create a comic that's funny, mysterious and exciting, playing on standard comics tropes in order to come up with some new curves.

Loser Comix #2, by Richard Van Ingram. These are underground comics in the tradition of Robert Crumb and Skip Williamson, full of heavily-rendered drawings that parody pop culture and politics. This issue was the end result of a Kickstarter campaign and it shows, with high production values and full color throughout. There's a plague story that's a thinly-veiled political allegory that has some genuinely funny lines and a densely inked, horrific quality to the art. Van Ingram's visual sense is perhaps a couple of steps ahead of his ideas, like the Loser Tarot. It's a funny concept that's beautifully-illustrated, but the actual ideas "The Ex-Wife", "The Republican" are on the bland side. The Peanuts parody Chunky Brown is tedious at best, turning Charlie Brown and Linus into loser hipster types, Lucy in a capitalist femme fatale (in one panel, her nipples poke through her shirt for no discernible reason) who sends them to work at a used bookstore. That latter development was clear Van Ingram's way of getting back at his awful used bookstore job, which was probably cathartic for him but not especially relevant for the reader. There's an accurate but tedious bit of social commentary about a yokel voting against his own interests by supporting Republicans. Van Ingram works best when he works briefly, like a hilarious strip about Richard Nixon seeing the future and the Partridge Family sending a message from 3013 to 1973, thanking them for their help in ousting Nixon and establishing a utopia. A serious strip about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson wouldn't have been out of place in World War III Illustrated, and here Van Ingram's dense but colorful style and page design perfectly encapsulates the desperate quality of his text. Van Ingram has a great deal of talent, and it's clear that he's trying to find the best way to use it.

Thanger Dangers, by JT Yost. This is a collection of odds and ends from various anthologies by Yost. "Thenthy" is an odd story about a particular way he bit down on his tongue when seeing an especially cute animal (and later, his daughter), and it leads him to wonder why we evolved with the tendency to react to extreme cuteness with an almost violent response. "The Lead Masks Case" is about the mysterious deaths of two men in Mexico that prompted the possibility of aliens, cults and other phenomena to explain a genuinely puzzling event. Yost is at his best here: clearly and amusingly laying out the facts while employing a line that skirts the edge between naturalist and cartoony. The mashup/parodies of classic comics are nicely drawn but not especially clever or funny. I did enjoy the ode to Waffle House, their absurd juke box and even more absurd styles of serving hash browns. Like Van Ingram, Yost is an excellent cartoonist who is still figuring out what he wants to say as an artist.

Consumed: Digestate -- A Food And Eating Themed Anthology

JT Yost's anthology Digestate contains an interesting concept that gets lost in its bloated pagecount. The anthology is about different cartoonists' relationship with food and eating. Though on a superficial level there are stories from vegans and carnivores alike, the best parts of the anthology take on different aspects of food and how traumatic events can shape what we eat and our subsequent social identities. Unfortunately, at nearly 300 pages, that personal touch got lost in Yost's attempt at cramming in a number of previously published stories and story excerpts that had something, anything to do with food. There are any number of examples of this: pages from Renee French's new book, an entire minicomic reprinted from Daryl Ayo, an excerpt from a comic by Minty Lewis, assorted gag reprints from Keith Knight, Hawk Krall and Dan Piraro, etc. I found these comics distracting and not just because I had read them before. Aside from the back cover being somewhat misleading in getting the reader to think that people like Berke Breathed had contributed new material in this anthology (his strip is actually a photocopy from a collection; I get that it inspired Yost to rethink his own eating habits, but advertising it on the back was a dubious move), those strips stand out in the anthology because they lack the kind of personal touch that the best stories in the anthology possess.

Take Alex Robinson's "That Peanut Butter Kid", for example. Robinson rarely does autobiography, but not only does he explain that he is only capable of eating the blandest, kid-friendly food, he boldly reveals that he suspects it has something to do with being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. One can almost sense the relief on the page as he relates how embarrassing and awkward it's been over the years to explain his very limited palate and relates this to his introversion and preference for staying at home. The gratitude he expresses toward his therapist but especially his wife for slowly, patiently getting him to try new things is also remarkable. It's a powerful story that's still funny (because Robinson is naturally funny). Tod Parkhill's "Picky Picky" is along the same lines, only in his case his eating habits were simply solidified at a young age and he lacked the parental attention needed to correct his palate.

A common theme among many of the meat-eater's stories is guilt for eating meat. Pranas Naujokaitis' "The Tell-Tale Burger" plays this for laughs, as his guilt for eating fast food is mostly in his own head, as his girlfriend doesn't care even as she's cooked chickpea burgers for him. Paul Hoppe's "The Flesh Is Weak, The Meat Is Strong" takes a friend saying "Oh, you're eating meat?" and proselytizing for vegetarianism, which he goes along with until he's hungry and a KFC is up ahead. Cartoonists like Sophie Wiedeman touch on meat eating in terms of sacrifice, as a group of children eat a chicken as a way of keeping up their strength in lieu of their mother leaving to bury their grandmother. It's a touching, intense rite of passage story.

The stories from the vegan/vegetarian side of the fence vary in their fervor. Sam Henderson manages to poke fun at both sides in his inimitable manner; his interstitial strips were important in trying to break up the anthology's unwieldy page count. JT Dockery's ruminations on being a vegetarian are lushly illustrated and funny; he's less interested in preaching than describing what works for him. Liz Prince's autobio account of becoming what she describes a "junk food vegetarian" is also quite funny, thanks in part to her sketchy line and solid comedic timing. Hazel Newlevant rightly points out the connection between veganism and the food-related practices of religions, though she doesn't go all the way in connecting the dots between the fervor of some vegans as a kind of evangelical fervor. At the other end of things, the title of K. Thor Jensen's "Living With Murder" alone tells the reader what's in store for them, as an injury to his daughter puts him in a furious state, with no desire to candy-coat his beliefs. Yost's 25-page illustrated text relating to the slaughterhouse industry is even-handed in tone, though I found it a slog in terms of its repetitiveness. Nicole Georges' "Boycotts" tries to poke fun at her own self-righteousness but doesn't quite get there. Cha's extremely amusingly-drawn fairy-tale screeds may have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but they're still extremely well-done and effective. She absolutely sells every one of her points with illustrations that are both hilarious and horrifying. The same was true of Danny Hellman's typically superb two-page illustration depicting a history of meat consumption.

I could have done with more of that kind of expression than some of the blander attempts at comedy and/or weirdness in the book. I enjoy William Cardini's wacky monster comics as much as anyone, but a strip about the Mizzarrd eating a snack didn't really add much to the proceedings, nor did Aaron Mew's "Ghost Dog" strip. About the only other bit of weirdness that I enjoyed was Josh Bayer's frantically scrawled strips, but even they had relatively little to do with food. I could have used more strips like L.Nichols' "The Wonderful World of Vegetables", which really gets at one woman's experience with eating that's atypical of many Americans.  Jess Ruliffson's "City Chickens" is an excellent bit of reportage in comics form about the history and implications of raising one's own poultry in an urban setting. I got the sense that Yost was trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by bringing in genre stories or stories with a tenuous connection to food. I'd love to see him take another crack at this concept with a tighter focus.

Still More Minis: Antal/Kelly, Mozzocco, Yost, Pritts, Hindle, De Radigues

Immovable Objects, by James Hindle. This comic shows the influence of later Daniel Clowes, right around the Ghost World era. It's a story about an outsider told with a certain sense of distance and a clear, naturalistic line. Though there are repeating visual motifs, every page is designed differently in terms of panel layout and whether or not there's any bleed between panels. There's a fairly extensive use of foam-green as a spot color but never for the characters' skin, which is left white. There's a great deal of care and thought that went into this comic about an aimless young man in college dealing with his only friend drifting away from him as well as his lifelong curiosity about his father, who left when he was too young to remember. Though it has some of that Clowesian iciness, reserve and restraint, there are certainly a lot of emotions bubbling under the surface in this story. It's really a story about depression and the ways in which we find ways to deal with it, and how certain kinds of activity can cause such a depression to lift. Steven finds a measure of happiness not because he finds his father, but rather because he tries, because he finally goes into motion. The breakthrough is subtle, to be sure, but the fact that Steven joins the track team at school is another sign of him becoming aware of his needs as a person. This is a really outstanding comic with a number of different angles to consider from a character perspective, and it's all done by mixing formal qualities designed to keep the reader off guard with narrative qualities that keep the reader on an even keel--until Hindle deliberately wants to upset the apple cart. It's definitely the best work I've seen from Hindle to date.

The Mothman Comics, by J. Caleb Mozzocco. The well-known blogger and critic did a funny comic about the infamous "Mothman" sightings in West Virginia, which is a source of both bizarre local pride as well as genuine terror for those who claim to have seen it. The creature has inspired a wave of books and even a movie that are heavy on the alien/supernatural/monstrous qualities of the creature. Mozzocco goes in a different direction, using a number of cited cases as a sort of humorous set of what ifs. Mozzocco has a crude line but a keen sense of humor, as he imagines the Mothman to be a misunderstood creature that enjoys skateboarding, writes letters to the editor and is generally unfailingly polite. Mozzocco went the extra mile and had these comics printed with spot colors for the creature's glowing red eyes (its most distinctive characteristic aside from its freakish wing span), which help sell the comic's deadpan gags. I'd love to see Mozzocco wax amusing on any other personal obsessions, because his sense of the absurd juxtaposed against something usually treated with deadly seriousness is quite effective.

Walking Into Traffic #3, by Dave Kelly & Lara Antal. This is a little anecdote of a comic about a man reminiscing about a particular sexual encounter that may or may not have happened in the way he recalls. It's a nice little play on the unreliability of memory, as his reverie is triggered by finding a thong that said "Roxy" on it, leading him to remember a crazy night that he ultimately abandoned, for fear of being trapped in a crazy relationship. Of course, if he bagged on her, how did he have the thong? The naturalistic style of Antal is stiff at times, but I admire her dedication to detail, like in a "freaky sex" panel complete with whips, a double-headed dildo and a screwdriver. The ambiguity of this comic is its greatest strength.

Moose #14, by Max de Radigues. This is the last issue of the excellent and influential minicomics series by de Radigues, who is the inspiration behind Oily Comics. The slowly unfolding story of a teenaged boy who is systematically bullied by a sadistic schoolmate, this final issue has a surprising and even ambiguous ending. When we learn the reason why Joe is being beaten and mentally tortured, it's a reason that doesn't make much sense as a real justification beyond the ways in which bigotry can justify persecution. In the last issue, when Joe is being chased by his bully through a snowy field, the bully threatens him even more, given there's no adult supervision there to stop him. Instead, he falls into a deep hole, and Joe is given an interesting choice: go get help (which the bully demands even as he continues to threaten him) or leave him to rot? The choice Joe makes here is surprising and manages to straddle the two extremes, as he seeks relief even if it's just for a brief moment. The comic ends on a sweet note that leaves the question of what happens to the bully unresolved, even if it's implied that Joe will eventually act. de Radigues' drawings are exquisitely simple and assured, with a remarkable command over body language and a surprisingly diverse array of different character types. Any American publisher would be smart to snap up what would wind up being a 180 page or so book.

There Will Be Nothing Left, by Nate Pritts. This is Pritts' first minicomic (he's a published poet) and it shows in terms of his ambition outstripping his drawing ability. I liked how he attacked the page regardless of his limitations without over-rendering too much to compensate. Indeed, Pritts goes out of his way to try to keep each page clear and simple as he goes into his philosophical digression about the nature of choice creating a specific temporal and narrative path, snuffing out others like opening up Schroedinger's box. Pritts imagines being "haunted by ghosts...echoes of the ruptures" as all our choices might occur sometime, somewhere simultaneously with the choice we actually make. He further fantasizes about being able to study our choices as we make them on a page that cleverly uses a leaf with a branching vein structure spreading across his 2 x 3 panel grid. It's an interesting bit of musing on being and time, if a paralyzing one, since he wonders which choice is the "right" one a question that (perilously) presupposes that there is such a thing, because it assumes an objective and clearly understandable greatest good. That problem has been confounding philosophers for a long time. Hopefully, Pritts will continue to work out his questions on the page.

Thinger Dingers and Losers Weepers #3, by JT Yost.  Losers Weepers is the continuing story of poor Alvaro, based on scraps of paper or lost mail found by Yost and his friends. In this issue, Alvaro encounters racism at a copy shop (based on a found flyer that read "Learn Spanish! It's to easy and funy."), confronts his girlfriend over a letter she received from an ex-boyfriend in prison ("You know I'm coming to sex that asshole of your's, right?") and sees an enigmatic note after he's arrested when a bottle he throws accidentally winds up in front of a cop ("Constant grinding can turn an iron rod into a needle"). Yost has great chops, and I especially admire his varied and cartoony character design: square-jawed characters, squatly-shaped characters, bushy unibrows sweeping across a face that are furrowed in rage. Even if this comic is based on a gimmick, Yost manages to wrest real emotion out of it.

Thinger Dingers is a catch-all anthology of shorter works that have appeared elsewhere. "Ruemates" is an autobio piece about awful roommates of the past. It's amusing enough and Yost tries to be fair about his own eccentricities, but I found myself sympathizing with the roommate who was annoyed that Yost's cat kept missing the litter box. On the other hand, "Earl Bible" was a funny account of a friend who pretended to be a sort of redneck savant as a kind of performance art. It definitely seemed to be the sort of thing better read about than experienced in real life. The two best strips here are "Oval vs Square" (a series of "battles" where a square shape always trumps any other shapes by virtue of its inherent awfulness) and "Unappreciative Baby", wherein a baby yells at his father for singing a traditional song with racist content. When I read Yost's work, I'm not sure what sort of cartoonist he is. A humorist? A formalist? An autobio cartoonist with a didactic streak? He obviously has a great deal of talent but I've yet to read one of his comics that feels like something close to a definitive statement, as he seems to be trying to figure out the answer to this question himself.