Fantagraphics: Katie Skelly's My Pretty Vampire

With My Pretty Vampire, rising star Katie Skelly has a book that matches up her exquisite color sense, delightfully lurid sense of humor, eye for style and aesthetics and acidly satirical, feminist take on gothic/horror tropes. Skelly's eye for page design and layout have always had a lot more in common with French fantasy comics and manga as well as a number of delightfully trashy horror & exploitation films than any American comics. While dialogue is important, it's her arrangement of images (and in this book, colors) that are essential to the narrative. The opening pages, which turn out to be a dream sequence, wind up establishing and foreshadowing much of the action in the rest of the book. It starts with a bouquet of flowers, then zooms in a rose bloom that's dripping blood. A beautiful, half-naked girl licks up the blood, briefly revealing the teeth of a vampire. When she comes upon a half-naked corpse, she finds that it's her own body, dripping blood, prompting her to wake up from the dream.

The rest of the first chapter serves two purposes, narrative and aesthetic: establishing who she is, why she's there and her intent of escape; and long, lingering shots of her bathing, swimming and generally serving as an erotically-charged object of the gaze of her brother, who acts as a stand-in for the reader in that sense. We learn that she's a vampire who's been held captive in her brother's house for her own "protection", even going to school. Whatever noble intentions he may have are undermined by a shot of him watching her bathe through a peephole, establishing that no one in this book has the moral high ground. Clover, the titular vampire, is hungry from years of drinking ox blood but manages to escape. Switching from day to night, Skelly immediately embraces the night, with Clover's shining golden hair drawing the reader's eye into every panel where she's scurrying around at night.

In a horror-exploitation story like this, nudity is certainly expected, but so is violence and gore. Skelly does not skimp in the latter department either, beginning with her biting a trucker who is actually worried about her being underage. Skelly uses an interesting narrative device here, as she shifts to first person narrative captions that are so specific to her memories of what it was like to be a vampire that she barely acknowledged the personhood of the driver. Skelly adds a few more layers to the narrative as we meet a vampire hunter tasked to find her as well as a vampire cult who helped to create her. Skelly is careful not to overwhelm the story's imagery with too much plot, however--just enough to add some shade and structure to the story. Instead, both story and imagery intensify as the story goes on, as Clover hits the big city.

There's a great scene, after she's dodged sunlight and recharged herself with a new victim, where she stares into the window of a restaurant. Instead of starving for the food they were eating, she was starving for the blood they possessed--a clever image, as her hands dripped with blood. She allows herself to get picked up at a bar and then goes to a house party that quickly turns both erotically charged and bloody. We then get a flashback which reveals that her brother deliberately had her turned into a vampire by a vampiric order in order that "the one you love will never die". It's a creepy, incestuous gesture, made more so by the fact that she was underage. The same is true of the man who picked her up, as she was even wearing a school uniform when he started to hit on her. Even in a scene where she's actually having fun with a woman who's seducing her, her actual lusts come to the fore. Echoing the beginning of the book's dream, a half-naked Clover dripping blood from her mouth slowly and blankly eyes the other guests at the party as the objects they are for her.

The book's climax finds Clover, the vampire hunter and the order all converging at once. While her threat to society at large is neutralized, the ending has a tantalizing bit of karmic payback for her brother. It's a classic morally muddled ending to this kind of story, where there may be protagonists but there are no heroes. There are only competing urges, and Skelly's ending finds Clover with the kind of agency that she had been denied by her wholly unpleasant brother. Indeed, words like "love" and concepts like empathy have little meaning given the way her brother tried to control her and instead helped to create an amoral monster. The way Skelly slowly unveils increasing moral ambiguity in her characters escalates at the same time that style, fashion, sex and violence also become increasingly important to the story. Striking that note between lurid and stylish feels like what Skelly's career has been leading up to, and she was greatly aided in the undertaking by Keeli McCarthy's striking cover design. From the logo design meant to invoke 60s psychedelia (complete with a drop of blood bulging down from one of the letters, the color shifting from yellow-orange to red) and the ecstatic, half-naked Clover on the cover, blood dripping from her lips, it's a perfect composition that finds the eye bouncing from the title to the figure and back again.

Minis: K.Skelly/S.Horrocks

Agent 73, by Sarah Horrocks and Katie Skelly. Skelly's career breakthrough (after essentially earning her comics Ph.D with Nurse Nurse) was Operation Margarine, a book that saw Skelly finding subject matter that was at once fanciful and personal and that appealed to what she liked drawing most. One thing that I've always liked about her work is that her influences are vastly different from those of most North American cartoonists. Sure, it's not surprising that key manga artists have had an impact on her, but she's just as likely to have been inspired by psychedelic European comics from the late 60s and early 70s, as well as films from that era. Operation Margarine owes a lot to 70s exploitation and revenge films, with a far greater emphasis on the agency, independence and power of women. Skelly is as good a critic as she is a writer, as seen at tcj.com but also in the Trash Twins podcast she co-hosts with writer Sarah Horrocks (a distinctive critic in her own right). I mention that podcast because they are dedicated to appreciating the aesthetic qualities of what is perceived to be "trash" culture, like the aforementioned exploitation films that are often hyperviolent and sexualized.

Operation Margarine and a piece she did for the art-porn anthology Thickness seems to have unlocked a new direction for Skelly. Her sci-fi/porn series Agent 8 (and the subsequent Agent 9 and Agent 10) for Slutist takes some of the tropes she used in Nurse Nurse and takes them to their logical extreme. Then there's the horror-porn My Pretty Vampire, which is going to be collected and published by an alt-comics publisher next year. This is all context for her collaboration with Horrocks, Agent 73, which was written by Horrocks and drawn by Skelly. (I'm guessing the title is a sly reference to the 70s sexploitation film Double Agent 73). At heart, this is a romance comic with sci-fi/mad scientist/spy thriller overtones, as a woman named Dr Paracletus is seen dictating her memoirs to her assistant, Bertrand, in an isolated jungle facility where she is being held prisoner by the government. An assassin, the titular Agent 73, kills everyone in the facility as well as the assistant. That's before she realizes that the assistant was formerly a man, who had been a guard in the hellish facility of Dr Paracelsus. This is a story about revenge, transformation, secrets and abuse that's specifically designed with plot based lacunae that force the reader to fully confront the information at hand instead of being overly concerned with detail. That's an especially effective approach given Skelly's spectacular stylizations and lurid use of color, which was done by hand. The final panel, a sketchy flash-bang effect where Agent 73 pulls the trigger on Dr Paracletus, is especially striking, as the agent's red hair is rendered as splotches that could be seen as blood stains. The missing and irrelevant plot details and background helped keep the comic short, maximizing its impact without running into the common genre problem of diminishing returns when being repeatedly confronted with the same images. Horrocks and Skelly hit hard, hit fast and then quit, the narrative equivalent of only drawing the climax of a story.

Minicomics: Seitchik, Farrell, Skelly, Dinski, Taylor

Brendon and Going Rate, by Greg Farrell. There's no question that these comics are a major step forward for Ferrell. His Yo Burbalino comics had amusing moments, as it was clear that he was a good storyteller with no end of interesting anecdotes to share, but the stories felt rushed and the execution underworked. He also relied on the cheap joke and shock because they were both easy. With Brendon, a story obviously based partly on his own experiences (though it's explicitly noted as a work of fiction), Farrell retains the crude charms of his previous comics with a far greater sense of restraint and subtlety. This is a really sharp story that has a knowing sense of just how pre-teen boys relate to each other. The story revolves around a porn mag that "Greg" trades with the titular Brendon, a Hispanic kid who's become his best friend. Farrell homes in on the frequently homoerotic relationship young boys have with each other, even as there's a hyperawareness about not really being gay. That extends as far as actually performing sexual acts on each other as a sort of way of less expressing real attraction and more as a way of using their bodies. Farrell also relates tales of cruelty, betrayal and confusion, creating a book that is light on nostalgia and heavy on lives as they were lived, warts and all. Farrell keeps his line simple and utilitarian, rarely varying line weight or using many effects. Instead of using a grid, Farrell has an open page layout, which works because of the way memories and experiences bleed into each other.

While Brendon was Farrell's best effort to date, a look at his short story collection, Going Rate, reveals that this change didn't happen in a vacuum. "White Whale" is an interesting account of Farrell's obsession with one particular missing hip-hop album from his collection, and how he feel actually he after acquires it. "Jumbo Jockey" is about the B&H lunch counter in Manhattan, and Farrell does a great job capturing the essence of the place, the kind of food they serve and the sorts of people who eat there. "420" starts out as what seems to be another tedious story about someone's personal drug habits but turns into a story about personal responsibility and being a role model, all without taking on any kind of faux-moral tone. "I Am The Son Of A Small Business Owner" talks about the realities of the internet and corporations destroying small businesses and talks about the only way a small business can survive is to provide knowledgeable and personable customer service for those who happen upon their store. There are other, more-hastily drawn stories in the book, and while they're appropriately expressive, Farrell's line is too loose in those stories.

Children of Divorce and Still Life #1, by Daryl Seitchik. Seitchik is one of my favorite young cartoonists, and she flexes some different aspects of her talents in these two minis. Still Life has strips in the vein of her recent comic Sub: meditations that dip into magical realism and stream of consciousness thinking. Seitchik uses a very simple, fluid line in relaying stories about wanting to be a ghost (and how she suddenly realized that she had become one after getting high), hilariously overreacting to her toe going numb while watching a show in bed, and flashing back to remembering the sound of an ocean she heard in a beloved sea shell while using it as an ashtray while listening to music now. The way Seitchik draws herself as tiny goes beyond simply being short, as exemplified in the strip "Dinner With An Adult", where she draws herself as just a few inches tall, sitting in a gigantic chair opposite someone asking her if she's depressed and where she sees herself in ten years. These are comics about drifting, about the feeling of being betwixt and between. Fortunately for the reader, they are stylishly drawn and quite funny. The strip where the internet gives her possibilities for why her toe is numb is amusingly drawn, as she conflates "inflamed" with "enflamed" and draws herself on fire. In other strips, the way she spots blacks to create dramatic negative space is striking.

Children of Divorce is not quite as assured in terms of the drawing, but Seitchik displays some skill in the ways in which children act cruelly toward each other. The physical version of this comic is in black and white, which actually wound up flattering her character design a bit more than the way she used color online. The main character fancies herself a witch, giving out fortunes. While she's the lead, she's far from sympathetic, as she's jealous of her best friend giving attention to "Medusa", a girl with a lazy eye who is nonetheless one of the popular kids. I loved the way Seitchik drew thin, flailing limbs and skinny legs looping around. Best of all are her exaggerated faces with contortions worthy of Peter Bagge in some panels and subtle, tiny lines that nonetheless are packed with emotion in others. Seitchik will have a comic out with Oily Comics soon, and I imagine she will shine in that format, especially since she seems comfortable with her style and storytelling abilities. I'm interested in seeing what kinds of stories she'll tell from here.

Operation Margarine #2, #3, by Katie Skelly. Skelly seems really at home in this mod-inflected road story about two women whose paths cross in interesting ways. The first issue set things up for Margarine, a rich girl frequently kept in a mental institution by her mother, and Bon-Bon a tough girl on a motorcycle who simply punches out a guy who hassles her after selling her out. These issues set up what Skelly really wants to do: draw images of the open road, introduce mysterious guys with scars and stylish women with different-colored eyes to hassle them. There are motorcycle and arms dealers in the middle of the desert and a funny diner scene wherein a long-suffering waitress is made to look every bit as interesting as the leads. Skelly clearly loves combining glamor and menace, as Bon-Bon pretty much exudes that on every page. She's like a ronin on a motorcycle, waiting for something to do and someone to protect while trying to think about her past as little as possible. Margarine has been broken for so long that she's looking for someone to put her back together in an entirely different environment. Skelly really plays to her strengths as an artist here: character design, gesture and body language. She minimizes background detail in such a way that it's not lacking on the page when needed, but doesn't interfere with the two leads when she wants the reader to zero in on them. This series will be collected by AdHouse and will undoubtedly look great.

Alarm Clock, by Will Dinski. I've been reviewing Will Dinski's comics since I began High-Low over seven years ago, and he continues to produce thought-provoking, funny and occasionally disturbing work. This mini is a grab-bag of shorter work by Dinski, including an extended sketchbook section. The cover, a tribute to Gluyas Williams' work from the 1930s, leads to a hilarious punchline when one opens up the back cover as well. It's a well-designed gag that adds an enormous amount of character detail in the service of pulling the eye in one direction. Even though this is a series of shorts, Dinski manages a callback gag in the last story from the first in two stories that otherwise have nothing else to do with each other. One's a bit of hyperbole about a man who's always late and the extreme measures he takes to try to reset the clock, and the other's a droll bit of satire about a cruel but dim executive who prefers delegating unpleasant tasks to underlings. In general, each of the strips carries the titular quality of nothing happening and then alarms going off; In "Wait", a man is anxious to shake things up, but his friend tells him to sit still despite an ever-escalating series of crazy events, until the craziest event of all is an opportunity to act. "A Fine Job In The Execution" is about a watch and a conversation a man has with himself sitting alone in a room, imagining various men of authority praising his work.It's an inner dementia at work here, an alarmed mind that is stirred by a timepiece and a possible reminiscence of being a state executioner. Dinski uses a variety of color schemes here to reflect the action; the first story employs shockingly bright colors and exaggerated figures, while "Wait" employs a red and green scheme for key phases of the story, with green representing calm and red representing action. This is a fine sample of work from a smart cartoonist with an impeccable sense of design.

Stethoscope Microphone, by Whit Taylor. This is a real change of pace for Taylor, who generally tends to do autobio and semi-autobio comics. This is a comic about the rise and fall of The Doctors, the greatest funk band of all time, and Taylor takes every music trope she can think of, puts them in a blender, and sets it on Space Bass. Taylor throws in elements from Parliament-Funkadelic, Rick James, the Beatles and every other Behind the Music idea and lets the absurdity flow. Taylor works in color here, which gives her very thin line some definition and greater structure, allowing her to pull off the kind of images she needed for the story to work. Taylor isn't afraid to get very silly, making a woman adopting the persona of Betsy Ross as the main love interest of the narrator. Overall, this is a pleasant diversion that's actually quite well-researched in its own way, and fans of funk in particular will enjoys some of the references.

Telling a Story: Baddeley, Brown, Jackson, Skelly

Silent V #7, by Kyle Baddeley. This trippy sci-fi/fantasy/monster series has been the equivalent of a comics MFA for Baddeley, whose draftsmanship has tightened up and whose storytelling has become much more fluid. From designing pages to understanding how to fill particular panels, Baddeley is a far more assured artist. I'm not going to attempt to connect the finale of his time and space spanning story of robots, monsters, babies, space gods, monks and cults to the rest of the series. Suffice it to say that the hero of the story makes it back to Earth after a pit stop at a space burger, only to ultimately be left out in the cold. Baddeley's crazy imagination makes him one to watch; keep an eye on his new collaboration with Rob Jackson titled LetterBomb.

California #3 and #4, by Rob Jackson. The final two chapters of Jackson's Steinbeck-meets-Lovecraft mash-up are every bit as crazy as the first two installments, yet both are held firmly in check by Jackson's mastery over plotting and fine details. After everyone disappears after his sinister preacher brother's machinations, Billy (the hero of the story) tears out of there to get some help. He's lucky in that his old boss knows some Wise Folk who set him on the path to save his family from their mysterious fate. Things get really weird after that, as a ritual turns Billy into a head floating across the dimensions until he finds his house, and he must rescue everyone while dodging a monster and an evil intelligence. Just when it seems the story has reached its end, Jackson turns the craziness up another ten notches and injects some genuine suspense into the story as Billy desperately tries to find a way to stop the evil intelligence that threatens his town. Jackson really delights in drawing wriggly, disgusting and slightly absurd monsters, and this comic is a special treat as he goes all-out in #4 in depicting the final battle. This may be his most cohesive story yet.

Memorexia, by Box Brown. This is a short, powerful comic about a man going to a clinic in order to recover some especially painful memories from a futuristic machine. All throughout the story, it's emphazed that he can feel the memory but can't actually alter it. The result is a wistful and sweet story with a twist ending that feels earned. The use of techniques like zip-a-tone, diagrams and a rendering style that's simplified with the exception of its character designs make the comic all the more effective, as the reader slowly begins to learn that all the the technological mumbo-jumbo is just a smokescreen for a quietly and effectively portrayed moment between a father and a son. Brown contrasts red and blue throughout the story to add to the sense that one is reading a simple diagram or map of some kind, one of many contrasts found in the story. The difficulty of his relationship with his father is contrasted against the way their relationship ended, so even abusive language by the father is met with a smile. It also points to the way our minds try to create their own narrative, even in the face of memories to the contrary. This is one of many stories by Brown that I've read that have characters with abrasive exteriors that are nonetheless loving and beloved in turn.

Operation: Margarine #1, by Katie Skelly. This is the opening chapter in a stylish caper series about a rich young runaway named Margarine who gets mixed up with a rough and tumble hellraiser named Bon-Bon. After figuring out her strengths and weaknesses as a cartoonist with Nurse Nurse, one can really see Skelly's strengths on full display here. Her characters have a mod, stylish quality to them, lending a pulpy and delightfully affected feel to the adventures and interactions of the main characters. It feels like a movie or a story even as it's being told in a straightforward fashion. Skelly is just great at drawing interesting clothes, styluzed character poses and mannered yet entirely believable character poses. The way she draws huge and expressive eyes is a particular draw, especially because they are never cute. Rather, Bon-Bon's big almond eyes have a vague hint of menace, while Margarine's rounder eyes express a wide variety of emotions, allowing her to act as the in for the reader. The story itself just gets off the ground in this issue with a minimum of fuss: Margarine skips out on a mental institution but gets ratted out by a guy she thought was helping him. When she confronts him and things go south, Bon-Bon steps in and punches him out, leading to the pair escaping on a motorcycle. I'm looking forward to seeing what Skelly does with this sort of runaway set of tropes in terms of characterization; I'm sure it will carry her usual sense of style in terms of the drawings.

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.

Sequart Reprints: Leslie Stein, Blaise Larmee, Katie Skelly

 This article was originally published in 2008 at sequart.com.
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Eye of the Majestic Creature #3, by Leslie Stein. Stein's unique blend of misanthropy, anthropomorphic fantasy elements and search for connections returns with a new issue. #3 goes in a slightly different direction, as "Larry" (Stein's likely stand-in character) leaves her isolated cabin to visit her family in Chicago. This 40-page comic is quite rich and dense, both in terms of story and art. As always, the visuals in her comics are a treat. The fact that it's printed on cheap, thin newsprint somehow enhances the tactile experience of reading this comic. As in prior issues, she employs a rubbery thin-line style that's given depth by her painstakingly intense use of stippling.

This issue is probably her most focused and sustained single narrative. There are fewer random digressions and surreal moments, but the story is no less odd. The plot is simple: Larry goes to stay with her mother, hangs out with old friends for a night of drunkenness that leads to a blackout, then has dinner with her brother, father, and his assorted exes. Then she returns home to her best friend, the anthropomorphic guitar Marshy. What's interesting about the story is the way Larry lives a little less in her own head than in past stories. The comic has always been about the tension between misanthropy & alienation and the desperate need to connect. This issue feels a bit like Larry is rewinding to a past identity or identities and seeing how they fit. The result carries an evocative sense of verisimilitude in its craziness. It reminds me a bit of certain issues of Hate, as we're thrust straight into someone else's family drama and pub crawl. The latter sequence is one of the most entertaining I've ever read. I love the way that the button eyes she employs for her characters dilate as they get drunker and drunker. The page where Larry approaches her blackout is cleverly composed, as the formerly neatly-aligned panels get smaller and tumble down the page and her figures get more and more sketchy (in every sense of the word). The story's last page reiterates Larry's essential struggle: the need to connect against the exhaustion she feels when she gets home...and the exhilaration she feels when she's alone again.

Stein's work is alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) charming and grotesque, and I was especially impressed by her character design and characterization in this issue. There is an issue-to-issue narrative of sorts, albeit a thin one, and I'm curious to see how long she intends to continue this particular project and where she sees it going. Her high level of craft and care, combined with her unique sense of humor, makes reading each issue an increasingly rewarding experience.

Nurse Nurse #2, by Katie Skelly. The clever Skelly really starts to bring her psychedelic sci-fi story to full life in this second issue. Skelly shows a confidence in using the visuals to carry the narrative that wasn't quite there in issue #1, and the result is a pleasantly demented story. Our heroine, the sexy nurse Gemma, arrives on Venus only to find a man attacked by a cloud of butterflies, a mysterious black goo and the surprising sight of two of her colleagues making out with each other. Skelly really stands out here with a hallucinogenic sequence of one patient, a free-flowing & loopy series of drawings that coalesce nicely with her expressive character design. I like the fact that this is a science-fiction story that draws from very few conventional sci-fi sources, especially in terms of the look of the story. As always, Skelly writes funny, blunt dialogue to go along with her rapidly-developing sense of motion and composition. I'm looking forward to the eventual collection of this mini-series.

Untitled, by Blaise Larmee. This is a 12-page comic printed on thick cardstock, with a mysterious, evocative narrative about family and tragedy. Jumping back and forth in time, Larmee tells a story of a teenaged boy and his two sisters. Working with light, pastel tones, Larmee uses color to evoke different levels of memory, fading panels in and out as though he were connecting them to specific memories. A brother and sister must deal with a phone call out of the blue telling them that their parents have died, while a third sister is in the hospital with a toy elephant that serves as an emotional anchor for her. The end of the story flashes ahead to the brother, Birch, thinking about his past and literally walking out of the present into the past, taking his youngest sister out of the hospital as she rides out on her elephant, the hospital room flooding. There's a sense that the whole sequence, the whole story is about regret and connections lost. It's a story that demands multiple readings to allow the visual cues Larmee uses to really wash over the reader.

Black and White: Nurse Nurse

Katie Skelly's Nurse Nurse is the first book to be published by Sparkplug Comic Books after the death of its publisher, Dylan Williams.  Plans for collecting Skelly's original miniseries had long been in the works, pending Skelly's completion of the story. With the boost of an Indiegogo campaign that helped fund a year's worth of books, Nurse Nurse finally made its debut in May of 2012, eight months after the death of Williams and a few months after it was announced that the trio of Virginia Paine (a former Sparkplug employee), Emily Nillson (Williams' wife) and Tom Neely (Williams' close friend) would take over operations of Sparkplug. Skelly noted that Paine did a lot of production work on her psychedelic epic, and it shows in the way that even Skelly's earliest images pop off the page with great clarity. When we reach the more explicitly psychedelic portions of the story, the pages look especially beautiful.  I would have preferred them going to a larger page size to truly feature that aspect of the storytelling, but the simplicity of Skelly's line is such that no details are lost going to a digest-sized format.

The comic was inspired in large part by Roger Vadim's film Barbarella, which in itself was adapted by the Jean-Claude Forest comic. Both are essentially complete nonsense, and really act as an excuse to indulge in style as well as T&A. Skelly was not so much inspired by the sexual content of Barbarella but rather its style. Each chapter of the book is a chance to dip into a different set of stylistic flourishes, to the point that in Nurse Nurse, style is substance. The story of vaguely Candide-like outer space nurse Gemma finds her going from one set of perils to the next, just barely staying ahead of doom and/or insanity. She winds up on Venus, where a careless chemist has created a goo spread by the planet's many butterflies that causes those who touch it to become super-horny. She is captured by space pirates, who include a masked woman and a half-woman/half-panda hybrid as well as her ex-boyfriend. She commandeers an escape pod to Mars and winds up with mysterious natives who are hosting the most popular pop band in the universe.She winds up having a bad trip but recovers, only to discover that her likeness is being used in a popular TV show.  Investigating further, she is nearly torn to bits by a group of her clones, until she's rescued by her pirate ex-boyfriend. She finally winds up on Earth and simply drops out, laying in a field.

All of those episodic plot points are to be enjoyed on their own, as Skelly throws a kitchen's sink worth of crazy and cute images at the reader. With a very simple and spare line, Skelly tosses in classic psychedelic images, which at its core is all about the ways in which black and white interact with each other. There are a number of pages that reflect that sort of interplay between the two opposites, with figures and background melting into and warping into each other. Skelly is still interested in telling a story, which is why the visuals draw the reader in rather than overwhelm the eye, as a lot of psychedelic art might. Her character designs are simple but effective, drawing in the eye with the use of key details like carefully-placed freckles, odd clothing and body paint. The simplicity of her character design makes the psychedelic quality of her pages all the more effective, since it's still easy to follow the action in every sequence. In addition to character design, character costuming is another important aspect of this comic. In addition to the crisp nurse uniform Gemma wears, the outfits worn by the pirates are a sort of futuristic mutation of 1960s mod fashion. Skelly's use of gesture and body language drives each panel, with character poses that almost look cinematic in their dramatic nature. The overall effect is a breezy, lighthearted, relentlessly strange and amusing narrative that must be accepted by the reader on its own terms. The conspiracy theory and adventure narrative that might have driven other comics are less important in Nurse Nurse than simply enjoying the journey and taking in all the sights.

TCJ Post #28: Katie Skelly & Dina Kelberman

Over at The Comics Journal, Rob reviews NURSE NURSE #5, by Katie Skelly; and THE REGULAR MAN 1-5, by Dina Kelberman.

Genre Minicomics: Katie Skelly, Rob Jackson, Tyler Stafford

Rob reviews three minicomics that fall very roughly within the realm of genre. Included are NURSE NURSE #4, by Katie Skelly; FOLK #2, by Tyler Stafford; and BOG WIZARDS 2 by Rob Jackson.



NURSE NURSE #4, by Katie Skelly. This was the best issue yet of this odd little psychedelic sci-fi comic. It was a meatier 22 pages, allowing the story to flow a bit more naturally. Beyond that, Skelly's line, design, and ideas have all started to converge, making this the best-looking issue of the series. Skelly simplified her designs across the board at the same time she became a more confident draftsman, and the convergence of these two events is not a coincidence. NURSE NURSE has proven to be a sink-or-swim project for her in this regard, given the crazy visuals she's starting to unleash on readers. The masked space pirate, her panda henchman, the mod pirate doctor with a mysterious hidden eye scratch the surface of the non-stop array of delightful weirdness that Skelly throws at the reader. The way Skelly tosses in throwback psychedelia such as the traditonal black & white pulsating checkerboard design adds to the series' overall style. In a sense, style and substance are pretty much interchangeable in this comic--both directly inform the other. That said, the overall master plot of the series is slowly starting to take shape, as Nurse Gemma arrives on Mars and discovers her overall destiny is a bit more dramatic than what she was expecting. There's really no other comic out there quite like NURSE NURSE, and it's exciting to see the way that Skelly has grown as an artist in the course of making it.



FOLK #2, by Tyler Stafford. This is a wandering through a cluttered environment type strip that might have been published by Highwater Books a few years back. One can identify elements from Brian Ralph, PShaw, Jim Woodring and especially Mat Brinkman here as Stafford tells very simple stories about a hunt gone horribly awry and the way a spaceship refuels after making an emergency landing. Stafford takes the route of Ralph and tells his stories directly and with no pretense; it's a strip meant to be read, not decoded. Stafford's greatest achievement with these stories is creating an incredibly natural environment, one that he's obviously in total command of. His use of gesture in his odd character design sells them as sentient, emotional beings. From the moment we're introduced to these characters and their environments, we want to see what they're going to do. That's the hallmark of an artist comfortable with their own ability as a draftsman. The only thing I found distracting in this issue was Stafford's use of different colored stocks of paper on several of the pages. It didn't add anything to the stories at hand, and felt more like a low-tech way of jazzing up the issue's presentation. Stafford should either keep it simple (which would highlight his character and environment design all the more), or else spring to get these stories printed properly.



BOG WIZARDS 2, by Rob Jackson. I reviewed some of Jackson's earlier efforts back at Sequart a couple of years ago, and it's nice to see that his line and composition have vastly improved but that his warped sense of humor remains entirely intact. This is a fantasy adventure comic in the vein of Trondheim & Sfar's DUNGEON or Jesse Reklaw's BLUEFUZZ--written for comedic effect, yet containing a perfectly strong and straightforward fantasy story as well. Like DUNGEON, there are frequent plot-altering twists and turns that are absurd yet impossible for the characters to ignore. Like BLUEFUZZ, the characters speak with a bluntly modern tone that leads to other comedic situations. The hero of the story is forced to go on a quest by a horrific mountain creature that keeps a psychic rapport with him, and throws rocks in his general direction when he starts to go off course. The hero is funny because he spends very little time thinking about the potential ramifications of his actions, until it serves his purposes because it might get him laid. The character is a bit thick and more than a little brutal, both of which lead to some casual but hilarious scenese of violence. Jackson even threw in a hand-made Bog Wizards game in with his comics, which gives the reader a real sense that he has this particular world firmly set in his mind and can't wait to get it all out. Jackson's line is still very crude, but he makes it work for him with his strikingly simple character design. Fantasy is actually an area he could regularly do quite well in, given the potential for developing all sorts of weird characters and situations with less regard to naturalism.

Off-Beat Genre: Mini-Comics

Rob concludes his look at unusual genre comics with several short reviews of minicomics. Included are NURSE NURSE #3 by Katie Skelly, SATISFACTORY COMICS #8 by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe, THE NATURAL WORLD #1 by Damien Jay, MOTRO #1 by Ulises Farinas, and three comics by Jarrett B. Williams.

Minicomics have the freedom to take genre ideas in some unusual directions. Each of the artists discussed in this article looks at science-fiction, fantasy, heroic epics, and manga-inspired adventure in different ways to different effects.

NURSE NURSE #3, by Katie Skelly. The third issue of Skelly's psychedelic sci-fi series starring a nurse's adventures in outer space was especially enjoyable. The action in this issue centered around the weird goo emitted from a certain kind of butterfly infecting Nurse Gemma's ship, causing a love-induced short circuit. A pair of sharply-designed pirates then infiltrate her ship, one of them a half-human/half-panda. This series is dominated by Skelly's unusual stylistic choices, both in terms of character design and page design. There are all sorts of unusual angles, characters in odd poses and flourishes that dominate whole pages, like Gemma sliding through a tube. Skelly's command over her line and the world she's created grows issue by issue, immersing the reader into a freaky and fabulous environment. Her use of body language, gesture and character interaction carries the story, with just enough background details to impart information without detracting from the real action. My only complaint is that each issue is too short (18 pages); I sense that the story will really cohere once it's collected.

SATISFACTORY COMICS #8, by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe. The comics of Cates & Wenthe are best known for two things: the closeness of their collaboration and the self-imposed rules, limitations and formal boundaries they like to place on themselves when they are creating their comics. While the latest issue is no exception, the result is perhaps the most entertaining, organic effort I've seen from them yet. The format, unsurprisingly, is quite clever: each page is presented as a separate postcard, bound by a wrap-around strip of paper. The back of each postcard/page reveals the particular constraints placed upon them (some of them revealed in highly specialized comics jargon) and which of their colleagues suggested the constraints.

The story, "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible", is an extremely clever fantasy story about a young wizard's apprentice sent to procure a map from a particular mapmaker. The apprentice winds up having all sorts of unexpected adventures against a set of opponents he winds up feeling some sympathy for. While Cates & Wenthe manage to tell a dense, satisfying story in just ten pages, they leave the ending quite open for further adventures. Much like Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's DUNGEON, I found myself both amused by certain formal tricks on the page and the slight tweaking of the genre, but also genuinely wrapped up in the story itself. As for those constraints, they ranged from style mimicking of Steve Ditko or Peter Bagge to drawing a page without a panel grid. My favorite, where references to Marcel Duchamp were required, was a stunning action sequence done in the style of Duchamp's famous "Nude Descending A Staircase" painting. The comic was done in full color, which greatly flattered the pencils and made each page pop. Hopefully we'll be seeing more of these characters from this art duo.

THE NATURAL WORLD #1, by Damien Jay. Jay is one of the most underrated artists in comics. His minis are consistently beautiful and entertaining art objects. Jay's character design is clever and expressive, and this comic is no exception. This purports to be the first issue of a series, and it's set in some generic medieval village where a pious village elder has hired a crew to completely remove a huge and supposedly evil thicket inhabited by a witch. Meanwhile, the elder's mentally deficient brother is out hunting mushrooms when he is startled by something and runs to tell his brother, who happens to be philandering with a local woman. The issue ends with an image that indicates things aren't quite what they seem.

Jay is quite leisurely in parceling out plot points in this issue, concentrating on character. He has a marvelous looseness to his line reminiscent of Jules Feiffer in this issue. The characters are all simple, sharp angles punctuated by a line here or there to indicate motion or emotion. There's a flow to this comic that made it a breezy read even as it was mostly just characters talking to each other. That's a tribute to Jay's skill in depicting expression and gesture, even with fairly simplified, iconic character designs. Like many of the other minis reviewed in this article, I only wish another issue would arrive shortly.

MOTRO #1, by Ulises Farinas. MK Reed recommended this comic to me, and it's a pretty delightful mix of Conan-style heroic fantasy and psychedelia. MOTRO can be found at the act-i-vate.com website, but Farinas gives the reader their money's worth with the intricate design of this comic. The cut-out cover, the string binding it and the clever use of hidden color immediately drew my eye. This issue discusses the fate of a boy deemed to be Motro, the warrior who would end winter. We see him go through a variety of trials that turns into an encounter with a Yellow Submarine-inspired character named the Master of Fate.

Farinas merges bigfoot character design, a very thin line, a touch of psychedelia with a sharp use of black and white contrasts. The result is a comic that is too weird to take at face value, yet tells an entirely coherent, straightforward story. It's by far the most eccentric of the comics reviewed in this article, moreso even than Skelly's comics. His aesthetic is certainly in the "take-it-or-leave-it" realm occupied by folks like Brian Chippendale and Gary Panter (though in a very different way), and for some a little might go a long way. Overall, I found this comic charming and funny, enjoying it more with each subsequent reading.

SUPER PRO K.O.!, ACTION FRIENDS, and EBALL & CHADWICK by Jarrett B. Williams. These are all very short (8-10 pages) minicomics that show off Williams' skill in character design and interaction. SUPER PRO K.O.! introduces us to a mixed martial arts fighter's apprentice with a lot of potential; ACTION FRIENDS is about a group of animal commandos who rain death on a group of developers; and EBALL & CHADWICK is a wordless tale of two creatures in a forest. Williams' style reminds me a bit of Brandon Graham, mixing manga and graffiti stylizations into pages filled with unusual composition and design choices. Williams loves using weird angles, unusual grid construction and going big and loud on his pages. The weakest of the three comics was ACTION FRIENDS, written by a different person; the gags here were all sort of obvious. The strongest was the very strange EBALL & CHADWICK, a short story following the title characters (a little walking puff of flame and a one-eyed horned creature) on a journey with a group of anthropomorphic, singing leaves. The slickness of Williams' line was a perfect match for the simplicity of his character design. It's difficult to say much more given the shortness of these comics, but he certainly has a lot of potential as a storyteller and illustrator.