The Hunt: A.Meloro, J.Willems, S.Wiedeman, L. Milevski

Let's take a look at some minis that talk about being hunted, hunting after something or experiencing a life of being set up as prey.

Funnies, by Anthony Meloro. The three one-page stories and the accompanying purely decorative pages speak to Meloro's aesthetic: raw and dirty on the one hand, and densely but abstractly beautiful on the other. The stories here are about restless people hunting for relief: a man getting his fortune told, one that indicated he'd never get out of his rut; one where two professionals examining a corpse are struck by its similarity to an old lover; and a man giving into seduction somewhat releuctantly. Meloro's figures are shadowy and even ephemeral, eliciting emotional reactions with a remarkably sparse amount of detail. His narrative captions are similarly terse, yet they work hand-in-hand to create that atmosphere of longing, of things out of our reach--or worse yet, desires fulfilled in a less than satisfactory manner. The strange color of the cardstock used and the texture of that cardstock only add to the comic's strangely appealing qualities.

The Lettuce Girl #4, by Sophia Wiedeman. This is the last chapter in Wiedeman's reworking of the story of Rapunzel. It's a story about bad parenting, absent parenting, selfish parenting and the effects that each have on children. Hazel, the Rapunzel stand-in, has been locked in a tower her whole life by her false mother. The (implied) witch acquired her thanks to Hazel's father cowardly promising her to the witch after stealing lettuce from her garden, lettuce that her pregnant mother demanded. From the very beginning of the series, Hazel is fed a series of lies and simply accepts them because it's all she's ever known. She's kept in the tower for her own "protection", even as she longs to see the world. When Hazel manages to break free, thanks to a talking serpent looking for her mother, she learns that her "mother" was not entirely in the wrong. She winds up being drawn to a gingerbread house, where she's being fattened up to be another witch's dinner. This take on the story about mothers and daughters is more of a feminist version, one where there are no male rescuers who swoop in to save the day. Instead, Hazel has to figure out her own salvation. Meanwhile,her "mother", who has grown another child from magic seeds, finds that controlling the fate and behavior of your children is an impossible task. When Hazel and her "mother" meet again toward the end of the book, Wiedeman's storytelling is excellent. Framing them in the background of each panel, so as to keep them just barely in the sight of the reader, their conversation is private, intimate and clearly ultimately healing for both parties. When they part, they know it's for the last time (there's no longer any place for Hazel in her mother's life), but they parted with a far greater understanding of the other. It's an emotionally powerful moment of forgiveness on the part of Hazel in particular, but also for her "mother", who had previously reacted as though Hazel was a piece of property rather than her child. Humanizing her was Wiedeman's most intriguing innovation in this story, as was having the ocean in front of Hazel and her serpent companion at the end--what better symbol for the unknown? Wiedeman's line is a pleasing mix between loose and dense. The characters all have a loose, expressive quality that gives the entire story a spontaneous feeling. One can sense the energy on each page as the panel-to-panel transitions are smooth and fluid. At the same time, Wiedeman isn't afraid to use dense hatching for her forest scenes or a more delicate and refined line for other key scenes, like the vast tower and finely-rendered forest in the background of an embrace between Hazel and her "mother". The entire story is an understated study in balance, in terms of the visuals, the narrative and the characters themselves.

The Wild One, by Laila Milevski. This is a disturbing, visceral story drenched in dense blacks about a teenage girl lured by a wizened woman into performing a ritual to appease the jungle's jaguar goddess. The only problem is that girl backs out at the last second before the ceremony is over, leading to disastrous consequences. The aftermath of the event forms the latter part of the mini, as the old woman has not only disappeared, but has seemingly slipped out of everyone's memory, leading the girl into the jungle for her own encounter with the jaguar. Milevski crams a lot of panels onto each page, which serves to create a sense of claustrophobia as well as heighten tension and suspsense by forcing the reader to jump from panel to panel. This is a story about alienation, folklore and the consequences of crossing certain lines. The main character, Camilla, essentially had her fate sealed the minute she started talking to the old woman, even if she didn't know it at the time. Of course, her fate is an ambiguous one in the sense that she is now entirely severed from society--it's neither happy nor sad, it's just new and savage. The story is all about rules and rituals, and how fragile they can be. It was interesting that while the backgrounds in the jungle scenes were all drawn in a lush manner, the backgrounds in the other scenes were frequently blank. Part of this was to add clarity to scenes with lots of talking heads, but that lack of background detail in Camilla's daily life was telling in some ways. This was another smart, gritty effort on the part of Milevski, whose other comics have explored the frequently violent and troubled relationship between civilization and nature.

The Fatal Marksman Act I, adapted by Jaime Willems. This is actually Willems' second crack at this story, adapted from the Thomas DeQuincey story "The Fatal Marksman". It's about a young man named Willhelm, who's hoping to earn the hand of Kate, the daughter of a huntsman. Her father refuses the union because his son must be a huntsman in order to keep the land in the family. The reason this was so because his ancestor who originally won the lands as a reward from a nobleman was accused of having used a "devil's shot" to kill his prey--unerring but demonically-rewarded aim. To continue to defend the family's honor, each descendant must prove his own worth. Of course, Willhelm is a writer, not a hunter, but the end of the first act sees him gain aid from a shadowy figure. Willems' adds a bit of depth and richness to the story by starting it off at a carnival, with a carny barker setting theme and adding some potential portents on the first page. The key difference in this version is really in the art. Willems' figures are so dark as to appear to be woodcuts. Eyes are deep and sunken and every line is thick, with hatching looking like dense shadows and the frequent use of spotting blacks creating an atmosphere of dread. The features of the figures are slightly grotesque, appearing almost to be marionettes thanks to their exaggerated cheeks and eyes. Willems' frequently curvy and erratic panel design adds to that sense of distortion and unreality that the book evinces; even the structure of the page itself can't be depended upon by the reader. Even though nothing bad happens in this comic, Willems has created an atmosphere where one expects things to fall apart at any moment.

Minicomics Round-Up: Lindo, Milevski

Let's take a look at multiple minicomics that a couple of cartoonists submitted for review.


Little Bear, Acorn Dream, & Uncertain Doe, by Laila Milevski. Milevski is an interesting young cartoonist in the style of Aidan Koch and Amanda Vahamaki, in that she uses a fragile, even tremulous line, simple and sometimes blocky character design, and gray-scaling that acts as kind of smear or cover of her line in some panels. Two of the minis have screenprinted covers and all three are attractive as sheer art objects. Milevski's interest seems to be in juxtaposing the experiences of animals either with the experiences of humans or how their experiences mirror that of humans. At the same time, she doesn't anthropomorphize her animals, and all three of these minis emphasize the primal nature of her protagonists. Acorn Dream is about a squirrel falling in love with an opossum, only to ruin it by worrying about the possum eating it. It's a funny twist on how relationships can get derailed that relies on the very animal nature of its characters for its charge.


Uncertain Doe is the best of the three comics, embracing an Immersive technique as the letters themselves take on both decorative and narrative functions as part of the drawings. The way she uses negative space on many of the pages adds to the awkwardness of this story of a deer who becomes obsessed with a young human male and follows him around. The man doesn't really notice her and it's too late for her to go back to her fellow deer after that--she literally disappears off the page. Her light line is a perfect match for the subject matter, especially as she adds wit to the inherently sad nature of the story. Little Bear (published by Parcell Press) is told partially in color and partially in gray scale and tells of a doomed relationship between a young boy and a female werebear. Inspired in part by a Latvian folk tale, there's an especially devastating scene where there's a celebration in the village where people dress as animals and dance in order to gain the hospitality of the house. The werebear in human form comes to the door where the young man lives wearing a bear mask and dances, only to leave in frustration when she understands that the two of them can never be together. There are some powerful images in this story, like one panel where we see the werebear suddenly on the telephone with words exploding out of the receiver, only to see the phone hanging as she walks away. I'm not sure it entirely coheres as a narrative, and the grayscale is sometimes distracting, but it's still an ambitious, impressive effort for a cartoonist who shows tremendous promise.


Carl Finds Love 1-2, Wall Street Cat and Lobotomy, by Sara Lindo. There is a consistent sweetness to be found in Lindo's comics about cats, anthropomorphic traffic cones and walking brains. They're silly and fun, and it's obvious that Lindo takes delight in the simple act of making marks on paper and creating narratives. Lobotomy is about a brain that gets time off from its frontal (decision-making) lobe in order to have some fun. It's a cute concept that's derailed by sloppy storytelling and rendering choices; the brains themselves meld into the background in ways that make it difficult to discern what's happening in a given panel. The two oversized Carl Finds Love stories show improvement from the first issue to the second, in part because Lindo adds color in that second issue. Her use of color is varied but also restrained, adding depth and substance to this odd little slice-of-life comic about a cone named Carl who's trying to find a girlfriend. Even in the most awkward moments of this comic, there's a central niceness to it as every character is without guile.


Ike The Cat In: Wall Street Cat is the best of these three comics. It's a simple story: a cat gets up in the morning, his owner puts a tie on him, he takes the subway to work in a Wall Street office. His job is to make employees feel better about their day. The concept is clever, and its execution luxuriates in the details: the cat riding an escalator, the cat looking at someone's newspaper on the subway, the cat nestling into his bed at his job, the woes that the workers pour out to him. It's perhaps on the over-rendered side (there's a lot of hatching that doesn't add much to the story), but it's obvious that Lindo wanted to portray the sheer denseness of city life and how strange & silly a cat is in negotiating this environment. I'm not precisely sure what kind of stories Lindo is interested in telling, but I have a sense that she'd be ideal doing comics aimed specifically at children.