More Autobio: Park, Lautman, Fricas

Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream #4, by Laura Park. Park is unquestionably one of the most skilled cartoonists around. She's best known for illustrating other people's projects for a living, but her own autobio comics are at once funny, heart-breaking and sharply observed. Her self-caricature is one of the best in comics--especially when she's wearing a hat. Her strips about happiness, loneliness and illness are especially affecting, because Park gets at the essence of her feelings with a minimum of self-pity but a maximum of thought. There's a strip about going to a bra-fitting that's absolutely hilarious, while a strip about not having enough to say or being good enough to do her own comics is powerful. Despite her obvious talent, it's obvious that some of the comics she makes simply don't come out in the manner she imagines. I should note that this issue of the mini (published by Uncivilized Books) is sketchbook-raw, with several images and tiny strips crammed on some of the pages. Happily, Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing a collection of her work.

MacroGroan 6 and Lying And Cursing: 2 Stories, by Sara Lautman. Lautman's images are scrawled and scratched across the page. Her scribbly self-caricature is especially appealing, especially the way she draws her hair as an indistinct blob. MacroGroan is a sketchbook comic featuring mostly humorous observations by the artist. What I like best is the way she experiments with different visual styles. The scribble is always there, but sometimes it's on a page with detailed cross-hatching and background details, creating wobbly and almost vibratory effect. On other pages, the images are still and dominated by heavy use of blacks. Even in her simplest drawings, there's a detail or two that makes the images pop, like the way she draws eyes. Some pages are overlaid with other images, while still others strategically use grey-scaling. Her observations are funny, even when dealing with serious issues like therapy. Lautman's mind goes in a lot of different directions, and her comics reflect this.

Lying and Cursing is part autobio, part fiction. Each page in this 5.5 x 5.5 inch squarebound mini is a single image, which allows those scribbly drawings to breathe a little more. The first story is a history of Lautman's love of swearing, including resistance she's received from doing it as well as musings on the implications of cursing versus blessings (including saying "bless you") after sneezes. The story is a mix between genuine contemplativeness and total silliness. The second story focuses on an idea Lautman had about a story where a bunch of kids convince a naive and gullible friend that ridiculous things are true, like "Jellyfish are immortal", only to find that once she believed it, it automatically changed reality to accommodate this new belief. Describing it as "Amelia Bedelia meets Quantum Leap", Lautman takes the idea to some dark places. Lautman's greatest strength as a storyteller is her ability to make every idea, every story and every journal entry sound like a conversation she's having with you, the reader.

Blabbermouth 1, by Katie Fricas. It's not unusual for autobio cartoonists to write about sex, or even do a history of their sexuality. What's different about Fricas' work is that it's as much about rudimentary feelings of desire that one feels as a child as it is about actual sexual experiences. In a highly expressive scrawl that looks like it's ripped straight from her id, Fricas goes in chronological order to discuess being referred to as a pervert by someone's mother at the age of ten, seeing girls in summer clothes at the age of eleven, writing stories about sex and then ripping them to pieces at fifteen, etc. The page about losing her virginity is just a drawing of the stucco ceiling above her; the image itself is fascinating, highly detailed and beautiful in its own way--as opposed to the actual experience. There are drug-laden encounters, dizzying experiences and moments seared into her memory. There's also a sequence where her mother tells her that she had a child much earlier in her life and gave it up for adoption. Fricas spills a lot of ink in this comic, both literally and figuratively. Her splotched line gets at the emotional content of an experience, the part that's most closely associated with memory, as opposed to trying to accurately recreate the "real" experience.

Autobio Minis: Park, Budnik, Jordan

Mumblecore Comix, by Kevin Budnik. I enjoyed Budnik's debut, Our Ever-Improving Living Room. This mini collects some four-panel, frequently downbeat gag comics that he did for Columbia College's student newspaper. It's the same basic beat in every strip: a depressed looking couple plaintively look away from each other as they get off a quip that's sometimes goofy, sometimes absurd and sometimes sharp-edged. One of Budnik's best assets as a cartoonist at the moment is his sense of comic strip rhythm. He knows when to set up a premise, how to pause a beat or two (usually with silent panels) and then deliver a punchline. Even the strips that don't have great punchlines or are just very silly work because of that sense of rhythm and timing. Budnik also adds just enough detail to get across his points but not so much as to distract the reader's eye. Indeed, many of the strips are guided by tiny positional changes of small lines in the faces of the characters. The use of color filled up lots of empty space and prevented that from being a distraction, as well as adding to certain punchlines in the strip. This was a short mini and I found myself wanting to read more.

Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream: Autoptic Mini, by Laura Park.These look like sketchbook drawings from Park, piled into a mini and looking beautiful on every page. Park somehow manages to combine the spontaneity of a sketchbook drawing with a level of detail and craft that make looking at every one an absolute. Despite details like intense cross-hatching and detailed backgrounds, the strips are nonetheless loose, expressive and funny. One of the keys is her consistently delightful self-caricature, which exaggerates her size and shortness. Those glasses she wears and the way she draws her hair give her a powerful, iconic appearance on the page. Even when she's being shy or recovering from surgery, her caricature dominates every panel. Despite the level of detail she provides in every panel, the reader's eye is drawn to Park herself on the page. The strips here range from single panels to groups of related single panels to fully developed narratives. Park isn't shy about sharing the most intimate details of her life, but she always manages to play them for laughs. "In The Mood For Love" is about her needing "to get laid today" and the efforts she goes to in order to try to do so. "Lazy Laura: The Idling Idjit" and "The Days Feel Long" are about trying to work alone as a cartoonist and managing the intense back pain that would later presumable lead to the back surgery she alludes to later in the comic."If You Want Something Done" is about her epic quest to get to a bathroom without wetting the bed as she's recovering in the hospital. Her comics will soon be collected by a big name comics publisher, but she told me that she will continue to release new minicomics through Tom Kaczynski's Uncivilized Books. I imagine Park will receive a lot more attention when that book does come out.

17 Weddings, by Robyn Jordan. I've only read bits and pieces of Jordan's work in the past, but I found it to be witty and expressively drawn. This mini has a killer premise: single page accounts of memorable moments from 17 weddings she had either been a part of or attended. This is the Jesse Reklaw model of autobio that he uses so effectively in Couch Tag, wherein focusing on a particular detail often sheds light on larger issues that are brushed off to the side. Jordan starts with her flower girl days, where she was delight to receive an Alf watch after being bored for hours at the ceremony. Other strips talk about ridiculous dresses, school friends she no longer has anything in common with, arguments with boyfriends at the wedding ceremony, the embarrassment of seeing people she knew when working a catering job at weddings with her mom, hooking up at weddings and one hilarious strip where a guy came out before the wedding to announce that the couple was not going "to parade their solemn vows before you" rightly raising the question of why they were even there. Jordan's strip about her own wedding focused on the malfunction with her "chicken cutlet bra": pads that stick to one's breasts with adhesive. She ends the mini by simply yanking them out and going "free and easy". Jordan's loose, spontaneous line highlights her character design and understanding of physical interaction in space. She reminds me a bit of Ellen Forney in that regard, going from dot eyes in some panels to more naturalistic close-ups as the situation dictated. This is a clever and well-conceived bit of autobio that doesn't outstay its welcome.

Out With A Bang: Mome #22

The final issue of Mome is understandably all over the place, as Eric Reynolds wanted to encourage as many of its contributors as possible to submit a piece for the finale but also had a gaggle of new cartoonists he wanted to include as well. Given the new roster of cartoonists he published in this issue, I could have easily seen Mome go on for another dozen issues, replenishing its talent pool as older artists bowed out. I hope that Reynolds sees fit to do an occasional "Mome Annual" in the future, especially since Fantagraphics doesn't have a flagship anthology at the moment.

The last issue sees several more episodes of serials, many of which unfortunately did not get a chance to finish up. Kurt Wolfgang hilariously addresses that problem head on with his latest installment of "Nothing Eve." Right in the middle of this episode, Wolfgang (inexplicably depicted as a talking dog) yells "cut" and sends his characters home since Mome is ending. It goes on from there: dog-editor Reynolds informing Wolfgang that Mome was being cancelled because no one likes his comics, dog-publisher Gary Groth demanding zombies and hookers to liven up the series, and (best of all) Jordan Crane being brought in to write exactly the ending that Groth wants. Wolfgang is finishing up the real ending now for a Fantagraphics book, but this ending reminded me a bit of his Low-Jinx days, when he would cleverly savage everyone in comics (especially himself).

I don't have much to say about the other serials in this issue, like the Michael Jada/Derek von Gieson "Devil Doll", Ted Stearn's latest Fuzz 'n Pluck epic "The Moolah Tree", T. Edward Bak's "Wild Man" or Josh Simmons/Shaun Partridge's "The White Rhinoceros". I've discussed each of these at length in prior reviews. Bak completely reworked "Wild Man" into a book that will be out in the fall of 2013, and he notes that "it's a completely different work." I really hope someone picks up the demented Simmons/Partridge story. Speaking of Simmons, he also contributes a lovely one-pager that's essentially a series of happy endings about a group of friends meeting their maker.

At nearly 250 pages, Mome 22 must have been an enormous challenge for Reynolds to whip into something that had any kind of flow. Thanks to its size and variety of material, this issue indeed lurches back and forth, with some of the serials providing particular screeching halts. Reynolds clever gets around this to an extent by using a series of Steven Weissman strips as interstital material, giving the anthology a number of rest stops to cleanse one's aesthetic palate. These strips, featuring the members of Guns N Roses working in a deli, are some of the funniest comics I've ever seen by Weissman. With titles like "Chinese Chicken Salad Democracy" and "Appetite For Delicatessen", Weissman piles on the crazy in strip after strip, especially with his star character, the guitarist Slash. I could read a book's worth of these.

Many of the returning regulars turned in some of their best work for this volume. Eleanor Davis' "Nita Goes Home" stands as one of the best five or ten stories published in Mome. It fits snugly into most of her themes, involving family and the ways in which women relate to each other, transplanted to a futuristic setting. The colors are bright and deliberately stylized, reflecting a future where the air is toxic but family relationships are still a matter of push-and-pull. There's a wistfulness to this story that reflects a woman coming back to where she was raised after having rejected it for a life as an artist and natural farmer, a bittersweet quality that reflects the experience of dealing with her father dying. The scene where the titular Nita and her sister, each wearing a cocoon-like anti-toxicity suit, spread their father's ashes out across the land and then weep wracking sobs into each other's arms. It's both absurd and totally heartfelt, a reflection of the way humanity can trump technology. I'm hoping this and her other excellent Mome contributions will make it into her upcoming Fantagraphics collection.

The other top-notch submissions by returning artists included stories by Joseph Lambert, Laura Park and Tom Kaczynski. I reviewed the Kaczynski story, "Music For Neanderthals", elsewhere. Lambert's "Lists of Lasts" continues his considerable leap as a storyteller, taking the intensely detailed and hyperkinetic stories about kids and once again transplanting that concept into a darker, deeper setting. In this story, two young boys suddenly have total freedom in their house and decide to make lists of things they have, as Lambert slowly reveals the apocalyptic reasons why they have this freedom. Lambert's creative use of lettering takes on an especially crucial role in the story telling. Park's "George" is a delightfully creepy little noir story about an unassuming man who secretly blows up movie theaters as a sociopathic way of lodging his protest against modern civilization. As always, her character design and sheer drawing skill are impeccable.

There were nearly a dozen other stories by past and recent Mome regulars that were also quite good. The always dependable Nate Neal's "Death" was his cheerfully morbid take on the end, focusing on the absurdity and inevitability of it all through the use of randomly named characters. Sara Edward-Corbett's "The Fanciful Companion" was typical of her melding of childhood whimsy and cruelty, drawn with her delicate line. Lilli Carre's "Into The Night" is another of her mysteries; she loves spinning yarns about unexplained and strange compulsions that appear without warning; This time, it was a sound in the middle of the night that had a slightly different effect on everyone, but it was something that could not be entirely ignored. There's a delicacy to her line as well, though it's put to slightly more abstract ends. Tim Hensley's "Sir Alfred" is a series of hilarious strips about the late, great film director Alfred Hitchcock. Hensley really gets after the gossipy side of Hitchcock and his many sexual obsessions, along with his impotence. I could have read a book's worth of these, and I was delighted to see Hensley return after finishing up his amazing "Wally Gropius" serial. When Noah Van Sciver was first published in Mome, he was just starting to build up steam as a cartoonist. Now he's entered into a more mature phase of his career, and it's remarkable to see how assured and funny his "Roommates" is. Van Sciver loves depicting toxic, disgusting and generally reprehensible relationships, and this short & sweet story really gets at that essence. Joe Kimball's story was another bizarre and immaculately drawn bit of visceral weirdness, while Sergio Ponchione provided another of his rubbery and fun Dr Hackensack adventures. Tim Lane's "Belly Gunner" abandoned his usual interest in life on the American road and instead flashed back to the possibility of instant death as a plane gunner in World War II, drawn in his usual naturalistic but fluid style.

Three of the original Mome artists returned for the finale (along with Wolfgang, who never stopped contributing): Gabrielle Bell, Anders Nilsen and Paul Hornschemeier. Hornschemeier's main contribution to Mome was his serial "Life With Mr Dangerous", which was later collected. In #22, he contributes an interview with Amy, the main character from that story, revealing influences and generally finding ways to talk about the story. It's a little gift for long-time readers of his. Nilsen contributes one of his funny and philosophical photo comics, the kind that make up his "Monologue" books. Bell, who was another MVP of this series, contributes a funny fantasy comic called "Unlucky", which sees her unable to get into a club where a party held in her honor was being staged. Things just get worse from there, as her evening and fortunes unravel bit by bit. It's a fitting final story for the anthology, as she was on the cover of the very first issue.

Eight artists made their debuts in this issue of Mome. Chuck Forsman's story "Francis", about a young man dealing with his own insecurities and his inability to cope with the fact that his mother was dying, was typically excellent. It's in turns crude, heartfelt and bubbling over with barely-contained and confusing emotions for its main character, who doesn't quite know how to express them. Forsman nails that feeling of being close to losing a close family member where that relationship is strained. Most of the newer artists worked in a more fantastic fashion, like Jesse Moynihan's excellent "Simon Magus". Moynihan has a knack for staging big, dumb battles between godlike beings who nonetheless have all the emotions and frailties of a human, but does it in a deliberately stiff and color-drenched manner. Malachi Ward's approach is a bit more restrained, but he also likes to use science-fiction settings to depict man's essential savagery, showing that the line between man and savage is a thin one indeed. James Romberger's "Loving Bin Laden" is reality based tale that quickly veers into fantasy, as a woman dreams of having an affair with the notorious terrorist after 9/11. Romberger is an incredible artist who makes great use of color in this bracing, bizarre story. Finally, Victor Kerlow's "Oh Man" is one of his fantastical stories of a man being devoured by invading vines, Nick Drnaso' "Keith or Steve" is a curiously flat story about a nobody who nonetheless takes on great significance for the narrator, while Jim Rugg's one-pager pokes gentle fun at serials by being an "original page" from a comic called "Suburban Love Tales".

Eric Reynolds managed to publish over 2,600 pages of comics in six years, and he did a fine job of recruiting new talent and shaping each issue in order to keep it coming out on time. For any serial publication, even one aimed at bookstores like Mome, keeping a regular schedule is key to it lasting any length of time. I think the key to Mome surviving was the combination of Reynolds' singular taste as an editor and flexibility. I know that the comics by David B and Lewis Trondheim may not have been in his particular wheelhouse as a reader, but he listened to the advice of Kim Thompson and published them in Mome because they would draw in readers and provide a home to material that would not otherwise appear anywhere else in English. He was a tough editor who could demand that young artists step up their game when submitting material, though there were times that some of his veteran artists didn't always submit their best stuff. I found Sophie Crumb's presence in Mome to be especially frustrating when she half-assed a story, or when Jeffrey Brown didn't seem to be saving his good stuff for Mome. On the other hand, he greatly nurtured the careers of Gabrielle Bell, Eleanor Davis, Dash Shaw, Lilli Carre', Tim Hensley and many other cartoonists who made it a point to really do their best for each issue. Mome wasn't necessarily avant-garde in the way that Kramer's Ergot is, but it reflected the rise of the alt-comics scene from its new blossoming around 2000 to the explosion of young talent present today. Reynolds was the steward of much of this talent, as so many cartoonists aspired to be in Mome, and the comics scene now lacks a similar guidepost for young artists. That's why I hope Reynolds will consider going back to producing a new anthology that returns to Mome's roots and rotates in the best of the younger cartoonists on the scene today. Even if he doesn't, he produced a body of work that is lasting and produced some of the best short stories of the past decade.

Sequart Reprints: So Super Duper, Superior Showcase #3

The sort of super-hero comics that I tend to discuss are off-beat in some way. The genre is usually at its best when it depicts motion, drama and action. Super-hero comics should have a propulsive quality to them and should be easily understood without even looking at the dialogue. Gesture and a body's relation to space and other bodies is crucial for such stories. The inherent fantasy limitations of super-hero comics limits its abilities to address certain ideas. Famous super-hero comics that deal with racism and other ills of the day almost always have a laughable quality to them, because the author's good intentions take the reader out of a believable sphere. That said, it's quite possible for super-hero comics to portray human interactions and dynamics in an interesting way, as long as the artist keeps everything within the rules of the world that we've been made familiar with.

Chris Pitzer's AdHouse published a fine anthology featuring indy/alternative artists doing their take on superheroes called PROJECT: SUPERIOR. Like all the books he releases, it was beautifully-designed and had a number of stories that successfully told off-beat tales that succeeded because they stayed within the parameters of the rules the artists created. So many of the artists had such a good time doing it that Pitzer occasionally releases a new issue of a periodical called SUPERIOR SHOWCASE, featuring three stories in this vein.

Issue #3 featured a Street Angel story by Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca, a tale of superpowered siblings by Laura Park and an extended superpowered fart joke by Dustin Harbin. The latter story is drawn in a lively, playful fashion. It really is one long series of fart jokes invoked by a superpowered kid on the teacher he has a crush on and a school bully. The story dragged a bit as the same set-up was repeated with different variations and eventually became quite tedious. Still, there's no question that Harbin has great chops. The Street Angel story perfectly encapsulates the idea of creating a world and staying consistent within its rules, no matter how absurd. For Street Angel, the young skateboarder/martial artist/orphan, it wasn't odd for her to wind up in a hospital where all of the other patients were ninjas. It also wasn't too strange for her to face a monstrous opponent who was straight out of The Ring, something that was alluded to from the very beginning of the story. Rugg & Maruca tell a satisfying, very funny story that is told in an entirely deadpan fashion, while still being able to depict a lot of action.

Laura Park's entry is a quiet, wistful story that just alludes to superpowers without showing us much of them. It's really about the relationship between two latch-key siblings and how they react to the way their peers treat them as freaks. The older sister is quite sanguine about it, thinking only of the welfare of her brother. The younger brother gets into fights when people insult his sister but is unable to fully articulate his rage. A loving gesture by his sister helps him start to deal with his feelings. This story is lovely because of the details Park includes: the way his sister goes about the rituals of cooking, cleaning, washing and sewing for him. It's unspoken, but in many respects she acts as surrogate mother, thinking of nothing but him and how to make him happy and well-adjusted. Those details, evoked by Park's use of shadow, cross-hatching and lively character design, make this tender story a true highlight.

Brian Andersen's SO SUPER DUPER is similarly consistent in tone. That tone is one of constant, over-the-top enthusiasm as the story's hero, Psyche, deals with being an underpowered hero on a JLA-style team and his own repressed homosexuality. Psyche's the sort of gay man who is closeted pretty much only to himself, as virtually everyone else in the world knows he's gay. The funny thing about this comic is that it's incredibly sweet, goofy and good-natured. Andersen's art is crude and highly stylized, which somehow fits in perfectly with the ridiculousness of the scenarios he creates. Having Psyche get off witty, bitchy one-liners to the fairly square-jawed heroes surrounding him, stumbling around his own desires (very chastely depicted), and generally behave like the most hyper gay kid you've ever met is a delight. The effect is like reading a child's superhero comic, retaining a certain purity of design without a sense of self-consciousness or guile. One can feel Andersen's personality busting through on the page as he combines what is an obvious love of superheroes with a style of art and pacing that is pretty much the opposite of what one would expect from such comics. The comic works because Andersen takes this ridiculousness seriously, with detailed subplots surrounding the longer character bits much like a standard superhero comic. This comic couldn't be any more different from the ham-handed, tedious superhero comics that have appeared in recent years trying to deal with gay issues.

Sequart Reprints: Autobio Minis From Wertz, Park & Ayuyang

This review originally appeared at sequart.com in 2008.
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I love the immediacy of a good autobiographical comic, especially when it feels like something ripped out of an artist's sketchbook. That's certainly the case for the minicomics of Laura Park, Julia Wertz and Rina Ayuyang. All three artists make very different stylistic decisions, but share similar senses of humor and outlooks on life. Their minis avoid simply being standard diary comics or straightforward accounts of their life narratives, and instead focus on the "little nothings" (to quote Lewis Trondheim) in life that make for good gags, jokes and anecdotes.

Julia Wertz is best known by many for her webcomic, The Fart Party. Her art is the rawest and most stripped down of this group, often using stick figures to depict her life. One can sense the burning need she has to express herself in comics form, as even the crudest of her drawings are well designed and expressive. Her understanding of gesture and timing is what makes her strip so effective. The particulars of Wertz's life are no more or less interesting than anyone else's, but she's clearly fully aware of this. Instead of a navel-gazing narrative, Wertz instead concentrates on wringing humor out of every situation. Her tendency to look at life as a series of adventures is contrasted nicely by her cynical, curmudgeonly attitude.

Issue #5 is about a cross-country trip by train that involved meeting up with her boyfriend and seeing many other cartoonists. Wertz's comics have actually gotten funnier and more cutting since that relationship ended, especially since boyfriend-foible comics are an area that several other cartoonists have been mining (Liz Prince comes to mind). What fuels the humor of this issue is the tension between Wertz's misanthropy and genuine desire to reach out and share ideas with like-minded individuals. The jams that Wertz and Park did were fantastic, as both artists seemed to bring out the best in each other. I could see the two of them collaborating on a long-form work with spectacular results.

Issues #6 and 7 detail the agony of moving across country. Wertz is often at her best when she can really go off on a good rant, but the target of her fury is just as likely to be herself as an outside irritant. One critic admired her comics because they "bared all"; on the contrary, I admire them because Wertz edits out events that aren't pertinent to her punchlines. While many of her strips can be found at her website, they're meant to be read on paper and work best as coherent 32-page units.

Most of the material in Laura Park's mini, Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, can be found on her Flicker page. Many of the pieces there are in sumptuous color, which obviously didn't translate over to this black and white mini-comic. On the other hand, that only highlighted her remarkable and multifaceted skills as a draftsman. This mini has a variety of single-panel strips, gags, sketchbook drawings, short stories, recipes and other ephemera; with all of it revealing much about its author. Even in the fairy tale she starts about a young girl and a garden, the character she draws is an obvious stand-in for herself. Park is comfortable in any number of styles, from realistic and heavily rendered to a more cartoony line.. Her sense of design is what really pops off the page, from her own iconic character to the fonts in her lettering. The word that best describes her work is "playful", both in terms of the way she addresses her subject matter and the way she plays around with the medium. There's something warm and inviting about her line that makes one want to look at more of her drawings, because they create a comforting environment for the reader to visit--even if it's just for a brief time. Park's storytelling ability doesn't get too much of a workout in this mini, but her restraint and understanding of story beats pervades other work of hers I've read.

In Namby Pamby #4, Rina Ayuyang spins stories about her cat, her brother, her TV-watching habits and people she's met into engaging, well-constructed stories. What's interesting about her work is the effortless way she's able to switch tones from story to story. "Cat's Got A New Crush" and "A Secret To Die For" are both light-hearted accounts of specific obsessions. Ayuyang loves writing about such obsessions from a third-person perspective even as she immerses the read in the particulars of her cat's imaginary life or the way Murder, She Wrote episodes are constructed. The scene where she imagines her cat leading a gang and getting into vicious knife fights with rival cat gangs was hilarious.

"The Book of Ruth" is a touching, hilarious tribute to the life of her older brother from her perspective. The twelve panel grid she employs forces her to keep each panel clear and simple while propelling the reader through her brother's life story. While she gets off plenty of jokes at his expense, Ayuyang doesn't spare herself, frequently casting herself in the role of consummate irritant. The sequences where each youngest child reacts with jealousy at the arrival of a new child, only to be taunted by their older siblings as a sort of karmic payback, are cleverly told in an understated manner. From the lighter early stories to the range of emotions exposed in Ruth's story we turn to a thoughtful and meditative anecdote about a man that Ayuyang was friends with, each relating to each other's misery and ennui. It was done with her non-dominant hand for an anthology, but the result saw a striking use of white on black to tell this bleak but ultimately hopeful story. Ayuyang doesn't have Park's chops, but she is able to effectively tell the kind of stories that she wants to relate.

It's interesting that all three artists discuss their lack of self-confidence and self-worth through their comics, but it seems clear to me that they work through this self-doubt every time they commit to creating a page. The proof of their ability, commitment and passion for comics is on every page, even if it's not immediately apparent to them. They've internalized Lynda Barry's dictum not to worry about whether "Is this good? Does this suck?" and instead have faith in the simple act of drawing and writing and where it will take them. These minis have the feel of immediacy and urgency to them, as though the artists simply couldn't wait another second longer to put them together. That's why the work of all three artists bears watching as they continue to develop their voices.

Autobio Minicomics

Rob reviews a number of autobiographical comics. Included are minis by Liz Baillie, James McShane, Vanessa Davis, Laura Park, Raina Telgemeier, Marion Vitus, Sarah Glidden, Alec Longstreth, Julia Wertz, and Matt Hawkins.


One joy of attending SPX is finding the latest issues of autobiographical minicomics series, as well as discovering new and interesting takes on the subject.

9/27/08, by James McShane. This was an interesting little brick of a comic; it was not so much printed as constructed, its pages punched out. Its dimensions are 4" x 2.5" by 1" with a silkscreened cover. Apart from its nature as an art object, the book itself follows an interesting formal concept: a diary comic where one draws what one has done every ten minutes. The day begins at 7:40am as his partner wakes him up and proceeds from there, detailing the most minute details of daily life in rapid-fire fashion. This approach has as much to do with animation as it does with comics, because with McShane's stripped-down approach, the reader is not meant to linger on any particular image for too long.

McShane noticeably tells the story almost entirely with pictures, avoiding dialogue in most of his panels. I'm guessing that's partly a function of not being able to remember everything that was said and only focusing on bits of verbiage that would make the diary a little easier to understand. It's interesting that even in a comic that purports to report on the details of a day, there's still a lot of room for variation and interpretation on the part of the artist. Of course, one also has to account for the fact that drawing his log was part of this day--a snake eating its own tail, in a sense. I'm not sure I'd want to read another comic like this; this is an experiment that would quickly yield diminishing returns, but I admire the way McShane devoted himself to it for a day.

SING ALONG FOREVER, by Liz Baillie. It's always interesting to read an autobiographical comic by an artist who rarely makes them, and why they would choose to reveal themselves. In Baillie's case, it was simple: she decided to create an account of traveling to a music festival with a friend (fellow artist Robin Enrico) in order to meet her favorite band (the Bouncing Souls), see them play and take a photo with them. The comic, as she notes on the cover, is a "love letter" to the band, something that she describes as "messy, sloppy [and] gushing words of pure devotion", something that's "uncomfortably sincere".

The framework of this comic was a sort of cousin to what Jesse Reklaw is doing in his COUCH TAG series. She's revealing portions of herself through a mediated source. In Reklaw's case, it was through accounts of all the cats his family owned or the story of a particular friendship. In Baillie's case, it's the way the band became not just an obsession, but a security blanket of sorts. From the first song she heard, she felt like she was understood, that her pain was not random, and that she could find ways to put it to use. One reason why artists create is to externalize their emotions in a way they can't quite do otherwise, and Baillie's comics are filled with characters bursting with emotions they can't quite understand who express them in often inappropriate ways.

The love letter approach, while indeed sloppy, led to some delightfully spontaneous, expressive art. Baillie carefully crafted the comic to include flashbacks as to how and why the band became important to her, but the actual events of the day she met the band went beyond her expectations. As she met the band, got sketches, got a photo and watched them play from backstage by their invitation, one could sense the sheer bliss she was experiencing. She met her heroes, men she had never met but who in a sense had saved her life, and they turned out to be superheroes. Baillie had the rare experience of interacting on an intimate level with that which was by its very nature larger-than-life in her own eyes. As an artist, she had to capture these rare feelings, feelings that couldn't entirely be captured in a coherent fashion. A little sloppiness was part of the process.

SPANIEL RAGE 2008, by Vanessa Davis. Davis is probably my favorite diarist in comics and this recent minicomics collection shows that she's only gotten better. Davis has organically created a formula for her comics that plays to her strengths. Her comics are intimate without being overly confessional. They have a warmth, immediacy and spontaneity while still clearly being carefully composed. They are revealing of neurosis and worry without being pathetic. Davis' comics are funny without devolving into shtick. This volume details the ups and downs of being in a relationship without lapsing into being overly cute or sentimental. I especially enjoyed the way she and her boyfriend tease each other about various subjects, and the way she depicted the way she veered between sheer bliss and insecurity. It was interesting to see her connect her desirability as a partner with her productivity as an artist.

The key to Davis' success is providing the illusion of intimacy to the reader. The reality is that by withholding the context of the events she depicts, she actually creates distance between herself and the reader. As a result as that safety net of sorts, this allows her to talk about deeper feelings. That sense of intimacy and immediacy is further aided by the way she designs her pages--there are rarely grids or panels, yet the reader never feels lost. Her comics owe as much to the classic New Yorker cartoonists or Jules Feiffer as they do modern alternative comics. About the only drawback to her spontaneous style in this mini is her lettering. It's clear that she didn't always measure out word balloons properly for certain anecdotes, and some words spill out of the balloons. I imagine that will be corrected for the eventual larger collection of these strips.

DO NOT DISTURB MY WAKING DREAM #2, by Laura Park. Park was probably my favorite discovery in 2008, an artist with fully-formed chops who is finding her way around sequential storytelling. Her comics are a great companion piece to those of Vanessa Davis and Julia Wertz, with each artist simultaneously revealing intimate details while keeping the reader at a distance. The only problem with this mini is that the reader doesn't get to experience the sumptuous way she employs color on her flickr page for these strips. The grayscaled strips in this mini look a bit muddy in comparison.

The subtext of these strips details Park's social anxiety. Like many cartoonists, she's shy and solitary by nature, and these strips provide a window into the comfort she feels being along against her urge to be with others. "Good Time Gal About Town" crystalizes these feelings, as she tells herself to go to a nearby party but can't quite do it, telling herself "Probly wouldn't have had fun". That said, these strips really aren't about misery, but rather simple joys. "The Bestest Damn Hobo What Ever Was" is a delightful strip about an especially busy and accomplished day as she shot around Chicago on her bike. The final, contented image of Park lying in a chair with her sore feet propped up was a particular pleasure to look at.

Park is a skilled draftsman who uses a spontaneous approach to her line. The result is a series of pages that are beautiful to look at with simple, expressive figures. The way Park draws her own facial expressions on her lumpy self-caricature is this book's biggest draw. Her self-caricature captures her energy, her curiosity, her urge to create and the way she delights in the world around her. The way she frames each anecdote into structured grids (often telling the same story more than once) speaks to both wanting to make these anecdotes readable to an outsider and that she constantly thinks about her world in comics terms. Hopefully some wise publisher will publish a collection of her strips in full color. In the meantime, Park will have a story in an upcoming issue of MOME, and I'm delighted to see that she'll soon be getting wider recognition.

OUTREACH, by Raina Telgemeier. Telgemeier got her start doing minicomics, so it was nice to see her first such effort in several years after laboring over four Baby Sitters Club adaptations. This short mini is autobiographical, detailing anecdotes from conventions and classes she's taught to children. Her line, as always, is enormously appealing and spare. Telgemeier is an artist who really knows how to play to her strengths: gesture, expression and depicting energy and enthusiasm (especially from children). I could have read a book full of these modest, easygoing strips. I've read plenty of comics much like this one, but it's Telgemeier's distillation of both the joys and frustrations of working with children that make it such a pleasant read. There's a rhythm to these strips that's framed by the disciplined simplicity of Telgemeier's line, effortlessly setting up punchlines with visuals rather than gag lines. Telgemeier's own autobiographical book, SMILE, will be published by Scholastic in a couple of years, and I expect that to be the best work of her brief but productive career.

NO IN-BETWEEN #7-9, by Marion Vitus. Vitus has been working on this rite-of-passage/travelogue series for some time now, and it's clear that she's built up quite a bit of momentum with it now that she's serializing it on the web. The latest collection of issues stands alone quite nicely, as we see her in Austria, visiting the relatives of her ex-boyfriend--though they aren't aware that they've broken up. This series is about breaking out of one's shell, taking risks, confronting fears and experiencing intense highs and lows. Vitus mixes a naturalistic and expressive styles interchangeably, which sometimes makes for some awkward moments. Some of her figures have odd body proportions that change from panel to panel, for example. On the other hand, Vitus' more expressive drawings do a fine job of telling the story, especially in the way she draws faces. These comics have a compelling quality to them, mostly because of Vitus' narrative voice. That voice is of someone who had obviously been quieted by people in her life and was just starting to find ways to break out. That exploration of how tentative this process can be, of one step forward followed by three steps back, compels the reader to want more. Vitus' voice is self-deprecating without being self-pitying, which is a rare combination in autobiographical comics.

EIGHT DAYS OUT, by Sarah Glidden. Glidden is the artist behind the award-winning HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS minicomic that got picked up by Vertigo's new line of original graphic novels. I tend to think of her on the "writer that draws" end of the comics spectrum, as much of what she writes would be nearly as compelling without comics to go with them. It'll be interesting to see the end result of that comic, because I imagine Glidden's work will move more towards the middle of that art/text distinction as her line grows more confident. This mini is the perfect sort of comic to balance those interests, given the warmth and immediacy of the art. It's a travelogue (which seems to be Glidden's go-to subject at the moment) about a trip she and her brother took across country from New York to Los Angeles.

It's funny that she and her brother chose to listen to podcasts of "This American Life", because her own storytelling style is not unlike a feature on that show. Her narrative voice has a gentle, warm, probing wit. She looks at her world with eyes wide open and openly seeks out new experiences and sights. That openness translates well to comics, as the reader feels like they are traveling with her, listening to her tell a story. The sketchy quality of her art has a certain immediate power to it, but she has difficulty getting across the beauty of her surroundings with some of her less detailed drawings. It's clear that experiencing the natural beauty of the American southwest had a profound impact on her, one that she wanted to share with her audience, but this venue was not quite the right one. It really required the use of full color and/or an elaborate series of visual tricks that aren't quite in her arsenal to date. At eighty pages, Glidden does serve up a meaty account of her trip that still manages to reveal little in the way of personal detail but much in our understanding of how she perceives the world. Glidden is already a talent to watch and someone who should only improve as she continues to evolve as an artist.

2007 PHASE 7 SUMMER SUPPLEMENT, by Alec Longstreth. The most enthusiastic artist on artist cranked out an attractive-looking story as a 24-hour comic, no less. Longstreth enjoys writing about the craft of creating comics, and time management in particular. This comic was a sort of meta-commentary on time management, since it's all about his decision to become a fellow at the quite isolated Center for Cartoon Studies in a small Vermont town. Longstreth throws in nice-looking splash pages, a number of fairly detailed drawings, diagrams, caricatures of over a dozen people and more in this high-energy mini. It's a comic about wanting to draw comics, and the purity of Longstreth's enthusiasm for the form has always been one of his biggest strengths as an artist. The simplicity of his line has always made his work appealing if not always compelling. When his "Basewood" serial is done, that will most likely his best early work, and I sense that he's best suited for clever genre-related work with occasional pit-stops and detours into autobio and other experiments.

BEFORE THE FART PARTY and THE LEGEND OF REBOB MOUNTAIN, by Julia Wertz. I'd describe Wertz as another "writer who draws", only unlike Sarah Glidden, Wertz is rambunctious, all over the place and sloppy. She mixes her potent sense of humor with a healthy dose of anger, bitterness and self-deprecation. Wertzpretty much pours all of her feelings on the page, and these two comics show the results at different points in her career. BEFORE THE FART PARTY contains the strips she did prior to launching the webcomic that has attracted a fairly substantial audience. It's an interesting mini, as Wertz is trying to find a voice both as writer and artist. She actually started off trying a more naturalistic style for her autobio strips, but it was clear that she was best suited for a more cartoony, almost bigfoot, style. She very quickly honed her chops as a comedic writer even before settling on a style of art that worked for her, as was evident in strips like "Hospital 1982-2004" (wherein she discusses her history of falling down and her desire to give birth to kittens), "First/Last Date" and the hilarious "Robot Vs Snowman" (a pitched battle between her left and right brain selves that leaves both dead--this was her application strip to CCS!).

REBOB MOUNTAIN is not a comic, but rather an illustrated story from Wertz's childhood. There are a few interesting uses of misdirection here, as we expect an irreverent story from her early life (which had many unusual stories attached to it), but instead we get a fairly sober meditation on how & why children attach meaning to certain events. In this case, the unthinkable death of a friend of theirs from cancer was shifted into their ongoing angst about the creatures they thought lived at the top of the mountain near their house. It's about the rituals children use to ward off the unexplained, about the feeling of being kept in the dark by adults and wondering about how to gain access to the world's real secrets. This mini is an interesting fit with the rest of Wertz's work, since one can't fully pigeonhole her. Most of her work is funny, but it also has a diary strip quality to it, as well as days where it's more a straight rant than a punchline. Still other days are expressions of pure joy, once again with no punchline. Wertz took a fairly common internet phenomenon and has carved out a unique identity for herself.

UNLUCKY #3 & #4, by Matthew Hawkins and various artists. Hawkins does Harvey Pekar-style autobio collaborations with a variety of artists, focusing almost solely on stories about his own misfortunes or the very strange things he's seen. He has a raunchy, visceral wit as he zips back and forth in time for these short anecdotes. Issue #3 matches a story with scatological and broken-heart elements with Matthew Bernier's minimalist (almost symbolic) art, which fortunately blunted the gross-out factor of the story while playing up its humor. I thought Dave Savage's scrawled-out art for a story about the various weirdos he knew in school was another appropriate choice, looking as though it had been scribbled on someone's book cover. Hawkins' stories seem to go best with collaborators whose art is heavily stylized (which is why I thought Toby Craig's moody but naturalistic art was a bad fit), partly because Hawkins' writing has a certain deadpan quality to it no matter how weird the situation he describes. That matter-of-fact storytelling style is perhaps his greatest strength; he never oversells his premises but rather lets them play out with restraint on his end, allowing his artists to go hog wild. I'd like to see Hawkins illustrate one of his own stories--he's certainly got the chops to do so.