Around the World: Loge, Machado, Pereira, Astromanta/Hetamoe

I get comics from all over the world. Let's dip into a sampling of such work.

Lies Die Kind, by Lilli Loge. Loge notes that the title's meaning in German ("Read the child") applies as much to this portrayal of trauma and lost memory as does the English meaning, though neither meaning is entirely applicable. It's about lacunae, gaps in memory that feel like holes ripped out of one's brain in much the same way that Loge hand-ripped out a hole in each one of the covers of this comic. The comic isn't so much a narrative (it's about something lost, after all) as it is a series of representations of knowing that something horrible is missing from one's memory but that it's completely lost. Loge's linework goes from exquisite and detailed to cartoony and scratchy, depending on how she chooses to represent this phenomenon. She also uses a bunch of interesting formal tricks, like a post-it note on a blank page that features a rabbit saying "Got a mind like a sieve? Better take notes!" Loge also depicts the struggle as two young women portraying different parts of the brain, with one unable to communicate to another what has been forgotten; she has forgotten that she has even forgotten anything, and getting upset about it makes the situation even worse. It's a brief, powerful and striking attempt to get at an interesting idea. Loge is an extremely clever cartoonist who puts her formal inventiveness to good use.

Megafauna/Inner Math, by Joao Machado and Andre' Pereira. This mini is a flipbook, with each artist contributing one story that meets in the middle. Megafauna represents the distant past, while Inner Math tells of the far future. Both are about evolution and freedom, and the way that the struggle for both is literally a life-or-death affair. Megafauna shows the birth of the first sentient humanoid creature in a savage environment, and how its existence activates and angers the presence of the gods in the form of a many-headed elephantine creature. Inner Math is about a distopian future where a single human is bred to combat the decay of society, navigating its structures and bringing it back in touch with nature. Here, the state (or science, or religion) plays the same role as the gods in the first story, angry about humanity's attempts to evolve and better itself. The baby born in the first story is essentially another iteration of the human designed to run the gauntlet of the repressive future. Pereira's art in Megafauna is appropriately visceral and harsh, cutting up his pages into horizontal panels interspersed with EKG readouts indicating the brain activity of the new child. Machado's lettering in his story is a bit hard to parse at times, but I liked the way he used smudges, inserted diagramatic marks on his pages and mixed freehand drawings with what look like drafted structures. Both artists use greyscale to strong effect, modulating the lightness and darkness of individual images to create ghostly appearances. This is intriguing work.

Idle Odalisque, by Astromanta and Hetamoe.This odd and lovingly-made comic is crudely-drawn in manga style. The artists (writer and artist) tell the story of a young woman going about her day as she gets ready to go to work. It's just that her job is being a streetwalker. The comic is very much in the tradition of magical realism, as her world sparkles and she winds up going home with a talking bear who prefers to talk and play scrabble than have sex. There's a matter-of-factness about this story that I enjoyed. The crudeness of the line actually made it more attractive to my eyes, since I find typical shojo-style art to be painful to look at in its slick cuteness. I'm not entirely sure where the artists are going with this; it feels like a bit of a lark. Both this mini and the preceding mini came from Portugal, by the way; click on the link to see more work on a dedicated tumblr.

New and Old : Hive #5

The fifth volume of Jordan Shiveley's anthology of new and old material, Hive, is unsurprisingly hit and miss. However, Shiveley is to be commended for the sheer breadth and depth of the material in the book, as many of the cartoonists here are relatively new to me and show exciting potential. Let me start with Cole Closser, a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies whose "Finnegan Frog" stories channel both the style and spirit of golden age comic strip cartoonists like EC Segar or (especially) Billy DeBeck. The ways in which the poor title character gets beaten down by life in strip after strip is hilarious and evocative of later work (Chris Ware crossed with Tony Millionaire, perhaps). What makes Closser's work great is the organic nature of his line. He's not simply doing a pastiche but rather looks to have achieved his own style after much trial and error after looking at a lot of different kinds of comics. I could read a book full of these gags.

Shiveley did a nice job in getting a number of non-US cartoonists for this anthology, and these artists in particular piqued my attention. German artist Lilli Loge's darkly humorous "Make The Most Of It" plasters that platitude atop a number of funny and grim situations in which a wheelchair-bound woman goes out of her way to overachieve in the most ridiculous of situations. I enjoyed her bleak but absurd sensibility in this strip and found myself wanting to see more, which is certainly the mission of a good anthology. Liliana Velez wrote and Paola Gavira drew Velez's  story "Naked In The City", a straightforward account of a provocative act done with no thoughts toward eroticism, but rather a way of truly inhabiting (and forcing others to confront) the sense in which we are embodied. It's a fact that we literally cover up as people, a fact that is eroticized or shamed but that is always present. Her plaintive cry of "Don't they have a body?" as she is mocked, scolded and/or leered at rings true. Gavira's nervous line reminds me a bit of Julie Doucet in the way it wavers and is slightly on the grotesque side, a factor that helps ground the nudity in the story.

There's a lot in here that I've already seen, but I'm guessing many American readers haven't. Comics by Joe Decie, David Zggy Greene, Craig Collins &Iain Laurie come to mind in that department, representing diary comics, gags, and skewed horror, respectively. There was also an excerpt from Noah Van Sciver's excellent comic The Hypo published long before that book debuted. The tone and subjects of this anthology are really all over the place and have no particular flow; really, it's less an anthology than a sampler of work that Shiveley happens to like, published in a highly attractive package. (The hand-printed vellum dustcover is a beautiful little art object.) That said, Shiveley publishes work by artists not usually seen by wider audiences, like Hawk Krall's excellent comics about being a chef or Danny Hellman's lovingly-rendered exercises in hilarious filth that he drew a number of years ago.There's a couple of amusing Jonathan Baylis stories from his minis and lightweight but well done pieces from Lauren Barnett and Annie Mok (the former Ed Choy Moorman). Generally speaking, there's simply less dross in this volume than in the prior one. The comics in general look better and are visually distinctive. There's less genre tedium (not to say that all genre work is tedious, but there's nothing more tedious than bad genre work) and more risk-taking in the sort of storytelling approaches that are attempted. Even the most conventional of stories, like Paul O'Connell's by-the-numbers stories about jazz musicians and other cultural figures from the 1950s, are at least readable and competently done. I can't help but think that Shiveley is on the verge of being able to make Hive uniformly excellent, but that may require a rethinking of the way he gathers some of his material. There's no question that he has a knack for identifying talent and anticipating its rise.