Catching Up With Liz Suburbia

Liz Suburbia's Cyanide Milkshake is perhaps my favorite one-person anthology minicomic of the past several years. Throwing in a serial, autobio stuff, jokes, and other assorted weirdness, she always stuffs each issue full of viscerally enjoyable entertainment. With the eighth issue, she has decided to close it down (as of late 2016) and move on. The issue explains some of those reasons, but let's look at a couple of other side-projects first.

Teen Dream Tragedy was a quickly scrawled out mini about the passion of Britney Spears, roughly speaking. On the back cover, Suburbia claims she drew this in 28 minutes and I can sort of believe that, given how she seems to be drawing from a few internet reference photos and takes it from there. Lots of text is crossed out in a move that looks deliberate, not a series of mistakes, as Suburbia is using sous rature as a method of exploring the transition between her traditional lyrical style and something far darker. The final revelation of a knife falling down from the heavens, its eventual (but unknown) use and its final disposal turns this into a story about striking out against the hierarchical forces arrayed against her own sense of agency.

What A Dog Wears is a perfect, goofy delight, demonstrating costume after increasingly absurd costume a individual can wear in order to help with "struggling w/articulating yr personal style". This mini is just a chance for Suburbia to joyfully goof off and draw fun and funny things for twenty or so pages. It starts to get really ridiculous with "SK8 Sandwich", which is two skateboards, one in front and one in back. "The Blood of Mine Enemies" (cheerfully subtitled "Goes with everything!") is a dense, disturbing image, matched only by "Apex Predator", which is a person with a shark out of water devouring most of their body. Funniest of all is the truly unnerving "A Mascot Suit Of Yourself", complete with two eye peering out behind the "mouth" of the mascot. Suburbia has formidable cartooning and drawing skills, but it was nice to see the illustration part of her drawing take center stage with these concepts.

Cyanide Milkshake #8 is an extremely revealing but also very silly comic, and that's a dynamic that sums up Suburbia nicely. She did a flip book in the bottom right hand corner of each page of Batman licking himself in a sensitive area like a cat. She talked about shoplifting groceries from a nearby market and laments how expensive the mustard she once stole was. There's just gag after gag on some pages, like the buttons on Jughead's hat (him fucking a burger, of course), wearing her partner's face at his funeral, a joking-not-joking bit about wanting to do watersports, etc. Then in "No Identity", she gets serious, revealing that pushing herself to finish her book Sacred Heart broke her, as her lack of self-care produced depression and severe anhedonia. It got to the point that the thought of making comics was upsetting to her, and she preferred to live life for a while pursuing the most basic, visceral experiences: eating, sleeping, exercising and having sex. The end of the story had no end, other than hesitant attempts to get back in the game (like this) that were still limited, as she chose to end the series with this issue. There's one last ode to her dogs and the wrap-up of her dimension-travelling zombie story that ends with a glorious deus ex machina. Suburbia really does give her reader a lot to chew on, especially in terms of comedy, and in her own way, Cyanide Milkshake was sort of her version of Love and Rockets. There's the angle of serialized stories, a mutual love of Archie comics, strange one-offs and a punk attitude, only Suburbia's comics are even more personal in some ways. To put a finer point on it, she allowed herself to do whatever she wanted--no rules, no restrictions--and she blossomed as a cartoonist with the freedom she gave herself to experiment. The series will be collected at some point soon, but I'm hoping she's able to return to the sequel to Sacred Heart in due time.

Mini Round-Up: E.Brubaker, Luce, L.Suburbia

Reich #12, by Elijah Brubaker. Ten years and 260-odd pages after he began this series about psychologist Wilhelm Reich, Elijah Brubaker finally finished it with this twelfth and final issue. It's a tribute to new Sparkplug publisher Virginia Paine that she's found a way to raise the funds to see this project through after the death of former publisher Dylan Williams. The final issue, which covers his eventual imprisonment and death, deals with Reich in much the same way Brubaker did throughout the entire series. Reich was both a moral crusader with ideas about sex and sexuality that were way ahead of his time and a hypocrite consumed by jealousy over imaginary situations and dismissing jealousy from others. Reich was almost always the smartest person in the room but also lost touch with reality, conflating real threats with imagined ones in what resembled a schizophrenic breakdown. His unshakable belief in himself and his discoveries was both his admirable quality and the eventual cause of his downfall. Brubaker treats Reich as a fascinating, brilliant, flawed and damaged person; he is sympathetic to his plight and even-handed with regard to many of Reich's theories, but is interested in the gestalt of Reich's life, both good and bad.

Brubaker's detailing Reich's early sexual experiences in a previous issue is a crucial but understated way of showing how many of his theories originated in encounters he couldn't fully process as a child. Making Reich the narrator of his own story also helped keep Brubaker's explicit opinions out of narrative, giving Reich himself the opportunity to state his own case--for good or ill. The angular, shadowy and cartoony nature of the art allowed Brubaker the flexibility to make this as much an emotional narrative as it was a chronological one. To his credit, Brubaker never shoots for visual or narrative pyrotechnics throughout the story, no matter how bizarre Reich's stories of battling with UFOs with orgone energy became. Indeed, one question left for the reader is that given that many of Reich's theories about sexuality were so progressive, what aspects (if any) of his orgone-related research (including seeding clouds) are valid? Brubaker asks that while Reich may have been delusional and jumped to some incorrect conclusions, it doesn't mean that many of his ideas weren't worth pursuing, albeit using different methods. Reich was a fantastic series about the ways in which ego and personality conflict with seeking the truth, and how those conflicts affect those around us.

Oafanthology, edited by Ed Luce. Luce's Wuvable Oaf is a genuine comics phenomenon, but one underrated aspect of that book is how much Luce loves to collaborate. This "collection of Wuvable Oaf drawings & stories" allowed Luce to work with fans, friends and admirers with his characters. The series (recently collected by Fantagraphics in a superbly well-designed hardcover) has always been part romance comic, part pro wrestling comic and part rock 'n roll comic. The fact that the titular character is a "bear" and that most of the characters are gay somehow manages not to matter much with regard to the above genres, yet the fact that most of the characters are gay is crucial to the series' DNA. It's assumed, uncompromising and direct, as Luce doesn't dilute his content for a crossover audience, yet the wacky but somehow relateable characters clearly appeal to a relatively wide audience. Fantagraphics wouldn't be publishing it if they didn't think so.

Oafanthology takes this crossover appeal and runs with it. For example, Luce's collaboration with Tom Neely, having Oaf meet Neely's "Henry and Glenn" characters, reflects Luce's own contributions to Neely's anthology and their shared aesthetic and cultural touchstones with regard to metal. The same is true for "The Spawn of Goteblud", drawn by Josh Bayer, who has used his scratchy line to write about pro wrestling elsewhere. Edie Fake's comic about Oaf's crazy cat working for the sadistic chef character is hilariously over the top. The Katie Skelly-drawn strip about the character who loves to wear dead cat skins is perfectly in Skelly's wheelhouse in drawing fashionable characters. In the same vein, Vanessa Davis's story about Oaf's grooming is perfectly her. There are a number of interesting pin-ups as well, including a mind-bending Junko Mizuno drawing, an appropriately disgusting one by Johnny Ryan and even one by mainstream artist Stephen Sadowski. None of this will make a lick of sense to non-Oaf fans, but it's a perfect supplement for those who are in the know.

Cyanide Milkshake #6, by Liz Suburbia. Suburbia just had her first book released by Fantagraphics, but this series is a catch-all for her other interests. This is the sort of one-woman anthology that's stuffed with gags, brief vignettes, a running serial, autobiographical notes and more. Suburbia's foice is clear and distinctive, and her line is both clear and expressive. A memory of nearly being kidnapped into a stranger's car and barely outrunning him is chilling, especially in the way she contrasts the terror of the moment with the calm of hiding out in a fenced-in yard with a rabbit staring at her. The post-apocalyptic romance "G.B.A" is exciting, funny and charming, mixing the Gary Panteresque style with a vividly detailed relationship story, one where commitment, choices and killing zombies all go hand-in-hand. Suburbia effortlessly blends fantasy, rock, feminism, punk, autobio, dogs and superhero gags into a surprisingly coherent package, held together by a singular aesthetic. This is the laboratory of a percolating and unique talent and indicative of the ways in which younger creators draw inspiration from a huge variety of sources.

Pondering the End: Puppyteeth Volume 3

The third volume of Puppyteeth represented a big step up in terms of both format and the quality of the contributions. Every cartoonist takes maximum advantage of being able to use color, and as a result every story looks great without going too over the top into slickness. I also liked that there wasn't an explicit theme stated anywhere, but the contributors nonetheless submitted stories that dealt with issues related to death, mortality and legacy. Matt Czap's opener is a bright bit of silliness, wherein a narrator starts babbling about a story featuring a group of entirely unconnected characters. The foreward (sic) by Dan Tallarico strains really hard to try to advance its shtick and falls well short of being funny. Jory Griffis' parody of the TV show Pawn Stars is another bit of silliness that led me to believe that this anthology would be all dumb goofery, all the time.

Things pick up a bit with stories from Eric Kubli, Brandon B and Jessi Zabarsky. Their art is all of the "cute" variety, with a clear line, bright colors and strong animation influence. Kubli's story is about two kids who find a cel phone that turns out was misplaced by the Grim Reaper. It's a funny story that grows increasingly dark until they walk away from it. Brandon B's story was one of the best in the entire volume; it extrapolates a horrible cyst/boil he had on his leg and turns into a voraciously hungry and evil supernatural entity. The scene where his doctor tells him "Your leg is haunted" was one of the best beats in the whole book, and the slight flatness of his line works nicely. Zabarksy's mostly silent story involves the main character (of whom we strangely get a lot of panty shots) opening up a door in her apartment to find a flattering supernatural presence that later becomes more menacing when she steps all the way through. The transition from the cool, metallic blue in the early part of the story to the garish and disgusting extradimensional room is the best part of this mostly one-joke story.

Just as the anthology seems like it's going to be just a succession of gags, things go in a different direction. Liz Valasco contributes a genuinely strange strip done in a thin and wavering line with a subtle color wash. It's about this tiny figure who confesses to his host that he ate her cat in one bite. There's no set-up or explanation, other than the figure revealing at the end that he's some kind of avatar of death (his eyes read "you are next"), albeit one who speaks in a halting and slightly nagging vernacular. Alex Martin's strip is a pixelated series of color patterns combined with some word balloons from old Marvel comics.  The pixels get bigger from page to page until they become blocks of color, given context solely because of the word balloons. The story after that features more abstract work by L.Nichols, as she addresses the concept of entropy by starting with a photograph and slowly breaking it down into fractal patterns. This is a very effective piece of comics-as-poetry, as her connections between chaos and order cleverly play themselves out in the images she chose to use. Kevin Czap's collage/paint/comics piece "Nude Heaven" is another visual stunner, a witty piece about chasing utopia that fairly uses doodles and scribbles almost as a kind of graffiti on top of the other images.

Niki Smith's "Your Hair" is about the death-throes of a relationship done in an elegant, slightly scratchy pen-and-ink style with a russet and olive color wash. Hair is the metaphor for both connection and dissolution, as a planned haircut is a sort of death-knell. Pieces by Keith Pakiz, Mandy Sampson and Cherry Au are all visually striking but not especially memorable as narratives. Au's piece is the stereotypical "artist who doesn't know what to draw and procrastinates" non-story, redeemed by the fact that she's an excellent artist. Pakiz' story is a silly one about a World War I flying ace, while Sampson's details a childhood memory. The real stand-out piece in the back of the book is Liz Suburbia's homage to Joan of Arc as a kind of punk rock figure. This is a beautiful, funny and apt framing of the famous martyr that combines stained-glass framing and iconography with comics technique and the quintessential punk attitude. She really has become a major talent and her work really shines in color. Overall, this is a solid anthology that ranges from good to very good, with a couple of excellent pieces that stand out. As a showcase for a particular group of cartoonists, it's an impressive sign that they are committed to getting better in public.