Brit Comics: The Hic & Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humour: Volume 2

The Hic & Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humour Volume Two: The United Kingdom, is a follow-up to the publisher's first volume of humorists from the United States. One of the reasons why Hic & Hoc is one of my favorite new publishers is Matt Moses' dedication to printing actual humor comics, something that had gone out of style for many publishers over time. This volume, edited by Lizz Lunney and Joe List, focuses on quick-punch single page stories for the most part. A few key contributors have multiple strips throughout the book, giving it a nice rhythm while varying the style of humor. Some of the pieces are outright gags, while others are more humorous slice-of-life stories. I'm going to go creator by creator and focus on the most interesting strips in the book.

Luke Pearson: The NoBrow star is better known as being whimsical rather than out-and-out funny. In this book, however, he goes to all sorts of extremes. His first strip is a gross-out effort built around the expectation of a different punchline, subverting the comedy of manners that is the explicit punchline. His second strip once again subverts an initial interaction and goes in a far more absurd direction, as a man ends up in a romantic relationship with a robin and winds up falling out of what turns out to be a tree after sex. His third strip borrows from the Michael DeForge playbook, as what appears to be a personal ad written by a cartoonist is in fact written by a horrifying monster that's a DeForgian nightmare. The fourth strip also plays with his style in a different way, looking more like something out of Paper Rad, as a snooping roommate looks at someone's internet cache and finds some rather distressing search histories. Pearson really stretches his cartooning muscles here rather than do what is expected of him, and as a result he shines the brightest here. 

Lizz Lunney: Lunney's "Alternative Greeting Cards" are one of the funniest things in the book, with entries like "Congratulations on finding your long lost father/commiserations on finding out he's dead" being one of the darker and funnier bits. She uses a simple line to get across her humor that ranges from the absurd to the morbid.

Joe Decie: The autobio cartoonist consistently delivers the laughs here, whether he's talking about the "untidy Decie DNA" that afflicts three generations of slobs, a gag about his brain needing a system update, burying a remote battery and digging it up a week later to gain the satisfaction of having a working remote again, and (best of all) advising the reader to sell things to door-to-door solicitors as a means of driving them away. That's an especially artfully delivered strip, even with the backfire of having one of the salesmen enjoy the comic that Decie tries to sell to him. As always, Decie's slightly scratchy and naturalistic style and extensive use of greys creates a dreamy, pleasant atmosphere for the reader to latch on to.

Philippa Rice: Her strips about sisters are pleasantly grotesque and knowing about familial relationships; here, two sisters try to trick each other into putting raw eggs into tea and cereal. Rice employs a scribbly, scrawled style here where those scribbles filling in space are meant to be apparent. These are funny drawings meant to be looked at as drawings that nonetheless get across a certain kind of familial emotional truth.

Kristyna Baczynski: Her strips about aliens shopping and fossils arguing about whose eternal view is worse are mildly funny, but they are exceptionally well-drawn. Her funny and exaggerated style sells most of the jokes in both cases.

There are some strange strips that aren't conventionally funny, but they are of interest because of their sheer weirdness. Becky Barnicoat's entry about a bear who tries to make friends with children is lovingly rendered with a level of detail not unlike Anders Nilsen; the poor bear makes bizarre statues of children that partly frighten them but mostly drive the brats to get their parents to drive the bear away. James Downing's story of a demented child's show host who has a woman on to recite Pi is the single weirdest story, as she fails and goes on to hide on a mountain for a hundred years. The exaggerated character design and absurd (and occasionally non sequitur nature of the jokes) remind me a lot of Paper Rad. Donya Todd's story about crash landing on a planet is along the same lines visually, leaning toward more DeForge-style use of tiny, squiggly arms in what turns out to be a romp. Isaac Lenkiewicz has an anthropomorphic walrus attacked by naked children, creating a weird atmosphere where they accuse him of being a pervert. It's a story without a pat resolution that is nonetheless absurd in the most anxiety-provoking sense of the word, aided by his clean, beautiful line.

There are silly and less interesting gags as well, like Fred Blunt's scrawled monkey & elephant story where they take turns hurling things at each other, Jonathan Edwards' nonsensical story about onion curses, and Gary Northfield's extended sci-fi ass joke. The two outstanding slice-of-life bits both revolve around popular internet memes/games. Timothy Winchester turns a moment of appreciating nature into a typically demented game of "Would you rather?", expertly turning a rant of protest into a clever resolution thanks to a well-placed story beat panel. Stephen Collins' strip about a teenage boy trying to get over on a girl with a game of "Zombie Bunker Apocalypse" is funny and knowing, especially since the boy doesn't come close to getting over. The other really notable strip belongs to Gareth Brookes, even if it is a bit meta: he lists any number of stupid suggestions for comics people have given him over the years, with one example being the only two worthwhile topics: Chelsea and Chelsea Under-21s. The rest either don't really have much of a punchline or fall into the absurd or parody categories. The anthology clocks in at a tight seventy pages but easily could have been fifty pages and had more of an impact. It was nonetheless a solid effort that spotlights a number of young British cartoonists.

Brit Comics: Collins/Laurie, Lunney, Cowdry, Decie

Metrodome and Crawl Hole, by Craig Collins and Iain Laurie. This macabre and darkly humorous duo continue to be a perfect writer/artist pairing. In Metrodome, the Scottish creators cleverly created super-powered/monstrous characters by combining random words from a local free newspaper, spawning such combatants as "Leaking Anger", "Blood Fog" and "Sex Axe". They combatants were then thrown into a city setting and there was much carnage, as Laurie channeled his inner Rob Leifeld ni the way he employed an excess of lines, grotesquely contorted mouths, and exaggerated figures. Collins and Laurie then channeled their inner Johnny Ryan (by way of Prison Pit) in developing plot-free, visceral, bloody and funny scenes of violence. It's essentially two artists playing around but committing to a premise with great enthusiasm and seriousness. Crawl Hole is a collection of short stories. "House of Mercy" is a bewildering story of a man bringing his father to a place where he has to fight masked men until he is eventually rent limb from limb; it winds up being an elaborate and grisly form of assisted suicide. "The Quiet Burden" is about an elderly man living a mundane existence, except for when he gets a call about the "vengabus", which are Lovecraftian creatures that live in his basement. Then he must don a mask and chop them up with an axe. Once again, Laurie's ink-spattered, lively visuals and interesting page design complement Collins' ideas perfectly. "Regression Artifact" combines the awkwardness of seeing an ex at a party with the secret knowledge that they are demonic/fantasy creatures who played out their conflicts on a battlefield. At four pages, it's perfectly paced and boasts a great punchline as well. That's a big reason for their success: they understand how to pace a story for maximum effect, allowing Laurie's visuals to pound the reader without becoming repetitive. Their take on horror is smart, funny and genuinely unsettling.

At The End Of Your Garden and At The Theme Park, by Lizz Lunney. Reading these Lunney comics is like watching a long-form improv performance. Bits of random strangeness turn out to be running gags that provide structure, like "The Girl With The Lion In Her Hair" in Garden. With a simple but expressive line, green ink and jokes that center around vegetation, we get advice from a chicken that's being prepared for an oven, follow two indolent cats as they buy items to delight themselves, listen to a talking tattoo make its recipient regret getting it, and ponder what it would be like if things like baking and interpretive dance were our dominant forms of communication. With a simple, clean line, Lunney neatly arranges what are essentially sketchbook gags into a minicomics format where their tenuous connections add to the humor of each individual joke; here the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In Theme Park, we follow the cats around as they wait endlessly for various theme park rides, encounter mysterious "foodz", and make jokes about a "ten hour build-up for ten seconds of intense pleasure" and connect that to golf. There are wistful autobiographical tidbits as well, as Lunney explores the nature of a theme park's mandatory fun with stories about her past and wishes that she could simply ignore anxiety. Mixed in with the same kind of silly sketchbook jokes as in Garden, and you have a short yet reliably amusing package that doesn't outstay its welcome.

Down Town, by Richard Cowdry. These bleak, cruel and funny comics are sort of like if Bazooka Joe became homeless and was relentlessly tormented by the police and the dregs of society. The simple line, classic comic strip character design and surprisingly dark and brutal violence makes for a stew that's both hilarious and slightly nauseating. Cowdry makes it work by following a sort of gag-strip code, full of characters slipping each other dynamite, abusive clowns who desperately need their victims in order to be happy, and deliberately unseemly gags about alcoholics. Because it's all in a familiar rhythm and structure, Cowdry can go as dark or silly as he wants and it all makes sense. Whether it's a couple of "boys will be boys" terrorizing a neighborhood, only to be sold off to a sailor, or a mentally ill person being taken off their government benefits and given a "portable living unit" (ie, a barrel) to "maximize the flexibility of your job search". The strip is ruthlessly satirical, mining some of the same territory as Ruben Bolling's Tom The Dancing Bug but adding a more visceral, slapstick quality to his comics. Punch and Judy get turned into a much meaner and more hopeless version of Andy Capp, while a homophobic and racist man gets emasculated by his wife thanks to a classic "pants-falling-down" gag. I could have easily read a book full of these strips, and their mix of social & political commentary and flawless comedic timing make them unusual in the world of comics.

Pocket Full Of Coffee, by Joe Decie. Decie is the rare memoirist whose of humor tends to drive his comics. His comics are almost doggedly quotidian in terms of the sort of details he explores, but he is careful to avoid hackneyed observations as a means of eliciting a quick laugh. Instead, his comics are set to a low comedic burn, as every detail of both his writing and drawing has a dry, droll quality.Observations about his scruffy appearance by way of his young son's merciless judgment are a good example of this; his son tells him that he looks "really scruffy". Decie takes off a wrinkled shirt and asks if that's better, but he knows "even when I try really hard, I impress no one". The drawings in this sequence find his son bouncing from room to room and Decie standing still; his use of grey here adds a great deal of life to his character drawings and gives the backgrounds of sense of solidity. One of my favorite features of a Decie comic comes when he goes for a walk; in this comic, his observations are peppered with assorted outbursts from his son, including "Can I have a sister?" Decie then reveals his painfully ordinary to-do list, which includes ego-boosters like "Write to-do list" but also includes the momentous "Propose to Steph", an item which was checked off but not seen or even mentioned as an event in the comic. Decie even mocks his own "gentle observations" at the end of the book with a bathroom humor joke, but the truth is that he does have that poetic autobio touch of a John Porcellino turned to mostly comedic and lighthearted ends.