Minis: Coin-Op Special: Karl Marx Bolan

The Coin-Op brother-sister art duo of Peter & Maria Hoey is well-known for their fastidious approach to their comics' aesthetics. Their smaller-run comics, the "45 rpm" line, both mimics their fascination with music in terms of form and content. They are designed to look like sleeves for 45 rpm records, best known as short-playing records with a single song on each side. The comics also are a mix of music history and something else. In the case of Karl Marx Bolan, it imagines an afterlife where rockers Gene Vincent & Eddie Cochran conspire with Karl Marx to change the world. The Hoeys have the uncanny ability to draw naturalistic caricatures of famous people without losing any expressiveness; indeed, they lean into the caricatures to emphasize their larger than life qualities.

The story follows Marx using the event of Elvis Presley's death as a distraction in order to send Vincent and Cochran to save Marc Bolan. He claimed that "We need a working class hero who knows how to boogie!", and Bolan's music destabilizes the Soviet Union and leads to crushing defeats of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. What makes the comic so much fun is the way that the Hoeys are so obviously conversant both in Marx's political ideas as well as the stories of each rock star. In just eight pages, they tell a story with an epic sweep that touches on raw early 50s rock, 70s glam rock and funk. It's a funny statement about the potential power of music apart from its status as capitalist commodity. The whimsical qualities of the comic are grounded by its naturalistic approach and roots in reality, but at heart it's still a fun bit of subversiveness.

Fifteen Artists And Publishers To Seek Out At SPX 2018

As always, it's a pleasure to compile my annual list of artists and publishers to seek out at SPX. I always make an effort never to repeat a name, and that's a tribute to the continuing depth of talent in alt-comics these days. There are also a few veterans here and there who are making their first appearance.

1. Laura Lannes. Table B11-B. This Brazilian autobio cartoonist made a big splash with By Monday I'll Be Floating In The Hudson With The Other Garbage, a painfully honest account of a doomed relationship. Her acidic sense of humor and sharp observations about life as a single person combined with her loose, fuzzy line made for a remarkably coherent & memorable series of vignettes. I believe she'll have a new comic at this show. 

2. Leila Abdelrazaq. Table M13-A. She's a Palestinian cartoonist based in Detroit who specializes in personal and political strips about alienation, persecution and identity. She recently finished as the first-runner up for the Locher Award, given to editorial cartoonists under the age of 25.

3. Conundrum Press. Table W66-B. They are one of the most underrated publishers in comics, consistently releasing daring, unusual comics. They're known for publishing works in English for the first time, giving a platform for young Canadian cartoonists, reprinting key comics and collecting truly strange comics. I don't think publisher Andy Brown will be there, but Max de Radigues will be there, repping his book Weegee.

4. Richie Pope. Table E11-A. Pope's magnificent issue of Frontier about fatherhood was one of the most memorable of the entire series. I'm eager to see his other comics.

5. Perfectly Acceptable Press. Table N13-A. Publisher Matt Davis is one of the premier purveyors of exquisitely-produced art objects (via Risograph) that are also excellent comics.

6. Rina Ayuyang. Table W1-4. Rina's a long-time favorite of mine who is debuting a book from Drawn & Quarterly soon called Blame This On The Boogie. I also have the pleasure of being the moderator for a panel she's on.

7. Silver Sprocket. Table J1. Avi Ehrlich's punk DIY aesthetic is the engine behind this burgeoning publishing concern. He publishes the personal and the political.

8. Iona Fox. Table D13. She's one of the brightest young voices in the embarrassment of riches we as readers are enjoying with regard to memoir and diary comics. She draws from experiences that are quite different from the average city dweller.

9. Matt Emery. Table F2. He's the brains behind Pikitia Press from Australia, and he's introduced me to a number of excellent cartoonists.

10. Summer Pierre. Table I11-A. In a year where the theme of the programming is memoir and there are so many great cartoonists in that area, Pierre stands out as one of the best of the best. Her line is as engaging as her storytelling, which is full of wit and warmth.

11. M.S. Harkness. Table M12-B. Her Tinderella was a hilarious but poignant autobiographical book that was remarkably frank and upfront about desire, loneliness and the sheer indignity of dating.

12. Maria Hoey. Table L14. One half of the Coin-Op team, she will be there with a recent issue of the comic as well as the collection from Top Shelf. She's one of the best illustrators around.

13. Julia Kaye. Table N1-A. Her book Super Late Bloomer is one of my favorites regarding the experience of transitioning. Her line is endlessly fun to look at.

14. Taneka Stotts. Table I1-A. A fine writer in her own right, Stotts is also a superb editor. Her Elements: Fire rightfully won the Eisner award.

15. Fred Noland. Table G5-A. This is "Fredo's" first SPX in some time. His minis from the early 2000s were some of my favorites.

Minis: M.Hoey & P.Hoey, C.Cass, W.Taylor

Time for some more mini talk:

Coin Op: Project Gemini (Musical Twins) and Coin Op: Chuck Berry's Revenge (Afro-Futurist Re-Mix), by Peter & Maria Hoey. The Hoey siblings have always been interesting in exploring music on the comics page, and their "45 RPM comics" are shaped like the old 45 sleeves: an aesthetically pleasing square. Project Gemini is one of their comics that combines historical research and straight-up illustration, juxtaposing interesting anecdotes about famous musical twins with vintage imagery of casinos, countrysides and gas stations that all use a twin theme.

On the other hand, Chuck Berry's Revenge is hilariously deranged, working in themes, quotes and lyrics from a number of artists into this unexpected sequel to Back To The Future. As you may recall, Marty McFly passes off Chuck Berry's work as his own, to the point where Chuck's "cousin" Marvin plays him some of the music. We see the other end of that conversation, as a furious Chuck slams the phone into the wall. However, he seeks out avant garde jazz maestro Sun Ra, who sends rock pioneer Ike Turner with him to alter the course of history. Turner kills Henry Ford, uses his assembly line idea, and becomes America's premier industrialist, only with a diverse workforce. Chuck goes back to 1955 and seduces Marty's mom ("she's too cute to be a minute over seventeen"), causing Marty to disappear. This twelve-page comic features an avalanche of ideas, jokes, references, puns and history, and it's astonishing just how much havoc the Hoeys wreaked in the course of the story. The mix of naturalism and psychedelia (the "Afro-Futurist Remake") were perfectly balanced for a comics story, as both made sense right away, given the story's absurd premise.

The Once Great Auk, by Caitlin Cass. As far as Cass's comics go, this one is pretty grimly straightforward. The Great Auk was a bird that had no natural fear of man, was plentifully found on small islands, and exceedingly easy to kill. It was like they were a litmus test for humanity's capacity for mercy that it wildly failed. With each page a single panel, Cass zeroes in on the escalating hilarious and horrible circumstances surrounding the eventual total extinction of this species. Cass indulges in some detailed cross-hatching in this comic, emphasizing the utterly benign quality of the bird and its utter lack of a survival instinct. From an evolutionary perspective, it's a simple case of a species getting wiped out because it had no way of dealing with its predator. From a human perspective, it's an extreme example of the way we take advantage of nature without fully thinking of the consequences, like an exceedingly long game of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Fizzle #1, by Whit Taylor. Taylor has really come into her own in the past year or two doing autobiography and journalism. This series represents her best slice-of-life work to date, and she really stands out in terms of character design and expression. Always great at drawing side-eye and creating expressions with scrunched-up mouths, Taylor really goes to town with those expressions in this comic in panel after panel. In a story that's mostly a series of talking heads, Taylor creates action and tension in each panel because of the frequently seething and hidden character of emotions that are hinted at by facial expressions. This story follows a young woman named Claire who is questioning her life's choices. She has a stoner boyfriend with a rich family that he's rebelling against, finding him complaining about having to hang out with his dad and brother at a posh steakhouse. She has a job at a boutique tea "lounge" with a hilariously obnoxious boss named Poppy who is obsessively focused with her business. Her glasses and sort of mop-top haircut are a great example of the way Taylor used character design to sum up her characters without saying a word. This is a character who isn't suffering: she has a job, a relatively cushy life and a boyfriend--yet it's clear that she's deeply depressed, her life the titular "fizzle" as she has no creative outlet. The verisimilitude of the dialogue and the story's tiniest details are elements that help it stand out, as well as variations in page design that reflect Claire's disorientation and ennui. The cover image reflects the overall cleverness of the comic. It's exciting to see how Taylor has come into her mature style as an artist and is doing it across the board with all of her various projects.

Mini-Comics Week: Coin-Op

Peter and Maria Hoey are among the very best illustrators in comics. Using an ultra-precise, colorful style in the vein of Chris Ware, they love to use fractured panels to form visual gestalts along with the influence of an early 20th century aesthetic in much the same way that Kim Deitch does. At other points, they do a more straight-up kind of naturalistic illustration. Cities and music are two crucial touchstones in most of their work.

In addition to their anthology Coin-Op, they occasionally produce stand-alone works that have the same dimensions and are designed to look like 45 RPM records. Blacktop Mourning (They Died By Night) is a straight illustration job, bringing to life a number of musicians whose lives were ended by car crashes. They range from blues singer Bessie Smith to early rocker Eddie Cochran to Minutemen frontman D.Boon. The Hoeys include the particulars of the accident: who was driving, what the cars hit, what the weather was like, etc. in an effort to link each of the accidents and their senselessness. It's all drawn in a naturalistic, if somber and muted, style. You Don't Look Like (Anyone I Know) is a compelling narrative that transposes the flow of crowds in a city over the buildings themselves, creating an almost ghostly image as the people the unnamed narrator is following pop into view and then pop out as the narrator shifts from one direction to another. Following a final man up to the roof of a tall building, the title phrase is uttered by the man to his pursuer just as he was about to jump off the roof, implying perhaps that the pursuer was Death. The blue tones in the comic reflect that sense of melancholy. The final stand-alone, Boxed In, was written by Adam McGovern. It juxtaposes images of vacations and other activities with the reality of the stultifying nature of urban conformity, all with a fuzzy peach veneer. It's about how those that are privileged, even if it's the bland privilege of the bourgeoisie, are dissuaded from thinking of the misfortunes of the abjected.

In Coin-Op #5, the story "Au Privave" sees the Hoeys use a nine panel grid to break up the larger image on the page. Each of the panels has a blue wash, while the extended gutter space is a bright orange while featuring drawings that complete the main image. Each column of panels on the first page features a single character, and the top panels have a variety of thoughts streaming through each of their minds. On the second page, we see a character stretched out on a couch, and her dialogue spreads across the page. The story is about jazz musicians and the wife and daughter of one of them in particular thinking about their lives. The title is a play on the title of a famous Charlie Parker song as well as the fact that these are private, inner thoughts. This issue's "Saltz and Pepz" strip (a regular feature in the anthology that's a throwback to 1920s cartooning shenanigans) is done in the orange and blue that marks the rest of the book, with an overlay of zip-a-tone that adds texture and depth. That's important for the story, especially considering the silliness of its protagonists, two dog-looking creatures that walk upright and have a cartoony design.

"The Trials Of Orson Welles", written by Peter Hoey and C.P. Freund, is my favorite story in the issue. The Hoeys have always shown a fascination with classic cinema, and this story manages to blur and warp several of the great director Welles' best films. The bottom row of panels that run across each page are done in the style of an old newsreel, with a mixture of oblique commentary and explicit credits regarding which Wells character is being introduced in the story. It begins with Harry Lime and a nod to the sewer chase scene in The Third Man, who is found by the corrupt cop Hank Quindlan from Touch of Evil. They meet with the sailor Michael O'Hara from Lady From Shanghai, who takes them to the famous funhouse from that film's climax, where they are confronted by Charles Foster Kane (from Citizen Kane, of course). The final dialogue of the fortune teller quotes Touch of Evil, asking what one could say about Quindlan: "A man? They were some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?" That's a clever ending, given that the comic is an oblique commentary on Welles's use of imagery and his relationships, but in the end, it doesn't really matter what Hoey and Freund say about him.

"The Windy Parade" features a series of 4 x 3 grids, each panel of which makes up a larger image and also serves as not only a discrete image, but also serves as part of a distinctly different narrative. Panel one is about an editor dealing with his nephew's graphic novel, panel two features an arguing couple, and the middle panels feature a parade. Over the span of six pages, we get a satisfying little story from each set of panels, some of which spill over into other panels. It's whimsical but intricate storytelling at its best. I was less taken by "The Interoffice Memo", which uses the familiar trope of an office setting being transformed into something else. Here, it's an elevator leading to an island across an expanse of water and the systems admin office, and then back to the original desk. The mixture of mundane and surreal feels a bit forced.

In Coin-Op #6, "Inter-Office Memo" continues with an even more opaque approach to storytelling. Mixing together the image of the office being flooded and a worker surviving a boat on the river crashing into the shore, the clutter of the storytelling technique didn't justify the end result. On the other hand, I appreciated that this installment of Saltz and Pepz was a take on Waiting for Godot, as the two were pushing a handcar along a loop on a video cassette tape, never making progress and constantly commenting on their predicament. With canary yellow in the gutters adding a sort of muting process to the actual art, the overall flatness of the strip and its repetitive structure doubles down on its theme without wearing out its welcome.

"Une Lune Andalouse" may be the Hoey's greatest achievement: a mash-up of Luis Bunuel and Salvadore Dali's surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou and the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window. Co-written by C.P. Freund, the genius of this story is that it combines the suspense thriller elements of Rear Window and merges them with the transgressive elements of Un Chien Andalou in a manner that emphasizes the films' common element of voyeurism. Raymond Burr is replaced as the villain of the piece by Bunuel himself, as the story switches between black & white and color, depending on which film it's quoting at the time. Reprising the famous razor-to-the-eyeball scene from Un Chien Andalou and making it the central point of violence and terror for the James Stewart and Grace Kelly characters generated genuine tension, especially since surrealism at its heart aims to get at what is hidden in the subconscious and bring it to light through provocative imagery.

This issue also features an image-heavy piece that combines still images from film and shapes that are meant to represent a film projector rolling, which I thought was clever. There's also a longer piece about the director Nicholas Ray that's dense but entirely straightforward, mixing a first-person narrative from the director's point of view with all sorts of revealing anecdotes, along with snapshots and anecdotes from those that worked with him. That the panels form the shape of a film strip is yet another typically clever Hoey design choice. The issue also features what seem to be some illustration jobs, all of which get top-notch reproduction values here. What's impressive about the Hoeys' work in Coin-Op is not their obvious skill as illustrators, but rather the way they think through every piece so carefully.

Comics-as-Poetry and Stylized Comics: Badman, Adams, Shrestha

MadInkBeard #1 & #2, by Derik Badman. Badman is an artist who specializes in repurposing previously existing text and images for poetic effect. This is his new (mostly) one-man anthology comic that's a catch-all for his shorter projects. The first issue uses text from Henry David Thoreau's Walden journals juxtaposed against Badman's recreations of comics by a variety of cartoonists, including Charles Schulz, Mike Sekowsky and a variety of other romance comics artists. He did this as part of the "30 Days of Comics" challenge that Allan Haverholm participated in (which I reviewed on 8/20/2012), and the results are understandably mixed given that restriction. His strip on 11/3/2011 was a great one, with the text reading "They will occur with/some essential difference/though at the risk/of endless iteration" and each of the four panels depicting the very outside edge of a house. The last two panels originally come from Schulz, and this is an example of one of Badman's comics working because of the way he was able to match text to image while creating a sort of poetic narrative with the actual images themselves. Things pick up again when he switches to using romance comics art that totally repurposes Thoreau's original text. Badman creates something lively and spirited with his use of spot color, adding hues in an almost abstract manner to create atmosphere and contrast. From there, he switches to near-abstract uses of color, grounded only by the text which suggests fires, breezes and at times extreme close-ups. Badman also includes a page each from Haverholm, Warren Craghead and Simon Moreton, all of whom did their own variations on the challenge. Craghead's drawings on leaves were fascinating, while Moreton's use of smudging and water effects reminded me of some older Craghead comics.

The second issue is all photocomics (what we tend to call "fumetti" in the US even though this term is not quite accurate), including a long essay on the history of the technique and its general lack of favor in the US. Badman tries a variety of approaches here: anchoring the photos with poetic text that tells a vague story, wordless pages that coalesce around types of images, and a visual photo narrative of sorts that dips into abstraction. Of the three approaches, I thought the first was the least interesting. There's a rigidity about the photographic image that for me resists poetic text; it's almost intrusive to see words with these images. I thought his attempts of the second sort were interesting, matching angles, shapes, colors and textures in each photo to form photo patterns. I thought the visual photo narrative was the most interesting, as the reader is led along a leafy path, up a set of stairs and into a dark forest. Here, the concrete and "real" qualities of the photos work in their favor, as the reader is led somewhere that seems to actually exist, until they are confronted with alternating images of pure light and darkness. I wouldn't mind seeing more experiments of this sort from Badman, who certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities of the photo comic, even if it seems clear that he's struggling to discover them himself. As always, Badman's comics fascinate and raise questions about the formal nature of the art.

Period, by Christopher Adams.  Adams is an up-and-comer whose first book is about to debut at SPX, published by the folks over at 2D Cloud. His work is all about stillness, quiet, and everyday experience as a kind of marvel. This comic follows a family as they go about their day, pelting the reader initially with a 4 x 8 panel grid that emphasizes the ways in which our morning routines blend into each other. Adams jumps back and forth in time as memories take over the narrative for extended periods of time and fantasies (like flying on a hammerhead shark) intrude on work rituals. Adams explores the family unit as one that is stultifying in its boredom because of the repetitive nature of its interactions but at the same valuable for that very reason. There's an extended sequence where a father players his young daughter in Wii tennis while her mother looks on that's remarkably true to life in how toddlers interact with their parents. From there, we see vacations, garbage day and other either memorable moments or quotidian rituals burned into memory, before consciousness recedes and we see mountains, just as the comic opened with a seahorse floating around and smoking a cigarette. This comic works because of Adams' chunky line and attention to detail; the reader is drawn to every panel as an event worth watching, even as Adams draws the reader's eye across the page quickly. Adams' work looks even better in color, and I'm hoping that his new book will fall into that category.

Genus #1 & #2, by Anuj Shrestha. This mini reminds me a lot of Adrian Tomine's work, if Tomine wrote conspiracy/mystery/sci-fi stories wherein a significant number of people had had their heads replaced by grotesque, bulbous plant-like organisms. Shrestha's line weight, character design and overall restraint as a storyteller all seem to be in Tomine's balpark, but the Lovecraftian body horror that runs throughout the series is heightened precisely because of that distance and restraint. The first issue is entirely silent, as a man wakes up from a nightmare where a spore organism is vomited out of his mouth to go to a job interview. From there, he begins to notice that a number of people have had their heads replaced, only to be confronted with the dead corpse of a "plant man", as he's discovered with the body a la an Alfred Hitchcock scene out of North By Northwest. At the end of the first issue, he discovers that his nightmare is coming true, as he feels protuberances on the back of his neck. The second issue is driven by narrative captions and a chase scene that feels a bit like The Matrix, as the hero is guided by a mysterious caller on his cell phone on how to escape his pursuers, down to drinking special hot sauce that cures him of the condition, or rather, allows him to control his transformation. I love the way that Shrestha plays around with familiar genre tropes while not alighting upon a particular genre; instead, he keeps the reader as off-balance and bewildered as the protagonist, who must wonder not only what he's up against, but who's helping him and why. This is a wonderfully clever and smartly designed comic that looks like it's headed in some interesting directions.

Coin-Op #4, by Peter & Maria Hoey.The brother and sister combo return with another comic's worth of the surreal and the mundane with a crisp, beautiful line and rich sense of color. It's no surprise that one of their strips was printed in an issue of Blab!, given that that publication is well-known as the intersection between the art world and the comics world. Once again, the stories are a mix of modern and postmodern, with an art deco feel representing the former and a fractured storytelling sensibility representing the latter. The highlights of this issue include "An Occurrence at Pont Neuf Bridge", a story that playfully riffs on the Hoey's own cinematic tendencies by providing three layers of storytelling. First, there's the wide-angle shot of a director screaming at a runaway actor to get back. Second is the highly cinematic series of small panels in the middle of the page which emphasize both motion and the actor's own dreamy, dazed narration. Finally, there's a series of single-page panels emphasizing particular story elements from classic films, abstracting a motion picture down to a few static elements. It's a funny story both about the obsessiveness of directors and the feeling of detachment the actor feels from reality--fueled in part by being in a movie.

Going back to the art deco/Max Fleischer feel are "Valse Mecanique" and the latest installment from "Saltz and Pepz". The former reminds me a bit of Metropolis, given the robot society and how it works within an oppressive government, although this strip is more about creativity in such environs. The latter story's anthropomorphic dogs once again get in trouble with the law, this time over a Thelonius Monk record. Naturally, this leads them to travel back in time to meet Monk himself and steal a wallet from an associate of the jazz musician's. It also wouldn't be an issue of Coin-Op if there wasn't at least one story with fractured storytelling,as "The Slippery Lobster" sees the Hoey's use a 4 x 3 panel grid both as a single image and as a series of panels telling a propulsive story. This story is about motion coming in a number of different directions: left to right, right to left, upper left to lower right, upper right to lower left. That motion is given real stakes when boats threaten to run into each other and a lobster fisherman eventually loses his catch. It's a tremendously clever, witty comic that uses formal innovations to tell a very simple story, incorporating both movement and simultaneity into a page that makes it static and dynamic at the same time, depending on how the reader approaches it. This is a fine showcase for two illustrators who are also top-notch cartoonists.

Now and Then: Coin-Op Comics #3

Coin-Op #3, by Peter & Maria Hoey.  It took me forever to get around to reviewing this stylish and strange little comic, partly because its visual style seemed so familiar yet unplaceable.  Upon rereading it, it finally hit me: the comic, both in terms of form and style, is a mash-up between the distinctive modernist flair of Max Fleischer and the post-modern construction of Matt Madden.  Both of those artists aren't afraid to dip into the surreal or silly as they tell their stories.  For Fleischer, he created an atmosphere and background setting that was every bit as important as the characters he depicted in his cartoons of Popeye and Superman.  The Hoeys seize on that with their "Saltz and Pepz" strip, as two Fleischer-esque anthropomorphic dogs try to make their way in a harsh, rainy city.  They eventually fall into a nightmarish, regimented world that's given a dreamy atmosphere with the issue-wide use of a blue-green tint that's meant to evoke the night. 

The Madden influence (which can also be described as a Chris Ware influence or even Richard McGuire influence) involves the Hoeys' experimentation with panel formatting, as they break up the page with multiple panels while using the full arrangement of panels to create a different gestalt in "The John Lee Hooker Highway Rest Stop Blues."  The Hoeys get even more ambitious with "Jingle In July", which uses a 5 x 4 panel grid depicting action from panel to panel and page to page, but each page also works as a fractured, single image.  It's four quick moments in time as a liquor store is robbed, a truck smashes into an ice-cream truck, a man in a dentist's office runs to stop a man with a jackhammer, a boy on a skateboard plows into a pedestrian, and scores of feathers are released onto the street when the truck gets into an accident.  It has that Madden crispness, with simple but distinct character design and a reliance on the language of comics.  The heavy use of sound effects is very comic booky and aims at creating the sense of simultaneity that the Hoeys are pursuing. 

Those sensibilities are merged in the very odd "The Fred Balloon', a send-up of magical realist stories that features a balloon being transformed by a power line into a sentient being that eventually starts taking over other balloons and forming a DNA strand in the sky.  It's a funny, odd and understated bit of weirdness that is effective because of the "cool", almost metallic color scheme and the overall restraint of the artists as storytellers.  Their graphics sensibility is so indelible (if familiar) that it's easy for them to hang back and let the images guide the text, rather than the other way around.  There are other oddities in this issue, like a series of one-page articles about obscure jazz musicians as well as a collage strip that repurposes photos with new color schemes, a comic-style grid, and swathes of color.  However, it's their most ambitious formal experiments that really carry the issue.  That's not because the experiments are especially innovative (indeed, they all feel familiar), but because they are so entertaining and well-executed.