Minis From CAKE: S.Roberts, C.Hannah, M.Galloway, J.Campbell

The Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) was one of the better shows I've ever attended. Here are a few minis I picked up, with this batch from locals.

Body Magik, by Scott Roberts. I reviewed an earlier comic by Roberts (Chemtrails), but I get the sense that this new comic is much more closely related to his real project as an artist. I was fortunate enough to talk extensively with him about his artistic interest and methods, and a lot of that conversation revolved around Gary Panter as an inspiration. Roberts is definitely in that "mark-making" school of cartooning, where the imperfection of the line itself is an important part of the aesthetic--much more so than its pure representational value. It's an aesthetic that borrows some aspects from abstract expressionism in that the line is an expression of emotion, but it's one where narrative is still a key aspect of that expression.

In the case of this comic, it's about a group of old friends who visit their now ultra-rich and somewhat spaced-out friend who created some kind of life-changing app. Printed on a Risograph, Roberts uses a two-color approach (blue and orange) as well as decorative effects that affect the actual narrative. There's an interesting tension between form & figure and environment, especially with regard to depicting hallucinogenic effects that warp perception and reality. Roberts starts the reader off on shifting sands when introducing them into the rich man's home: it's strange and almost alien in character. Then things get even stranger when he introduces them to an app that reads one's desires and creates a new, 3D-printed, perfected body.

The rest of the comic explores these new bodies: a centaur, a lumpy but masculine mass, a furry bear, a couple sharing the same body in the most intimate ways possible, etc. Roberts naturally explores the downside of this app. The couple sharing the body has become completely cut off from the outside world. The centaur runs away from intimacy. The man who became the bear did it only for his lover, whose near appearance as male is distressing to him. That leads to an interesting debate: "Did you love me or my body?", with the remarkably honest answer being "I don't know...both?" Throughout this series of explorations, Roberts is careful to continue to focus on the figures while providing decorative subtext that push themselves into text, like the character who becomes a caterpillar suddenly bursting into life as a butterfly. It's the ultimate symbol of unambiguously joyous transformation, and to see it juxtaposed against someone regretting their own change was an interesting narrative strategy. It also points to the idea that subconscious desires may not match up with one's own conscious narrative.

My Erotic Life, by Jessica Campbell. Humor comics are something I take very seriously, if I may venture into contradictory territory. I can enjoy something that's a humor comic even if I don't laugh out loud; I can generally enjoy them on a more conceptual level, even if it's tough to make me laugh like that. Of course, when I do find a cartoonist that elicits that reaction (Ivan Brunetti, Michael Kupperman, Lisa Hanawalt, Gina Wynbrandt, Lauren Weinstein, Peter Bagge), they become instant favorites. So is it also the case with Jessica Campbell. Her Hot or Not was a brilliant work of satire, and I've enjoyed her other illustrated minis that were mostly not entirely comics. But this collection of four-panel strips (the building block of humor) shows the artist going strictly for punchlines--and a lot of them land hard. The great thing about the strip titled "Oh, this old thing? It's just..." is not that she escalated the absurdity to build to a crescendo, but rather that she immediately elevated the absurdity and kept it a high level. From "Cheetos sprinkled on my feet" to "A trash bag with nipple holes" (with hilarious accompanying illustrations, this was the best gag in the mini.

Not all of her gags are conceptual. A drawing of her own tongue writhing in her mouth begins with the question "How hard is it to swallow your own tongue?" and ends with the statement "I smoked a little pot", giving perfect context to the prior four panels, especially since that kind of pointless tangent and staring off into space is precisely what happens when getting stoned. Campbell has clearly been working on her cartooning and drawing, as it is way more confident than it was even in her book. A side effect of that work provided another strong gag, where she starts off wanting to learn how to draw a nude man. She opens up a Google rabbit hole, simply saying "Huh!" for the next eight hours. As Campbell continues to refine her line, she has the opportunity to continue to clearly merge the visual aspects of her humor with the already razor-sharp wit that she possesses.

Nest, by Marnie Galloway. Rarely do I encounter cartoonists with a high degree of technical illustrating skill who also possess an intuitive, humane approach to art the way that Marnie Galloway does. Her Burrow was a personal meditation on motherhood (though not an autobiographical one) that explored the relationship between early motherhood, sleep deprivation, and the dream-like state (bordering on psychosis) that often occurs as a result of that lack of sleep. Nest is a non-narrative companion piece, juxtaposing drawings against Galloway writing out the Sophie Jewett poem "To A Child" on pages opposite the drawings. The drawings are similar to her Burrow style: Megan Kelso-esque in the use of a clear line, the bulky bodies with a powerful presence, the pastoral imagery of mothers and infants asleep together. It was printed on a Risograph, with green (of course) being the single color at work here. The most beautiful thing about this comic is its stillness: mothers and children asleep together: safe, becoming rested and rejuvenated, and sheltered. There's a sense of beautiful dreams chasing away the confusion of Burrow, if only for a little while.

Chicago In The Fall, by Cathy Hannah. Hannah's being doing memoir comics for a long time,but with her recent Springtime In Chicago and its sequel, she's really started to hit a new stride. Each daily strip is just four panels long, and she is careful with regard to what she chooses to talk about each day. This volume is a raw, honest look at her love life, as she still pines for one co-worker while sleeping with another one, a man whom some of her friends worry about with regard to his temper. Hannah has found her stride in part because she's found a way to simplify her line without sacrificing coherency or emotional content. Working with what looks like a fine-line marker, she's also attained a level of panel-to-panel consistency that resonates with the reader--especially her own self-caricature. With a few lines for bangs, dots for eyes, and a prominent nose, her profile pops on the page.

Hannah switches subject matter from her current job, to job interviews, to therapy sessions (mostly talking about jobs, the guy she's sleeping with, and the guy she's still obsessed with), time alone with her ailing cats, and eventually anxiety over the 2016 presidential election. There's a strip where she turns away from sex because her partner is drunk; initially she thinks to do it just to get over with then realizes that's precisely the wrong thing to do. This later leads to a fight, which leads her to question why she's even in this arrangement, other than for sex: "Trust me, it's not that glamorous". Strips like that are balanced with Hannah experiencing delight with regard to things coming in the mail or getting goofy with friends, as it's clear that personal connections are a big part of her happiness, even as she tends to be a homebody by nature. Hannah goes round and round a bit and even cops to it at the end: there's no conclusion to this comic because her life wasn't wrapping up neatly either. There's a sense that this comic is one long holding pattern, waiting for other shoes to drop: Trump, the health of her cats, her job, the guy she's dating, and the guy she's in love with. The fact that none of the shoes other than Trump dropped, so to speak, add a certain amount of tension to her life, but it's clear by the tone of the strips that simply writing about these events is therapeutic in its own way.

Heavy Hitters Part 1: Rilly, Galloway

Pope Hats #4, by Ethan Rilly. In a format reminiscent of 80s alt-comics, Rilly continues to defy conventions by publishing his work in serial format. This issue is a collection of short stories published elsewhere, some of which are related. Indeed, the front cover features several key characters from the issue in one scene. Interestingly, none of the characters are looking at each other, which makes sense considering none of them interact within the context of the issue either. The back cover features mostly silent images from the stories, or rather images suggested by the stories that we didn't actually see. It's a clever idea that helps frame the entire issue.

"All In" connects to "The Nest", a story seen later in the issue. It's a small character moment: a young woman ignores going to bed for the siren call of playing poker on her phone. The steady march of panels in the 3x4 grid gives the story a deliberate, uneasy quality. "The Hollow", done in a yellow and blue wash, is about a disgruntled member of a colony on another planet. It's not just that he's disgruntled with the conditions, but that his mind has become wrapped up in conspiracy theories and paranoia, unable to see the point of view of any others. When he takes a drug that allows him to read the thoughts of others, it's too much to bear the actual thoughts and feelings of others. Rilly's takedown of an egocentric, Clowes-style misanthrope was extremely clever.

"Stained Glass" is a strip that really shows off Rilly's incredible understanding of how to convey gesture with just a minimum of lines. It's a story about the way vanity and ego, especially an artists's vanity, can have horrific real-life repercussions. Gesture is crucial to the story because the artist, who created stained glass windows for a church, noted a slightly unimpressed expression on the face of the sponsor, which drove him crazy. Rilly's simple and subtle use of gesture here was key to making the story work. "New Friend", which has a homey, brown wash, is all about trying to reconnect with one's past and the ways in which the choices of people we thought we knew can confound us. Once again, Rilly uses gesture and body language to tell the story even without dialogue.

"The Nest" is a multipart serial about the heartbreak of parenting and mental illness. Clement, a middle-aged dad drawn with a huge, bigfoot-style nose and a mustache (he looks like a slimmer version of Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace), discovers his grad student daughter sitting in her car behind his house when she should have been in school. Marie, his daughter, developed schizophrenia and no longer recognized her parents as such, thinking them impostors. This is the only story in this issue that features women as primary characters with their own agency, which I imagine is coincidence since women feature prominently in the usual Pope Hats narrative. Rilly navigates Marie's point of view, Clement's point of view, and the point of view of various other characters with a great deal of empathy, especially since Marie's mother is so obsessed with the idea of being judged for Marie's mental illness. The story ends with the father of two neighborhood vandals talking to him about how difficult it is for him, and without saying a word, it's clear that Clement does. The character design in this story is particularly clever, mixing a naturalistic setting with exaggerated facial characteristics. That combination creates a shorthand that allows for fluid panel-to-panel transitions, slightly rubbery movements and immediate clues as to the characters' emotional states.

"Bitter Drummer" is the most straightforward story in the book, as it talks about a famous but defunct band deciding to get back together, from the point of view of the drummer. He's the most grounded and domesticated member of the band, and his eventual fate (hinted at in the first couple of panels of the story) made sense because one got the sense that this was really no longer his life. There are few other gags in the issue that round it out that remind me of the sillier things Dan Clowes used to do in Eightball. Clowes and Adrian Tomine are Rilly's most obvious peers, but Rilly's line differs in important ways, as does the overall emotional tone of his comics. Certainly, there are sometimes desperate, obsessed people in his stories, but Rilly's take on them is to give them a fair shake rather than use them as either an emotional stand-in expressing frustration or as subjects of pure derision. While his comics are usually subtle and restrained, there's a remarkable sense of warmth to be found.

In The Sounds and Seas Volume 2, by Marnie Galloway. The second volume of three silent volumes about the creative journey is much more straightforward than the first, but no less filled with deeper meaning. The first chapter of this book is about the three creators we met in the first book working on building a ship for their journey. It opens with a crow flying into their workshop (in the middle of winter, no less) and perching at the top of the mast, becoming a sort of living good luck token. The woman with the longest hair is chosen for a special task: having all of the ship's ropes woven into her hair. Weaving is a repeating image in the comic, as there have been visual representations of weaving together songs and weaving in groups of three. While the task of being at the center of the ship's operations clearly wears on the woman, she accepts it without complaint. The fourth chapter describes the first part of their ship's passage. It's a joyful journey, full of fishing, diving, sketching, and bioluminescent squid. When the ship's crow is discovered dead, the crew reacts with horror, and a violent storm envelops the ship as the chapter ends. As always, Galloway's skill as a draftsman and cartoonist is impeccable. The density and precision of her hatching is a sight to behold. Her use of blacks adds perfect balance to every page. Her nature drawings are incredibly lifelike, indicative of her ability to reproduce patterns in a matter that's entirely organic. The fact that she's also an excellent cartoonist on top of a great illustrator is what makes this such an absorbing reading experience. Rather than one's eye falling off the page, the reader instead is sucked into each panel as the characters react to each other with fluid gestures and vivid expressions. All that said, this is still just a story fragment, and I eagerly await the finished product when it arrives.

Sweet Home Chicago: Chenette, Modlin, Galloway, Leipzig, A. Dahm

At Autoptic, I saw a lot of work from some young artists living in Chicago that I wasn't familiar with. Let's examine these minis, artist by artist.

The Ruins, Chapter 0-2, by Amara Leipzig. This is an interesting narrative following an old woman who was seemingly birthed from and nurtured by a vast sprawl of abandoned ruins. The prologue and first two chapters take the reader through the earliest moments of her life and go into great detail regarding the trial and error nature of learning one's environment. As such, these comics have a powerfully visceral quality to them as Leipzig tries to get across the physical sensation of smooth stone, cold rain and ripe fruit--as well as the sensation of vomiting when eating the wrong things. Chapter One is perhaps the most interesting entry, given that it covers the birth of the woman, who was presumably abandoned in the ruins by her actual mother. Leipzig leaves that and many other details deliberately vague at this point, because what's more important is relaying the way a life is lived without any social input. The comic features a parade of problem-solving exercises on how to depict things like hunger without words and heavily relies on motion lines and sound effects to make the reader understand precisely what's going on in each panel on a phenomenological level. Leipzig's line is functional and simple, getting out of the way of her interesting page compositions and getting across information in a direct manner.

In The Sounds and Seas Volume 1, by Marnie Galloway. This a silent comic that speaks volumes. Galloway's intricate but organic style of creating patterns is absolutely beautiful to behold. Opening with a dense but geometrically precise forest, we see three women open their mouths to emit wave after wave of rabbits, birds and fish. Their three strands merge into a larger wave reminiscent of an M.C. Escher drawing, until they coalesce into an actual ocean wave. We then see a young woman in a small, chilly coastal town. She visits what seems to be a combination of museum and workshop in a large barn, marveling at the skeletal models of boats and whales and imagining a whale being made up of that very song/wave that we saw earlier in the book. She asks the curator for three things, and the curator opens up some old trunks in a storage room and dives into them, going to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve a rope, an anchor and a chain. The young woman sees a painting of the three singers from earlier in the book and opens up her mouth hoping for her own song, but finds nothing. Galloway's images are flexible and offer multiple interpretations, but the three women we see earlier are clearly creative spirits, collaborating on a greater work. Whether they're singing or bringing forth life isn't important; the fact that they have their own powerful voices and have learned how to use them together is key. The curator is a guardian of secrets and knowledge who can help the young woman in her search, but cannot actually give her the spark of creativity. Galloway makes that painfully apparent in the final pages here, as she is despondent that she literally doesn't have anything inside her that desperately needs to come out. She has no voice of her own. This is the first of three planned volumes, and I imagine the next two will address this sense of desperation and discovery. This first volume won a richly deserved Xeric grant (one of the last ones awarded), and the quality of the book's design speaks to how much thought Galloway gave to her story. Galloway cleverly ties in the patterns and waves we hear in music with the patterns we see in art and the waves we see in water, blurring the lines between the concrete and the metaphorical. It's a beautiful account of the struggle for meaning, for one's voice as an artist and one's desire to be part of a continuum of creativity.

Melba and Malbik and The Big Sweet, by Talya Modlin. Modlin's brushy, slightly distorted and grotesque character design remind me a bit of Leela Corman by way of Aline Kominski-Crumb. Modlin's gift is being able to uncannily depict the language of teenagers--both in terms of dialogue and body language. In particular, she's adept in depicting how the two are at constant odds in teenagers, with the awkwardness of their bodies and posture belying tough talk and braggadocio. At the same time, she takes those particular sorts of interactions and plants them in slightly off-kilter scenarios. For example, The Big Sweet is about two boys in a grapefruit tree, trash-taking each other as they try to get the best fruit. When one of the kids starts talking about the sexiness of the fruit, it leads to a bizarre and hilarious hallucination after he falls out of the tree. Modlin's touch of the absurd thrown into the proceedings is a perfect counterbalance to the verisimilitude of the dialogue. She goes a step further in part one of Melba and Malbik. It's about a young girl moving into an apartment building with her family. She meets a boy living in the building who takes an immediate shine to her, and this first chapter serves as an effective tour of the building's eccentric inhabitants. Of course, the last inhabitant, a hulking man named Malbik, proves to be the most mysterious and dangerous, given his history of uncontrollable rages and strange behavior. It's unclear if Modlin aims to make this the story of an unusual friendship or something else, but there's a vividness to the way she outlines each character that once again has an almost visceral quality. The reader can almost smell and touch the apartment building, even if much of it is depicted using a shadowy technique that puts the emphasis on atmosphere over clarity. It's a messy place with messy lives, and Modlin gets that across on every page.

Thoughts Become Things #2, by Danielle Chenette. This is a sketchbook collection of assorted odds and ends, and as such it has a typically rough, immediate quality to it. There's page after page of crisp, expressive figure drawings that really capture the essence of each subject, revealing them as living figures on the page rather than drawn to death. The short story "Cheery Beery" was rendered quickly and simply, and depicts two young men on a boat, with one getting drunk for the first time and diving into the ocean, like a fish ready to be caught on a hook. In her drawings, I especially liked the way Chenette varies her line, going from a fine line to a shadowy scribble that becomes increasingly abstracted as it depicts motion. "Quickly Evolve" depicts an argument between tadpoles wishing to accelerate their development so that they can join in the frog chorus. Using dense, wavy lines, Chenette relates a tale of yearning, jealousy and a failure to heed good advice. This all feels a bit like a series of warm-up exercises rather than polished projects, but one can still see Chenette's promise as a cartoonist.

Sorry If That Was Weird, by Alex Dahm. This is a brief collection of four-panel gag strips, rendered in a crude style that plays up the slightly grotesque nature of Dahm's character design. The bulk of the humor is in the dialogue and set-ups, but it helps that Dahm's drawings are worth looking at in and of themselves. The strip above, where in the final panel we get a close-up of Dahm's face with gaps between her teeth, disheveled hair and a scrunched-up nose is simply a funny image. The strips themselves never overreach into trying to squeeze humor out of everything, like one scene where Dahm is vomiting into a toilet for three panels and is asked by her boyfriend if it was worth it. Dahm is simply reporting on direct, powerful images from her daily life; it just so happens that most of them are funny. As she refines her line and storytelling, Dahm could really make an impact as a humorist. While her character design is great, how the characters relate to each other and their surroundings in space is sometimes on the awkward side; that's the sort of thing that gets sorted out with time.