Another Vein Extracted: Mineshaft #29

Mineshaft continues to roll on with another issue filled with unexpected treasures. This issue is comics and photography-heavy, with no poetry or short stories in the mix. I imagine editors Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieiri take what they can get as far as that goes, but it's interesting to see how they build those contributions into a coherent whole. As I noted in my presentation about Mineshaft at DICE in November, Rand and Palmieri really are in a position where they are bringing up esoteric, buried and hidden treasures into sharper view. That's especially true of artists who want an outlet for short stories or pieces that don't necessarily fit into the rest of what they do. For other artists, they contribute to support Mineshaft's mission and keep their own visibility intact.

For example, the issue starts with a typically amiable and sharp strip by David Collier about the end of the use of film in movie theaters. It's a warm and witty take that's very much a personal one, and he even skewers himself and his obsession with film in the final panel. That's followed by six single-panel political cartoons from Mary Fleener, who's been reprinting her work off and on in Mineshaft for quite some time. She included some of her best cartoons here, some of which have nothing to directly do with politics at all. The relative sobriety of those features is broken up by one of Aaron Lange's hilarious, profane and slickly-drawn comics that incorporates the same kind of flat, advertising art/romance comic art-related imagery that influenced folks like Dan Clowes.

Different styles of short comics keep coming at the reader, including an interesting digression from Aleksandar Zograf (on Eastern Europe's upcoming role in bridging the gap between Europe and Asia), Christoph Mueller (in an astounding strip that's sort of a cross between Chris Ware and Robert Crumb) and a sketchbook from the late Spain Rodriguez, which he sent to Mineshaft shortly before he died. This was extensively cleaned up by Pat Moriarty, and there are some truly remarkable drawings here, especially the crowd scenes which seemed partly sketched from life and partly as a satirical pastiche.  The rest of the issue is filled up with more of Crumb's dream diaries, which are both amusing and vaguely disturbing, as one would expect, as well as a photo essay on blues artists from the 1960s. These were taken during the folk explosion that dug up countless bluesmen, many of whom had had to take other jobs in the intervening years. The photos of legends like Son House are especially powerful, capturing, his elegance and wry sense of humor. That said, the spread is considerably less esoteric than the average Mineshaft photo feature, even if the photos themselves are artfully composed. The issue concludes, in a more typical Mineshaft fashion, with a Charles Bukowski poem illustrated by Moriarty and inked by Collier. That kind of collaboration and the platform that Mineshaft provides for it sums up the zine's mission and is also the reason why it receives so much support from the alt and underground comics communities.

Minicomics Round-Up: Roberts, Sharpe, R.Smith, Fleener, McMahan

There's no through-line in the minis reviewed in this column this time around, other than I found them all to be quite good.

Powdered Milk #11, by Keiler Roberts. This mini is an especially sharp and subtle bit of storytelling. Roberts has been doing comics about being an artist and a mother for a few years now and hasn't flinched in detailing her struggles with post-partum depression along with the ups and downs of being a parent. This issue is a tightly-drawn series of rapid-fire comments from her toddler daughter, and while many of the comments are hilarious and played for laughs, it's clear that Roberts is drawing these comics as a way of letting off steam as well. Having your child yell at you, hit you, bite you and just do inexplicably destructive things is maddening  Children are also quite intuitive and can pick up on emotional signals both subtle and not so subtle, and they are quite willing to confront you on them, like when Roberts' daughter asked why her eyes are crying. Roberts also hints at the difficulties of being a primary caregiver, especially when one is trying to be an artist. There's a page where Roberts tells her daughter "You're supposed to be napping" when she's drawing a strip, only to meet with curiosity from her daughter. When she sees the strip is about her, she says "Thank you for drawing that, Mommy". It's the situation in a nutshell: guilt, joy, frustration, astonishment. In strip after strip, Roberts gets across what it's really like to be a parent.

Viewotron #2, by Sam Sharpe. Employing frequently deadpan anthropomorphic animals as a storytelling device not unlike the artist Jason, this is a devastating story about the disintegration of the relationship between a son and his schizophrenic mother that seems to be at least partly autobiographical. Sharpe opens the comic depicting himself as a child, talking about his mother being missing with a friend, as well as the odd fact that his father let him read the strange, convoluted and paranoid letters she sent to her boy. From there, we see the hopeful reconnection between mother and son as we're privy to Sharpe's nervousness and uncertainty about what, exactly, he wanted from the relationship. Sharpe slowly, painfully details the way his mother's mind starts its descent back into paranoid delusions, as she thinks that her son is part of the "Sharpe crime family" and wants him to disassociate from his father and family completely. He humors her and tries to change the subject as much as possible, helping her when a friend of hers from therapy suddenly commits suicide. The end of the comic is chilling, as Sharpe is forced to confront his mother's mental illness with her when she demands to know if he's seen the horrible things she hallucinated at his house. Even then, the connection he wants to have with her (as opposed to the actual connection) is so strong that he patiently tells her that they just see things differently and that she has a mental illness. At that point, she starts laughing hysterically, writing him off as a duplicate and telling him that her son is dead. Even drawing his characters as anthropomorphic dogs does little to blunt the emotional impact of the scene, and one senses that drawing his characters in this way was as much for Sharpe's benefit as it was for the readers. Sharpe uses a 2x3 panel grid to maintain the same sense of rhythm and pace no matter what the situation, so even the rougher scenes aren't lingered on for very long by either artist or reader. This is a powerful comic that's told with confidence, skill and even flair.

I Am Fire, by Rachael Smith. This is a full-color mini about a couple of wildly dysfunctional teens who develop a crush on each other. British artist Smith has a nicely-honed sense of comic timing and manages to create a pair of protagonists who are near-sociopaths yet strangely likable at the same time. The story follows a girl named Jenny, who creates havoc doing an internship of sorts in a department store, and Chris, a pyromaniac who somehow winds up as an intern for a fire-prevention outfit. While the cover certainly has an apocalyptic feel to it, the actual circumstances of how Chris winds up wearing that sign are quite amusing. Smith is unrelenting in these forty pages when it comes to the obnoxiousness of her characters and the shtick that surrounds them, as the cast includes an obsessed fire safety officer, an alpha male fireman, a dotty saleslady and various other somewhat one-dimensional character types. Smith manages to insert a bit of humanity into the proceedings in a way that doesn't seem ham-fisted, unearned or sentimental, and that rescues the comic from falling into cliche'. Indeed, it provides some rather amusing surprises for a number of characters. Smith's bug-eyed characters remind me a bit of a slicker Kate Beaton or perhaps Raina Telgemeier. That smooth, slick line actually goes nicely with her acerbic sense of humor. Given the way she writes her characters, I thought her use of color was a bit over-the-top, however. Nearly every page had dense, rich colors that at times overpowered the eye, especially on pages where nothing much was actually happening. A more muted palette would have been appropriate for much of the book and might have allowed the reader a better chance to take in the loveliness of her drawing style. There's no question that Smith is funny and talented but a smidgen of restraint could have made this comic even funnier.

You Were Swell, by Sophie McMahan. Getting this comic in the mail is one of those rare occasions when you get a comic that's completely bonkers and fantastic from an artist you've never heard of. This is an amazing series of strips mashing together 50s advertising art and romance comics tropes with modern body horror/body dysmorphia that together give a scathing, hilarious critique of gender norms and roles. "Other Self" illustrates a seemingly happy, white 1950s family with heads that split off, as the narrative caption posits the question "Do you ever feel split between two selves?" It's an arrow aimed right at societal and consensus constructions of "normal" and acts both as a declaration by the artist and a hand extended to the reader. In "What If?", McMahan takes an idyllic scene of three women enjoying ice cream, inserts a traditionally handsome male making a crude remark, and then has the women disintegrate him with a laser eye blast. I found this comic to be hilarious, partly because the wish fulfillment is so obvious but mostly because of the way she juxtaposes bland figures with crazy action. "Winner", which details a beauty queen winning first prize, goes in a similar direction, as she loses all of her teeth upon getting the crown, though no one seems to notice. It's a funny image to begin with, but it also pokes fun at the ways in which beauty is so obviously a socially constructed concept, something the pageant setting makes quite clear.

"Bad Thoughts" is the central piece of the comic, where McMahan explores and admits that the hateful thoughts she has about others are literally ugly and a reflection of her own self-hatred. This comic is a way of acknowledging this tendency and destroying the notion that we are abnormal if we have negative feelings. McMahan subverts and undermines this notion at every turn, like in one strip where a handsome guy tells a beautiful girl with lovely lashes that mascara is made out of bat feces, or another "perfect date" where the couple's faces melt at the end. This remarkable comic covers a lot of ground and hammers home a lot of provocative ideas thanks to McMahan's command over her line and willingness to explore the grotesque. That facade of beauty that she punctures again and again is set up perfectly, as McMahan has an unerring grip both on what makes such art and imagery appealing as well as how it is also innately revolting. That sense of revulsion is almost palpable throughout the comic, whose commentary is less overtly political (though there is a political and satirical element to it) and much more deeply personal. McMahan has an interesting career ahead of her.

The Less You Know, The Better You Feel #2, by Mary Fleener. This early alt-comics era standout continues to draw political comics for The Coast News, focusing in on local government greed and calling them out for getting in bed with big developers trying to extract every dollar possible from her idyllic and arts-oriented beach town in California. Fleener's at her best when she gets into particulars, like in the above strip about the right of every citizen to speak for three minutes at every city council meeting. Another strip gives advice on how to be effective when given that platform. Fleener also veers away from politics to offer amusingly-illustrated recipes, complain about aggressive bikers (those strips are especially hilarious), talk about the local flora and fauna or whatever strikes her fancy. Still learning on the job as a political cartoonist, she's making much better use of simple and striking images and cutting back on fussy over-labeling and complicated drawings. Strips where she compares a local politician named Stocks to MacBeth (complete with the three witches and their cauldron) are a good example of this powerful image-making. Fleener is a naturally funny cartoonist, and it's been interesting to see how she's allowed her whimsical nature to merge with her sharp, focused political instincts to provide cartoons that are memorable and brutal. She's not afraid to repeatedly get out the long knives to carve up hypocrites and greedy politicians who would prefer that the public simply ignore what they're doing.

Sequart Reprints: What's Fleener Doing?

Mary Fleener immediately became one of favorite artists upon discovering her work fifteen years ago. Her old SLUTBURGER series for D&Q was in the vanguard of great alt-comics of the 80's; much of it was collected in her LIFE OF THE PARTY collection by Fantagraphics. In the last decade or so, however, Fleener's mostly retreated from the comics world, surfacing here and there in some less-traveled places.

For example, she did a self-titled comic for Matt Groening's Zongo publishing concern that lasted just three issues. She did one issue of a hilarious pornographic series called NIPPLEZ 'N TUM-TUM for Eros after introducing them in the DIRTY STORIES anthology. She popped up with strips in the Comics Journal Specials, and has also contributed work to the Graphic Classics line. She has a standout strip in the new volume of the HOTWIRE anthology, producing a story that could easily have been a SLUTBURGER classic. Fleener's also spent much time in the world of fine art, displaying her paintings in a number of different galleries.

A few years ago, Fleener also started doing a strip for the Surf City Times called Mary-Land. She's collected some of these as ENCINITAS--THE LAST SMALL TOWN ON EARTH, volumes three and four. She also has a fascinating collection of her flyers for rock shows (mostly her own band) called FLYERS BY FLEENER. Fleener is best known for her unusual visual style, a combination of somewhat exaggerated naturalism (punctuated by her use of thick black lines for her character design) and her signature "cubismo", a sort of cubist, distorted technique that serves to hyperexaggerate emotion. By distorting facial features into geometric shapes, it forces the reader into a different interpretive state and heightens the dialogue that's used, especially since it can portray multiple and mixed emotional states simultaneously.

In her Mary-Land strips, Fleener tones down on that sort of stylization for the most part, which is not surprising considering that her stories are mostly observational anecdotes. While she often focuses on the quotidian, she also addresses a number of local political concerns as well. She even comes up some tried-but-true topics that she goes back to more than once, like her "Wish List/Anti-Wish List". The strip understandably has a provincial feel to it, yet it's her very love for her town that makes the strip such an enjoyable read. Like Justin Green's SIGN GAME collection (strips about and for professional sign painters), the minutae of everyday life in Fleener's quirky town is expanded upon with wit, affection and clarity.

Fleener's narrative voice is one of the most distinctive in comics, and it's what initially drew me to her autobiographical stories. Above all else, she has this sort of brassy forthrightness that is both enormously engaging and hilarious. While Mary has seen and done it all, her sense of wonder in finding quirky beauty around her is almost childlike in its enthusiasm. She loves surfing, the art-project mailboxes of her neighbors, her pets and other animals, both wild and domesticated. She uses her strip as a platform to rant against corporate greed and development, hypocritical inspection rules, byzantine regulations, absurd protests (from the left and the right) and obnoxious bicyclists.

It's interesting to see Fleener work in single-page, comic-strip format. It's not something that she's done much of in her career, but she quickly adapted to it and always seemed to have something to say. Fleener did have certain restrictions at play in her strip, especially language as well as sex and drugs references. Indeed, Fleener seemed eager to adapt little anecdotes into strips, the kind of slighter material that she didn't do much of in SLUTBURGER. That said, Fleener excels with longer narratives, and so my favorite story in either volume is "The Landed Immigrant Song", about Mary's childhood years spent in Vancouver after growing up in Southern California. A bit where her mother was distressed that Mary and her brother were using Canadian curse words was especially hilarious. The punchline of that strip, involving an embarrassing incident where Mary was asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance but didn't know it because she grew up in Canada, tied nicely back into her current life.

FLYERS BY FLEENER is a must for any fan of Fleener's art, especially her more decorative aspects. It's a perfect example of her aesthetic: a mix-up of fine art, low art and pop culture detritus, drawn with an enormous amount of skill and verve. From a historical perspective, it was interesting and amusing to see some of her earliest art when she was influenced by Howard the Duck in the late 70's and was trying to "draw 'The Marvel Way'". One can still see her Cubismo sensibilities starting to form even at that time, with one drawing of a superheroic figure taking off his mask to reveal an anthropomorphic guitar-man.

I hold out hope that Fleener will return to comics with a higher-profile project; I know that she has a number of things in the works. She is such a versatile artist that I can see her producing any number of interesting works, from a children's comic for First Second to another autobiographical series to Fantagraphics to something far more abstract and unusual. It's to comics' detriment that she's not currently keeping a higher profile, especially since her visual style is unique, playful and clear. The merging of high and low art techniques and influences in her comics puts her in perfect company with the Kramer's generation while still in line with her underground influences.

Minicomics: Friedman, Fleener, Gennis, Alden

My Senior Year, by Sarah Friedman. Friedman is a comics newcomer just finishing up college, and this modest but witty minicomic is her first attempt at autobio. I really like her self-caricature: freckles, curvy eyebrows, pointy chin, and a short shock of hair. In this comic, she keeps things short and stays within her limitations without over-rendering her figures. Indeed, she makes nice use of negative space as a way of varying her pages and tries to hit on the highest points of her anecdotes to create a strip with a bit of comedic impact. "Babysitting" is a good example, as the two kids she's taking care of first declare that they're not going to go to college, then express interest because they wonder if one "gets to see people's butts". Friedman's palpable discomfort is nicely captured in the way she draws her mouth screwing up. Other strips see her understanding her future as a cartoonist, like when she turns down a party to finish a drawing. There's nothing revelatory about these strips, but they do indicate someone with a good sense of storytelling and how to get across a gag. Hopefully, she'll keep going and we'll see what else she's capable of.

The Less You Know, The Better You Feel, by Mary Fleener. Fleener is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists, both for her outstanding autobio comics and her occasional forays into filthy fiction. In February of 2012, she started doing a weekly political cartoon for the Encinitas Coast News, in part as a reaction to the rampant greed and opportunism of her city's government. As a native of Miami, I know only too well the ways in which politicians will roll over when given a chance to line their pockets with money from developers. Fleener had never done political cartooning before, and that shows in a number of her early strips. She's overly reliant on labeling her illustrations to represent specific people, ideas or events; while this is a long tradition in political cartooning, it can also be a bit of an easy cop-out. As she went forward, her own natural creativity and style started to take over the page, coming up with narratives like the one above regarding how trees and their owners were suddenly treated. Fleener also goes on tangents regarding the flora and fauna of her beloved small coastal town, giving a reader a true sense of the flavor of Encinitas. The strips also get funnier and meaner as she gets more comfortable with expressing herself in such a compact manner. Visually, they are impeccable, as her character design and visual flourishes add a dimension to the political cartoon that is not usually seen in typical fare If she hasn't already, I hope she joins the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), because she deserves to be recognized by a new group of peers.

Unfortunate Mishaps In Aviation History and The Unusual Death of Gregory Biggs, by Emi Gennis. Gennis is making an interesting side career out of depicting weird ends "from the Wikipedia list of unusual deaths". What's interesting about these exercises is how they've made her a better artist. Simply put, her character design, backgrounds and sheer drawing ability have improved tremendously over the past few years as she's had to draw machines, people in different eras, and weird situations. Of course, this material strikes a chord in Gennis as well, as evidenced by her editing an anthology's worth of stories about "untimely ends" for Hic & Hoc. Unfortunate Mishaps is a cruel but often funny account of two incidents of sheer hubris, wherein dumb inventors and unprepared explorers thought that their sheer intellect and ingenuity were a match for things like gravity and the Arctic winter. The death of Franz Reichelt is about a man trying to perfect a working parachute who decides to use a live model (himself) and jump off the Eiffel Tower on a windy day. The Arctic expedition went awry because the explorers made no attempt to understand the terrain.  

Gregory Biggs is a far more unsettling comic. The title character was slammed into while walking on the side of a highway, and he went flying into the woman's windshield who hit him. She was all kinds of high, which may have led to her spectacular disconnect from reality. She apologized, drove him, had sex with her boyfriend and woke up the next morning to unsurprisingly find him dead. Her boyfriend helped her cover it up, but she got drunk at a party and bizarrely bragged about the incident. Gennis takes an understated approach here, letting the events speak for themselves with an extensive use of cross-hatching and negative space. Gennis is ready for a major project. 

Patron Saint, by Sam Alden. Published by Space Face, this recent Alden mini is another leap forward. Using this kind of crazy, angular drawing style that emphasizes negative space, Alden tells the story of a young production assistant on a film set and interpolates it with the haunted story of Astro Boy. Seeing Astro Boy, whose ghost (according to a sound man) haunts the earth after he plunged himself into the son, is an ill portent, but the PA instead turns all of her frustration toward her asshole boss (centering around batteries) into a single moment of reality-warping and fantasy-fulfilling violence. It's a remarkable set of panels, made possible by the slightly rubbery quality of his line.

Sequart Reprints: Mineshaft 19

The best publications about comics are those that reflect the idiosyncratic interests and viewpoints of its creators. Mineshaft's Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieri are interested in comics of the underground era, dating up to the early alternative years. What's remarkable about this unassuming little zine is the stunning array of art and talent they're able to assemble in each issue. Issue #19, for instance, sports a front cover by Peter Bagge, a back cover by Robert Crumb, and inside illustrations by Carol Tyler and Mary Fleener. The 52-page zine is packed with rare art and strips from a list of artists that reads like a who's-who of underground stars.

The first ten pages are dedicated to some of Crumb's sketchbook drawings. These include drawings from life, hilarious strips, funny-animal bits, autobiographical confessions, etc.--all from the past ten years or so. Jay Lynch and Ed Piskor teamed up for a tale from Lynch's underground days. Mary Fleener contributed some of her excellent Mary-Land strips printed in a local California publication. There are illustrations by Simon Deitch (including one of the Bill Everett character Venus!), a strip by Penny Van Horn, a chapter from a delightfully lurid serial by Frank Stack and a crazy robot illustration by Robert Armstrong. Each page holds new and unexpected delights.

What takes Mineshaft above the status of simply being an interesting depository for underground comics art are the essays, poems and other bits of writing ephemera. Palmieri's account of meeting Peter Bagge at Heroes Con was fascinating because it came from someone who does not have the perspective of being a comics insider. Bruce Simon's illustrated essay on cartoons about television was brief but both amusing and incisive. The letters page is another little treasure trove of interesting material, including a long letter from Crumb. Mineshaft has a fairly narrow focus in the comics it chooses to run and examine, but any fan of the artists from the underground/early alternative era will find it to be essential reading. About the only thing I would have like to have seen more of in this issue are reviews, especially by artists about other artists.
Mineshaft has a lack of pretension and mercifully lacks the name-dropping tendencies of similar magazines devoted to collecting comics art from one's collection. The publishers love comics, love certain artists in particular and publish a humble magazine dedicated to seeing that love through in print. It'll be interesting to see if they ever choose to focus beyond the 1960-1990 roster of talent and devote an issue to more contemporary work.

Sequart Reprints: Hotwire 2

This article was originally written for sequart.com in 2007.
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There's a lot to like in the new Hotwire, both by contributors new and old. The package is pretty similar to the last volume: lots of lurid, over-the-top and funny comics along with many pages of similarly-grotesque illustrations. Hotwire is editor Glenn Head's reaction to "literary comics" that he feels are pretentious an dull. While there's no editorial in this version announcing his manifesto of sorts, it's clear that Head both is continuing his own personal aesthetic vision while breaking his own rules when he sees fit. For example, there are even more non-story illustrations in this volume than the last, which contradicts Head's desire to present "comics with cool style and great stories". There's a lot here that isn't comics, but it does somehow fit into the anthology's underground, anything-goes, unruly sensibility.

I like the unapologetic, take-it-or-leave-it aesthetic that Hotwire carries. This isn't an anthology designed to win new converts to the world of comics, but rather it's a celebration of a style rooted in the tradition of the 60s underground artists and the 80s anthology Weirdo. As such, it's hard to imagine a reader being drawn to every artist in here, given such an extreme series of artistic choices. For example, Glenn Head's "Tongue Trouble" and Doug Allen's "Hillbillys 'R' Dumb" are the sort of over-the-top, stylized and id-soaked comics that are personally difficult to read. Johnny Ryan's "Sin Shitty" quasi-parody felt like a Ryan Mad Lib (insert your own scatological reference into line A, a taboo sexual act into line B, a vague comics reference into line C), especially since Frank Miller comics are the proverbial low-hanging fruit. Matti Hagelberg's "Zombie Justice" feels more like a Kramer's Ergot or Bete Noire piece than something for Hotwire, given the extreme stylization and scratchboard technique. Illustrations by David Paleo and Stephane Blanquet are the sort of page-jamming, highly-detailed orgies of visceral unpleasantness that my eye tends to gloss over.

On the other hand, the fact that this anthology provides such a fine spotlight for humorists, which is such a rarity in this era of graphic novels and prestige anthologies. It's exciting to see new work by Ivan Brunetti (in his stripped-down but still-vulgar style), Mark Newgarden (with his usual combination of old-style gag format with nihilistic punchlines), and R.Sikoryak (another literary smash-up, this time of Little Nemo in Slumberland with The Picture of Dorian Gray, done with his usual astonishing style mimicry), and Sam Henderson ("Lonely Robot Fuckling"--nuff said). Christian Northeast's "In The Trenches" was a hilarious, deadpan account of a self-serious but unaware small businessman's past. Onsmith contributes an autobiographical story detailing the odd behavior of a creepy neighbor. There's a lot to laugh at in Hotwire, and that alone makes me hope that we get a new edition every year.

Beyond pure humor strips, there's an amazing range of interesting material. The most welcome new presence in this volume is that of Mary Fleener, who contributes a new 10-page story and several of her distinctive illustrations. The latter are in her "Our Lady" series, using her fractal "cubismo" style, with subjects like "Our Lady of Apocalyptic Fixation" and "Uninterrupted Munitions". Her story, entitled "Niacin" will thrill any readers of her old Slutburger series in its depiction of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. This was a hilarious account of Mary winding up in a car with a creep who gave her pot laced with PCP, and her attempts at crawling out of that particular trip. Her thick, rubbery line is a perfect delivery system for the warped, drug-induced imagery that she saw in the story. Hotwire is a perfect home for Fleener's work, and I hope she continues to contribute to future volumes.

My favorite Hotwire discovery has been Tim Lane. His unfussy, naturalistic line is used to tell straight-up pulp stories. "Outing" plops us straight into a bizarre encounter in a bar that ends with a shooting and a car crash. My favorite conceit of the story is that it's narrated by a character who gives us all sorts of intimate information without revealing who he is or most of his backstory. "The Aries Cow" features a character named Muncie and weird stories told at a bar. "In My Dream" has Lane detailing the wacky details of a flying dream and his downfall in it. This sort of anthology is a great showcase for Lane, because his stories act as a sort of anchor for the work in here that are weirder, while still creating an unusual and unsettling tone.

Another remarkable achievement is Jonathan Rosen's "A Massive Stroke of Bad Luck", which is about an aunt who suffered a stroke and was kept alive but in a great deal of distress and pain for quite some time. The top half of each page is a single image that illustrates a few lines of text. The bottom half is a series of images from a sketchbook that "diagram" his aunt's sad state. The grey wash acts as a sort of numbing agent for the reader to the intensity of each page's drawings. The story's best quality is its lack of sentimentality while still getting across the affection Rosen had for his aunt and his concern for her condition.

Not every story here is in-your-face. Carol Swain's "Communicable Disease", is a quiet story about a man in an institution of some kind, where the very words of books fly off the page and his companion starts burying the books when they're empty. Colored pencil seems to be at work here in setting up the air of melancholy and despair. "Last Testament" is a clever, time-jumping story by Chris Estes and David Lasky about Clash guitarist Mick Jones.

Still, Hotwire's main punch comes from its stylization and concentration on the "all that is good is nasty" school of storytelling. Lorna Miller (another welcome presence) retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood that portrays her as a little skank who ends up being eaten--eaten out, that is, by the Big Bad Wolf. Glenn Head's "Oozing Dread" is a hilarious account of Wilhelm Reich's wackier theories regarding orgone energy, orgasms and how they're rooted in alien involvement, all centered around a particular neurotic patient. David Sandlin's "Slumburbia" is a typically sex-and-shame centered story, a sort of echo of Reich's prediction that sexual behavior and activity was doomed to take on a fetished, guilt-ridden quality. Mack White's "Trouble In Tacosa" takes on a western legend, splitting its depiction into the grimy truth on one side of the page and then how it would be portrayed in Hollywood. Craig Yoe's ode to Tijuana Bibles is a sort of day-glo meditation on the surreptitious, anonymous nature of these bits of pornography and the writers who created them. What I get out of it is that these artists weren't all that different in nature to other cartoonists in terms of pandering to an audience and doing it in a sweatshop setting. All told, while not every story in this anthology will appeal to every reader, there should be at least a story in here that will draw in the eye of any reader.

Sweeping The Underground: Mineshaft #24

Rob reviews issue #24 of the underground grab-bag, MINESHAFT.

It never fails to amaze me just how much editors Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieri are able to pack into every issue of MINESHAFT. The covers alone are often worth the price, and this issue's delightfully bizarre Mary Fleener cover is no exception. She's seen all too infrequently in comics these days, but MINESHAFT has been one of her more regular outlets as of late. Of course, MINESHAFT is about all of the odd and overlooked corners of our culture, from the poems of the Brutalists to photographs from the "Cabinet of Curiosities" (lots and lots of conjoined twin remains) to a bracing feature on the death of newspapers framed by the mastheads of dozens of dead and dying papers. The Brutalist poems fit right into the underground aesthetic of the zine, detailing the day-to-day life of the working class in an unflinching manner. Adelle Stripe's stream-of-consciousness memories about her awakening sexuality were particularly memorable.

The big draws in this issue were assorted odds and ends from legends R.Crumb and Skip Williamson. Williamson contributed some pages from his sketchbook, including a stunning likeness of Harvey Kurtzman. Williamson is clearly an artist that's had a big impact on today's cartoonists, yet he's not as widely discussed as his contemporaries. Crumb contributed the back cover, a five-page letter to Rand that's endlessly fascinating (noting that he voted for Barack Obama--and that this was the first time he had ever voted for president), and several pages from his dream diary. It's clear that Crumb and Rand have a close relationship, and that shows in the intimacy of Crumb's correspondence and the sheer volume of material he's contributed over the years. Rand's tastes and passion for underground comics and culture has acted as a magnet of sorts, as countless veterans of the scene have flocked to contribute.

At the same time, it's not so much about an era as it is about a certain aesthetic for Rand, and so he's given room to younger artists like Ed Piskor (drawing a truly demented story by Sarah Sveda) and Joseph Remnant. Every issue seems to draw in another veteran; this time around, it was David Collier contributing a strip in exchange for a subscription. The ultimate expression of Rand's interests came in the form of a book review about Charles Bukowski, written by Dennis Eichorn and drawn by Pat Moriarity. That's a remarkable convergence, one that resulted in a clever and elegant essay that blended Bukowski's poems, Eichorn's commentary and Moriarity's inventive page design. The Eichorn piece is an example of a tiny story nugget that otherwise would not have had an appropriate home, while the assorted sketches from legendary artists are even rawer examples of this. MINESHAFT isn't truly an anthology, but rather a sampling of undiscovered and unpublished obscurities whose existence is simply a delight for a comics fan.