Minis: Michael Aushenker, Jenny Zervakis

Crows, by Jenny Zervakis. This was a zine that Zervakis produced for 2019's Zine Machine show. It's not a comic; instead, there are illustrations on the front and back cover of the Durham skyline and crows flying over it. This is a painfully difficult read, as it's about the slow dissolution of her marriage, yet her writing is intimate and full of wisdom. Zervakis adds the running element of associating her divorce with seeing crows. Though she's not superstitious, she wonders about this. Much of the zine is also dedicated to talking about the women of her family and their strength, and it's suggested that perhaps the crows are ancestors trying to pass on a message. The final lines, "They are neither villains nor ghosts. They are just birds, living their lives. I should be too." are powerful and worth pondering. Creating meaning in random events is a human thing to do, but obsessing on these details can create paralysis. Zervakis' story is a difficult one that emphasizes finding a way to mourn and move on; making this zine is clearly part of the process.

Professor Mrs. Miniver, by Michael Aushenker. A good rule of thumb for Michael Aushenker's comics: the more ludicrous the premise, the more entertaining the actual comic. And the three premises for Professor Mrs. Miniver are among his zaniest. The first imagines a third volume in the Mrs. Miniver film series (from 1942!), conflating the character's relationships with the actress who played her. Greer Garson, who played the feisty titular character, had an affair with the much younger actor who played her son. In Aushenker's version, she fakes her own death, goes to college, parties naked, and manipulates her "son's" love into committing an extremely minor crime. Then she goes off into the sunset with the Nazi she supposedly killed at the end of the first film. It's all total nonsense that's made even more hilariously lurid with his use of color.

"Lincoln Horse" asks the question: "What is Abraham Lincoln had been transformed into a centaur?" Well, he would have personally ended the civil war, been in threesomes, and gotten a new owner. Aushenker keeps this silliness to a tight five pages. His Unstoppable Rogues also get a story as McDonald's employees, and the expected chaos ensues. Tonally, Aushenker likes his images, colors, and action as loud as possible. This sometimes belies the cleverness of his craft, especially his verbal gags, but it also befits the overall silliness of his ideas. From premise to execution, every aspect of this comic is designed to make the reader asks "WTF?"

Minis: Michael Aushenker, Kelly Kusumoto

Trolls: Operation Great Wall, by Michael Aushenker. Michael Aushenker not only likes to go over the top in his humor, he builds the wall extra high and then goes over the top. The composition of his drawings, the frantically scrawled quality of his lettering, and the lurid nature of his colors hammer the reader from the beginning and don't stop. He's clearly going for a Warner Bros. cartoon on acid (or maybe PCP) here, as his anthropomorphic air traffic controllers Wayward and Edward have exaggerated actions and conversations starting on the very first page. Aushenker pushes the reader into parsing the pages (his lettering sometimes gets out of control to the point where it eats up panels) and blasting them through the narrative.

The narrative is slight, with just enough story to get the characters moving. Wayward's fiance' Winda (a lisping, Chinese tweety-bird sort of character) gets kidnapped by her controlling parents and taken back to China. Wayward and Edward hijack a plane and crash it into the Great Wall, where more assorted hijinks occur as they wind up in prison. They are eventually freed because they inadvertently uncovered a terrorist cell while an absurdly racist and sexist Bill Clinton (an anthropomorphic pig) is there to make all sorts of inappropriate comments. Aushenker goes as far as to use the softened version of the n-word here, though the other characters make it clear that he shouldn't be saying it. The Clinton character goes on to insult every ethnic and religious group possible as a way to get cheap heat, essentially. Aushenker was trying to cast Clinton as the epitome of the uncouth ugly American, but it didn't quite scan and instead detracted from the overall story. That's unfortunate, because the manic energy of the narrative didn't need that extra bit of offensiveness in order to be effective.

Art Is My Joby, by Kelly Kusomoto. Aushenker tipped me to her lovely four-panel gag/diary work, which is simple and direct in its execution. What I especially liked about this comic is that Kusomoto varied her topics and tone from strip to strip. Some of them were melancholy, like when she bemoans being single but still gets a gag out of it when her dog thinks "What is she talking about? I'm right in front of her." Indeed, she gets a lot of mileage out of her dog, whether it's for silly or sentimental purposes. The simple shape she designed for her dog is yet another triumph of design, as her use of expression and body language is so precise that she can get across an enormous amount of information and emotion with just a few lines.

Other strips revealed her anxiety about stress and pressure she feels in her life but also talks about her love of being a wrestler and how it changed her life for the better. Some of the strips talked about self-care and how bad she is at it, while others talked about the frustrations she feels as a graphic designer. It's not diary work in the sense of taking the reader through a specific day and set of days over time. Instead, Kusomoto peppers the reader with anecdotes that build on each other, though many of the strips could have been rearranged with great ease. The comic left me wanting more, in part because each strip was so pleasant and made me want to read another one, but also because I got the sense that Kusomoto's work would have its greatest impact consumed in larger chunks. She doesn't quite spill a lot of ink about herself here, slowly revealing things about her life and history, but I think a clearer picture would emerge over time and a greater aggregation of comics. There's definitely something promising about her upbeat but emotionally sincere comics.

Minis: M.Aushenker and M.Collar

Michael Aushenker and Marcus Collar have worked together before, but let's take a look at some recent solo projects and collaborations with others:

Pool Care Handbook, by Marcus Collar and Joe Collar. The central narrative that runs through the book is that a version of the Creature From The Black Lagoon has taken a job as a swimming pool cleaner. He's friends with various other monsters, all of whom inhabit a typically drab suburban neighborhood that freaks out when they appear. There's also a running narrative that follows a family that goes camping and encounters a benevolent bigfoot. Video games later get interpolated into rock 'n roll dreams with Funkadelic references and laser shootouts with aliens, and the kid from the family is later hunted by actual werewolves and saved by the yeti. It's a weird and wacky series of events that's mostly played straight, which is to the benefit of the material. The art is almost entirely naturalistic, with even eyeball monsters rendered with the same kind of detail as people and buildings.

The fact that the Collars never wink at the reader in telling these nonsensical stories is what makes them work, even as the pacing of the stories is sometimes a little wonky. There are also points where I'm not sure whether the reader's knowledge of what is about to happen matters much, like in a drawn-out story involving a fishing expedition and the yeti. The tone of the book is clearly comedic, but it's written almost like a slice-of-life comic, only with monsters interacting with often-terrified humans. There's also a clear narrative through-line that is mostly just hinted at in this issue, as the Collars were more interested in establishing tone and character than anything else. Overall, this is a well-produced, quirky comic that isn't quite sure what it's going to be just yet, which is both intriguing and distracting at the same time.

The War On Dental, by Michael Aushenker. When Aushenker grabs hold of a concept, no matter how silly it may be, he goes all the way with it. In this completely wacko comic, he riffs off the infamous story of the American dentist who killed a beloved, protected lion named Cecil and turns it into an apocalyptic tale. The story begins with a dentist stealing the teeth from Cecil, father of dragons, and taking them home as a trophy. From the very first page, Aushenker assaults the reader with a garish color scheme designed to make the whole book look larger than life. As the narrative begins, he switches from a thin line to his usual ultra-thick line that is matched in his lettering, with every panel being composed conservatively but featuring highly stylized images. In the story, the rest of earth's dragons decide to get even with the dentist. The way he depicts the dragons is hilarious, as a cross between a biker gang and a hipster enclave. Aushenker's style of humor is almost entirely visual, as there aren't so much jokes or even a funny story as there is something weird and humorous in every panel, often as a sidebar to the actual narrative. An example is the absurdity of the Pacific Palisades community in California, going to extremes in depicting its bizarre "small-town charms".

After getting revenge on the dentist and his family with fiery righteousness, the dragons decide to destroy the entire city. Then they decide to kill every dentist on earth, just in case. That leads to various militaries and the usual Aushenker weirdo-characters (this time around, it's "Jump Boy Olson" and "Fancy Youngin") getting into the fight. They wind up deciding to destroy Korea and Iraq, sparking an all-out war that destroys everything. There's something satisfying about the lunacy of this comic. Aushenker never lets up, but he does allow for enough silly moments to make the comic more than a simple exercise in drawing mayhem. Although to be sure, there's plenty of that as well. Aushenker had a vision of complete ridiculousness when he started this comic, and he more than lived up to that goal with page after page of brightly-colored, silly and frequently nonsensical mayhem.

Thirty Days of Short Reviews #30: Michael Aushenker

Humorist Michael Aushenker has never been afraid to get weird. He has a penchant for the silly, the grotesque and the just plain strange in his comics, as he's not afraid to chase the punchlines he finds amusing. The first two issues of his three issue comic book series, Go, Genius, Go! find Aushenker working in slightly different territory. With artist Marcus Collar handling the actual cartooning, Aushenker has crafted an off-kilter workplace comedy about a schlub named Derick. A movie blogger, his girlfriend walks out on him at the beginning of the story and it's revealed that he lives in the guest cottage in a retirement community. He bluffs his way into getting a job at an internet start-up thanks to his friends sending him info via bluetooth, and this yields a great salary, the sexual attentions of his beautiful boss, and an unrequited crush from a fellow worker. Everything's going his way until his girlfriend finds out he's a fraud, and his whole scheme unravels.

The detail from the story that I particularly enjoyed, however, was Derick taking advantage of a pricing error at a high-end grocery store in order to get some expensive cheese. Despite having enough money to buy it at full price, he can't help but be a scammer. At the end, even that's taken away from him. While I enjoyed the overall loopiness of the story, Collar's work was stiff and amateurish. His naturalistic approach didn't seem to suit the story, whose over-the-top nature would have been much better off with Aushenker's own grotesque line. I will be curious to see where Aushenker takes the story in its final issue.

Back in his comfort zone, Trolls features Aushenker doing both story and art, and it features various anthropomorphic characters behaving badly. The story is in full, lurid color, something Aushenker takes full advantage of in this story about a pair of slacker air traffic controllers who come up with the bright idea of hosting a wild party at work. The duo, Edward and Wayward, find themselves dodging landlords badgering them for rent, psychotic drug dealers looking for money owed, and sneaking around their draconian supervisor. Aushenker starts the story off crazy and continues to elevate it, as the debauchery depicted at the party is hilarious, drawn in Aushenker's dense line and saturated in his intense color schemes. The images of planes falling from the sky while the duo falls asleep on the job as a party rages around them is just the right kind of crazy. The backups, featuring his Unstoppable Rogues characters, trade in much the same territory: things getting out of hand in the workplace and leading to orgies, or else the main characters trying to score but sniffing glue until they pass out. There's something about the sheer, gleeful loudness in Aushenker's comics that I find to be fun; there's a lack of slickness and structure that actually helps some of his more familiar story elements find new life in his iteration of them.

Plug Time: Bourdeaux, Aushenker, S.Toth, Standfest, Espey

A few requests for project publicity have come my way, so I thought I'd run a little clearing-house here.

First, cartoonist pal Michael Aushenker is working on the comics end of an overall revival of The Human Fly. Billed as "The Wildest Super-Hero Ever -- Because he's REAL!", the Human Fly was a costumed 70s daredevil who had a short-lived Marvel Comics series. There's going to be a movie based on his life as well as the comic. This is about as obscure a 70s revival I can imagine, but the premise is so agreeably strange (as was the 70s Marvel Comic, written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Golden Age legend Lee Elias) that I can't wait to see what it looks like.

This isn't strictly comics, but I was enormously excited to have received a bag of cookies from the Golden Age Bakery in Chapel Hill, NC from a friend. It's starting to make the rounds that baker Sylvia Toth is creating cookies containing panels from public domain golden Age comics, including a batch that's nothing but Fletcher Hanks' Stardust the Super-Wizard. Toth recently quit her day job to bake cookies full time, and they are delicious and beautiful.

Ryan Standfest has just opened a Kickstarter fund for his second issue of Black Eye, his intriguing comics/essay publication dealing with satire and black humor. This issue will feature comics from Michael DeForge, S.Gross, Ben Marra, Brecht Evens and many more. The first volume was excellent and ambitious, so I'll be curious to see how Standfest refines his ideas for #2.

I haven't yet had a chance to review it in full, but the puppet show adaptation of Eamon Espey's Songs Of The Abyss looks fascinating. Espey and his wife, Lisa Krause, co-created the show. Check out details and a schedule here.

My old pal Steve Lafler has a video up about his Dog Boy series and its recent revival on the web: 

Finally, I wanted to point readers to the fine job Robyn Chapman did collecting Ariel Bourdeaux's Deep Girl series. Full disclosure: I interviewed Ariel for this book.That said, I recommend her comics unreservedly.

Quick Comments On Kids' Comics

I receive a lot of comics to review, and the next few weeks will be devoted to playing catch-up. First up is a survey of the many comics aimed at kids and teens. It's common knowledge in the world of publishing that the only segment of the book market that's still thriving is the young adult category. Scholastic is the publisher that caught lightning in a bottle with the Harry Potter franchise and later duplicated that feat (albeit on a much smaller scale) by reprinting Jeff Smith's Bone series in color. As such, they are still very much all-in with regard to comics aimed at various age groups, as this survey will indicate. Other publishers, like First Second, have also achieved success by concentrating a great deal of their output on all-ages material. Let's take a look to see what approaches are in vogue with regard to story and art, from roughly youngest audience to oldest:

The Super Crazy Cat Dance, by Aron Nels Steinke . (Baloon Toons/Blue Apple Books. Aimed at ages 3-6). This is modeled after Francoise Mouly's Toon Books line, right down to the shape and design of the book. Of course, those books were modeled after Golden Books and other classic book designs for kids, which are heavy on decorative properties. Steinke has an idiosyncratic voice as a writer, a tone that winds up being perfect for a kids' book. That's partly because while he channels Dr. Seuss for the rhymes about cats that make up most of the book, he screeches to a halt to actually write about the title dance in a way that's genuinely amusing and unexpected. His line is simple but he adds a lot of detail and "eye pops" on every page, making this an ideal book for a child to read again and again as they take in new images. Lastly, the colors in this book are simple but warm & inviting, providing an interesting contrast to the predominant use of black as a background color. Steinke seems to have really found his niche with this book.




Gumby's Gang Starring Pokey #1, by Michael Aushenker & Rafael Navarro. (Gumby Comics. Aimed roughly at ages 7-10.) This is an agreeably dopey comic jammed with funny visuals, dumb puns and just plain nonsense. In other words, this time travel story is a snug fit in the continuum of strangeness that is the world of Gumby & Pokey. Navarro's loopy line and Lance Borde's garish colors give the reader something interesting to look at in every panel. Gumby and Pokey are funny-looking characters to begin with, but Navarro's drawings of Gumby & Pokey as Run-DMC, cube-headed people of the future and Gumby climbing the Trojan Horse are simply funny apart from their larger context. Aushenker's references to 80s rap, the Minutemen, and Suicidal Tendencies are meant to fly over the heads of any kids who happen to be reading the comic (sort of the way The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle did). Aushenker's frantic, silly and absurd style of humor is a contrast to the gentler, slower pace of the original cartoons, but creator Art Clokey designed these clay characters to be flexible in every sense of the word. Aushenker clearly respects the source material but exploits that flexibility to expand the world and references of its star characters. I don't think every kid who reads this would like it, but a certain kind of kid to whom absurdism is appealing would no doubt re-read it endlessly.



Adventures In Cartooning Activity Book, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold & Alexis Frederick-Frost. (First Second. 78 pages, aimed roughly at ages 6-12.) The follow-up to the excellent comics/textbook for kids encourages cleverly disguises its exercises as fun activities. The book follows a knight in search of adventure who is encouraged by an elf to draw. The reader is asked to draw increasingly more complex objects, starting with free-form doodles to copying a simple horse to making up food items to draw in a fridge. From there, the reader is introduced to sound effects, decorative aspects of drawing, simple perspective, backgrounds, dialogue, sound effects, lettering, panel sequencing and transitions, motion, and the passage of time. To my eye, it looks like Frederick-Frost's line is responsible for most of the figure work, with his simple brush line and supple figure work delighting the eye at every turn. There's a warmth and approachability on every page that's designed to draw in readers, but the book also challenges its readers with the final exam of doing all the work (save panel design) for a 14-page story. Hopefully, there will be future activity books that up the ante a bit further.



Pilot & Huxley: Their First Adventure, by Dan McGuiness. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 62 pages, aimed at ages 7-9.) There's a reference to South Park in this comic, which I thought odd given its target audience. In many respects, the smart-ass give-and-take between the title boy characters and the deliberately crude, stilted art make this a sort of action-adventure version of South Park, minus the swearing and sex jokes. McGuiness does actually land plenty of good gags in this silly book about two boys hopping between dimensions, but the computer-drawn art is crude to the point of distraction and too many of the gags rely on gross-out humor. It's also surprisingly meta for a comic aimed at kids. None of that would have been a problem if the art (and that goes for the garish coloring) was simply more interesting to look at.


Missile Mouse: Rescue on Tankium3, by Jake Parker. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 158 pages, aimed at ages 8-12.) It's no surprise that Parker has a background in animation, given the clean lines and functionally attractive use of color in this book. This science-fiction story is an entirely tidy adventure that focuses on its episodic plot and simple characterization. Parker's anthropomorphic mouse hero is a triumph of character design, as is his primary antagonist in the book, the Blazing Bat. Parker skillfully introduces visual elements early in the book that either wind up becoming plot points or recurring bits of comic relief. The result is a smooth, pleasant read that is generic and not especially memorable, in part because the main character is such a generic action hero. Like many an animated action feature, the focus on action over character makes it difficult to create a connection with the titular character. Still, the clarity of action, simplicity of the humor and crispness of the color & character design will no doubt be appealing to readers at the younger end of its target audience.


Sidekicks, by Dan Santat. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 224 pages, aimed at ages 8-12.) This is a book about the super-powered pets of a generic (but older) superhero named Captain Amazing. It's got two chief assets: the chunky & blocky drawings are expressive and funny, and Santat lets the characters dictate the action at all times. The plot is simple and the twists are telegraphed, but both serve simply as a stucture for the four animal characters to interact. The emotional plot of the book involves three of the animals (a dog, a hamster and a newly-arrived chameleon) wishing they could spend more time with their master, a hero on the verge of retirement. The hero decides to get a new sidekick, and the dog (Roscoe) decides to try out for the role. When the hamster (Fluffy) and chameleon (Shifty) decide to do the same, they encounter the cat (Manny), their former "brother" who had run away from home after a long stint as the hero's sidekick. That emotional structure is imbued with genuine warmth to go along with slapstick, and it's the key to the book's success. The story is otherwise pretty silly superhero boilerplate, but each character's personality drives the book in different ways. The dog is loyal but stubborn, relying too much on brute force; the cat is prickly but clever, slowly letting his guard down with regard to his brothers; the hamster is good-natured and relentlessly loving; the chameleon is a bit baffled but eager to fit in. Santat's use of color is expressive and appealing, spotlighting his idiosyncratic visual style. This was the best of the Scholastic books by far.

Ghostopolis, by Doug TenNapel (Graphix!/Scholastic. 268 pages, aimed at teens.) I've always found TenNapel to be a clever cartoonist whose comics tend to wind up being all over the place. This book is no exception. It's a love story about a shiftless ghost hunter and a clever ghost. It's a family rapprochement story. It's a sick child story. It's a monster story. It's a quest. It's an action/adventure story with fantasy elements. It's a story about belief. Gross-out gags are mixed with cloying sentiment. It's not complex as much as it is cluttered, with some characters possessing rich backstories and others lacking enough depth to justify their heroic arcs. There's plenty to recommend in this volume (the character designs, unsurprisingly, are all top-notch, with clever variations on familiar designs), but it simply doesn't cohere--especially at an emotional level.

Bad Island, by Doug TenNapel (Graphix!/Scholastic, 224 pages, aimed at ages 10-13.) This book by TenNapel has a much tighter focus, following a family of four and their life-and-death adventures after they get shipwrecked on a mysterious island. Like Ghostopolis, this book concerns a dysfunctional family and how the extreme conditions of an adventure scenario provides a crucible for its repair. In particular, TenNapel zeroes in on wayward sons, and Bad Island provides a clever set of parallel narratives regarding two sons trying to assert themselves as adults in different but equally inappropriate ways. TenNapel quickly sets up the personalities of each family member before putting them on the island, and then jacks up the danger & action quotient steadily. The connections between scenes and flow of the action are reminiscent of Carl Barks at times, and his character design (as per usual) is elastic, animated and expressive. The one sour note of the book is the character of the mother, who is at first a sour scold and doesn't advance much past that. The female characters in both of his books are one-note: the wacky girl in this book, as well as the bitter mother & sadly scorned ex-girlfriend in Ghostopolis. Those latter characters go through what I call a binary arc, switching from unhappy to happy without the same sort of journey as the male characters. As a result, that change feels forced and unearned. On the whole, the action in this book is compelling and the family elements ring true without being too didactic.

Bone: Quest For The Spark, Book One, by Tom Sniegoski & Jeff Smith. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 218 pages, aimed at teens.) Smith's Bone series is the gold standard for young adult comics over the last twenty years after it initially garnered an enormous adult audience as well. While Smith won't be writing new stories himself, the Bone empire rolls on with a new series of novels written by long-time collaborator Sniegoski and illustrated by Smith. This book is right in the Bone pocket: sinister & mysterious force threatening happiness in the valley; a young and unlikely hero teaming up with a group of Bones; a desperate quest to find the one thing that can defeat the enemy, picking up strange allies along the way. Sniegoski's take on the Bone mythos is perfectly competent, but I've always felt that his writing was a bit on the broad side--which is saying something, because Smith certainly went for some broad punchlines throughout the course of his original series. In this book, he reins himself in a bit, but he lacks that certain quirky something that made Smith's series such a huge success. This being prose instead of comics doesn't help matters much, given that the kinetic quality of Smith's panel-to-panel transitions carried so much of the series' momentum. As a result, the book winds up being a pleasant visit with some old friends but not much more.

The Good Neighbors: Book Three: Kind, by Holly Black & Ted Naifeh. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 112 pages, aimed at teens.) This book is radically different from the others on this list, in that it's not a "boy's adventure" action quest. In terms of packaging and even certain story elements, there's a certain resonance with the mega-successful Twilight novels. The cover features a young woman clearly being torn between two different lovers (which is indeed the case, as the story reveals). How this book is radically different from Twilight is that the female protagonist here is a decidedly active one, as opposed to the more passive Bella. I had not read the first two books in this series and so missed the full emotional ramifications of the initial premise: an odd teenage girl named Rue learns that her mother is in fact a faerie and that she has all sorts of magical powers. The end of the second book finds her city being merged with the land of Faerie, with all of its attendant nastiness and a potential war brewing between the two peoples. Rue's struggle is being caught in-between, with no clear choices for resolution: between her mother and father, between being human and immortal, between her boyfriend and a newer lover, between her friends & the life she knew and a different life in a magical realm. Black, the writer, wrings every bit of angst possible out of these conflicts, rendering the entire book an overwrought series of pained internal monologues. After a while, this gets to be tedious. To her credit, Black doesn't cop out with any easy decisions at the end, and the choice Rue makes is a surprising one in many ways. Naifeh's work is excellent throughout; his shadowy pages are reminiscent of a slightly more cartoony Gene Colan. He does his best to add life and atmosphere to the story, contributing nicely to its downbeat mood. While I am far from the target audience for this book, I appreciate Black attempting to steer away from cliche' as much as possible while still including the sort of story elements that that audience expects from a fantasy series.

Gag Comic Round-Up Nowacki, Viola, Reed,, Latta, Aushenker

Time to dip into an array of gag-oriented minicomics.

Moe, by Piotr Nowacki. Nowacki, a Polish artist, uses a delightfully simple and blobby line in depicting his anthropomorphic protagonist and the mysterious blotch who both aids and hinders him. This is a silent comic with an open four panel-per-page layout that emphasizes each character's body language above all else. Nowacki values exaggeration of action as the hero is punched in the face by the blob (after being offered a bone), winds up in jail, gets busted out by the blob, smokes a joint with a Rasta angel blob in a cloud, and finally rescues a beautiful woman underwater. The mischievous blob reminds me a bit of Al Capp's Shmoo character, only it's black with white eyes. Nowacki's work is incredibly self-assured in its simplicity and expressiveness; there are no wasted lines. The gags are reminiscient of the sort of thing Lewis Trondheim does so well in his silent humor comics: set up a character, provide an antagonist, then subvert reader expectations. Nowacki's imagination isn't quite as wild as Trondheim's, but Moe's ambitions are modest and this mini is a rewarding read.

Some Stories #1, by Desmond Reed. Reed is another artist who uses a simple line in order to tell his shaggy dog twist gags. Sort of like the O.Henry of minicomics gag work, Reed uses his exposition to set up an unexpected punchline. I wish Reed would vary the thickness of his line from time to time in order to make his pages more interesting to look at (as well as giving him more storytelling options); his art is merely functional, though it is effective. This latest effort, published in a larger size than his earlier micro-minis, is a mixed bag. "4 O'Clock" is too much of a shaggy dog story, dragging out the fate of a lab guinea pig who is killed by accident and is trying to sort out his afterlife. The eventual resolution of this story felt predictable in a way his prior comics hadn't. On the other hand, "Todd" represented a step up for Reed. As we meet two fish who are madly in love, we continuously flash back in time three seconds at a time, a clever way of detailing their extremely short attention spans and memories. It's a sort of underwater version of Memento, where Reed adds layer on top of layer until he reaches the final payoff. Unlike the first story, every single page is funny on its own, working first as a kind of non sequitur and then finally cohering in the end.


Herman The Manatee Volume 4, by Jason Viola. Viola's meandering strip about a manatee and his "lousy friends" hits a nice groove in this collection. Viola has an appealing line and great character design sense, but the quality of his work has varied as he's tried to figure out just what he wants to do with his strip. He quickly ran out of variations of his initial premise (the titular character getting hit in the head by passing boats), but attempts at piecing together extended storylines fell flat. His characters are simply too silly to support such attempts. In this volume, Viola strikes a balance with the Candide-like Herman, depressed (to the point of absurdity) Lester and vicious narwhal Knuckles playing off each other. Instead of trying to attach these characters to a plot (even a plot that was a parody), Viola instead simply structures gags around each character's quirks and how they interact. The result is a consistently amusing set of strips, drawn in a clean and assured style with a minimum of fuss.


Those Unstoppable Rogues Party Hard!, by Michael Aushenker. Of all the humorists discussed in this article, Aushenker's work is certainly the weirdest. Even in this series of strips about a turtle named Brett and a chicken named Clucky, it's hard to pin down Aushenker's style. There's a kitchen sink quality to it that I admire, as he throws in wordplay, absurdity, puns, double-entendres, purely visual gags, meta-humor, and character-based jokes. It's a loud, sprawling series of strips that features my favorite character designs of Aushenker's; there's an almost geometric appeal to Clucky (all triangles) and Brett (all curves). That balance makes this strip work better than his Greenblatt the Great! strips simply because I like looking at these characters more. There's also no real attempt to bring in other characters as concept gag generators, which sometimes proves to be a distraction in Aushenker's other comics. Brett and Clucky are at the center of every storyline and other characters serve purely to react against them, and then leave. Most of these strips are pretty old (dating from the early 90s) and there are some pages that have a bit of clutter that interfere with the overall storytelling. However, there's mostly a happy lack of fussiness to these strips. Aushenker has such a heavy line that keeping things relatively simple on the page winds up being the best approach. That simplicity allows Aushenker to create a strip that's simultaneously dumb and smart.


Rashy Rabbit Droppin' Anchor, by Josh Latta. Latta returns with another Gilbert Shelton-style adventure of a slacker rabbit done in a rubbery, lively anthropomorphic style. Latta has all but abandoned any sense of verisimilitude in his comics, as Rashy winds up at sea after his girlfriend dumps him and meets a group of sexy mermaids. While the comic is well-paced and balances its chaotic and ridiculous elements with straightforward storytelling, it's far sillier than Latta's earlier comics. Latta is better at mining humor out of awkwardness and sleaze than he is out of pure absurdity, and as a result this story winds up being fairly forgettable. The characters, divorced from prior continuity, all feel fairly stock and paper-thin. The sea captain Rashy ventures off with (and with whom he discovers he has a surprising connection) is ridiculously cartoonish. As a result, this issue isn't silly or absurd enough to be memorable in a Michael Kupperman sort of way nor is it tethered enough to actual character relationships to keep the reader focused on the page. That said, it certainly looks like Latta had a great deal of fun drawing this issue, especially the mermaid sequences. If Latta does decide to commit to more of a fantasy element in his stories, I hope he takes his concepts further.