New High-Low at TCJ: Top 25 Minicomics of 2010

Here's my latest column at the Comics Journal, listing the Top 25 Minis of 2010 plus some other related comics.

TCJ Post #33: Minis From Silber Media

Rob reviews a variety of comics from Brian John Mitchell's Silber Media over at The Comics Journal.

TCJ Post #32: Troop 142 #1 & 2

Rob reviews the first two issues of Mike Dawson's new minicomics series, TROOP 142, over at The Comics Journal.

TCJ Post #31: Odd Jobs #1

Rob reviews Eric H.'s minicomic, ODD JOBS #1.

TCJ Post #20: Big Plans #4 by Aron Nels Steinke

Aron Nels Steinke's BIG PLANS #4 is the subject of my latest post over at The Comics Journal's website.

TCJ Post #19: Lisa McDonnell

My latest post over at The Comics Journal concerns the minicomics of Lisa McDonnell.

TCJ Post #17: Zack Soto and Rob Jackson

Rob reviews new minicomics from Zack Soto and Rob Jackson over at The Comics Journal.

TCJ Post #13: Colleen Frakes & Dennis St. John

My 13th blog post at the Comics Journal concerns new minis by Dennis St. John & Colleen Frakes.

TCJ Post #12: Penina Gal & Alexis Frederick-Frost

My twelfth post on the Comics Journal website concerns minis by Penina Gal & Alexis Frederick-Frost.

TCJ Post #11: Chuck Forsman's Snake Oil

Here's my review of issues #4 and 5 of Chuck Forsman's series SNAKE OIL.

TCJ Post #8: Jen Vaughn & Morgan Pielli

In his first CCS review catch-up column, Rob considers the work of Jen Vaughn and Morgan Pielli.

Minicomics Round-Up: Krall, Turnbull, Viola, Ineke, Runkle, Jordan & Harada

Time for another look at a variety of minicomics that have been sent my way. Reviewed are RUNX TALES #2 by Matt Runkle; HERMAN THE MANATEE #1 & 2 by Jason Viola; THE SLEEP OF KINGS by Ibrahim Ineke; PRIZE #2 by Hawk Krall; INVASIVE EXOTICS #2 by Jack Turnbull; and MOULGER BAG DIGEST #2 by Rusty Jordan & Brent Harada.

RUNX TALES #2, by Matt Runkle. Runkle has a crude but expressive line, but these comics popped off the page because of his terrific design sense. In this large format comic (8.5 x 11), the standouts were "Nora Stories" and, oddly enough, a long essay on ranch dressing. With the former, Runkle's character design was key, especially with regard to the huge eyeglasses of the title character (they fairly overwhelmed her face) and the sleazy vagrant named Crow who somehow kept popping up in her life. Nora's exasperated but resigned body language was nicely related by Runkle, particularly in the way she looked exactly like a weirdo magnet--the sort of person freaks gravitate toward because they know they'll be tolerated. Runkle's comics essay on the virtues of ranch dressing leaned heavily on his use of white-on-black images and a clever use of fonts. Runkle was more than a little tongue-in-cheek in this essay, especially when he compared the dressing to semen and noted that many of the folks he waited on reacted to it much like a desired money-shot.

Runkle's own personal observations also had some amusing moments. "Wrestling With The Truth" was about his high school experiences as a wrestler, while dealing with the awkwardness of being gay in rural America. While that was the backdrop of the story, the meat of it dealt with what happened when he was thrown to the mat in practice and hit his head hard. He saw a vision where for a second, "it all made sense": a middle-aged woman, a ladder and other vague details. Runkle contrasting this to San Francisco goddess worship was hilarious, noting that this goddess was very much of her surroundings: "farm-hardened, sensible and the type that would hate new-agers". His story about a recently deceased friend of his was touching, funny and compelling, detailing the ways in which this trans friend embraced living. Runkle is a great cartoonist despite being a mediocre draftsman who plays to his strengths, understands how to compose a page, and focuses on his line expressing his sense of humor and point of view. The result is one of the more entertaining one-man anthologies I've read in quite some time.


HERMAN THE MANATEE, #1 & 2 by Jason Viola. At first glance, I thought this might be a series of cute strips about a manatee and worried that it might be a bit saccharine. Then I read the first strip and realized that it was about a manatee who was hit by a speedboat in strip after strip. It was the equivalent of reading a collection of PEANUTS wherein every strip featured Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Varying the set-up to a situation with the same punchline every time is not easy, but Viola went through a lot of variations: flashing back to childhood, being deceived by god, playing Marco Polo, doing a Gorey pastiche, etc. By volume 2 of this mini, Viola started an extended narrative about the perils of having a protected pond, including being forced to pose for humiliating photos with tourists and being exploited for money. Viola is a good gagsmith with an appealing line who gets a lot of mileage out of being extremely cruel to his characters for no particular reason. Herman isn't punished because he deserves it; it's simply his fate to have his head hit by boats. While I can understand the difficulty of coming up with variations on a particular formula, I did think that Viola started to drift away from what made his strip successful when he went on to do the longer storyline. His attempts at satire were clumsy, but more problematic was that he was trying to turn Herman into a real protagonist. Sure, he still turned out to be a failure, but it still felt like an uneasy match of ambition and character. Herman is perhaps less like Charlie Brown (a sad-sack who is multidimensional) and more like Wile E Coyote, and the extended storyline felt like Viola was plopping him down into a story that didn't suit the character.


THE SLEEP OF KINGS, by Ibrahim Ineke. Ineke is a Dutch artist with a fine arts background who has recently started to move into comics work. His specialty is horror, but less an American sense of horror and more of a Japanese one. That is, the ideas presented and hinted at by the story are more awful than the standard American presentation of gore. There's also a bit of Lovecraft to be found here, in that evidence of something ancient & horrible is discovered with disastrous results. The story finds two boys playing sword and sorcery games in the woods. When one boy disappears for a bit, his friend finds him with his back to him, unresponsive--and surrounded by buzzing insects. What I liked about this story is that its horror takes place in broad daylight, with light and shadow cleverly deployed when an eclipse occurs. Ineke only hints at what's happening here: stones in a circle with some sort of mystic runes, and some type of demonic possession. All the reader needs to know is that both boys meet a terrible end in a story that moves leisurely but doesn't outstay its welcome.

Ineke's figures, especially in close-up, have a scribbly & energetic quality to them that made them come alive. Indeed, there's a spontaneity to his line that made reading this sort of story more entertaining than usual, given that I'm used to a certain slickness with American horror comics. There were some panels where he seemed to be losing a bit of control with regard to characters in motion (not surprising for someone from a fine arts background); panel-to-panel transitions as well as characters in relation to each other are things that I imagine he'll continue to improve on as he continues to draw comics. He's certainly an interesting artist, and I'll be curious to see how he would tackle a longer-form work.


PRIZE #2, by Hawk Krall. I first became aware of Krall's work in the pages of Danny Hellman's anthology TYPHON, with his "Summer of Seven-Eleven" story being a standout. PRIZE is a collection of shorter strips in three different categories: stories about working the graveyard shift at a 7-11, stories about living in squalid conditions with his art school roommates ("Living In Filth"), and tales from the kitchens of a big city ("Dirty Dish"). Krall's work is very much in the tradition of underground comics, with a particular focus on grotesque character design. Krall is a great yarn-spinner, especially when he zeroes in on the most sordid details. He plays up the absurdity of living with filthy roommates in a run-down apartment, of the frequently disgusting truth of working conditions in a kitchen, and the sort of people he encountered working in a convenience store. His ability to capture the characters he met and crystalize them in short order made strip after strip a hilarious experience.

Of the three different features, I thought "Dirty Dish" was the funniest and most original. They're presented as single-page strips, and it's a format that flatters Krall's style. Krall doesn't vary his line or panel composition much from strip to strip. With his longer stories, the reader is hammered in panel after panel by Krall's grotesque imagery, and the effect can be suffocating at times. "Dirty Dish" not only opens up the page a bit, it finds Krall concentrating on a single image or idea and playing that out. The strip also provides the reader a peek into the world of professional kitchens. Krall portrays it as an unrelenting series of hostile encounters, where the workers struggle to hold on to their sanity. He also made it seem like fun, at least in the sense that huddling in a foxhole develops camaraderie. Even in strips that seemed a bit cluttered, Krall's ability to escalate situations is the hallmark of his very sharp sense of comic timing.


INVASIVE EXOTICS #2, by Jack Turnbull. Turnbull's APOLLO ASTRO series of minicomics that he published before he went to art school positioned him high on my list of interesting young artists. His new series is a radical departure from those comics that clearly displayed his influences (Clowes, Ware & Tomine in particular) but still showed that his voice was one that needed to be heard. INVASIVE EXOTICS is a mash-up of a startling array of genres, including sci-fi, conspiracy fiction, psychedelic social satire, slice-of-life, and crime fiction. While not a direct influence, Matthew Thurber's 1-800-MICE is the closest point of comparison I can think of, though Turnbull's comic is not as tightly plotted or outrageous in its conceits.

Most stories involving satires of corporate America tend to fall flat, but Turnbull mutated an obvious visceral dislike of Coldstone Creamery (the one where the servers are forced to sing whenever they get a tip) into an over-the-top conspiracy story. I've always liked Turnbull's elongated character design, and the slightly bigfoot nature of his character design serves the story well. The villainous "Slimecold" CEO resembled a warped Bozo the Clown, with pointy hair that he used as corporate iconography. His scheme was to force out the residents of Brooklyn using a mutated form of killer ant that would cause them to flee, create gentrification and then provide the sort of Brooklyn where he could open up many more stores. He's opposed by a small cadre of eco-terrorist types, with the character of Jane Easewell being Turnbull's all-purpose satire of scientist-as-action hero. The first issue sees her go on a one-woman commando raid at a Slimecold lab in a sequence that's deadpan in its depiction but completely ridiculous. At the same time, there's a pastiche of slice-of-life romance going on in the backdrop that gets dramatically halted when the ant rampage story slams into it.

This comic is jam-packed with ideas, characters and crazy page layouts. At times I think it's too all over the place, as Turnbull seemed to want to draw every single idea he had had for the past several years in one series. The action scenes, while funny, didn't really work on their own visually because there's a lack of fluidity in the way he depicted motion. His figure-to-figure interactions also felt a bit stiff. The comics simply seemed rushed at times, with a slew of spelling errors and some cramped panels. That said, there was a lot to like in INVASIVE EXOTICS. Panels where you see ants who have been put to sleep with tiny little "zzz"s next to their head displayed just how loony Turnbull was getting here, while still positing the insects as a very real threat. Turnbull created caricatures that, while exaggerations, still have a lot of uncomfortable truths to them. This comic simply needs to be refined, edited and cleaned up; the energy, ideas and images are all there.

MOULGER BAG DIGEST #2, by Rusty Jordan & Brent Harada. This is a comic very much in the Fort Thunder tradition, with a big dose of Gary Panter. There is a kind of narrative at play here, on pages dominated by psychedelic character design that's mashed up much like a collage. The narrative involves ambling movements followed by utter stillness and a sense of characters constantly changing and pulsing into one another. What's surprising about this comic is the way my eye was able to latch on to the figures on the pages. Even the most jam-packed pages had a few images that seemed to pop out at the reader. I'm not sure what to make of this succession of images that combined figure and structure, other than I liked looking at it. It certainly felt like an object that was meant to be looked at more than read, especially given the oblique nature of its narrative.

Minicomics Round-Up: Downes, Madden-Connor, Dinski

Rob reviews minicomics from Christopher Downes, Will Dinski and Jonas Madden-Connor.

A DIARY OF A WORK IN PROGRESS, by Christopher Downes. As one might ascertain from the title, Downes pens a diary comic. It's unremarkable in that regard, though Downes does slowly start to reveal more about the hopes, fears and dreams of himself and his wife as time passes. Despite an obvious restlessness with regard to his life working in a department store, Downes' essentially cheery nature prevents the comic from bogging down into an autobio whine session. Indeed, he seems quite happy to be living in Tasmania with his wife and cat, pondering the issue of progeny. What makes this comic stand out is the appealing nature of his line. I love the thickness of his line, the way he densely hatches and cross-hatches and his charming character design. There's a little bit of R.Crumb, Craig Thompson, and Drew Weing (the artist whose style he most closely resembles) to be found in his art. His lettering is drop-dead gorgeous, with thick stylized letters that are printed slightly off-kilter against each other but still come together to form an attractive whole--and one that's quite easy to read. This is an artist with great chops and style who is still searching for his voice. I would be eager to see him try his hand at fiction or any kind of longer-form comic, especially one that pushes him to become more formally experimental. There are hints of that to be found in terms of the way he uses panels as a storytelling device (a panel bending back under the pressure of wind, or crashing down through two panels when he's exhausted), and I think he could tell an entertaining story as he made that kind of exploration.


COVERED IN CONFUSION, by Will Dinski. Dinski continues his recent string of excellent minis with a story that's a bit more straightforward than his usual stories. At the same time, there's a greater richness and complexity in both plot and characterization, with surprising story layers that manifest themselves in unusual ways. Dinski begins the story with a discussion of why we blush, a trope that pops up throughout the story of a woman recalling the tragic story of a favorite high school teacher. That teacher, Mr Danielson, was a quirky guy with a habit of stealing pens from other faculty and being a steadfast voice of support for his students. He was also the stereotypical absent-minded professor, something that's amusingly set up early in the book but leads to horrific consequences in the story's climax. This story is about triggers of trauma, as the woman is triggered by the cries of a baby in the apartment next door and reminded that she might have prevented the tragedy. That realization is a shattering one for the reader, yet Dinski handles it with a great deal of restraint.

All of Dinski's usual stylistic signatures are in effect here, yet stand out a bit less than usual thanks to the compelling nature of his story. There's the way he uses word balloons to block out whole panels, the way he uses a blank panel with a triangle in the corner to indicate time passing (a page being turned, as it were), his unusual character design (lots of angles, squidged eyes, bushy eyebrows) and formal flourishes (the splash pages freezing characters in time, almost like a yearbook photo, the cover glowing in the dark). The cumulative effect of Dinski's formal approach is a cold one, a coolness that distances the reader. That coolness is what allows him to tell such a downbeat story with so much restraint; the reader never feels manipulated nor is sentiment ever earned cheaply. It helps that the dialogue is never overwrought; indeed, conversations in Dinski's comics are deliberately on the spare side as he prefers to let images convey most of his story's major beats. With this story and last year's ERRAND SERVICE, it seems as though Dinski is reaching a new level of maturity and ambition as an artist, exploring emotional depths as well as creating a unique page.


OCHRE ELLIPSE #3, by Jonas Madden-Connor. Madden-Connor is an exciting newcomer whose specialty has been bold formal experiments coupled with a lingering sense of wanderlust and melancholy. The latter two aspects of his work were certainly at play in this new issue, though the formal fireworks were considerably toned down. Madden-Connor likes bending time and space as formal elements in his comics, but given that this story was about both time travel and the way one's past images accrue, it makes sense that he'd mute those formal elements.

The story seems heavily influenced by Lewis Trondheim by way of Chris Ware, though the tone is entirely his own. The figures are simple ovals (ala Trondheim's MISTER O) but retain a great deal of expressiveness. The comics' hook is killer: an unhappy, lonely man who remembers a happy childhood despite being a loner goes back in time to those happy days. Despite the fact that he can't interact with anyone as a time travel (appearing as a ghost), the visits to his childhood self with an intricately detailed fantasy life fill him with joy. The eventual resolution of the story is both heartbreaking and sweet, as the man realizes that the accumulation of his ghost images was the inspiration for that wonderful fantasy life--but that he will never be capable of any other happiness. Madden-Connor concludes the issue with the actual fantasy being played out as his childhood self imagined it, a wonderful sequence that recontextualizes earlier scenes in the book. Madden-Connor deftly uses genre trappings (even throwing a "science-fiction" sticker on the cover with an iconic ray-gun) to tell a story of one man's infinite emotional loop.

Minicomics Round-Up: Reklaw, Nelson, Frank, Madness

Rob reviews TEN THOUSAND THINGS TO DO #2-4 by Jesse Reklaw; TYPHOON #1 by Kelli Nelson; NEGRO FRANKENSTEIN by Al Frank; and REAL MADNESS COMIX by Bobby Madness.

TEN THOUSAND THINGS TO DO #2-4, by Jesse Reklaw. This is the print version of Reklaw's one-year journal comic project that's going to wrap up in a couple of weeks. It's no surprise that the artist behind SLOW WAVE has always been interested in formal constraints, and so TTTTD employs a (mostly) rigid 4-panel grid in every strip and tends to follow similar patterns on a day-to-day basis. There's a density to everything that Reklaw draws, a richness found in every panel both in terms of content and drawings. One gets the sense that Reklaw feels an obligation to the reader to entertain them while recording quotidian details like meals and time spent sleeping. What's most interesting about this comic is the way that it seems to be acting as a form of therapy, even if such revelations tend to either be asides or come from out of the blue. Reklaw even comments on doing this, noting that he can say things about pain and depression in his journal that he doesn't feel comfortable talking about with his friends. From both the title of his comic and the frenetic way he goes about his life, Reklaw fills his schedule with projects and an active social life as a distraction of sorts, a way of staving off feelings of failure and depression.

As the strip proceeds, Reklaw opens up a bit and discusses those feelings and how he finds ways to fight them and stay creative. One of the most fascinating running bits in the strip was a daily meter that measured pain in his shoulders, head and back; mood; energy level; and caffeine & alcohol consumption. It highlighted just how much pain he lives with on a daily basis, something that he glosses over in some of his strips. Something that isn't spelled out is the way that Reklaw has assembled a tremendous support system of friends, even if he mostly acts as the life of the party around them. Reklaw actively fights against the sort of isolation that many cartoonists wind up experiencing, both in terms of of his social life and artistic pursuits like playing in a band, organizing gallery shows and the many comics projects he has a hand in.

Reklaw's greatest asset as a cartoonist is his brain. I'm not sure if rendering other people's dreams for years gave him the tools to solve problems on the page in creative ways or if he was drawn to begin SLOW WAVE because it gave him an challenging outlet for his ideas, but in any event, Reklaw thinks through each page and assignment like few other artists. In particular, he has a way of mediating genres through different story filters. For example, in COUCH TAG, Reklaw is working in autobio filtered through accounts of pets and a particular set of activities with friends. BLUEFUZZ is straight-up fantasy filtered through an absurd framework and dialogue. And TTTTD is a diary comic peppered with gags, one-liners, and guest strips, surrounding the grind of committing to such a grueling project. Reklaw seems incapable of half-assing anything (even if he might say otherwise), and one has to admire the level of devotion shown in this comic in terms of drawing and structure. At sixty pages apiece with an immense (but clearly presented) amount of detail on each page, these are not comics that simply fly by. They present rewards for readers that linger on particular panels or pages, and I think that once it's over, TTTTD will be regarded as one of the best of all comics memoir strips.

TYPHOON #1, by Kelli Nelson. Nelson is a long-time favorite of mine whose style is marked by a stark, computer-drawn line. While I usually have a hard time looking at such art, Nelson has made that style her own, creating a harsh aesthetic that matches her acerbic wit. TYPHOON is a venture into fiction, depicting the aftermath of a cataclysmic storm that has flooded the world. This is really a story about trying to keep one's sanity in the face of oblivion, as the two characters we meet have to come to terms with the flood in different ways. The woman keeps her sanity by anthropomorphizing the storm and gaining new strength by trying to find more survivors. The man, stuck on an island, had to deal with his own psychosis at feeling like the last, trapped man on earth. This is an elegant little comic with an intriguing premise and a beautiful design that perfectly suits Nelson's voice.

NEGRO FRANKENSTEIN, by Al Frank. In Portland, the three small press publishers Sparkplug, Tugboat Press & Teenage Dinosaur occupy a continuum of sorts in terms of the kind of comics they publish. Tugboat publishes the most mainstream and straightforward of the three publishers, while Teenage Dinosaur's releases are very much raw, underground comics. (Sparkplug tends to be somewhere inbetween the two extremes). Al Frank's comic is an old-school rant, dwelling on old high school tormentors and acerbic thoughts on race & gender. The two best strips are the autobio "1983" and "1993", two accounts of the perils of being African-American in a mostly white community. In the latter comic, Frank reluctantly goes to a swimming hole, worried about running into rednecks who were going to harass him for having a white girlfriend. When his worries turn out to be well-founded, the fury and helplessness he feels fairly vibrate off the page. The scribbly line he uses here is well-suited to the immediacy of the story. "1983" finds an middle school-aged Frank dealing with a bully and trying to get the attention of a girl, finding no solace or resolution to his desires. Frank employs a stick-figure style that feels a bit like Peanuts gone horribly awry. Frank's at his best when he channels his anger into memoir; his gag strips have a certain mean-spirited edge to them, but are almost entirely dependent on the context of the other stories for their ultimate meaning.

REAL MADNESS COMIX #3, by Bobby Madness. Madness is a regular with Teenage Dinosaur, and he's very much in the underground tradition, albeit with more of a political than sexual emphasis. In that respect, he has more in common with punk/DIY culture than some of the slicker work found in ZAP or HOTWIRE. There's also a great deal of sympathy with Big Daddy Roth's motorcycle comics of the 60s and graffiti artists. Indeed, his drawings of cars and motorcycles are the most lovingly rendered in the book, compared to the way he clearly quickly drew the rest of the comics in the book. This comic is a clearinghouse for his stories, and the effect is rather scattershot. Strips like "Tom Teen" are funny in the underground tradition, as Madness uses a variation of Archie-style drawing in depicting drugs, violence, anarchy and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There are a lot of great gags in this story and it's rendered in a slightly less sloppy fashion than some of the other strips. Like all of his work, it's bursting with energy but never overcrowded.

"Uzi Duck" and "Gun Girl" are fairly self-explanatory strips that seemed pretty quickly scribbled out and improvised--violent gags with absurd premises. Madness even makes fun of his characters later in the issue, noting they are the "world's shitty-ist cartoon characters", vowing "we'll never sell out. How? Because we never sell!" There are a number of single-page sets of gags, and the self-deprecating Madness chides himself for ripping off MAD when he's supposed to be an underground artist. That particular panel really spelled out his appeal to me: he's a politically aware gag cartoonist who doesn't take himself too seriously. That said, he's also clearly compelled to write and draw; it's something that seems as important as breathing to him.

Minicomics Round-Up: Gfrorer, Neely, Huizenga, Jackson, Jay, Platt, Beyer, Wiedeman

Rob reviews another selection of minicomics from old pros and newcomers alike. Reviewed are ARIADNE AUF NAXOS V. 1 & 2, by Julia Gfrorer; SELF-INDULGENCE, by Tom Neely; GREAT DEEDS AGAINST THE DEAD, by Rob Jackson; RUMBLING Chapter 2, by Kevin Huizenga; MY EXPLODING HEAD, by John R. Platt; THE NATURAL WORLD #2, by Damien Jay; CASUAL SEX and CITY UNDER SAND, by David Beyer, Jr.; and THE DEFORMITORY, by Sophia Wiedeman.


ARIADNE AUF NAXOS, volume 1&2, by Julia Gfrorer. These fall into the category of what I call "ramble comics"--minis where the artist takes the reader on a rambling journey that usually features themselves or a stand-in as a character and where the action and scenery is fluid to the point of surreality. I'd throw Jonas Madden-Connor and Damien Jay (especially in POCKET PARTY) in this category as well. The title of the comic refers to a Richard Strauss opera that originally followed a long play that was about a commedia dell'arte being thrust into the middle of a serious work. In much the same way, Gfrorer thrusts herself into the middle of other storylines, fed by pop culture concerns. The results are hilarious, with her thin and spontaneous line feeding her twin concerns of absurdity and sheer horror.


The first issue, themed around the idea of time, features Julia encountering James Bond in his different incarnations, then getting bored and drawing Gilgamesh meeting Simon Templar (The Saint)--with herself as a character in that meetup. That duo starts making out, leaving Julia to comfort Gilgamesh's now-left out pal Enkidu. Julia goes on to meet up with Doctor Who (leading to a comedy routine the two), St Francis of Assisi (whom she horrifies by chomping on a live rabbit) and Lancelot, whom she contacts with her mind. This is a playful comic where horrible & inexplicable things can happen at the drop of a hat. It has the feel of total spontaneity on each page, but really seems to conform more to the principles of long-form improv. That is, while each individual page and panel might be improvised, there's an underlying structure that is referred to from time to time and that pops up in surprising ways.

The second issue's theme is death, and it mostly sees Julia wandering around as a sort of ghost zombie after the king of the witches kills her. There's an obsession with nomenclature and language that pervades this comic, especially the ways in which focusing in on picayune details obscures real meaning. Grforer expresses this idea with deadpan wackiness, with dialogue a bit reminiscent of Mat Brinkman's MULTI-FORCE: slang and curses spoken by supernatural characters. Doctor Who pops up again, this time dancing around the theme of regeneration. This comic is as much about the creation of the comic as it is a narrative, as Grforer never lets the reader forget that the comic is being drawn and that she is drawing it, even as strange things happen to her. The drawings have the crackling energy of sketchbook spontaneity but with a wit that provides a solid support structure.


SELF-INDULGENCE, by Tom Neely. This little mini is a wordless bit of body comedy/horror from an artist who combination of bigfoot drawing and naturalism creates an unsettling atmosphere. The concept is simple: a pair of naked twins faces each other and one starts eating the other whole. As he's doing this, his twin is excreted out the other side, until the original image is duplicated as the book's final panel. With Neely, the fun is in the visceral, inky details and exaggerated body language. The way he elongates arms and legs while drawing pubic hair in exacting detail is the sort of thing that creates the old/new tension in his comics, a visual signature of sorts. I believe he customizes the cover for this comic when purchased at conventions (he did a drawing of the wolf from THE BLOT on mine), which is just a bonus for this beautiful comic.


GREAT DEEDS AGAINST THE DEAD, by Rob Jackson. This is another off-kilter genre comic from the prolific Jackson, in the tradition of Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar. This time around, Jackson takes on the occult, in this story about a haunted house manipulating a widower. Jackson manages to hit every note and cliche' while still telling a straight-ahead story, including occult investigators, paintings coming to life, being forced to sleep in a haunted house overnight and deadly cemetery statues. At the same time, Jackson's characters often drift off on amusing tangents, like the musings of a literary agent and the matter-of-fact rantings of the demonic house. Jackson's crude but earnest line tackles occult conventions with gusto, and that simplicity subverts the usual visual cliches one associates with the genre. Jackson backs up that feature with what looks to be some drawings from life that form a rough narrative of a day out. The main critique I might make of Jackson's work is to further simplify his line. There are times when he overrenders a bit in an effort to provide atmosphere, and it's distracting. Taking a further cue from the simple but clear style that Trondheim employs would go a long way to making his genre explorations all the more effective.


RUMBLING, Chapter 2, by Kevin Huizenga. With the cancellation of his D&Q series OR ELSE, Huizenga announced that he'd be continuing his "Rumbling" story in minicomics form. The second issue adds a bit of context and backstory to the vague sense of dread regarding an exile trying to evade the ramifications of a religious war. What's fascinating about this adaptation of a story by Giorgio Mangenelli is how Huizenga works in his visual and verbal interests into a previously existing narrative structure. There are the wide shots of countrysides and night skies, this time imbued with a feeling of doom instead of the usual sense of awe. There are the diagrams and philosophical asides that now represent life and death instead of merely playful exploration. It even features his signature everyman character Glenn Ganges, whose intellectual curiosity is subsumed in favor of survival and desire for human contact is warped into hermitage. The most fascinating thing about this story is the way Huizenga presents iconography as something that has lethal real-life consequences--both in a predictable way (religious wars) and unexpected (science wars). Glenn eschews all conflict and dips into his true love of ancient history, a pastime derided as heretical by all. Huizenga jumps around chronologically, going from quiet reflection to moments of danger along the way in rapid succession. It's a rich and potent stew from one of the most interesting cartoonists working today.


MY EXPLODING HEAD, by John R. Platt. Platt noted that this was his first mini-comic, and he was wise to play to his strengths as an artist. This is an 8-page collection of gags and observational humor that reminds me a bit of the sort of thing that Shannon Smith does. Platt employs a simple line that eschews extraneous details and overrendering and displays a knack for character design. His best strips actually feature jokes about monsters (like "Mummy Dearest" holding a wire hanger) and especially Bigfoot. Platt also did a micro-mini comic called "My Beard In Alternate Dimensions", which featured a number of funny Don Martin-style drawings of reimagined facial hair. There are downbeat undertones to his gags, as Platt also refers to his ongoing battles with depression, and it's interesting to see him deflect this particular show of emotion with jokes. It feels like Platt is slowly trying to figure out what he does best as a cartoonist and humorist, and I think that will be an interesting process.


THE NATURAL WORLD #2, by Damien Jay. One of my favorite minicomics artists returns with another chapter in what's shaping up to be a grimy fantasy epic. I'm reminded a bit of Terry Gilliam's film JABBERWOCKY, a medieval epic that paid special attention to the mud, manure and sheer unpleasantness of the life of a serf. Jay's greatest skill as an artist is his character design. The way he draws eyes (especially the bulging eyes of the forest hermit who falls in love with a female villager), facial expressions and gesture makes each page a pleasure to simply look at. While the pages look fine in greyscale, I must admit that I'd be very curious to see him unleash his vivid color sense on this story. There's an ease of pace to this story featuring all sorts of character bits, but I was surprised at the way Jay managed to pick up seemingly disparate plot threads and connect them. My favorite sequence in the comic featured a woman trying to hit on the village blacksmith, who was utterly immune and oblivious to her advances. The way she subtly removed her head scarf and tried to stand seductively, only to never even get the slightest glance from her intended, made what was essentially an extended conversation into something that drew the eye to the page. I'm guessing that this story will be Jay's longest sustained narrative to date.

CASUAL SEX and CITY UNDER SAND, by David Beyer, Jr. These are two sharp but very different looking minis. CITY UNDER SAND began as a 24-hour comic but turned into a comic mostly done on the subway--and given that the bulk of the narrative concerns a subway ride gone horribly awry, it's fitting. The story reminds a bit of Yuichi Yokoyama's TRAVEL in that it's a wordless comic that follows a particular traveler through a weird environment but doesn't seek to explain what he's doing or why. Beyer uses an expressive, scribbly style that's fleshed out with what looks like magic marker, adding atmosphere. I liked the way Beyer shifted the focus of the journey from what seemed like a long, arduous desert journey to a subway ride instead.

While CITY UNDER SAND was all about mood, CASUAL SEX was all about a clever device setting up a punchline. Beyer employs a naturalistic pencil style here in his depiction of a young man who wakes up with just one thought: "sex". That thought carries over throughout the day, culminating in a trip to the bar where he says things like "obnoxious sexual advance!" only to get slapped or drinks poured on him. The punchline of the strip, where the person he goes home with has more in store for him than he expected, was a perfect comeuppance for this walking pile of hormones. I get the sense that Beyer is very much still trying to figure out exactly what he wants to do as an artist in terms of the sorts of stories he wants to tell. It also seems as though he's trying to settle on a visual style. It's clear that his chops are already first-rate, with the confidence to create more spontaneous comics without overrendering like CITY UNDER SAND but the skill to pull off something trickier in CASUAL SEX. Beyer has the potential for a very


THE DEFORMITORY, by Sophia Wiedeman. This is a Xeric grant-winning book that's a collection of related short stories about the denizens of a sort of asylum for freaks. Wiedeman uses an intensive black & white pencil style with lots of hatching and cross-hatching but simple figures and faces. Her figures actually remind me a bit of Gabrielle Bell, but even more cartoony. Wiedeman's pages are cramped and claustrophobic, which I think is an intentional effect to heighten the occasional two-page spreads. These are cramped and claustrophobic stories about desperate people who have put themselves in tough situations.

The book is framed by the story of a young boy who sees a unicorn in a forest and is frozen by the memory, building himself a tower in hopes of one day seeing it again. Then we meet Dolores, a woman whose hands warped and deformed but one day turned into sentient crab-like appendages who became her friends. They pointed her to the Deformitory, a place where she would be accepted. It becomes evident that her hands have their own agenda as they point out the Heart Monster as something to be feared, when it seems that this may not be the case. That subsequent Heart Monster strip is a sort of pivot point for the book that takes it in a darker direction; the style she uses here is even more cartoony, even as the Heart Monster meets a bitter end.

From there, Wiedeman introduces us to a mermaid with tentacles who can't make friends and whines incessantly about it. When a slug-girl offers to hang out, the mermaid recoils in disgust, revealing her own shallow nature. We're then returned to a now happy Dolores, who makes the mistake of getting a date, sending her hands into a jealous fury. They attack her date, belittle her for crying, slowly torment her over time and then try to kill her. She drowns them in a bucket but immediately regrets it, given that they're all she had. The book's final pages find the man from earlier in the book finally meeting his unicorn again, bringing it within sight of a forlorn Dolores, offering a glimpse of hope for all.

Dolores' hands are a potent metaphor for any sort of self-destructive behavior or addiction. Even when they were trying to kill her, she desperately wanted them back. Wiedeman manages to sidestep hammering this idea home with the visceral nature of her storytelling. The panels where Dolores is drowning her hands are larger than most in the book, and her line is much more detailed; so as to force the reader to feel the impact of the event. There's also a lot of unexpected humor in the book (especially in the mermaid chapter) that leavens out the more melodramatic elements of the story. The best thing about the book is its elegant structure; its formal elements provide a solid framework for its flights of fancy. Like most young cartoonists, Wiedeman simply needs to refine her linework. Some of her use of cross-hatching seems overly fussy, detracting from her character work. Her use of gesture also seemed a bit awkward at times, especially when characters interacted with each other. Still, this was an enormously ambitious early work for the cartoonist, one worthy of wide attention.

More Mini-Comics: Sobel, Viola, Bougie & Frank, Apt 307, & the MCC

Another interesting crop of mini-comics to consider, each of which couldn't be any more different from the next. Included are THE RED STILETTO, by Marc Sobel; SUNWARD by Jason Viola; APARTMENT 307 by Josh Blair, Noah Van Sciver, Pete Borrebach & Nick Marino; MAXIMUM SUPEREXCITEMENT #2 by Robin Bougie & Maxine Frank; and MINIMALIST COMICS COLLECTIVE #1, by Agnes Anger, C. Che' Salazar and Abel Jimenez.

SUNWARD, by Jason Viola. This is a curious little mini about a group of three friends, one of whom has become unstuck from gravity and threatens to fly off the face of the earth (and inevitably, as his friends note, into the sun). The way that the cartoony characters are introduced, the reader almost has a sense that these are established dramatic personae whom we should know all about. Viola plays it straight the whole issue, now matter how absurd the set-up gets or crazy the ideas become in trying to solve the bedraggled hero's dilemma. The most interesting thing about the comic is the way that whom the protagonist actually is shifts from page to page. Is it Dave, who's in danger of flying off? Is it the pensive Felonious Monk? Is it the rambling Sebastian?

I enjoyed the weirdness of the premise so much that I was a bit disappointed when there was a kind of explanation as to what happened to Dave that wound up being the on-the-nose receptacle of the mini's main theme. That theme was the need to define a direction to one's life before it slips completely out of control--especially when one is experiencing near-total freedom. The figure work is fairly simple and ranges from expressive to slightly stiff and clunky. Viola seemed to really enjoy drawing short-haired and chunky Sebastian; at the very least, he comes alive a bit more than the book's other characters. Viola does well with keeping things deadpan, and as a result, there's plenty of sly humor in this comic. It just could have done with either more or less control over its line: more would have given the book a greater sense of restraint, heightening the tension of the situation; less would have been a nice chaotic counterpoint to the artist's dry humor.



THE RED STILETTO, by Marc Sobel. This is the first mini written and drawn by my former Sequart.com stablemate Sobel. Sobel is best known for his ultra-exhaustive, issue-by-issue take on LOVE & ROCKETS, an effort that I hope is one day published in a more permanent form. Sobel brutally critiqued his own art on this mini at the link above, and he's pretty much spot on. The problem for me was not that he used too much photo reference (including some direct traces). The problem was that he didn't go far enough in one direction or another. That is, it would have been preferable to see a shaky but spontaneous & expressive line or go the other way and play up the story as though it was a series of photographs, emphasizing the still & stiff nature of the images. That would have been perfectly appropriate for this story, which was about images & memories, both lost and found. Instead, we got something in-between whose linework was indeed stiff and awkward.

That said, this was a cleverly designed and composed comic, especially for such an early effort. There's no question that Sobel is a fine writer, and he really went to town adding layer upon layer of metafictive aspects in this story. THE RED STILETTO is a story about one man's memories of his best friend growing up. This friend lost contact with him many years prior but had moved to get back in touch with him for reasons that were initially unclear. Much of the issue's narrative involved a reminiscence juxtaposed against the actions of the friend, some of which confirmed his beliefs and others of which belied them. The climax of the comic was a text short story that led the friend to want to reconnect, a story written by her father who had killed himself. The story was about missing motivation and ideas that haunt creators, and it seemed both autobiographical and prescient in unusual ways. The shock ending of that story and the shock ending of the mini itself mirrored each other, creating spectacularly violent endings for mysteries that could never really be resolved. It's obvious that Sobel already has a firm grasp on visual storytelling, and that it will simply be a matter of repetition and refinement. I'm eager to see what he publishes next.

MAXIMUM SUPEREXCITEMENT #2, by Robin Bougie & Maxine Frank. This is a sharply drawn bit of filth and fluff. Bougie is best known for his Cinema Sewer magazine, celebrating the sleaziest examples of grindhouse films and culture. He's also a fine cartoonist who isn't afraid to go to some pretty extreme places with regard to sex, violence, gore and gross-outs. This comic is a collaboration with Frank, one where the two artists traded off panels and sometimes collaborated within the same panel. The results are amazingly seamless, which no doubt reflects their similar sensibilities. The story is a mishmash of postapocalyptic shenanigans, rapacious sex slaves, maggot-inducing viruses and the destruction of all human knowledge. There's gunplay, S&M, worms exploding out of assorted body parts and an (anti-) heroine dressed smartly in an old WAC uniform. This is gleeful gross-out, not really meant to shock or disturb, but rather to point out "Hey, isn't this exploding head awesome?" This comic is a fun drawing exercise by the artists--no more, no less. Its potential audience would seem to be a rather self-selecting one.

APARTMENT 307, by Josh Blair, Pete Borrebach & Nick Marino, and Noah Van Sciver. This little mini-anthology hit upon a coincidence of circumstance shared by the three artists: they all lived in apartment 307 in each of the different cities they inhabited. Both Blair and Van Sciver complain about going up three flights of stairs. I liked Blair's visual treatment of this, using numbers and crossed lines to break up what is otherwise a mundane story. He's obviously not a very confident draftsman at this point, but he worked his way around that cleverly. Van Sciver engaged in a bit of navel-gazing here as he reflected on the ways in which his social anxiety has made him want to retreat to his room (and his stuff) more and more. Van Sciver's self-caricature is fascinatingly ugly, a point that he not only plays up in this story, but spreads to his art in general. There's a sloppy ugliness to his line that's starting to grow on me. I don't think he's really found his voice yet as an artist, but it's clear he's determined to do so. The Borrebach/Marino piece breaks up the introspection with a tale of why it's really best not to get involved in other people's business in Miami. It's a funny concept, but Marino's art manages to be both crude and drab.

MINIMALIST COMICS COLLECTIVE, by Agnes Anger, C. Che' Salazar and Abel Jimenez. This is the sort of comic that will draw a strong reaction from its audience, be it positive or negative. It's a conceptual exercise in comics narrative storytelling, with each of the three involved artists using a different technique. Jimenez crafts comics using only the most basic of geometric shapes as his characters, and they spout dialogue as though they were drawn in a perfectly naturalistic style. His are actually the most conventional comics in this anthology. Salazar uses text and panel-to-panel transitions to tell stories, a slightly more abstracted approach but still fairly straightforward. For Salazar, the iconography of the text becomes the image; words bend, dip and wrap around each other in a way that gives the reader information at both levels. Anger repurposes photographs to act either as word balloons or actual captions. Jimenez's comics are sort of like Matt Feazell's stick-figure comics taken to their logical end.

It's important to note that the stories in this comic aren't abstract. Indeed, with the exception of Anger's image-only comics, the storytelling is rather easy to follow. The grid on each page is standard, the Jimenez's drawings are obviously made with a simple computer program, and the lettering is also done by computer. The whole thing should be entirely dull to look at, and yet I found to be a compelling read. That was especially true in the stories where the three artists collaborated and combined their techniques. "A Typical Comics Story" combines Salazar's "expressive text" to create the characters and Anger's appropriated (but public domain) photographic images to create word ballons: text and image are cleverly inverted to tell a story that itself is a commentary on genre stories.

I think this comic succeeds because the artists made a deliberate conceptual choice to work using these techniques. It owes as much to dada artist Marcel Duchamp as it does any cartoonist. Anger in particular appropriates images with a particular (often charged) meaning and recontextualizes them in a manner similar to Duchamp and his ready-mades. In "Blink And You'll Miss It", horrific images literally blur into each other when the page is held up to the light; the formal properties of both page and image are integral to seeing these images in a new way.

Jimenez is much more playful, as in "Great Panels in Comic Book History", where he reduces motion and emotion from famous comics and breaks them down to circles and rectangles. The cascading rectangles depicting R.Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'" is particularly clever, evoking a different Duchamp work: "Nude Descending A Staircase".

Duchamp's work crossed a number of media, making it hard to ultimately classify as a particular sort of art or literature. His art was both funny and whip-smart, thinking through concepts and laying them bare in ways other artists never considered. It should be noted, however, that once he told a "joke", he rarely lingered on the same sort of material for long. Along those same lines, I'll be curious how long the thinkers from the MCC will be content to work using these same techniques. One can only tell the same joke so many times, even when it's deadly serious, before the punchline gets stale. That said, this comic was an enormously clever dissection of the relationship between the formal qualities of comics art and craft. Those who conflate the craft of drawing with the art of creating comics will no doubt be enraged by this comic, but its sheer audacity as both an act of provocation and meditation made me chuckle throughout. Hopefully we'll soon get to see what the MCC has in mind for a second transmission.

Mini-Comics Round-Up: MariNaomi, Gonzalez, Jackson, Moorman, Cardini, Melaina

Rob reviews autobio confessional minis by MariNaomi and Melaina; odd genre takes by William Cardini and Ed Choy Moorman; underground-flavored minis by Jenny Gonzalez; and a lyrical take on water by Martine Workman.



ESTRUS #7, by MariNaomi. The Bay area artist specializes in confessional stories from her love life, but after the rather dramatic account that capped her previous issue, MariNaomi decided to fill this issue up with bits and pieces from various sources. Some are illustrations for various zines and anthologies, the most notable of which was a panel that was reproduced on well-known USA Today writer Whitney Matheson's blog. MariNaomi repurposed one of those assignments to hilarious effect here, adding captions to illustrations designed to make children less afraid of needles. Photos of cheerful children with captions like "I sure hope there aren't any bubbles in that syringe, or you're gonna die!" reveal her dark sense of humor.

While there was a fictional story in this issue, MariNaomi's strength is autobiography. "In Case Of Emergency" saw her ponder the notion of having to save everyone's life on a subway car in case of terrorist attack, and the ways in which she'd fall short. "Not My Celebrity Story" is a funny anecdote about her ex flitting from new crush to new crush and getting burned when his new girl turns out to be a porn star lying about her identity and intentions. The most revealing piece was "Euphemisms = Love", a one-page strip where her lover makes MariNaomi feel better about drinking too much with a well-placed euphemism. What's most interesting about this comic is the number of visual styles she uses, depending on the assignment. some are more naturalistic, others are steeped in the deep blacks that are her usual trademark, others are more spontaneous and cruder, while others still are deliberately cartoony. Her brand of wit seems to do best with a non-naturalistic style; there's something about her authorial voice that seems to "sound" best with a more fluid, cartoony style. There's a fluidity to her narrative style to begin with, so it only makes sense that her line should match it.



DATER'S DOZEN, by Melaina. Melaina lists MariNaomi as her comics mentor, and it showed in this mini about the artist dating different men. The kicker here was that it was a deliberate, chronological pursuit after a difficult break-up, and the dates came from the internet or were blind dates set up by friends. In terms of a visual approach, Melaina's work is very much unlike MariNaomi's in that she doesn't do much in terms of spotting blacks. Instead, she presents a flatter page and relies solely on her minimalist but expressive linework to tell her story.

Overall, this was a charming, breezy read. Melaina is a nurse by profession, and that sort of no-nonsense attitude found in nurses surfaced in the way she approached her dates. At the same time, she found ways of expressing her vulnerability and pain in a manner that was forthright and honest but not whiny or self-pitying. Regarding her art, she displayed a lot of cleverness in solving certain storytelling problems, with her panel composition in particular being fun to look at. In terms of her figure drawing, her self-caricature is distinctive & expressive as well as being a funny drawing. Her biggest weakness as an artist is in how she presents gesture and character interaction. There's a real stiffness there that could be aided by spotting blacks to establish mood, which would force the eye to see how characters are reacting to each other more clearly. What I liked most of all about this mini was that it was a warts 'n all examination of her dates and relationships, one in which she took herself to task as much as she did those men who didn't quite measure up. The power of her comics personification's personality combined with her ability to cleverly lay out a story will no doubt continue to lead her to create some interesting work.



TOO NEGATIVE #9-11, by Jenny Gonzalez. Gonzalez is a long-time mainstay of the minicomics world, working roughly in the tradition of underground comics. Gonzalez employs a cute, cartoony style to depict a "halfway house in hell". These minis seems to be fairly crude reproductions of strips originally printed elsewhere, and the copies don't do her work any favors in the way they chop of border edges and even dialogue at times. That's unfortunate, because her rubbery figures, over-the-top sense of humor and thinly-veiled fictive self all pack a powerful punch. While the series is ostensibly about a group of characters living in hell and either recovering or helping to treat others, it's mostly about the experience of living through mental illness. More to the point, it's about the experience of living through institutional treatment for mental illness.

As such, the Devil Dahlia character is obviously a liberating fictive construct, both for venting on this harrowing set of experiences and also as a powerful id-figure. She's quite matter-of-fact about her grip on reality, never preventing it from living her life freely and to the max. She's in a band, she freely expresses her libido, and she reaches out to others for friendships and connections. Gonzalez freely experiments with formats and story goals in these minis. One issue is nothing but dark four-panel gags. Another issue features an extended story of how Devil Dahlia wound up in an institution. Both of these issue flattered her strengths for the most part. Gonzalez's comics were less compelling when she was venting against crummy bands, whiny hipster cartoonists and other more ephemeral complaints. These tended to feel a bit dull and flat in comparison to those strips that flexed a sharper, darker sense of humor or depicted a nightmarish experience with wit and more than a little detachment. Her comics certainly deserve an extensive repackaging that flatters her expressive line to a much greater extent.



8 STORIES, by Rob Jackson. Rob Jackson is an artist with a pleasingly loopy sense of humor whose art is rapidly starting to catch up with his ambitions. His use of grey and black in depicting a city that fell in love with its own reflection nicely established the story's mood, and the way he both anthropomorphized the city and displayed the collateral damage it inflicted on its people was quite clever. Jackson's cruder stories tended to be more autobiographical, though these stories all had humorous content. "Rob Jackson's Rules of Life #6" was a brief bit of deadpan silliness that subverted its own initial conceit at the end. "Blood and White Water" amusingly told the story of his one and only attempt at white-water rafting, a story that played up his own ineptitude and humiliation to great effect. "Show Me Your Insect Hooves" was about his experience going to see his favorite band, drawn more-or-less on site. While I appreciated the spontaneity of this piece, it was so rough that it either needed to be left in the sketchbook or else redrawn.

My favorite two pieces in this comic couldn't be any more different. "My Nearest Mountain" finds him experimenting with what looks like a brush to tell a more serious story about a particular day trip. His line here is thicker and more expressive and gives the reader a real sense of the terrain. "Math-Ro-Mancer" is the sort of absurd, violent genre comic that Jackson does so well. It begins as a fantasy tale as two children seek out the Math-ro-mancer to help them multiply fractions, and the title character teaches them with the gruesome use of a corpse that induces them to vomit. Pulling back, we see that this is an educational TV show and our hero pensively wishes that he could do math without terrifying children. Jackson takes a ridiculous premise and then subverts it in the weirdest way possible. About the only thing I could have wished for in this story was a line that was either more deadpan or funnier looking. Jackson's line here falls short of the situation he creates. It serves well enough to understand the joke, but what separates Jackson from being a great humorist is that he doesn't yet have a fine enough control over his line to go the extra mile to sell his joke. Given his improvement in composing a page, he will likely soon reach a point where his line catches up to his ambition.



DARK CLOUD COMIN', by Ed Choy Moorman. This mini feels strongly influenced by ED THE HAPPY CLOWN-era Chester Brown in terms of its line, the ambiguity of its narrative and its bleak view of humanity. More specifically in terms of the art, the way Moorman uses oversized heads and straightforwardly engulfs his character in a world of nightmare logic also recalls Brown. There are a number of striking images in this comic: the mute giant who must swallow children to live and in turn (supposedly) protect a value; the way he feels haunted by this proposition and scrawls his tortured confessions on the side of a mountain; the girl/boy child Elona stopping the giant's heart from the inside; the final page where we see the interaction between Elona, a baby tadpole and the wind whistling through a tree's long branches.

This story feels like a splinter from a longer epic, pared down to a few important emotional beats. While the character of Elona and the giant maintain a certain delightful mysteriousness, the other principals are all frustratingly bland: the deceptive priest, the helpful newfound friend, the earnest but impotent mother. It felt like Moorman either gave the reader either too much information or not enough, and I am actually leaning toward the former. Moorman might have been better served removing a few pages of exposition in favor of forcing the reader to work harder to engage the many striking images in this comic. Still, it's obvious that Moorman is bursting with ideas, and each successive comic of his I read is better than the last. He's one of many comics in Minnesota who are making a name for themselves.



FROGHEAD HANGOVER, by William Cardini. Despite this comic's absurd title, it is absolutely an accurate description of its contents. Reminiscent of somewhere between Mat Brinkman and Sam Gaskin, Cardini tells a story of a video-game playing humanoid who wakes up from a bad hangover to find that a large froghead has somehow wound up in his house. It's 12-pages of well-designed silliness and a vibratory line that winds up teaching us not to play Dr. Mario with mysterious shamen, lest one find oneself at the receiving end of a powerful magic spell. Cardini doesn't bother with set-ups, explanations or other extraneous details to get to his eventual punchline; once reached, the story's over. His line is so appealing (yet idiosyncratic) to my eye that every page is a pleasure to look at. Unlike a number of artists influenced by Fort Thunder & Paper Rad, there's a great deal of clarity and confidence in his line. I could easily imagine a collection of a number of stories like this one making an impact in the world of comics.



WATER AND FALL, by Martine Workman. This is a charming series of drawings that loosely work together to form a narrative of sorts about water. Mostly, it's about water spraying people in weird and unexpected ways. At times, it acts as comics-as-poetry, creating a certain rhythm of images on the page to get across the visceral sensation of floating and/or being splashed. I particularly liked the way that Workman diligently stippled drops of water while crafting figures that were small blobs in the face of nature. This comic is a beautiful trifle; it doesn't aspire to deliver a powerful emotional statement but rather simply creates an atmosphere and details a singular and similar set of experiences. It fits quite nice into the overall aesthetic of comics & zines published by Little Otsu.

More From CCS: Dan Archer, Colleen Frakes, Jose-Luis Olivares, Jeremiah Piersol

Rob reviews some recent releases from some CCS grads and alumni. Included are WOMAN KING by Colleen Frakes, ARCHCOMIX #1 by Dan Archer, END OF EROS & POLITE FICTION #1 by Jose-Luis Olivares and THE MARVYNS: PROPER DECEPTION, by Jeremiah Piersol.

Let's look at some recent work by some graduating students and an alumnus of the Center For Cartoon Studies (CCS). The four projects reviewed couldn't be any more different from each other. Dan Archer's comic continues along the lines of the sort of polemics one might see in WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED. Jose-Luis Olivares' comics fall very much into the "mark-making" school of comics, with thick blotchy lines carrying the narrative almost exclusively. Colleen Frakes continues with her modern myth-making rooted in sex & identity, while Jeremiah Piersol pens a wild tale that owes a great deal to Gilbert Hernandez in its willingness to break boundaries as well as some of its visual flourishes.




WOMAN KING, by Colleen Frakes. Frakes' work reminds me a bit of Eleanor Davis in the way she works in myth and allegory, putting a modern spin on it. WOMAN KING is the final product of a story that's appeared in various stages in anthologies and minis, about a very young girl who is named "king" of the bears, who take up arms against their human enemies. Like Davis, there's a sensitivity in her line that borders on fragility, informing the actions and gestures of her characters. Earlier versions of the story felt overrendered, but the final output has a simplicity and delicacy to its line that put total trust in her own character designs and their ability to convey emotional information.

The delicacy of Frakes' line is usually juxtaposed against a certain savagery of subject matter. In a Frakes comic, someone is usually going to get killed or maimed, and I've always admired the rather matter-of-fact way this is delivered. Old fairy tales were rife with all sorts of mayhem (and sometimes even for instructive purposes), and Frakes recreates that feeling in her comic. The structure of this comic is one of its strengths, as we follow the girl from age 3 to 5 to 7 to 9 and so on, up to age 18. The most distinctive contrast in the book is the innocence of the girl with the ferocity of the bears, who are seeking bloody vengeance on all humans for taking their land. The book brings up questions of the difference between justice and revenge. The child is quietly miraculous, bringing down sheep from her dreams, only to look on horrified as the starving bears feast on them.



At a certain point, the bears' vengeance turns bloodier and bloodier, eclipsing the girls' ability to understand her role. For the bear leader, she's a sort of symbol or token, a way to weaken their enemies in a talismanic fashion. When the leader finally tires of war and plans to marry the girl off to a human king, he's not cognizant of the metamorphosis the girl has made: for all intents and purposes, she considers herself a bear, one of "us" and not "them". This transformation became complete after the girl met a human boy and was then inadvertently betrayed by him, completing the circuit of a cycle of violence. Frakes deliberately quotes back key dialogue and symbolic actions toward the end of the book, emphasizing the cyclical nature of revenge and how it feeds on itself, exploiting the innocent. Frakes is careful not to be heavy-handed in delivering this message, allowing the reader to tease it out (with the exception of the last image in the book, which spells it out just a bit). Frakes' work is all about how we perceive and react to the Other, set against a pleasant line that invites the reader to deeply and fully immerse themselves in the story.

ARCHCOMIX #1, by Dan Archer. With a silkscreened cover image of Richard Nixon, one could instantly tell that this was going to be an attack comic. I've always been made somewhat uneasy by comics that were both directly political and prescriptive, since it's easy for such work to fall into propaganda. Art falls by the wayside in such efforts, serving only to advance a particular rhetorical position. Such comics also tend to stop trying to tell a story and fall into lecture bullet points. I thought this was true at times in Archer's WHAT A WHOPPER, which is what made this collection of short stories such a welcome departure.

Certainly, Archer's political edge is still in full force. "Lunch On K Street" is a lecture about how lobbying is done disguised as a human interest story, and that disguise works quite nicely. "Global Meltdown" is a bit of a fantasy revenge story, but it's also a bluntly accurate comparison of Wall Street predators as deer caught in the headlights. One reason why this comic works well is that Archer varies his tone, writing glowingly positive accounts of a woman who works on a cruelty-free farm and a group of amusing gay marriage protesters. His best short strips are those where a story is laid out but the reader is given more leeway to make their own judgments. "Take Me Out To The Gun Show" is an incisive but playful bit of reportage that allows its targets to hang themselves, while "Beggars" is a memorable anecdote about how a micro-trend of beggars on a bridge (one with horrible gangrene) hints at larger problems.

The centerpiece of the issue is the first part of "The First 9/11", about the US government's direct hand in an infamous military coup in Chile in 1970. Being of Chilean descent, I was already well aware of many of the facts of this incident, yet Archer created a compelling and chilling narrative about the hows and whys of the coup. The source documents he used to spin this story were equally fascinating. What is hinted at but not fleshed out in this part of the story was the way Chile wound up as a lab for the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton Friedman, and how this eventually nearly ruined the nation.

As an artist, Archer needs to play to his strengths, which sometimes contrasts with his storytelling aims. He's not a very strong naturalistic artist, leading to some stiff figures and clumsily-designed characters. When he relaxes and allows himself to work in a slightly cartoonier style, his pages come alive. I'm not saying he needs to marry his political interests with a bigfoot style, but rather ensure that his visuals aren't working against his story. A little exaggeration and a little playfulness with his character design will relax a reader, allowing them to more fully absorb what the artist is trying to say. That's another reason his Chile strip was so effective: he quickly abandoned trying to recreate realistic renditions of Nixon and Henry Kissinger and instead created simpler caricatures that readers could easily identify and move on from. As he continues to loosen up his line, his political comics will only have a much greater impact. I hope that he continues to develop the Chile story, expand it, and redraw certain sections; it could be a potentially fascinating, explosive statement.



END OF EROS and POLITE FICTION #1, by Jose-Luis Olivares. While Olivares is certainly interested in narrative, he's also interested in the visceral qualities of each panel he's drawing. The texture of line, the visual effect of tools like zip-a-tone and the way blacks are spotted are as much on his mind as the story he's telling. This gives his stories a certain raw power and influences his subject matter. In particular, he's fascinated with the way eschatology converges into creation myth. In END OF EROS, a couple engaging in sex literally become physically merged at the same time this happens to millions of others. Taking this to its logical outcome, you have a race of huge, misshapen creates with diffuse and now-primitive wills lumbering about the world. Olivares goes crazy with his monstrous character designs, gleefully approaching this sort of Gnostic idea with a smudgy line and dialogue that devolves into primitive symbology. This is a sort of shaggy dog of a comic, as he stretches and stretches the idea out for a number of pages, but the climax is still reasonably satisfying.



POLITE FICTION starts with "Creation Myth", a story that begins with what we think is a retelling of Adam & Eve but is really about how vowels were created. It's a bit of a visual lark, cleverly designed. The more interesting stories were "Buh", a series of strips about a primitive man engaging in silent adventures and discovering things like art and magic; and "Munster", another wordless tale about a creature kept in a basement who gets out. The former is Olivares' best cartooning: cleverly designed characters, clarity in line despite its chunkiness, and funny punchlines (and sometimes not-quite-punchlines). I don't think he quite had the chops to pull off the desired effect in the latter story, as the creature emerged into a huge, ornate church and was then ordered back downstairs by the hand of god. There's enough information given to have the joke make sense, but with perhaps a lesser level of impact if we had seen something a bit more naturalistically rendered. That said, Olivares is certainly an artist who will benefit from being highly prolific. There's no question that he's imaginative and has an interesting point of view; the rest will start to coalesce as he keeps writing. He's actually only finished his first year at CCS, so we'll see what he builds up to next year.


THE MARVYNS: PROPER DECEPTION, by Jeremiah Piersol. This comic felt like a weird, alternate-world version of Gilbert Hernandez's LOVE & ROCKETS X. Set in Los Angeles, that comic was the intersection of racial tension, punk rock, the sex lives of teens, the status of being a foreigner in the US and much more. It had a huge, sprawling cast and was filled with ambiguity. THE MARVYNS takes a number of cues from Beto. First, the cast is similarly huge and quirkily memorable. Second, it concerns itself with what lies beneath the surface of polite society. Third, Piersol owes a lot to Beto's character design and rubbery line. Piersol's line is not graceful or flowing, but has a sort of fascinating ugliness to it, much like the characters in Hernandez's world. In THE MARYVNS, even the good-looking characters are ugly.

The main difference between the artists is that Piersol is less interested in contocting a balanced stew of fleshed-out characters than he is in cooking up an over-the-top social satire. This is a story in the tradition of Roger Corman: sex as a form of power relation and exploitation, freely mixed in with violence, degradation, social humiliation and every other soap opera trope in the book. When one of the main characters in the vast ensemble explains away being late to work by making up a story about her daughter trying to kill herself, one gets the sense that there are no limits here. Piersol introduces each character vignette with a fake ad that promises total transformation by way of material consumption (like a clothing ad whose tagline reads "Let's start a revolution").

Another influence here is the story (and later film) Short Cuts, one where a number of characters live out there lives and cross over briefly (and sometimes significantly) with other characters. But in THE MARVYNS, every character's story is an operatic one. So we are introduced to a man who was rejected for a loan at a bank one of the characters worked at, promising to blow himself and the bank up with dynamite strapped to his body. We meet a woman who not only has a crush on the woman from earlier in the story, we find out she's a practicing witch casting a spell to capture her heart.

It's a larger-than-life comic, and this 64-page promo version was even printed big: 9" x 12". Every vignette has a crazy twist or weird development that covers as many aspects of the seedy underside of polite society as possible. Subtle is not what Piersol's going for here, but he makes going big and loud work for him. At the moment, he doesn't quite have the chops to create as many varied character designs as he'd like; there's a certain sameness to some of the characters in the book. While his characters have great facial expressions, their body language is sometimes a bit awkward and stiff. This book really needs to flow from story to story to create that sweeping, soap opera feel, and the stiffness of some characters hinders that flow (that's especially true of the male characters in the book). One can forgive this because of the level of his ambition and cleverness, but I do wonder if the finished version of this story will be published as is or if any pages will be redrawn. Piersol is another one of those CCS grads who are utterly devoted to comics and have just finished an intense experience that has made them better cartoonists because it afforded them the time and opportunity to do nothing but draw and write. As long as he continues to refine his style and loosen up just a bit, he has the potential to do some very eye-catching and provocative stories.