Thirty One Days Of CCS #25: Kevin Uehlein, Pat Barrett, DW

Pigeon Man #2 and #4, by Pat O'Brien, Zack Poitras (writers) and Pat Barrett. Barrett drew this visceral, disgusting and over-the-top satire of politics, capitalism and the culture that surrounds them. If anyone was up to the job of drawing the adventures of a superhero who combined the aspects of pigeon and man in the most revolting ways possible, it's Barrett. His humor comics have always had that quality of being game for anything, and that's certainly true here. I unfortunately was only able to read the 2nd and 4th issues of the comic, so I can't comment too much on the story. The basics are that the mayor of New York City is kidnapping orphans and grinding them into sausage, and only Pigeon Man and his friend the Commissioner of the police can stop him. Hilariously, the mayor uses the New York Rangers hockey team as his stooges. Pigeon Man himself is a disgusting character, frequently lapsing into heavy drug and alcohol-fueled binges as he does things like go down on a bat. Tucker Carlson gets seduced, various rescue missions are attempted, horrific sausage is consumed, and Pigeon Man's prison-bound daughter wreaks havoc. The comic is a bit of a grind sometimes because it never lets up, making it something of a breathless experience. Still, Barrett's saturated use of color and ability to mix a cartoonish style with realism make the gags work.

Kevin Uehlein's solo project was the immense minicomic Quit Rasslin' Me!, an epic deconstruction and parody of the WWE and pro wrestling in general. Featuring his anthropomorphic characters Disgusting Duck and Dumbass Dog, those two go from "back alley wrestling" to the WWE when the corporation was beset by steroid scandals, sexual harassment claims and being increasingly out of touch with the fans. As ludicrous as the action in this comic is (and it goes way over the top), virtually everything in it is based on something that actually happened. The Duck is chosen to be the new, hot babyface and even gets tabbed as the new champ, since he's cheaper than maintaining the older, Hulk Hogan-like mainstay. The Dog is chosen to be a heel who can reliably take chair shots to the head and get sent through tables, no matter the damage to his body. There's turn after turn here, as an arrogant Duck gets taken down by an Undertaker-like version of the Dog, who then decides to become a born-again Christian. This is a funny, silly comic with appealing, rubbery art that is entertaining in its own right in addition to being a dead-on satire of the WWE's greed and questionable ethics.

KJC 4 is Uehlein's sketchbook collaboration zine, done with the artist DW as well as James Stanton and Dakota McFadzean. Uehlein's bigfoot wackiness and DW's intense mark-making and pattern designs make for a compelling mix, and they do all sorts of things to create a variety of visual experiences. For example, there are pages that are transparencies, laid over a paper page. The drawings on the transparency interact with the drawings on the page in interesting ways, deliberately adding new details and contexts for them. In the middle of the comic, there's a stapled-in micro mini that features Uehlein-designed characters talking, only their word balloons contain DW's patterned drawings that feature strange animals and fossils in the middle. There are also occasional comic strips with interjections from DW that contribute to the dense glee of this project.

Compulse 10 and an untitled mini from DW round out the comics here. Compulse is Uehlein's micro-mini sketchbook project, and this edition focuses on a female character with various hairstyles in profile. Uehlein really has a knack for drawing angry cartoon degenerates. DW's zine has more of his current interest: circular designs that resemble mandalas, containing a bird, a lizard or some other creature in its center. He alternates between black & white and color, with the former looking bolder and the latter more visually appealing. They almost look like cave drawings or some kind of ancient image that's been long buried.

Thirty Days of CCS #19: Ben Horak & Pat Barrett

Ben Horak and Pat Barrett, two masters of nasty satire, teamed up for Thanks For The Sour Persimmons, Cousin (an all-time great reference to the classic cartoon, Duck Amuck). They lay on the visceral gristle in a story about a blobby angel (a go-to special for Barrett) who isn't very good at his job: instilling a sense of unity in a humanity that absolutely hates itself. The opening scene, on a crowded bus where everyone is yelling and acting hatefully, stops on a dime when the angel appears to work his magic. When the results go horribly awry, he goes back to his wife in a sitcom-derived scene (complete with laugh track and background "awwws") that demonstrates how sometimes following your dream perhaps isn't the best idea. The lurid pinks and purples are almost nauseating on the page, and that's the whole idea.

Horak's work has gone to another level of hilarious and brutal in its examination of human nature in his Grump Toast #5. The running story "Them Are Bad" features a situation where a person overreacts to an insult by killing the offending party, only for the story to reveal that this was an alien simulator designed to train potential secret agents on how best to fit in and infiltrate society for future conquest. Horak doesn't spare the detail in making the aliens grotesque while doubling down on the humor of what turned from an over-the-top response to a slight to essentially a bit of office humor. There's a second strip that involves the bad employee simply laughing at someone offensive dying and getting reprimanded, and the final strip puts a final, pathetic spin on the whole enterprise that reveals what's really going on.

"Never Mention Rope To A Hangman" sees Horak going silent, with images filling up thought balloons instead of words. It's about a pizza delivery man who thinks he's getting shorted on a tip, only to find he got a hundred dollar bill. When he starts to feel guilty about getting it and fantasizes that it might make the grumpy, ugly old man who gave it to him wind up in poverty, he turns around, goes back to the house, walks in and puts the money on a table. Then he makes a jaw-droppingly horrifying and hilarious discovery about the man he just delivered the pizza to, which then leads to a series of events far worse than anything he could have imagined. This is Horak doing what he does best--using the tools of his narratives to set up the reader in how things are flowing, then throwing in an over-the-top twist, and then returning to those tools with a new spin on how to interpret them.

"If It Wasn't For The Nights" almost defies description, as it's about a would-be hipster using highly dated "jazz" lingo in order to try to get women to pay attention to him at a night club. When every attempt fizzles, he winds up in a nightclub for cats (daddio!), a cute gag that Horak then takes to yet another visceral extreme when he winds up at the doctor later on. When the jaw-dropping revelation is made, Horak once again uses a gesture from earlier in the story as a callback meant to signal that everything was cool, only at the end of this story it was a pathetic attempt at justifying behavior beyond the pale.

At heart, Horak is a simple gag man. What sets him apart is the loving amount of labor he puts into each drawing in order to set up the gag, along with his razor-sharp understanding of using long form improv instincts to build up to the eventual punchline. He favors visceral, violent and revolting humor built on rock-solid comedic constructs, where no matter how absurd or disgusting the gag, the joke is so beautifully told that one must appreciate it. Take "Back In The Day...", which is essentially an extended beer ad for something called "Rat Brew", which contained "cheap but strong alcohol as well as a live, vicious rat fighting to free itself from its cold aluminum prison". That premise is so nonsensical as to defy description, not to mention good taste, yet Horak's genius in generating an ad copy buzz phrase in "The bite's the best part" gets at the core of what advertising does: sell people on the idea that being bitten by a vicious rat is the stuff memories are made of.

Another pure (if dark) gag strip is "Caroline". Here, Horak distracts the reader with the end of a sex scene with a chatty guy and a silent woman. Little by little, the details of how the encounter came to be are revealed, and the end of the story is a masterful execution (in all senses of the word) of distracting the reader through visceral visual details (not just assorted fluids, but the way in which the bed stand is cross-hatched draws in the eye) and babbling dialogue until the last crucial bit of data is revealed before the final punchline.

The book's epic story is "This Will Be Our Year", and it follows the structure of similar Horak stories from earlier issues. An abusive, unpleasant loser is physically beaten by his wife and infant son and forced to clean the house and throw out the garbage before he runs away. (The single page of pro wrestling moves the baby executes on his dad are hilarious and meticulously drawn.) From there, the man is beaten up, laughed up and begins starving before he goes to a fast food restaurant. Unable to pay for the food, he gets a job and is subjected to an array of disgusting humiliations before he's fired and thrown into the street. At this point in the story, Horak is just getting warmed up, as he stumbles upon a Scientology-type center and goes through a battery of tests before he's "approved". What he's approved for is sacrifice by a demonic cult that takes him to the woods and rips out his heart. What follows appears to be that character's redemption run, as he becomes an all-powerful being that wreaks havoc and revenge upon the city and his old job before he returns to his wife and son. Horak ends the strip with a gag that is predictable only in the shaggy dog sense, but it's perfectly executed. Along the way, there's mass destruction, lots of oozing, skeletons, people being burned, etc. What I like most about Horak, whose sense of humor is certainly distinct and certainly not for all tastes, is his absolute commitment to his craft, both in terms of fastidious attention to detail in his linework as well as the structure and set-up of each gag.

Thirty Days of CCS #15: Steve Seck, Pat Barrett, GP Bonesteel

Steve Seck continues to hone his comedic chops in the pages of his one-man anthology, Monday Saddies. This issue features two separate stories: "Ghost Roommate" and "Locker Up!", both of which earn their humor with awful, over-the-top characters behaving badly. Seck adds weight to his pages with a lot of spotted blacks balancing the simple nature of his character design and unvaried line weights. His characters look funny, but most of the humor comes through in the dialogue. Mostly, his characters look weird, with vertical slits for eyes and angular features amid a pleasingly cluttered background. Seck's characters just seem to live in filthy settings, and "Locker Up!" makes particular use of that conceit. It's about a group of anthropomorphic objects that live in a kid's locker at school trying to make sense of their worlds. Most of the objects have devolved into highly juvenile and even senile behavior, like the "elders" that had been sitting in there for far too long. Seeing a rubber band become ecstatic upon being "raptured" by getting stuck to the kid's backpack was hilarious, as was the belligerent and foul-mouthed soda can wanting to watch dirty videos on the kid's phone. "Ghost Roommate" is a funny take-off on the ultimate form of do-nothing, slacker roommate that also mines humor from ghost mythology. Seck has really refined his line, making what could be a sloppy page easy to follow and giving his figures a pleasing, eye-catching quality. That approach in terms freshens up his slacker humor, in part because he's satirizing that kind of culture as much as he is taking advantage of it as the de facto stars of his comics.

Pat Barrett has a lush, dense illustrative style that he uses for stories that are comedic but possess a certain edge.The latest issue of his one-man anthology Oak & Linden (#6) is a micro-mini, measuring 2.25" by 4.25". The stars of the issue are his gross, goblinoid naked characters who are both representative of id-centered, scatological storytelling as well as sources of existential discussion. Of course, that existential discussion (centering around the idea of being remembered for something) winds up in a slapstick, springy fistfight, short-circuited by the object of discussion: their queen ("her flatulence"), who also happens to be the aging mother of everyone. The crudeness of these characters still gets at the heart of Barrett's point: that we are bags of phlegm, blood and shit with a biological imperative to have sex, eat and excrete. How we balance our biological imperatives against our higher selves (or rather, how we fail to do so) is at the heart of Barrett's sense of humor.

Barrett's comic How To Make Comics The Whiner's Way is a funny shot across the bow against cartoonists who constantly bitch about being cartoonists, who bemoan the lack of shortcuts, who substitute buying new gadgets for actual hard work, who use autobio comics as a crutch when they don't really have anything to say, who steal their styles wholesale from popular images, who hop on cultural memes and other easy reference points as a way of gaining readers, and who generally try to make their lives out to be worse than those undergoing actual hardship. It's all done in the style of How To Make Comics The Marvel Way, with hilariously arch "how-to" steps that flog those whom he perceives as whining their way through something that should be giving them pleasure, even if it is hard. Barrett makes a compelling case, especially as someone who went to "cartoon boot camp" at CCS, a place where artists were expected to work hard on actually drawing their comics because they loved it. This is a cleverly designed comic that should be a gut-check for every cartoonist, including Barrett himself, I would imagine.

GP Bonesteel's series Jason continues its crystallization in its second issue. Bonesteel's comics have always had a high pop-culture saturation combined with an amusingly cynical and even postmodern take on same. Jason's high-concept is irresistible: the quotidian activities of movie slasher villains. Jason from the Friday the 13th films is the series' protagonist, one that posits him as a sympathetic, lonely character in search of meaning in his life while still being a homicidal killer. Bonesteel creates a weird, heightened sense of reality where these killers all have high-profile advertising profiles that exist in real life, even as they all form a curious sort of insular and exclusive group of friends. Bonesteel plays that emotional chord in an entirely straight-ahead fashion, all while jarring the reader with hilariously over-the-top violence and murderous references. For example, the Big Brother-type program that Jason tries to sign up for is called "Tor-Mentors", designed to have slasher killers teach their trade to young kids in need. In one extended sequence, Ghost Face from the Scream movies and Freddie Krueger from the Nightmare On Elm Street films wind up arguing and have a "smoke-off", wherein each tries to kill three victims as quickly as possible. The entire comic is printed landscape, with each page featuring three panels. The figures are reduced to blank figures, with the only recognizable features being those of the killers. That simple approach works well in allowing the comic to move from comic to violent to poignant--sometimes on the same page. Bonesteel has found his groove as a creator here, though a few pages here and there appear rushed. When this project is complete, Bonesteel will have his best career work to date.

CCS Anthologies: Wings For Wheels, Stranger Knights, Irene

Stranger Knights #3, edited by Bill Volk.The latest volume in Volk's quirky, genre-oriented and comic pamphlet-formatted anthology is tighter in focus and all the better for it. Volk's own stories revolve around an institutionalized team of super-heroes called the Stranger Knights, who have their own hierarchies and politics to contend with along with threats. In "The Capsule's Promise", Volk turns around the time-worn theme that an alien crash-landing on earth might be friendly by having one of the Knights try to engage it peacefully, only to discover that when it shouts out "Kill Everything!", it means it. "It Grows Among Us" features the dense but simplistic art of Casey Bohn with Volk's story. This is an on-the-road story featuring the Search and Detrucktive going after a food-stealing thief, only to find things aren't what they seem. Bohn's heavy use of blacks and chunky line remind me a bit of the work of John G. Miller, the Scottish cartoonist. Mary Soper's linework in "Incantrix X" is crude and derivative of mainstream manga, but it also has a certain charm and energy, along with an energetic sense of humor. The most polished piece in the book is Bryan Stone's "The Orb of Shalla", a sort of cross between fantasy, sci-fi and high adventure. As a cat woman and a robot hunt for a priceless artifact in the jungle, they are pursued by a creature who actually wants the horned piglet they've picked up as a pet. Stone caps the story with a funny punchline and keeps the reader interested with clever and clear character design. Stranger Knights is lightweight work to be sure, but Volk is slowly but surely figuring out just what he wants this book to look like and feel like. There's certainly a place for smart and funny genre fiction, but it will take time to sand off some of the rougher edges of the anthology. Volk is already adding clever elements like fake ads and a more thoughtfully considered sense of design to the proceedings, as he and his collaborators are clearly dedicated to getting better in public.

Wings For Wheels, edited by Nomi Kane. This is another lightweight but enjoyable anthology with excellent production values. It's a tribute to Bruce Springsteen and his music, and the cardboard cover plus the comic with painted grooves designed to mimic a 45 are both quite clever. Todd McArthur's "A Clarence Clemons Christmas Carol" was the most inessential story in the book in part because of its nonsensical premise (a ghostly Clarence Clemons, the former sax player for the E Street Band, telling the author to spend money in the form of the Dickens story?). Much better was Josh PM Frees' "The Boss Don't Stop", which is about the experience of being carried away by music in the form of a lunatic at a karaoke bar belting out "Born To Run" despite crashing through a table and losing volume on his microphone. Jen Vaughn's "This Town" tries to connect up a younger girl's taste in music with her mother's in the form of Springsteen in a fairly obvious way. Editor Kane's take on the same idea, "Home Is Where The Boss Is", is a better attempt at getting at the idea of a cross-generational appreciation for Springsteen's form of grassroots-inspired Americana and the ways it extends and deepens into adulthood. Pat Barrett's "Growin' Up" takes on this concept from a different angle, trying to justify his own hard-youth bona fides despite growing up in Connecticut by comparing his upbringing to Springsteen's in New Jersey by trying to lump them all together as the tri-state area. This leads to dueling fantasy Springsteens that his friends bring to life, hilariously personifying the ways in which we attach ourselves to our musical heroes. Finally, Jen May's interstitial drawings were a nice touch, especially the final one which details her history with an iconic (and to her troubling) t-shirt image.

Irene, edited by Dakota McFadzean, DW and Andy Warner. This was a strong anthology mostly from recent grads and current students of CCS. That's an interesting editorial board in that each of the artists has radically different approaches to the comics page. McFadzean uses a cartoony style, DW is a mark-maker in the Fort Thunder tradition, and Warner uses a naturalistic approach. McFadzean's "Skeletons" continues his interest in the intersection between small-town life's stresses and the supernatural, especially with regard to children. This story of a friendship fraying because one family is moving away perfectly captures the ways in which kids interact (especially young boys) while creating an unnerving supernatural subtext. Warner's "Come Into My Heart" is the story of an acid trip shared by two teens, culminating in a confession disclosing abuse by the troubled boy. Warner's page and panel design break up the story nicely, but the story gains its real power by his wordless, tight close-ups on the characters at the end. While there's a crisp precision present in his character design, they're also organic enough to allow the story to flow.

DW's collaboration with cute-figure-drawing Rachel Dukes is demented, hilarious and gripping all at once. It's a spy/assassination story drawn in the style of cute, Pokemon-style critters. Levels of denial and disavowal figure into this story of a Daymaker teaming up with a vicious Kid to take down Death Dude, with the price being some baked goods. DW plays it totally straight, building up an intriguing mythology from the ground up while Duke's loose, simple style is perfectly suited for such a story. Jonathan Fine's "Endswell" and Nate Wootters' "Blueberry" bookend the anthology in more ways than one: it's the gritty reality of the boxing ring versus the horrific fantasy of a father forcing a creature on his son, as well as warmth and trust in the face of adversity vs. abject betrayal. Fine's line is clean and naturalistic, while Wootters employs a more cartoony but densely-hatched approach. They're fit nicely into the anthology's overall themes surrounding family, betrayal, and secrets. I hope to see future volumes.

New Comics from CCS Students and Alums

Let's take a look at some comics from current students and alumni of the Center for Cartoon Studies.  Some of these cartoonists have recently signed publishing deals and others are just getting started, but they all have differing techniques and approaches.

The End Of The Fucking World #3-6, by Chuck Forsman.  I was going crazy trying to figure out what artist Forsman's figures reminded me of in this series until I hit on it: Dik Browne drawing Hi and Lois.  The way Forsman draws eyes, hair and most especially big, bulbous noses reminds me of the simple but effective style used for years in that most conventional of comic strips about a family.  TEOTFW is about a makeshift and dysfunctional family of two.  As a sociopath teenage boy and his eager girlfriend leave town in his father's stolen car, they manage to create their own utopia of sorts in a lavish home left vacant by a vacationing college professor.  Those moments of beauty prove illusory when the boy finds some disturbing photos implicating the professor as a merchant of horror, but they really serve to give the boy an excuse to kill.  This changes the relationship as the couple are forced to flee, but the girl finds that she has little choice.  Each issue flips the narrative voice between the two leads, with the boy narrating issues 3 and 5 and the girl 4 and 6, and each issue fills in certain emotional gaps in the form of catch-up.  Forsman does quite a job foreshadowing the potential violence in the series and then ratcheting it up quickly, but defuses the visceral nature of the acts with this deliberately cartoony art and languid pacing.  It's the first major story that he's done without a fantastic element of any kind, but it certainly doesn't suffer for the shift away toward grim naturalism--especially since it seems to share the same sense of inevitable doom that his other comics possess.  He's hit upon a loose, sketchy style that works extremely well in telling the sort of psychologically disturbing but slightly absurd stories he seems most interested in.

Lou #1-2, by Melissa Mendes. Like Forsman and  Max de Radigues (in Moose), Mendes is crafting a minicomics series, 12 pages at a time.  Mendes is a master of depicting family dynamics.  In her Freddy stories, Mendes focuses in on a single child and the way she relates to the world as a cheerful outsider.  Lou is a story of three brothers of varying ages and their various concerns.  The youngest loves to antagonize his pre-teen older brother, while the oldest is thinking about heavy metal and smoking cigarettes.  The second issue throws in a dinner-time conflict between the younger brothers punctuated by their father's haltingly discussing maybe bringing home a puppy, to the chagrin of his wife.  There's a scene at the end where the middle child walks into his brother's room right before bedtime in order to rock out with him; it's a perfect depiction of the ways in which younger siblings seek out and absorb their older sibling's taste, as well as the way that such experiences create bonds and memories.  Mendes has a way of depicting family dynamics with warmth and sincerity but without the slightest trace of sentimentality; the ragged expressiveness of her line is a key to the success of this depiction. 

The Man Who Built Beirut and Two Stories, by Andy Warner.  These are three different exercises in storytelling for Warner, who has highly polished chops.  His character work is subtle, and it's obvious he can draw anything.  What's also clear is that he's trying to find his voice as a cartoonist.  The Man Who Built Beirut is part Joe Sacco-style reportage (his hand is heavily felt in this piece), part autobio.  Warner tries to make sense of why the death of a Lebanese plutocrat and politician could spark a new civil war that draws in any number of other countries into the conflict and finds that he can't come up with a pat answer.  I found that realization to be refreshing, actually: that an outsider has no better chance of understanding the complexity of a Middle East conflict than an expert or native.  The problem in this comic comes with Warner trying to link his own experiences to what he observes.  For example, when he talks about trying to repair a relationship via email in Beirut at the same time the politician, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated, the former feels like extraneous information.  There's no compelling reason to care about Warner's life or struggles at this point of the story, especially when he unleashes a massive Sacco-style crowd scene on the next page, pulling the reader out of Warner's story and into a different one.  Throughout the comic, he talks about his love of Lebanon and is clearly disturbed by the conflicts to seek out more information, but there's no synthesis of personal and political elements.

In Two Stories, Warner has more success with "Squirrel", a visceral and emotionally powerful story that seems to lead with the climax (his pet cat killing his pet squirrel), but it cleverly ends with Warner's later recall of that incident and the way in which he unexpectedly reacts at a public event.  It's a quiet, restrained story where his grief is a palpable thing, but Warner wisely doesn't linger on any one image or memory for too long.  "A Ghost" is the story of a childhood friendship unraveling as one boy has moved on to a private school and left his friend behind, despite his protestations about how much he hates it.  The friend left behind is naturally resentful of this, and concocts a story about a kid-seeking ghost to frighten his friend, which works.  This story's dialogue feels emotionally manipulative and predictable, as Warner simply spells things out too plainly with regard to their relationship.  Warner has a strong sense of design (I love the way that black smoke dominates the cover of The Man Who Built Beirut) and imbues his characters with a highly expressive quality, even when he's telling a story naturalistically.  One gets the sense that he's trying different narrative styles out, looking for something that fits him as a cartoonist.  Once he finds his niche, he has an interesting career ahead of him because of his skill and work ethic.

Kid Clampdown, by DW.  DW is an unusual CCS student in that he's almost entirely disinterested in narrative and is more in the tradition of Fort Thunder-style mark-making.  These minis are collections of sketchbook and blog drawings, and while there's no narrative per se, they all bear the stamp of the artist in particular and peculiar ways.  In some respects, these drawings represent his own process of cycling through and exploring his influences while putting his own stamp on them.  On some pages, one can sense the heavy hand of Ron Rege' in the intricacy of his pattern-making and the design of each page.  On other pages, one can see the raw power and ratty line of Gary Panter. On others, the absurd sense of humor and detail of Marc Bell seems to be what DW is exploring.  Throughout the comics, there's a particular set of visual motifs that repeat: a sort of psychedelic set of semi-circles that form a maze pattern.  There are moments of Sam Henderson-inspired gags, random commentary and inspired bits of lunacy.  I don't have a sense of where DW is going with all this.  These aren't purely abstract bits and it seems clear that there are germs of narrative on nearly every page, but it seems as though DW is working through style before he actually tackles a true narrative.  For the artists whose work he admires, there's virtually no division between style and story.  The question for DW will be not what style he settles on, but if he hops between styles to tell different kinds of stories.

Oak & Linden #5, by Pat Barrett.   This issue of Barrett's one-man anthology features the next two chapters of his odd serial "Petrified Girlriend", which is part relationship comic and part dystopian sci-fi/horror.  The premise finds a young couple who seem to be an unlikely match wind up in an unusual situation: she simply freezes up and petrifies.  Initially freaked out by the situation, he simply goes about his business as usual and even picks up a woman from his job and brings her back to the apartment.  (In a brutally funny bit of disrespect, he starts piling his dirty clothes on top of his petrified girlfriend.)   Meanwhile, the girlfriend wakes up in a terrible world where she's pursued by a monstrous bird and winds up being pinned under its corpse.  Those moments where she's trapped allow her to reflect on her relationship, both when she cheated on him but he stayed with her and the many times he was whiny and selfish.  Barrett doesn't spell out the relationship between the two worlds, nor does he need to at this point.  Instead, he allows the details of the relationship to spill out in a way that successfully frames the story and throws in volatile story beats that jolt the reader at the end of each chapter.  Barrett's another cartoonist with tremendous chops who doesn't let his drawing get in the way of his cartooning.  What I mean by that is his naturally eccentric character design is given free reign in this comic, but the drawings possess a vital and kinetic element as they lurch, reach and stumble across each page..  The way he draws the girlfriend's bushy eyebrows and squarish face provide her with an unconventional kind of beauty, whereas the male lead is constantly in search of a look that makes sense for him, setting on an unshaven look, horn-rimmed glasses and slightly poofy hair.  Barrett also threw in an interesting art object with this comic: a flip book that doubles as the world's thickest business card, promoting his website with a vomiting frog.

Some CCS Minis: Forsman, Barrett, Bohn, McFadzean, Vaughn

The advent of SPX has once again brought a bounty of minicomics to review. Here's a quintet of minis from assorted students and alums of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

The End of the Fucking World #1, by Chuck Forsman. One of Forsman's specialties has become the depiction of losers, creeps and the generally alienated. This mini concerns an extreme example of such a person, a nameless teen who at a very young age has an awareness of being a psychopath. That manifests in his inability to laugh or feel, leading him to extreme behavior in an effort to generate some kind of emotion or sensation. The result is a lot of dead animals, two of his fingers mangled by a garbage disposal and contemplating the murder of someone who more or less pushed her way into being his girlfriend. The issue ends with him slugging his father and stealing his car. Forsman's line continues to grow simpler and more economical as he evolves as an artist. He still adds a lot of hatching and cross-hatching in the corners of his strips, an effect that rounds the tops of his images and contributes an air of gloom and dread. He also has a knack for depicting kids with long hair with just a few lines. This is an intriguing little comic and I'm eager to see just where Forsman will take this story.


Dental Damned!!, by Pat Barrett. This is the fourth issue of Barrett's one-man anthology series, Oak & Linden, done in a completely different format. This is a 7x3" comic (landscape, essentially) done entirely in color, and it looks like it may have been drawn on a computer. The color is more than a little garish as Barrett is trying to emulate animated features moreso than comic books. Another clue in that direction (other than the Looney Toons tribute on the inside front cover) is the way his characters move: in fits, spasms and jerks. The story concerns a Barrett stand-in character on his way to the dentist to fix a tooth that's been knocked out. Along the way, he spins fanciful reasons as to how the tooth got knocked out (fencing match, orgy, dance party) until the merciless dentist makes him tell the truth. What I liked about this story is that Barrett takes standard autobio tropes (a story about a medical problem) and spins it into an exaggerated series of gags. In terms of images, the panel where one sees a huge penis juxtaposed against Barrett's cute drawing style was especially funny, as was the naturalistically-drawn close-up of the rot & gore in his mouth. This is not Barrett's best comic, in part because it doesn't flatter his most significant skills as a draftsman, but it's an interesting experiment nonetheless.


After The Future, by Casey Bohn. Some artists come into CCS without a real style to call their own. That is not the case with Bohn, who uses a simple line predicated on chunky figures and the dominant use of black to emphasize backgrounds and deemphasize figures. His line has a somewhat creepy quality, as his figures resemble something like 1950s clip art or advertising art. It lends his comic a weird, artificial quality, as though it was an object that was found instead of drawn. That sense of disorientation is an apt match for this comic about an inventor alienated from his magnate father who transfers his consciousness into robot form. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic and makes the issue feel more like an origin story than a one-off, but the quirkiness of Bohn's style is enough of a draw to make this a worthwhile reading experienced.


Ghost Rabbit, by Dakota McFadzean. McFadzean is one of the most accomplished draftsmen I've seen from CCS, and it's clear that his storytelling instincts are also well-refined. Despite his obvious skill, there's a sense of restraint in his storytelling that elevates his work above its basic visual appeal. This story features the parallel narrative of a young girl growing up in a house where her mother struggles with her own mentally decaying mother along with an anthropomorphic rabbit haunted by the titular ghost rabbit. The lingering images of memory loom large in this story and they're elegantly portrayed by McFadzean, starting with the vellum cover featuring the ghost rabbit and an intact country house that transforms into a house ravaged by age when the page is turned. McFadzean implies that the anthropomorphic rabbit's narrative is a product of the girl's imagination as she processes the repeated phone conversations her mother has with her grandmother, until she actually sees a rabbit in the wild. Initially, that real-life meeting leads to a joyous fantasy sequence (featuring two pages of the characters dancing with each other excitedly) but the ghost lingers further when she understands that the rabbit is sick and soon dies. We see that small ghost hop after her when she comes inside after covering the dead rabbit with leaves, as the girl has acquired the same sort of ghost that she imagines her mother is burdened with. This is a simple, elegant and poetic comic by a highly promising young artist.


Heavy Flow, by Jen Vaughn. This is the third in a series of Vaughn's hilarious and frank "Menstruation Station" comics, this time focusing (in minute detail) on the mechanics of the menstrual cup and why it's a superior alternative to tampons and pads. Vaughn has always been ambitious and creative in her page design and panel composition, adding elements of diagrams, instructional manuals and decorative illustrations in an effort to create a narrative around her campaign for alternative menstrual cycle care. Vaughn also makes a number of interesting side points related to gender with a helping of wit, but she doesn't soften her rhetoric while doing so. For example, she refers to tampons and pads as "yet one more tax for being a woman" and includes things like birth control and ibuprofen but also adds "unicorn figures" and "creepy hair removal products" to the list, with an asterisk that notes "some items optional". What's disappointing about this mini is that while Vaughn has a definitive and powerful voice as a writer and designer, her line simply doesn't live up to the material. Vaughn's line is in a limbo state between naturalistic and cartoony, a state not uncommon for artists who are trying to draw something very specific but simply don't have the chops to draw it effectively. Part of Vaughn's problem is that she rarely varies her line weight (except when lettering). Another problem is that her attempts at hatching and cross-hatching seem rushed and sloppy. As a result, some images create distraction instead of imparting information and telling a story. Vaughn does have a nice knack for body language and gesture, and the pages that feature two characters interacting with each other are her most successful. I get the sense that Vaughn will simply improve over time, but I hope that she one day redraws these minis when she's ready to collect them.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2011; High-Low @SPX

I will be at SPX 2011 this year. I'll be hosting a panel on 9/10 at 3:30 in the Brookside Conference Room on "Stories Of Cultural Identity". I'll quote the blurb from the website: "America’s own culture wars are only part of a global struggle with identity, as nations the world over attempt to address the challenges of assimilating multiple cultures within a stable society. Moderator Rob Clough will talk to Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Marguerite Dabaie (The Hookah Girl), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) and G. B. Tran (Vietnamerica) about comics that deal with issues of cultural identity." I'm looking forward to it.

As always, I'm happy to review whatever comics cartoonists choose to give me.

Here are ten young artists to seek out at SPX, on the basis of their potential and/or significant debuts at the show. A number of them are up for Ignatz awards. In alphabetical order:

1. Darryl Ayo. Ayo is an Ignatz nominee for Promising New Talent and is someone who has been steeped in comics and comics culture for a long time, even for a cartoonist as young as he. He's become a sharp observer of social mores as well as a mark-maker whose style has begun to coalesce.

2. Pat Barrett. This graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies is one of its best draftsmen and stylists. His Oak & Linden minicomics are well-crafted one-man anthologies, and the actual anthologies he's been a part of (Nymphonomena and Tag Team in particular) are rather good.

3. Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie is on my panel and has proven to be an interesting young voice with her Hookah Girl comics, which are autobiographical stories about growing up as a Palestinian-American. Dabaie is a fine draftsman with an eye for intricate detail.

4. Mike Dawson. Dawson is one of the more established cartoonists on this list, but his new book Troop 142 debuts at the show and it's his strongest work to date. He'll also be hosting a panel on his Ink Panthers co-host (on ten years since the publication of his first major work, Box Office Poison) that will likely be hilarious. Look for an extensive interview with him (by me) at tcj.com very soon.

5. Lisa Hanawalt. She's one of the top humorists in comics, full stop. I don't know if she'll have anything new, but now is your chance to pick up both issues of her awesomely gross and hilarious series I Want You.

6. Melissa Mendes. This CCS grad has a bright future ahead of her and will get a bit of spotlight with the release of her collected Freddy stories. Mendes' scratchy line and ear for children's dialogue make her comics a wistful pleasure.

7. L.Nichols. Nichols is a talented artist still restlessly searching for her ideal style. Her Jumbly Junkery one-woman anthology comics feature an assortment of diary strips, longer autobio stories, fiction, comics-as-poetry and other experiments. Like the other young cartoonists on this list, she has a relentless work ethic and it shows in her improvement.

8. Laura Terry. Terry's up for an Outstanding Minicomic Ignatz award for Morning Song, a comic I greatly enjoyed. Terry's work has a lyrical quality that complements her interest in formal experimentation quite snugly.

9. Matthew Thurber. Thurber is the genius behind the 1-800-MICE series, which is now done and will debut in its collected form from PictureBox. He'll be on a panel at 1pm on Saturday titled "Drawing The Grotesque".

10. Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is another hard-working cartoonist who's gotten better thanks to his willingness to publish everywhere possible. His recent mini The Death of Elijah Lovejoy will likely be one of my top 25 minis of the year. He has a book coming out with Fantagraphics next year, but until then I'd buy up copies of his one-man anthology comic book Blammo.

New CCS Minis: Barrett, De Radigues, Christensen, Forsman, Burger

Time for another round of comics by alumni and former fellows at the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS).



The Stag #1 and #2, by Andrew James Christensen. Christensen just graduated this past year and this is the first work I've seen from him. These are the first two issues of a three issue series about an old man living in a snowy, post-apocalyptic environment on an island. Christensen uses a strict four-panel grid on a square page so as to alert the reader that every panel should receive equal emphasis when the eye passes over them. The panels are large enough to absorb at a quick rate so as not to linger too long on any one image. Christensen's line is simple, skillfully creating solidly composed panels with a minimum of fuss. The story is equally simple, as the old man negotiates what is clearly a tediously familiar environment until he runs across and accidentally kills a stag with a disturbingly human face. The second issue sees him going about his usual rituals after introducing the delicacy of stag meat, but his actions have repercussions that leave him wondering what's really going on. The most interesting aspect of the comic comes when he mounts the stag's head and begins talking to it as though it were a friend. I'll be very curious to see how the issue concludes and what direction Christensen pursues as an artist. It's clear that he has a great deal of potential.



Uitke and the Lucky Penny, by Jan Martyn Burger. Burger is another recent CCS grad who is also a puppeteer. This comic is a lovely story featuring Burger's gorgeous, feathery pencils and clear but strong line. The story concerns a girl named Uitke who finds a penny that allows its bearer to receive wishes. She discovers that each wish has its price, even those that weren't requested for herself. The wishes she made for her uncles (a thriving bakery and an invention that works) turn out to be disasters, and while the spirit she first meets that understands the nature of the penny tells her that something can't be unwished, Uitke learns that she can still help. The comic has the rhythm of a fairy tale, weaving in and out of its cleverly-rendered and dreamlike images into the mundane and troublesome realities of everyday life. Burger notes that the story evolved from family-spun tales and it's these little details that stand out, like the interaction between the girl's family members, the way the house is designed, the ancient forest and the way the girl's grandfather scolded her for flying in the house. Burger allows for a lot of silent beats in this story, adding a sense of the stillness of nature to the story. That stillness winds up being the dominant aspect of this comic, as one's allegiance to the land and family turns out to be more powerful than any wish. Burger seems like a natural to do a kids' comic for the likes of Toon Books, First Second or Scholastic; the languid nature of his storytelling makes for a nice contrast to the "louder", brighter and more frenetic styles of many comics for children.



Snake Oil #6: The Ground Is Soft, by Chuck Forsman. This is Forsman's best comic to date, and that's saying something considering the impressive output of his young career. Visually, Forsman has evolved out of his Chester Brown/Sammy Harkham stylizations and has found a style that's more fragile and stripped down. There's even a touch of Charles Schulz to be found in this story about a boy named Oliver and his relationships with his mother, father and step-mother. Set in some unspecified medieval civilization, the mini consists of a number of smaller vignettes that are scrambled chronologically, though both beginning and ending are clearly delineated. What I love most about this comic is what is not said or shown. Oliver's father Arthur is a soldier who is rewarded for his service with a second wife by the priesthood. All he hopes for his son is for him to become a priest instead of a soldier, but he is incapable of showing any form of affection. Along the way, Oliver must endure a variety of baffling and humiliating formal (including riding in "the goat boat", which is exactly what it sounds like) and informal (the unwelcome advances of that second wife) rites of passage. Oliver is Forsman's best-conceived character, with his pile of unkempt hair depicted in a few scratchy lines. The nature of the painful, doomed relationship between father and son is rendered all the more tragic given that both parties wanted to please the other but could never figure out how. The time-jumping nature of this story underscores the ways in which old wounds continued to stay fresh.


Moose #1 and #2, by Max De Radigues. This is a new, continuing series from the talented Belgian with the delicate, fragile line. De Radigues specializes in stories about teenagers, and this series focuses in on a young man negotiating the harshness of a cold climate. That harshness extends to nature itself, as he runs away from an unseen threat in the first issue, vaults a fence in a snow-covered environment, only to vomit as he tries to gasp for breath. That purging seems to energize him, even as he's still in the freezing cold. The second issue finds him avoiding taking a school bus and once again braving the snow to take a shortcut. He encounters a moose who looks like he's about to stomp him but instead is spared. Of course, when he gets to school he is not spared by his daily tormentor, who chokes him and draws a dick on his forehead. These are absolutely beautiful little objects and De Radigues' trembling but clear line and angular character design is perfectly matched to the subject matter.



Oak and Linden #3, by Pat Barrett. The rest of the artists in this article are notable for their restraint and spareness of line. Barrett goes in the other direction, using thick brush strokes and lush imagery to tell his stories. In the third issue of his one-man anthology, Barrett opens up with "Hicough & Belch", an extended adventure/argument between two blocky, bulbous creatures. The simple, cartoony gray-scaled creatures form a Mutt & Jeff kind of duo against a naturalistic background, arguing about nothing less than the meaning of life. The loose, elastic nature of his characters, their casual bawdiness and their odd patois give this comic a sort of Pogo/Krazy Kat quality. The other story is the second installment of a serial called "Petrified Girlfriend", about a young woman who gets cold in her boyfriend's bed and literally stops moving. This issue flashes back to the beginning of their relationship and then flashes to the woman waking up in a dense forest. This story is all about sweep and shock, as Barrett slowly rolls back a number of reveals until he unleashes a splash-page stunner that pushes the remainder of the story. If his first story showed off his chops in building a story around a conversation, then this one illustrates how well he can tell a story with visuals alone. I'm still not exactly sure what kind of artist Barrett will eventually choose to become, but he certainly has the skills to do whatever he wants.