The Newest From Rob Jackson

Minicomics stalwart Rob Jackson has always had a knack for genre mash-ups that respect all of the storytelling tropes of each genre will altering them in frequently amusing ways. In his latest comic, Behind Thick Glass, I Saw The Stars, he starts off with a crime caper, transitions into a fantasy story and then winds up with science-fiction. The overall message is: there's always someone bigger than you, but there are ways around that. The book is structured like a set of concentric circles, radiating out from smallest to largest. That first circle is a group of thieves who strip a car and sell off its parts. They do it so they can get passage to "Big Town". That name is quite literal, as they literally travel to a city of people two or three times their size.

After a series of misadventures involving being conned by a seemingly nice Big woman, they wind up in a Gnome (that's what they're called) sweatshop. They contact the underground who helps them escape and they are told about yet another passage to yet another city, where they are accompanied by one of the bigger folk. This is where Jackson's consistently weird character design works as a plot device, because when they get to the next city, it's revealed that the gnomes and the next size up in "Business Town" are trolls--both of whom are smaller than humans and were bioengineered as a way of helping to conserve resources. The people chosen for this shrink-ray treatment were the lower classes and business classes, of course. There are further revelations and hijinx, but Jackson establishes his themes clearly here.

A constant Jackson theme is the revelation that the emperor wears no clothes. Long-ingrained societal practices are frequently just a way to keep the lower classes in line. Our leaders are petty idiots drunk on power (even if they're gods). Exploitation of the weak or ignorant keeps the machine running. The plots of his stories tend to revolve around something being a spanner in the works, that being the protagonists. What makes his stories such a delight is the way he deflates the hero's journey. It's not dreamy or glamorous. It's dirty and grimy, and the heroes themselves are frequently disreputable people, if good-hearted. That fits with Jackson's entire aesthetic, which is celebrating the appearance of that which is, rather than imagining an idealized appearance for his heroes. In other words, his heroes are just regular schmoes who simply find themselves questioning the way things are and then acting on it. In this comic, it's the courage of the thieving gnomes that sparks the foundation of a new society, hidden deep. Pointedly, Jackson implies it's the fact that gnomes, trolls and humans are choosing to live together in this new society that will give it its strength, and that segregated societies will inevitably stagnate and wither. The final image of the comic, where the new group sets about rebuilding on top of the remains of the last human city, is a fitting way of connecting past and present without using a false narrative.

Catching Up With Rob Jackson

I've been reviewing Rob Jackson's comics pretty much as long as there's been a High-Low, and his wonderfully eccentric sense of humor continues to drift into new narrative directions. His three issue series Volunteers has the look and feel of someone who has some direct knowledge of (quite literally) trainspotting, or at least the industry born out of nostalgia for old modes of transportation that include trains. Jackson starts with a simple premise: a group of highly disparate people are volunteers for an old-fashioned railroad line that provides some folks with transportation, but it's mostly a local tourist attraction, with movie nights, gourmet nights, etc. The volunteers conduct the steam trains, shoveling in coal, polishing them, repairing them, etc. One thing that was obvious in reading this series is that Jackson really enjoys drawing trains and drew them freehand but with a remarkable amount of detail.

Jackson piled a romance story and a gangster story on top of this otherwise cute and eccentric milieu, as one of the volunteers hesitantly begins seeing another, who happens to be the son of a city councilman. No matter the genre, Jackson's trademark has always been piling narrative on top of narrative in order to create interesting interactions between characters and unexpected situations. Sally and her boyfriend Tristram go through the usual ups and downs of people getting into a relationship, but they also go undercover to investigate the office of a shady businessman who threatens the existence of the train's business. The story is a funny one, but Jackson adds down notes like Tristram genuinely getting disillusioned when he realizes his father is corrupt, or how sad and lonely Old Dan's life is. At the same time, everyone gets to have a role in saving the train line, even including the obnoxious busybody Imogen, who saves the day by delaying a deal from going through simply by walking into a meeting and blabbering on. It's a wonderfully ridiculous scene and precisely the sort of thing that Jackson's so good at. There's also something incredibly British about this comic, not just in terms of vernacular but also culturally. It's all relaxed and low-stakes, as Jackson can't quite help but gently make fun of genre work while producing work that's squarely in that realm.

Japan is a travel zine from Jackson, and it was a nice excuse to craft a souvenir that's part collage, part scribbled drawings and part brushwork. I think there's some magic marker in there as well, but it's all black and white. The difference is in terms of the plastic quality of the line--big, thick and full of energy. He drew various pagodas and nature scenes in this style, trying to capture as much visual information as possible as spontaneously as possible. It works, as I got the sense of the essence of what he was trying to capture without losing any real sense of detail. Jackson talks about things he sees, food he eats and odd things he encounters along the way, great and small. There's one page where there's a copy of the Tokyo metro system, annotated by Jackson to note the things he had done at each stop and favorite bars. Japan reflects his other work in that Jackson shows a genuine curiosity about the entire world and has a knack for turning anything into a narrative that he can't quite take seriously. His crude character designs fit his world just fine as they're expressive, distinctive and functional, especially since he particularly delights in drawing ugly characters. However, Jackson is never deliberately cruel to his characters, even the villains, as everyone is more-or-less part of the joke of existence in his eyes.

Minis: Catching Up With Rob Jackson

I've been reviewing Rob Jackson's work for a decade now, and the British cartoonist's comics are just as strange and funny now as they were then. Pinning down exactly what he does is impossible, because he flips between genres effortlessly, even including quotidian slice-of-life comics. While he's happy to tell those genre stories in a straightforward way, the crude quality of his line and his sardonic wit always make whatever kind of story he's telling ridiculous on the face of it.

Take the four issues of his Flying Sausage Academy miniseries, for example. It's Jackson's mutated take on high school dramas mixed with supernatural/mutant high school genre material. The genius of the series, which begins as a punk rebel named Daryl is sent to his new school, is that it makes no attempt whatsoever to explain away the weirdness inherent in the series. His schoolyard nemesis is a kid nicknamed King Penguin, who has a bird's head. The headmaster wears wizard's robes as a way of impressing the students. One of Daryl's best friends is a skull-faced boy named "Lord of Despair, Devourer of Worlds, Jr." There are numerous student gangs like the Tough Girls, the Math Genii, the Alien Abductees, the Fashion Victims, etc--and they tend to have regular rumbles. When Dayrl is forced to be an informant for the headmaster, that's when things really take off as all sorts of weirdness emerges. Jackson's plots are remarkably tight for all of their silliness, and this is no exception as the reader slowly learns about the secrets of the school, the reasons why there are gangs, and why both giant spiders and music class play such prominent roles. Through it all, the usual high school drama is front and center, only it's far more seedy and less romantic than Harry Potter-style proceedings. Jackson's method here is to whip the reader through the story by cramming ten or eleven panels on each page. Jackson's line is deceptively simple: every panel is well-balanced, the character designs are memorably odd, and there are even moments of well-placed cross-hatching to add variety to the aesthetics of the story.

Ragnar The Cheesemonger is a classic Jackson story, in that he seems to have a special interest in stories set in the Middle Ages and a talent for emphasizing the mundane, unpleasant aspects of those times. This one's set in a small Viking village and involves the titular cheesemonger (a very funny variation on using a bad-ass name with a powerful-sounding title, like say "Conan the Barbarian") being threatened by a lunatic warrior. The entire plot revolves around Ragnar wishing he could get away from the warrior's challenge, yet won't accept the alternative--falsely apologizing for his cheese getting him sick. While the plot twists and turns in all sorts of unexpected ways, the heart of the piece is in the quotidian routines of Ragnar and the other villagers. The evil warrior is also a very funny character and brings an anarchic presence that drives the humor of the piece, as everyone else is a reasonably sensible person who's willing to talk through their problems. That style of humor is exactly the opposite of Flying Sausage Academy, where Jackson the one sensible character was the protagonist. It was up to him to navigate that chaos and ride it out. On the other hand, Ragnar had the whole of consensus polite society backing him up and he almost didn't make it past the chaos agent that affected everyone in the village.

Jackson's also been involved as an editor of various anthologies, including the third and fourth (and final) issues of Rhizome. They lean toward genre comics a bit but aren't necessarily restricted in any particular way. Issue three features a typical William Cardini story where a scribbly boulder becomes a troll and attacks what turns out to be a wizard. Cardini's comics always emphasize that these are marks on a page and play on those qualities in as visceral a manner as possible. Kyle Baddeley-Read uses his deliberately stiff figure drawing style to create a horrible scenario where everyone is happy all the time, no matter what. His other story uses grotesquely cute character design to create a horrible world where only a drug can restore that cutesy fantasy world. Both stories juxtapose that friendly line and open layouts to create remarkably grim, nihilistic worlds. Jackson's story is a departure, making it an illustrated walking guide in an icy, wintertime England. It's reminiscent of the sort of thing Oliver East does so well in exploring an environment and describing it in beautiful, poetic detail. Nick Soucek's does his own end-of-the-world piece, as what appeared at first to be a training exercise later turned out to be the real thing. It's a bit predictable in its execution and isn't especially memorable visually, either.

The final issue, #4, opens with Desmond Reed channeling Gilbert Hernandez with an awesomely gross story about a "disgusting man" named Ronald who's kidnapped by aliens. He winds up getting his owners pregnant, and the offspring are deposited on a suitably ugly world. It's Reed's level of detail that makes the strip so repulsively funny. Jackson's comic takes the rough plot of Star Wars (shepherd goes on a space adventure to save a princess with rebels) and then reverses every assumption the reader makes about who's good and who's evil. It's hilarious, even as the "good" guys turn out to be pretty brutal themselves once they've come into power. Once again, Jackson's wacky character design is the star here, as he makes most of the cast grotesque and deliberately avoids aesthetically appealing character and prop designs. Soucek's "Response" is extremely clever, as he stripped down his line even more than he did in #3 to tell a story of a guy growing up who is aware that someone is watching him at all times, and his disclosure to her that this is the case is a surprise that triggers a series of strange events. Baddeley-Read offers up more of his cute/grotesque nihilism, David Shenton's highly detailed superhero parody runs out of steam quickly, while Adam Smith's densely crude story about a robot war is funny at times but does not flow well. That said, it points out Jackson's willingness to give younger artists a showcase, something that this anthology did throughout its run.

Brit Comics: More From Rob Jackson

Since starting to review British comics in earnest recently, I've received a bunch more in the mail. That included a couple of new things from the highly prolific Rob Jackson, who does some of my favorite genre comics these days. His Slaves of the Megapode has a brilliant high concept: a detective and a forensic investigator investigating murder during the Roman Empire. Indeed, the first issue of this story is even subtitled "An Octavian Columbas Adventure", and it contains all of the elements that make a genre story effective while adding huge dollops of Jackson's quirky sense of humor.

Columbas and his assistant/slave Quinceps (hilarious name choice!) were sent to investigate a mysterious set of murders and disappearances in a remote province. The way Jackson incorporates police procedural cliches with Roman practices like tortures and crucifixions is hilarious and off-putting, especially with regard to how matter-of-factly he treats them. The duo eventually uncover a bizarre local cult, go undercover and discover that the locals worship a supernatural being called the Megapode. The first issue serves to set up the world and establish the conflict, just as Octavian is drugged. As always, the minimalist yet expressive line of Jackson is more than sufficient to establish each character and their world; he's well-settled into that style and never wastes a line.

UPDATE 8/11: I just got the second and third issues of Slaves of the Megapode, and what's interesting about it is just how closely it actually wound up hewing to police procedural shows. The comic isn't so much about the supernatural as it is about narcotics, government corruption, conspiracy and murder. At the same time, this comic kept getting funnier despite staying firmly within its own world and rules. This may be my favorite Jackson comic ever.

The second issue of RhiZome, the sci-fi anthology series Jackson co-edits with Kyle Baddeley, doesn't go as far with its interesting ideas as it could have. It's inspired by British underground comics, but there are also flashes of EC comics and Heavy Metal to be found as well. For example Baddley's comics are usually challenging and unpredictable. In RhiZome, he offered a slighly weird ditty about a bizarre chiropractor and a by-the-numbers sci-story about a group of warlike aliens traveling to find a new home. Baddeley seems to be holding back a bit in this anthology, and it doesn't help make it any more interesting. The same goes for Nick Soucek's ecology tale, about a ship going forward in time, only to find all life has been wiped out in the ocean. It's too direct and on-the-nose a story.

Tyler Stafford's "Leera" channels Moebius in another time travel story, this time mixed with post-apocalyptic settings. What's interesting is that there's another major shift in setting after the initial plot is set up, and this leads to an intriguing ending. Jackson's own "Dan Smith" serial continues to be wonderfully strange in a slow-burning manner. This issue positioned Dan (who suspects that he's working with a clone) first as a detective (following the other Dan around) and then as a potentially delusional mental patient, until he's rescued by yet another Dan. The hilarious conceit of the clones talking themselves into thinking that they don't much look alike is one of my favorite aspects of the serial. Dave Huxley's smudgy "The Company" works because of the way he creates atmosphere with his heavy pencil. That air of paranoia is thick in the way he adds so much grey in this story of a man who discovers an error so grave at his company that he's eventually hunted down, even if he doesn't understand the implications of the mistake. John Robbins' short story about a man with mental powers that mimic a computer keyboard's is typically horrific and odd, though I would have preferred to have seen it as a comic. All told, Rhizome has potential to be an interesting serial, but I'd like to see its artists cut loose and really get weird.

Brit Comics: Rob Jackson's Assorted Projects

Rob Jackson's comics generally take on a skewed or absurd version of whatever genre they happen to be occupying, be it autobio comics, fantasy, horror, suspense, etc. This is not to say that he's not concerned with plot and developing a serious story; indeed, his plots are all rock-solid and entirely respectful of genre and genre tropes. It's just that his storytelling voice is so eccentric that he can't help but make them weird and funny. These stories are not really parodies and don't go for those kinds of easy jokes. Instead, Jackson has a knack for inhabiting the setting of a genre so intently that minor details are often blown up into become huge, ridiculous plot points.

For example, in A Handful of Groats, Jackson weaves a story of a mercenary knight who comes into a village looking to make money. We eventually learn that the knight is a woman who's escaped being branded as a witch and thus keeps her helmet on at all times. There's nothing noble about this medieval world, as it's grimy, disease-ridden and generally unpleasant. The lords of the land and their enemy, a land-grubbing bishop, are all depicted as being stupid and vicious. The inn-keeper who helps the knight is a realist just trying to survive but also fully cognizant that his rulers will never stop fleecing him. From there, Jackson throws in interesting twists and turns, including another hyper-competent mercenary who opposes the protagonist, kidnapping plots, clever disguises and traps. The bishop has sharp, curved blades instead of hands, which is one of many funny details that Jackson drops into the story. Jackson rarely gives much thought to the inner lives of his protagonists except as far it will resolve the plot, yet the action is colorful enough for the reader to find out what happens to all of the characters. In his highly simplified style, he's able to get across a great deal of brutality and action in a manner that is frequently funny, thanks to this slight abstraction of ideas and images. It seems like Jackson was directly influenced by Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns like For A Fistful of Dollars, in terms of tone and the dryness of humor.

Jackson gets far wackier in his send-up of heist movies, Bradley The Tree Leaf. Available only on his blog, this is an account of a leaf that plans a heist of the Forest King's treasure from his highly secure juice factory. The leaf puts together a team that includes a safe-cracking wrapper, a blueberry, some rubber cement, a pair of mittens, etc. While the characters are all totally ridiculous, the action itself is once again  quite serious in execution, as the various stages of the heist were clearly carefully thought-out and even suspenseful. Jackson's use of color adds a lot to the story, especially since there are a lot of details dependent on making references to color. Somewhere along the way, the comic becomes a political struggle thread, as the revolting fruit are led by a blueberry named Lenin Berry, complete with a little goatee. This one feels more improvised than Jackson's other stories, which takes away from the usual tightly-plotted nature of his stories but adds to this particular effort's fanciful absurdity. In flipping from children's story to heist to political uprising, Jackson is all over the map, but the deadpan nature of his humor somehow makes it all work.

Jackson and another up-and-coming, uncategorizable artist from the UK, Kyle Baddeley-Read have started a new anthology called Rhizome, a science-fiction/fantasy themed work with some artists who make interesting use of their tropes. Max Mose's story about a group of aliens (ie, humans) going to a world run by intelligent dogs at war was both hilarious and typically thought-provoking. The hypocrisy of the people who were trying to steal the dogs' nuclear arsenal in the guise of trying to mediate their conflict was heightened when their theft was discovered and they wound up decimating them with a "hot lift-off". Mose's figure drawings are starting to become more economical even as he continues to mine EC comics narrative techniques. Jackson's "Corporation Pop" is a funny story about identity when a company hires two nearly identical looking men named Dan Smith. When one starts to have bad dreams and discovers a tiny camera in the empty next-door apartment, things start to get weird. The last panel reveals yet another Dan Smith, whose intentions seem sinister. Baddeley-Read's "Fingers" is his best-looking story to date. He loves to draw strange-looking children, and in this case, the children are toddling about, drinking something called Liquitin and living in fear of despotic robots who want to chop off their hands. This one gets its own EC-style shock ending after several pages of wonderful and awkward strangeness. Baddeley-Read's character design and screwy use of perspective make the action in this story especially weird.

Irish cartoonist John Robbins is no stranger to dark, nihilistic fantasy-related fiction. In "Swallow Me Hole", we see a woman named Aileen talking to her therapist over time about a man she knew who had a small, black hole on his stomach. It looked like it was drawn on with a marker, but something about him and her future sightings of him made her extremely anxious--especially when the hole got bigger and he started babbling about "something coming". Aileen's therapist said all the right things about setting up boundaries, stigmata, Munchausen syndrome, a desire to change circumstances and other bits of sound advice--until Aileen reveals that she now has a hole of her own. The final panel, brilliantly set up by the seemingly-bland actions of the therapist during the session, reveals that not all paranoids are wrong. Robbins' sketchy approach and use of zip-a-tone contrasts the thicker and bolder lines of the other artists in the book, but it's a perfect fit thematically. Pete Batchelor's strip about waking up in the future only to encounter a nightmare has its own twist ending, but this one's just for laughs. Jackson continues to be an exemplar in publishing genre stories that are funny without resorting to parody, and his fellow contributors snugly fit into the satirical space pioneered by EC Comics as well. The biggest difference is that the art in this book is considerably rougher, more personal and idiosyncratic.

Telling a Story: Baddeley, Brown, Jackson, Skelly

Silent V #7, by Kyle Baddeley. This trippy sci-fi/fantasy/monster series has been the equivalent of a comics MFA for Baddeley, whose draftsmanship has tightened up and whose storytelling has become much more fluid. From designing pages to understanding how to fill particular panels, Baddeley is a far more assured artist. I'm not going to attempt to connect the finale of his time and space spanning story of robots, monsters, babies, space gods, monks and cults to the rest of the series. Suffice it to say that the hero of the story makes it back to Earth after a pit stop at a space burger, only to ultimately be left out in the cold. Baddeley's crazy imagination makes him one to watch; keep an eye on his new collaboration with Rob Jackson titled LetterBomb.

California #3 and #4, by Rob Jackson. The final two chapters of Jackson's Steinbeck-meets-Lovecraft mash-up are every bit as crazy as the first two installments, yet both are held firmly in check by Jackson's mastery over plotting and fine details. After everyone disappears after his sinister preacher brother's machinations, Billy (the hero of the story) tears out of there to get some help. He's lucky in that his old boss knows some Wise Folk who set him on the path to save his family from their mysterious fate. Things get really weird after that, as a ritual turns Billy into a head floating across the dimensions until he finds his house, and he must rescue everyone while dodging a monster and an evil intelligence. Just when it seems the story has reached its end, Jackson turns the craziness up another ten notches and injects some genuine suspense into the story as Billy desperately tries to find a way to stop the evil intelligence that threatens his town. Jackson really delights in drawing wriggly, disgusting and slightly absurd monsters, and this comic is a special treat as he goes all-out in #4 in depicting the final battle. This may be his most cohesive story yet.

Memorexia, by Box Brown. This is a short, powerful comic about a man going to a clinic in order to recover some especially painful memories from a futuristic machine. All throughout the story, it's emphazed that he can feel the memory but can't actually alter it. The result is a wistful and sweet story with a twist ending that feels earned. The use of techniques like zip-a-tone, diagrams and a rendering style that's simplified with the exception of its character designs make the comic all the more effective, as the reader slowly begins to learn that all the the technological mumbo-jumbo is just a smokescreen for a quietly and effectively portrayed moment between a father and a son. Brown contrasts red and blue throughout the story to add to the sense that one is reading a simple diagram or map of some kind, one of many contrasts found in the story. The difficulty of his relationship with his father is contrasted against the way their relationship ended, so even abusive language by the father is met with a smile. It also points to the way our minds try to create their own narrative, even in the face of memories to the contrary. This is one of many stories by Brown that I've read that have characters with abrasive exteriors that are nonetheless loving and beloved in turn.

Operation: Margarine #1, by Katie Skelly. This is the opening chapter in a stylish caper series about a rich young runaway named Margarine who gets mixed up with a rough and tumble hellraiser named Bon-Bon. After figuring out her strengths and weaknesses as a cartoonist with Nurse Nurse, one can really see Skelly's strengths on full display here. Her characters have a mod, stylish quality to them, lending a pulpy and delightfully affected feel to the adventures and interactions of the main characters. It feels like a movie or a story even as it's being told in a straightforward fashion. Skelly is just great at drawing interesting clothes, styluzed character poses and mannered yet entirely believable character poses. The way she draws huge and expressive eyes is a particular draw, especially because they are never cute. Rather, Bon-Bon's big almond eyes have a vague hint of menace, while Margarine's rounder eyes express a wide variety of emotions, allowing her to act as the in for the reader. The story itself just gets off the ground in this issue with a minimum of fuss: Margarine skips out on a mental institution but gets ratted out by a guy she thought was helping him. When she confronts him and things go south, Bon-Bon steps in and punches him out, leading to the pair escaping on a motorcycle. I'm looking forward to seeing what Skelly does with this sort of runaway set of tropes in terms of characterization; I'm sure it will carry her usual sense of style in terms of the drawings.

New Comics From Rob Jackson

It's always a happy occasion to receive new work from Rob Jackson, in part because one never knows what to expect from him. Horror? Science-fiction? Fantasy spoof? Autobio? Some combination thereof? There have been subtle changes for this artist with a remarkable work ethic. His line is still crude, but his layouts are getting clearer and simpler. His actual draftsmanship has improved, especially in a project like The Storytellers where he clearly worked a lot with outside reference material.

Let's start with part two of Jackson's horror-Americana mashup California. What I like best about it is that the protagonist, Billy, is suspicious of what deviltry his minister brother is up to, even as he can't begin to fathom the true weirdness that's going on. Expecting devil statues and whatnot, he ignores things like his brother buying occult books or bringing down dark forces as he worships on a hilltop. Jackson goes with the full Lovecraft treatment when a church aide (after drinking too much communion wine drawn from a dark, magical source) starts to grow serpents out of his body and uses them to open a mysterious door the minister had managed to uncover. While Jackson slowly reveals the increasingly creepy details behind the minister's machinations, he still keeps the reader guessing. The minister claims to be a force for good, but what's he really up to? There's a plain-spoken bluntness to Jackson's prose, that John Steinbeck-folksiness, that subverts the expected Lovecraft purple prose, making the the story all the more effective and unsettling.

The Storytellers is a labor of familial love, as Jackson weaves together family vignettes stretching over two hundred years. The story begins with Jackson's great-grandfather (also named Robert Jackson) as a boy, just after his mother had died. He was sent to live with his grandfather in his pub, who comforted the mourning lad with tales from his days as a smuggler. He told stories about his father being shot at by Americans during the War of 1812 and having his ship confiscated by them, as well as a story about his grandfather in Canada, trying to hike his way to New York after abandoning the British army. It's one of many colorful tales of Jackson run-ins with authority, including an uncle who was nearly executed in Chile, a relative who had to skip town after dropping some concrete on a cop, a female relative who skipped out on her husband to run off with a colorful salesman, a great-grandfather who drank way too much, another relative who demanded that that the men of his family have a drink and remember him at every pub en route to the cemetery (only to be thwarted by the women of the family who changed the route to avoid pubs), and a grandfather with grim war stories.

Structurally, the book (it's a beefy 75 pages) is fluid in its storytelling, jumping back and forth in time in a way that makes sense. Jackson is careful to establish key members of the family and then work forward and backward as the focus switches from young Bob Jackson to his descendants. What I like best about this book is that these are clearly treasured family stories passed down as part of a tradition of pub storytelling. Jackson clearly put a lot of thought into how to properly record these family stories in print for posterity in a way that made sense and paid proper tribute to the best of the storytellers. It helps that the family has no censor whatsoever, relishing their scrapes with the law and their adventures just outside it. Despite that craziness, one can also sense a long tradition of love, support and continuity in the Jackson clan; despite the misadventures of many children, they were always welcome back. This may be my favorite of Jackson's comics; it has the flourish of his fantasy stories with the unvarnished truth of his autobio.

Two New Minis From Rob Jackson

Let's check in with the latest from Rob Jackson, whose career has an uncanny resemblance to that of Lewis Trondheim's. Like Trondheim, Jackson likes doing fantasy and adventure strips that are thrilling in their own right but also gently mock their source material. He's also quite adept at autobio comics as well, and has his own little publishing empire. He was the first of the new wave of British cartoonists to send me their work when I started reviewing comics at sequart.com a number of years ago, and while his linework is still quite crude, his storytelling and sheer inventiveness are as sharp as ever.

Take California, for example. It's The Grapes of Wrath meets H.P. Lovecraft by way of the show Carnivale. It's the story of a poor farming family in Depression-era America that drives west in search of a better life in California. The only problem is that that their car wrecks in a mysterious small town, and they settle in with a farmer/repairman who fixes their car in exchange for help around the farm. Billy, the hero of the story, discovers his younger brother Jake wandering off and falling asleep in front of a mysterious old statue. It's not long before Jake takes on a malevolent air and starts performing "miracles", and he manipulates the family into heading west without Billy. Jackson then spins this into a sort of cult-like conspiracy, as Jake (now a revival-tent preacher) tries to create new converts by way of the water from the town's spring, ending the issue on a cliffhanger. Mashing up eras and genres with his distinctively dry and wacky sense of humor is Jackson's specialty, and the earnestness of Billy's homespun narrative mixed with the feeling of creeping dread is effective and funny.

Segway is a collection of shorter Jackson stories. "Professor McGregor's Fantabulous Time Travel Device" is the sort of silly sci-fi pastiche that Jackson does so well. The title character goes back into time with a couple of dupes to right some personal and petty wrongs, only to find his lab assistant (who punched out some people going back in time), wants to further his time travel experiences as "The Time Puncher". The story stacks silliness on top of time paradoxes as Jackson jams every page with detail (while still using a clean and clear sense of design). The rest of the comic consists mostly of even shorter stories, like the autobio piece "The Great Ice Cream Disaster of 2011", wherein Jackson admits to trying to get solace out of an annoying accident by knowing he'll be able to get a page out of it. "As Far Back As I Can Remember, I Always Wanted To Be A Ventriloquist" is exactly what it sounds like--a send-up of Goodfellas by way of a guy with his hand up a dummy. "The Interpretation of Dreams" is an especially funny story that leans on anthropology in providing a man first with a life of leisure and then rulership of his tribe thanks to his bizarre dreams. His eventual, grisly fate is based on an incredibly silly dream that's entirely within the logic of teh rest of the story. Jackson is really a master of coming up with an absurd premise, fleshing it out logically, and then capping it off with a killer gag. The final story is a slice-of-life fragment called "Marigold", about the adult daughter of a celebrity chef who doesn't quite know what to do with her life. I'm hoping Jackson returns to this character, as the premise (the chef essentially owns the small town she lives in lock, stock and barrel) is clever but more low-key than most of his fiction. Those curious about Jackson's comics would be well-advised to start here, given the wide variety of storytelling devices he uses here.

Checking In With Rob Jackson

Rob Jackson continues to be one of the most prolific minicomics makers in the world, as crazy ideas seem to flow out of him faster than he get them down on paper. While his draftsmanship remains rudimentary at best, there's a delightful wit to be found in his comics. I got the impression that his most recent comics "It's A Man's Life In The Ice Cream Business" and "Flying Leaf Creature" were more about him just wanting to tear through an experience and record it in the former example and playing with a new format and color in the latter.

"It's A Man's Life..." (the title is a take-off on an old slogan for the British military service) is an autobio story of Jackson abandoning his cushy job in order to sell home-made ice cream and soup at local farmer's markets. Jackson gets into the nitty-gritty of how he tried to find new markets, the experience of trying to offer something no one else did and the frustrations that went along with the times where ice cream wasn't selling. This is a very British comic in that Jackson discusses how certain fruits are only enjoyed by people in a small radius, but that a ice cream made from that fruit becomes a real delicacy in that market. Jackson's dry, self-deprecating wit (the notion to quit his job comes from a Cat Wizard talking to him at work) and bespectacled, blank-eyed self-caricature give what is otherwise a straight procedural comic a large degree of warmth and humor. While his line here is strictly for utilitarian purposes, there are portions of the comic where his drawing is rather lovely, like when he's drawing old cottages and vegetation. The second issue of the series is more of the same, as Jackson tries to create new flavors and figure out new wares to offer. Battles with the weather and other cheese & ice cream distributors emerge as new annoyances for a family trying to make a living in an unconventional manner.


Jackson is perhaps better known for his sardonic fantasy comics, and "Flying Leaf Creature" is an interesting variant on this sort of story. It's printed on a newspaper broadsheet and in full color, both of which are firsts for Jackson. Of course, Jackson makes odd use of the extra room, essentially jamming four pages' worth of material on each broadsheet page. One gets the sense that he originally wrote this comic as a regular mini and transferred its contents late in the game. This is a typically demented story, mashing together mad scientists, inter-dimensional travel, stereotypical gangsters, mysterious woodsmen and monsters into one delirious package. The figures are a bit more raw than usual for a Jackson comic, but he makes up for that with his bright, almost lurid use of color. That use of color seems arbitrary at first, until Jackson ingeniously shifts the reader into an alternate dimension of grey-scaling. While that was clever enough the first time he did it, the story's climax features a grisly but subtle use of red in that world of grey that made me laugh when I saw it. It was an extremely clever storytelling solution, to be sure.

Humor & Adventure: Jackson, Smith, Michel

This batch of minis is humor oriented, by way of superhero/action, horror and sci-fi tropes.


Monkey Squad One Annual #1, by Doug Michel. This comic is an odd duck. It's equal parts Marvel comics homage and kid's adventure, as though the artist was making up stories for his own children or nephews. Even the "annual" concept is straight out of superhero comics, with a number of shorter stories, behind-the-scenes reveals, schematics, Marvel Universe Handbook-style bios, etc. Michel adds weight to the silliness of a book featuring a bunch of young kids as superspy/assassins with sheer density. While he has a simple and cartoony style, he packs every panel with details, eye-pops, hatching, stippling and greys. The balance works, as every page is a breeze to read but fun to look at. There's also a good balance between the action tropes, the depiction of how kids interact and overt parody and winks at genre conventions (there's a villain named "Seven Bricks of Fury" and then a critique by some characters about that name). This is less a fusion comic than a funny superhero adventure; as such, its main appeal will be to those who grew up reading X-Men and have especially fond memories of the interstitial scenes, where the characters bickered in an affectionate, familial manner.


The Gods Must Be Bastards, by Rob Jackson. The latest bit of lunacy from the U.K.'s Jackson may well be his best comic. At 56 pages, it's one of his most sustained narrative efforts. Jackson has really found his niche working within fantasy-as-farce as his genre of choice, playing ridiculous situations completely straight (as opposed to winking to the reader when making a joke, as Michel does). This story concerns a world where a group of scientists must work in secret lest they draw the wrath of the gods and their human servants. Through a convoluted series of events, the scientists travel to what is reputed to be the gods' home, Atlantis, with a sympathetic navy captain and a group of marines. Jackson creates genuine suspense and mystery as he slowly reveals details about this world and its gods and whether or not they actually exist. When he pulls the big reveal, he pulls the rug out from under the reader several times: when the gods are revealed to be the kind of petty, vindictive yobbos that Greek myth makes us familiar with; when the captain acts in an unexpected fashion; and when the true function of the gods is revealed.


Jackson's line is still crude, but he's found ways to really make this work for him. The way he varies his page composition as well as line thickness led to some genuinely attractive art. As always, his character design is hilarious, especially the images of the gods and the bonus "character sheets" he included at the end of the story. Characters like Bolto, god of lightning, required a special kind of inspired silliness. What makes the comic work so well is the way Jackson flips between total weirdness and the driest of deadpan humor. It's a sort of low-fi fusion comic, given his modest draftsmanship skills, but fusion nonetheless. Jackson's point of view and sense of the absurd always takes center stage no matter what kind of story he writes, but he always makes it a point to stay as true to his genre of choice as possible in all other respects. I hope he continues to grow yet more ambitious in his storytelling choices.



SF #1 and SF Supplement #1 by Ryan Cecil Smith. Smith is firmly in the Fusion camp, though he comes at it from a different angle than most cartoonists. Currently living in Japan, Smith filters all of his comics through a Japanese genre lens. His previous effort, Two Eyes Of The Beautiful, was a hilarious and genuinely creepy take on Japanese horror comics. SF is a manic, sprawling and frequently ludicrous attempt at epic science fiction. Smith's character design is delightfully exaggerated, with the leader of the group SF, Ace, sporting a bouffant as tall as his entire body and assorted aliens looking like a cross between manga characters and Vaughn Bode designs. There's a perfectly modulated stilted seriousness to the dialogue that brings to mind sci-fi stories of the past as well as translated manga & anime (I got a Star Blazers/Space Cruiser Yamato vibe from the story, but I'm sure there are other influences in there as well).


The story follows a young orphan whose parents were killed by terrorists who is then adopted by Ace and the S.F.S.F.S.F.--Space Fleet Scientific Foundation Special Forces. That group features anthropomorphic ducks and cats, Aladdin, a kick-ass aerobics instructor, etc. Smith is equally at ease with small, character-based moments and big (if ridiculous) action setpieces--like a scene where Ace is disguised as an anthropomorphic rhinoceros in an effort to bypass security. This comic has a weird timelessness to it that I think is intentional; extensive use of effects like zip-a-tone give it a retro feel, as though this was some kind of lost artifact that's just surfaced. Smith doesn't make this explicit, but it's clear that he's working his way through all sorts of sci-fi adventure tropes, from the overtly intellectual adventurers of Asimov's Foundation series to bits of Total Recall along with the aforementioned manga/anime influence. There's an impressive level of detail here, as the SF Supplemental File reveals. A character who essentially had one line in the first issue of SF, Smith whipped up an extensive backstory for him and how he came to join the S.F.S.F.S.F. Smith here has whipped up a series that's a perfect match of style and content, from the "secret file" envelopes the comics come in to the gleeful silliness of the character design to the minutely planned story & character details.

TCJ Post #17: Zack Soto and Rob Jackson

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

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.

Minicomics Round-Up: Smith, Cagle, Mitchell, Stafford, Pasty Anthology, Volk, Candy Or Medicine, McAndrew

Time to take a look at the latest batch of minicomics that have come to my attention. Included are minis by Bill Volk, Phil McAndrew, Susie Cagle, Brian John Mitchell, Ryan Cecil Smith and Tyler Stafford, as well as anthologies Candy or Medicine and the Pasty Anthology.

TWO EYES OF THE BEAUTIFUL and UN PETIT CARNET DE VOYAGE II, by Ryan Cecil Smith. Smith is the first of the Closed Caption Comics group that I've had a chance to read, and I was impressed by both of these minis. TWO EYES OF THE BEAUTIFUL is an adaptation of Umezuo Kazuo's "Blood Baptism", billed as "a grotesque horror manga". It's an over-the-top, jam-packed story about an actress with a disfiguring facial disease and a mysterious doctor who compels her to do all sorts of horrible things for a potential cure. Smith throws the kitchen sink at the reader visually, with zip-a-tone, photorealist panels, and heavily rounded Tezuka-like figures. The highlight for me was a witty four-page sequence where the actress is trying to tie up an innocent girl for hideous purposes--with nothing but zip-a-tone and sound effects representing the dark room. Smith cleverly captures the crazed nature of J-horror, mixing warped humor and genuinely disturbing images.

UN PETIT CARNET DE VOYAGE is a travelogue in the tradition of French comics, showing off Smith's lush brushwork. He is currently teaching english in Japan, and so made the trip from Osaka to Hiroshima, ostensibly for a sake festival. He notes with some delight that he feels like he's learning to draw trees, and they are indeed some of the most striking images in this minicomic. It's interesting seeing him mix Japanese imagery (especially with regards to trees and buildings) with a more French style of line with regard to his figures. This is one of the most beautiful minicomic sketchbooks I've ever seen, and I only wish it was printed bigger. It's obvious that Smith has tremendous tools as an artist, and I'll be eager to see how his time in Japan continues to influence his work.



THIS AND THAT #3, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH?, THE SECRET THOUGHTS OF HAROLD LAWRENCE WINDCRAMPE, and PEARLY WHITES, by Phil McAndrew. McAndrew is all about character and caricature in these comics. SECRET THOUGHTS... is a Jules Feifferesque mini about an ineffectual guy who whines about not having a girlfriend and then spies a perfect candidate...only to lose her to an alpha male. It's nicely drawn but with a predictable ending, though he did get off a great joke in the middle ("Lola is too picky" after rattling off a capricious list of reasons why all the girls he knew weren't good enough for him). THIS AND THAT sees the artist collecting a variety of sketches, gags, and short stories in a variety of styles. He seems most comfortable drawing slightly grotesque caricatures with lots of angles, bushy eyebrows, stubbly facial hair and bulbous noses.

Speaking of facial hair, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH? was the funniest of these entries. He combined his scratchy line, pointy noses and exaggerated character design with an excellent gag: a wimpy suitor impressing his girl's hyper-masculine father with an "awesome drum solo" so powerful that the father's moustache flies off of his lip and on to the suitor. He rides away with his lover with a motorcycle summoned by his moustache. PEARLY WHITES features another grotesque, scribbly, hyperemotional figure who regrets a lost love. McAndrew backs up a good final gag involving a creature sending him back in time in exchange for his teeth with a series of funny drawings. McAndrew is leaning heavily on his chops at the moment and still seems to be finding his way with regard to story structure. Of course, his control over his line is pretty remarkable at this stage. With his skills, it's likely that he will improve from story to story, as he continues to develop and refine his style and story interests.



O WOE! and DOMESDAY by Bill Volk. The first effort I read from this Center for Cartoon Studies student was a 24-hour comic (THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED). While that mini was rough in presentation, one could see a witty voice emerging. O WOE! is an account of the creation myth and apocalypse of a civilization that rose out of the remains of a giant space sperm. It's a clever idea with some funny and even disturbing bits (like a society that fell because of "doubling", wherein the rich made duplicates of all their possessions, up to and including cities--only to leave them unused), but Volk's chops weren't quite up to making their society as vivid as it needed to be. I'd love to see Volk redraw this comic at some point.

On the other hand, DOMESDAY is a comic that plays to Volk's strengths as an artist: character design, gesture and exaggeration. The story's about William the Conqueror's rule over England, and follows a young man following the king's decree of counting the possessions of every man in the country. The young man, of Norman descent, is terrified of the savage English, and Volk gets a lot of mileage out of the young man fearing for his life and begging god for mercy. The superdeformed looking character design is clever, giving this historical account a certain playfulness. Historical fiction, especially of an obscure nature, may well be Volk's forte, and I'll be interested in seeing how he continues to develop.



FOLK #3 by Tyler Stafford. This is a 24-hour comic by this intriguing cartoonist who works in the Brian Ralph/Mat Brinkman tradition. The best thing about the comic, other than a surprisingly well-defined plot, is the delightfully loony character design. The story follows an escaped prisoner on an alien world who is captured after breaking out and returned to his cell. Stafford then takes the story in a weird direction, as the jewel on the alien's head pops out and it magically rescues them all...with some unforseen complications at the very end. The way Stafford manipulates the shapes of his characters is what appeals to me the most: the oval-headed heroes, villains with bullet heads and creatures with heads that look like light switches, the weird Vaughn Bode-like helmet of the female leader and the toy-like proportions of the spaceship. This is a goof of a comic that does what Stafford does best: put funny-looking characters in motion.



NINE GALLONS by Susie Cagle. Cagle cleverly mixes the personal, the political and a keen eye for caricature in this account of her time with Food Not Bombs. This mini was the first part of a longer work related to this subject, and is unusual for a story with a strong political point of view in that it's not a polemic. Instead, it's a warts 'n all love letter to the various people she met when she was helping feed the homeless of San Francisco. Cagle takes aim at herself as much as anyone as she encounters, depicting herself as hemming and hawing and having trouble asserting herself. The story she relates is equal parts ambivalence and affection, given the friable and flaky people she encountered in the organization, like the group leader who always passes on cooking duties and urges her to go faster when she's chopping potatoes. Her most affectionate portraits are reserved for the people she helped feed--even the ones who screamed at her. There's a freshness to Cagle's point of view and a lot of verve to her line, making her an artist to seek out for those interested in political cartooning and comics journalism.



JUST A MAN, WORMS #4, XO #5 and LOST KISSES #9 & #10, by Brian John Mitchell, et al. These are tiny micro-mini comics, measuring about 2x2", and range from 16-40 pages each. Mitchell is the writer for all of them and is also the (stick-figure) artist of LOST KISSES. Most of these are parts of a series, all of which are easy to pick up on as Mitchell hops from genre to genre. JUST A MAN, drawn by Andrew White, is a sort of hard-bitten western, stripped of glory. A farmer sees his house burned down, his infant son killed and his wife disappear. He's pretty sure he knows who did it, and hunts them down, one by one. I liked the voice Mitchell used for the character, but he overwrote this story. That's not unusual for a writer collaborating with an artist, but the story would have had a bit more power if the first-person narrative had been sparer and he let the visuals carry the story.

WORMS and XO fall into the realms of sci-fi/horror and crime noir, respectively. WORMS had a zippy pace to it and appealingly minimalist art by Kimberlee Traub that fit the story nicely, one that featured a young woman who witnessed the death of her father and was the subject of an experiment in a lab. This issue found her gaining power through some strange worms, subduing her tormentor, and escaping. The single panel per page format fit with Traub's striking and hallucinatory imagery. XO had a similarly snappy pace to it but was let down by Melissa Spence Gardners art. It was competent, but it didn't fit the story's mood or add anything to Mitchell's narrative, which needed a moodier style.

The stand-outs in this set were Mitchell's issues of LOST KISSES. These stick-figure comics were first-person, meandering observations about human behavior and the narrator's own misanthropy. What's clever about these strips is precisely the same thing that hamstrung JUST A MAN: there's a narrative caption working against the image and dialogue on each page (it's a panel per page for all of these comics). However, in this comic, there's a comedic tension that arises as a result of that juxtaposition. Issue #10 was especially amusing, as it was a takedown of the concept of love and those who insist on expressing it, with the author worrying about falling for that fallacy himself. I love how unassuming and direct these comics are; there are no frills or pretensions here--just a writer and artists who are experimenting with a variety of means of expression.

CANDY OR MEDICINE 4-7 and LUNARCY, edited by Josh Blair. Blair's modest little anthology continues to roll on. Each issue is 16 pages long (including covers) and is just a dollar. The focus is on up-and-coming creators, though virtually issue has work by at least one reasonably well-published cartoonist. The highlights of #4 are a great gag strip by Blair and Ray N (punning on "Love Is Blind" in clever fashion) and Kevin Richardson's strip about a loveline DJ who gets his heart broken in a bar. His character design and use of gesture carry the strip.

Issue five has a couple of Shannon Smith strips later reprinted in his own minis, a "missed connections" strip by Ed Moorman that had a certain sweet wistfulness to it, and a cleverly-designed strip about a sleepwalker meeting a series of horrible fates. The sixth issue's highlights center around gags, featuring up-and-coming cartoonist Lydia Conklin with a couple of surprisingly silly punchlines, Jason Viola contributing a typically cartoony strip about a playground lawyer, and Patrick Morgan selling a character named Blobby for all that he's worth ("Do you dance?" "I shimmy..."). The latest issue's best story was from Tyler Stafford, who contributed a typically quirky tale of a tiny space creature that winds up popping a hole in a giant space whale.

LUNARCY is a comic filled with silent-beat gags involving the moon hanging in the sky, eventually making absurd or witty declarations. Blair is a crude draftsman but I admire the level of devotion he has to his gags as well as his sense of timing. In general, CANDY OR MEDICINE is an interesting if uneven sampler of new voices in comics from across the world, from an editor who is clearly devoted to creating a showcase for these voices. Many of the comics in this anthology aren't very polished, but I admire the diversity of styles and aesthetic choices featured here.


THE PASTY ANTHOLOGY, edited by Rob Jackson. This is anthology devoted to the glories of the British baked goods known as pasties, a quirky and geographically specific theme that was somehow delightfully conveyed. The stories range from Steve Butler's cautionary tale of why being a health nut (and denying oneself a tasty pasty) can be hazardous to one's health to Dave Hughes' pasty-obsessed character studies to Jackson's absurd history of the importance of pasties throughout history.

What I found surprising about this anthology was how much witty cartooning there was to be found. Jim Medway's calendar comic featuring anthropomorphic animals buying food at a pastry shop was a clever talking head strip with surprisingly expressive characters. Francesa Cassavetti's account of being scared as a girl because she swallowed chewing gum (leading to her ignoring pain that would turn out to be an appendectomy) was my favorite strip in the book, thanks to her loose character design and appealingly sketchy line. Even the text pieces in the book fit into the uncompromisingly provincial nature of the anthology. Jackson's hand as an editor is quite evident here, given each artist's total commitment to absurd ideas and seeing them through as seriously as possible.