Minis: Robin Enrico

Subscribers to my Patreon can see my review of the (finally) collected edition of Robin Enrico's Jam In The Band that was published by Alternative Comics. I've reviewed the individual issues of the comic over its decade or so of production, but I wanted to have a final look at the book after many years of being away from it. Enrico has followed up with two minicomics (and a third one coming, I suspect), featuring several key members of Jam In The Band's cast.

Specifically, the minicomics Post and Quit follow a tour by a band that spun off from JITB's Pitch Girl: an "Electro Booty Jamz" band called Rayd Titties that was comprised of guitarist Corbin, DJ Jennet (another long-running character in the Enricoverse) and bass player Becky Vice, a breakout supporting character who earned her own spinoff miniseries while Enrico was still in the midst of finishing the main comic. Each of the issues is a contemplative inner monologue from the point of view of a different character, striking a very different tone from JITB's jittery, larger-than-life feel. It's obvious that Enrico thought a lot about structure in these comics. As always, he let the story dictate a lot of the format, as the panel structure varied on virtually every page.

Other than the narrative structure, the most notable thing about these comics is the way that Enrico obviously set out to challenge himself as a draftsman. Most of JITB was set in clubs, cafes, bars, etc, with lots of talking heads. In Post and Quit, he draws the backgrounds that one might see in exploring the Pacific Northwest. Lots of nature and lots of weird roadside attractions; it's obvious that he did some research with regard to the latter. Post, Corbin's story, deals with a character who was starved for love and stability in JITB as she tries to comes to terms with the way her old band broke up and how lead singer Bianca left their lives. In this story, a number of the characters consider where they've wound up in life as they start to get older, with some neatly tracking it into their personal narratives and others, like Corbin, who find themselves facing a lot of dark thoughts late at night.

Post's title is a play on words in several respects. It refers to the postcards and letters that Corbin is sending to her friend, zinester and close friend of Bianca, Alec Supernova (an Aaron Cometbus stand-in) through the post office. It's also a reference to this being post-band breakup and part of a transition to a different kind of living. If the ending of JITB made this transition seem easy, these minicomics reveal what happens after the honeymoon period. She can't help but reflect on her life in the old band and how it ended, miserable as it was. There are references to Bianca's imaginary "spirit guide" that she used to talk to and an encounter with a young woman at the end of the tour who was escaping a bad situation in a small town and reminded Corbin very much of a young Bianca.

Corbin is the sort of character who drifts from one situation to another, rather than going out and seizing something in the way that Bianca did. Corbin doesn't just wonder what Bianca's doing; instead, her musings are her way of trying to understand Bianca as well as trying to understand her own motives, especially since she slowed down on her drinking and casual sex. She doesn't want Bianca back in her life, telling her what to do, but there's an almost manic certainty that Bianca possesses something that she simply doesn't comprehend. Enrico himself wrote that by the end of JITB, Bianca was the character whom he understood the least, even if early on she was very much an Enrico stand-in. Time and the vicissitudes of life have a way of changing one's perspective. The key at the end of the comic is that Jennet kisses Bianca, after years of insisting that she wasn't attracted to her but was still her best friend. There is a lot to unpack there, but I sense that will come in Jennet's chapter.

Quit sees things from Becky Vice's point of view. More than anyone, Becky is a character whom at a very young age understood that life was a series of trade-offs, and the choices she made offered her an enormous amount of independence but very little in the way of emotional security. For Becky, this story is one about beginning to feel the weight of time and aging and understanding that even the most independent person needs to have a support system as they grow older. When the tour starts, Becky finds an unopened pack of cigarettes and vows that this will be her last pack, as a sort of tour companion. It's an understanding that she has to start making other trade-offs now in deference to growing older. If she gave up on getting married and having children as a trade-off for having full control of her time, then starting to live a little healthier was the trade-off for giving up a genuine pleasure in smoking.

Becky's thoughts are in big block print, fitting for a larger-than-life character such as she. She's an admirable character in many ways for facing up to her own failures and reminding herself that she chose this life to lead when she starts to get down. At the same time, she's human. She's lonely sometimes, no matter how satisfying being a performer might be. More to the point, she's not just lonely--she chooses to isolate herself, which is very different from both Corbin and Jennet. She confronts that aspect of herself as well, vowing to also get in touch with Alec after the tour. Becky is a glorious marble maze of a person, constantly shifting herself back and forth in an effort to keep the ball rolling and avoid pitfalls. While there will always be something of the hedonist in her, she's a pleasure-seeker who's now starting to understand of certain things that had perhaps escaped her in the past.

In terms of the art, Enrico's distinctly stylized technique is at its peak here. There's a clarity and confidence in his line that wasn't always there, when he would simply fill panels up with detail. He makes great use of negative space in both of these comics, as committing to do a story about the outdoors forced him to do so. His characters were sometimes so stylized as to look stiff, but his line has also become much more fluid. He still likes to throw a lot of eye pops at the reader for comedic or referential effect, but they're less jumbled now. These comics are downbeat and hopeful, restless and realistic, and uncompromising in writing narratives about characters while admitting that people's lives are rarely clean or simple enough to be framed in narrative terms.

The End: Jam In The Band 3, #4

The final issue of a project that took seven years to complete, Jam In The Band Volume 3 #4 is an appropriately low-key ending to a story that reached its climax in Volume 2. Volume 1 followed an all-woman rock band from a small town, documenting its rise and the thrills surrounding that rise. Volume 2 followed the tensions that started to mount as its megalomaniacal lead singer, Bianca, constantly tried to urge the band on to greater success while her bandmates started to push back against her control. It eventually saw the band fall apart during a pressure cooker of a European tour. The first three issues of Volume 3 have been an extended epilogue, as each band member found different ways to pick up the pieces. Bass player Corbin joined a new, fun band. Drummer Tiara moved in with her boyfriend Nathan, a writer who covered the band, Pitch Girl, in its early days. Bianca was the only member of the band who couldn't let go, cutting herself off and alienating most of her friends while flirting with suicide. The end of the third issue saw her slow recovery 

While this issue and volume to a certain extent are simply about balancing an artistic career with growing up, it's more accurate to say that it's about how we measure success. What success looks like to each of the characters is quite different, and what trade-offs they're willing to accept for that success are also different. Bianca had the hardest fall because her goal was nothing less than worldwide fame, fortune and rock stardom. For Tiara, the band was about fun and getting out of her small town; even as a married woman, she still has a small band she plays with as an artistic outlet. For Corbin, the introvert who hid her loneliness with drinking and hooking up with women she met at shows, she never found the true love she wanted but at least has a new, fun band to play with. What I liked best about this issue is that Enrico wisely avoided making the wedding of Tiara and Nathan a cathartic experience for the whole band. Instead, Bianca goes to Germany to front a different rock band, launching herself back into life on the road with a wiser perspective but still brimming with enthusiasm. 

There's a song whose lyrics play in the final sequence of the book, one about being with your friends. The song ends by saying "Don't you miss all your friends tonight/But I can't be with my friends tonight/No I can't be with my friends tonight/I won't miss all my friends tonight" as we see scenes from the wedding and Bianca texts a friend to see how it went while she's in the airport leaving town. It's a scene that evokes that feeling of trade-offs that each of the characters faced. For Bianca, missing that wedding and being unable to either come to grips with the decision that Tiara made or making a scene and confronting her about it at the wedding seemed like impossible choices. For her, better to simply walk away, even if it's a decision that essentially ended many of those friendships. Bianca was no longer in charge of the lives of her friends and that realization, along with the realization that it was impossible not to think of them as being an extension of her will as an artist, that made the decision to simply walk away the smart one. Bianca was a fundamentally damaged character, one who sought solace through her talent and ambition, but it only dawned on her late in the story what kind of effect she could have on others. A reconciliation simply would have been impossible, especially at this stage of their lives. 

As a cartoonist, Enrico's style developed an admirable clarity as the series wound down and there became fewer exciting things to draw. He got to cut loose drawing the stage antics of Bianca's new band Omega Rugal (a band that reminds me a little of Flaming Fire), and the wedding scenes are lovely, but this issue was all about restraint, body language and finding creative visual solutions for depicting character interaction given Enrico's "flat", mostly static style. Enrico solves these problems with more detailed and varied backgrounds, greater character clarity with regard to moving in those backgrounds, and little visual flourishes like pictograms, characters being filmed for documentaries and other tricks. Combined with the other three volumes and the companion piece Life of Vice, Enrico has created quite the little epic, one that deserves far greater attention than it's received. Enrico took a lot of familiar elements and influences and turned them into something new and intensely personal. Jam In The Band is about any group of friends and artists who grow up together and struggle to find ways to continue to grow together while trying to find success in the real world. 

Minicomics Round-Up: White, Drawdoer, Gamboa, Enrico, Cass, Wiedeman

We Will Remain, by Andrew White.The theme of this comic is the journey. Some of these journeys were to a particular geographical location, some to states of being, and others concern journeys through time around a single object. A graduate of the Frank Santoro course, White uses the grid to interesting effect in several different ways. In "The Deep End", a story of a young boy watching an older woman swim at a public swimming pool, he uses a strict nine-panel grid. Every center grid is an action panel--usually the woman swimming, or leaving a wake, or emerging from water. On page three of the story, White deviates from this with a four panel grid on the second tier of the page: the middle of the page summarizes the action of the story as noted in the captions on either side of these silent images: "She swims. He watches." Those two center images set up the dynamic for the rest of the story, a relationship whose motives are deliberately vague. The final page is a kind of metaphor for the boy's thoughts and fantasies mirroring hers: a crossover into adulthood. White uses a sort of smudged pencil effect in this story that's meant to simulate the murkiness of being underwater.

"Travel" is a narrative about an astronaut dematerializing across space, except that we only see what is being seen on the journey: stars, Kirby effects, etc. The actual character drops away, other than his narrative captions. Some of the images are close to abstractions, but they are given context by the reader's understanding of the story. "As Leaves Change Color" superimposes loosely-rendered but inked figures over smudgy penciled backgrounds, an effect that places our eye on the characters as they are both part of but removed from their environments. This effect is useful, as the story is about a woman feeling displaced after an accident who discovers a hidden garden. The story flips back and forth in time, as we discover that there's someone in the woman's life steering her toward recovery (including magically creating the garden) who is also trying to repair the woman's relationship with her brother. The title story returns to that nine-panel grid and the technique of superimposed inked figures over a lighter background. This time, however, the background image takes up the entire page, with the figures operating through time and space in the grid. It's a clever technique that tells the story of a single, unusual space through thousands of years. When a statue is built out of the area's rock, it has the effect of inspiring devotion, awe and eventually madness. Without explaining the hows and whys of the statue, White gets across the message that something about the area inspires a connection to this concept of an eternal thing that one may as well call god. Every one of these journeys that White depicts is a mysterious one, though one that each adventurer feels inexplicably and inexorably drawn to. In this Retrofit comic, White neatly ties together a number of complex ideas while leaving the essentially meaning of each story up to the reader, though he is careful to leave many clues.

Miss Lonely Hearts 2, by Gabrielle Gamboa . This second issue of Gamboa's adaptation of the 1931 novel by Nathanael West doesn't dip into the same kind of cartoony well as the first issue did. Instead, this issue features two stories dealing with the main character's existential despair as it relates to his belief in Christ. As the story begins, the Miss Lonelyhearts writer is despondent from reading letters from the desperate all day long and retires to a speakeasy after work, where he is accosted by a dandy friend of his who won't stop talking about all sorts of nonsense, which is clearly what Miss Lonelyhearts craved. A bizarre tableau follows, as the dandy engages his girlfriend and Miss Lonelyhearts in some hilarious babble about religion (a constant running throughline in the series), carnal concerns and how one man was using an adding machine as a means of prayer for a man condemned to be executed. The second story involves MLH in bed, praying to his crucifix and chanting "Jesus Christ", having a dream about a drunken collegiate romp with a pair of Humpty-Dumpties that leads to sacrificing a lamb. With all of its crazy events, the second chapter was far more interesting to look at than the first, despite Gamboa's best efforts to use a number of different shading effects to draw in the reader's eye. In both chapters, it starts to become clear that MLH has an uneasy relationship with the rest of humanity. He wants to be able to love all people but finds them just too much to bear. He wishes to be carefree and hedonistic but is weighed down by his own sense of guilt and propriety. Even in his own dreams, a day of drunken fun turns into a gruesome animal sacrifice, as MLH is forced to batter the lamb's head in with a rock: MLH feels so guilty about his desires that he imagines that he's killing Jesus' stand-in himself. Gamboa's figures are a little stiff at times and her panel-to-panel narrative flow can be a little creaky, but she's a solid storyteller overall who's taking a piece that's obviously difficult to translate into comics and bringing a lot of her own personal style to the task, which I hope she's able to complete.

Jam In The Band 3, #3, by Robin Enrico. Enrico is starting to veer toward the conclusion of this series and finally gives the reader a bit of hope with regard to Bianca, the former lead singer of the band Pitch Girl, whose adventures comprised the first two volumes of this series.What this comic is really about and what the series has really become is a story about writer's block and the dark places that paralysis can lead to, as well as growing older and growing up (which aren't necessarily the same thing). If the second volume of the book was about the things that distract from the pure joy of creating and the camaraderie that creates, the third volume is about rediscovering the joy of simply making music with your friends as a fun thing to do, as opposed to be rich and famous. The parallels with making comics are so obvious that I don't think I need to draw them out. The other former Pitch Girl bandmates Tiara and Corbin were able to rediscover that simple sense of joy together in their new projects, something that Bianca was able to rediscover in this issue, even as her friends were getting married and having children. Enrico wisely depicts each of these decisions as trade-offs in terms of how one's freedom becomes limited by marriage and children but how much can be gained in the process. Enrico's greatest character, hedonist musician/philosopher Becky Vice, spells all of this out pretty clearly as she accepts Bianca because they've shared the same kind of despair and the same disinterest in family. I'll be curious to see where Bianca ends up in the final issue.

The Lettuce Girl #3, by Sophia Wiedeman. Wiedeman reminds me a bit of Julia Gfrorer in the way she reimagines fairy tales in a wider cultural context. The third issue of this new take on the story of Rapunzel (grown in a lettuce patch by a witch) adds in another element: the story of Hansel and Gretel. The girl in question finally escapes from her tower, only to find the warnings of her "mother' to be surprisingly accurate: the world is a cold, dark and dangerous place. Each issue of the series is slowly paced, as Wiedeman is interested in establishing place and mood in great detail. Wiedeman's rendering has become quite good; her characters remain slightly blank and cartoony in the best sense, while her backgrounds have become lush and dense, with lots of crosshatching acting as a counter-balance to the simplicity of her character's line. There's a certain grimness to this story about the darker side of motherhood that makes one wonder about the ultimate fate of these characters. The witch literally creates her children for sinister ends, yet raises and nurtures them up to a point. Is she evil, selfish or merely controlling? Wiedeman adds further complexity to this question by introducing the carnivorous witch who treats the girl sweetly and feeds her sweets in order to fatten her up for her oven. It's hard to tell just where Wiedeman is going to ultimately take this story, but the richness of her storytelling and unsettling imagery make this a consistently intriguing read.

The Index #3, The Text, The Salon, by Caitlin Cass. The Text expands upon Cass's life-long obsession with and fear of texts. In this mini, she explores the history of language and her uneasy relationship with its dogmatic control over meaning. What something "really" means and what it meant to be an informed person were questions that vexed her so fiercely that she went to St. John's College, where the "Great Books" of the Western World are taught in their original form. It's interesting that her drawings (and even her spelling, something else she rails against as a dogmatic concept) are so fuzzy and tossed-off; it's like comics became her escape hatch from this curse of needing to conform to the reality of the text as she understood it. Comics are a kind of way of communicating at a more basic, intuitive and even poetic level (at times), though Cass' own comics's writing style tends to be more direct rather than poetic.

Despite her discomfort with the text, she is fascinated by ideas and thinkers in particular. The Salon is a spread of famous thinkers and writers all trying to come to terms with what they have created and achieve immortality in the own ways and with varying degrees of success. Each thinker is in their own (literal) frame on this oversized, cardstock  For example, Adam Smith is despondent looking upon his works, because he realized "that no one ever read past the first chapter of his book", and he sees capitalism run amok. Isaac Newton used only "ink and geometry" to "create a ladder to infinity". Cass cleverly draws the thinkers as men dealing with ink, books, words and the detritus of ideas; it's one of her best pieces.

I have mixed feelings regarding the third issue of The Index.I love this series as a crazy mix of ideas, with the text-phobic nature of Susan clashing with the need to order and index everything that John possesses. I enjoyed the side trips the series takes and how it introduced the index writer Otlet into the cast of characters, summoning him from a fire as they all mused about the library at Alexandria. Cass notes how the library became more useless the more information that was stuffed into it, as there was little regard as to the quality of that information. The problem I had with this issue in particular is that Cass overstuffed it with ideas, characters, and information; there's hardly any room for the reader to breathe. There's also the problem of the drawing itself; while Cass is undeniably improving as a draftsman, she's over-rendering too many of her pages when a more simple approach might have been more appropriate. Her lettering and word balloon placement also drive me crazy at times, as words are squeezed into balloons and sometimes spill out. It doesn't seem to be a deliberate effect (if it is, it's distracting). The real issue I had is that after three issues, I'm starting to lose track of the characters qua characters, as opposed to mouthpieces for certain states of mind. These is the first story of hers that I've read with original and fictional characters, and it seems like she's still trying to find the right balance between concept and character. That said, she continues to take the ideas of the series in fascinating directions.


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Be The Love, Be The Comics, Buck, and Drawdoer's Best American Comics 2013, by Jon Drawdoer. This large array of comics are mostly of the gag variety. Be The Comics is a series of gag strips headlined by the title story, which is a tongue-in-cheek exploration of why one should become a cartoonist. It should be said up front that Drawdoer is not a great draftsman and few of his jokes land because of his visual sense. However, he can draw well enough to tell a story and shape his jokes, which makes lines like "Not many people know this, but every so often, when they reach a certain age, Los Bros [Hernandez] hold open auditions for a new brother" really stand out. Drawdoer likes drawing distinctions between high and low, like making a joke about pubic hair with regard to Downton Abbey. Buck is a different look at the 1980s TV version of Buck Rogers interpolated with The Shining; there are some decent gags here, but the crudity of the work distracts from the references he's trying to get the audience to understand. Be The Love #1 saw Drawdoer start to refine his line a bit, trying different line weights and textures in different stories. He also continues a story begun in Be The Comics about "Chubby Meltdowns": the phenomenon wherein children have a meltdown when children have Chubby Checker's music taken away from them. There's also a hilarious strip about being on the wrong side of history throughout history. The Chubby Checker saga is continued in Best American Comics, as Drawdoer also makes an extended pun on the awful movie B.A.P.S., with B.A.P.S.tist churches proliferating and sermons ending with statements like "We must all serve the plot!". This issue really starts to get impressively self-reflexive and complex, as the cultural references start warping into something other than simple and cheap gags. He's starting to get at something here, but his ambition is still outstripping his ability in terms of what he wants to depict on the page. That said, he's come a long way in a short period of time, especially since he seems to be publishing a minicomic a month.

Sequart Reprints: Jam In The Band

I reviewed a mini-comics preview of Robin Enrico's Jam In The Band last fall, and I noted that I looked forward to the larger work to come. The resulting first volume of what looks to be at least a three-volume set had all of the charms of that mini and added a great deal of depth as well.

There are two competing narratives at work here, though that doesn't become clear until the end of the first volume. This is the chronicle of the rise of an all-female rock band, escaping from a tiny Pennsylvania town to some small measure of national recognition. The story centers around Bianca, the obsessive and ambitious lead singer who by force of will bosses around her bandmates with the singular goal of success. This volume explores the nature of her obsession in the form of an ongoing dialogue she has with this idealized Rock Star version of herself, a clever conceit that reveals much about her character. Jam In The Band's competing narratives are that of the unrequited love between the book's lead male protagonist, Nathan, and Bianca; and then the eventual relationship that arises between him and the band's drummer, Tiara. The clash between those two narratives doesn't come to a head in this volume, but it's strongly hinted that it will be a major part of the next.

I discussed some of Enrico's influences and similarities in my first review, which included the rock scene comics of Jaime Hernandez and the video-game influenced comics of Brian Lee O'Malley. Enrico discusses a specific video game which inspired his highly-stylized design sense (Jet Set Radio) and Seth's Wimbledon Green, which helped him organize the book. The influence of the latter allowed him to strike a number of humorous oounterparts that riffed off the main narrative, using a third-person documentary-style cutaway. This gives the book a very fluid, unpredictable quality that makes it exciting to read. We're led to believe initially that this is Nathan's story and that he would dominate the narrative, even if he was just giving us details in flashback. Instead, Enrico flits from character to character, sometimes to move along the narrative, sometimes for laughs, sometimes as a commentary on what the main characters were doing, and sometimes for pure stylistic effect. I especially liked the scrapbook pages that gave us bits and pieces about what life was like on the road.

One influence that Enrico mentioned that I thought was interesting was Pagan Kennedy's novel The Exes, about the rise and fall of an indy rock band and the interrelationships of its members. Enrico shares Kennedy's keen ear for dialogue, ability to depict the uniqueness of a certain time and place for youth culture and the bittersweet realization that youth is fleeting. What makes the story so strong is the way he's able to clearly sketch out character arcs and motivations without telegraphing his attempt in too heavy-handed a fashion. Band member Corbin hides her essential aimlessness and loneliness through drinking and hooking up. Tiara has a sense of wonder and adventure that is balanced by her love for Nathan.

Bianca is obsessed with becoming this kind of Rock Star ideal (whose eyes are always obscured--hiding what she knows?), and we see her appear in this form at the very beginning of the book. Enrico takes an interesting risk in making Bianca the focus of this book, because she's an interesting bundle of contradictions. She's the sort of vibrant personality who draws people into her orbit but doesn't always either understand or care about the effect she has on others. Her casual interest in the art of a local girl named Janette gave her the confidence boost she needed to become a successful graphic artist, for example. On the other hand, Bianca seems incapable of forging any deep, meaningful relationships with anyone around her.

If there's a single weakness in this volume, it's that the character of Nathan seems underwritten. We never get a real sense of who he is and what he cares about other than his feelings for Bianca and later feelings for Tiara. We know he's now a successful writer, but we don't get the same understanding of his life that we do even for a minor character like Janette. Hopefully in the second volume we'll get to see more of his story, since in many respects he's every bit as pivotal to the overall narrative as Bianca.

Enrico's visual sense gives the reader something exciting to look at on every page. His character design is simple but distinctive, and it's clear that he especially loves drawing interesting-looking women. There's a clarity to his aesthetic style that is enhanced by his video game influence. It's a different kind of energy than the sort of motion that is depicted in most comics; there's that sort of vaguely two-dimensional video game quality to his characters, but that allows them to move and interact with their environment in unusual ways without breaking the reader's sense of continuity on the page. The sort of excitement that Enrico manages to depict on the page will be familiar to anyone who's ever been part of a scene--either as participant or observer. The sense of the possibility of youth, the crackling energy of potential, the feeling that something special is happening (or about to happen)...Enrico captures that ascendant moment in this volume. It will be interesting to see how the conflicts he sets up in this volume play out and how well he can capture how it feels when youth is misspent and potential isn't met.

Back to Black: Jam In The Band 3

There's a sense in which Robin Enrico wrote himself into a corner at the conclusion of Jam In The Band V2.The first volume depicted an all-woman indy rock band in mid-rise, flashing back to their roots and forward to their decline. It's an upbeat, visually exciting comic that combines stripped-down cartooning and a certain video game aesthetic. The second volume depicts the depressing crash of the band, a break-up that occurs in a tour of Germany in front of hostile fans and in unpleasant working & living conditions. Bianca, the despotic leader of the band whose drive put the band together and pointed them to success, was no longer delivering on her promises. That prompted Tiara, the sweet-seeming drummer, to stand up for herself and punch her out. Corbin, the alcoholic skirt-chasing bass player, also walked out. Enrico wrote in the notes to these comics that he had trouble returning to the story, doing an entire second miniseries (the fun Life of Vice) but then nearly quit comics altogether. It's understandable; he wrote a story that ended; and coming up with what occurs after that ending is tricky from a conceptual and narrative standpoint.

Bianca being his stand-in, it's no wonder the story progresses as it does in the first two minicomic issues of the third volume of Jam In The Band. Enrico goes to some pretty dark places in this volume, including a repeating motif of Bianca tying her belt to her door and suffocating herself with it--not enough to kill herself, but enough to alter herself. It's telling that Enrico draws her as her Rock Star alter ego that she has dialogues with earlier in the series; she has now become a Rock Star, only now she's in the washed-up stage of rock stardom. Bianca dominates the first two issues of this volume mostly be her absence; she barely says a word as she constantly tinkers with her music, draining the patience of the few people who will still talk to her. The comic is also interesting because it examines the life of artists who have to figure out what to do with their lives after their first big project ends. Do you get married? Get a job? Drop out altogether? How do you balance the immense satisfaction of playing live shows with the reality of turning thirty and trying to figure out how you can do art and live a relatively comfortable life? Of course, all of these questions pertain to making comics as well and all of them undoubtedly had a place in  Enrico's thinking during his time away from making art.

These issues catch up with Tiara (now close to thinking about marriage), Corbin (now in an "Electro Booty Jamz" band called Rayd Tittiez) and assorted side characters like the ebullient Becky Vice and outsider artist Jennet. The relationship between Jennet and Corbin is fascinating; Corbin's in love with her and Jennet is willing to allow an emotional relationship between the two of them, but nothing more. There's a level of complexity in that relationship that Enrico pulls off nicely, adding a layer of depth to Corbin that she badly needed. Indeed, Enrico does a nice job of fleshing out his characters the more time he spends with them, turning potentially one-note (but fun) characters like Becky Vice into vivid, believable (if slightly crazy) people. Enrico has also progressed as a draftsman, adding a level of precision to his simply-drawn characters that makes them pop off the page. He still has his trademark party-clutter pages, but even these are easier to follow as his page design sense has sharpened. The flashbacks and flashforwards and "interview" pages continue to be go-to narrative devices for Enrico as a way to break up the story into vignettes, though they are in less evidence in this volume out of necessity. Enrico definitely answers one of the big questions of this project: can you balance ambition in one's art with having a personal life? That's a pretty definitive yes as far as most of the character go. The larger question is, can an artist obsessed with success ever be satisfied? That's a question that I imagine we'll see answered in the remaining issues of this excellent series that captures a particular time and place with a great deal of verisimilitude.

Sequart Reprints: Yet More MoCCA minis

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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There's always been a strong relationship between minicomics culture and zine culture. Indeed, one could make the argument that minicomics are one of the most vibrant subtypes of zines these days. Beyond the fact that they're relatively cheap and easy to make, minis also allow cartoonists to turn comics into art objects if they so desire. Another connection is that many personal zines tend to be autobiographical musings of the author, and that tradition is certainly prevalent in the minicomics scene. This article will examine a number of minis that are either autobiographical or deal with slice-of-life narratives. I'm going to try to resist giving detailed plot descriptions and instead focus on character and characterization, along with the specific look of the comic and what kind of impact it makes on characterization.

CROSS-COUNTRY, by MK Reed. MK Reed's newest feels like a screenplay, but she puts in enough comics-only flourishes to give the comic weight and substance. This one's about a cross-country road trip with a young guy who's part of a family of Wal-Mart-like stores, and an employee. Greg, the boss, is a boorish frat boy type whom Ben, the employee, despises. Greg is a vacant sleazeball and Ben is conflicted about being there--it's a summer job and he needs the money. Greg loves to sleep with young girls, and this first issue ends with Ben being forced to drive home a waitress that Greg slept with--to school, because she's only 15 years old.

Greg is actually the more interesting of the two lead characters, because he's so unrepentently awful and banal. Ben clearly hates himself in more ways than one, and is stewing over an old girlfriend. He obviously thinks he's morally superior to Greg, but the fact that he's enabling his boss' bad behavior makes him worse in some ways. I like this ambiguity in Reed's characters here, as well as the unusual page and panel composition she uses. That includes panels at odd angles like diagonals, eschewing a grid on certain pages, using diary-style narration in print outside the panels, and going to unusual close-ups. Reed's figure-work is crude but she continues to play to her strengths, focusing on gesture, body language and facial expressions. Reed's definitely one of my favorite mini-comics artists who specializes in the lives of young people; I'm glad that she's moved on to a slightly older age demographic after mostly writing about teenagers.

MATCHING JACKETS and SOURPUSS 1 by Robyn Chapman. Chapman is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design whose work I've been following for many years. She's one of the co-editors of the fascinating TRUE PORN anthologies as well as the driving force behind the enormously entertaining HEY, FOUR-EYES! zine. This pair of minis are obviously very personal and intimate; one is explicitly autobiographical and the other inspired by autobiographical events.

MATCHING JACKETS is a compilation of stories about old boyfriends. "Something's Wrong" is from TRUE PORN, and is a devastatingly personal account of her problems with sex with one particular boyfriend, and how this turned into an irreparable barrier. What I liked most about this story was the disconnect between "Robyn's" emotions and her physical reactions as a sexual being. When she reveals that it may be related to her evolving sexuality (being attracted to women), it's a painful moment, one where all further communication is impossible. A cheerier story is "Comfortable", a John Porcellino-style story where Chapman merges text and image in a free-flowing manner, abandoning panel gridlines altogether. This one retells a clearly-doomed but still-pleasant relationship from college, and is told in Chapman's sparer, cleaner line from her recent works. The nature of the narrative will feel familiar to anyone who recalls their first love from college, but it's her compositon that makes this the best story in the book. There's one page where she describes the first time she and her boyfriend told each other that they loved each other. The way she makes the eye follow her boyfriend laying in the grass, to the narrative, to an overhead view of a park, to Chapman in the bottom right hand corner, is a perfect example of assured and creative storytelling, neatly solving several visual problems.

SOURPUSS is the first chapter of a high school story, and it takes place in Chapman's native rural Alaska. There's a Chapman stand-in in Doris, an artist who hangs around with some nerd friends and can't relate to anyone else around in her redneck town. This comic is a well done but quite familiar account of teen alienation. In the first chapter, the dynamic between Doris and her friends is fairly predictable, down to her jealousy over one of them getting a girlfriend. Chapman's character design is the main attraction of this mini, along with her understanding of expression. I'll be curious to see where the story winds up going.

JAM IN THE BAND and PARTY @ HORROR BEACH, by Robin Enrico. Enrico's specialty is conjuring up atmospheres of particular youth scenes, and he creates that verisimilitude thanks to witty dialogue. JAM IN THE BAND is a short preview of a much longer work, and it had echoes of Brian Lee O'Malley's SCOTT PILGRIM and Jaime Hernandez' LOVE AND ROCKETS. It's about a music writer in New York who's about to see a well-known, all-female indy rock band--one that he knew quite well in the small college town they came out of. It's got that same indy rock vibe as SCOTT PILGRIM but uses the time-jumping techniques in those Locas stories. Despite those influences, Enrico has his own voice. His cartooning is simple, iconic and stylized, with a number of decorative flourishes. He's careful to keep his panels uncluttered, even when he's trying to get across a lot of information through visual cues. The small taste we get of the characters in this issue wasn't quite enough to get lost in their stories quite yet, but it does lay out the tensions nicely. I look forward to the larger work that's yet to come.

PARTY @ HORROR BEACH has several semi-auto-bio stories, some of which read like inside jokes. "Trapped In The Closet", however, put together a string of ridiculous situations and sustained them nicely as one coherent, funny narrative. It's about a Halloween party that Enrico's stand-in character attends, where he comes as a "Big Stupid Box" on a dare. There's a funny aside where two women note that since it's Halloween, they're required to dress in something Sexy--so one chooses to be Sexy Abe Lincoln and the other comes as Sexy John Wilkes Booth. He winds up fooling around with a woman (with a boyfriend) whom he had slept with before (at a drunken party) in a closet. When he's told that the woman is now engaged, and that her fiance was at this very party, he finds himself stuck in a closet for the night, hiding out. Enrico manages to play a sordid encounter for laughs, mostly at his own expense. What I like about this is the extreme short-sightedness of every character; the woman he sleeps with has no problem cheating on her fiance, until he gets wise and takes away their engagement ring, while Robin knows it isn't a good idea but does it anyway. Enrico's skill at humor is what distinguishes this autobio mini from others of its kind, along with that amusingly cartoony art (which greatly aides in evoking laughs).

DISCO MAXX by Katie Skelly  This brief mini has a mylar cover with a different design on every copy. While this is an autobiographical story, it's not really a narrative or even an anecodote, really. Instead, it's a series of memories as images, flowing together on a night when Skelly and a friend DJ'd a party at Syracuse. Skelly's style is spare and simplistic, emphasizing expression over form. It's a sweet, unambiguous account of a night where everything went magically right. It was the sort of night where one could sense great things happening as they unfolded, and the result is a series of memories that burned themselves into one's mind's eye quite vividly. Skelly's panel composition can be slightly cluttered; if anything, I'd like to see her simplify things even further. Still, I enjoy the way she presents memories and encounters on a page, especially how she constructs dialogue. Though this story was very sweet, she actually has a tart and witty voice, and I'd like to continue to see that fleshed out in longer narratives.

MY BRAIN HURTS #6, by Liz Baillie  Enrico and Skelly distance the reader from the emotional content of the material, either through humor (Enrico), narrative ambiguity (Skelly) or a cartoony drawing style. Liz Baillie, whose work I've reviewed here previously, goes in a different direction. She plunges us head-first into her characters' tumultuous emotional lives, and does so with dense, detail-packed panels. Her actual line is fairly thin, which lessens the punch of each particular panel (different from Robyn Chapman, who uses fairly thick blacks for her lines), but she adds mood to her panels with the heavy use of shadow, cross-hatching, blacks in a panel, etc.

All of this is in service to her story, and this particular issue deals with some unusual difficulties regarding young love for a teenaged lesbian. Baillie perfectly captures the awkwardness of an attempted sexual encounter, especially when her girlfriend paradoxically clings to her Catholic upbringing. Baillie gets this across in a page where the panels sit at odd angles to each other, overlapping and zooming in and out of intimate close-ups. It's a great page, one of several in the book where the page design has a direct influence on the book's emotional content. By the end of the issue, we have a real sense of the main character feeling as though she's hit rock bottom, with nowhere to belong. Baillie's become more adventurous as an artist as the series has proceeded, and the interesting choices she's made have deepened the book's emotional impact.

NO IN-BETWEEN #1-6, by Marion Vitus  I remember buying the first issue of this series at SPX several years ago, and was struck at how ambitious it seemed for a young artist to undertake a sprawling travelogue as their first work. It's obvious that this story, described as "fiction with autobiographical inspiration" (what Dean Haspiel calls "semi-auto-bio"), was a life-changing and enormously meaningful event for Vitus. The plot can be described simply: an aspiring artist is stuck in a dead-end job, awaiting a backpacking trip to Europe with her long-distance boyfriend as the catalyst needed to get her out of a rut. When he unexpectedly dumps her, she decides to go anyway--by herself. I like that Vitus took a sharp turn away from standard 20-something romance drama and went in a very different direction. It's clear that this isn't just a series of observations on travel, but rather an attempt at using travel as a means of finding out what she really wants in life, and how to get it.

The fact that it took Vitus nearly four years to produce six 8-page minis just points to how much of a struggle it can be for a working artist to find the time to concentrate on their personal projects. Among other things, this mini is obviously Vitus' laboratory in attempting to grow as an artist. She changed her rendering style twice before settling on a look that seems to be a good fit. The first issue was a pretty clear-line affair; there weren't many blacks used, and she kept her figures fairly simple. I also noticed that Vitus loves to play with gesture, posture and expression as emotional cues; there's a squirminess to her stand-in character that reflects her own discomfort with the world, and at times, herself.

The second issue, which takes place in Italy, was much more heavily rendered than the first. At times, it was over-rendered. That killed a lot of the spontaneity on the page and made her figures look stiff. By the end of the third issue, she loosened up a bit, especially on a page where she gets goosed on a subway. In the sixth issue, Vitus does a nice job of keeping that spontaneity going while still getting across the beauty of the surrounding countryside. It's fitting that in a story about transformation, growth and becoming comfortable with oneself, Vitus the artist continues to grow and struggle with the lessons she learned as Vitus the character. The difference is that the story crystalized that moment into a series of epiphanies. The struggle to hold onto those feelings of self-discovery and relay it on paper continues to inform the way Vitus is slowly unfolding the story.

THE ROSIE STORIES, by Diana Tamblyn  As a storyteller, Tamblyn is clear, restrained, matter-of-fact and has an assured, bold line. After reading a number of stories involving teens or young adults, it was an interesting change of pace to read stories about becoming a mother. Tamblyn's tone is gushingly emotional and joyful; there's no attempt or thought of an attempt to put any distance between her plain feelings and the reader. She ameliorates that bluntness by using a couple of different techniques in these stories about her daughter. Tamblyn either tenderly narrates her stories in a realistic style, or else simplifies her line for stories told from her daughter's point of view. It's a more cartoony, John Stanley-esque style that's very appealing. Throughout the comic, there's a genuine warmth that comes across on each page. At times, it's a bit overwhelming for a reader.

While I can certainly appreciate how much a new mother loves her child, there's not much going on in the first story other than an expression of that love, along with trying to capture perfect moments. It felt more like something you'd send out to your relatives than work for the general public. The Rosie-as-narrator stories work a bit better, especially when Tamblyn introduces some light elements of conflict. The last story, where Tamblyn relates her paranoia regarding her child's safety and her own desire to become a better person, is the most interesting by far. There's a lot of skill and sincerity in this comic, but one senses that Tamblyn isn't sufficiently distanced from the initial event to write a compelling narrative about her experiences. I'd like to see her take cues from the last story in the mini and add a bit of perspective to what is obviously an amazing, life-changing odyssey.

DUMB JERSEY WHITE BOY #3, by Mark McMurray McMurray is a very strong storyteller, using a variety of approaches to give a powerful sense of time and place. His stories usually mix comic and horrific real-life events, and this issue is no exception. It's a collection of short stories about his father from various points in his life. The most accomplished is a short story he submitted to the SPX anthology some years back, and it's a beautifully-illustrated memory of his childhood. Young Mark is obsessed with the new Fantastic Four cartoon, which his father interrupts by talking about his failing marriage. While he weeps and holds his son, young Mark can only think that Jack Kirby was definitely involved in the cartoon! The stage is set for the other stories in the book, where McMurray displays a combination of ambivalence and bemused affection for his father. The latter stories were originally done as correspondence, and have the vibrancy that a quick sketchbook drawing possesses. McMurray has a very assured line and an excellent eye, and augments these skills with a keen sense of when to exaggerate and when to reel things in. As a writer, McMurray keeps a layer of humorous distance up when discussing his father--he talks about what his father has done or said, but never spells out his own feelings. He prefers to let the anecdotes speak for themselves, a tactic that works to his advantage.

PHASE 7 #11, by Alec Longstreth. This is a follow-up to PHASE 7 #10, wherein Longstreth starts to lay out his entire history of comics involvement. This issue picks up with Longstreth deciding to make creating comic books his life. The last issue was all about how he became immersed in comics and came to start drawing them, but this one focuses on how he developed his working method, the ways in which he started interacting (and drawing strength from) fellow cartoonists, and how he came to terms with his own publishing schedule. Longstreth uses a cute framing device to explain why he published issues out of order, giving a long and very specific autobiographical story some structure. What I find interesting about Longstreth is that while he acknowledges the huge debt he owes to those cartoonists who inspired him over the years, he doesn't seem to be quite aware yet of his own role in inspiring his peers. Simply put, it's rare to see an artist this completely devoted to his art, who thinks about it in terms of the years that are ahead of him, and who provides such a steadfast example of hard work being its own reward. The fact that he has such an enormous appetite for different kinds of storytelling and doesn't seem to favor one over another is also interesting; he's very much an "in-between" sort of artist. He lists BONE as his favorite comic ever, but is also a big fan of Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. Likewise, his comics go from gags to autobio to adventure, and his art ranges from stick-figure (inspired by Matt Feazell) to intensely cross-hatched and detailed; he refuses to impose limits on what he can do.

Even though he's already published quite a few comics, I get the sense that he's still working through his influences. As solid a craftsman and storyteller as he is, Longstreth is not yet an innovator or visionary as an artist. He's an artist that I think will plow through a series of "steady-states", wherein he will master a storytelling or artistic technique, and then face either a new problem to solve or influence to absorb and then adapt that into his routine. Eventually, these years of internalizing these adaptations through sheer hard work will coalesce into something we've never seen before. Until that time, his audience will have a great many unusual, enjoyable comics to read.

ANTELOPE EATER, by Juliacks. This is an intensely stylized, painful story of a young boy struggling with his mother's illness and her resentment towards him. What's most striking about this is the sophistication of the page design, coupled with raw, primitive art. The way Juliacks combines text and image on a page, such that the text should be seen both as part of the image and as a separate message, makes for an intimate, almost suffocating experience as a reader. The images are not pleasant, because the experience of watching one's mother die as she wishes you had never been born is certainly not pleasant. The boy retreats into fantasy, becoming a superhero who can save her. The images switch from purely grotesque to fanciful, though the tiny text reminds us of the painfulness of the experience. The last page, with a number of small panels that intersperse her vitals with images of a heart (acting as both literal and metaphorical agent), is shattering--especially, once again, with the way she integrates text into the image. Juliacks has a powerful voice, and the multitude of influences on her art (see her website) point to someone who can do some very interesting things in the world of comics.

THE OTHERS, by Matt Madden. Madden is well-known for his formalist experiments, devising whole stories around clever storytelling constructions. He seems endlessly interested in taking the basic format of comics--panel, page, images, letters, panel-to-panel transitions, point of view--and scrambling them so as to force the audience to see what's happening "backstage", so to speak. At the same time, he's able to imbue this interest with enough humanity to make these more than mere technical exercises. THE OTHERS is a brief, circular exercise in switching points-of-view. It reminds me a bit of the Richard Linklater film SLACKER in that we are privy to a character's narrative for a few moments, and then we sail off into another character's narrative when their paths cross. The difference is that as a comics audience, Madden gives us access to their interior, running monologue. Each character happens to be studying the next character, wondering about their histories and motivations. Starting with one young man in a cafe, we zip from character to character until we arrive back at the original character--and an attempt to make contact. "Other" here refers to our essential isolation as human beings, and how difficult (and often startling) it can be to try to genuinely break through that layer of alienation. Madden's line is as loose and sketchy as ever; I sense that he prefers that his work should look a bit fuzzy so as to provide less of a shock to the reader when he starts shuffling his formalist deck. Madden really found his voice doing these sorts of comics, and they're always satisfying to read--though they'll never have the emotional impact of more personal work.

THE OTHER SIDE and DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES, by JP Coovert and Hope Larson. These comics have modest ambitions, but the ambiguity in both made them linger a bit. THE OTHER SIDE is a seemingly simple look at a sleepover with two boys who are best friends. They scamper around their neighborhood at night in a carefree manner, peeking into the windows of various people. Until one of them spies a couple having sex--one of the boys is fixated, and the other gets nervous and wants to leave. This leads to an argument, accusations of being gay, and then an attempt to pretend the whole thing didn't happen. While never apologizing, I liked the way Coovert found ways for the characters to nonetheless reconnect without language--especially through the use of physical contact.

DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES is a beautifully-designed mini (black cover, black-embossed lettering, and 2 yellow lines to represent the highway) where Coovert and Hope Larson collaborated. Both stories reflect on each other, as they're both about the briefness of life and the painful awareness that it can be taken away at any time. Larson's story has her coming upon a rabbit that had been struck by a car . As she tried to comfort it, she noticed that the rabbit's mate saw them near the edge of the highway. The rabbit she held died, but the other was shooed away to safety, despite the obvious urge to search for his mate. Not for long, however--the rabbit returned, only to meet his own death on the highway, joining his mate. "Driving In The Rain" is about Coovert wondering where his better half is and getting a phone call from her that she'd been in a wreck. He raced to get her, worst-case scenarios burning through his thoughts, until he found her OK--and presented him with a touching romantic gesture. The sentiment of the story is a nice balance to the downbeat ending of Larson's half of the mini. It's the nature of mortality, that we're all essentially living on borrowed time, and this mini eloquently gets at that truth in just ten pages. Visually, Larson punctuates her bold black line with all sorts of decorative touches that act as narrative clues, while Coovert keeps things clear and simple. His art is all about economy of line and advancing the emotional narrative of his story with a minimum of fuss.

NEW CONSTRUCTION #1, by Kevin Huizenga Huizenga is a fast-rising star in the world of comics, with an Ignatz book (GANGES) from Fantagraphics and his own series (OR ELSE) and a collection (CURSES) from Drawn & Quarterly. However, he got his start with his minicomics series SUPERMONSTER, and he continues to make minis to work out ideas, provide anecdotes, and show off some interesting work from his sketchbook. There's a sense that this is autobiographical, because it's displaying ephemera and sketches straight from the cartoonists' pen, and a number of the pages are about his working methods.

A number of the strips here were "deleted scenes" from GANGES #1. I have no idea if he actually meant to include these scenes but didn't have room, drew them but decided they didn't fit, or did them after the fact as a lark, but they're all a hoot. That issue depicts the life of a couple at home, focusing on minutiae and moment-to-moment beats & rhythms. Both of the scenes depicted here were a lot more light-hearted than what we saw in the actual comic, and I can see why they weren't included. Still, it was fun to see Wendy Ganges tell Glenn to stop thinking sexualized thoughts about her, or see her fall on the floor laughing because of a trick Glenn was pulling with snacks. I also rather enjoyed the very odd "The Hundred Most People In America", a riff on celebrity and other such lists featuring a number of oddball characters and descriptions. Any fan of Huizenga should track down a copy.

ECLIPSE and THE ANATOMY OF US, by Karla Krupala. Krupala has serious chops as an artist. ANATOMY OF US is less a story than a self-described "work in progress", where she "sketched various relationships in states of disorder". The results are very interesting in this mini, but they've obviously not resulted in a coherent whole as of yet. Krupala likes static images and using them in unexpected ways. On one page, we see the back of a skeleton as a means of conveying a conveying a dialogue, doubling as an anatomical chart. On another page, we see a woman's legs, and her shadow is formed out of the word "take" repeated multiple times. Krupala seems to be emphasizing our essential aloneness and the near-impossibility of communication. In particular, words not only fail in trying to connect people together, they inevitably serve as weapons. ECLIPSE is a story set in outer space, but the themes are similar: loneliness, the possibility of connection, and the nature of that connection. I felt tantalized by these two minis, wanting to see more by the artist. I especially wanted to see her themes fleshed out a bit more in longer stories. Her development as an artist over the span of a year was remarkable, especially in terms of her figures. They became more assured and bolder in ANATOMY, though her composition in both comics was striking.

ALICE IN NEW YORK #4, by Henry Chamberlain. I reviewed the first two issues of this series in entry #10 of this column, and was happy to see this issue pop up in my mailbox. I missed #3, but it was easy to catch up with what happened. This is the conclusion of Chamberlain's love letter to New York and Lewis Carroll, and it's interesting to see how his art has matured. He uses a thick line but is nice and loose with his figures. There's a pleasing, sketchy quality to them that meshes well for the slightly dreamy quality he embues in his story. The theme of the story is allowing oneself to become open to an awakening of imagination and the possibilities therein. The Henry character is guarded and uncertain, but clearly wants to find ways to break out. This issue is essentially one long battle of wits with the object of his affection, a woman who challenges him to break free of his self-imposed, over-intellectualized restraints and assumptions. This issue is very talk-heavy, but Chamberlain counters that with big panels that are well-composed. The central conceit of the series, that characters from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND are secretly aiding Henry in opening himself up to a new world, is kept mostly to the edges of the story, allowing the issue's central dialogue to take precedence. It's a smart decision, because there was definitely a danger in those fantasy elements overwhelming the emotional thrust of the story. Instead, Chamberlain was able to present the story of a character who overthinks things a little too much, who was able to find a way to lose himself to the immediacy of experience.

THE HOOKAH GIRL VOLUME 1, by Marguerite Dabaie. The subtitle of this comic is "Growing Up Christian Palestinian In America", and Dabaie wastes little time in addressing some very sticky points about this subject. She cleverly begins this collection of brief stories and anecdotes with "Should/Am", which is a series of paper-doll cutouts. Dabaie goes from stereotype to stereotype, boldly drawing humor out of a cut-out of "Martyr" ("NOT in Israel To Sight-See!"), alongside "Muslim", "Seductress" (a harem girl costume), "Revolutionary" and finally "Hungry Artist". It's a direct shot across the bow to start a collection, and Dabaie makes her bluntness work by using dark humor and the convention of a child's activity.

The rest of the stories in the book range from light-hearted memories as a child to pointed observations on today's political climate. A story about her family stealing grape leaves from wine orchards (prefaced by the technique on how to roll a grape-leaf) was funny, as was a story about the ways in which Palestinian-Americans go to extremes in connecting with their culture. It's clear that Dabaie is conflicted on a number of matters relating to the Palestinian cause. In a story about hijacker Leila Khaled, it's obvious that Dabaie is drawn to her because she was a woman who acted boldly in the Arab world, and not just because she drew media attention to the Palestinian cause. There's another story called "The BestEST Joke" where someone tells her a Palestinian joke (not knowing that she was half-Palestinian), and she doesn't know how to react.
My favorite story in the collection was "NOW", an acidic critique of Americans using the kaffiyeh, a traditional piece of cloth, as a fashion statement. ("Go against 'the man' Now. In style!") I think Dabaie is currently most skilled as a satirist; she has an elegant thin-line in those drawings that really brings out the cutting humor in her concepts. I also admire her simplified, stripped-down style that she used in "The BestEST Joke" and the grape leaf story. The stories using thicker blacks are somewhat less successful visually, feeling slightly over-rendered and drawn with a less confident hand. Still, Dabaie was bold in trying so many different styles for her first collection of work, and she has a strong storytelling voice. Her point of view and experiences are also obviously unusual in the world of comics, but it's not just that point of view that makes her distinctive as an artist. Her brains, sense of humor, and graphic design sense are the engine that manages to link her memories and opinions in such a bold presentation. I'm eager to see how she grows as an artist.

STABBED! and BERNIE, by Cheryl Gladstone. These autobiographical comics score major points for being really funny. Gladstone uses her background to generate laughs out of family drama, thanks mostly to the outsized personality that is her mom, Bernie. She's a "Jewlipino", a rare person who is both Jewish and Filipino. In BERNIE, Gladstone does a series of one-page gag strips with Bernie's point of view on all sorts of things. My favorite is Bernie telling young Cheryl that she was adopted, even though she wasn't. Another strip, "Motherly Advice" has Bernie offering dating advice to Cheryl's sister: "No blowjobs!" STABBED! relates another crazy anecodte: Cheryl's brother and mother both threaten to kill themselves as a means of trying to one-up each other. Her brother finally tops her by impulsively stabbing himself in the leg, which is a cold dose of reality for everyone. That bit of insanity leads everyone to cope the best they can: Bernie starts organizing her shoe closet, Cheryl starts writing in her livejournal, and her sister goes shopping. BERNIE is the later mini, and it shows. Gladstone's line is both bolder and simpler. It's much more assured, with better panel composition. STABBED! loses some of its comedic impact simply because the figures are shakier, and Gladstone tries to compensate by overrendering the backgrounds. BERNIE is more successful on a visual level simply because Gladstone makes sure to emphasize her characters above all else. She has a strong comedic voice and manages to evoke humor from a situation without relying on distancing herself from the reader. Reading these two comics made me want to see more from her.

KING-CAT #66, by John Porcellino. To say that John Porcellino is a revered figure in minicomics circles is an understatement. He long ago mastered an economy of line that strips away everything but what is essential, especially in terms of emotional content. His stories range from standard narratives to wisps of memory to story poems, all grasping at getting across the sublime on paper. "Football Weather" is a lighthearted story about playing football with the neighborhood kids, with more funny moments than the usual Porcellino story. I especially liked the revulsion he felt at the possibility of having to play on a team called "The Packers", given his status as a life-long Bears fan. I love the way this story looks--the stripped-down lines still depicting action and motion so well, various emotions shown with just a line or squiggle, and the way he creates a rainy fall atmosphere. It's beautiful and evocative. This issue is like a Porcellino primer, because he goes from a straight-ahead story like "Football Weather" to an illustrated poem in "Blue Light" to an almost wordless meditation on scenery in "Freeman Kame". Porcellino writes many of his stories on a small scale--a memory here, an anecdote or observation there. It's that very scale that creates an intimacy and warmth for a reader, that slowly lets us understand Porcellino's point of view instead of him jamming it into our faces. The urge to create autobiographical work is often a narcissistic one, wherein the creator is the most important "character" in their story. Porcellino manages to side-step that tendency by neither overselling nor underselling himself, but rather by revealing himself to be a small but not insignificant part of the world--just like everyone and everything else.

TCJ Post #14: Robin Enrico's Life of Vice #1

Rob reviews the first issue of Robin Enrico's new series, LIFE OF VICE.

Sequart Reprints: Girls' Guide To Guy's Stuff

The Friends of Lulu is an organization that's always had a noble purpose but has faced a lot of controversy as to how its mission was carried out. Its mission statement is simple enough: "A national nonprofit organization whose purpose is to promote and encourage female readership and participation in the comic book industry." Its main problem is symbolized in some respects by its choice of mascot: a character made famous in comic books aimed at girls. To a large degree, Lulu's recommendations and publications have been in the "all-ages" category, comics meant to be read and enjoyed by girls and boys of any age. The problem is that many have perceived this as a form of infantilization of women who read comics. There have been plenty of anecdotes about members of the group being dissatisfied and ultimately quitting for this very reason. In particular, indy/alternative comics have often historically gotten short shrift from the organization when their subject matter doesn't fit squarely into fantasy/adventure type stories.

In recent years, it seems as though there's been a sea change with the organization. Pioneering and controversial cartoonists Roberta Gregory & Phoebe Gloeckner were elected to FOL's hall of fame. Perhaps more significantly, FOL is for the first time releasing an anthology that is not all-ages, but rather mature readers only. Editor MK Reed also made the decision that the anthology should only include women as its creators. To that end, she searched far and wide to assemble an eclectic group of artists, many of whom are being published in the US for the first time.

On the whole, the anthology is a success. This is in spite of its theme, "A Girl's Guide To Guy's Stuff". The theme is problematic from a feminist as well as an aesthetic perspective: it's limiting and even somewhat demeaning on the face of it. There seems to be an element of pandering to fanboys in order to get them to buy it. Fortunately, Reed gave each creator a lot of latitude in how they interpreted the theme. There were mercifully few strips that actually read like a guidebook (and they were uniformly the worst in the book) and instead there were a number of interesting discussions of gender, gender roles, personal connections and fond memories. While there were few stories that were brilliant and that lingered long after finishing the book, the hit-to-miss ratio was quite high. Given that there were very few established artists in this book, this was an impressive feat. Indeed, the only "name" artists in the book are Roberta (Bitchy-Bitch) Gregory, Lark Pien, Emily Flake and longtime minicomics maven Missy Kulik.

As noted earlier, the "guidebook" stories didn't work on any level. An artist like Lorena Caiazzo seems to be quite talented, but her story "Porn", regarding the virtues of porn, was only notable in that it appeared in a FOL publication. Bonnie Burton & Cynthia Cummen's "Star Wars Guide" was sad on many levels--and perhaps the saddest is that a woman would go out of their way to attract a Star Wars geek. Sheryl Schopfer's "Comics Are For Me" is an unremarkable account of a couple where (gasp!) the woman likes comics more than her boyfriend. Probably the worst strip is EJ Barnes' "Con Survival Guide For Women", which deals with the sad scenario of a comics geek bringing his girlfriend to a con when she has no interest, and the things she can do to amuse herself there. I suppose these stories are trying to throw a bone to mainstream fans who might purchase the book, but frankly these stories are neither here nor there. They certainly seem insulting to women who are already reading comics, and I'm not sure they'd do much for newcomers to the medium. Of course, it's difficult to fault artists who are trying to adhere closely to a theme, and I suppose a tightly-constructed book centered around this theme might have some value, but that's not the case here.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed the stories that revolved around more personal anecdotes about men in their lives. Abby Denson's "True Tales of a Punk Rock Boy" and Tatiana Gill's "Oly" in particular had a sweetness and warmth to them that stood out. Chari Pere's anecdote about her father has a nice comic build-up and a great pay-off. Tessa Brunton's story about a family vacation with her brother and father did a nice job of hinting at the important particulars of her life growing up while illustrating the obsessions of the men in her family. One of my favorite stories in the collection was "The Miracle Season" by Rina Ayuyang, which combined her intense devotion to the Pittsburgh Steelers with an affectionate look at her boyfriend, a non-sports fan who slowly got into the action during their recent Super Bowl year. Rina's ear for dialogue and humor makes this pared-down strip work nicely.

The meat of the anthology lies in stories that subvert or blur gender roles and expectations. That was often told in women who preferred "masculine" activities like watching sports or using tools, men who had more "feminine" interests, and the curious ways that gender blurred lines. When the theme of the book was thought of in this way--asking a woman what it means to be masculine or feminine--it suddenly became enormously compelling. The book starts with a shot across the bow of sorts: Hellen Jo's "Too Fucking Cute". It's a funny rant about a girl railing about cuteness and wanting to "be a dude".

The stories about sports provide a convenient shorthand for that blurring of roles. Lauren Skinner's "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" is a cute story about a woman attending a baseball game with her boyfriend, and his slow realization that her devotion to the game far exceeded any of his hopes. Vanessa Satone's "Desert Racing" is about a woman who uses extreme measures to win a desert road race, blowing up her competition to win. Debbie Huey's "I Heart Hockey" is a nice contrast between her cute cartooning style and her obsession with hockey. For her, hockey is a means of accessing her inner aggression and assertiveness. All three of these stories work because the woman in them evince behavior more typically associated with masculinity.

The book is at its most interesting when it addresses gender bending. Cathy Leamy's "Who Likes Neckties?" examines her own obsession with ties. For her, they're emblematic of a completely different culture and representative of the line between genders. She was fascinated by how men's expression in fashion is limited, and the tie allows them a small sphere of creativity. It's clear that this is her way of accessing her masculine traits, both conscious and subconscious. "One of Two Rabbits", by Vicky Hsu & Anita Cheng, is a visually striking retelling of the Mulan story--a woman who disguises herself as a man to become a warrior. The punchline to the story is a memorable one. Most interesting of all was Liz Baillie's "A Self-Made Man", about jazz musician Billy Tipton. In a story that jumps between eras, we see Billy at the end of his life and a surprising discovery made by those who prepared his body. It's a stunningly unlikely story, skillfully related by Baillie.

A pleasant discovery in this anthology was the work of several international cartoonists I was unfamiliar with. Poland's Agata Laguniak contributes "Figurines", a tale of a one-night stand that evolved into something more, in part due to her noticing something creative that he was involved in. Norway's Lene Ask has a story called "Brian From Birmingham", a tale of frustration told from a man?s point of view who has never known love. Her stretched-out figures have a crude liveliness that's clever and playful. Most amusing of all was Dutch artist Anneke van Steijn's "Not Here But Here", a strip where what seemed to be a series of public sexual acts turned out to be something more innocent. Her composition and angular figures fit the punchline perfectly, and she's one of several artists in the book who made me eager to see more of their work.
Along those lines, perhaps my favorite strip in the book was Julia Durgee's "How To Talk To Male Celebs". This was the one "guidebook" strip that worked, probably because its premise and execution was so absurd. Durgee is a fashion illustrator by trade, and her combination of bold composition and an acidic sense of humor make her a talent to watch. For anthologies that feature a lot of emerging artists, one always hopes to make a few new discoveries, and this book is especially promising in that regard.