The Complete Clough On Comics at Cicada

I just wrapped up a year's worth of reviews over at Cicada, the literary magazine for teens (and cousin of the more famous Cricket). Here are links to every one of my columns:

1. May/June 2014: Margerite Dabaie, Ed Piskor, Gilbert Hernandez
2. July/August 2014: Nicole Georges, Rutu Modan
3. September/October 2014: Max Badger, Isaac Cates
4. November/December 2014: Liz Prince
5. January/February 2014: Farel Dalrymple
6. March/April 2014: Renee French

New Articles at Cicada, Foxing Quarterly

Those interested in my reviews may want to check out my reviews of books by Rutu Modan and Nicole Georges over at Cicada. I've also started a new weekly minicomics review column over at Foxing Quarterly. New editions will appear every Thursday. The first column was about Whit Taylor's The Anthropologists. 

Comics For Kids; Toon Books, Adventures In Cartooning, Anna & Froga

The latest batch of comics for kids definitely skews toward the alt-comics neck of the woods this time around, with several new releases from Toon Books, a new volume in the Adventures in Cartooning series and an English translation of a book by Anouk Ricard.

The Toon Books line is an interesting success story, given that editor and publisher Francoise Mouly was initially unable to sell her idea of comics for very young readers to a single big publisher.  Fast-forward a few years, and the line has sold a lot of books and won several awards, and is now an imprint of a larger publisher. Mouly still retains control, but she's started to farm some of the work out ever so slightly to her daughter Nadja, who was a "guest editor" on a couple of the recent books. Mouly has expanded her initial vision for the line, concretizing the notion that some of the books are aimed at pre-K kids and others are for more slightly advanced readers. As such, a couple of the books here are longer and more challenging than any of the prior volumes, but Mouly is also careful not to abandon established formulae, like the beloved Benny & Penny books of Geoffrey Hayes.

Let's start with Hayes. His latest Benny & Penny book is called Lights Out!, and it's once again an evocatively drawn story about two siblings at bedtime.Hayes has an incredible knack for portraying their relationship with great affection yet still understanding the ways in which children squabble and generally enjoy making each other miserable at times. Here, the mischievous Benny can't settle down at bedtime, annoying his sister in every way imaginable, until he has to go get his all-important pirate hat from the playhouse outside. Throughout the series, Hayes has loved folding back a story's conflict onto the aggressor (usually Benny), putting them in the sort of situation that they taunted the other about. Once again, Hayes masterfully balances his background as a traditional illustrator of children's books with making this work as a comic, including finding ways to lead the reader's eyes across the page as simply as possible. At the same time, he provides a wave of eye pops, as characters bleed off-panel or tiny bugs pop up in the same place. For the youngest of readers, these are perfect story and art objects.

Frank Viva (an illustrator for the New Yorker) takes a completely different approach in A Trip To The Bottom of the World. Drawn in Illustrator, this book is much colder and starker than Hayes' work, filled with a confluence of basic shapes and colors that pop off the page.This book is actually based on Viva's own experience on an Antarctic research vessel, as the things that the explorer's mouse sees are things Viva spotted. The plot (with the mouse constantly wanting to go back home, until the trip is over) is fairly boilerplate for this kind of thing, but it's Viva's visuals that make this one worth a look.

Mouly switches things up once again with David Nytra's pen-and-ink comic The Secret of the Stone Frog. It's more than a little influenced by Lewis Carroll (and of course the illustrator John Tenniel) by way of Winsor McCay, as a girl and her younger brother try to find their way home in a mysterious forest, aided by the immobile but loquacious titular frogs. This 80-page book is  the longest of the Toon Book entries and is billed as the first Toon graphic novel, and as such it's obviously aimed at a six or seven year old as an early "big" book for them. The book is beautiful to look at and carries the line's usual sterling production values, even if it does feel derivative.

The gem of Toon's fall batch is Rutu Modan's Maya Makes A Mess. It's a pure visual joy and has some of Modan's best-ever cartooning. It's about a messy little girl with bad table manners who is called to eat with the Queen, and her uncouth nature (done because it's more fun to eat with your hands) has a surprising effect on the Queen and her court. Modan's line is crisp and clear, and her already highly-developed color sense makes every page a treat, without going into too much pyrotechnics. There's also a running gag at the bottom of the page that appears to simply be a visual flourish at first, but is revealed to simply be a time-release joke. I love that this book does not desire to teach any sort of lesson about good manners but rather is all about pursuing a joke to its logical end.

The Center for Cartoon Studies team of James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost return for their third book in the Adventures In Cartooning series, this time with the every-sturdy Christmas Special. This book really does have "stocking stuffer" written all over it, as it's by far the least interactive of the three books. The first one taught cartooning basics and the second volume was pretty much a cartooning workbook, but the Special is mostly just an extended series of (effective) gags and rhymes about Santa struggling to deal with giving gifts in the digital age. All the reader gets to do is write a comic strip for Santa about something cheerful, and they are then encouraged to send it to CCS ("Halfway to the North Pole") for Santa's benefit. It's a clever idea, and I'm curious to see what kind of responses they will wind up getting. The book takes a while to warm up, but once the cartooning elf summons forth the cartooning knight of the first two books, the gags start flying and the visual storytelling of the trio starts popping. I'm still not quite sure what the division of labor is like on these books, but it does seem like I sense Frederick-Frost's hand most strongly. I'm not sure where this series goes next; does it try to teach a more advanced lesson, or will it stick with concept books like this one? I'm hoping for the former (at least another challenging activity book), but I'm guessing the latter would be an easier sell.

It makes sense that Ben Jones blurbed the translation of Anouk Ricard's Anna & Froga: Want a Gumball? That's because her figures look a lot like Jones' own weird, crude and ugly drawings. Like Jones, however, those figures have an enormous amount of personality and power on the page, thanks in part to what looks like a lively application of magic marker. I've never seen a book that had so many ugly drawings on it that made me want to stare at it for hours. Part of that is Ricard's judicious use of negative space on every page, saving the reader from being overwhelmed by the drawings and the colors. Indeed, the use of white made it easy for anyone to follow the characters across the page and zero in on the gags at hand. As interesting as the art is in this book, it's Ricard's skill as a humorist that makes this book endlessly readable. The title characters, plus dog friend Bubu and cat friend Ron form a kind of Seinfeld gang that milks a lot of humor from awkwardness, vanity, self-deception and a healthy sense of mutual aggravation. On some pages, Ricard goes from her crudely-drawn comic strip to beautifully painted full page strips that comment on the previous story. One of the best things about this book is Ricard's storytelling rhythm. With each story running about three or four pages, that allows Ricard to pack a lot of gags into this forty page book. She ramps up the awkwardness in each strip until the climax of the final punchline, gives the reader a palate cleanser with her paintings, and then repeats the process ten times. The result is a highly meaty forty pages, though I found myself wanting more by the end. This is a truly outstanding book for kids, one they will be able to follow with ease as well as appreciate the jokes, which generally wind up with a chase scene, things being thrown, or something gross or cruel happening to one of the characters. I hope this sells well enough for Drawn & Quarterly to publish many more volumes.

Family Ties: Jamilti and Other Stories

Rob reviews the career-spanning collection of stories from Rutu Modan, JAMILTI AND OTHER STORIES (Drawn & Quarterly).



Rutu Modan's EXIT WOUNDS was one of the best-reviewed comics of 2007. I didn't get to read it until fairly recently, and while it has many virtues, it didn't strike me as book-of-the-year material. Reading JAMILTI AND OTHER STORIES, I was struck by the raw energy in her earlier work. Her draftsmanship is considerably more crude in her older stories, yet the power of her line in depicting pain, loss and loneliness is almost visceral at times. Modan zeroes in on family and the ways it can fall apart as her primary theme. The ways in which we idealize our concept of family and the ways that this image is inevitably shattered and trusts betrayed are centered around little mysteries in each of her stories. Those mysteries are there to hang a plot around but also as a way of exploring how we try to understand the motivations of our own family members--especially our parents.


Modan also ties in this concept of family with life as an Israeli. It's clear that the concept of Israel as a nation is one that fills her with pride and affection as well as a feeling of disappointment and betrayal. The title story is about a woman marrying an oaf who learns that her fiance is more of a right-winger with regard to Palestinians than she thought. When she tries to help what appears to be the sole victim of a suicide bombing, she is overcome by all sorts of feelings for the dying man. When she later learns his surprising identity, those feelings become all the more complicated and ambiguous. That sense of ambiguity of identity is Modan's greatest strength as a storyteller. What's interesting is that the more specific she allows herself to become with regard to setting, the more ambiguity she adds to the story itself. That level of detail gives her a foundation to explore certain ideas without worrying so much about the backstory of her characters.

For example, in "Your Number One Fan", the central idea of the story is the tension the protagonist has in centering his identity around being an Israeli singer and his intense intuition that success will only come when he is validated by someone outside of Israel. Finding himself performing at a Jewish community center in England is humiliating to him and his concept of success, and it causes him to want to lash out at himself and the woman who brought him there. He had hung his identity on this very Western concept of rock 'n roll success, and an understanding of the dilemma that so many Jews face (assimilate vs isolate) gave the reader a sort of instant shorthand on how to read this story. Like most of her stories, this one has a climax without a real resolution; the character faces a crisis point and passes through it, but nothing is neatly tied up despite the central mystery of each plot being resolved.

"Homecoming" taps directly into the angst and paranoia surrounding terrorist activity and the way loved ones can simply disappear. It's about a woman, her boyfriend and her father-in-law. The latter believes his son is still alive despite being shot down over Lebanon. The boyfriend thinks her father-in-law is crazy and wants her to move in with him on their kibbutz. For her part, she's trapped between reality and fantasy until the day a plane starts hovering over the farm. Most people think it's piloted by a terrorist, while the old man thinks it's his son. The boyfriend thinks (and is backed up by radio) that it's a terrorist. The standard is-he-or-isn't-he-alive homecoming story is given a good and horrifying twist with the terrorist angle, a detail that's simply part of the background of daily life.

The intersection between sex and death and the ways the mysteries therein haunt us as children is another subtheme in JAMILTI. "The Panty Killer" is the story with the most literal application of this idea, done in a grimly humorous fashion. A serial killer is murdering seemingly unconnected victims using the same MO: putting a pair of panties over the heads after they are killed. The identity of the killer is revealed halfway through to the audience, though the signficance of this character is left vague until the very end. Modan stunningly reveals that the whole story was an elaborate joke of sorts on the readers, complete with a one-liner of a punchline. That said, the repressed nature of the killer reveals Modan's understanding that one's sexuality is a living, fluid experience that can't be contained for long without dire consequences.



All of the stories in the book touch on family in one way or another. "The Panty Killer", for instance, marks one person's exciting but inconsequential public sexual humiliation as fun but also marks it as traumatizing to her daughter. The relationship between daughter and parent is discussed more explicitly in "Bygone" and "Energy Blockage". Both stories are about families who have had to resort to gimmicks in order to survive the absence of one or both parents. "Energy Blockage" is about a family where the matriarch fakes having spiritual healing powers and her daughters run the practice. One day, she zaps one of her customers with too much energy, who happens to be the current wife of the father who left them all behind. It's a clever story with all sorts of twists and turns around its central mystery; many of its themes would pop up again in EXIT WOUNDS.

The narrator of that story is hard-edged, cynical and a step ahead of everyone else. In contrast, "Bygones" is told from the point of view of a 16 year old who has little life experience and only a dawning sense of what the outside world could offer. Working in a bizarre "theme hotel" with her caretaker older sister and younger sister she falls for an older photographer until her older sister steps in. The sisters had been together until their parents died in a hotel fire. At least that's the story we know about until her sister's sometime lover gives her much more information. In the end, while she is still angry at her, she doesn't want to upset the status quo for her younger sister.

Comparing these newer stories to "King of the Lilys" is not flattering for the other works. Sure, it's still thematically interesting with some grotesque thrills thrown in, but it lacks the more personal touch of his later works. Anchoring his characters in Israel doesn't make them seem "more real"; this isn't a very interesting concern. Instead, providing a certain level of detail about time, place and setting that act as static characters in their own right, giving the antagonist and protagonist something to bounce off of.

Modan's art changed over the years as she was compiling strips for the book. She starts with a sort of polished-looking crudeness reminiscent of Olivier Schwauren's comics. The figures themselves are lumpy and often grotesque, but they move through space gracefully. Later strips play up this sense of the grotesque even more, even as her line takes on a "clear-line" quality. A story like "Jamilti" is a sort of compromise between the two styles, with grotesque and simply rendered characters done with flat coloring and a clear-line style. The grotesque figures in "The Panty Killer" are played for humor value, while the black & white figures in "Bygones" have a sloppy awkwardness to them that reflects the sloppiness of their lives. Reading this book made me instantly want to see out EXIT WOUNDS again, a book I sense I will read with new eyes thanks to how Modan showed the reader her development in JAMILTI.