Minis: Sophia Wiedeman

Sophia Wiedeman's comics continue to be elegant, restrained and scratchy in a way that adds a visceral layer to the reading experience. Looking at her 2015 mini, Semisolid, one can see how her line has become more confident, with no extraneous rendering. That said, when she requires a greater degree of naturalistic density, her hatching and stippling skills are more than up to the task. Her storytelling was always poetic and evocative, but she's truly developed the drawing chops to effectively tackle any subject without distracting the reader with figures or objects that are just a bit wobbly.

Wiedeman's ability to draw faces in a style that straddles the line between naturalism and a more iconic approach is one of her most distinctive visual signatures, especially when the eyes of her characters are the color of burnt-out embers. In this story, we follow a woman (possibly a stand-in for the artist) who is literally trying to draw her way into something. The panels of the page become large sheets of paper that she's drawing on, until finally a door appears on one and she grasps its handle. She emerges into a landscape with a withered tree that begins to fill with sand. After a moment of seeming impassivity, she finally extricates herself from the room and shuts the door. She's now in a complex of rooms and halls and happens upon something decaying, flies buzzing around it. When the flies start to swarm and chase her, she runs to another door and this time sees a huge blob sitting in the sand. Upon closer inspection, it's a giant baby, and she begs for its help after it asks "Is it time?". Its response was to swallow her whole and tell her "You know what happens now". The baby changes shape, turning into a marsh and then a forest where she wakes up. She spies a caterpillar and holds it in her hand, til she turns over and lies on her back--revealing a bulge in her stomach.

Clearly, this is not only a comic about becoming pregnant, but it's also one about the process of transformation as a whole. The rotting pile of decay perhaps represents the decision to abort a previous child, with the flies' insistent aggressiveness being a manifestation of lingering or unprocessed guilt. This is a journey that took her a great deal of effort to make, and while it may not have been time (there so rarely is a perfect time to have a child, though some are obviously much worse than others), it was clear that there was a need to sweep out the detritus in her brain and move on. That caterpillar, on its journey to transformation, was a clear metaphor for her own journey that was about to begin Wiedeman hints that while giving birth is certainly transformational in its own way, the real barrier here is the woman's attitude toward giving birth and the ability to discard and reshape her feelings. It's a beautiful, fascinating comic that offers the readers a number of clues but never spells things out.

Overripe is a collection with a couple of stories in it. The first is about a beloved dog rendered with an appealing gray wash. Wiedeman does a great job drawing the dog, which is the type which is essentially a four-legged carpet. The scribbles, squiggles and loops that made up the dog oddly gave it a sense of realness that a more naturalistic drawing might not have captured, because the squiggles made it easier to depict the dog's emotions and body language. The second long story, "Night Stand", is about Wiedeman's childhood proclivity for running through her mother's night stand. The feathery gray wash is exquisitely rendered, perfect for a story about memory and identity. In reading, smelling, using or eating everything she found, Wiedeman says she was "consuming her piece by piece". Not in the sense of using her up, but rather loving her so much that she wanted to know her totally, almost in a desire to see the world precisely through her eyes. It gets at the problem of human connection, where no matter how much we might love someone, we can never truly know them, never show true empathy because of how our bodies and minds are separated. Wiedeman suggests that over time (there's a beautifully-rendered sequence where the different shoes she wears indicates how she kept coming back to this practice), she knew her as best as she could--and she was ready to return the favor one day with her own night table. This is a beautiful, moving story that is still told with a sense of restraint, both in terms of the text and the visuals. There are also some interesting short pieces here exploring shapes, including a character falling across a nine-panel grid and another featuring ink drip down from panels in another grid, as well as a funny rendering of a worm speaking Spanish.

Thirty Days of Short Reviews, #22: Sophia Wiedeman

Sophia Wiedeman's comics explore dark places and spaces with a deft, feathery touch. Her latest collection of short stories, Born, Not Raised, continues her tendency to frame her stories as reconsidered and reconstituted myths. She always has one foot in what it means to be a woman in terms of how gender is constructed, how boundaries are violated and how aspects of our culture associated with feminimity are devauled. Her take on the Leda/Zeus myth speaks to the way the masculine aspect of aggression through rape is excused because of Zeus' godhood, when "who cares that he was a god if he has made a hen out of me?" Those words are stretched across a 12-panel grid, where each image is related to each other across time.

"How To Eat A Chicken" speaks to the responsibility a young girl is made to feel when her mother leaves her to tend to her dead grandmother. It's phrased as a "how-to" comic, but what it's really about is not falling apart. Using food as a metaphor for the ways in which families unite around certain rituals, it speaks to the importance of work that is not otherwise rewarded. There's also an amusing story about young Sophia refusing to be badgered into saying "I love you" to her father when her mother wasn't there to tuck her into bed. The use of shadow and cross-hatching gives the story a certain dark density, but Wiedeman's use of black dots for eyes allows the reader to make their own judgments about emotions expressed and unexpressed.

Another story, this one silent, that dips into the darkness and mysterious of the forest finds a man and a woman going for a walk. The woman goes off on her own for a bit, and when she returns, she reveals a gunshot wound in her torso. The man, instead of helping her, is hell-bent on instead exacting revenge, only to find that his aggression has led him down a dead end and to his own doom. There's an especially telling panel when the woman is talking to him, but the word balloon is empty. Her words had no weight or impact on what he had already decided to do: indulge anger over compassion. Wiedeman's work continues to become sharper even as her symbology becomes more elliptical.

The Hunt: A.Meloro, J.Willems, S.Wiedeman, L. Milevski

Let's take a look at some minis that talk about being hunted, hunting after something or experiencing a life of being set up as prey.

Funnies, by Anthony Meloro. The three one-page stories and the accompanying purely decorative pages speak to Meloro's aesthetic: raw and dirty on the one hand, and densely but abstractly beautiful on the other. The stories here are about restless people hunting for relief: a man getting his fortune told, one that indicated he'd never get out of his rut; one where two professionals examining a corpse are struck by its similarity to an old lover; and a man giving into seduction somewhat releuctantly. Meloro's figures are shadowy and even ephemeral, eliciting emotional reactions with a remarkably sparse amount of detail. His narrative captions are similarly terse, yet they work hand-in-hand to create that atmosphere of longing, of things out of our reach--or worse yet, desires fulfilled in a less than satisfactory manner. The strange color of the cardstock used and the texture of that cardstock only add to the comic's strangely appealing qualities.

The Lettuce Girl #4, by Sophia Wiedeman. This is the last chapter in Wiedeman's reworking of the story of Rapunzel. It's a story about bad parenting, absent parenting, selfish parenting and the effects that each have on children. Hazel, the Rapunzel stand-in, has been locked in a tower her whole life by her false mother. The (implied) witch acquired her thanks to Hazel's father cowardly promising her to the witch after stealing lettuce from her garden, lettuce that her pregnant mother demanded. From the very beginning of the series, Hazel is fed a series of lies and simply accepts them because it's all she's ever known. She's kept in the tower for her own "protection", even as she longs to see the world. When Hazel manages to break free, thanks to a talking serpent looking for her mother, she learns that her "mother" was not entirely in the wrong. She winds up being drawn to a gingerbread house, where she's being fattened up to be another witch's dinner. This take on the story about mothers and daughters is more of a feminist version, one where there are no male rescuers who swoop in to save the day. Instead, Hazel has to figure out her own salvation. Meanwhile,her "mother", who has grown another child from magic seeds, finds that controlling the fate and behavior of your children is an impossible task. When Hazel and her "mother" meet again toward the end of the book, Wiedeman's storytelling is excellent. Framing them in the background of each panel, so as to keep them just barely in the sight of the reader, their conversation is private, intimate and clearly ultimately healing for both parties. When they part, they know it's for the last time (there's no longer any place for Hazel in her mother's life), but they parted with a far greater understanding of the other. It's an emotionally powerful moment of forgiveness on the part of Hazel in particular, but also for her "mother", who had previously reacted as though Hazel was a piece of property rather than her child. Humanizing her was Wiedeman's most intriguing innovation in this story, as was having the ocean in front of Hazel and her serpent companion at the end--what better symbol for the unknown? Wiedeman's line is a pleasing mix between loose and dense. The characters all have a loose, expressive quality that gives the entire story a spontaneous feeling. One can sense the energy on each page as the panel-to-panel transitions are smooth and fluid. At the same time, Wiedeman isn't afraid to use dense hatching for her forest scenes or a more delicate and refined line for other key scenes, like the vast tower and finely-rendered forest in the background of an embrace between Hazel and her "mother". The entire story is an understated study in balance, in terms of the visuals, the narrative and the characters themselves.

The Wild One, by Laila Milevski. This is a disturbing, visceral story drenched in dense blacks about a teenage girl lured by a wizened woman into performing a ritual to appease the jungle's jaguar goddess. The only problem is that girl backs out at the last second before the ceremony is over, leading to disastrous consequences. The aftermath of the event forms the latter part of the mini, as the old woman has not only disappeared, but has seemingly slipped out of everyone's memory, leading the girl into the jungle for her own encounter with the jaguar. Milevski crams a lot of panels onto each page, which serves to create a sense of claustrophobia as well as heighten tension and suspsense by forcing the reader to jump from panel to panel. This is a story about alienation, folklore and the consequences of crossing certain lines. The main character, Camilla, essentially had her fate sealed the minute she started talking to the old woman, even if she didn't know it at the time. Of course, her fate is an ambiguous one in the sense that she is now entirely severed from society--it's neither happy nor sad, it's just new and savage. The story is all about rules and rituals, and how fragile they can be. It was interesting that while the backgrounds in the jungle scenes were all drawn in a lush manner, the backgrounds in the other scenes were frequently blank. Part of this was to add clarity to scenes with lots of talking heads, but that lack of background detail in Camilla's daily life was telling in some ways. This was another smart, gritty effort on the part of Milevski, whose other comics have explored the frequently violent and troubled relationship between civilization and nature.

The Fatal Marksman Act I, adapted by Jaime Willems. This is actually Willems' second crack at this story, adapted from the Thomas DeQuincey story "The Fatal Marksman". It's about a young man named Willhelm, who's hoping to earn the hand of Kate, the daughter of a huntsman. Her father refuses the union because his son must be a huntsman in order to keep the land in the family. The reason this was so because his ancestor who originally won the lands as a reward from a nobleman was accused of having used a "devil's shot" to kill his prey--unerring but demonically-rewarded aim. To continue to defend the family's honor, each descendant must prove his own worth. Of course, Willhelm is a writer, not a hunter, but the end of the first act sees him gain aid from a shadowy figure. Willems' adds a bit of depth and richness to the story by starting it off at a carnival, with a carny barker setting theme and adding some potential portents on the first page. The key difference in this version is really in the art. Willems' figures are so dark as to appear to be woodcuts. Eyes are deep and sunken and every line is thick, with hatching looking like dense shadows and the frequent use of spotting blacks creating an atmosphere of dread. The features of the figures are slightly grotesque, appearing almost to be marionettes thanks to their exaggerated cheeks and eyes. Willems' frequently curvy and erratic panel design adds to that sense of distortion and unreality that the book evinces; even the structure of the page itself can't be depended upon by the reader. Even though nothing bad happens in this comic, Willems has created an atmosphere where one expects things to fall apart at any moment.

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.

Supernatural Minis: Lewis, Bongiovanni, Wiedeman

Time to take a look at three minis that take an offbeat approach to horror and the supernatural.

The Lettuce Girl #2, by Sophia Wiedeman. This is the second part of Wiedeman's take on the story of Rapunzel, or at least a variation thereof. In this issue, we learn how the lettuce girl came to live locked away in a tower by a crone. It gets at the heart of the themes Wiedeman tackles here: the ways in which the desires and weaknesses of parents inevitably extracts a price on their children. A mother-to-be wanted nothing more than to eat lettuce, even if her husband had to steal it. The way in which Wiedeman depicts the ravenousness of the pregnant woman is slightly unsettling if amusing; reason and ethics took a back seat to her craving. Of course, he gets caught by the owner of the garden, who may or may not be an actual witch, and in his cowardice he agrees to offer up his potential daughter to spare his own life. Wiedeman implies that this act permanently destroys his marriage, especially when he offers up the cold comfort of "We can have another."

The girl grows up thinking that the witch is her mother, who visits from time to time to bring her vegetables (only vegetables). The girl is tired of living in the keep and longs to leave, but her "mother" forbids it. The issue ends when the girl encounters a sort of magic serpent looking for its mother. Once again, Wiedeman loops the reader around to absent and bad parenting, where the girl is abused by her adopted mother but still loves her, because it's all she's known. She strains against that relationship, but only leaves when presented with someone who is missing their own mother. What makes this book so interesting is that unlike a modern fairy tale, where the girl is kept apart from her noble parents by a witch, the young parents in this book are far from ideal. Their own greed and fear wind up costing them their child, forcing the reader to ask if they even deserved to have a child in the first place. Wiedeman's art combines a simplicity of form with some nice usage of crosshatching. Her figures are admirably loose and slightly scribbly, giving the whole comic a fluid quality. I'm interested in seeing how unconventional she's going to become in the greater narrative of the story.


The Offering, by Anna Bongiovanni. This creepy tale of witches with a ragged, fragile line reminds me a bit of Julia Gfrorer's Flesh and Bone. It starts with two sisters in a forest, with one excited about going to a gathering of witches in a coven and the other creeped out. When their activity escalates into human sacrifice as to create a hideous demon baby, things take a truly horrific turn. With her light and almost delicate line, Bongiovanni nonetheless expertly evokes fear and disgust in equal measure, with an ending that provides an interesting twist. Just as creepy as the actual bloodshed and witchcraft is seeing the witches freak out about "their baby", a play on hysterical parents in real life that's quite clever. Bongiovanni has been a consistent stand-out in the Good Minnesotan anthology, and this comic represents some of her strongest work to date.




Klagen: A Horror, by Jon Lewis. This smudged, scribbled comic done in pencil and printed on yellow paper feels as much like an artifact retrieved from a dark corner of an occult bookstore as it does a comic. That atmosphere allows Lewis to submerge the reader in a death cult conspiracy that's essentially going about its business and using the objects at hand (i.e., people) to create a creature to act as their servant. Lewis wraps all of this in a mystery/conspiracy theory involving a man looking for his best friend, only to discover that he's been transformed into a "black dog", a man turned into a creature thanks to being seduced by pure nihilism. Lewis undercuts reader expectation by making the protagonist nothing more than a witness; there's nothing he can do against an enemy that's everywhere and that's already won. He escapes from the ritualistic rape by the black dog of the woman he was obsessed with, and why not? The cultists (who speak in white-on-black text found in the hoods that cover their faces) know where to find him and he has no understanding or way of stopping them. In just sixteen pages, Lewis creates a world of fear and dares the reader to engage it.

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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