Minis: L.Weinstein, G.Galligan, S. Mannheim

Perfect Maine Vacation and Normel Person, by Lauren R. Weinstein. These are minicomics collections from strips Weinstein had online at Mutha Magazine and in print in the Village Voice. There's always been a humorous, unapologetic bluntness to Weinstein's work that gives it a raw power, matched by her line that ranges between exquisitely naturalistic and cartoonishly ratty and grotesque. Weinstein takes her trenchant sense of humor and turns it on herself as she struggles to cope with the onslaught of emotions she feels after giving birth, especially with regard to her status as an artist. It includes self-recriminations as her teenage self vowed never to become a mother since it would interfere with her desire to be an artist. Weinstein even teases herself at the end by admitting that she hoped doing this strip would give her an epiphany between motherhood and her art, between being present and drifting into fantasy. Each page is framed by a large upper panel, but the rest of the page is a six-panel grid without panel borders. That pull between tight and loose is not only a theme, it's also the very structure of the comic itself.

"Perfect Maine Vacation" picks up a few years later, as her is growing older and Weinstein realizes that so many memories she holds dear with regard to her daughter are things her daughter is about to forget. It's a remarkable story (Ignatz-nominated) that plays on memory itself and why the fragments we retain from childhood stay with us and why other memories don't. It's a much more straightforward story done in a 2 x 3 grid with a blue wash that gives the sense of memories fading away. Once again, her style is blunt, self-deprecating and unashamed to share very personal details. Also once again, Weinstein struggles with being present and starts to acknowledge that these moments are slipping away, and it hurts. "Flower Voyeur" is a great example of her watercolor skill as she recounts recovering from fusion neck surgery, laying around her garden. Speaking of the pollination, she says, "All around me is sex. Which I miss, not being in my 20's in Brooklyn anymore." It's a perfect example of her almost blase' frankness; she's writing it because it's an amusing truth, not to get a rise out of the reader.

Normel Person is a single-page strip that reminds me a lot of her old alt-weekly strip from The Stranger, Inside Vineyland. It's a similar format, only this time around Weinstein is stressing about Donald Trump and sharing stories of getting pregnant again (by accident) at 41. It's a full-color strip, which gives many of the strips a particularly visceral and unpleasant quality. For example, in her strip "Extreme Comfort Food", the creamed cat casserole wouldn't have been quite right without the nauseating yellow-orange she chose for it. There's one strip where she's crying because her uncle was going on a bigoted rant with regard to Trump winning and she's off buying cranberry sauce for the family Thanksgiving dinner. The can of sauce urges her to run away with it, and as the sun sets in this happy ending, Lauren asks, "What do we do now?" The next strip is an absurd diagram of her parents' fridge. It's an easy juxtaposition regarding the kinds of things she tackles on a week-by-week basis, with strips like "Feel Good Lefty Valentines", "Time Loop" (about a relationship with an expiration date), "How To Think (First World Edition)", "Parent Zone!", and "Tainted Hoods, Blocked Blocks: The Streets I Avoid" giving you a taste of her bouncing between the political, the personal and the completely absurd. Sometimes she mixed all three in one strip. This is truly the best work of her career, and I get the sense that the deadline prevents her from getting too precious with regard to the art. Weinstein's skill makes even he scrawls and scribbles expressive and funny, and her willingness to be vulnerable and real only fuels her more pointed political and humorous asides.

Weeb 1 & 2, by Gale Galligan. Galligan is known now as the artist who took over the Baby Sitters Club series from Raina Telgemeier, but her autobio work is sharp and funny. It's got a heavy manga influence put through an American blender, with a look not unlike the sort of thing Bryan Lee O'Malley does. Galligan's strips are much different, however, and they use the exaggerated character of manga style to emphasize heightened emotions. There's a great strip where she gets her first boyfriend as a teen and her eyes turn huge and the facsimile of the One Ring he gave her to put around her neck glows. Galligan's stock-in-trade is exaggeration, like when her boyfriend mentions kissing, her face first shrinks up like a prune, then she fades into an endless field of flowers until the actual kiss, and....CLUNK. It's a great punchline, since when she "learned the power of storytelling", it came at the price of hissing "lies" to a wall of manga books she saw. The second issue is a series of one-page vignettes about gaming and Yu-Gi-Oh in particular. It's really about the kind of friendships that can develop with a shared interest. Galligan's work is never anything short of charming, mixing the bitter and the sweet in a way that makes her an obvious choice to take over Baby Sitters Club. It's a mix of funny drawings and sharp set-ups that never stray too far from reality.

"No Time For Coffee", by Stephanie Mannheim. This little mini highlights Mannheim's ability to draw herself looking unbelievably stressed out, mouth agog and eyes bulging, as she thinks she's late to class. Each page a single panel, Mannheim hilariously was so disoriented by being an hour early to her class that she thought she was dreaming, because she was encountering an entirely different teacher and set of students! It's a good story that doesn't outstay its welcome.

Minis: S.Mannheim, B.Heinly, D.Johnson/R.Lockie

The Amazing Vanishing Man: Prelude, by Daniel Johnson and Rosie Lockie. This mini is about the juxtaposition of fame and performance with a desire to escape it--escape from all contact. It follows an escape artist in a circus who comes to want to escape the ultimate trap: his own body. By learning astral projection, he's able to accomplish this, but then he starts having trouble getting back into his body, realizing that the only way to accomplish his goals is to do it in his laboratory of performance: the stage. The pressure of the stage paradoxically allowed him to relax into performing his tricks, as having something at stake allowed him to concentrate in a way that trying in a less risky fashion couldn't. This comic was just the first part of a larger story, and it was interesting to see how the artist (Lockie) expanded on the script, using a variety of compositional techniques on each page. Sometimes she went for a straight grid with minimal detail--especially with regard to the other characters in the story, who naturally were fuzzy because of the escapist's indifference toward them. On other pages, she used a lot of heavy hatching and cross-hatching to get at the heaviness of certain experiences, like trying to escape from one's own body. The final product felt rough, both in terms of writing and drawing, in a way that I don't think the artists were intending. It seems to be the work of younger artists figuring things out in an ambitious manner, and I'll be curious to see how they develop as a team as the series progresses.

Roxie #6 and #7, by Stephanie Mannheim. These two issues complete the saga of rocker Roxie, an over-the-top stew of sex, drugs, violence and rock-and-roll rendered in the tradition of Peter Bagge and Johnny Ryan. The plot is actually reminiscent of Josie And The Pussycats more than anything else, only everyone in the story is either looking to get laid, get famous, get revenge or some combination of all three. The plot is about two rival bands, one all women and one all men, and their various sexual/romantic entanglements and mutual plans to sabotage each other. The story comes to a head in the final issue, in which all of these terrible characters do awful things and get some partial comeuppance for it. Of course, these comics work because Mannheim has a great sense of the cultural zeitgeist and just the sort of references that make the most sense for it. In particular, her commentary on fame, what creates it and what people will do for it is especially on-target. Of course, the main appeal of these comics is her frenetic and funny cartooning. Her characters have crazily gritted, cartoony teeth, bulging eyes, and pointy noses. With all of that visual "noise", Mannheim did something especially clever on a page where she drew two characters falling in love in a naturalistic style, representing a truly over-the-top and sappy event in the story. Mannheim isn't afraid to get mean, which gives her work a powerful source of energy. Over the course of this series, Mannheim has also refined her line, giving it a precise crispness that makes the eye-popping quality of her subject matter all the more effective. It's cartoony art that is powerful because she has total control of her images, as well as the compositional elements of each panel and page.  In many respects, this series felt somewhat disposable, as though it was a way of stretching her writing abilities such that she could put together a longer narrative while keeping it both coherent and funny. I get the sense that the best is ahead for Mannheim.

Camp and The 3:00 Book Best of 2016 Again, by Beth Heinly. Heinly, a friend of Meghan Turbitt's, works in a similar, unfiltered and funny manner. The 3:00 Book reprints her internet single-page gags as well as her Facebook commentaries on same. Many of the commentaries wind up being funnier than the actual strips in question. Sometimes it's because Heinly is beating herself about a weak strip and hilariously over-explains, a favored comedy technique pioneered by Johnny Carson. That kind of meta-humor is in full effect throughout this book, but Heinly is careful not to pour it on too thick. Sometimes, the commentary is just commentary, adding context or an anecdote about the set-up. That said, the commentary is almost always funny no matter what its aim. The big weakness in these strips, and something that she gets at in the introduction, is that there's no particular point of view that emerges in the course of reading them. Heinly says "There is really nothing special about me or these comics because there about 500 straight white cis freckled girls who write the same shit." I think what differentiates the better autobio cartoonists is that they find an angle, be it Turbitt's over-the-top cultural commentary, Vanessa Davis' layouts and sharp awareness of how she relates to others, etc.

Where Heinly excels is in more conceptual humor, something that gets lost in the midst of doing a diary comic. That's why her comic Camp, a "stoner horror comedy", is so much more effective as a cohesive work of comedy. The cover promises that "Everyone dies" and Heinly lives up to that promise, albeit in the most hilariously convoluted manner possible. The concept is that a group of stoners are camping out in the woods with the idea that they're going to rough it. The only problem is that most of them are either stoned, stupid or both. Rather than an external force hunting these clowns one by one, the only real threat to them is their own stupidity. Two of the stoners find rare mushrooms in the forest, which may or may not be poisonous. Of course, they eat them and then die. One woman stacks way too much wood in the fire pit they've built, catches on fire, and falls into the inferno she's created. Heinly keeps escalating things from there, with the members of the party dying in increasingly absurd ways. The real humor of the book is that they're pretty much either too stoned or too sociopathic to care that their friends are dying left and right. The survivor was, of course, the stupidest and most stoned member of the party who was more concerned with getting joints off the dead body of a friend than either the friend's death or the need to actually find a way out. Heinly then takes that premise and goes way, way over the top, suddenly turning scene after blase' scene of people dying into something truly horrific. It's a grim final joke, but Heinly pulls it off thanks in part to the rhythm and structure of the story. Her line is serviceable and more effective here than in her other gag work, because her simple but exaggerated character design makes sense within the context of the story. Her strict use of a 2x3 panel grid keeps the story zipping along, another element that shows how carefully she considers and structures her work.

SAW-Related Comics and Broadsheets

I've previously mentioned the Sequential Artists Workshop that Tom Hart & Leela Corman are opening in Gainesville, FL (home of the University of Florida). Recently, the school announced its initial curriculum for the fall of 2012. Hart spent years at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is writing a text on teaching comics; he's a fine writer about and critic of comics as well as being one of the best cartoonists of the Xeric generation that sprang up in the early 1990s. Hart is known for his close relationships with many of his students, and as such he's been selling two broadsheets at conventions that reflect his interest and guiding hand.

The first is Seriously Comics, a broadsheet that Hart says was inspired by Peter Bagge's classic I Like Comics fanzine from the 90s. Hart wanted a goofier, more irreverent take on comics than something like The Comics Journal or Comic Art and wanted it in a cheap, disposable format. As such, this broadsheet is a great success. While Hart is all over this publication, his former student Stephanie Mannheim is the engine behind nearly every feature, which functions as the most entertaining school newspaper ever. The cover functions like an issue of The Onion, with snippets of "stories" like "Webcartoonist Just Can't Seem to Make Cathy Existential", "Is Dewey A Gay Icon?" and "Pizza Island is WOMEN!" mixing with teasers for actual stories. The combination of Hart's enthusiasm and sincerity with Mannheim's boundless energy and smartass attitude results in a publication that's more than just a lark. Indeed, the interviews with Dash Shaw, Gary Panter and Keith Mayerson (yes, this is a highly SVA-centric publication) are substantive and revealing.



That said, it's the ancillary material, the frosting on the cake, that sets this apart from other comics publications. In addition to a page of comics by Aaron Renier, there's a good old-fashioned fumetti strip featuring "Stacey Nightmayer" and various cartoonists, a photo feature on the amusing "Ballpoint Boxers" event (wherein female cartoonists drew on men, a flip of an event from 1950 wherein a bunch of male cartoonists drew on women in bathing suits), and a hilarious feature called "Vote For Your Favorite New York Cartooning Couple". This send-up of tabloid journalism was perhaps a little in-jokey, but most of the people buying this will probably get the references. I hope that Hart & Mannheim can keep this going.


The other broadsheet Hart's been selling is Isra Rushes Out Of The Sandcastle, a collection of one-page comics from various of his students hand-picked by Hart. It's a surprisingly strong anthology given that much of it is student work (with some stories directly adapted from assignments), featuring a number of different visual approaches. There's delicate, image-driven comics as poetry from Alexander Rothman, brush-heavy confessions from Li-Or Zaitzman and a hilarious, scatological manga-inflected comic by Kendra Wells for starters. There are excerpts from larger works (like a surreal, expressively-drawn story from Maria Sputnik and a page from a Mannheim comic that frankly doesn't make sense outside its larger context. Not everything in here sparkles (Hillary Allison's crack at a daily, gag-driven comic strip features fairly stale observations and Shauna Grant didn't have the chops to pull off her manga-meets-classic-cartooning stylings), but it's all at least solid and some of it is outstanding. In particular, I thought the last three cartoonists featured all had distinctive visual styles. Henry Fernau's kinetic woodcut-style piece had a wonderfully expressive economy of storytelling. Alabaster did a fine job of channeling classic cartooning and balancing it against classic literature. Finally, Katie McEwen's delicate illustration reminds me of the fragile work of Aidan Koch or Amanda Vahamaki.


Mannheim's own Nate The Nonconformist Crashes A Party minicomic is over-the-top social satire in the vein of Peter Bagge's Hate! Mannheim employs a similar kind of grotesque, exaggerated figure work to take aim at the sort of self-styled punk "non-conformist" who thinks a t-shirt bought from Hot Topic is a cultural and political statement. The targets are broad and a little easy in this comic, but Mannheim makes up for that with bugged-out eyes, sharpened teeth and some pretty trenchant jokes. (Having songs like "Whip My Hair" and "Black & Yellow" playing at the party was pretty amusing, for example.) Having the titular character crash an intervention because he mistook it for a party was another great gag. Mannheim is more directly parodic than Bagge in terms of her targets (no one in this comic resembles a realistic character), edging more towards Johnny Ryan in terms of the way she sets up gags and how far she's willing to take them. She definitely has her own style, however, and it's fully-formed and distinctive.