Retrofit: Tara Booth's How To Be Alive

Tara Booth's uniquely and deliberately crude, quotidian and hilarious comics have always impressed me with both their sincerity and their willingness to go over the top at a moment's notice. In her longest collection of comics yet, How To Be Alive (Retrofit/Big Planet Comics), Booth really managed to stretch out a bit in her comics that look less like drawings and more like painted constructions cut out and slapped on top of a page. It's this aesthetic that works so well for her, because any movement on these pages feels weird, exaggerated and yet somehow still agreeable. The character Booth inhabits on the page is goofy, gross, sweet and absurd, and she always lets the reader in on the finest details of her everyday life.

The comic is entirely silent, which makes sense because Booth is such an extraordinary visual storyteller. Her self-caricature is weird and sometimes off-putting because the way she crudely draws her eyes and mouth is in distinct contrast to her loving renderings of complex patterns on clothes and backgrounds. Indeed, the way she draws herself naked has a similar quality of crude absurdity; she has a strong understanding of the ridiculousness of being embodied while totally embracing it as she shares this experience with the reader. The first image of the book features Booth (or her stand-in; I will refer to her as "Booth" for reasons of convenience) sitting down and reading a guide called "How 2 Write A Fucking Book". It's a serious statement of purpose as he clearly wanted to stretch herself but it's also a way to prick the balloon of pretentiousness.

Booth uses an open-page format for her mostly one-page strips. This provides a fluid reading experience, both as individual images but also as a collective punchlines. From the first two pages which simply feature her put on lovingly-rendered and painted clothes to the next strip, where she tapes up her breasts in order to elevate them a bit. Even though the way she draws her eyes and mouth are deliberately simple, it doesn't mean that they're not expressive; indeed, in this strip, her narrowed eyes and frown carry the storytelling day.

Much of the comic centers around her being alone finding ways to engage herself while dealing with many emotions and mental states. There's a page where she lines up all of her medications and forces a cheesy grin while crying. That use of an open format is especially revealing when she draws herself flitting from place to place in her apartment throughout the day, trying to keep busy. There's a sort of divine and colorful clutter in her apartment that makes these strips stand out from those with just white backgrounds: Booth wants to be understood as part of the context clues her surroundings evoke, as well as the way her apartment makes her feel secure. As she loosens up in the book, Booth draws more gag strips like getting sunburned on the beach, turning her apartment into a disaster prepper's stronghold, and feeling coins fall out of her thighs after going bottomless  in her apartment. That's a hilarious and embarrassing image, but Booth has a way of killing shame in her work and making it just one more quotidian detail to absorb and laugh at.

Booth's take on sex and her own sexuality is as funny as the rest of the book. There's a strip where she squats over a mirror, solemnly considering her own genitalia. Another strip finds her on her period, as she angrily eats an entire bag of cheetos, getting her mouth stained in orange powder while working on a journal called "Feelings". Later, she experiences an equal amount of stress when she's extremely late for her period and swallows a whole packet of birth control pills. Booth switches from silly (pulling out every sock from her dresser, unable to find a match) to funny (buying a bunch of pointless stuff online while high) to the deeply poignant and absurd (constructing her own bedmate boyfriend out of a pool noodle, paper plate and discarded clothes). As I've noted before, the essential sweetness in these strips ties into her willingness to confront issues that are hidden or couched in terms of shame. On the saddest and happiness of strips, Booth forgives and celebrates herself. She allows herself to be human and to be alive, and it's that self-affirmation that acknowledges the title and shines on every scrawled but carefully-assembled page.

mini-Kus! Of The Week #7: Tara Booth, Ingrida Picukane, Tommi Mosturi

Picking up my ongoing mini-Kus! reviews...

mini-Kus! #37: Snake In The Nose, by Tommi Mosturi. Subtle, this comic isn't. Using a thick line and lurid color, the first page introduces to a woman sunbathing outside. Eventually, we see she's being splashed by a yellow liquid. The next page, a huge splash page, sees a man pissing on her from above as we're given a close-up of his penis. The comic is essentially one, long misanthropic, self-flagellating yowl. After a close-up of the man's anus, he goes to a happy place and winds up singing "Like A Virgin" to himself as he pisses all over his fantasyland. That scene was mildly amusing, but it takes a special talent to get away with this kind of self-negating nihilism (like Ivan Brunetti), and this comic felt like a deliberate poke in the eye to the reader. I imagine that was the entire point, to provoke and punish, but the final product was simply self-indulgent and tedious.

mini-Kus! #38: Three Sisters, by Ingrida Picukane. This story of the titular sisters encountering a strange, nude man in the forest is in French and Russian, with no subtitles or translation into English. Considering that the entire Kus! series has been translated or subtitled, this is clearly a deliberate move on the part of the artist, that the dialogue should be unintelligible for the English reader. Having both French and Russian indicates that Picukane was trying to create dissonance and confusion not just for the reader, but for the characters as well. Drawn in colored pencil, the visuals in the comic are immersive and beautiful, as Picukane uses an open layout that draws in the eye in an interesting way, as she uses the resulting negative space to push the reader along the page in the same direction they're walking. The color, the ultra-feminine dresses, the make-up and the flowers they put in each other's hair all wind up being a bit of misdirection, as the ultimate acts of the sisters upon finding the unconscious man in trying to "calm" him are both horrible and yet utterly in character. For them, Picukane, life seems to be a series of dreamlike vignettes without any meaningful consequences. The fact that the man speaks a different language seems to indicate that they viewed him in much the same way as they did the flowers and a bear: as curiosities meant to be curated, pondered and collected, but not as fellow living beings on their own level. That's also reflected in the man's totally pale appearance in comparison to the sisters, who are adorned in flowers, only the way they added color to him wound up being deadly. This is a well-paced, sharp comic that gets across its main twist quickly and effectively through the use of visuals.

mini-Kus! #39: Unwell, by Tara Booth. I found this silent bit of quotidian minutia to be beautifully crude in its use of watercolors, character design and subject matter. Booth gets across the titular idea that the woman that we follow in the story is not exactly living a healthy lifestyle, but she is at least living it on her own terms. What makes the comic such a consistent delight is Booth's use of sight gags that are not exactly jokes, but rather absurd, shocking and/or disgusting. In the opening scene, she crawls out of the bed of the guy she just slept with but pauses, naked, in the living room to read some comics before she lurches to the bathroom to vomit. That absurdity turns to pure joy when she gets outside, breathes the air, feels the sun on her skin and the sensation of riding on her bike. There's a brief moment when she remembers the things she did with the guy (riding him like a horse, strapping her underwear on his face) and one gets the sense that she's wondering why the hell she did it. Again, Booth takes the reader through moment by moment as she showers, lays on the shower floor and goes through a number of outfits before she picks one to paint with. After she paints a simple frowny face, she pours paint out on a cloth on a floor, sits on it and paints with her ass. One gets the idea: this is a woman ruled entirely by her whims, which sometimes result in funny outcomes and sometimes results in her downing an entire bottle of vodka on the street. Booth makes no judgments and leaves that up to the reader, resulting in a series of events that are both hilarious and vaguely unsettling.

Minis: The Yeah Dude Comics Box

Philadelphia's Pat Aulisio has been steadily publishing his own work as well as the work of others for quite a while. The beautifully constructed cardboard box that houses the Yeah Dude Comics mini-sampler is quite the attention-getter for a variety of comics. Aulisio essentially constructed a portable mini-library for these comics.

Most of them are very short and raw. Going in order of the table of contents, Josh Bayer leads off with Hot Desert Fever. It's one of his riffs on Sylvester Stallone and Stan Lee, as he imagines Stallone desperately wanting to write comic books like Lee. The resulting Human Torch story is a classic Bayer parody: altered character design (the Torch wears a helmet and carries a gas can), scatological humor, and visceral violence. Bayer's ability to fully inhabit the minds of these hyper-masculine, ridiculous characters and somehow make them come alive on the page is one of his greatest talents. Even in a story as absurd as this one, where Stallone has a butler that he names as Jarvis or Alfred, depending on the panel, and where he grows a tiny version of himself as Rocky to give him advice and encouragement, Bayer's always working within an internal set of logical rules.

Ian Harker's Face Force is a parody of 90s era Image Comics, with Rob Liefeld in particular being a touchstone. Nothing much actually happens in this comic, which makes it a particularly apt satire. McDonald's National Cemetary (sic), by Michael Gerkovich, is a series of strange images and clip art surrounding the idea of McDonald's going back to ancient Egypt, and to imagine what one would find if a site was excavated. Some of them riff off McDonald's iconography, like a Hamburglar looking through a telescope or a pharaoh having Ronald McDonald makeup on. The actual images match the meaningless absurdity of the concept itself, and Gerkovich gleefully runs with it. Josh Burggraf's International Geographic cleverly takes the you-are-there anthropological premise of the source material it's parodying with similar shots of nature, candid shots of "native" life, and the rituals from an alien world that are as baffling to the reader here as indigenous societies are to western societies. Burggraf's skill as an illustrator sells the joke, which is short enough to not outstay its welcome.        

         
Aulisio's Diabolik! is a parody of the Italian anti-hero, and he nails the way the narrative in the comic spells everything out. Getting pushed aside by his girlfriend Eva was also amusing in the way he puts everything in annoyingly modern speech patterns. The use of shadows and effects like zip-a-tone also made it reminiscent of its source material. Tara Booth's Daily Routine reminded me a lot of Jerry Smith's Rattletrap: extremely crudely-drawn comics, printed at tiny size, that hilariously and disgustingly address quotidian issues. Booth holds absolutely nothing back, like an early strip where she's over at a friends' place, falls asleep on her couch and accidentally urinates on it while asleep. When she wakes up, she leaves as fast as possible, as the caption "Run away from pee couch" indicated with a combination of shame and glee. Booth isn't afraid to get absurd or exaggerated, like in her strip where her face resembles two eggs and bacon, another where her dog licked her face off, and a truly disgusting entry where she gives birth to a "food baby". The cheery wave the food baby gives is what puts the strip over the top. There's an essential sweetness to these strips despite the frequently disgusting and scatological subject matter, and that sweetness ties in to her willingness to confront issues that normally are couched in terms of shame. She forgives herself and allows herself to be human, and that shines on every scrawled page.

Issue one of Box Brown's Softcore is something I have reviewed elsewhere, Skuds McKinley's Korgok is straight-up, visceral sword-and-sorcery. After an epic-establishing introduction, the actual comic is all highly-detailed violence. Keenan Marshall Keller's The Goiter #1 is another standout in this collection. Keller's work is not unlike Ben Marra's in that he uses hyperviolent and exaggerated situations for humorous intent, only that humor is bone-dry and at times indistinguishable from the actual genre comics and movies that he is paying homage to. In this case, Keller starts out doing a story about stoners and transforms it into a supernatural/horror story, as a young man who's working for an elderly woman hears a voice coming from the enormous tumor on her head. Keller leaves open the possibility that the young man is insane & hallucinating, which makes the scene where he "frees" the tumor by cutting it off, leaving her body spurting blood, all the more disturbing (and yet hilarious because of its ridiculous nature). Keller goes over the top in his figure work, deliberately overdrawing and cluttering up his page in an effort to keep the reader off-balance.

Finally, Erika Davidson's enigmatic Hadaka is a dreamy, surreal version of the Japanese festival where a minimal amount of clothing is worn. All the figures here are women, as they walk into rooms filled with or filled up by various women's erogenous zones. It's a brief mini whose mission seems to have been getting down those images on paper, of putting something that came from dream logic and fantasy and making it partially tangible. Thomas Toye's Entering A Room Full Of People is another visceral horror story, this time involving a frightening, serpentine home intruder who encounters a voracious plant that has killed the family living in the home. This almost entirely silent comic is typical of the works found in this box: rough, visceral, iconoclastic, visually distinctive, uncompromising and entertaining. The actual quality of each comic varies, as does its ability to sustain interest after a single read, but this was a great sample of a particular kind of comics aesthetic that a number of artists are currently pursuing.