Miscellaneous Mini-Comic Round-Up

Rob reviews a number of minicomics that are hard to classify. Included arebcomics by Lydia Conklin, Shawn Cheng, Molly Lawless, Ed Piskor, Austin English, Matt Wiegle, Falynn Koch, JB, Renee French, and Jonas Madden-Connor.


FLYING MACHINE and MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN, by Lydia Conklin). Every once in a while, I receive a submission for review by an artist I've never heard of that stops me in my tracks. Lydia Conklin's minicomics fall into that category. The visual approach is simultaneously crude (reminiscent of David Heatley in many respects) and sophisticated as she depicts the lives and dreams of children. MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN is a matter-of-fact account of a young girl named Nanette who hates everyone but her dog, whom she declares must marry her. She reasons that this must be done in the middle of the ocean, where she finds a number of other people who are also married to their dogs. There's a flatness of affect to this story that contrasts with the nature of the play/fantasy that is revealed to the reader. As Lynda Barry notes, play is a serious thing for children and so are fantasies. Even as Nanette makes faces and rolls around with her dog, her fantasy of falling in love with her dog is told in a straightforward, unironic manner.

MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN is a similarly straightforward story, though this time it seems to be at least somewhat autobiographical. It's an unromanticized account of how children interact with each other in pursuit of play. Young Lydia and her friend Elisabeth hit on a plan to create a "flying machine" but have to cajole tiny Brianna to be their guinea pig. She accedes, but only if the other girls refer to her as Purple Star Rainbow. Tension is added when Brianna's bully older sister, Erica, has to be kept out of the loop. The "machine" is a box lifted up by jump ropes, and naturally the bottom of the box falls out when she's lifted up. The epilogue, detailing Erica's death eight years later, is an interesting coda that shows how this incident tapped into Lydia's sense of guilt. She knew what she was doing was somehow "wrong", yet felt compelled to do it.

Conklin uses the crudeness of her figure drawing as a strength in these stories. Her figures are expressive, especially in the way she draws eyes and mouths, and she has a real understanding of gesture and body language. That comes from her background as a painter, I would guess, but her paintings I've seen by her have always had a narrative element. Technically speaking, the one distracting element of her primitive style is her lettering and word balloon placement. However, she works big (no more than two panels on a page) and gives her characters a lot of space to breathe in her panels. I noted a similarity to David Heatley's work, but I think perhaps Lauren Weinstein is a more apt comparison. They share similar sensibilities, backgrounds and even subject matter. I'll be quite interested to see how she develops as a cartoonist.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN, by Shawn Cheng. In many ways, Cheng is the most visually dazzling member of the Partyka comics collective, and this comic is a perfect display of his formal pyrotechnics. The story is simple: a traveler finds a giant beast/man lying covered in rocks and takes steps to try and help him, first with water, then with raw meat. The final punchline is a great one, revealed only when Cheng pulls back and lets us see a bit more of the bigger picture. It's a clever gag, but what makes this such an appealing comic is the way Cheng constructs it as much as draws it. The swaths of color he uses on the salmon-colored construction paper are bold and distinctive, especially the pale white of the wind and the beast and the burnt orange used to decorate the title character and his speed lines. There's an almost visceral quality to Cheng's coloring technique. This is an older comic (2004), and while it's not as meticulously drawn as his later comics, one can see him already taking a number of formal risks. The story he collaborated on with Sara Edward-Corbett that was reprinted in BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2008 is a step in the right direction of getting him the wider recognition that he deserves.

OCHRE ELLIPSE #1 and #2, by Jonas Madden-Connor. Issue two of this series was nominated for an Ignatz and just won the Isotope award, and both honors are well-deserved. That said, both of these comics have the feel of an artist just warming up and figuring things out as he goes along, trying to contain a score of ideas whirring about his head. Madden-Connor tells stories about people in motion that are circular in nature, as one portion of the stories segues into something completely different only to come back around to the original theme or motif in unexpected ways. The first issue starts with a strip featuring Aristotle talking about birds. We pull back to see that Madden-Connor's stand-in (an anthropomorphic mynah bird) is reading this story. He then becomes a giant, smashes out of his house, goes on a rampage and grows large enough to see an airplane--where it's revealed that he is in fact a passenger on this plane having a daydream. He has another daydream where he starts talking to clouds and finally starts reading a book--a book whose text takes over the rest of the comic. That story is a sort of metacommentary on the daydreams in this issue as well as a reference to Jonathan Swift, and that joke is concluded on the last page, when he shrinks.

Madden-Connor's line has a ragged, sketchbook quality in the first issue that seems ill-suited to the kind of formalistic fireworks he's playing with here. His line becomes much clearer and his background choices far bolder in the second issue, which expands on a number of ideas and techniques he used in the first issue. This issue loops its characters and stories in unexpected ways, made all the more interesting in the use of certain formal techniques. For example, the contents and even the word balloons in the first story in the issue are placed at 45 degree angles--tilted. It grid panels themselves are standard squares and rectangles, making the read crawl up or down a panel to read it. It really puts us into the head-space of the character Spot, who has a crush on the checkout girl at a supermarket. The page where he "talks" to her through the logos of assorted products and is "answered" in the form of receipts is funny and clever, one of many visually striking things about this section. Above all else, Madden-Connor's line here is clean, with the occasional thicker line used for emphasis.

The story segues into Madden-Connor's mynah alter-ego going to the same store and meeting the same girl, with a very different outcome that appears to bleed into the sort of surreal imagery of the first imagery. Instead, we stop right in the middle to reveal that Madden-Connor is in fact showing Spot this very story in his sketchbook, and goes on to tell a story about what turns out to be the checkout girl trying to find if she's actually related to a discredited scientist. Before we reach the answer, Spot changes trains (not really wanting to talk to Madden-Connor) and sees the girl again, contemplating whether or not he should wake her up on her train. This issue is remarkably well-designed and executed, and has many moments of quiet humor. His character design was simple but striking, and his use of gesture was much more sophisticated in this issue. I see Madden-Connor as an artist who perhaps needs to pare his line down even more, because his ideas really shine when his pages have room to breathe and make use of white space. If these comics are his debut, then it's clear he has a bright future ahead of him. I would love to see him really address a particular feeling or emotion in his next comic and build his ambitious framework around exploring that idea. The emotional exploration he makes in the first two issues is a cursory one, even as Madden-Connor concentrates on a motif or theme from an intellectual standpoint. It will be interesting to see him really flesh out human emotion in future issues.

WATER FLIES, by Renee French. No one draws creepy better than Renee French, who is especially good at turning something that seems cute at first into something enormously unsettling. In a matter of just a couple of pages, French introduces us to a humanoid who loves feeding carnivorous water flies outside his aquatic home. Fascinated by their lives, the person can't resist trying to interact with them under water in their natural habitat. This of course leads to disaster in ways that could not be foreseen; suffice it to say that the flies were much more intelligent than the person suspected--and quite malevolent. The comic was drawn in French's simplified (for her) art style; spare but still possessing a certain lushness and playfulness. There's a final punchline in the comic that reveals the sort of food that the flies really wanted that is a perfect summation of French's macabre sense of humor.

THE RUMOR, THE DIVIDE and PIE, by Falynn Koch. Koch certainly has great chops as a cartoonist, but these minis feel more like something one would see in a sketchbook than fully-formed ideas. THE DIVIDE is a very cleverly presented short mini about the skies opening up and separating a couple and them finding a way to get back together. PIE is about an interloper winning a pie-making contest and the blowback she gets from the other jealous participants. THE RUMOR is an intricately design mini about how rumor solidifies to become fact in the minds of many after it's spread around enough times. PIE and THE DIVIDE are nicely designed and presented but fairly forgettable. THE RUMOR is extremely intricately assembled with expressive and striking character design and a clever concept as the rumor is spread from place to place in a house. The little pouch the comic comes in looks silkscreened and is certainly striking, but the contents are no less painstakingly drawn. It seems clear that Koch is a developing talent trying different avenues to find her voice as an artist. THE RUMOR shows that she has some ambition and is trying to find the best way to harness it. She's someone to keep an eye on.

WHY DID I PUT THIS TOWN ON MY FACE?, by Matt Weigle. Weigle, another of the Partyka artists, draws comics that are funny and slightly unsettling. This is a collection of short stories that appeared in various anthologies, and there are some clever gag strips here. "A Story" uses a static visual grid (with a minor change in one panel) to deliver a gag; it's a nice introduction to his brand of humor. Weigle often combines a conceptual punchline or twist with the most scatological of situations; most of his stories also tend to center around the passage of time as a key component of the set-up. "The Salt Lick" has a grim and visceral punchline to the concept of someone putting up a lure for deer, eventually leading them right into a butcher shop. "The Omega Dome" takes us from an apocalyptic War of the Worlds scenario to a farting contest to determine world supremacy--except that it's a meta-commentary on fart jokes. "Your Career Is Not Working Out Like What You Had Planned" shows us the unfortunate but predictable deaths of three people in particular professions--and the out-of-left field death of a fourth in a home run of a punchline. There's a restless playfulness in Weigle's work as he balances intellectual, aesthetic and humorous concerns. While his line his completely different, his work reminds me a bit of John Kerschbaum's in its nastiness, occasional obliqueness and willingness to go to silly extremes to get across a punchline. He's certainly an artist deserving of wider recognition.

SWEETHEART COMICS #1-3, by Austin English. These comics feature the sort of memory strips and unusually skewed stories of growing up that English does in his WINDY CORNER MAGAZINE. It's unclear which (if any) of these anecdotes is supposed to be autobiographical (other than some being from first-person perspective), but that information isn't really pertinent. The strips are less about events than they are feelings about these events. Sometimes those feelings are direct and obvious, like "I was happy to be a part of it", but in others it's as though he's trying to get record the experience of deja vu'. His art is extremely crude but has an immediacy to it that manages to capture those thoughts and feelings. There's also a sense of distortion to his figures (and his comics are dominated by figures as opposed to a sense of place) that's both disorienting and warm.

I missed the idiosyncratic use of color that's a hallmark of his WINDY CORNER strips. That changed a bit with the standout issue of the bunch, #3. His account of someone named Laurie and her troubled relationships, along with the story "Joel and Me", about a dialogue with and eventual surrender to one's own inner darkness, were both notable in the way he used black. His line got much thicker and as a result his figures were more solid in his panel design; they "held space" better than thinner-lined figures that blurred into the rest of the panel. That was true of issue #2 as well; the first story where we meet Austin's friends has a number of appealingly chunky figures. I didn't like the single panel-per-page set-up in #2 because it hurt the intimacy that English seemed to be driving at. The way he layered panels in unusual way in #3 added to that sense of immediacy. I like the way that English is constantly pushing himself in an effort to create clearer lines of expression and the way he balances editing and assembling a magazine with his own development as an artist.

CURIO CABINET #3, by JB. This was a comic I had heard about but not yet read until I picked up a copy at SPX. This is a collection of densely rendered but cartoony strips with a surreal slant. The first strip, "Human Again" details the day spent by a sentient hatchet that tries to commit suicide over the love of an anthropomorphic teapot by jumping off a building. The ax accidentally kill a bystander when it reaches bottom and winds up in lockup--in this case, a tool shed. Another strip details the horror felt by a man on a car ride in the desert with a friend as time fractures. One man is swatted out of the car by the end of god (in the form of a giant dog's paw) and the other repeatedly experiences this before managing to call some confused policemen. Another story finds a dinosaur summoned by a bagpipe player that winds up melting a field of soldiers with its sonic breath.

The stories are silent and have the feeling of dream logic combined with a certain well-defined set of personal symbols and characters. Each story has its own internal logic as JB isn't interested in "explaining" these images; they really speak for themselves. Indeed, one of the chief virtues of his comic is the clarity of JB's storytelling. We may be asked to swallow weird premises (like the metaphorically sentient ax) or accept bizarre endings (like godlike dogs watching over the world), but the way the story flows is crystal clear. JB actually uses a fairly naturalistic approach to character design, with his dense pencil work giving each panel and drawing a certain heft. His work reminds me a little of Eric Haven's, in that genre conventions, non sequiturs, oblique symbology random outbursts of violence and blunt moments of humor all blend together in take-it-or-leave-it fashion. It's the very definition of "cult comic".

WIZZYWIG #1.5, by Ed Piskor. This is a dense, 32-page preview of the second volume of Piskor's story about a composite of early computer hackers. As in the first volume, Piskor uses a variety of narrative techniques to keep the reader off-balance. He uses flashbacks, an omniscient narrator, a friend of the main character broadcasting on his own radio show, immersive action with no narration, talking heads and more. It's clear that Piskor absorbed a lot of lessons from working with Harvey Pekar in that he goes to great lengths to provide visual variety on his pages for a story that's mostly just people sitting around and talking. With his slightly exaggerated character design (ao many of his characters are gloriously ugly) and grab-back of narrative techniques, a potentially static subject becomes dynamic in Piskor's hands. I'm eager to see the rest of volume 2 when it arrives.

INFANDUM! #3, by Molly Lawless. This 8 page, 8 1/2 x 11 comic is more of the same from Lawless--which is a very good thing. There are more tales from baseball's often inglorious past, more stories about her sometimes dubious exploits as a long-distance runner, and more cheerfully disdainful advice and commentary on relationships. As always, her baseball strips are her best comics, a smooth combination of diligent research and irreverence. One of the strips is about Roger Connor, baseball's career home run record-holder prior to Babe Ruth--a record that no one knew or cared about until Ruth made home runs popular. It's a strip as much about the stats geekery surrounding baseball as it is about Connor himself. Another strip, about Wally Pipp, the man Lou Gehrig legendarily replaced in the Yankees lineup, is told from Gehrig's point of view and is both charming and witty.

Lawless packs a lot of detail into her pages, and each one is designed rather oddly. Her panels are of irregulas size and shape, word baloons and captions spill out of her grid, and her figures are both rendered with great detail and cartoonily expressive. Her pages wobble but seldom break, as the reader is whipped from panel to panel. Lawless is skilled at keeping the reader's eye on task in the way she places captions and word balloons, making each panel and page easy to follow. It doesn't hurt that she balances anecdotes with bon mots and assorted smart-ass remarks in support of her art. Lawless makes clutter work for her, and in fact her more visually cluttered pages are more fun to look at than her cleaner, simpler pages.

Seduction of the Pattern: Sublife #1

Rob reviews the first issue of John Pham's new series from Fantagraphics, SUBLIFE.

The first issue of SUBLIFE was something I had been looking forward to ever since John Pham stopped serializing his "221 Sycamore St" story in the pages of MOME. Pham is an interesting young artist working through his influences to create his own voice. His first series, EPOXY, contained several serialized stories, some of which veered into genre. His aesthetic can best be described as somewhere between video games (especially classic 80s games) and Chris Ware's diagrammatic approach to comics. There are other more superficial similarities to Ware in Pham's work. For example, he documents the minutiae of quotidian despair, the fruitless longing for meaning and connection, and the ways people inevitably sabotage their own lives. The two artists also share a similarly bleak sense of humor; the sense of distance each artist creates can sometimes mask exactly how absurd and sharp their wits cut on the page.

At a deeper level, Pham's approach to composition seems similar to Ware's in that both seem to look at each page as both a single, cohesive unit (or diagram) and also a series of diagrams/panels. Pham's pages combine that diagrammatic/8-bit feel with the immersive quality of video games, making reading each page beautiful to look at apart from their role in creating the narrative. Where Pham really diverges is in his character design. He uses an extremely thin line and likes to draw lanky, almost elongated characters. The faces of his characters are simple & iconic yet distinctive. Probably the biggest key in creating his world is his use of color. Pham's palette is mostly combined to pastel hues: coral, peach, and soft blues. When the character Phineas MacDonald is introduced later in the book, his bright orange hoodie draws the reader's eye to him and lets one know that this is a pivotal character.

There are several different story threads in this issue. Some of them connect explicitly, like the lives of the people renting a house. There are also thematic and possibly narrative connections between that storyline (first seen in MOME) a brief vignette about a cat escaping from a pack of wild dogs (but not without incident) and the story of two white supremacist brothers taking in their nephew. In addition, Pham also takes us through "sub life", a series of small stories concerning two astronauts lost in deep space. Their spacecraft is shaped like a submarine (hence the pun), and their story concerns the sense of being lost in every sense of the word. The "Deep Space" is a sort of encapsulation of the character types one finds in SUBLIFE: those desperate to connect with others and those who see the world conspiring against them.

The first part of the book focuses on the events of a single day, retold from the point of view of Mildred (a student), Vrej (a worker at a deli), Hubie (a put-upon teacher at a local Catholic school) and Terence (the son of the house's owner who always wears a sheet over his head). The characters desperate to connect (Vrej, Mildred Lee, Phineas) are hindered by their own obliviousness to the world around them. Mildred is a college student who is unhinged by exhaustion and a general inability to cope. Vrej is a well-meaning dunderhead who doesn't understand why he's alone. Hubie is a martyr who allows himself to be tortured by his students. Terence does not speak and very much lives in his own head and dreams. Each character's own narrative is intertwined with that of the others, yet they either rush past each other or communicate superficially. As much as they hate their own lives, they are slaves to their own patterns of behavior.

The second half of the issue catches up with the housemates a couple of years later. In Mildred's case, she's much more social and gregarious, but still teetering on the edge of desperation. Like many of the book's other characters, she is obsessed with dreams. We are also introduced to Uncle's A___ and B___, two white supremacists living in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. Uncle A___, like Hubie, imagines himself to be the target of a vast racial conspiracy against him. His brother doesn't talk much, but one senses he's the sort who prefers swift violence to language. When Phineas comes to stay with them after a dust-up with his mother, it's made clear that the brothers are pretty much ignored by the rest of the family for their general misanthropy. Pham only starts to dip into how Phineas winds up relating to his uncles, and how Uncle A___ views Phineas' visit as a chance to reestablish himself with his family. His uncles are depicted as simultaneously despicable and pathetic, desperate for a different kind of world; the reader almost has sympathy for them.

There's a lot going on in this ambitious first volume. Every page seems to find Pham trying to solve some kind of storytelling challenge with an unusual visual technique, like Phineas meeting some neighborhood kids but the reader only seeing the shadows of the children. The most important character in the book is the city of Los Angeles itself. SUBLIFE feels in some ways as a sort of companion piece to Gilbert Hernandez' LOVE AND ROCKETS X: a portrait of a city in constant flux, filled with tension, illusion, drama and drifting. The cover image of Los Angeles about to fall off the earth, speaks to the quiet dread that pervades the book, staunched only by dreams and self-delusion. I'm eager to see how the story evolves in the next volume.

The Examined Life: Alan's War

Rob reviews the translated edition of Emmanuel Guibert's ALAN'S WAR, his adaptation of the memories and stories of Alan Cope (First Second).

ALAN'S WAR is a triumph, though not necessarily for its surface qualities. As Tom Spurgeon noted in his review, this isn't really a World II book or even a typical biography. I saw it as a personal manifesto of sorts, a conversion narrative. Religious conversion narratives have certain common characteristics no matter the belief, and one of the cornerstones is that the narrative must be told and retold. Alan Cope, the subject of this book, went through a process of deconversion from standard religious practice but took many years to become "reborn", in his own words. The flashpoint of that rebirth was his dawning understanding that personal relationships were not only the foundations of life's meaning, but that he himself had held the key all along to his happiness. That key was personified in the way Cope had the uncanny ability to befriend so many different kinds of people. That ability was due in no small part to Cope's natural ability as a storyteller, someone that people wanted to talk to. His ability to spin interesting anecdotes was his way of applying flint to steel, sparking conversation that might lead to friendship.

Indeed, near the end of his life, that's precisely how Cope became friends with the artist Emmanuel Guibert. A chance meeting led to Cope regaling Guibert with a few stories, and Cope immediately realized what he had on his hands. Cope had spent his later years focusing on his memories, which were no doubt shaped by his new outlook on life. Guibert met Cope on an island off France and learned that Cope was an American who had left his country for good nearly fifty years earlier. Guibert offered to illustrate Cope's memories of World War II and the two men became close friends. There's a sense in which one can sense how much Cope loved telling his story because he was telling it to his friend. It's obvious that Cope regrets what he considers years of lost opportunities to stay close to many of his friends. That sadness pervades the last section of the book, along with anger towards older belief systems that he now views as hindrances. That sadness is tempered by the sense that Cope is finally getting it right with Guibert, giving even the most downbeat of sections a certain bounce.

Guibert's art in this book is simple but stunning. Certain sequences have a level of detail that's breathtaking, while much of his figure work is iconic but expressive. Guibert flips back and forth from pages with no backgrounds (even when climbing a mountain, which was a stark and interesting choice) to panoramic scenes of nature. The book has a washed-out appearance, perhaps mimicking an old book of photographs. That washed-out appearance is literal, this film clip demonstrates his technique. Using that waterjet device to etch the paper with an impression and applying ink to make images appear seemingly out of nowhere is an apt description of what Cope does.

Cope's skill as a storyteller does not lie in the ability to render the quotidian poignant. Rather, it's his ability to bring others to vivid life in his recollections that makes each tangent and detour so compulsively readable. He was naturally drawn to outsiders, individualists, iconoclasts and artists. Even when he was a fundamentalist Christian, he couldn't help but want to be around people who had a certain sensitivity. While they would certainly wind up having a significant influence on his beliefs, the mere fact that he was drawn to them showed that he wanted his beliefs to be challenged. The setting of war, one where an individual is supposed to mold one's identity in the image of his country, was a sharp contrast to the memories that were important to Cope. The way he disobeyed orders and made friends with a local German family and the warm affection he felt toward them was one of the most striking sequences in the book.

One thing that is unspoken but still felt was the way Cope evolved the further he got away from the U.S. and spent time abroad--both in distance and time. The kind of people he met and interacted with, especially as he got away from the army, reflected Cope's own growth and interests. He left America ostensibly because of what he felt was the pernicious influence of fundamentalism and a shallowness of thinking. While this conclusion was certainly valid, leaving America would seem to have concretized his own initial transformation. Abandoning his old country was a boldly symbolic way of abandoning a way of thinking and living that he had come to hate in himself, and this is what America became to him.

Two future volumes are planned, one about Cope's childhood in California and another about the friendship between Cope and Guibert. It's clear that these books are true labors of love for Guibert. The responsibility and opportunity to record and immortalize the stories of his friend are something he obviously takes very seriously, but Guibert never forgets to let each page breathe. There's nothing ponderous about these books, which owes as much to the playfulness of Guibert's style as it does to the breeziness of Cope's storytelling style. A subtle and dry wit pervades every story, making Cope and Guibert perfect complements and collaborators. ALAN'S WAR is a powerful testament to the way memory shapes identity and vice-versa and the way
friendship enriches lives and creates meaning.

Off-Beat Genre: Mini-Comics

Rob concludes his look at unusual genre comics with several short reviews of minicomics. Included are NURSE NURSE #3 by Katie Skelly, SATISFACTORY COMICS #8 by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe, THE NATURAL WORLD #1 by Damien Jay, MOTRO #1 by Ulises Farinas, and three comics by Jarrett B. Williams.

Minicomics have the freedom to take genre ideas in some unusual directions. Each of the artists discussed in this article looks at science-fiction, fantasy, heroic epics, and manga-inspired adventure in different ways to different effects.

NURSE NURSE #3, by Katie Skelly. The third issue of Skelly's psychedelic sci-fi series starring a nurse's adventures in outer space was especially enjoyable. The action in this issue centered around the weird goo emitted from a certain kind of butterfly infecting Nurse Gemma's ship, causing a love-induced short circuit. A pair of sharply-designed pirates then infiltrate her ship, one of them a half-human/half-panda. This series is dominated by Skelly's unusual stylistic choices, both in terms of character design and page design. There are all sorts of unusual angles, characters in odd poses and flourishes that dominate whole pages, like Gemma sliding through a tube. Skelly's command over her line and the world she's created grows issue by issue, immersing the reader into a freaky and fabulous environment. Her use of body language, gesture and character interaction carries the story, with just enough background details to impart information without detracting from the real action. My only complaint is that each issue is too short (18 pages); I sense that the story will really cohere once it's collected.

SATISFACTORY COMICS #8, by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe. The comics of Cates & Wenthe are best known for two things: the closeness of their collaboration and the self-imposed rules, limitations and formal boundaries they like to place on themselves when they are creating their comics. While the latest issue is no exception, the result is perhaps the most entertaining, organic effort I've seen from them yet. The format, unsurprisingly, is quite clever: each page is presented as a separate postcard, bound by a wrap-around strip of paper. The back of each postcard/page reveals the particular constraints placed upon them (some of them revealed in highly specialized comics jargon) and which of their colleagues suggested the constraints.

The story, "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible", is an extremely clever fantasy story about a young wizard's apprentice sent to procure a map from a particular mapmaker. The apprentice winds up having all sorts of unexpected adventures against a set of opponents he winds up feeling some sympathy for. While Cates & Wenthe manage to tell a dense, satisfying story in just ten pages, they leave the ending quite open for further adventures. Much like Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's DUNGEON, I found myself both amused by certain formal tricks on the page and the slight tweaking of the genre, but also genuinely wrapped up in the story itself. As for those constraints, they ranged from style mimicking of Steve Ditko or Peter Bagge to drawing a page without a panel grid. My favorite, where references to Marcel Duchamp were required, was a stunning action sequence done in the style of Duchamp's famous "Nude Descending A Staircase" painting. The comic was done in full color, which greatly flattered the pencils and made each page pop. Hopefully we'll be seeing more of these characters from this art duo.

THE NATURAL WORLD #1, by Damien Jay. Jay is one of the most underrated artists in comics. His minis are consistently beautiful and entertaining art objects. Jay's character design is clever and expressive, and this comic is no exception. This purports to be the first issue of a series, and it's set in some generic medieval village where a pious village elder has hired a crew to completely remove a huge and supposedly evil thicket inhabited by a witch. Meanwhile, the elder's mentally deficient brother is out hunting mushrooms when he is startled by something and runs to tell his brother, who happens to be philandering with a local woman. The issue ends with an image that indicates things aren't quite what they seem.

Jay is quite leisurely in parceling out plot points in this issue, concentrating on character. He has a marvelous looseness to his line reminiscent of Jules Feiffer in this issue. The characters are all simple, sharp angles punctuated by a line here or there to indicate motion or emotion. There's a flow to this comic that made it a breezy read even as it was mostly just characters talking to each other. That's a tribute to Jay's skill in depicting expression and gesture, even with fairly simplified, iconic character designs. Like many of the other minis reviewed in this article, I only wish another issue would arrive shortly.

MOTRO #1, by Ulises Farinas. MK Reed recommended this comic to me, and it's a pretty delightful mix of Conan-style heroic fantasy and psychedelia. MOTRO can be found at the act-i-vate.com website, but Farinas gives the reader their money's worth with the intricate design of this comic. The cut-out cover, the string binding it and the clever use of hidden color immediately drew my eye. This issue discusses the fate of a boy deemed to be Motro, the warrior who would end winter. We see him go through a variety of trials that turns into an encounter with a Yellow Submarine-inspired character named the Master of Fate.

Farinas merges bigfoot character design, a very thin line, a touch of psychedelia with a sharp use of black and white contrasts. The result is a comic that is too weird to take at face value, yet tells an entirely coherent, straightforward story. It's by far the most eccentric of the comics reviewed in this article, moreso even than Skelly's comics. His aesthetic is certainly in the "take-it-or-leave-it" realm occupied by folks like Brian Chippendale and Gary Panter (though in a very different way), and for some a little might go a long way. Overall, I found this comic charming and funny, enjoying it more with each subsequent reading.

SUPER PRO K.O.!, ACTION FRIENDS, and EBALL & CHADWICK by Jarrett B. Williams. These are all very short (8-10 pages) minicomics that show off Williams' skill in character design and interaction. SUPER PRO K.O.! introduces us to a mixed martial arts fighter's apprentice with a lot of potential; ACTION FRIENDS is about a group of animal commandos who rain death on a group of developers; and EBALL & CHADWICK is a wordless tale of two creatures in a forest. Williams' style reminds me a bit of Brandon Graham, mixing manga and graffiti stylizations into pages filled with unusual composition and design choices. Williams loves using weird angles, unusual grid construction and going big and loud on his pages. The weakest of the three comics was ACTION FRIENDS, written by a different person; the gags here were all sort of obvious. The strongest was the very strange EBALL & CHADWICK, a short story following the title characters (a little walking puff of flame and a one-eyed horned creature) on a journey with a group of anthropomorphic, singing leaves. The slickness of Williams' line was a perfect match for the simplicity of his character design. It's difficult to say much more given the shortness of these comics, but he certainly has a lot of potential as a storyteller and illustrator.

Autobio Minicomics

Rob reviews a number of autobiographical comics. Included are minis by Liz Baillie, James McShane, Vanessa Davis, Laura Park, Raina Telgemeier, Marion Vitus, Sarah Glidden, Alec Longstreth, Julia Wertz, and Matt Hawkins.


One joy of attending SPX is finding the latest issues of autobiographical minicomics series, as well as discovering new and interesting takes on the subject.

9/27/08, by James McShane. This was an interesting little brick of a comic; it was not so much printed as constructed, its pages punched out. Its dimensions are 4" x 2.5" by 1" with a silkscreened cover. Apart from its nature as an art object, the book itself follows an interesting formal concept: a diary comic where one draws what one has done every ten minutes. The day begins at 7:40am as his partner wakes him up and proceeds from there, detailing the most minute details of daily life in rapid-fire fashion. This approach has as much to do with animation as it does with comics, because with McShane's stripped-down approach, the reader is not meant to linger on any particular image for too long.

McShane noticeably tells the story almost entirely with pictures, avoiding dialogue in most of his panels. I'm guessing that's partly a function of not being able to remember everything that was said and only focusing on bits of verbiage that would make the diary a little easier to understand. It's interesting that even in a comic that purports to report on the details of a day, there's still a lot of room for variation and interpretation on the part of the artist. Of course, one also has to account for the fact that drawing his log was part of this day--a snake eating its own tail, in a sense. I'm not sure I'd want to read another comic like this; this is an experiment that would quickly yield diminishing returns, but I admire the way McShane devoted himself to it for a day.

SING ALONG FOREVER, by Liz Baillie. It's always interesting to read an autobiographical comic by an artist who rarely makes them, and why they would choose to reveal themselves. In Baillie's case, it was simple: she decided to create an account of traveling to a music festival with a friend (fellow artist Robin Enrico) in order to meet her favorite band (the Bouncing Souls), see them play and take a photo with them. The comic, as she notes on the cover, is a "love letter" to the band, something that she describes as "messy, sloppy [and] gushing words of pure devotion", something that's "uncomfortably sincere".

The framework of this comic was a sort of cousin to what Jesse Reklaw is doing in his COUCH TAG series. She's revealing portions of herself through a mediated source. In Reklaw's case, it was through accounts of all the cats his family owned or the story of a particular friendship. In Baillie's case, it's the way the band became not just an obsession, but a security blanket of sorts. From the first song she heard, she felt like she was understood, that her pain was not random, and that she could find ways to put it to use. One reason why artists create is to externalize their emotions in a way they can't quite do otherwise, and Baillie's comics are filled with characters bursting with emotions they can't quite understand who express them in often inappropriate ways.

The love letter approach, while indeed sloppy, led to some delightfully spontaneous, expressive art. Baillie carefully crafted the comic to include flashbacks as to how and why the band became important to her, but the actual events of the day she met the band went beyond her expectations. As she met the band, got sketches, got a photo and watched them play from backstage by their invitation, one could sense the sheer bliss she was experiencing. She met her heroes, men she had never met but who in a sense had saved her life, and they turned out to be superheroes. Baillie had the rare experience of interacting on an intimate level with that which was by its very nature larger-than-life in her own eyes. As an artist, she had to capture these rare feelings, feelings that couldn't entirely be captured in a coherent fashion. A little sloppiness was part of the process.

SPANIEL RAGE 2008, by Vanessa Davis. Davis is probably my favorite diarist in comics and this recent minicomics collection shows that she's only gotten better. Davis has organically created a formula for her comics that plays to her strengths. Her comics are intimate without being overly confessional. They have a warmth, immediacy and spontaneity while still clearly being carefully composed. They are revealing of neurosis and worry without being pathetic. Davis' comics are funny without devolving into shtick. This volume details the ups and downs of being in a relationship without lapsing into being overly cute or sentimental. I especially enjoyed the way she and her boyfriend tease each other about various subjects, and the way she depicted the way she veered between sheer bliss and insecurity. It was interesting to see her connect her desirability as a partner with her productivity as an artist.

The key to Davis' success is providing the illusion of intimacy to the reader. The reality is that by withholding the context of the events she depicts, she actually creates distance between herself and the reader. As a result as that safety net of sorts, this allows her to talk about deeper feelings. That sense of intimacy and immediacy is further aided by the way she designs her pages--there are rarely grids or panels, yet the reader never feels lost. Her comics owe as much to the classic New Yorker cartoonists or Jules Feiffer as they do modern alternative comics. About the only drawback to her spontaneous style in this mini is her lettering. It's clear that she didn't always measure out word balloons properly for certain anecdotes, and some words spill out of the balloons. I imagine that will be corrected for the eventual larger collection of these strips.

DO NOT DISTURB MY WAKING DREAM #2, by Laura Park. Park was probably my favorite discovery in 2008, an artist with fully-formed chops who is finding her way around sequential storytelling. Her comics are a great companion piece to those of Vanessa Davis and Julia Wertz, with each artist simultaneously revealing intimate details while keeping the reader at a distance. The only problem with this mini is that the reader doesn't get to experience the sumptuous way she employs color on her flickr page for these strips. The grayscaled strips in this mini look a bit muddy in comparison.

The subtext of these strips details Park's social anxiety. Like many cartoonists, she's shy and solitary by nature, and these strips provide a window into the comfort she feels being along against her urge to be with others. "Good Time Gal About Town" crystalizes these feelings, as she tells herself to go to a nearby party but can't quite do it, telling herself "Probly wouldn't have had fun". That said, these strips really aren't about misery, but rather simple joys. "The Bestest Damn Hobo What Ever Was" is a delightful strip about an especially busy and accomplished day as she shot around Chicago on her bike. The final, contented image of Park lying in a chair with her sore feet propped up was a particular pleasure to look at.

Park is a skilled draftsman who uses a spontaneous approach to her line. The result is a series of pages that are beautiful to look at with simple, expressive figures. The way Park draws her own facial expressions on her lumpy self-caricature is this book's biggest draw. Her self-caricature captures her energy, her curiosity, her urge to create and the way she delights in the world around her. The way she frames each anecdote into structured grids (often telling the same story more than once) speaks to both wanting to make these anecdotes readable to an outsider and that she constantly thinks about her world in comics terms. Hopefully some wise publisher will publish a collection of her strips in full color. In the meantime, Park will have a story in an upcoming issue of MOME, and I'm delighted to see that she'll soon be getting wider recognition.

OUTREACH, by Raina Telgemeier. Telgemeier got her start doing minicomics, so it was nice to see her first such effort in several years after laboring over four Baby Sitters Club adaptations. This short mini is autobiographical, detailing anecdotes from conventions and classes she's taught to children. Her line, as always, is enormously appealing and spare. Telgemeier is an artist who really knows how to play to her strengths: gesture, expression and depicting energy and enthusiasm (especially from children). I could have read a book full of these modest, easygoing strips. I've read plenty of comics much like this one, but it's Telgemeier's distillation of both the joys and frustrations of working with children that make it such a pleasant read. There's a rhythm to these strips that's framed by the disciplined simplicity of Telgemeier's line, effortlessly setting up punchlines with visuals rather than gag lines. Telgemeier's own autobiographical book, SMILE, will be published by Scholastic in a couple of years, and I expect that to be the best work of her brief but productive career.

NO IN-BETWEEN #7-9, by Marion Vitus. Vitus has been working on this rite-of-passage/travelogue series for some time now, and it's clear that she's built up quite a bit of momentum with it now that she's serializing it on the web. The latest collection of issues stands alone quite nicely, as we see her in Austria, visiting the relatives of her ex-boyfriend--though they aren't aware that they've broken up. This series is about breaking out of one's shell, taking risks, confronting fears and experiencing intense highs and lows. Vitus mixes a naturalistic and expressive styles interchangeably, which sometimes makes for some awkward moments. Some of her figures have odd body proportions that change from panel to panel, for example. On the other hand, Vitus' more expressive drawings do a fine job of telling the story, especially in the way she draws faces. These comics have a compelling quality to them, mostly because of Vitus' narrative voice. That voice is of someone who had obviously been quieted by people in her life and was just starting to find ways to break out. That exploration of how tentative this process can be, of one step forward followed by three steps back, compels the reader to want more. Vitus' voice is self-deprecating without being self-pitying, which is a rare combination in autobiographical comics.

EIGHT DAYS OUT, by Sarah Glidden. Glidden is the artist behind the award-winning HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS minicomic that got picked up by Vertigo's new line of original graphic novels. I tend to think of her on the "writer that draws" end of the comics spectrum, as much of what she writes would be nearly as compelling without comics to go with them. It'll be interesting to see the end result of that comic, because I imagine Glidden's work will move more towards the middle of that art/text distinction as her line grows more confident. This mini is the perfect sort of comic to balance those interests, given the warmth and immediacy of the art. It's a travelogue (which seems to be Glidden's go-to subject at the moment) about a trip she and her brother took across country from New York to Los Angeles.

It's funny that she and her brother chose to listen to podcasts of "This American Life", because her own storytelling style is not unlike a feature on that show. Her narrative voice has a gentle, warm, probing wit. She looks at her world with eyes wide open and openly seeks out new experiences and sights. That openness translates well to comics, as the reader feels like they are traveling with her, listening to her tell a story. The sketchy quality of her art has a certain immediate power to it, but she has difficulty getting across the beauty of her surroundings with some of her less detailed drawings. It's clear that experiencing the natural beauty of the American southwest had a profound impact on her, one that she wanted to share with her audience, but this venue was not quite the right one. It really required the use of full color and/or an elaborate series of visual tricks that aren't quite in her arsenal to date. At eighty pages, Glidden does serve up a meaty account of her trip that still manages to reveal little in the way of personal detail but much in our understanding of how she perceives the world. Glidden is already a talent to watch and someone who should only improve as she continues to evolve as an artist.

2007 PHASE 7 SUMMER SUPPLEMENT, by Alec Longstreth. The most enthusiastic artist on artist cranked out an attractive-looking story as a 24-hour comic, no less. Longstreth enjoys writing about the craft of creating comics, and time management in particular. This comic was a sort of meta-commentary on time management, since it's all about his decision to become a fellow at the quite isolated Center for Cartoon Studies in a small Vermont town. Longstreth throws in nice-looking splash pages, a number of fairly detailed drawings, diagrams, caricatures of over a dozen people and more in this high-energy mini. It's a comic about wanting to draw comics, and the purity of Longstreth's enthusiasm for the form has always been one of his biggest strengths as an artist. The simplicity of his line has always made his work appealing if not always compelling. When his "Basewood" serial is done, that will most likely his best early work, and I sense that he's best suited for clever genre-related work with occasional pit-stops and detours into autobio and other experiments.

BEFORE THE FART PARTY and THE LEGEND OF REBOB MOUNTAIN, by Julia Wertz. I'd describe Wertz as another "writer who draws", only unlike Sarah Glidden, Wertz is rambunctious, all over the place and sloppy. She mixes her potent sense of humor with a healthy dose of anger, bitterness and self-deprecation. Wertzpretty much pours all of her feelings on the page, and these two comics show the results at different points in her career. BEFORE THE FART PARTY contains the strips she did prior to launching the webcomic that has attracted a fairly substantial audience. It's an interesting mini, as Wertz is trying to find a voice both as writer and artist. She actually started off trying a more naturalistic style for her autobio strips, but it was clear that she was best suited for a more cartoony, almost bigfoot, style. She very quickly honed her chops as a comedic writer even before settling on a style of art that worked for her, as was evident in strips like "Hospital 1982-2004" (wherein she discusses her history of falling down and her desire to give birth to kittens), "First/Last Date" and the hilarious "Robot Vs Snowman" (a pitched battle between her left and right brain selves that leaves both dead--this was her application strip to CCS!).

REBOB MOUNTAIN is not a comic, but rather an illustrated story from Wertz's childhood. There are a few interesting uses of misdirection here, as we expect an irreverent story from her early life (which had many unusual stories attached to it), but instead we get a fairly sober meditation on how & why children attach meaning to certain events. In this case, the unthinkable death of a friend of theirs from cancer was shifted into their ongoing angst about the creatures they thought lived at the top of the mountain near their house. It's about the rituals children use to ward off the unexplained, about the feeling of being kept in the dark by adults and wondering about how to gain access to the world's real secrets. This mini is an interesting fit with the rest of Wertz's work, since one can't fully pigeonhole her. Most of her work is funny, but it also has a diary strip quality to it, as well as days where it's more a straight rant than a punchline. Still other days are expressions of pure joy, once again with no punchline. Wertz took a fairly common internet phenomenon and has carved out a unique identity for herself.

UNLUCKY #3 & #4, by Matthew Hawkins and various artists. Hawkins does Harvey Pekar-style autobio collaborations with a variety of artists, focusing almost solely on stories about his own misfortunes or the very strange things he's seen. He has a raunchy, visceral wit as he zips back and forth in time for these short anecdotes. Issue #3 matches a story with scatological and broken-heart elements with Matthew Bernier's minimalist (almost symbolic) art, which fortunately blunted the gross-out factor of the story while playing up its humor. I thought Dave Savage's scrawled-out art for a story about the various weirdos he knew in school was another appropriate choice, looking as though it had been scribbled on someone's book cover. Hawkins' stories seem to go best with collaborators whose art is heavily stylized (which is why I thought Toby Craig's moody but naturalistic art was a bad fit), partly because Hawkins' writing has a certain deadpan quality to it no matter how weird the situation he describes. That matter-of-fact storytelling style is perhaps his greatest strength; he never oversells his premises but rather lets them play out with restraint on his end, allowing his artists to go hog wild. I'd like to see Hawkins illustrate one of his own stories--he's certainly got the chops to do so.

Connections and Disconnections: The Country Nurse

Rob reviews the third and final volume of Jeff Lemire's Essex County trilogy, THE COUNTRY NURSE (Top Shelf).

Jeff Lemire's beautifully expressive, scratchy art is at the heart of why his Essex County stories are so appealing. His blocky, squat character design is a perfect match for the sort of rural life he depicts. Essex County and its wide expanses is a character unto itself, as both caretaker and agent of isolation. Lemire's books are filled with characters in isolation, either by choice or bycircumstance. As the trilogy unfolded, we learned of hidden connections between the characters and the reasons behind much of the alienation. In volume 2 (GHOST STORIES), I thought Lemire gilded the lily a bit too much and didn't trust the readers enough to pick up on story points strictly through his visuals. The clues were pretty plainly laid out for the reader to interpret, and certain subsequent conversations seemed both out of place and hammering points home without much subtlety.

In THE COUNTRY NURSE, Lemire scales things back quite a bit, letting the reader make connections without him spelling things out until the very end of the book. It made for a much more satisfying read as Lemire cleverly told the story of how several generations of different families interacted with each other in significant ways while being unaware of their connections. The title character, named Anne was a catalyst in the lives of the LeBeuf family, forcing them to work past their regrets, alienation and self-loathing. At the same time, she found herself trying to work through her own feelings of disconnection from her son and grief over her dead husband. Anne is a caretaker, and sometimes that means tending to people who either don't want to be taken care of or don't have their own best interests at heart.

What she didn't know was the way her grandmother played a similar role for the patriarch of the LeBeuf family, long dead by the time this story was told. That flashback of her grandmother tending to a group of orphans after a tragedy was a moving one, as she had to learn how to forgive herself just to survive a series of hardships. That theme of learning to forgive one's own sins before one can reach out to loved ones is a central one in this story. Visually, the way Lemire weaves in and out of past and present, dropping thematic hints here and there (like young Lawrence Lebeuf being good at pond hockey presaging the greatness of later Lebeufs, Lawrence wearing a blanket looking like a cape much like his great-great grandson later would) and then shifting to shots of buildings or land that held significance made following each page quite compelling. Lemire also tied together a variety of threads with a crow that seemed to be watching all of our characters across time and even played a significant part in the past. The crow was a nice symbol of the ways in which we are connected, often in a manner we don't understand.

The Essex County books have won all sorts of recommendations for reading by teens. I think this makes a lot of sense. There is symbolism here that isn't too obtuse and themes that are fairly easy to pick out. There's often unspoken tension beneath the surface, but Lemire throws in plenty of clues and guides to understanding those conflicts. The books even have a sort of understated but epic sweep to them, raising questions and only answering them much later when connections are revealed. There's an immediacy to the scratchy quality of his art that makes a reader want to study each page and each panel. These books remind me a little of Chris Ware's work in the way they deal with surprising connections, human loneliness and the things we do to combat it. Lemire's work is not nearly as complex or graphically dense as Ware's and is certainly much less ambiguous, but both men have a way of depicting bleakness, hope and the minutiae of daily life that reveals deeper truths. At its heart, Lemire is telling a story about the way growing up in a rural environment fosters a certain sense of hardiness and distance, to be sure, but also a sense of interdependence and affection as well. Finding ways to integrate the two is at the heart of the trilogy and embodied by Anne the country nurse herself.