Under the Surface: Petey and Pussy

Rob reviews the riotous new book from John Kerschbaum, PETEY AND PUSSY (Fantagraphics).


I've extolled the virtues of John Kerschbaum's work from time to time in this column as one of the most underrated humorists working today. His work has never caught on widely in the comics world (though many children have seen his work in Nickelodeon Magazine, among other sources) for reasons that have never been entirely clear. Part of it may be that his character design is intentionally bland. They have a pleasant cartoonishness that belies the weirdness lurking in his strips. Another reason may be the way he suddenly injects violent and visceral scenes drawn in that same cozy style. Kerschbaum also jars his readers with punchlines that are not immediately obvious unless one follows the visual clues in his comics very closely. Kerschbaum is a gag mechanic of the first order, a total master of panel and page composition.
Above all else, Kerschbaum trades in deception, luring the reader in with one expectation and then brutally subverting that expectation repeatedly.

There's a lot going on in each of his pages. Kerschbaum wants to simultaneously achieve a number of goals with his characters Petey & Pussy. He wants to tell a story about the nasty things animals do to each other and themselves. He wants to set up gags on every page and have a funny drawing in every panel, but he wants these gags to build to a master punchline in each story. He uses repetition in unexpected ways for comedic effect. Kerschbaum's style of humor is at once enormously sophisticated, refined & complex as well as crude, scatological and slapstick--sometimes in the same panel. Petey and Pussy are most definitely animals, but they have the heads of balding middle-age men, talk like people and even get service at a bar. They are driven by instincts and lusts that are sometimes hard to distinguish from that of a person and sometimes shockingly animalistic. Petey the dog is very much a dog-as-person (always looking to get laid or drunk) while Pussy the cat is very much a cat: short-tempered, prissy and vicious.

Petey and Pussy have been around for quite some time in other formats, but this book is the first true sustained narrative that Kerschbaum's created. Keeping up a complex narrative in the face of the demand to have gags on every page obviously made this a challenge, but Kerschbaum was up to the task, imbuing each page with a sort of raw power that compelled the reader to keep turn pages even as they were flinching. The action in the book can be defined as the way that friendships and enmities serve to create the story's central structure. Pussy is trying to kill the mouse who taunts it by spelling "Loser" with its droppings in front of its hole but falls prey to the mouse's manipulations. Bernie the bird either wants to be freed or killed, and no one in the apartment is in any mood to grant him any favors. The senile, deaf owner of the pets dodders around, occasionally doing horrible things to the bird in an effort to "clean" it. The longest story revolves around Pussy dropping his eyeglasses into a sewer and the efforts he makes to get them back. The final gag requires a close reading but is well worth the effort.

The backup stories are not quite as strong or complex, but they certainly have their moments. The set-ups for both strips are a bit more conventional but the way Kerschbaum manages to escalate the ridiculousness (and violence) of each premise while at the same time subverting reader expectation is masterful. Kerschbaum loves creating verbal and visual puns as a sort of aside to the overarching narrative, a bonus on the way to larger jokes. What's interesting about his work is that his dialogue is all very literal and direct; the jokes he makes with words are often funny, but rarely complex. On the other hand, the warm and inviting nature of his art brings in any number of readers, but Kerschbaum is often apt to make the visual nature of his gags more obscure, demanding the audience figures it out using the verbal clues he's provided.

Without possessing a slick, exaggerated style, Kerschbaum create a world that favors neither word nor image. Instead, he creates a gestalt that must be apprehended on several different levels simultaneously. His work manages to evoke the violent anarchy of a Warner Brothers cartoon with a level of sophistication that can be found in a New Yorker strip. He doesn't rely on "funny pictures" or funny-looking characters to get across his punchlines; indeed, those funny-looking characters soon become funny in some unexpected ways. The drawings are not mere props for his verbal punchlines and rarely even serve a decorative purposes; they're there to quickly convey information, especially information that's not immediately obvious to the characters.

Every aspect of this book works to sell its gags, even down to its design. The dust cover flaps are "testimonials" by characters we'll meet inside, making reference to events unknown to the reader when they start the book. Jacob Covey, one of the top designers in comics, did the book's design, and it's enormously clever. In the inside front and back covers, look very carefully at what the mice are doing, for example. All told, this book is one of the best of the year to date and certainly the best humor-related publication. Hopefully it won't be the last book we see by Kerschbaum from Fantagraphics.

Start Anywhere: Best American Comics 2008

Rob reviews the latest volume in the Best American Comics series, edited by Lynda Barry, Matt Madden and Jessica Abel (Houghton Mifflin). (This review originally appeared at sequart.com)



As I've noted in my reviews of prior volumes of the Best American Comics series, the choices selected for inclusion reflect not only the tastes but the editorial missions of its guest editor. For Harvey Pekar in 2006, many of his choices leaned towards naturalistic stories and representations. For Chris Ware in 2007, he was interested in stories that showed its characters expressing the truth of their desires. He cleverly and painstakingly edited it such that each story in some way connected to or commented on the stories around it. The experience started with the ways children looked at the world and went from teens to adults, then switched from the ways we communicate to the ways in which we try to obtain our desires. In each (unlabeled) subsection of the anthology, he would be careful to juxtapose stories with similar themes that had wildly different graphic approaches. It was a formalist editing experiment from comics' supreme formalist that was very much a love letter to comics and its capacity to express emotion, a capacity that obviously means everything to Ware as both cartoonist and editor.

The series' permanent editorship has passed from Anne Elizabeth Moore to the cartoonists Jessica Abel & Matt Madden. It's an interesting and inspired choice, given their roots as DIY minicomics artists to their current station as having published several books. It also fits their side career as educators, with every one of these volumes a potential text. Still, the most important component of this series is the guest editor, and it was thrilling to hear that Lynda Barry was this year's editor. A longtime fixture in the alt-weekly world, she's made a huge career comeback of sorts in 2008. After being unable to land a book deal, she found a perfect home with Drawn & Quarterly and published WHAT IT IS, my current pick for book of the year. She'll also have a new collection of her ERNIE POOK strips published by D&Q.

It's interesting to compare Barry's role as editor to her role as an educator. WHAT IT IS is an extension of her creativity workshops, where she helps people avoid the Two Questions: "Is this good?" and "Does this suck?" As editor, she gets to spend time picking out nothing but what seems "good" to her. In her introduction, presented in a comic strip/collage format not unlike WHAT IT IS, she talks about the phenomenology of looking at comics. She discusses looking at a "dirty" strip as a child and not understanding the "real" punchline, but instead taking a different meaning from it. Barry also talks about how much Bil Keane's THE FAMILY CIRCUS meant to her as a child, as a gateway into this ordered world she wished she could live in. Sometimes we don't understand why we make certain connections to certain kinds of art; we only know that it is important to us. Barry chose the selections in much the same way: she thought they were Good, and encouraged each reader to create their own experience reading the book. She encouraged them to start reading anywhere.

Obviously, this was a vastly different tact than Ware's, and yet this volume is not entirely dissimilar in terms of the way works are arranged and the ways in which they comment on each other. There are some more jarring transition points, to be sure, but one can see Barry reacting to certain aspects of excerpted work and reprinting those key pages. She'd then follow that up with a completely different kind of story that shared some aspect of the same theme. Of course, these connections are entirely accidental, given that the stories are printed in alphabetical order by author. As Barry suggested, the reader makes connections that aren't necessarily really there, but the mere act of putting one comic next to another and the parts of them that are excerpted creates new connections that must be sorted out.

As one might expect, the choices here are rather eclectic, and are taken from a number of different sources. As befits an artist with such a long history in independent/alternative weeklies, there are strips here from Derf, Kaz, Matt Groening, and Alison Bechdel. A number of stories are reprinted straight from minicomics. Barry also had a way of rooting out interesting stories that weren't widely seen by many comics fans. Chris Ware's Thanksgiving covers for the New Yorker is one example, David Axe & Steve Olexa's WAR FIX excerpt is another, and Kevin Pyle's BLINDSPOT excerpt is a third.

Barry avoided a lot of obvious names and included a lot of cartoonists who have not been widely printed to date. Barry did operate under the constraint that the stories must have been printed from August 31, 2006 to September 1st, 2007. They also had to be North American (USA, Canada or Mexico). Of course, the last constraint involved the willingness of the artist and/or publisher to have their work reprinted. DC forbade the anthology from using a Paul Pope Batman story, which sort of douses complaints from some sectors of comics fandom that superhero stories were being deliberately ignored.

The first few stories center around forms of obsession and inspiration. Graham Annable's "Burden" sees a man who commits a horrible act as a way of making up for the horrible acts of his brother. The excerpt from WAR FIX is about one man's obsession with Iraq and the ways in which the reality of the situation is a shattering experience. That dance between abstract desire and reality is examined from a different angle in T. Edward Bak's "Trouble", about two teenaged girls, the possibility of their sexuality, and feelings of abandonment. A series of DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR strips by Alison Bechdel focuses on the ways in which personal and political obsessions cross over, while an excerpt from Nick Bertozzi's THE SALON details obsession and inspiration, as Braque and Picasso struggle to find the right way to express their vision. Visually, we move from Annable's cartoony line to Olexa's dense, heavy naturalism to Bak, Bechdel and Bertozzi's focus on character design.

The next several strips, in their own way, are different kinds of fables. Lilli Carre's "The Thing About Madeleine" is about a woman coming home to find herself asleep in bed, and how this one fantastic element leads to a total loss of identity. Martin Cendreda's "Hopscotch" imagines little orphan children coming out at night to play games and then disappearing when morning comes. Both "The Monkey and the Crab" (by Shawn Cheng & Sara Edward-Corbett) and "The Seven Sacks" have a classic fairy tale set-up, with talking animals and monsters being used to construct ethical dilemmas and the ways in which revenge is pointless.

Seeing the grotesques in Derf's syndicated strip THE CITY next to a Rick Geary strip about a family of murderers was an appropriate transition. Going from a family of murderers to Matt Groening's LIFE IN HELL strips starring his young sons was an unintentionally funny segue. Groening is sort of forgotten in art-comics circles these days, but he's still very much a part of that community. From kids talking about monsters we move to Eric Haven's strip about the war between reptilian monsters and mammals, "Mammalogy". From there, the reader is given a left turn as we see a Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets strip featuring Maggie as a young girl, establishing connections of her own with the outside world.

Kaz and Michael Kupperman are next with their own brands of absurdist humor. Joseph Lambert and Evan Larson, going back to the fabulist theme, give updated versions of The Tortoise and the Hare and Cupid's Arrows, respectively. Lambert sees the race as a battle of drummers, while the world goes haywire when Cupid takes a day off. A running theme in the pieces Barry selected is obsession vs. inspiration. We see the latter running rampant in the excerpt from Jason Lutes' BERLIN and Cathy Malkasian's PERCY GLOOM, while John Mejias' "Teacher's Edition" seeks to tease out the latter in the form of an art teacher's diary comics. Sarah Oleksyk's "Graveyard" and the excerpt from BLINDSPOT both deal with significant encounters that change our protagonist's lives. The pieces from Seth, Ware and Gene Yang all discuss identity and how we measure ourselves as humans.

As a reader, I was delighted to see so many stories I hadn't read but had heard about. There are a lot of surprises in here and a lot of delights that I'm glad are being seen by a wider audience. The book is handsomely designed, with a wrap-around Eleanor Davis cover and endpapers designed by Joseph Lambert. Barry really is right that it doesn't really matter where one started in this book. That said, it's interesting to see how many of the stories had some kind of fantastic element, some sense of conveying the reader elsewhere (something obviously important to Barry). There's very little in the way of autobiographical stories in this volume (just Axe, and even that's mediated by having an illustrator). Every strip is very much a story, with an emphasis on narrative. That makes sense, given Barry's style as someone who in her creativity workshops emphasizes creating connections between objects and memories to create stories.

The kind of stories she selected are unusual, varied and challenging, but they are stories or jokes nonetheless; there's no interest in formalist experimentation. In a sense, the vagueness of her own directive ("good") made her selection process all the more clear. No matter where we start, we are getting a peak into Barry's point of view both as artist and reader. And so, we have a third volume in this series that is quite dissimilar from the first two, illuminating what is important to Barry. In the case of each volume, it's up to the reader to make their own interpretation of what was selected for them. Like Chris Ware's volume, this is Linda Barry's own love letter to comics and its readers.

The Anthologies of CCS

Rob reviews several anthologies from current and former students at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Works reviewed include SWORD (from One Percent Press), INDELIBLE, SORRY and NO. (This review was originally published at sequart.com)

I was happy to pick up a number of CCS anthologies at SPX this year, given how difficult it can be to keep track of the students going through that school. I've taken a great interest in the work of the artists who have attended the Center for Cartoon Studies and consider it to be one of the most interesting experiments in comics history. While I've reviewed a number of the artists who have attended the school (Annie Murphy, Sean Ford, Chuck Forsman, Alex Kim, Joe Lambert, Colleen Frakes, JP Coovert, and Jeff Lok just for starters), I'm always intrigued to see what kind of work other artists are doing.

While the crew behind the SUNDAYS anthology has been the most ambitious in terms of their output and presentation, these anthologies certainly have their own sense of ambition in style. Each one is themed, though only very vaguely and more as a jumping-off point. Indeed, the anthologies have the feel of art school exercises, the kind that can spark interesting ways of thinking. The 4-Square anthology series is a good example of that. The concept is simple: 4 artists work in one squarebound anthology (about 6x6 inches), doing stories around a loose concept. The first edition, SORRY, featured Caitlin Plovnick, Colleen Frakes, Emily Wieja and Mario Van Buren, and they all centered around the word "sorry".

Oddly, all four stories took a grisly turn. Plovnick's story is about a spurned mermaid whose desperate need to understand what love is takes a homicidal turn. Some of Plovnick's figures look a little awkward, especially in relation to each other, but she made up for it with a really strong sense of composition--especially in the panels where the mermaid went on a rampage. Frakes continued to mine the stuff of fables (as opposed to fantasy) in her story about a bluejay's miserable fate. She seems extremely comfortable and confident as a draftsman--her figures are simple but bold and distinctive, and I love the weight of her line. This was the first story I'd seen from Van Buren, a tale of a romp on a playground gone horribly wrong, and his character design was rather appealing--lots of sausage-like fingers, and a sharp use of geometric shapes to create his figures. Wieja's contribution was less a story than a study about fire. Wieja obviously loves to play up the contrast between light and dark, realistic depictions and primitive sketches. All told, this was probably the most consistently interesting of the four anthologies examined in
this article.

The second volume, NO, isn't quite as attractive. I thought the blue paper it was printed on didn't do a lot of favors for some of the stories, for starters. I did greatly enjoy Jon Chad's hilariously disgusting story about a sad sack who eats too much alphabet soup before declaring his love, and winds up vomiting it out in a way that spelled out foul insults. His grotesquely humorous character design and detailed linework were all in the service of the story's gags. From the finely-rendered we went to the very sketchy in Lauren O'Connell's "Fancy Clue" story. It's an amusing concept (a female superspy being sent on absurd missions like figuring out if a girl was attracted to a particular FBI agent), but it felt literally ripped out of a sketchbook and photocopied. I can appreciate the energy and immediacy of such work, but this was just sloppy--illegible lettering, tons of spelling errors, etc.

Frakes checked in with another entry in this anthology, part of which was reprinted elsewhere in a more polished form. This felt like a first draft for that story, albeit a well-designed and composed first draft with unusual ideas. This one's about a girl adopted by a family of talking bears who were getting ready to make war on humans. Frakes' work looks best in crisp black and white, and I thought the blue paper was an especially unfortunate choice for this story. Finally, there was a Morgan Pielli bit of lunacy. His story was a bit of Chuck M. Jones inspired fourth-wall breaking as his characters chase each other around and between comics gutters.

SWORD is the most attractive-looking of the four anthologies, featuring artists with some bold and distinctive visual styles. Each short story is about a magic sword, with each artist picking up the story thread from the next but taking it in some very different directions. JP Coovert and Stephen Floyd share a similar quality of line and story sensibility, spoofing the fantasy aspects of sword-related quests. James Hindle takes things in an interesting direction, rendering the discovery of the sword in a series of darkly humorous one-panel gag strips titled "Hello, Only Friend". Alexis Frederick-Frost, one of the most interesting visual stylists in the CCS crew, tells a story about a crow who manages to find the sword at the climax of his story, giving him a bit of a magic boost. Frederick-Frost loves to play with thick, bold lines and light/dark contrasts while using a stripped-down character design style. Lastly, Joe Lambert checks in with a single, silent page that quickly establishes a connection to the prior scene, sets up the scene and end then ends it with an implied act of violence and theft--all in three panels. This book is a pleasant diversion or a fun group art exercise-- not the most important or interesting work of these artists, but still a surprisingly tightly-wound series of distinctive stories.

INDELIBLE is the most uneven of the four anthologies, which isn't surprising since it's less a comics anthology than a "collection of creative endeavors" done by the women of CCS--students, faculty, staff, fellows and interns. There's plenty in here that's not comics but is still plenty entertaining, like Jessica Abston's poetry (some of which has been adapted into comics form by Alex Kim), Rachel Gross' illustrations and short stories by the likes of Frakes and Betsey Swardlick. These submissions contribute to the sense that this publication wasn't really intended to be a cohesive collection of comics but rather a group project where everyone contributes somehow.

As such, a number of the stories are excerpts from longer stories printed elsewhere, which is one of my pet peeves when it comes to anthologies. Excerpts can be fine when carefully selected to fit in with other submission, but here it felt more like artists throwing in a few related pages of recent work. I say this as a fan of one excerpted story, Robyn Chapman's SOURPUSS, and as a fan in general of Colleen Frakes' work. The latter's MARYA AND DEATH seems intriguing, however, and it's interesting to see her once again take apart fables and fairy tales to create a new context for them. In a school where most of the artists enrolled are decidedly influenced by art-comics, it was odd to see Chrstine Williamson's manga-inspired excerpt. Her rendering style felt fairly derivative and inert, but it's hard to say much more about it given how little the reader was shown of the story.

There is quite a bit to like about this anthology, especially in the stories that had more finite boundaries. Caitlin Plovnick has a dark sense of humor and a great ear for dialogue, along with a sense of the absurd; combining high school dramatics and politics with the apocalypse was a masterstroke, and her ugly, scratchy style was a great fit. Lucy Knisley has nice chops as a cartoonist, and her story about femininity showed off the expressiveness of her character design. Penina Gal combines the storytelling approaches of John Porcellino (in his carefully studied minimalism) and David Heatley (in the active dreaminess of his scenarios) to create a charming, bizarre bit of narration.

Kubby Barry's retelling of the story of the Tortoise & the Hare cleverly has them pairing off against each other in a race of self-esteem. She was perhaps a bit overambitious in what she tried to render, yet she captured all of the story's emotional nuances. Emily Wieja once again contrasted light and dark to put together a few images and ideas--this time, it was a cloud and a snake. The unquestioned star of the issue in my view was Annie Murphy, whose brief story about a boy adopted by a magical horse was given a surprising level of depth, weight and pathos. The story had Murphy's usual concerns: the line between life and death, the possibility of connection, the relationship between humans and animals. Murphy is a good but not great draftsman, but she combats that with an impeccable design sense and bold use of blacks.

I'd like to see further volumes of all three of these anthology series. I like the tighter focus of the 4-square series, the design sense of the One Percent Press anthology and the sheer variety of INDELIBLE. The CCS artists who have improved the most tend to be those with the most diligent work ethic. Anthologies are a great way to force oneself to get better quickly so as to keep up with one's peers. There's tremendous potential in these pages, with some artists closer to fulfilling it at the moment than others.

Enemy Territory: Drawn & Quarterly Showcase 5

Rob reviews the latest anthology of emerging talent, DRAWN AND QUARTERLY SHOWCASE 5.

In years past, the release of a new edition of a Drawn & Quarterly anthology was one of the biggest events of the year for art comics. What was once an actual quarterly publication became an annual and introduced the comics world to a wide range of talents, old and new. Appetites were whetted, for example, when one volume reprinted a number of Sunday pages from Gasoline Alley in vibrant full color. Since that time, D&Q has ceased publishing their larger annual anthologies in favor of smaller collections that spotlight new and emerging talent. There's a particular emphasis on translating the works of cartoonists not widely read in English. Past editions have included the likes of Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch, Gabrielle Bell, Sammy Harkham, Genevieve Castree, Matt Broersma, Jeffrey Brown, Nicholas Robel and others. Most of the volumes have featured three artists, writing stories of around 30pages. It's a great format, allowing for a story with some depth and weight but certainly functioning as a complete short story.

My experience in reading books published by D&Q is tha there's almost a house style that artists adhere to in order to be published by Chris Oliveros. These books are always attractively designed and have a certain coolness of affect for the most part. Of course, the reality is that Oliveros is entirely a hands-off editor and publisher, giving his artists complete freedom. He publishes them because they fit into his personal (and refined) aesthetic, not because he wants to bend someone else's artistic vision to his. That's why the range of artists published by D&Q is not quite as expansive as Fantagraphics, which is a bit more all over the place. Like FBI, D&Q has prospered in recent years, opening up a retail store, expanding their line of books and adding crucial staff members like Peggy Burns (publicist) and Tom Devlin (one of the top designers in comics and former publisher of Highwater Books).

The newest Showcase features American T.Edward Bak, Finn Amanda Vahamaki and Swede Anneli Furmark. All three stories have drastically different looks and storytelling approaches, yet all deal loosely with some similar themes. Most prominent is the sense of being in alien and hostile territory and how one chooses to engage one's surroundings. Furmark's story revolves around the discomfort felt by a man visiting his lover's family without revealing that they were gay and in fact a couple. It's a simple story about levels of deception, with self-deception depicted as perhaps the most pernicious. As the story proceeds, we learn that that closeted half of the couple, David, came from a religious background and was even engaged to a woman for a time (whom he happens to see in town). His lover, Jakob, yearns to be open and feels suffocated from living a lie in every aspect of his life, yet deceives himself into thinking that things will change. David deceives Peter in a rather cruel way at the end of the story in talking to his ex-fiance, who herself is in a marriage where all is not as it seems.

This story, "Inland", is visually striking due to Furmark's use of what looks like colored pencil to depict weird lighting conditions. The colored scrawl is a perfect contrast with her black and white figures, who are drawn in a simple, loose line. The form elements of this story are simple but enormously effective and really capture the ephemeral nature of the relationships in this story. The expressionistic use of color to capture changing, fleeting light nicely matches the sense of transience we feel for the relationships in this story.

If Furmark creates meaning out of small moments, T.Edward Bak works big. Expansive layouts and lots of negative space make sense for a story that's about a loss of love not just for a couple but for his country. Bak plays with a number of different narrative layers here, as the story is told from the point of view of a woman abandoned by a man in a time of war. Bak's trademark is throwing a number of different visual styles at the reader, creating a dizzying, disorienting effect. He starts by working on an all-black sheet with a simple red line for his figures and lettering. This evokes a certain sense of mythology for this story, establishing a feeling of otherworldliness while grounding the story in a very human sense of betrayal. The female narrator recalls what happened to the lover than abandoned her, "fighting for liberty". Her lover, "the Partisan", falls prey to his enemy, "the American". "The American" is a mindless automaton bent only on consumption and destruction, a descendant of a different set of Americans who had lost their way.

When the story swings over to the Partisan, the pages are filled with white space and densely rendered figures. We follow his progress until he's frozen in place by "the American", trapped in his own memories and guilt. The irony of the story is that the Partisan abandoned her to "fight for liberty" and wound up being frozen, while his lover (knowing that she deserved better) likewise put herself in a dangerous position. There are any number of ways to look at this story: as the literal story of a relationship shattering, as a way of exploring the ways relationships splinter in an occupation, the metaphorical & emotional nature of occupations, and as a meditation on the corruption and corrupting influence of America. It's an achingly beautiful story on any level, further establishing Bak as an artist to watch.

In Vahamaki's story, the enemy territory here is one's home, as a young teenaged boy and his female best friend find ways around his father with the help of a time-altering TV remote. Living in a small island village means that the benefits they actually receive from time traveling are limited, yet they have nothing much better to do. Unlike the couples in the first two stories, these teens have a powerful connection that transcends their environment. Their connection is the only thing that makes their environment tolerable, in fact. Taking a powerful item but not really being able to use it properly is a sort of cruel punishment for the boy, yet one he absorbs with a sense of humor given that he's not alone and misunderstood. Vahamaki's pages are densely packed and bursting with vibrant color. Her style is a bit more naturalistic than either Bak or Furmark, resembling Vanessa Davis' work a bit in my eyes, only using a more standard comics grid and adding a bit more density of detail to each panel. This story is a bit more subdued than the first two entries, yet no less concerned trying to navigate the unknown as well as actually finding rewards at the end of journeys.

What's interesting about all three artists is that their line is very different from the usual sort of thing D&Q prints. No one uses a flowing line like Seth and there's no obvious influence of Clear Line styles. At the same time, each artist's way of thinking through a story makes them perfect candidates for D&Q. The design of each page and composition of each panel has a powerful influence on how we experience the story. The way the anthology invites the reader to make connections between each story is deliberately vague but not opaque. Testing the measure of a relationship in an "enemy setting" immediately changes the emotional stakes the reader is prepared to experience. This book is a series of variations on a theme regarding common fears we experience as humans and the ways in which we respond, affecting those fears.

Engaged Detachment: Burma Chronicles.

Rob reviews the new collection of travelogue observational strips by Guy Delisle, BURMA CHRONICLES (Drawn & Quarterly).


Guy Delisle seems to have accidentally found a career as an observational cartoonist specializing in studies of Asian cultures and has made it the focus of his career. At the very least, these books (PYONGYANG, SHENZEN and the new BURMA CHRONICLES) have certainly drawn the most critical attention for this animator & illustrator. He started drawing these comics as a way of both documenting and coping with the alienation he felt as a foreigner in North Korea and China. He was working at animation studios and was there alone, and there's a mix of his own ennui combined with his bemused observations of life in a totalitarian state. The difficulty I had with those first two books is that they became as much about his own boredom as they did about his environment. There came a certain point where his inability to connect with the locals led to a certain sameness in his anecdotes. This wasn't entirely Delisle's fault due to the xenophobia of those cultures, but his smartass style of delivering anecdotes exacerbated this difficulty.

The circumstances surrounding BURMA CHRONICLES led to a different sort of book. He lived in Myanmar (called Burma by much of the west, which doesn't recognize the government that took power in the late 80s) for an entire year with his wife and infant son. His wife was working with Doctors Without Borders, and she mostly remained a peripheral presence. Delisle found a way of engaging with the local community, with his young son as a sort of passport, in spite of the restrictiveness of the police state. The resulting book is a series of anecdotes that form a narrative of sorts. While Delisle is the narrator and the view of the country is filtered through his narrative interpretation of his experiences, the reader learns relatively little about him. I think this is by design, since Delisle is trying to depict the nature of his interactions with his environment, not provide introspection. While the book can't help but be about his own perspective, and every story involves him on some sort of adventure, he wants to make his character blank enough to identify with.

Years of creating comics drawing interesting details from everyday life have sharpened his skills in breaking down anecdotes into bite-sized stories. Delisle also has a way of bringing people to life with his loose, stripped-down line. He packs a lot of information into his panels, but his compositional eye is superb, always allowing the reader to absorb expression and gesture while flowing from panel to panel. Despite the simplicity of his character design (lots of dots for eyes and characters built out of basic geometric shapes, with the triangle as a basic unit), there's a playfulness to his line that's quite appealing. It's a genuine pleasure to study his pages, especially the way he contrasts his lusher backgrounds and drawings of buildings with his simpler character work. One can see two factors influencing his method: the first is his training as an animator and understanding motion & spacing on a page, and the second is the sheer necessity to keep his style simple so as to make it possible to quickly record his thoughts.

The stories fall roughly into three categories: quotidian observation of daily life taking care of his son and engaging his environment; the occasional trip out to the field or other locations; and Delisle's attempts at connecting with Burma's local artists. The latter two concerns add depth and variation to the proceedings. Many of the trips are depicted in tightly-packed, 15-panel silent pages. The trips out to the field and Delisle's meditations on the life of an imprisoned opposition leader give us a sense of his political awareness and engagement. He's enormously sympathetic to her cause even if he knows there's nothing he is either willing or able to do about it. He even mocks his own occasional outbursts of activism by depicting himself forgetting his grandiose plans the next day.

It's his stories about interacting with local artists that are most memorable. The workshop he did for some local aspiring animators and the way their relationship deepened in unexpected ways was one of the book's emotional surprises. The scene near the end of the book where Delisle attends a party honoring an older cartoonist and his audience with him is the emotional climax of the book, as Delisle finally feels at home for a little while. Despite the way the populace is repressed, there is a strong cultural memory of better times and a feeling of defiance. That's a marked contrast to PYONGYANG and SHENZEN, where everyone either bought into the national culture or was too afraid to say anything to the contrary. In Burma, everyone was perfectly happy to complain to Delisle, with many older citizens apologizing to him for his living in such a "rundown country". While Delisle was not in a position to actively work for change the way his wife was, that forced detachment gave him the freedom to seek his own connections. Ending his stay with a three-day retreat in a Buddhist monastery, his view on leaving Burma was very different than the way he left China and North Korea. The ways in which the connections he made affected him shine through each page in this book, as he pays his debt to the people behind those connections by bringing them to life.

Anthology Round-Up: Good Minnesotan 3, Papercutter 8, Fluke 6

Rob reviews three fairly recent anthologies: Papercutter #8 (edited by Greg Means), Good Minnesotan #3 (edited by Raighne & Meghan Hogan) and Fluke #6 (edited by Drew Weing). (This review was originally published at sequart.com)

Three attractive anthologies to tackle in this column, each with distinctive editoral and aesthetic viewpoints:



PAPERCUTTER #8, edited by Greg Means. PAPERCUTTER, as I've noted before, is one of the most attractive anthology series currently in publication. This issue follows the established formula of the anthology: one long story by a feature artist, a shorter story by a second artist, and a very short (2 pages) story by a third artist. The concept behind the anthology is to feature young and/or underpublished cartoonists in the most flattering format possible. Varying story length adds variety to the reader's experience and editor Greg Means is careful to feature artists whose styles and interests are different in each issue.

The featured artist in #8 is Corinne Mucha, who brought a very interesting sense of design to her autobiographical story of being haunted as a child. She thought she was being menaced by witches that lived in her closet and came up with a byzantine set of rules and regulations regarding her own behavior and safety. The most visually striking aspect of her comics was her lettering, often using huge, decorative font designs to emphasize fear, ridiculousness or a sense of being childlike. Lettering is an underappreciated part of the art of comics, and Mucha makes a point of fully integrating it as part of her page. Her work reminded me a bit of Lynda Barry's comics, especially the shifting perspectives and the diagramatic nature of the comics page. Mucha turns this account of her experience into a discussion of memory and perception, and the ways one's brain creates connections when it needs to make sense of the world.

Brubaker has the 2-page slot in a story that integrates some amusingly freakish character design with his typically angular style. It's a little spoof of one tough high school outsider's aggressive posture and serves its purpose as a palate cleanser of sorts after the dreamier first story. The third story, Jeremy Tinder's "Pete At Night" starts off as a typical slacker pity-party sort of story, but takes a right turn into violence and the absurd. The story's punchline picks up the story thread regarding his lack of confidence with regard to women and manages to tie it into the weirdness he just experienced, a hilarious stroke of genius. PAPERCUTTER succeeds because it has modest ambitions. It's not trying to reinvent the comics wheel or provide a showcase for avant-garde' creations. It features distinctive voices, styles and narratives and makes them look good. Each issue is simply a pleasure to read.

GOOD MINNESOTAN #3, edited by Raighne & Meghan Hogan. Minnesota is fertile ground for comics talent these days. Zak Sally is probably the best known name from the north country, though Will Dinski is starting to get more recognition. The GOOD MINNESOTAN anthology proves that there's a full-blown comics scene, rapidly improving from issue to issue. There's a delicate balance between trying to provide exposure for as many artists as possible and tightening up the content a bit. There are a number of short pieces that seem ripped out of the artists' sketchbook that fail to leave much of an impression and some longer pieces about relationships that feel perhaps a bit too self-indulgent for this sort of anthology. Ed Moorman's well-drawn "Polaroids" especially falls into the latter category; it's almost too intimate in the way it presents anecdotes without context, and there's just not enough for the reader to grab onto.

There are a number of strong stories in here that merit further discussion, however. Meghan Hogan's own "You Are The Great Horned Owl" is a beautiful and distinctive excerpt from a larger work about the inner life of birds. Its only problem is that it's clearly meant to be a color piece but is presented in greyscale here. Without that color, some of the story's impact is blunted. I enjoyed both of the rambling stories about apartment living: Justin Skarhus & Raighne Hogan's "Sex Box" and John & Luke Holden's "Fuckleberry Hinn". The former uses a blotchy line and heavy use of blacks to detail one man's frustration with his sex-crazed housemates--only to add the not-unexpected punchline of committing the same indiscretions at someone else's house. The latter story is even blotchier and much cruder, depicting several days in the life of a man who is forced to become homeless. The grotesque character design is compelling and makes this quotidian story a page turner. There's also a deadpan sense of humor perfectly set off by the art; there's a sense that the protagonist's entire life is just a series of absurd moments and he's become quite resigned to it.

The standout story in this issue is Nicholas Breutzman's "My Town". It's cleverly well-designed, integrating word and text in interesting ways. Breutzman manages to balance his depiction of ennui and horror in pitch-perfect ways. The story functions both as a literal horror story and a metaphorical account of loneliness and alienation. The way Breutzman wildly varies panel size and placement from page to page was key to modulating the story's emotional rhythms. One brief story deserves a mention: Anna Bongiovanni's "To Take Back" is a wonderfully unsettling piece that sees a naked woman laying in a forest. She has apparently just given birth, takes a look at the baby, and swallows it whole. In the last panel, her back is turned to us so as to prevent the reader from seeing the expression on her face--adding to the sense of mystery and ambivalence in this piece. I hope we see more of her work in future issues of GOOD MINNESOTAN. The format and design of this issue of the anthology as a whole continues to become more distinctive, and I hope at some point that they'll be able to introduce color.

FLUKE #6, edited by Drew Weing. FLUKE is a minicomics/zine event that takes place in Athens, GA and provides a spotlight for a number of southern cartoonists that may not get a lot of exposure elsewhere. Drew Weing is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) and a fine cartoonist. He drew one of liveliest journal comics for a time but is better known for his lush online work. He has a fine eye for talent and produced a strong minicomics anthology for FLUKE 2007. FLUKE #6 is jam-packed with SCAD graduates, artists from the Partyka collective and even Joseph Lambert, a CCS graduate.

The anthology reflects Weing's tastes in that each piece is well-drawn and fluid. This is not to say that every story is straightforward, especially given the presence of artists like Chris Wright; indeed, Weing makes a point of including a number of different storytelling approaches. There are stories with oblique narratives (Michele Chidester's "Invention"), slice-of-life concerns ("." by Mel Stringer), the absurdly grotesque ("Meat Cute" by Eleanor Davis), and fantasy ("The Acker Brothers" by Mike Laughead). Weing's own "Algernon Lamb", about a detective who specializes in art-related crimes, is a particular highlight. There are very few duds in this anthology, which is rare for such books created for comics festivals. That's a tribute both to Weing's discernment as an editor and the way he placed the stories. FLUKE #6 succeeds, much like PAPERCUTTER in having modest goals and exceeding them. I don't want to overstate the value of these comics; I wouldn't consider either to be among the best comics of the year. That said, they are fine collections of short, strong pieces by young artists, carefully edited and skillfully designed. They are worthy of emulation by any young editor with similar aspirations.

Off-Beat Genre: Daybreak #3

Rob reviews the third issue of Brian Ralph's zombie epic, DAYBREAK (Bodega Distribution).

I reviewed the first two issues of Brian Ralph's zombie post-apocalyptic story DAYBREAK in an earlier column, and I noted that the story is so striking because of the way Ralph immerses us in his world. It's an ugly, broken world that is densely depicted, and the reader gets a visceral understanding of what that world is like as Ralph tells the story from the point of view of the reader, an unseen character in the story. This issue ramps up the stakes, tension and horror considerably.

The one-armed protagonist and the unseen reader stand-in have been captured by a crazy old man, whose purposes are uncertain but most likely nefarious. The issue is a tense showdown between the one-armed man and the old man as they scheme around each other, with the first climax culminating in the unseen character taking decisive, explosive action. The old man wound up double-crossing our protagonists in horrific fashion, as the one-armed man met up with the old man's "family", with dreadful results. With the knowledge that his days as a human are now numbered, the issue ends on an uncertain note.

Once again, there is no explanation or backstory presented by Ralph. With an assumption of the audience's familiarity with this sort of scenario, Ralph drops the reader into a disorienting situation and challenges them to keep up with the shifts in tension and tempo. We go from moments of tense waiting to sudden frenzies of action, punctuated by moments of black humor (like the way a certain human head is used as a prop). Throughout, Ralph displays his chops as a visual storyteller, especially one sequence where our nervous unseen protagonist walks outside at night with a flashlight. The panel where we see the legs of zombies appear in the view of the flashlight is especially chilling. At this point, I'm eager to see where this story is going to end up. It feels like we've reached a middle point of the story, and I can't imagineDAYBREAK lasting more than a couple of more issues, but we'll see.