Dream Jams: The Night Of Your Life

Rob reviews the new collection of Jesse Reklaw's SLOW WAVE dream comics, THE NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE (Dark Horse). He also takes a look at two minicomics of Reklaw's: SALIVATING BOX and PTNRT2.



A number of Jesse Reklaw's comics have revolved around formal problem-solving. The solutions he crafts are still conservative in terms of composition; he uses fairly standard grids and doesn't do anything especially avant-garde with regard to character design or layouts. His art has always had a certain pleasant looseness to it. His figures are sketchy and expressive, somewhere between cartoony and realistic. The information he conveys is always solidly designed and easy to follow; that looseness of line is not sloppiness and a quick scan of his work reveals how much he thinks about his designs. When I note that comics present a series of problems for him to solve as a cartoonist, I mean that he likes to find different ways of presenting old ideas. For his autobio comics series COUCH TAG, he frames his experiences around specific signifiers (pets, the things he used to do with a particular friend) to reveal deeper truths.

Reklaw recently reprinted his first minicomic (created 20 years ago), PTNRT2, a crude (in every sense of the word) stick-figure comic. This was about finding a way to shorten words by using letters and numbers, and he created an entire comic's worth of stories done in this style--a disorienting experience. Reklaw has also done jam comics as a way of sparking his mind to move in some different directions. His minicomic SALIVATING BOX, a jam done with Andrice Arp, Nate Beaty and Levon Jihanian, has someone issue a verbal prompt. Each artist then has five minutes to draw a comic about that prompt. It's a way of moving past the paralysis of the creative process and quickly solving a problem on the page. The way each artist approached each prompt revealed a lot about their creative process. The results were surprisingly coherent and funny. Having an outside "collaborator", even if that's just someone coming up with a word, obviously keeps Reklaw's pencil and mind moving.

In a sense, his long-running online and alt-weekly strip SLOW WAVE is a more elaborate form of collaboration, and in some ways even more random than the game played for SALIVATING BOX. The concept is brilliantly simple: readers send Reklaw accounts of their dreams, and he draws them in comic strip form. Dreams are a perfect spark for comics, especially someone else's. They are remembered in terms of narrative, with the person almost acting as a dominant narrator. Sorting through the convoluted logic of a dream to convert it into a single-page story presents its own kind of puzzle for an artist. Because it's someone else's dream, one doesn't have to worry about deeper meanings or interpretations.

That lack of editorializing on Reklaw's behalf (other than in the sense that he chooses which dreams to draw) is one of SLOW WAVE's greatest strengths. As a reader, one can simply enjoy the entertaining way Reklaw manages to briskly depict a narrative snippet that usually doesn't have a firm beginning or ending. One can also look at the trends one sees in the dreams and how it reflects the broader culture. Many dreams feature pop-culture figures interacting with the dreamer's lives in some way, often obstructively (like in one dream where someone has to fight Jackie Chan before he can go to bed). Animals play a huge part in many of the dreams, often acting out fantasies of being able to talk or otherwise interact with their owners at a higher level. One dreamer saw her dogs play the stock market so she wouldn't have to work!

Despite the repetitive nature of each page, SLOW WAVE actually reads much better as a collection than as a stand-alone strip. There's a page-to-page flow and sense of rhythm in this book, broken up from time to time by arbitrary chapters. While one can see some strips of a similar nature grouped together in each chapter, Reklaw is careful not to simply catalogue different dream fetishes. Instead, he varies what happens strip to strip just enough to keep a reader's interest. The reader knows that even though the grid will remain the same and each strip will feature a narrator, each one will feature someone doing something different. The chapter breaks acts as natural mental buffers to encourage the reader to pause.

Reklaw anchors his strips with thick black lines making up his panels, "trapping" the ephemeral dream images within. Another key to the success of his strips is his lettering. While this may seem like a trivial component, his clear, bold lettering gives the reader an immediate sense of access to the story of the dream. He uses a smaller, thinner line for any dialogue in the dreams, a clear signal that the reader needs to focus on the narrative box and the images to really engage each page. It's not surprising that Reklaw has been doing SLOW WAVE for so long; despite the repetitive nature of its process, it's been forcing him to solve storytelling problems on a weekly basis. That artistic curiosity and the ability to shape random thoughts of images into narrative continues to make him one of the more interesting artists in the alt-comics scene.

Static and Motion: Pohadky & Ojingogo

Rob reviews two recent volumes from Drawn & Quarterly's "Petits Livres" series, Matthew Forsythe's OJINGOGO and Marek Colek & Pat Shewchuk's POHADKY.



One interesting series of books coming out from Drawn & Quarterly has been their "Petits Livres" line. These "little lives" books are physically small, heavier on image than word and highly idiosyncratic. The most recent books from the line, OJINGOGO (by Matthew Forsythe) and POHADKY (by Marek Colek & Pat Shewchuk), both tread in some similar territory. Both are interested in exploring the inherently neurotic nature of fairy tales and folk legend. These stories were not simply made to entertain, they were crafted to instruct and offer correctives through fear. OJINGOGO tells us of the adventures of a young girl and what would become her pet squid as they travel through a hazardous yet exciting world. This story emphasizes the flow of movement, as events tumble into each other. POHADKY is more of a cultural excavation, as Colek & Shewchuk take turns on roughly opposite pages exploring static images dealing with either loaded iconic symbols or the enduring lives of the characters invoked in these legends.

Forsythe's book calls to mind three different artists. The tightly-packed gags and adventure sketches reminds me a bit of Lewis Trondheim's work in books like MR I and MR O. The simultaneous sense of characters aimlessly wandering through their environment combined with the propulsive nature of the panel-to-panel transitions recall Mat Brinkman's silent adventure comics. The way we follow the adventures of a plucky girl through a trippy dreamscape where creatures often unexpectedly change size makes me think of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Forsythe's character design has both charm and bite; the girl and her squid are both cute, but the squid attempts to eat her at first, and she's pretty much in constant danger.

The story, such as it is, is quite thin. Yet Forsythe never introduces a character that won't later have some use to the plot and eventual outcome of the story. He also keeps things lively by first introducing inanimate objects (such as a camera) and then having them surprisingly come to life. Forsythe continually ramps up the action by pulling back from the action to reveal yet another, larger, more threatening monster. Cleverly, he turns that size differential into an important plot point in the book's eventual resolution, turning a device that created tension into one that evoked laughter. This book started as a webcomic and it shows with the way Forsythe seems to be compelled to make each page its own comedic unit and the way he stitches them together as a continuing serial. The flow of the book is sometimes interrupted by two-page spreads that split apart single images. "Losing" part of the image was distracting, though I'm not sure there was a better solution with the material as he drew it. It'd be interesting to see what Forsythe comes up with when he doesn't choose to serialize his work.

POHADKY also proceeds silently, as intricate iconic symbols that have obvious power mixed with line drawings given life with a muted palette. The artists made the interesting decision of presenting their images without comment, providing an index only after they've concluded their images. The images in the drawings are archetypes: the crone, the soldier, Death, and even more familiar, modern figures (like the Capitalist). It's the sort of book that demands multiple readings to absorb the imagery and the way the artists are presenting an intentionally jumbled series of images. Many of the pages have a certain tension and energy to them by the way they are composed, even if the images are static. For example, "Witches, A Soldier a Donkey and a Black Cat" has the above figures floating above a city, huddled together as though they were waiting to be activated. Colek, who drew the images, is actually more effective in black & white than color. There's an almost primitive power to his b&w figures that his color images lack. Perhaps it's the difference between the visceral nature of a drawing and the more washed-out, storybook nature of a color image, but I found myself returning to Colek's spooky b&w drawings most of all.

OJINGOGO is a book for children to fall into, while POHADKY is more a book for adults to reflect on as they consider the roots of their own folklore. The former creates its own iconography as it follows a familiar storytelling path, while the latter is less about story than it is about the way images accrue weight and meaning over time in ways that expand beyond their original contexts.

Sequart Reprints: Minicomics roundup

Ah, the variety of minicomics I receive. I generally like to review comics that I can compare and contrast in some meaningful way, but these three comics couldn't be any more different. Liz Baillie's (http://www.lizcomics.com) MY BRAIN HURTS #4 is the most accomplished and ambitious. Greg Vondruska's SUMMER GOES SLOWLY (http://www.gregvondruska.com) is a sometimes bittersweet account of summers spent as a child and a teenager. And the CRAP YOUR PANTS anthology is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of stories about people soiling themselves.

While this is the fourth issue of Baillie's series, she provides an excellent recap of the events to date. What I like about her stories is that she presents events that are dramatic without being melodramatic. The main character is Kate, a high school kid who is dealing with a lot of stress. She's picked on and abused at school for looking different (with a streaked hairdo and her love of punk rock, she's an easy target) and being gay. Her best friend Joey was beaten by a gang of gay-bashers and put in the hospital, and one of them takes a shine to Kate and follows her around. When she screams at him, he charmingly throws her against a wall. Kate's dealing with her own self-hatred; when her new love interest Desi tries to kiss her on the street, Kate flinches, not wanting to be seen in public kissing a girl. Later, when Kate stands up to a priggish school administrator, it backfires and she winds up walking out of school.

Baillie's character work is her biggest strength. Kate struggles with trying to fight back against the world with just wanting to surrender. Desi is a delight; she's a firebrand who looks to be a bit on the frumpy side. Joey is dealing with an abusive father who is trying to redefine the terms of his abuse; both make a lot of bad choices. Baillie's faces are quite expressive; Kate's face when the thug is holding a knife to her is a combination of pure terror and total surprise. There's a grittiness to her art that befits this urban tale, and reminds me a bit of LOVE AND ROCKETS X or Jaime Hernandez's glimpses of Hopey's high school days. Baillie wisely focuses on her figure-work above all else, because they really carry the story. Comparing this issue to the first is a revelation: her ability to convey expressions has greatly improved, especially in terms of subtlety. She also is going away from a common trap for young artists, the tendency to over-render everything because of a lack of confidence in one's composition and draftsmanship. Baillie is simplifying her backgrounds and allowing her characters and their body language to carry scenes. Her panel-to-panel transitions and lettering are also big keys in making her comics work. About the only aspects of her art that still look a bit stiff are her attempts to convey motion and action.

SUMMER GOES SLOWLY is a much quieter sort of comic. There's not really much of a story arc in this series of vignettes from Vondruska's childhood, other than perhaps his growth as a person. In particular, we see him go from being afraid of the world and its possibilities to taking chances and following through on commitments. Vondruska relates the sort of dumb and random things a kid does, like ride a bike without holding onto the handlebars (resulting in a fractured skull), to trying his cat's food, to calling a girl 13 times in 2 days before realizing she wasn't going to call him back.

There are moments of quiet humor and more moments of self-deprecation as Greg recalls how socially inept he felt. Being a Doctor Who fanatic certainly didn't help in the latter department. A little more poignant were the recollections of the small humiliations he experienced at the hands of his peers and various animals; even at the time Vondruska realized that he was working himself up over nothing but couldn't help himself. This is a pleasant read and the art is serviceable, but it doesn't really distinguish itself in its observations or execution. The stories aren't quite funny enough to consider it to be a humorous autobio book, nor are they sharply observed enough to require 44 pages. As a result, the two types of stories pull at each other and ultimately cancel out their effectiveness.

The CRAP YOUR PANTS anthology has 18 stories in it. Of that number, only four are worth reading. Most of the rest are either badly drawn, scatological with no other hook for the reader, or incomprehensible. There was an open call for submissions and as one might expect, most of the stories looked and felt rushed & amateurish. Let's look at the four exceptions. "It's Delhi Belly" by David Robertson details the author's gastrointestinal distress on a trip toIndia. What seemed like a set-up for a routine tourist's tale quickly segued into him learning that he had Crohn's Disease, an embarrassing and unpleasant condition that can be managed but not cured. This is one of the few strips that had any humanity, while still maintaining some sly humor.

K. Thor Jensen is always a welcome presence in any anthology, and he manages a great gag set-up in "In Space No One Can Hear You Shit" (a take-off on the old Alien tagline). An astronaut is on a spacewalk when he uncontrollably starts voiding his bowels. It's no laughing matter as he realizes he could drown in his own waste. In the last panel, we learn from a couple of scientists onboard his craft that this was no accident. Jensen's panel design and use of blacks make this strip visually appealing.

Steven Tillotson's "Uncle Ken" strip was perhaps the most vicious in the book. A kid puts a laxative in his brother's tea, only to have it go to his grandmother instead. She winds up soiling herself, and as a result gets put in a nursing home and dies of loneliness. Tillotson's exaggerated figure-work makes this another piece that's nice to look at.

My favorite strip overall was the last one: Kate Allen's "20 Minute Miracle Diet". A young woman steps on the scale and is disgusted to find that she weighs 121 pounds. She decides to go for a run then and there and then painfully realizes that she has to defecate immediately. Two miles later, she finally makes it home and after sitting on the toilet for 20 minutes, she steps back on the scale and finds that she lost 7 pounds! This strip is well-composed, has an appealingly playful line and a nice payoff for the initial gag set-up.

sequart #190: Mini Comics Round-Up: Neely, Ayuyang, Sayers, Mardou

Rob reviews a variety of intriguing minicomics. (These reviews originally appeared on sequart.com)



YOUR DISEASE SPREAD QUICK and BRILLIANTLY HAM-FISTED, by Tom Neely. Neely is the artist behind THE BLOT, one of the more astonishing recent major comics debuts. Neely's work falls squarely into what I call "comics-as-poetry". I've written about THE BLOT and this topic for another website (which has yet to debut), but briefly, comics-as-poetry is not the same thing as an illustrated poem. Rather, it's a comic that utilizes the same sort of strategy that poetry does in terms of beat, rhythm and abstraction. It eschews standard narrative and forces the reader to engage the work. Unlike most narratives, which have an immersive quality (carrying the reader smoothly through the story), comics-as-poetry is most frequently anti-immersive: the reader is aware of each word, each image, each panel. It's up to them to create connections between word and image.

Neely's artistic style makes for an interesting series of contrasts. He draws much of his inspiration from classic animation and comics from around the 1920s, and his comics have a rubbery, cartoony quality that draws the reader to its surface qualities. At the same time, he subverts reader expectations with images that are often gruesomely visceral. Another trope of his is his use of ink blots. These blots have multiple meanings, depending on the context, but generally represent both creation and destruction. Neely also has an extensive background in fine arts, and as a result his comics have a tension between the flow between panels & pages and the powerful single image.

That tension is highlighted in YOUR DISEASE SPREAD QUICK, a minicomic "inspired by the music of the Melvins". Neely draws from the lyrics and characters of the album "(A) Senile Animal" to create an apocalyptic narrative. Flipping between a horse-headed man crying doom to a spectral figure drawing ink from the horse to a heavily-bandaged multiple amputee inching along the ground, Neely spends the story introducing doomed protagonists who are victimized by schemers (exemplified by a two-page spread of some of history's nastiest monsters). The bandaged man winds up turning the tables after being sacrificed to a huge eagle, and the world winds up transforming into a mass of doom-saying horse-headed men. The last page, with one of them screaming "The world is full of evil!" as he's buffeted by thousands just like him, is a funny bit of irony. Having not heard the album for reference, this comic is still an eye-popping read because of the way Neely creates a flow of imagery. The back cover, featuring an obligatory Hostess Pies parody starring the Melvins, is a bit of wish-fulfillment with a slightly salacious ending.

BRILLIANTLY HAM-FISTED is a collection of "comic strip poems" originally published on Neely's website. Neely dips a bit into John Hankiewicz territory here in terms of the way he uses realistically depicted ordinary objects in his strips and gives them a different meaning by virtue of the way they're juxtaposed. The similarities end there, because Neely is still working in a classic comics tradition by using a four-panel grid for each strip. He also is more deliberate in the way he contrasts word and image--sometimes working in concert, sometimes at deliberate cross-purposes. "Sunday Afternoon" is a strip featuring a common Neely image: a crowd so tightly packed there's nowhere to breathe or move. Panel by panel, the phrase "Some people just can't appreciate the pathos of it all" is uttered by someone in the crowd--but we don't know who, because the figures are so tiny. Of course, the actual identity is unimportant, since all of the characters look exactly alike and are in precisely the same jam.

The themes running through these strips include suffocation, failure, anxiety, and the desperate attempt to connect--both on an emotional level and as an artist. "Art" features the artist taking off his glove and cutting off his hand, even though he knows we "would prefer cheap decorations". Some of the strips are more engaging than others; some make a quickly-absorbed point while others require multiple readings. It's fascinating to see Neely continue to mix old cartooning traditions with formal experimentation. The contrasts and contradictions inherent in his style and methods are what make him an artist to watch.

Rina Ayuyang's recent string of sketchbook/diary minicomics has been quite engaging. The best quality of her recent OVERWHELMING WOT-NOT, for example, is the spontaneity and liveliness of her approach. She manages to sprinkle quotidian observations, joys and frustrations into narratives that are surprisingly coherent given her loose approach. Her self-characterization in her comics is as someone who's constantly frazzled, harried and short of inspiration, yet the comics themselves have a clever exuberance. In "Fire!!", Ayuyang manages to relate an amusing workplace anecdote, throwing in a couple of gags related to an annoying co-worker and then shifting seamlessly to a related event at home. It has a light, breezy tone that simultaneously feels like a funny memory recorded for posterity in a journal and a polished narrative.

"Sushi Times" is a rougher, sketchier story that's as much about Ayuyang's often misplaced sense of empathy as it is about a particular lunchtime incident. "Happiness" and "A Dream of Sandra Bernhard" are slightly melancholy ruminations disguised as rambling anecdotes. The best story in this mini is "This Is The Day", a story that's both about writer's block and a way of fighting her way out of it. Faced with a blank sheet of paper and nothing to say, Ayuyang at first retreats into time-wasting activities, but soon tries to find ways to inspire herself. She draws support and wisdom from her friends, gets told to practice what she preaches after telling a friend to value her work, gets a hilarious "pep talk" from her father and vows to get back to her Big Story after a brush with mortality. What I admire most about this mini-comic is that it works as a form of art therapy. Instead of staring blankly at a sheet of paper because she can't work on her "real" project, Ayuyang engages in a form of highly polished doodling. In her recent work, she's become much more relaxed and comfortable with her storytelling, which has translated to a real sense of playfulness on the page. While I'm eager to see her eventual long-form project, I hope she continues to give us these pleasurable little side projects.

One of the specialties of the cartoonist Mardou seems to be examining friendships both deep and casual, especially among women. In MANHOLE#3, her character Bea takes us through a first-person account of the history of her friendship with Carrie. Both rock scenesters, Mardou tells a story of a friendship that was really a platonic love affair. Her use of detail and ability to evoke emotion through vivid anecdotes really gets across the depth and importance of this friendship, at least through Bea's eyes. The story does meander a bit and coalesces a bit more after a second reading, especially after one reads the ending. Indeed, as Bea is about to become the mother of a girl, her experiences with Carrie became all the more important in her memory, as a sort of continuum of feminine connection.

Mardou's line is sketchy and loose but highly expressive. Her character design is varied and effective, with her eyes in particular carrying a lot of the narrative's load. In the story, Mardou had a way of the story's leads creating meaningful eye contact with each other that frequently reduced the men they were with to mere props. In retrospect, Bea could see the end of their friendship coming, but there was nothing that really could be done about it. Sometimes, some friendships have a limited time span, no matter how intense they may be in the moment. This story is about a series of moments that had a life-changing quality to them; Bea knows that they're gone forever, never to be reclaimed, but the memories will always linger and influence her the rest of her life.

I WISH YOU WERE DEAD: THINGPART COLLECTION #6, by Joey Sayers. This is a drop-dead hilarious collection of 4-panel gag strips from Sayers' THINGPART website. Sayers specializes in classic "turn the idea on its head" humor, presenting a premise that the reader expects to go in one direction and then subverting it by the third panel before ending with the punchline. To this end, she employs a cartooning style that is simultaneously minimalist and grotesque. The design of her characters' bodies and backgrounds is bland and is just there to provide points of information and reference. The faces and heads are another matter.

Sayers draws round, stick-figure style heads with crudely-rendered faces: dots for eyes and simple mouths. Those mouths are often filled with just 2 or three teeth that almost resemble fangs. Like Matt Feazell, the master of stick-figure comics, Sayers' characters are still enormously expressive, with Sayers' refined understanding of gesture and body language shining through the simplicity of her line and aiding the punchline. Sayers is a flat-out great gagsmith, either taking an absurd idea to its logical end (like an employer praising what are suggested to be a commercial artists' samples but look like blank squares to the reader--until we see that the artist is applying for a job at "White Cardboard Squares, Inc.") or subverting a familiar scene (like a teenager asked to say grace who instead insults Jesus' tastes in food, is praised by his parents in doing so, and leads Jesus to buy the junky "Sugar Bomb" cereal the kid wanted instead). Sayers' work is also in the Michael Kupperman/Martha Keavney area of absurdist humor, but her goals and methodology are different. Fans of those humorists should certainly check out her website, especially since Sayers has such a high hit/miss ratio.

Id On The Page: Where Demented Wented

Rob reviews the career-spanning collection of lesser-known underground comics artist Rory Hayes, WHERE DEMENTED WENTED (Fantagraphics).



The influence of the underground artists of the 1960s on comics today is still considerable, especially since the vast majority of them are still alive and active. Robert Crumb is better than ever and still an inspiration to many artists. Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Frank Stack, Jay Lynch, Justin Green, Spain and others continue to publish fairly prolifically. I've found that for most of these artists, their work from the 1980s on is actually much better than their 1960s work. Some of the most famous and influential artists of that era, like Gilbert Shelton and S. Clay Wilson, produced comics that seem fairly juvenile and tedious today. Shelton led an array of artists making jokes centering around drugs, which was in itself a creative dead end.

Wilson was a different case. He was the first underground artist to encourage and exemplify the idea of not holding back anything on the page. He unleashed everything from his id in his dense, sex-and-violence soaked pages. However, I've always found the results to be juvenile at best and unreadable at worst. The theory behind what he was doing always seemed more interesting than the actual comics, though his influence on artists like Crumb would prove to be crucial. He also had a significant on another artist who was by nature incapable of holding anything back: Rory Hayes.

Hayes didn't publish a lot of comics and died fairly young of a drug overdose. In the first collection of his work, WHERE DEMENTED WENTED, we not only get to see the bulk of his published comics (and some unpublished material), we also get a couple of key essays about his life, influences and career. It's frankly a stunning retrospective that seems remarkably fresh today. Hayes' work was not well-understood or embraced outside of his artist friends at that time. It was considered too raw and even too transgressive (like his infamous Cunt Comics); in today's comics world, it looks like cutting-edge work. Ever since I first saw his comics in an old collection of Bijou Funnies, it popped off the page for me, and I'm grateful to see such an extensive collection.

The story of Hayes is that of his influences and the way he processed them and then transcended them. The key essay in the book is by his brother Geoffrey, a successful children's author and illustrator. It offers a tremendous amount of insight into Rory's early years, especially Hayes' relentless anger as a child. Despite their growing differences as children, the two constantly collaborated on any number of creative endeavors: films, fanzines and especially comics. Geoffrey was always the more polished artist of the pair, but he noted in his essay that Rory always pushed him and inspired to go further. Rory was always more obsessive and focused, though Geoffrey notes that Rory never consciously analyzed what he was doing: he just did it. Creating art together was a part of their sibling language, part of the way they dealt with the world. The fact that Geoffrey's art, and life, went in such a different direction despite all that they shared in common continues to mystify Geoffrey, though he notes that despite their differences "Rory is still present, as he always will be, in every story I write, every line I draw. Ultimately they are all for him."

An unfortunate aspect of this book is the way Hayes' fellow underground artists refer to him as a primitive artist or "original outsider artist". I think this description is probably based more on how people interacted with him than on the work itself. His brother Geoffrey touches on it briefly, but it seems obvious in retrospect that Rory was probably somewhere on the spectrum of autism. It's not so much a matter of being an "outsider", but looking at and interacting with the world in a very different way. If there's anything unusual about Hayes' methods, it's that he never seemed to care about what Lynda Barry refers to as the two questions: "Is this good?" and "Does this suck?" Drawing was as natural to him as eating or sleeping, not something that was a matter for introspection. While he obviously responded to the tutelage of Crumb and Wilson and wanted to respond to their challenges and encouragement, he was always ever drawing for himself.

Hayes' earlier work was informed by EC horror comics, various horror films, humor comics and other assorted pop ephemera. Hayes took the bear character that he developed with his brother and inserted him into grim, gore-splattered scenarios. Though he was clearly inspired by EC comics in terms of the text narrative, purple dialogue and ironic twist endings, what he does is very different. Hayes manages to zero in on the creepy and atmospheric parts of those sorts of stories without worrying much about plot or characterization. The cuteness of his bear character makes a clever juxtaposition with the horrible things that happen to him--and unlike many EC stories, he reaches a bad end regardless of whether or not he deserves it.

One reason why I wouldn't refer to what Hayes does as outsider art is that while his line can be crude, his understanding of composition and design is excellent. It's clear that he studied other artists extensively, though it didn't seem to bother him too much that he couldn't precisely reproduce their techniques. It also didn't take him long to rapidly develop and improve his technical prowess, though his work never lost the immediacy of his vision. One can see the frantic detail of Wilson and rubbery character design of Crumb informing his comics, but those influences didn't alter his voice any more than horror films did. He simply absorbed the influence and it became another layer of images that informed his artistic vision.

The reprint of the hyper-violent "stories" from "Cunt Comics" is certainly the most startling work in this volume. While there are certainly misogynistic images, it's not the juvenile revenge fantasies of Wilson or domination fantasies of Crumb. It's far weirder and more primal, a documentation of a fear of sexuality on the page. As warped as some of the images are, it's also incredibly funny at times. There's an absurd character to Hayes' work that separates it from similar sorts of comics. In a sense, Hayes goes a step further than Crumb or Wilson in that there's no agenda to how he expresses his id, no self-serving set of fantasy ideals or images. There's almost a child-like quality to these comics, in the way that children imagine sex and obsess on body parts as much or more than the act of sex itself.

Hayes' later work is almost startlingly polished-looking, with extensive use of zip-a-tone. By this time, he felt the need to consistently exist in an altered state, especially on speed. That started to show in his stories, especially in the stunning "Keeper of the Mind". Returning to an EC motif, we're drawn into the world of Popoff Hayes, "the drug fiend". Using one of his trademark teddy bears (drawn with a sort of permagrin that resembles the way jaws lock up when one takes speed), Hayes tells a story where Popoff gets speed & coke, takes them, and later travels with a friend and does more speed and coke. The physical trip in this story is inconsequential; it's the weird places he finds his mind going to that's the show here. Being that wired, Hayes implies, takes the brain to some very dark areas, tapping into some kind of primordial nightmares. Hayes' brother implies that Rory's stories tap into a sort of "H.P. Lovecraft territory". That is, he suspects that Rory was entering into a place mentally and emotionally where it became difficult to hang on to reality, making him become dependent on drugs. As a result, he began to work less and less. Though he died in 1983, the last story in this book is from 1976.

Hayes has slowly become an important influence in the world of alternative cartoonists. Edwin "Savage Pencil" Pouncey (who wrote the introduction) is one such artist, while it's obvious that Mark Beyer drew a considerable amount of inspiration from Hayes--both in terms of theme and style. This collection is simply essential for anyone the least bit interested in underground comics. Not only is the book well-edited in terms of the comics themselves (thanks to the always-savvy Dan Nadel and co-editor Glenn Bray), but the bonus materials are among the best I've ever read in such a collection. Contrasting the memories of Hayes' fellow underground artists with the heartfelt and frequently heart-breaking memories of his brother made for a rather dramatic shift, and the brief archival interview with Hayes made for a fitting final piece. His last response says it all: "I'm not so much into words. When people ask me to talk about my work, it's hard for me. I just feel I don't need to talk about it. It's such a complete thing for me, when I do it, and I hope people will get
that from it."

Checking In With Will Dinski

Rob reviews some recent minicomics from Will Dinski. Comics reviewed include SHIFT, ERRAND SERVICE and BEAUTIFUL, COOL & IRREPLACEABLE.


Minnesota cartoonist Will Dinski's comics were some of the first I reviewed in this column two years ago, and he's really been on a roll as of late. The formal qualities of his comics have always been unusual and distinctive. For example, the presentation of his comics is often eye-catching, though fully integrated with the comic's ideas. For example, comics about smoking that resembled a pack of cigarettes or a comic about a personality test with Scientologists was designed as a graph. Beyond such decorative but functional flourishes, Dinski's panel and page composition is distinctive. In a tact that somewhat resembles a silent movie, we often see a panel of character interaction followed by a panel of accompanying dialogue. It's a separation of word and image that forces the reader to focus in on images, especially when there are several consecutive wordless panels. He often employs blank panels with a triangle in the bottom corner to reflect time going by--"turning the page", as it were. In his character design, Dinski is all about sharp angles: noses, chins, heads and bodies.

Dinski loves humorous twists and irony in his commentaries on superficiality, modern life and the rituals of everyday life. At the same time, ambiguity and even ambivalence are an important part of his comics; no ending is left pat and comfortable. In three recent minis, Dinski has taken his work to another level. In SHIFT, a 3-page mini printed on cardstock, the panels are printed at a tilting angle, reflecting the way the older version of the character we meet has found his life completely altered--until he realizes that it's not everything else that's shifted.

BEAUTIFUL, COOL & IRREPLACEABLE is Dinski's best long-form comic to date. It's about a plastic surgeon, his ambitious young partner, his celebrity clients and the wife he ignores. This comic is all about distance and the relationship between surface qualities and "true" identity. The icy surgeon is obsessed with his "work"--he views his patients as his creations, and can't stop thinking about the one remaining flaw in the famous actress that he had been working on for years. His attentions were misunderstood by his wife and the actress--they took his focus on physical flaws as attraction. There's a brilliant twist near the end of the story that's hinted at early on; Dinski then takes that twist and unravels it in some unexpected ways. The final punchline is especially clever, as the surgeon's wife makes a desperate bid for his approval based on what she thought he wanted.

My favorite of Dinksi's three recent minis is ERRAND SERVICE, a 6-pager printed on folding cardstock. Dinski starts with a clever premise: a first-person account of someone who performs errands for others as their job. Those errands include locking and unlocking a door five times for an obsessive-compulsive who wanted to delegate the job. The errand woman is a professional and feels compelled to take care of her assignments to the best of her ability and can't judge her clients...at least, not on their time. The story suddenly flips to the point of view of a different errand woman hired by our first narrator, hired to carry out her judgment against a client. The story ends with yet another clever twist, and it's a fascinating study of diffusion of responsibility. This is the best conceived and executed of all Dinski's work and certainly one of the best minis I've read this year.

Game-Changer: Mome #12

Rob reviews the twelfth volume of Fantagraphics' flagship anthology, MOME.

(This article originally appeared at sequart.com)


I've been reviewing the MOME anthology in bundles thus far. I'm reviewing volume twelve on its own because it's a stand-alone edition in every respect. None of the serials currently running through MOME appear in this issue. In fact, of the original MOME roster of artists, only Sophie Crumb and Paul Hornschemeier appear in this issue--and neither one really does comics in this issue.

This issue seems to complete a slow but steady transformation of the anthology. Originally conceived as a means to nurture a particular set of young cartoonists, many of the original members dropped out after a few issues. While series editors Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds continue to bring in new talent (five new contributors alone in this issue), the nature of that talent has shifted. Beginning with David B, MOME has also become a place for great artists to publish shorter work. #12 has the greatest concentration of such talent, with stories by David B, Killoffer and Belgian artist Olivier Schrauwen. There's a broader mix of narrative styles and intents, and more work that's purely decorative. New contributor Kaela Graham's crude, charming incidental illustrations are an interesting contrast to Sophie Crumb's ultra-detailed portraits. Al Columbia's "Invasion" is three pages of blue cats roaming through an eerily silent town, perhaps at dawn.

Nate Neal returns with another epic series of interrelated stories. These stories are a spoof of "serious" comics and the urge to create same; given that he's obviously been influenced by the id-first nature of underground comics, it's no surprise that he pokes fun at this greater cultural interest in comics. He goes from a cartoony character forced to face "reality" to "Reality Comics" that consist of single panels involving the most mundane activities imaginable (down to clipping toenails). In "Reality Apart", Neal switches to a third person narrative style to tell the hilariously warped story of a doomed relationship. Neal ties all three strips together by using the same color scheme. Neal walks the line between landing funny blows and belaboring the obvious. His criticisms aren't exactly novel, but he at least is funny in presenting them.

That humorous approach is something that's grown in MOME, which was much drier in its early issues. The addition of Ray Fenwick was a key moment in making MOME funnier, and he continues to get more into straight cartooning with another Bear & Truth Stick series of strips. While his lettering/calligraphy still dominates the strip, his panel-to-panel transitions show excellent comic timing. Jon Vermilyea joins MOME with a hilariously, shockingly violent story called "The Breakfast Crew". It begins with a bunch of bored kids complaining about their breakfasts and being stunned to see a gang of giant, anthropomorphic breakfast items smash through their wall. They become even more terrified when a rival breakfast gang (The Breakfast Bunch) bursts in, leading to a visceral and vicious showdown. Seeing an anthropomorphic creature have its eyes gouged out or getting disemboweled was quite a sight, and Vermilyea's tight line and flat layout give the strip a look that resembles a commercial. That familiarity is what makes the strip creepy and funny.

Sara Edward-Corbett is another newcomer to MOME. A member of the Partyka comics collective, Edward-Corbett's chops are sterling and her sense of humor is dry. She likes doing strips about children (the characters in her story in this volume are from her See-Saw series) and the horrible things they do to each other in school. The result is something lighter than most of the rest of this volume, but still retaining a certain tartness as well. Her work reminds me a little of Steven "Ribs" Weissman.

Dash Shaw and another MOME newcomer, Derek Von Gieson, both contribute slightly less straightforward stories. Von Gieson's "Paralleograms" is a silent, splotchy, black-dominated story about a certain woman on a park bench and her rather predatory nature. The story flashes between parallel narratives involving the same woman over a number of different years and her eerie appeal to young men. Shaw's "Train" begins with a therapist working with a young girl with some kind of neurological/ psychological disorder (an entirely cerebral process) to that therapist being determined to jog in the middle of the city. Arriving at a graveyard, she sees a train crash spectacularly into the middle of the graveyard. The survivors rush at her until she realizes that they're not really there. The shift from trying to understand the girl's world and perspective to a completely physical experience and back to trying to understand her own unexplainable hallucination is exactly the kind of whipcrack transition that Shaw employs so well.

Tom Kaczynski is the kind of artist that MOME was created to spotlight. He's grabbed that opportunity with astonishing story after astonishing story about humanity's relationship with its technology and the spaces it inhabits. When his work is finally collected into one volume, it's going to cause a bit of a stir in the comics world because of the way he speaks to the collective neuroses of the new millennium. There's no one quite like him in terms of his perspective and narrative voice. In #12, Kaczynski contributes three superb one-page stories about sound. In "Noise: A History", Kaczynski boils down the history of the world in terms of random events and how many decibels it measured out to, from the big bang to the falling of rustling leaves. He links past to present through the use of that measure of sound, providing an interesting shorthand for understanding the world in its greatest, worst and most indifferent moments. "Hotel Silencio" is about a man who creates a hotel that employs sound-baffling technology, creating a sensation that quickly abates after its inhabitants go crazy with the lack of sound. "100 Decibels" is about how the perception of sound can be quite subjective in its own way. It's a perfectly-executed and arranged suite of stories that fit right into the ideas he's been exploring all along in MOME.

The main event of this issue was the trio of foreign heavyweights. Schrauwen's bizarre "Hair Types" is his first story translated into English, and it's unlike anything I've ever read. The color in the story looks faded, as though the strip were decades old. That fits in with this story about the pseudoscientific classification of personality as a function of hair, a sort of follicular phrenology. Schrauwen intercuts the central conflict of the story with diagrams explaining the "theory" behind the hair type theory. In the mind of the protagonist, the diagrams of the "crazy hair" brain morph from words describing it (inertia, idiocy, laziness) to pictorial figures embodying the concepts. The concepts then break out of their compartments to interact with each other in an explosive manner. The story concludes with one of the members of the "hair salon" modeling different kinds of hair and showing off different drawings of the same girl--an imagining of external, arbitrary roots for artistic choices and inspirations. This is a story about self-fulfilling prophecy and the way categorization is often prescriptive, not descriptive.

Killoffer's "Dirty Family Laundry" is true to its title: an escalating series of scatological neuroses that Killoffer relates to a lover in bed. It's hilarious and horrifying as his quite literal anal-retentive tendencies play out in increasingly awful ways. His mother, depicted as a sort of cubist nightmare creature, is unbalanced in abusive in a shocking manner. The panel at the end of the story, showing his lover's stunned expression, is priceless. David B's "The Drum Who Fell In Love" is another in a series of stories creating an alternate, fabulist version of Christianity combining magic, war, dreams, art and sex. It's about a sect leader who dies but is brought back to life as a war drum that his followers create. He falls in love with a girl, tired of being used strictly for bloodshed, but their love is doomed. David B excels at these sorts of fantastic war scenes, creating a new kind of fairy tale.

This issue of MOME was far more visceral, scatological and funny than any previous volume. Given Gilbert Shelton's upcoming contributions to the anthology, I suspect that MOME will continue to evolve in this direction, at least for now. The quirkier, more organic editing touch that Groth & Reynolds are using to select contributors has aided the anthology's evolution; they're very much letting the talent drive the anthology rather than trying to box it in too much. There's no other anthology that's as aggressive in terms of translating the work of non-American masters while maintaining a commitment to find and grow younger talent. It continues to be essential reading.