Sequart Reprints: Minicomics Round-Up

Time to take a look at the minicomics that have come my way, and it's quite an interesting and varied assortment from all over the world. There's historical adaptations, horror, humor and autobio in this batch, among other things. Let's begin with humor.


Shannon Smith

There's a bunch of micro-minis in this batch, with several 4-page minis detailing a wild schoolboy from Smith's childhood and a vengeful possum. One of them was a 12-hour comic and they all have a tossed-off, disposable feel to them. A more substantive entry is BRUSH AND PEN, a stylish mini that pins its effectiveness on how Smith portrays its characters. The main character is an anthropomorphic pen named Clicky and it concerns his travails with his wife, a beautiful but "high-maintenance" brush. The story leads up to the two of them having the writing implement version of having sex: dipping into an inkwell and drawing on fresh sheets of paper. There's a great panel where Brush dips her head into the ink and flings her head back, ink spraying everywhere. It's a genuinely sensuous image that leads to a clever sequence where the two characters express their passion on the page, with the accumulated ink leading to a blackout (quite literally). Smith's playful figures remind me a bit of Steve Lafler's work. This mini had modest ambitions but fulfilled them admirably, and I'm curious to see what else Smith can do. Go to www.shannonsmith.net for more details.


Rob Jackson

Jackson is from England, though he spent some time in South Korea teaching english. That story is detailed in RANDOM JOURNEYS #1 in "1st Day At Work", where Jackson is led to a red-light district by his boss because "here you can make lots of foreign friends!" Things get weirder from there, as he's led to a public bath and gets a rubdown, getting cleaned in places he wasn't expecting. The beleaguered Jackson makes an amusing narrator, and his dry, smart-ass wit shines through all of his stories, even when they are ostensibly serious.

That's certainly true of the main story in this mini, an account of a jungle expedition, but even moreso in CAFE' LE GUILLOTINE: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. It's a straightforward account that somehow manages to mine the absurdity of that historical event. Especially random beheadings, heads on pikes, King Louis trying to pass as a commoner, storming the Bastille, Caps of Liberty and other wackiness. There are two very clever pages where Tom Paine (author of Common Sense and a key figure in the American Revolution) is in Paris and nearly lynched by a crowd for not wearing a Liberty Cap before he's saved. Jackson really captures the paranoia and general craziness that gripped a nation that desperately needed change. Of course, once the revolutionaries gained power, it didn't take long for backbiting, power grabs and murder in the name of the state to grab hold. Jackson's take on it was that everyone involved was a yahoo, with the revolutionaries ultimately tapping Napolean. The center of the story concerns the title cafe, across the square from where most of the executions took place, and the beheadings became public sport. (An aside where a woman bakes a "monarchist pudding" and is sent to her death sort of sums it all up.)

Jackson's ambitions as an artist currently outstrip his abilities. His composition is impressive--there's a great-looking page where the panels are arranged to look like a guillotine. The crudeness of his figure work is probably his biggest weakness as an artist, though he compensates for this by using a few recognizable iconic trademarks for each major character. Robespierre wears glasses (adding to his aura of nerd-drunk-with-power), Marat has a bandage on his head, Desmoulins has long black hair, etc. The limitations of his draftsmanship were aided by the light-hearted approach he took to this story. Jackson's brains, wit and compositional sense are currently his strengths, and I hope that he continues to work on his weaknesses, because he's made some interesting choices so far in his comics career. See smallzone.co.uk for more information.


Molly Lawless

Lawless' entry is SLEEPWALKER #1, and more info (including a link to her excellent sketch blog) can be found at sleepwalkercomic.blogspot.com. Lawless didn't write the bulk of this 16 page mini, which is unfortunate because those pages she did write were quite witty. I'm a sucker for sports comics and her one-pager on the Washington Senators' last game in 1971 (complete with the game being called because the fans stormed the field) was amusing and sharply drawn. Lawless almost completely eschews the use of blacks, preferring a heavily cross-hatched style that adds weight to the page without interfering with the reader's ability to process it. She perhaps overdoes it on this page, though the crowded and cross-hatched panels reflect the weirdness and claustrophobia of the event itself.

The main narrative in this issue was written by Carlton King and it's called "The Turning of the Worm". Her art breathes a bit more here, with a lot more white space. Her figure work is wonderful to lay one's eyes on. The body language is subtly detailed, the figures are expressive, and eccentricities are conveyed without the use of too much exaggeration. Her art reminds me a little of Alison Bechdel's (with a bit of Renee French thrown in), especially the way she uses facial expressions to convey meaning so effectively. The story concerns a fantasy nerd who gets a job essentially running the life of a sad-sack but very successful fantasy author. The nerd is enormously self-deluded regarding his own importance and of course is friends with similarly self-deluded creative/political types. This first episode is mildly diverting, but the one-dimensional nature of the characters makes me wonder how far this storyline can be stretched.

The rest of the issue has some nice gag work. There's a great page called "Alien Bride", the cover of an absurd bridal magazine that has a bride with metallic claws weepily lamenting "No ring for me..." Lawless clearly has a ton of talent (she does a lot of illustration work), and I hope she continues to write her own material.


Dave Bradbury's PICTOZINE

PICTOZINE is an anthology by cartoonists from New Zealand. There's a nice diversity of styles here, but each individual strip is too short to really get a sense of what each author is capable of. The two exceptions are by the best-known artists here, and their work frankly towers over every other entry in the anthology. The first is a bunch of Fred the Clown strips by Roger Langridge, who is merely one of the best humorists working in comics today. His design sense, gorgeous line, expressive figures and absurd sense of humor are a pleasure to read anywhere. The second exception is more of an illustrated essay by Dylan Horrocks, creator of HICKSVILLE (one of my all-time favorite comics). Horrocks writes an essay about his "lighthouse library", the ideas that have been in his head for years but he hasn't yet drawn. It's a revealing look at his struggle to be prolific, cleverly laid out as an extended checklist of ideas.

There are other funny bits: Robin E Kenealy checks in with "I Made a Toastie Pie for Satan", a gag that pretty much explains itself. Matt Scheurbert's "Discovery" is a one-pager wherein a man picks up a sheet of paper with a surprising message on it; the dominant use of black adds a bit of weight to a clever but slight set-up. On the other end of styles, Steve Saville's stylized and exaggerated figures in "The Forgotten" nicely match the nihilism of the strip.

The other strips don't do much for me. Some are slick but empty (like VL Dreyer's fantasy sequence), some have gags that are punchless (Grant Buist's "Fitz Bunny in Hell") and some have interesting ideas and images that are hard to follow (Tim Danko, I think). Another problem is that the order of the stories doesn't exactly match up with the artist list on the back, and not every story contains an artist's signature. As a whole, it's not an entirely satisfying read. The only thread running between every entry is that each artist is from New Zealand, and that's not quite enough to provide a coherent reading experience. Overall, I'd say that this was a noble experiment that didn't quite work, but it did at least expose me to a few more artists whom I want to see more out of. Contact Dave Bradbury at dave@pictozine.co.nz for
details on ordering.


Elizabeth Genco & Assorted Illustrators

Genco submitted two minis: WEIRD SISTER and RED. Both are horror comics, a genre in which I don't have much interest. Still, Genco managed to win me over with an intelligent, clever approach to old saws like witch and werewolf stories. Not an artist herself, she was somewhat at the mercy of her illustators, and the style of each artist had a huge impact on how effectively each story completed its aims.

WEIRD SISTER is about a young witch who summons up a hellhound to kill a couple of vicious thugs, protects a special child from someone she accidentally drove mad, and protects a friend from her now-undead ex-boyfriend. What's most interesting about the stories is the way Genco slowly reveals details about the character and her motivations. She's a witch who has some sort of mission here, but what exactly the mission might be isn't clear. The lack of detail the reader is given in the first story is not aided by the murky art by Adam Boorman. It's hard to make out what's happening from panel to panel at times, and the attempt by the artist to create a mood is hampered by this lack of clarity.

On the other hand, the extreme stylization of Dash Shaw in the second story makes it an interesting read. The man accidentally driven insane by the young child is a sweaty, scarred mess; we can feel his desperation as he's about to kill the child. Meanwhile, Shaw's composition and style choices on the two big action pages nicely convey the weirdness of the situation. There's almost a Ditko-esque quality to some of the action and close-ups of the characters. Again, we don't learn much about a lot of the characters in this story, but we are left wanting to know more. The art-comics sensibility that Shaw brings to a horror story is quite an effective pairing.

That's what makes the third story such a disappointment. Jeff Zornow's generically-slick horror style, combined with a cliched ex-boyfriend from hell storyline, makes this a rather dull episode. Especially since the main character gets out of every jam in the same way (summoning up the hellhound). It was disappointing because the reader could at least somewhat sympathize with the madman in the second story; the zombie boyfriend here is a rather tedious self-destructive tough guy. There is some interesting potential in this cycle of stories, especially the idea of a witch in modern Brooklyn. The idea of secret magic in the city is a clever one, but I wish all of the characters could be fleshed out as well as the protagonists--especially the male characters here.

Genco likes writing psychotic male characters, and does a decent job in RED. Sequart.com's own Kevin Colden does the art, with clever splashes of red throughout. Indeed, the use of color actually acts as a secondary narrator of sorts, drawing one's eye to important story points. Using the psycho as the story's narrator reduces the cliche' factor a bit, especially when we are introduced to our heroine on page two. In a black-and-white comic, she is wearing a red hoodie that draws not only our eye, but also that of the psycho killer, who has just claimed another female victim. She's Little Red Riding Hood, and he's the vicious wolf. He follows her and they strike up a conversation, and she winds up inviting him over to her sister's house for dinner. When the moon comes up, he gets a big surprise when the real wolves are revealed. The end is enormously clever and satisfying, in large part due to Colden's expressive figures and the use of color. I also like the fact that Genco seems to specifically write horror from almost a feminist perspective, which is a welcome point of view for a genre that at times has been notoriously
misogynistic. Check out http://www.streetfables.com for more.

The Simple Horrors of Dream-Time: The Bun Field

Rob reviews the recent translation of Finnish artist Amanda Vahamaki's THE BUN FIELD (Drawn & Quarterly).


The interpretation of dreams is much like the interpretation of any event: subject to a retroactive narrative of a primary experience. It's the same principle regarding the aesthetic experience vs. an interpretation of that experience--you can talk about it, and around it, and understand its origins and experiences, but the interpretation is not the same thing as the experience. It never can be. In much the same way, Amanda Vahamaki's THE BUN FIELD feels like an artist's best attempt to directly transcribe her own subconscious, but even that level of interpretation perhaps assumes a bit too much. This is a story with loose connections that follow the experience of a single character that starts off with a cartoonish but horrific dream and then delves into an even more cartoonish and horrific reality. The main character takes these events at face value and so must the reader.

That said, Vahamaki's art has a loose, scribbly quality to it that reflects immediacy and urgency. It feels like this was frantically scribbled into the artist's own sketchbook. Some of the images are actually beautifully rendered, while some panels retain the erasure marks of first tries. One of the ways in which comics are unique is that it's very easy to leave in those sort of tracings to reflect a change of artistic agency on a given page, an act that deconstructs both the act of drawing and reading the page. Seeing the artist's hand in such a direct way changes the way we perceive it but doesn't take us out of the narrative itself. It's one more story element that we simply must accept, just like a bear driving a car or an amateur dentist replacing the protagonist's tooth with a dog's tooth.



There are a number of recurring images and situations in THE BUN FIELD. The characters all obsess on eating, and in particular not having enough of or non-spoiled food. The protagonist is on some kind of journey, but it's not clear if she's moving toward or away from something. Indeed, aimlessness and the interminable length of journeys (represented by a number of panels tracking a tedious path) seem to be part of the equation here. The threat of death or personal injury always lurks, though it should be noted that the only significant injury the narrator sustains came when she tripped and fell on her face. Despite that vague sense of menace, there's an air of silliness as well, like the conversation the protagonist has with the bear driving a car, plowing a field of living buns, and the way various animals talk to her. Above all else, this comic seems to deal with how agency is frustrated in our dreams. The protagonist can't drive, can't decide where to go, can't finish a grisly job and eventually can't stop crying. The line between dream and reality is irrelevant here in very much the same way our own dreams can feel so very real.



In the end, that line between dream and reality is given a very deliberate wink as the dinosaur that pops up in the protagonist's dream reveals itself in "reality" to one of her friends. The protagonist is unable to overcome her grief (and guilt)-induced paralysis and so doesn't return home, despite being told that all is forgiven. This is a journey comic where things get progressively worse and eventually traps the protagonist into hopelessness. In a different comic, the dreamlike signifiers shown in this book would have an obvious story reference to tell the reader what they represent. Instead, it's the signifiers themselves that carry the weight of the book. The reader can guess at the potential underlying emotions (grief, guilt, despair) of those signifiers, but in the end it's all about the journey, not its beginnings. As a result, Vahamaki has created a bold variation on the hoary convention of the dream comic, one that trusts the reader to take each image as it is and react to the feelings we see on panel, not the feelings we guess they represent.

Two Kinds of Adaptations: First Time and The Raven & Other Poems

Rob reviews a couple of recent releases from NBM, both of which feature artists adapting stories from a single writer. THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS is illustrated by Gahan Wilson, while FIRST TIME is an erotica anthology featuring a host of artists interpreting the stories of Sibylline.



I always thought that CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED was a truly odd duck in the world of comics. They essentially mangled works of literature, paring it down to a more palatable length and getting industry hacks to illustrate them. That approach changed with the 90s revival and current reprinting and expansion of same by Papercutz, a division of NBM. These comics use high production values and try to match artists with subject matter that seems right up their alley. In the case of illustrating THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS, legendary NEW YORKER cartoonist Gahan Wilson could not have been a better choice. It's important to note that this volume is not a comic, but rather a series of poems with accompanying illustrations. The illustrations are subservient to and not in concert with the text, but nonetheless echo the sheer obsessive passion of Edgar Allan Poe.



Wilson manages to create a vibratory quality in his line by combining a lot of loopy lines that leave a lot of space with dense cross-hatching. The way he constructs his figures is fascinating, piling on geometric shapes that add up to characters. His proficiency in depicting the morbid made him an ideal match for Poe, but there's also a playfulness to his line, a sense of whimsy, that also fits in with Poe's lilting verses and sharp wit. While the illustrations for the titular poem were appropriately gloomy, the real show-stopper here was what Wilson did for the poem "The Conqueror Worm". This apocalyptic, gruesome poem feels like a predecessor to HP Lovecraft's stories, and Wilson's grotesque stylings live up to Poe's decriptions. Fans of either Poe or Wilson should seek this book out, even if Wilson declined to really attempt to adapt it to comics form.


Adapting erotica into comics form has mostly resulted in predictably inane narratives and/or art that that failed to arouse. Of course, the line between pornography and erotica is as nebulous as the very definition of porn itself. The anthology FIRST TIME valiantly tries to fly under the banner of erotica as its concept surrounds stories fleshing out first experiences with various aspects of sexuality. The writer, Sybilline, is a woman who wrote each story from a woman's perspective, in a further attempt to subvert the usually male-centric nature of porn.



The results were decidedly mixed, both in terms of narrative and arousal. While the concept of "first time" was clever, the stories themselves were remarkably predictable, even when a deliberate twist was thrown in. For example, the story about a woman "meeting" a man in a bar who was actually her husband lacked any sense of mystery. Some of the more light-hearted stories (like a woman buying her first dildo) weren't actually funny, just inane. The dialogue didn't help matters in most of the stories, especially those that tilted more towards accounts of specific sexual acts rather than fleshing out actual characters.

A notable exception was "1 + 1", a story about a woman's first lesbian experience. The cartoony art by Virginia Augustin was sharp and angular, adding an air of whimsy to what would turn out to be a sad story. While the "twist" of her one-night-stand being a woman was telegraphed, the way the affair turned out added a downbeat tone to a book mostly about fulfillment. In terms of pure sex appeal, the story "2 + 1", about a woman's first threesome, was the most visceral in its visual approach. Sometimes this was a bit much (like the depiction of the first kiss), but artist Vince's relentless commitment to details both explicit and decorative made the otherwise standard story a success.



The book's best story was a silent one adapted by Dave McKean. An anthology of this sort consisting entirely of silent stories might have been considerably more powerful, given the eye-popping quality of what McKean did here. It's about a man masturbating to an x-rated film on TV, his wife discovering him and seducing him, and the not-so-shocking ending where she turns on the film herself. McKean switches back and forth between a distorted photorealist style for the film and a sort of cubist/futurist take on the couple. This approach is the best in representing the kinetic qualities of sex in the entire book, as opposed to a series of still drawings.

Overall, the book feels a bit betwixt and between. The characters are well-developed enough for us to care about their sexual escapades. The stories are mostly not whimsical enough to get us to laugh with the characters as they get into sexual situations. The imagery, with the exception of McKean, is mostly the sort of stuff we've seen in other places. While the feminine perspective in narration was appreciated, it didn't seem to say much that hasn't been done in other volumes of erotica. Hopefully, if there are future volumes, they'll let the artists pursue newer avenues of representation regarding sex and won't worry about if the results are truly "erotic" or not.

Skin You're In: A Mess of Everything

Rob reviews the second volume of Miss Lasko-Gross' autobiographical high school vignettes, A MESS OF EVERYTHING (Fantagraphics).

Miss Lasko-Gross' self-caricature in her autobio stories is an interesting mash-up of a typical teen with low self-esteem and that of an indignant outsider determined to make her increasingly confident voice heard--and loudly. While she is constantly bombarded with the message that she doesn't fit in, she's weird, she's not "cute" like other girls and this message certainly takes its toll, by the end of this book one can tell that the volume of this message grows more and more muted in her own head. It's easy to internalize this message, and to a degree she does, but her own stubborn individuality and sense of generalized outrage constantly talks her out of it. At the same time, her utter contempt for anything resembling an institution (especially of learning) is magnified all the more when she "succeeds" in school as she learns to play the game of what is expected of her as a student.

It was this rock-solid sense of self that anchored her as a younger girl in her first book, ESCAPE FROM 'SPECIAL', giving her the ability to rise above the realization that the world has a way of punishing the naive-but-different. "Outrage" was her touchstone in this book, as her anger at everything gave her the fuel to rise above her own doubts and anyone who dared mess with her. Fundamentally, she wasn't really just angry about specific injustices (such as feeling that all the schools wanted were unquestioning sheep spitting back desired answers), but rather that qualities such as honesty, empathy and compassion were not only not encouraged by the culture-at-large, but openly derided. In her own eyes, she was doing everything "right" but was not only never rewarded but frequently punished. While despondent over this understanding, sometimes to the point of no longer wanting to live, she nonetheless kept plugging away.

Lasko-Gross lays out a fairly conventional narrative in terms of time and flow, but breaks it up with short vignettes. In the first book, the vignettes accreted an eventual collective weight that was greater than the sum of its parts. Lasko-Gross alternated between small, funny moments and the larger snapshots of personal drama. In this book, with several sustained subplots, the formal choice of using the vignettes worked in the opposite manner: it broke up a "heavy" storyline and made it more palatable by feeding it to us in smaller doses, punctuated by occasional sillier stories that also served to lighten the mood a bit.

This was a needed approach, because the "after-school special" nature of a friend with anorexia threatened to bog the book down at times, even as Lasko-Gross is careful to tie this in with her own sense of self and what a friend is obligated to do. It was obviously tough to deal with, given that this was based on Lasko-Gross' own experiences, but she perhaps threw in one vignette too many that repeated the same themes and exchanges. That was obviously done to reflect her own frustration in dealing with her friend (and the friend's eventual behavior toward her) and the conclusion of the story was certainly powerfully & skilfully handled. At times, however, I thought this subplot was in danger of taking over the book. That said, Lasko-Gross was careful to illustrate why this relationship was so important to her, particularly in the way she showed how she struggled to reveal her "true" self to others.


It's interesting to compare this book to Ariel Schrag's work. The former was done in the moment during high school and lacked the perspective of time to evaluate what it all meant. Of course, such an approach also prevents a bit of retroactive editing of memory. Lasko-Gross has a very particular sort of story that she wants to tell, but the use of vignettes to break up the narrative helps remove some of the temptation to make more sense out of one's own life story than is really there. Indeed, she goes out of her way to not just be self-effacing, but to even point out that she's a sort of "type" (the rebel), with a whole host of expected behaviors. It's actually that realization that allows her to break out of that role when she starts failing at school and smoking pot. Her strong sense of self is balanced with how her behavior affects others, including her family.


Lasko-Gross' greatest strengths as an artist are her character design, gesture and use of body language. It's the way she stages her characters that makes looking at each page interesting. She uses a muted palette on pages that are mostly filled with grey, and jams every panel with either decorative details or fills them with moody shading. When Miss is feeling a strong emotion in the comic, there are often strange little noodly lines that surround her that remind me (oddly enough) of mainstream artist George Perez. I love the touch of the exaggerated and the grotesque that she injects into her drawings, distorting faces and bodies to reflect emotional tumult. Lettering also serves as a way to depict exaggeration, and the organic quality of her lettering often reveals emotional states in a more direct way than the actual words themselves.


Ultimately, what saves the character of Lasko-Gross in this story is the feeling that she can escape this world by running off to art school. Her identity as an artist and increasing confidence in her own ability is perhaps the leading factor in caring less and less about what mainstream culture thinks about anything. At the end of ESCAPE FROM 'SPECIAL', she found a way to work herself out of being abjected into so-called "special education". At the end of this book, she stopped rebelling against the machine and instead pretended to play ball, never once internalizing the voice of authority, just so that she could escape from "normal". What was left unresolved here was the way her aggressiveness protected her from the world also isolated her emotionally; it'll be interesting to see if this becomes the main thrust of the last book in this trilogy. The last story in the book, coming as an epilogue of sorts, indicates how much connections come to mean to her.

Unspoken: Cecil And Jordan In New York Stories

Rob reviews the recent collection of short stories from Gabrielle Bell, CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK STORIES (Drawn & Quarterly).


With the release of LUCKY, Gabrielle Bell became best known for her wry autobiographical diary comics. Those comics have always been just one of her interests; in fact, her earliest minicomics tended to be fictional, as the collection WHEN I'M OLD shows. With the release of CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK, it's interesting to see how her dry sense of humor gets even drier when she gets away from strictly autobiographical accounts. It's also interesting to see a wider variety of visual approaches than one would expect from her wobbly but spontaneous line from her diary comics. As always, she's a master of subtlety, restraint, and repressed emotion--yet this volume sees her veering in some unusual, even fantastical, directions.

Bell is perhaps one of the more unlikely cartoonists to have their work adapted into film, yet director Michel Gondry adapted the titular story of this volume into his new film TOKYO! This was one of Bell's first attempts at working in color, and it looks a bit crisper here than in its original home in KRAMER'S ERGOT. The story of a woman who moves to New York to help out her filmmaker boyfriend takes an odd turn when she stops feeling useful and decides to turn herself into a chair. If she's going to be used, she may as well get really used. The deadpan nature of Bell's work made that transition a seamless one. While there are often loud, abrasive characters in Bell's comics, her protagonists are always calm and almost devoid of strong emotions--or at least emotional displays. That flatness of affect makes it difficult for a reader to identify with them, giving her stories a coolness. As a result, the reader is always kept a little off-balance and is forced to dig into each story's emotional subtext.


Bell does work a little more broadly and warmly in some of her stories. "My Affliction" reminds me a lot of her earlier stories. It's a wonderfully loopy story that feels almost completely improvised in the way it passes from weird episode to weird episode. There's a certain kind of dream logic going on as Gabrielle finds she can't fall to the earth, falls in love with inappropriate targets, gets a dog and parrot and winds up imprisoned in a giant's cage. What makes the story work is that the moment-to-moment transitions are muted and subtle up until a surprisingly tense climax, gently leading the reader along no matter how ridiculous the situations. "Robot DJ" is a first-person account of a reunion of friends at a concert. It's about camaraderie lost and found over the years that feels more like a Jaime Hernandez story than something I'd expect from Bell--especially the bonding over a particular band. There's a lightness to this story that results from the sense of connection and purpose we feel from these characters. Unlike most of the other characters in this book, they're settled and secure in their lives, and this story acts almost as an epilogue to the narrative we are told in a flashback. "Helpless", the last story in the book, is an interesting companion piece to "Cecil and Jordan". We see Cecil at an earlier age before she had been beaten down by life, connecting with her best friend in the form of public mischief. This story is warm and emphasizes connection with others as a way of finding a sense of belonging, as opposed to "Cecil and Jordan", which is about the breakdown of connection and finding oneself through isolation stretched into alienation.


At the other end of the spectrum are stories featuring characters who feel completely out of place and out of joint. "I Feel Nothing" features a Gabrielle stand-in visiting the apartment of the man who lives above her. He's young, shallow and rich, and the void he feels draws him to her. There's a brilliant scene where she imagines submitting to his plea and spending the day with him, extrapolating that out to a horrible end. So she stops and returns to the dull safety of her life, and it's not clear if that's the right decision or not, though it is certainly the decision void of both drama and potential reward. "Year of the Arowana" is an account in a letter of a meeting with a famous author, and the ways in which the evening became creepy and disappointing. The key to this story is that it's told as a letter by a narrator we eventually realize is not entirely reliable, as Bell provides subtle visual clues that things changed in the retelling. "One Afternoon" is about a woman who learns that her husband is dead and feels liberated by the announcement, only to learn that he's in fact not dead. The inane conversation the two have at the end of the story is chilling in the sense of quiet desperation we can feel from her and the mute self-satisfaction we feel from him. These stories experiment with some different tones for backgrounds and feel a bit more precise in the way they're drawn than more sketchy stories like "My Affliction". Bell sacrifices a bit of spontaneity here, but that may well be part of the intended effect for these emotionally cooler stories.



There are several semi-autobiographical stories here that mostly deal with Bell's childhood--and they don't paint a flattering picture. "Hit Me" and "Summer Camp" are set in the past, with the former finding outsider Bell dealing with bullies and stuck-up girls while being befriended by a class weirdo. When Bell impresses others with the use of violence, she happily moves up in the hierarchy of school and leaves her friend behind. "Summer Camp" details young Bell trying to recapture a feeling of connectedness she felt at summer camp as she runs away from home, only to discover that she made a mistake in trying to reproduce this feeling. "Gabrielle The Third" is on the surface about a family of pigeons that nested on Bell's windowsill, but it's also about Bell's relationship with her mother and how they differ from each other. Bell's modulation of emotion, shifting it into almost total flatness, actually adds to the pathos of each story without feeling like the reader is being manipulated. That flatness also forces the reader to stay their hand before judging anyone in the story, whether it's Bell herself (and she never makes herself a totally sympathetic character in her stories) or an aggressor.

The best story in the book, and of Bell's career, is "Felix". It's about an art student who tutors the teenaged son of a famous postmodernist sculptor. The tension between the student, the boy, and the artist is almost unbearable at times, with only the boy lashing out and acting, despite the fact that every character is feeling a sense of worthlessness and frustration. One of the funny ironies in the story is that the student is told that her work is "self-absorbed", yet the men telling her this are beyond self-absorbed--they're oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of others. Bell uses a soft pastel palette for her most successful use of color. It's not at all naturalistic, but rather feels like Bell is having the student draw the story. The linework and character design are more refined than in some of her other stories. It's a nice thematic summation of the whole book, touching on appearance vs reality, the feeling of being an outsider, the illusory authority of institutions and the difficulty of establishing and maintaining connections. It's also Bell's longest story, yet doesn't waste a single line. I'll be curious to see if she remains a short story writer or if she has a longer work in her. Either way, she has a body of work over the past few years that measures up to anyone in comics.

Expanding Pedagogy: Adventures in Cartooning

Rob reviews the young readers how-to guide/narrative, ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost (FIRST SECOND).



It's a golden age for comics in many respects, but it's especially a great time for comics textbooks. With schools such as CCS, SCAD, SVA and MCAD offering formal instruction and cartooning courses popping up everywhere, it makes sense that we should finally see some practical comics textbooks. From Ivan Brunetti's informal CARTOONING book to the densely-detailed DRAWING WORDS AND WRITING PICTURES from Jessica Abel & Matt Madden along with Lynda Barry's more general inspirational guide WHAT IT IS and Kyle Baker's goofy HOW TO DRAW STUPID, there's now an embarassment of riches for anyone designing a course for teens or adults. First Second, a publisher that has gone out of its way to publish a number of comics aimed squarely at children, has stepped up to supplement the Abel/Madden book with ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING, which is designed to both educate and inspire younger children as to the formal properties of comics while telling a story.



Not surprisingly, the book was put together by the head of the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), James Sturm, and two graduates of the school, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost. Frederick-Frost has already won a Xeric grant for his LA PRIMAVERA, and all three artists have collaborated here with a pitch-perfect blend of pedagogy and fun. The book starts off by asking if the reader can draw simple shapes and promises them the ability to draw comics if they can. ADVENTURES simultaneously folds in an adventure about a knight trying to rescue a princess from a dragon into a lesson about the basics of comics, with the knight as a stand-in for the reader and a magic elf as the instructor.


The reader learns about the basic unit of the page, the panel; how to depict motion against a background, the way text influences the way we perceive image, word balloons vs thought balloons and other concepts--all within the context of a comedic quest adventure story. It's actually a delightfully meta sort of story, like a less malevolent DUCK AMUCK, as the characters find themselves able to manipulate the rules of their world as they understand more and more about comics. The end result is extremely clever, as the book surprisingly becomes an exciting adventure story, a brief comment about gender equity, and an open-ended invitation to the reader to create their own stories. The book finishes with a handy appendix of other comics concepts (like gutters), and a step-by-step series of instructions on how to draw basic characters like horses and people. It's hard to tell what the division of labor was between the three artists. I recognize Frederick-Frost's brushstrokes in how the figures are finished, but the way the action is depicted makes it seem like Arnold did the layouts. Sturm may well have written it, given his recent background as an educator, though I'm sure all three artists had input in every segment of the book.




I'll be curious to see what sort of effect this book has on children, and what the best age group would be for it. I'm guessing that the ideal group would be somewhere between seven and ten years old. The book is probably a little too simplistic for anyone older, but I'm not sure its ideas will sink in with anyone younger, unless they have an adult working with them. I do like that there's a sample of an actual child's story based on the book's characters in the back, showing a reader that their own work doesn't have to be as exact as the creators of the book. That said, the only flaw of the book is that it may not be interactive enough to really force the reader into making their own strip. The reader is introduced to a number of concepts, shown how they can work in a story, but then gets swept along with the story. At the very end, the book asks the reader to create their own stories, but this requires a bit of a leap for a child that doesn't already draw. On the other hand, the book could be a way to get children to "turn your doodles into comics!" as the front cover suggests. It's supposing that most children will have the raw material to want to start to draw comics, just not the tools. As such, ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING is more of a toolbox (or perhaps toybox) than a textbook, explicitly providing aspiring cartoonists with the fundamentals an implicitly showing them how to write the sort of story that they'd want to read.

Mini-Comics Round-Up: Sayers, Dinski, M.Hogan, R.Hogan, Trivial, Carcieri

Rob reviews another batch of interesting minicomics. Included are JUST SO YOU KNOW #1 by Joey Sayers; TRIVIAL, an anthology by Sean Ford, Alex Kim, Andrew Arnold & Alexis Frederick-Frost; MIND-MAPPING by Will Dinski; BEARD-GROWING CONTEST by Raighne Hogan; MANNY & BIGFOOT by Meghan Hogan; and PORTALS #1 & DREAM #1 by Nic Carcieri & Eric Dotson.



JUST SO YOU KNOW, by Joey Sayers. This mini is certainly a change of pace for the artist behind the "Thingpart" gag strips. Sayers generally employs a minimalist but nicely composed style for absurdist gags that skillfully subvert reader expectations. Her comics remind me a bit of Matt Feazell (in terms of the minimalist style) and Michael Kupperman (in terms of the quality of the absurd gagsmithing). JUST SO YOU KNOW is an autobiographical comic featuring anecdotes about Sayers' transition from male to female. I've actually read a surprising number of autobiographical comics about this subject, but Sayers' strips here are unusual because she takes great pains to provide every anecdote with a punchline. No matter how personal or serious a direction she takes the reader, Sayers always leavens the seriousness with a joke. The joke is frequently at her own expense. One gets the sense that Sayers was worried about being boring or preachy in a comic that was already (by definition) entirely self-centered. Pricking her own ego from time to time acts as preventative medicine for the reader who might think that Sayers takes herself way too seriously.

The impression one walks away with after reading this comic is that it's only because of the greater ease she feels in the world and with herself that she was not only able to write about this subject, but make fun of it. The first strip, "Freaking Out The Parents" starts off with some stiff medicine, as she tells her parents (and the audience) about the way she's struggled trying to live as a man, her depression and how she felt the need to turn to drugs. She kept going on like this for several panels, noting that she just wanted to be happy, until we are hit with her father saying, "Wait, you did drugs?" Sayers once again sets the reader up with one expectation and then pulls the rug out, establishing the formula for the rest of the comic.

Sayers gives us certain bits of the process of transition and the anxiety a transgendered person can feel, but isn't interested in presenting us with all the details. This comic is really about her own thoughts about transition, both funny and otherwise, as opposed to making a larger statement about it. There are vignettes about how hormones affect her emotional state (which create more than a little unease with both her and her girlfriend), being excited about growing breasts and getting a state ID confirming her new identity, and wondering if she's a bitch now in various circumstances. She closes things out by focusing on the relationship with her long-time and supportive girlfriend, as Sayers went from cross-dresser to transsexual. All told, this is a clear early front-runner for minicomic of the year for 2009, and I'm eager to see Sayers do more stories in this mold. She has a gift for relating personal details without being insufferable and of mining humor without forcing punchlines.



TRIVIAL, by Alexis Frederick-Frost, Alex Kim, Andrew Arnold and Sean Ford. The third of the Center for Cartoon Studies' "Four Square" anthologies is the strongest overall. Every quartet of artists in each issue works around a central theme, with this issue's being "trivial". That's a rather open-ended concept, which leads to four very different sorts of stories. Frederick-Frost's bold brush strokes and heavy use of blacks are a perfect way to open the book, drawing in the reader's eye with the starkness of his style. It's a style that fits the story well, being about the harsh beauty of Antarctica and a Shackleton expedition there. As he and his men trudge across the unforgiving landscape, the only way they could keep their sanity was by discussing the most inane of topics: conceptualizing new dishes and then debating their merits and originality. During a heated debate about the jam roll, Frederick-Frost underscores the nature of their struggle by printing the rather restrained text of Shackelton's account of the debate but showing a life-or-death struggle in the ice. It's a clever idea, well-executed.


Alex Kim and his weird, wavy line really go to town on a trivial conversation that turns into a graphic description of a weird nightmare. Kim throws us straight into a talking head with no explanation (not unusual in his comics), as the character is talking to someone we never see (one can surmise that the reader is really his conversational partner). The character talks about his obsession with hands and then relates a dream where he discovers his hands have become gigantic, sentient and murderous--eventually killing him, even as they were still attached to his body. What makes the story work is the way Kim uses panel-to-panel transitions, slowly panning down and around to up the horror content of the story. The effect is deliberately disjointed, creating an intense dream logic that continues until we slowly, creepily pan back to the character in real time. This is less a story than an image that Kim expanded and fleshed out, and it's the strength of that image that makes this chapter memorable.

Andrew L Arnold has an entry about a retired god/superhero who lives on a cloud. His day starts off reading a book, and he is then presented with a problem that is seemingly trivial at first but grows ever more problematic: a meteor heading toward a city that his explosive arrows just won't blow up. In the end, his luck (and aim) run just a little bit awry. This is a nicely designed chapter with a funny punchline that is deliberately stretched out like a shaggy dog story. It's a bit more conventional than the other stories in this anthology and less interesting to simply look at, but it's solidly crafted.



Sean Ford checks in with a couple of vignettes related to his ONLY SKIN series, featuring the odd ghost and new kid Clay. In the series, the ghost is mischievous at best and malevolent at worst, but he's more the former in these stories. In the first vignette, Clay and the ghost are mushrooming and the ghost urges him to give a poisonous mushroom to a nearby girl. When Clay refuses, the ghost mocks him like a grade schooler. In the second story, the ghost longs for nostalgic memories that are not really his, like drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes in a cemetery. The punchline comes when Clay actually does it for him and it's not exactly as exciting as he hoped. Ford's biggest strengths are character design and page composition. He solves the problem of what are essentially two talking head stories by varying his panel design, having the characters engage in visually interesting actitivies while they talk and dropping characters into shadow as a way of adding variety. All of that would be pointless if Ford weren't so adept at crafting dialogue. Clay acts as a nice straight man of sorts for the ghost, whose enigmatic nature lends itself to all sorts of possibilities. It's not surprising that a good chunk of the crew behind the SUNDAYS anthology would produce such a visually distinctive book with great production values, and it's clear that they all approached their contributions to this book very seriously.



MIND-MAPPING, by Will Dinski. Another winner from Will Dinksi, who always engages the form of his delivery system in new and exciting ways. This comic is about memory as it relates to pain, and the ways in which the things we recall tend to be very much by choice. It's about a map specialty store owner with a photographic memory, who laments that he is haunted by the specters of his memories, recalling them more sharply than most. He relates in excrutiating detail various incidents burned into his brain. Upon discovering that his store has been robbed, including of his laptop, he realizes that perhaps a lifetime spent dwelling on the mental recreation of trauma has left him more than a little unobservant. That realization perhaps let him realize that the ghosts he was haunted by were of his own making.



The comic unfolds like a typical Dinski work: crisply stylized characters, word balloons that act as individual captions and a certain economy of line and storytelling. The comic folds out like a map, which not only refers back to the main character but also the way he thought of memory as a series of grids that one could access. When one has finished the comic, Dinski gives us a little surprise: turn out the lights and then look at the glow-in-the-dark images that pop up. It's a clever flourish for a story that had a lot of punch and wasted no time to get there. Dinski's been on a real roll the past couple of years, and this mini certainly continues his hot streak. I like how he goes out of his way to create comics that are difficult to reprint in standard format, fully embracing the freedom and difficulties that creating minicomics provide.





BEARD GROWING CONTEST by Raighne Hogan and MANNY & BIGFOOT by Meghan Hogan. This is a pair of tiny minis from the husband-wife duo behind the excellent GOOD MINNESOTAN anthology. Both of these minis are beautiful, weird art objects; they're less stories than quick impressions. R.Hogan's BEARD GROWING CONTEST is a brief little vignette about a little kid straining to grow a beard and unleashing a fart instead, with the real punchline being what happens in his dreams later on. The full-color MANNY & BIGFOOT feels like a story fragment, as a man and his pet rabbit are threatened by a mysterious kidnapping note, while his sweater-stretching roommate Bigfoot messes with him. The soft pastels grab the eye and create an almost blurry softness for the visuals. The production values of both minis are top notch, even if the comics themselves are the very definition of "slight". Still, it's clear that that's what both cartoonists were going for: a slight, fun comic that served as a useful test for some eye-catching techniques.



DREAMER #1 and PORTALS #1 by Nic Carcieri, Rantz, Jason Flowers, Joel Cotejar, and Eric Dotson. There's something comforting about a writer who is so devoted to creating genre comics that he puts them out bit by bit in minicomics form. There's no pretense to being rich or famous, but rather an intense need to tell one's stories. As part of United Fanzine Organization, these comics have the appearance of work by enthusiastic amateurs rather than polished pros, but this is honestly what is most appealing about them. With both DREAMER and PORTALS, we get a tiny snapshot of a larger idea, the effect being watching the first five-minute segment of a 25-part movie serial from the 1930s. DREAMER'S about a guy who receives a weird artifact of his father's that has something to do with some kind of ancient struggle. I like the unfussy line of artist Eric Dotson here, even if it is a bit stiff in places. Every story in PORTALS is a bit of high concept: both "Kylie West" and "Hot Wings" involve big-boobed heroines engaging in adventure; the former's about an astronaut who winds up on a weird planet, and the latter is about warrior angels. The stylizations of artist Rantz veer between sloppy and fetishistic, drawing equally from manga and Image-style art. As such, it feels more like pin-up art than something that really tells a story. Jason Flowers' work in "Are We Dead Yet?" (about an immortal detective) tries for noir but winds up being muddy (including the lettering). "The London Fog" is the most ridiculous concept in the book (a magical Victorian-era vigilante preying on killers in the form of fog) yet Joel Cotejar's linework makes the idea come alive. I like the enthusastic fan ambition of Carcieri in that he's writing five epics at once (if in dribs and drabs), almost as if he's finding out what will stick best. It's that purity of enthusiasm that shows through, even if some of the stories feel like well-trod genre ground. Other than the loopy-but-serious "London Fog", I can't say that I'd be eager to read further installments of any of these series, but I'm glad that they exist.