Peter Bagge: The Modern-Day Mencken?

Rob reviews the new collection of Peter Bagge's strips from REASON magazine: EVERYBODY IS STUPID EXCEPT FOR ME AND OTHER ASTUTE OBSERVATIONS (Fantagraphics).



Peter Bagge rose to fame in the 80s and 90s by creating HATE, the classic slacker comic that uncannily anticipated trend after trend in music and youth culture. It's still as funny as ever, primarily because the cultural touchstones were always less important than its cast of characters, led by Bagge stand-in Buddy Bradley. Bagge always said that Buddy was him, minus about ten years. So while Bagge was getting married and starting a family, Buddy was still single and dealing with weird roommates, crazy girlfriends and "working" for a living. Nowadays, Buddy is married and has a kid--though his life is far from normal. Bagge has always been a prolific writer apart from HATE, and his more personal strips revealed that he's really a big ol' square. He loves the Beach Boys, hates live rock shows, admires Britney Spears & the Spice Girls and hates hipsters.



Bagge is also a libertarian and has been crafting strips about free speech and limited government issues for a decade. Given that that decade was during the GW Bush administration, one that saw both out-of-control spending and increasing limits on personal liberties, Bagge certainly had a lot of material to work with. Libertarians tend to hammer home the same themes, often in a less-than-practical or humane manner, but Bagge for the most part manages to stay an engaged (if partisan) observer when he goes on his field reports. That's really what separates these pieces from the random ravings of a political blog: Bagge actually goes to political conventions, gun shows, protests, "swingers" conventions and rides on Amtrak. He talks to people, seeks to understand their points of view (even when he finds them horrifying) and isn't a blind devotee (as the strip where he comes to grips with libertarian star Ron Paul's past racist statements).



While Bagge makes no pretense of ever being a neutral observer, his best strips are those that put the people he talks to front and center rather than his own opinions. The weakest long piece in the book is "'Real' 'Art'", which is one long gripefest about modern art and his own experience in art school couched in some rhetoric about funding such programs. On the other hand, his campaign trail pieces, the articles about hypocrisy with regard to the wars on drugs and sex, and funding boondoggles like light rail & sports stadiums are all on point.. Perhaps the most even-handed and thought-provoking piece in the book was "Bums", wherein Bagge not only provides a lot of information about the reasons people become homeless but also interviews a number of the chronically homeless. Throughout the book, Bagge makes even the dryest of subjects palatable with his hyper-exaggerated line, rubbery figures with looping arms & legs and just-plain-funny drawings.



When Bagge does get really personal, as opposed to biased, that produced a number of great strips as well. "Malls" actually persuasively argues in favor of big shopping malls as places for people who aren't hipsters to spend time, like teenaged girls (who won't get hassled as much), the elderly, the infirm, etc. He also notes that pedestrian-oriented downtown shopping often features hassles with parking and the homeless, and is happy that malls threw him out as a teenager, as "keeping out the riff-raff is what makes malls worth going to!" The bluntly-titled "Amtrak Sucks" makes loaded but persuasive arguments about why Amtrak is a waste of time and money. As someone who frequently endured trains that were 12 hours late and for prices that seemed astonishingly high for the level of service performed, I found myself nodding along to Bagge's hyperbole.

Overall, the longer pieces are fairer and funnier than the shorter strips, which use strawman arguments and are generally a bit more unfair. I like that he was quite willing to take shots at the left as well as the right--though honestly, the Bush era gave him many more targets. The title of this book is quite revealing: Bagge savages his targets not out of partisan fervor, but rather because he finds them stupid, hypocritical and small. Like H.L. Mencken, Bagge favors a scorched-earth satirical attack, tearing down arguments by ridicule as much as reason. Unlike Mencken, Bagge's work is more playful and less likely to attempt to install himself as a know-it-all (even if he thinks he does) because of his nebbishy self-portrayal. Bagge is anything but an intrepid reporter, crumbling under the rhetorical styles of politicians or getting freaked out by weirdos. He admits to getting even with mean-spirited cartoons later, with their bite perhaps inversely proportionate to how meek and mild he was with his subjects in person. Admitting this out loud goes a long way to putting the reader squarely in his corner even if one doesn't quite agree with his beliefs.

It's rare to see a cartoonist branch out into this kind of second act of a career with this much flourish and skill. No one would have ever thought of Bagge as a political cartoonist or cartoonist/journalist before he started publishing with REASON, yet his work here demands a reader's attention every bit as much as the more famous editorial cartoonists in America. While Bagge is no Joe Sacco, it's still exciting to see a cartoonist put that much time and effort into crafting a piece around a subject that is meaningful to them. Best of all, Bagge is still funny. One may find some of the laughs unfair or even shooting fish in a barrel, but his total commitment to entertainment supercedes his political agenda, and this is a very good thing for both his hardcore fans and new readers alike.

Short Reviews: Jo Dery, Sleazy Slice, Grady Klein

Short takes on a few works: QUIETLY SURE--LIKE THE KEEPER OF A GREAT SECRET, by Jo Dery; SLEAZY SLICE #3, edited by Robin Bougie; and THE LOST COLONY VOL 3, by Grady Klein.


QUIETLY SURE--LIKE THE KEEPER OF A GREAT SECRET, by Jo Dery. This is another beautiful book from Little Otsu: well-crafted, well-designed and lovely to look at. Dery's art has a slightly immersive quality (not unlike Theo Ellsworth's approach) but also makes the reader look at the page perhaps more than read it. There's a loose narrative about a series of creatures searching for meaning or solutions to their woes, all of which wind up eventually crossing over into each other. There are actually some quite clever narrative touches to be found that coalesce after a couple of readings that evoke a certain wistfulness. Dery has the rare skill of being able to modulate the story's emotional content purely through her use of decorative flourishes. A shadow here, a lonely tree there and a set of background designs all serve to move the reader's feelings rather than just one's eye. This is a book about seeking what's missing in one's life: sight, a true home, knowledge, and how finding them is sometimes a matter of letting them find you. This is a book that in many ways is incredibly slight and manipulative by turns, yet is ultimately redeemed by an almost palpable sincerity that matches the artist's skill.



SLEAZY SLICE #3, edited by Robin Bougie. It's a Robin Bougie-led project, which means three things: 1) It will be impeccably drawn, with an emphasis on detailed linework; 2) It will have lots of sex; 3) It will be incredibly violent. Bougie's "Human Cows" gleefully shatters any number of taboos with this story of women used to pump milk to feed to cows in a world where cows are dying and the rich still need meat. Like most of the stories in this comic, there's a real bleakness and cynicism regarding sex and human relations. The brutal ending of this story reminded me a bit of what the Marquis DeSade used to do in his stories, but the upbeat Bougie still manages a nod and a wink in acknowledging the source material for this particular kink. Josh Simmons' "Cockbone" is no less brutal a story, but is filtered through his own surreal sensibility. Simmons creates worlds with his story that run on dark magic and dream logic as much as they do on rationality. He especially loves to play out twisted, hillbilly family dynamics in the form of a Candide-like innocent forced to run a gauntlet of misery. The story I enjoyed most was husband-wife team SCAR's "Wild Bessi", a bizarre and hilarious mix of wild west tropes and pornapocalyptic weirdness. A man on the run in the wild west encounters all sorts of weird and dangerous sex-related creatures: cowgirls who are part cow and part girl, centaur women with multiple genitalia, sex-crazed horses, dickworms, etc. It's the funniest story in the book, in large part because it plays it straight. Like most of the things Bougie publishes, the audience for this one is largely self-selecting: one look, and you'll know whether or not it's for you.



THE LOST COLONY, VOLUME 3, by Grady Klein. I hadn't read the first two volumes of this series and was prepared to be baffled and/or disinterested. Klein is also an animator by trade and it shows in his exaggerated character design, thickness of line and dependence on color for storytelling. When I often see a comic done by an animator, it's usually too slick-looking for my eyes to latch onto. I didn't find that to be the case with Klein's work, however, in part because of the eccentricity of his characters and the surprisingly dark story that he tells here. It's sort of like BONE meets NAT TURNER in this comic, dealing with a mysterious, hidden land teeming with secrets that happens to be a haven for escaped slaves, mystics and other outsiders. Like BONE, the central character is an innocent with a strong will who has some unusual connections to her home. However, the racial tensions in the story are always simmering and come to a head at the end of this story.

Klein pulls it off because of the way he positions Birdy, the little girl who is central to the story. Like most of the story's protagonists, she is not entirely sympathetic as a character, even though her heart's in the right place. She has a certain Dennis the Menace quality to her, especially when Klein draws her flitting all over the landscape in a single panel, as though she had clones of herself. The last connection to BONE is actually a connection to Jeff Smith's twin inspirations of Walt Kelly & Carl Barks. Like Kelly, the island swampland is its own character of sorts, informing the lives of every character. Like Barks, there's a constant propulsiveness to the cartooning, especially with regard to Birdy but with other characters as well. Klein transcends his influences with his own unique mythology and grounding of the fantasy elements of the story in history.

Adrian Tomine: Old and New

Reviewed are two recent re-releases from Drawn & Quarterly by Adrian Tomine: a new edition of 32 STORIES (a collection of the original OPTIC NERVE minicomics) and a paperback edition of SHORTCOMINGS (his most recent work).

It was a pleasure to compare the early and latest strips from Adrian Tomine, whose sheer ambition as a writer is a wonder to behold. In many ways, Tomine is the epitome of the neurotic, self-conscious, loner cartoonist stereotype. It's why so many comics fans give him so much grief: he takes himself and his work very seriously, making him an easy target for mockery. There's also the charge that he writes too much about the lives of so-called "hipsters" and/or too-obvious character stand-ins for himself, dipping into self-indulgence. I find these charges to be nonsensical, given that most of his strips featuring thinly-disguised stand-in characters are brutally self-deprecatory. None of his stories do anything to glorify the lives of hipsters. Indeed, what Tomine is the master of is distancing character from reader. Like his biggest influence, Dan Clowes, Tomine actively creates antipathy between reader and protagonist. He plays this antipathy for acidic laughs, especially in SHORTCOMINGS. Tomine's constant flattening of affect (both in word and image) creates a weird tension on the page where lust, guilt and jealousy are bubbling under. His greatest skill is making the reader want to read a story where virtually every character is awful yet totally believable.

Tomine's work is about authenticity and the way people desperately avoid authentic speech and action. The artist's eye and pen are harsh judges of inauthentic action, especially in himself. That shows in his harsh assessment of 32 STORIES, a new edition of his minicomic version of OPTIC NERVE. Tomine goes into great detail as to his reluctance to have this material reprinted because of its rawness, but relented if it could be reprinted in its original format. He didn't pretend that this approach was any less self-aggrandizing (coming in a fancy box and even featuring the Optic Nerve sticker from #4), but he did think it was a more honest approach--warts 'n all. Tomine's demolition of his own author's statement from 1995 is hilarious, as he calls himself out for copying Dan Clowes and David Mazzucchelli, being vain and having no sense of humor about himself. To that end, he reprinted an embarrassing photo of himself from his high school yearbook that someone tried to humiliate him with on the web a few years ago.

What stands out about these seven minicomics was his astounding ambition as an artist at a very young age, having published the first when he was sixteen. His earliest strips were crude but bursting with energy, dealing with small and often brutal moments. While the sort of emotional distancing that Tomine would make his trademark was present, these stories frequently had a visceral quality that would fade as his line became more sophisticated. They felt a bit like Tomine going through his R.Crumb/Julie Doucet underground phase. Still, his early autobio was frequently hilarious, especially when he started grappling with the idea of reporting "truth" in these stories. Early on, it became quite clear that, like many authors, Tomine revealed more of his true self through fictional characters than his own autobio persona.

Indeed, that latter persona was as deliberate and artificial a creation as any of his fictional characters. His character Amy was a combination of extrapolating the life of someone he saw at a bookstore and his own yearnings as a loner. His own self-caricature had an appropriately blank expression, his eyes always obscured by his glasses. That figure was an apt representation of the impotence he felt in expressing his rage; "Adrian Quits His Job" featured him apparently screaming at his own boss, his face dissolving in a bit of Ralph Steadman-esque scribble, until we see that such an expression of anger was simply a fantasy.



The fifth issue saw him start to move into his mature style, and the sixth issue featured two significant stories in "Smoke" and "Leather Jacket"--distilled but restrained expressions of despair and freedom with regard to relationships. The seventh and last issue saw him go into full-on Clowes mode in terms of both line and narrative style, but the best story was "Happy Anniversary", the kind of examination of a doomed relationship that would become Tomine's trademark.



Fast-forwarding to SHORTCOMINGS, we find Tomine's line and voice honed to a razor's edge. By this time, he had shed the slickness that had started to infect his work around the time of OPTIC NERVE #7, simplying and clarifying it while at the same time adding a level of sophistication in his character expressiveness and understanding of gesture and body language. Indeed, a big part of the storytelling in this book consists of body language belying actual speech, especially on the part of the putative protagonist of the book, Ben Tanaka. The story finds the stuck-in-his-ways Ben taking his girlfriend Miko for granted and not-so-secretly pining for sexual encounters with white women--his forbidden fruit.



The character of Ben is an obvious Tomine stand-in (they even share the same allergies down to olive bark), but it's a stand-in that feels almost like self-flagellation--or perhaps self-exorcism. It's a character that's a mass of insecurity, self-hatred, wheel-spinning and paranoia. His intelligence and lack of tolerance for fakeness in others (especially with regard to race) is constantly undermined by his relentless negativity and blindness to his own hypocrisy. With Tanaka, we get a character who engages in arguments with his girlfriend that have an almost painful verisimilitude, gets off hilarious and vicious one-liners but winds up being the butt of a particularly nasty joke, courtesy of fate.



The central conflict of the book is really Ben's conflict with himself and lack of willingness to embrace or even approach change. He doesn't want his girlfriend to explore her racial identity; he doesn't want his best friend to move to New York; he doesn't want to think about why he's managing a movie theatre instead of taking a hard look at his life. He not only doesn't want to think about the mire that his life has become, he wants everyone in it to stay mired with him. It's not til he comes to the final punchline of the book that he faces up to this fact, not allowing his best friend to speak ill of his now ex-girlfriend, saying "We all have our reasons".



What makes this book more than just a nuanced look at the end of a relationship is Tomine's fearless handling of race. He zeroes in on stereotypes, forbidden fantasies and desires publicly denied. Tomine plays these for awkward, uncomfortable laughs in brilliant scene after brilliant scene. His control both over his line and over character dialogue & interaction gives his comics a powerful tension between restraint and boiling-over passions. SHORTCOMINGS is proof positive that Tomine found his voice as one of the best naturalistic, slice-of-life cartoonists in comics. He's not a brilliant formalist, but rather sticks to his strengths and has refined them to a level that make every page and panel pleasurable to simply look at without reading dialogue.

A Trip To Forbidden Planet, NYC

Wherein a visit to the fabulous minicomics aisle of one of New York's best comics shops is described and said minicomics purchased are discussed.



During my last trip to Manhattan, I wanted to be sure to drop by Forbidden Planet because I knew that Austin English was ordering for and stocking their minicomics aisle. English is an interesting cartoonist, critic and editor; his WINDY CORNER MAGAZINE combines all three impulses in a quirky, personal package. As a critic, he's introduced me to a number of artists that would later become favorites of mine (Juliacks and Lilli Carre', to name two). As such, I was curious to see what he might recommend for me to read from FP's huge selection. The aisle is organized by title and would take at least a solid hour to go through from top to bottom as a browser.



Dropping by on a busy Saturday afternoon (the already-cramped store was practically shoulder-to-shoulder in some spots), I was lucky enough to spot Austin right away. He was gracious enough to take the time to be my personal minicomics shopper: if he recommended it, I was buying it. There were some things that he recommended that I already had (like an old Megan Kelso mini or various issues of PAPERCUTTER), but I wound up with a nice stack of comics mostly by cartoonists I had never heard of. What follows is a set of brief impressions of the comics that Austin suggested for me.



RATTLETRAP #1 and #2, by Jerry Smith. This was one of my favorite discoveries of this batch. Smith crams dozens of panels on a page with minimalist artwork (barely even stick figures for most of it) as he relates mostly funny stories from his everyday life. Once you adjust to the rhythms of this comic, it becomes almost hypnotizing: one wants to read more and more. These comics' biggest highlights come when Smith and his wife talk to, tease and/or yell at each other. It's amazing how much affection one feels on the page for these characters despite their ultra-simplified depiction.



Romero Burruel's EMPTY #3, by John Frizzelle. This is a fascinatingly scratchy will-to-power of a comic. The main character is a down-and-out artist struggling to find reasons to keep going and rediscover discipline and passion regarding his art. After an initial dream, the comic shares his internal monologue on his tour through his distractions and excuses until he stands at a point where he's out of time and has to make a decision on what he's really all about. What I thought was interesting was his struggle with the conflation of being an artist with being bourgeois. Were the two inseparable? He eventually rejects the only idea of authenticity as living under a bridge, completely divorced from consumer culture, and comes to an uneasy internal truce. I'm curious if the other issues all deal with the same ideas, or if it's something different every time. I quite liked the way Frizzelle shifted between his scratchy art for his characters and the paintings the character created.



ASBESTOS WICK, by Eamon Espey. The cartoonist behind WORMDYE was one of my favorite discoveries last year. This mini is a collection of nightmarish, hallucinatory yet ultimately funny images depicting worship, dismemberment, ritual sex, myths, and rollicking high adventure. There's not a narrative, per se, but there is a disturbing internal logic that draws the eye to slowly peruse every corner of every page for all of the weird details. I'd recommend reading WORMDYE--and thoroughly absorbing its less straightforward sections--before reading this comic.



TALES OF BLARG #9, by Janelle Hessig. This is a jam-packed, old-school, rock'n'roll sort of zine. Hessig and friends expound hilariously on sex (best is "Ugly People I Wanna Do It To"), drugs, exhibitionism, weird desires, weird people they've met, people from bands they like, hipsters, crusties and much more about the world that surrounds them in Berkeley. It's a very personal zine that still seeks to entertain and/or disgust on every page--the perfect antidote to the more cloying personal zines of people like Nicole Georges. It's rare to read a zine that reveals so many embarrassing personal details that doesn't feel like tedious navel-gazing or whining. Hessig is someone who laughs at the world no matter the situation, and that's how things play out in her comics.



RAMBLE ON!, by Calvin Wong. This is another entry in the new school of alt-fantasy/gamer comics that includes stuff like DUNGEON, Alex Robinson's delightful LOWER REGIONS comic, Jesse Reklaw's BLUEFUZZ, the ELFWORLD anthology, etc. The hallmark of that school is a genuine affection for fantasy tropes and narratives, a good-faith effort at establishing same, and the sort of mockery for this genre that can only come from an insider. RAMBLE ON! succeeds on all three fronts, and throws in video-game tropes as well. The bard-like protagonist seeks membership in a band, has a guitar battle with an Ent that resembles Guitar Hero as much as anything else, and finally gains entrance. The backup story, about the quotidian affairs of an evil sorceror, was even funnier. Wong's art works because he's so deft at character design & interaction, as well as panel-to-panel transitions. The scratchy nature of his line adds some nice texture to these pages--not unlike illustrations from an old Monster Manual.



ESCHEW #1, by Robert Sergel. Simplicity is the key to this comic's success. Sergel uses a stark, bold style that reminds me a bit of John Hankiewicz's line, minus the cross-hatching. Sergel uses a clear, thin line in all of his work, and gives it depth in some strips by contrasting it with a lot of blacks and lightness in others by removing blacks altogether. The stories are funny vignettes that appear to be autobiographical, with "Thirteen Bad Experiences Involving Water" being the centerpiece of the issue. There's a dry sense of humor in each strip as Sergel never forces a punchline or ever uses a funny drawing; indeed, the source info for the gags is often in the title of the strip. There's nothing revolutionary about this comic, but it is a fine read by an artist who has very quickly found his voice.



NIGHT BUSINESS #2, by Benjamin Marra. Austin mentioned that Sammy Harkham told him how much he liked this one. Reading this book felt like someone had dropped a slapped-off comic from the black & white explosion of the 80s in my lap, and it's either a brilliantly deadpan parody of 80's erotic thriller cliches or an unabashedly gleeful celebration of same. Honestly, I don't want to know. It is pretty funny, in a crudely-executed way, but isn't the sort of joke I'd care to hear again and again.



PANPIPES #3, by Jesse McManus. This was my "what the hell is this" experience of this batch, not having read McManus's stuff before. These are weird fairy tales of sorts featuring goblins, odd children, anthropomorphic animals and other such creatures engaging in all sorts of violent shenanigans. This is a fascinating-looking series of drawings of characters in constant motion, with the slight sheen of someone who seems as though they're at home with animation as well as comics. There's a slickness to the weirdness, a clean line used for dirty purposes, not unlike a Kevin Scalzo. I found my eye falling off the page a bit because it was so slick, but it was sure fun to look at.


IN THE TALL GRASS #3, by Tessa Brunton. Brunton writes and draws some sharply funny autobio stories, told somewhere inbetween the style of Vanessa Davis and Julia Wertz. There's a great page called "Comix Fer Yer Wall" that pleasingly stacks a bunch of short strips of varying length (ranging between 2 and 8 panels), with subjects ranging from a crackhead's persistent phone calls to a memory of her "telepathic" babysitter to her dog's to-do list. Brunton uses shifting vantage points to her advantage: strips about dating, embarrassing anecdotes from her past, the perils of city life and what it's like to be a young person with no particular attachments. Brunton uses a scratchy style that focuses on her very expressive faces--eyes and mouths in particular.

CROOKED TEETH #2, by Nate Doyle. This is a mish-mash of brief stories, drawings, ramblings and other ephemera by an artist with a great deal of potential. Doyle's line is a bit rough and ramshackle at times, but the spontaneity of his line leaps off the page. A few things in particular stand out: the way he balances character against background (especially panoramic shots); the way he spots blacks to manipulate a story's tone; and the way he draws gesture, body language & character interaction. It's interesting to look at his work now, but I think it will be downright exciting to see it five years from now. Doyle is a fellow employee of Forbidden Planet, by the way.


WARMER, by Aidan Koch. Koch's smudgy style brings an almost uncomfortable intimacy and immediacy to the page. There's a deliberate awkwardness to the way she juxtaposes word and image that forces the reader to slow down and consider each image and the way they unfold over time. Koch's art is emotionally evocative as well; in this case, expressing exasperation and claustrophobia.

EGO, by Dunja Jankovic. Jankovic's star has risen rather quickly in the world of alt-comics, with a book just published by Sparkplug. She brings a fine artist's eye to her work, varying her visual approach from panel to panel: sometimes a stick-figure sketch, sometimes a cartoonish figure, and sometimes figures with naturalistic musculature. In "Addiction", that musculature proves to be an important part of the story as we meet a woman who hoards words and hauls them around; eventually the panel structure becomes part of the story as she "wins" a game of tic-tac-toe. "Plastic Bags" is even more striking, as it deals with a nightmarish scenario where a woman's own paranoia threatens to do her in. Jankovic dips slightly into Immersive Comics territory in terms of the way her art needs to be read, but not quite to the same degree given that text is still very separate from story. Anyone one looks at this mini, there's no question that Jankovic is a great cartoonist.

Crimes & Punishments: Low Moon

Rob reviews the new collection of short stories by Jason, LOW MOON (Fantagraphics).



LOW MOON feels like a sharp right turn from Jason's other recent work, both in terms of content and presentation. The previous Jason books from Fantagraphics have been softcovers, all done with a design sense that made each volume look similar. Debuting with a hardback seemed to be a bit of an unusual departure. Either artist and publisher wanted to start a different look for these volumes, or else perhaps Fantagraphics wanted to capitalize on the story "Low Moon"'s appearance in the Sunday New Times Magazine. It's certainly a move that makes some sense if that's the case, especially for the bookstore market.



The book itself is a strange read, with a number of tonal & emotional shifts that are sometimes jarring. There's always a touch of melancholy in everything that Jason writes, but there's a bleakness in some of these stories that I haven't seen since HEY...WAIT. For example, "Emily Says Hello" has a grim noir feel to it in a tale about a woman delivering a series of escalating sexual favors to a man in exchange for him murdering several men. Part of the deal involves the killer telling the victims, "Emily says hello". The story's structure is unusual for Jason in that he witholds more information than usual from the reader, and obviously quite intentionally so. We never learn how and why the couple made the deal, why the woman wants revenge, or even whom Emily is. We're introduced to a situation, are quickly made to understand the nature of the deal, have tension escalated through variations on the situation, and then are given an ambiguous but downbeat ending. There's no comic relief, no jokes, no turning ideas on their head like in all of his recent books--just a bleak and brutal set of power relationships. This is underscored by Jason's use of color in the story. Set solely in the woman's apartment, we see that all of her walls are painted black. This underscores that for all intents and purposes, she's already dead.



"Low Moon" is an extended bit of silliness, riffing off wild west tropes turned on their heads. This story was much more in the vein of books like THE LAST MUSKETEER, THE LEFT BANK GANG, and I KILLED ADOLF HITLER in that it mashed together several genre conventions and then flipped around a couple of key elements for comedic effect. In this instance, the haunted sherriff and the black hat riding back into town had a memorable showdown over a chessboard. A fight breaks out in the saloon over a bad cup of espresso. Horses are replaced by unicycles. Jason downplays all of the ridiculousness with a deadpan emotional narrative; every character approaches every (laughably cliched) situation with deadly seriousness. The pacing of the story in book form is a bit different than in its original format, which breaks up the jokes a bit more. It doesn't ruin the story, but it is a bit jarring for someone who read the strips in the Times. That said, the ending of the story actually scans better in the book than in the Times, where it fell a bit flat as a big final episode. Without that sort of external temporal pressure, the ending in the book feels natural.

"&" feels like a story whose genesis came from its ending: two strangers, sitting in a bar next to each other. With that image, one might ask: how did they wind up sitting next to each other, with such weary expressions on their faces? The story as such involves the two men taking desperate measures to achieve their goals. For one man, it's getting enough money to pay for an operation for his mother. For the other man (with a Chaplin-like moustache), it's getting a particular woman to marry him. The story, much like "Emily Says Hello", stacks gag on top of gag as the first man bumbles his way through a robbery and the other man resorts to increasingly byzantine schemes to kill off the woman's various suitors. When they finally attain their goals (and the woman exasperatingly saying "Sure, why not?" after a story's worth of flowery denails and appeals to friendship was a nice touch), they find things didn't quite work out as they expected. Both men were in a shaggy dog story and didn't realize the joke was on them until the end. This story was amusing but emotionally flat. Jason seemed more interested in the gag than in making the reader care about these characters, which felt a bit out of place for one of his longer stories. In something like SHHHH!, that thinner characterization didn't seem to matter much, but it made this story neither fish nor fowl.



"Proto Film Noir" is another story that works much like "Low Moon" in that it very deliberately deconstructs a cliched genre and puts it back together with several weird twists. Here, we are introduced to a caveman who happens upon a house with a lonely wife, and they inevitably (rather quickly, actually) have sex. In classic noir style, the interloper decides that it's time to kill the husband...only it turns out to be much harder than expected. Jason then pulls off another example of escalating repetition of a joke until we're rewarded with a punchline that's not only the best in the book, but it's also a last bit of metacommentary on the subject of film noir. Note the bright, cheery colors in this tale of repeated homicide, underlining the humorous nature of this story--as opposed to the grimness of "Emily Says Hello".



The final story in the book, "You Are Here", doesn't have much in common with the rest of the entries. Sure, there are genre elements (an alien kidnapping a man's wife and his subsequent, life-long effort to build a rocket and find her), but they're more background fodder than something Jason's commenting on. The centerpiece of the story is the son of the couple in question, and the way's in which his father's obsessiveness first alienated him and then later drew him in when he faced the same sort of relationship woes. The father's obsession clearly derived from guilt (he and his wife had quarreled before her abduction) an emotion he felt to the exclusion of anything else. I liked Jason's use of word balloons here: the arguments we're shown have just black blogs in the balloons, signifying that what they were arguing about wasn't relevant; indeed, such screaming matches frequently find two people arguing past each other anyway. The ending, unsurprisingly, was heartbreaking, even if there was a shaggy-dog character to the way the story was paced. What made this story so much more affecting than the others in this volume was that each detail the reader was shown added to the emotional weight of the narrative. When we see the boy avoiding taking girls back to his house, or quickly suggesting that he move in with a girlfriend, then avoid his father altogether with a variety of excuses, we can feel the character's alienation that was never acknowledged or healed by either party. It was those moments that packed more of a wallop for me than the actual conclusion of the story, the sort of moments that enriched books like I KILLED ADOLF HITLER.

"Low Moon" and "You Are Here" were both top-notch Jason, while the other three stories faltered at times in terms of execution, purpose, emotional depth and/or tone. I liked everything about the way Jason set up "Emily Says Hello", but it lacked the emotional resonance of his darker stories. "Proto Film Noir" was a goof of a story that was redeemed by its punchline. "&" didn't always seem consistent in the kind of story it wanted to tell. The stories are somewhat tenuously linked in that they depict crimes and punishments in various forms. The first and second stories are directly about both topics; the third story punishes the crimes obliquely, while the fourth story punishes the crime ironically. In the last story, both crime and punishment were a bit more abstract: the crime was alienation, the punishment was loneliness. All told, this is still a book every Jason fan should read, but it's one that I perhaps wouldn't recommend to a reader new to the Norwegian's work.

Work Ethic: Ghost Comics

Reviewed is GHOST COMICS, the new Xeric-supported anthology edited by Ed Choy Moorman and published by his own Bare Bones Press.




When I first became aware of the lineup of talent in Ed Choy Moorman's ambitious new anthology GHOST COMICS, I could hardly believe my eyes. Zak Sally? John Porcellino? Warren Craghead? Jeffrey Brown? Allison Cole? I wondered if the contributions of the bigger names would be strictly perfunctory, but (happily) for the most part, this was not the case. This anthology deservedly won a Xeric grant for its publication, and its stated purpose is as a benefit for RS Eden, a "multifaceted agency" that assists with chemical dependency and "correctional residential programs".



Its noble aims aside, Moorman put together this anthology around the theme of ghosts. He really managed to strike a nerve, because this topic evoked a startling range of interpretations. From the funny autobio recollections of Corrine Mucha to the straightforward myth-making of Sean Lynch to the comics-as-poetry of John Hankiewicz, I've rarely seen a themed anthology with this much variety and quality. One thing that no artist did was actually try to tell a scary ghost story, which I thought was interesting. The other interesting thing about this comic is how Minnesota-centric it is. This makes sense, given Moorman's time as a student at MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art & Design), but this book just goes to show how deep the roster of talent is running in that state. It's giving the cartoonist-rich cities of New York, San Francisco and Portland some serious competition for the best region crown already, even as much of its talent is still incubating. Fourteen of the artists in the book have direct connections to Minnesota, and a number of others are based out of another cartooning hotbed: Chicago. In particular, it was nice to see Will Dinski's "Mind-Mapping" as part of this anthology; I previously reviewed it in its original minicomics form and it's yet another solid effort from the artist who introduced me to the Minnesota scene.



Some other highlights of the book include Toby Jones' darkly humorous account of the death of his partner's mother and all the familial weirdness that insued; the ever-delightful Lucy Knisley's sharply amusing story of the dubious joys of capitalism; the welcome return of Allison Cole as she detailed popping ghosts like balloons; Hob's tale of a brontosaurus' ghosts staying on earth, looking for something mysterious; Moorman's own touching tribute to his family; Kevin Cannon's funny mash-up of architecture and the Transformers; Tuesday Passen dying happy; book designer Jenny Tondera's clever text/visual experiment with a ghost in the snow; and most especially the piece by Warren Craghead.


I greatly erred in omitting Craghead's name from the list of Immersive artists in prior articles on the subject; that is, those that play upon and around with the formal qualities of text in combination with image to force the reader to think about each letter of text and how it relates to both the other letters around it as well as the images. Indeed, Craghead was a pioneer in this regard. He also shares much in common with comics-as-poetry cartoonists like Hankiewicz, where the visuals form their own sort of rhythm and language that's meant less to be looked at than engaged by the viewer/reader. Craghead is distinctive because of the way he uses so much white space, using a small number of distinctive drawings to face off against the void. Here, the text, (spilling out on the page) comments on the way we see and experience ghosts as a sort of manifestation of memory and identity. The way images "rhymed" across pages and feelings were grudgingly exchanged created a delicious tension, forcing the reader to take in each detail as they were presented. The reader strains to try to get glimpses at that which is hidden as the cascading text has to be teased out a bit to understand--which is the whole point of the piece.



Moorman wisely kept it simple in this volume. It's a nicely-designed (Jenny Tendura was the graphic designer for this comic) book, but not distractingly so. The author isn't given a lot of bells and whistles, which mean that some pros came over their tables and gave them some ideeas. He ordered the stories well, always managing to balance longer stories with shorter ones that served as palette-cleansers. He balanced humor with adventure, lighthearted flights of fancy with grim drama, pondering the afterlife and mocking it. There's a healthy mix of just-graduating students and old hands here, and what's remarkable is that neither side suffers from the juxtaposition. My only regret is that Zak Sally didn't contribute something more substantive than a single page that was really just an illustration. I thought his page was poorly placed with the actual stories in this book, rather than as a spot illustration (like the David Heatley frontispiece). It's a forgiveable enough misstep, especially given that Sally was one of Moorman's teachers at MCAD.

Saturation: Tales Designed To Thrizzle, Volume One

Rob reviews the new collection of the first four issues of Michael Kupperman's TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE (Fantagraphics).



About a decade ago or so ago, I first became aware of Michael Kupperman's work in dribs and drabs. There'd be a few pieces here and there on random websites, perhaps a strip or two in an anthology. As a cartoonist and humorist, it was obvious that he was the total package: awesome chops, clever design sense, and a refined sense of timing for gags all served his absurdist sense of humor. Paired with his appreciation (and homage-laded appropriation) of the history of comics and illustration, he rattled off strip after crazy strip that worked on several levels simultaneously. The drawings were dense, beautiful to look at and often funny on their own--though he rarely relied on "funny drawings" to get across a punchline. He wasn't afraid to work at any number of levels to tell a joke: conceptual, scatological, deadpan or mining the fields of popular culture. Even when drawing a more conventional gag, Kupperman always avoided the easy punchline in favor of something that subverted the expected, often confusing his own characters in the strip.


His first collection of strips, SNAKE 'N BACON'S CARTOON CABARET, was one of the best books of this decade. It was unfortunately widely ignored, coming just a couple of years before graphic novel mania hit the publishing industry. That is perhaps the densest collection of gags I've ever seen; Kupperman insists on filling nearly every inch of space with either his main joke narrative, a throwaway gag or a funny decorative touch. Every inch of that page demands reader attention. In his earlier work, his cross-hatching was much more dense and his commitment to crafting strips in the style of classic comics made reading this book a sometimes dizzying experience. Reading the whole thing in one sitting was akin to having one's reality slowly rewritten with crazy new rules. Running out and looking for the nearest sex blimp suddenly seemed like a reasonable proposition. His work is sublime in the truest sense of the word, speaking to me as a reader in ways that can be discussed and broken down but not quite fully communicated in their Rightness. It's my ultimate goal when experiencing art, this feeling of sublimity, and while it's quite rare in general, it's even rarer when dealing with comedy. About the only other humorists who have affected me in the same way were the Marx Brothers.



With TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE, Kupperman actually had the perfect delivery system for his work. Each issue was just long enough to leave a lasting impression, but was short enough to not have that dizzying effect. The first collection of this series addresses that density of his work by using color. There are some pages where color is clearly just being used to provide some variation so as to soften the backgrounds and dense cross-hatching of the art. This is especially true when he reprinted some of his older work here, with that use of color being rather perfunctory and being used to balance out the page rather than enhance the strip. Those older strips are jammed at the bottom of newer gags to fill up space, giving the reader their money's worth on page after page. It's as though Kupperman is afraid to let down his readers if there aren't twenty gags crammed in on every page.



For other strips, the use of color is a revelation. This is especially true with gags that are parodies of children's book illustrations, advertisements or of old, mediocre four-color comics. He doesn't pile color on to strips where it would hurt, like his lovely Granpa strips that are as much flights of fancy as they are gags. The hatching and use of blacks look perfect as is. Kupperman is careful to try and retain the experience of reading each issue individually, both in how the original covers were kept in the reprint and the way he'd add a couple of purely decorative pages to either encourage a reader break or at the very least refresh their palate.

It's encouraging to see Kupperman go from being a cult favorite to someone who's started to receive a lot more attention and recognition. In particular, he's done work with the great Robert Smigel back on his much-missed (by me, at least) TV FUNHOUSE show, and recently had a pilot of SNAKE 'N BACON air on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim (it's currently available at their website). Hopefully this collection will draw yet more attention to a unique humorist and the Human Sneeze, Twain & Einstein, the Scaredy Kids, Pagus and the ever-licenseable Fireman Octopus. Kupperman saturates each page with crazed ideas, bizarre connections, and references that aren't really references. Even a reader who may not be familiar with what Kupperman's (often obliquely) mocking is still pulled full-tilt into the gag. No matter what the concept, once Kupperman's laid his hands on it, it's no longer recognizable as anything but his.