The Comics Journalism of Josh Kramer

Cartoon Picayune #2 by Josh Kramer. Kramer, like Dan Archer before him, had journalism on his mind when he went to the Center for Cartoon Studies. Unlike Archer, whose comics have a political bent, Kramer seems to prefer human interest stories. The second issue of his journalistic anthology series finds him including other correspondents, but all of them are subject to his rigid rules regarding sourcing and quotes. Even if the stories are drawn as a narrative with dialogue, Kramer makes a point of making the reader understand that his stories are "rigorously reported". The Cartoon Picayune reminds me most of Brendan Burford's Syncopated anthology, which features similar first and second person reporting styles. Unsurprisingly, Kramer's reach is a local one, with stories about a local high school ski jumping team, a gubernatorial primary, a day camp for rock, and the evolution of a local brewing company.

"Fly By Night" is hampered by being the second part of a story about that ski jumping team. The angles he was approaching did become quickly evident, however, like the young rookie girl and the team's star who was trying to beat the best jumper in the state. When Kramer is drawing diagrams or depicts motion, his art is certainly up to the task of getting across his ideas. His major flaw as an artist is depicting different faces. In this story that features so many different characters, this is a significant problem. I think Kramer is cognizant enough of this problem to get around it by emphasizing emotion through using lettering and body language. Kramer is admirable in that he doesn't try goosing the results of his story to make it more dramatic, which is especially unusual for a sports-related story. Instead, Kramer is more interested in the mechanics of the sport, how the kids got into it, and the minutiae of how a ski jump meet is conducted. In terms of the action, Kramer is best at drawing sharp angles, which made him perfect for depicting the actual jumps.


"School's In For Summer" sees Kramer change some of his approach a bit, giving his characters tiny white circles for eyes. There are still some awkward drawings of characters in some panels, but there's generally a better balance between character and background. The story itself is a quick but thorough examination of a "school of rock" summer program, going through the program's goals and interviewing some of the kids. Kramer also did a separate mini called One Place, One Cheese, which details the process two local cheesemakers go through in creating their product, as well as providing other details about their lives. In each of his stories, Kramer has a way of letting his subjects speak for themselves without adding his own editorializing as to why they're interesting or significant. The simple choice he makes to write about them indicates that he thinks they're worth of reportage.

Bill Volk's story about the history of Iron City Beer in Pittsburgh, "'arn", suffers a little from letting the new CEO talk at length without really challenging any of his premises. Volk's cartooning is quite lively, however, and the slightly grotesque touch he added to his character designs was an interesting choice. The folksy reporting style of James Sturm and the delicate character drawings of Katherine Roy were a perfect match in the depiction of a day in the life of a candidate for the governorship of Vermont, "Honk and Wave". Given that this was a story consisting entirely of talking heads, it was to Roy's credit that she made it so interesting to look at. Kramer certainly did a nice job as an editor, balancing three different kinds of stories in the sort of anthology that's quite rare. Kramer's rock-solid standards as a journalist and his editorial eye are a great foundation for his work; it will simply take time and experience as a cartoonist to bring that aspect of his work up to the rest of his standards.

Brief Comments On Short CCS Minis

Finding Moby Dick, by Laura Terry. This is "a collection of sketches, drawings and comics"; more half-formed ideas than anything coherent. I don't have any interest in critiquing the content, given that the ideas are half-formed. Instead, I wanted to mention that this little sketchbook mini (in full color, no less) is further evidence of just how far Terry has come as an artist. Her figure work is so much more self-assured, for one thing, as is her general command over line and using different line weights. Most impressive, however, is the highly expressive way she uses color. In one story snippet, she shapes the story of a shipwreck using only midnight blue and blacks for spotting. Another image of three skeletons dancing on the ocean is rendered in aqua blue and sea-foam green. Her figure work in general is lively, full of personality and edged with humor. This is an artist who's ready for a leap forward in terms of the scope of ambition in her projects.

Zee Leetle Prince, by Katie Moody. This mini is an interesting exercise in style, as Moody takes the classic story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery "as filtered through Ed Emberley". Moody turns the book into kind of a goof for kids, rendering the characters in illustration teacher Emberley's trademark simple style (everything is basic geometric figures, lines, and squiggles--things almost anyone can draw) and adding a Pepe' LePew style French patois (The first line of the comic is "Zere wonce was a leetle prince"). The only problem with the comic was that there simply weren't enough images, and most of those images were just too small. An Emberley-style book packs a lot of visual punch into each page, even if the figures themselves are tiny, and this was dominated by text. That's not to say that the mini didn't have its charms, especially since Moody never strayed from the silliness of her text, but it didn't succeed in what she set out to do.

Moose #3 and #4, by Max de Radigues. De Radigues' series takes true narrative form in these two issues. The protagonist of the series, a nervous teen named Joe, is exhibiting all sorts of odd behavior, we learn, because of the way he's harassed by a bully. He has the opportunity to talk to a teacher about it in #3, but with his tormentor standing right outside the door, he has to hold it in. This issue is all about setting up the hopelessness of his situation in conventional terms. The fourth issue is about Joe managing to hide from the bully and his crony (whom he keeps in line with threats of physical violence when he's not gung-ho about torturing Joe). There's a sweetness to this issue as Joe doesn't exactly solve his problem, but he does derive some satisfaction from frustrating his nemesis (whose self-esteem seems to derive entirely from tormenting him). As always, de Radigues uses a fragile, simple line that emphasizes angles and negative space. His characters, though simply-rendered, are lively and bursting with emotion. de Radigues' ability to portray body language is remarkably intuitive, and he seems to thrive doing this short episodes that include eye-catching covers and incidental illustrations by guest artists.

Freeloader #1, by Nomi Kane. This is a typically charming and well-drawn set of short strips about being unemployed and living with one's parents after graduating from college. Her thoughts turn from her preferred job (illustration) to slightly less glamorous pursuits (like waitress, delivery person and stripper). Kane's all about the gag in this story (her bit about being unable to jiggle as a stripper was especially amusing), though the gag covers up real stress. This comic is also about the rare opportunity she has to live with her parents for an extended time as an adult, which is both stressful (because of the limbo she finds herself in) and an unexpected delight. Kane's character design and self-caricature are enormously appealing and have always been her major strength as an artist, and this comic is no exception.

Twelve New Drawings, by DW. DW is a CCS student who is clearly heavily influenced by Fort Thunder and the old Highwater Books comics. His drawings have the raw, hypnotic power of Ron Rege and Marc Bell, without the level of craft and sophistication of those two masters. There's not much narrative at work here, but each page is worth close inspection as DW mixes decorative patterns with hidden messages, surprising images and even small narrative snippets. It feels like sketchbook work, a form of graphomania almost, in that the artist is drawing just to draw, to make marks on paper. His bold sense of design is something that will serve him well as he shapes this vision, especially since CCS emphasizes narrative structure in even its most avant-garde students. He's someone to keep an eye on.
Early, by Joseph Lambert. This is a full-color charmer that involves Lambert's typical subjects: quarrellous little kids and the sun and moon as anthropomorphic beings. This eight pager finds a kid getting mad at the sun for melting his ice cream cone and throwing a spider at him. The sun freaks out and sinks early (a lovely metaphor for the way time can pass for a child), only to reemerge later and ask the moon if she's afraid of spiders. What's interesting about this strip is that Lambert cuts way down on his typical level of detail in favor of letting the color tell the story. The back cover has the unexpected bonus of telling the story from the poor spider's point of view.

Music As Map: Beth Hetland

The first two issues of Beth Hetland's Fugue are indicative of a young artist who has taken on an ambitious, personal project as one of her first major works. Choosing to attempt to depict music on the comics page is a particularly difficult trick for a young artist, but Hetland's obvious understanding of musical composition turned this into one of the comic's main strengths. Fugue is the story of Patricia Gullo and her journey through music. Its subtitle is "a family in three parts", and that's the true focus of the book: the ways in which families support, pressure, disappoint and eventually pick each other up. While the performance of music is a key component of the story, the way music is written is even more important. A score is not the music, but rather a map or puzzle that can lead to the treasure of music once it's decoded. To go back to Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville, maps as we understand can be decoded to understand our relationship to space. Comics can be read to understand a narrative as it relates to time and space. A musical score, once played, makes the sublime audible. That is, music is not an art form that can be reduced to a privileged material structure (like a sculpture or painting) or even reproduced like a comic or book. The art form is not even the recording of the music; that is an imperfect attempt at capturing the sublime experience of hearing music in one's head as a composer does. Only the map of a piece of sheet music comes close to providing the clues that will allow a listener to pick up on this.


That's why Patricia throughout both issues is so obsessed with the composer's original intent: music isn't just about fun, self-expression and camaraderie (though these elements are important as well), it's about chasing the sublime experience. The first issue was about her having the courage to truly pursue music as her passion, to have the confidence to work hard in testing the limits of her talent. There's a great two page spread where her future boyfriend (and husband) gives her a tab of LSD and they listen to Pachelbel, an immersive experience that helps cement the idea that nothing is more important than music. Pursuing the sublime has its price, however, as she freezes up at her senior recital and is unable to perform. She's afflicted by a kind of vertigo as the fear is not of performing per se, but a fear of not doing justice to the work as it was originally scored. That fear of not being great is a paralyzing one, a fear that has nothing to do with creation or performance and has everything to do with expectation and judgment. Or as Lynda Barry puts it, the Two Questions: "Is this good?" "Does this suck?"


The second issue explores this dynamic with her three daughters. It's clear that they all have some kind of musical talent and/or interest, but it's immediately suggested by her husband that she's pushing them to do play. In other words, she wants to live vicariously through her children to finish the job of performing and grasping the sublime. But that's not what it's all about; indeed, she also simply wants to share herself with her children, to play with them as a way of expressing a mutual love for something they love dearly. Who better to play with than one's own children? And "play" is an interesting term to use, because just as playing an instrument is an expression of joy that's done with great seriousness, so is play for a young child a matter of great focus and concentration. Beyond wanting musical partners, Patricia wanted to pass on the simple joy of music to her children. It's something that keeps her in check when she was about to go too far in pressuring her children to play the way she wanted them to. The danger of inculcating a hatred of music in her children was too horrible to contemplate, and that allowed her to come to her senses before she went too far.


Still, the idea of one of her children being good enough to reach for that kind of musical mastery continued throughout the book. Her first daughter, Alison, was clearly a talented player but had no interest in learning how to read music. That was too much like work and music to her was simply a matter of pleasure. Her second daughter, Beth (presumably the author or the author's stand-in), could read and understand music (and certainly loved it), but she was much more interested in drawing than playing. It was the youngest daughter, Rachel, who shared the same gift as her mother. She was portrayed as being developmentally delayed: quiet, grim and distant, she doesn't talk until she was four (when she sneaks out of her blanket fortress to play at the piano). When everyone else noticed, she copped to learning by ear--which happened to be her first words! She grew up to have the same kind of talent as her mother, but faced the same dilemma: mastery of a certain Mozart piece was beyond her grasp, and the fear of not being able to face up to the task of performing the music in front of a group of witnesses paralyzed her just as her mother was paralyzed. She and her mother are both dreamers, something that gives both of them inspiration but also can provide the seeds of its own ruin.


I'll be curious to see how Hetland ties all of this up in a third issue, but I wanted to comment on some formal aspects of the work. First of all, Hetland repeats certain motifs throughout the comic much like a piece of music might. The most common set of "notes" she repeats is the passage of time as expressed as a child sitting at a piano bench, getting noticeably older panel-by-panel. There's also the sort of conflict and resolution you might hear in a symphony, expressed in the form of both panels and notes. Of course, the second issue resolves in much the same way as the first, providing each issue/movement with a recurring theme. The eyes of Hetland's characters are black dots, while their eyebrows are simple lines; clearly, they are meant to imitate notes on a scale. That's made clear on one page where notes and a stripped-down version of Rachel's face are presented in alternating panels. Hetland's line is simple and unfussy. The main critique I have of her work is that she's better at page design and panel composition than she is at drawing figures. Sometimes, the way figures interact with each other in space is distorted. Her anatomy (even the way she simplifies it on the page) is also wonky at times, with arms and legs bending at strange angles in otherwise normal scenes; even if this was intentional, it's a distraction to the simplicity of the story. Lastly, she relies too much on facial expression to get across body language, which has the effect of making the bodies somewhat irrelevant. It's not an accident that the pages that are talking heads and musical notes are the strongest in these comics. These drawbacks don't mar the ambition of these comics and the cleverness with which she's designed them. In her own pursuit of the sublime, Hetland has simply gone for it in a very public fashion, and I'll be excited to see how she manages to stick the landing.

Flipping the Channels: Ben Horak's Grump Toast

Of all the graduates of the Center for Cartoon Studies, Ben Horak seems to have improved the most. He always had crazed, violent and hilariously disturbing ideas, but didn't quite have the chops to carry them off. However, in his solo anthology series Grump Toast, he's proven that he is willing to do the work in order to get better. The odd twist in this series is that there are serials with recurring characters, each one quite different in tone. "Monkanonee" is Horak's quasi-autobio series, going to some rather odd places. For example, the first issue features Hoark's plans for his own funeral, which involve him being catapulted across canyon with dynamite strapped to his body as "Benny and the Jets" is being played, timed to explode at the chorus. This is pretty much Horak's sense of humor in a nutshell: off-kilter and spectacularly violent.

The apotheosis of this concept is his "Asphalt" character, a ridiculously over-the-top, deluded and quarrellous frump of a man. The design of the character is key to its success, as he resembles a 1970s detective with a trenchcoat, bushy moustache, sideburns, flapping tie and cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The first issue finds him trying to return a dog for a reward only to lose it and try to kidnap someone else's dog. The second issue starts with Asphalt waking up to discover that he has a switchblade sticking out of his side (after he initially thought it was just hunger pangs). The leads him to try to discover the source of his stabbing, sparking an amazingly visceral sequence where he tries to remember the bar he got drunk at the previous night, gets it wrong (unbeknownst to him) and proceeds to cudgel, gouge, punch and stomp every innocent person there. The payoff gag for the story is a particularly memorable one.


Horak veers between the violently exaggerated in "Asphalt" and the violently surreal in "Pinky Palms". The latter is about an anthropomorphic hand who is a Vegas-style lounge singer. In the first issue, he helps out the ghost of a fellow singer try to get back his girl, only to discover that she's become monstrous. The grotesqueness of that story paled in comparison to the story in the second issue, which finds Pinky trying to prevent the suicide of a friend on his birthday by throwing him a party, only to be menaced by pudding-spawned zombies. This story approaches Matthew Thurber levels of weirdness, and the simplicity of Horak's design and the control he has over his line makes it work.

There are other highlights, like the shenanigans of "Unfortunate Face", a serial wherein the disguise of certain characters inevitably reveals something horrible. His drawings of his toast mascot (shades of Alfred E Newman!) imitating characters from Horak's favorite movies are perfect filler. If there's a weak link in the series, it's "Giggleton Holocaust", an ultraviolent send-up of Warner Brothers characters. The strip doesn't work for two reasons: Horak's character design isn't quite rubbery enough to mimic the classic designs, and those cartoons were so incredibly violent in the first place that the parody falls flat. Fortunately, Horak doesn't linger on this strip for long, as he's only produced a few pages of it so far. There's a gleefulness to Horak's use of violence in these comics, a commitment to the sheer absurdity of these acts that eschews mean-spiritedness. At this point, Horak needs to continue to work on refining his line and perhaps adding more decorative touches to his backgrounds. I'd also be curious too see him modulate his tone a bit; he can only go over the top so often before he starts to run out of ideas. In particular, I'd love to see more of his "Monkanonee" and his autobiographical daydreams.

Jon Chad Comics: Bikeman and Drop Target

Jon Chad is one of the best of the Center for Cartoon Studies' grads in terms of pure technical skill. In terms of character design, backgrounds, body language and detail, his comics are a joy to look at. He creates a fully-defined world for his characters to inhabit, jammed with clearly-delineated leaves, branches and small objects. The clarity of his line and understanding of when to emphasize character over place means that every panel is remarkably easy to parse and process. He switches between the naturalistic depiction of animals, cartoonish character design and diagram-ready drawings of bicycles and makes all three cohabit the same panel without jarring the reader. In fact, Chad deliberately tries to create visual tensions in order to draw readers in, drawing characters and evoking a world that are simultaneously grotesque and absurd, realistic and silly, dense and light.


Bikeman is his fantasy series where all of these factors come together. In almost every respect, the world he creates is a familiar one: a vaguely medieval world where hard-working villagers struggle in a world filled with intelligent and frequently vicious animals and mercenaries. The kicker in the story is that everything in this world revolves around the use of bicycles, many of whom are sentient at roughly the same level as a dog or horse. As a result, fashion and language revolves around bicycles as well (there's a character who wears glasses with spokes on them), a conceit that would be ridiculous if it wasn't played straight by Chad. The first issue of the series introduced as to the young villager who's the primary protagonist, as well as the titular character. He's a bike shepherd who wears a crafted bear's head to indicate his connection to the fierce but benevolent animals he's devoted to. Each issue has widened the scope of the world to Jeff Smith levels (it's clear that Chad owes a lot to Smith's world-building in Bone), introducing a bounty-hunting human with a grudge against the Bikeman, a pack of evil wolves who also seek revenge on the Bikeman and his guardian bears, a host of villagers, an intelligent bike who can speak, and a variety of other characters and conflicts. Other than a few minor errors here and there (spelling gaffes, a few lines that could be tightened up a bit), this is a marvelous bit of fantasy storytelling. Hopefully, Chad will continue to take his time and let things play out slowly.


I also wanted to mention Chad's pinball zine/minicomic Drop Target, which he co-writes with Alec Longstreth. Anyone with even a passing interest in pinball machines will enjoy this labor of love, as Chad & Longstreth interview the owners of a pinball-centric bar in Portland (and former editors of a pinball zine), talk about their favorite game, dream up and design new games, and talk about places with good pinball machines. The highlight of the issue as a comics reader is "From Zeroes to Heroes", Longstreth's typically breathless account of how he and Chad became obsessed with pinball machines. This is a niche zine, to be sure, but it's an obvious labor of love and done with a meticulousness that one would expect from Chad and Longstreth. Chad has done illustrations for some childrens' books and has his own kids' comic coming out in 2012, and I sense that he could very well have a career trajectory similar to Smith: working in genre fiction and alternating between work aimed squarely at kids and work that's slightly darker.

Another Worthy Kickstarter Effort: Motherlover

I'd urge interested parties to donate to the Kickstarter fund for Motherlover, an anthology featuring Nic Breutzman, John Holden and Luke Holden. It's edited and colored by Raighne Hogan, whose 2D Cloud will be publishing it. I wrote the introduction to the book, which is unsettling and beautiful.

Comics Readers Digest: Hive #4

Hive is an odd duck as far as anthologies go. It's not a standard anthology where all of its entries are new stories. Instead, editor Jordan Shiveley reprints stories from some of his contributors and gets new work from others. Shiveley's selections as editor are all over the place, ranging from personal & autobio stories to slick genre stories, arranged in a manner that occasionally defies rhyme or reason. Hive reminds me a bit of Josh Blair's Candy Or Medicine in that it looks like it takes all comers, from veterans looking for a venue to publish to new creators trying to get exposure. Hive is well-designed and attractive, but the size of the anthology doesn't always do its contributions justice.


For example, in issue #4, Hurk's story "Sculptor" is ill-served by the book's 5 x 8.5" dimensions. With 16 panels per page, there's a level of detail that's hard to parse given the small size of the page. The same was true for O'Shell's story, which had up to 17 panels on a page with tiny lettering. Even the strongest material in the book, a selection of Noah Van Sciver's best stories, doesn't look nearly as good as it did in his Blammo! series. There are other questionable publishing decisions, like publishing Jose' Antonio Alonso Barrueco's story in its original Spanish. I appreciate Shiveley's willingness to publish international material, but printing a story that its target audience can't read doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Another problem with the anthology is that Shiveley's tastes as an editor are too broad. Peter Richardson & David Orme's "Cloud 109" is a standard genre story, and a horrible example at that. The story is ill-suited to the anthology (it looks like this was originally a color story that was reduced to gray-scaling here), the lettering is tiny, the art is slick and soulless and the story itself trite & dull. That it takes up a full twenty pages of a 130 page anthology makes its presence all the more tedious.


That's unfortunate, because there are certainly the makings of a good anthology to be found here. Joe Decie is a real talent and the two-page anecdote he relates about his parents, New Year's Eve and toilet seats is hilarious. Cole Closser's "Sweet Sammy" looks like Shiveley took a minicomics version of the story, put it on a photocopier, and then printed the results. Strangely, that adds appeal to what looks and feels like an ancient artifact, as though Milt Gross did a minicomic decades ago. While Van Sciver's work isn't printed in a way that flatters it, these really are some of his best stories, like "Fame", "Process" and "Convention". Stories by Malachi Ward, Iain Laurie & Craig Collins were all welcome, if familiar contributions. In terms of artists who were new to me, I was impressed by John Kinhart's "Screw You" (a funny reminiscence of the consequences of swearing as a child) and Gloria's sparely-drawn strips about travel and grotesques. I'll be curious to see where the anthology goes from here; I like the idea of a well-designed entry-level anthology, but one with a sharper focus (even at the risk of printing lesser material) would make this a more consistent read.