New Comics And A New Kickstarter From Dan Archer

Dan Archer is a busy man. Behind Joe Sacco, he's probably the most adventurous comics journalist in the world. He's very much into social justice, human rights,  and bringing problems related to oppression, poverty, violence and general wrongdoing by both the state and big business to light. He's currently in Nepal, trying to gather funds for an incredibly ambitious project. He's interviewing survivors of human trafficking and experimenting with the plan of disseminating materials related to avoiding becoming a victim of human trafficking (in comics form). He's also going to document this experience in real time at his website, which is a comics journalism first. The money will go to travel, translators, supplies, etc. Please consider checking out his kickstarter fund.

Archer drew and co-wrote (with Adam Bessie) a series of stories related to the ill-named concept of "education reform" in the USA, which is mostly an excuse to privatize and exploit something best left in the realm of public goods.  the first story, "The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum", contains a number of the sort of striking and provocative images that Archer's come to be known for. He and Bessie also break issues down succinctly and with impact, outlining the ways in which Milton Friedman-style naked capitalism turns schools into a test-and-drill culture where any thought of learning is snuffed out. In "Murky Waters", Bessie & Archer discuss what is the free-market fantasy: a landscape where prior economic structures can be stripped away and replaced entirely by a free-market solution. That became the case in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where public school teachers were (illegally) fired and a network of charter schools were set up. Archer cleverly illustrates the debate between a local advocate and a Stanford free-market think tank member, depicting them rowing a boat in opposite directions in one panel. An interactive version of the comic includes links to a number of other sources, providing quick reference to claims made in the article. The third chapter, "The Finnish Alternative", details the ways in which a state that astutely supports the welfare of children as a public good can provide an educational system built on a model that encourages learning through doing and experience (things that lead to actual learning) rather than rote test-taking. These are well-reasoned but pointed comics that match graphic clarity with the power and complexity of its ideas. I especially like the way Archer uses color to catch the eye without it becoming garish, though lettering was a problem in some of the strips as Archer started to run out of room.

On a very different note, Archer did a comic for the National Parks Conservancy Trust about John Giles, a man who tried to escape from Alcatraz in Escape From Alcatraz: The Lone Wolf Breakout. This one plays to Archer's skills as a historian, researcher and documentarian rather than an activist or polemicist, and he's able to coolly lay out the facts while still providing a narrative that's quite tense. The story follows a jailed train robber and murderer known for being a jail-jumper who took advantage of the privileges afforded him thanks to good behavior and sheer luck to engineer an escape attempt. Working the laundry detail during World War II, Giles managed to slowly construct a uniform, ID and papers that he hoped would pass the eye test once he slipped out of his detail. Unfortunately for him, his absence was noted quite quickly and he was found out, but he was very close to freedom. Archer's art has never looked better than in this comic, as he was clearly stretching a different set of artistic muscles. In particular, there's a flair and level of detail in his facial depictions that I hadn't seen before, and he also takes full advantage of being able to use color.

Sequart Reprints: Lower Regions, Bluefuzz

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
*****

An interesting new trend I've noticed is alt-comics cartoonists approaching some old-fashioned genre stories with a great deal of affection. The most familiar example of this sort of storytelling is the Lewis Trondheim/Joann Sfar Dungeon series. They manage to take the hoary old sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic (reflected back and towards Dungeons and Dragons in particular) and tell stories that both celebrate and poke fun at genre conventions. Best of all, they do it with a straight face, allowing the inherent ridiculousness of fantasy tropes (and our inherent familiarity with them) to carry the humor, all while relishing the opportunity to engage in this sort of storytelling.

Alex Robinson is best known for his slice-of-life storytelling in Box Office Poison and Tricked! Of course, anyone who's read his comics will find that they're littered with genre and pop-culture references. His friend Tim Krieder, an alt-weekly cartoonist best known for his political cartoons, talked to him about fighting through cartooning ruts. When he asked Robinson what he really wanted to draw, he noted that he'd love to draw a sword-and-sorcery story that had the feel of an old D&D adventure: hack and slash fights, trudging through a dungeon, meeting weird monsters, etc. In essence, the goal was pure cartooning fun.

With Lower Regions, Robinson did just that. This book is entirely straightforward: a female fighter armed with a battle-axe walks into an underground lair with a companion on some sort of quest, fights all sorts of nasty monsters, and eventually completes her journey. The fact that the title of the book is a double-entendre shows that Robinson is approaching the subject with a bit of whimsy, yet the story itself isn't a parody. There are moments of humor, like when the companion is fried by a giant, fire-breathing cat and is brought back to life with a healing potion--and then flattened by a huge barrel. The sense of humor here is not unlike a group of gamers at a table coming up with ridiculous solutions to scenarios the game-master is throwing at them. There's a lightness in this work that's very appealing, where one can sense Robinson really throwing himself into the work and come up with a compelling, kinetic and visceral story. The storytelling problems inherent in fantasy fiction are completely different than the usual ones he faces, and one can see him relishing a very different kind of challenge, entirely on his own terms. The end result is slight and even disposable (it doesn't beg for multiple readings), but it was obvious that Robinson wasn't going for a lasting Statement--he was going for fun. It was a pleasure to see him stretch his cartooning muscles a bit, and it'll be interesting to see if this has an impact on his upcoming projects.

Jesse Reklaw's one of the most clever cartoonists working today. From his alt-weekly dream comic Slow Wave to his innovative autobio minicomics, Reklaw excels at subverting expectations. He finds humor in serious situations, and can lace a seemingly light-hearted premise (like telling the story of all the cats his family has owned) with memories of bittersweet and even traumatic events. So it's no surprise that his take on D&D-type storytelling, Bluefuzz The Hero, is somehow both a straightforward adventure with lots of cool twists and turns and a sarcastic take on same.

While Reklaw approaches the fantasy genre with the same kind of affection and intimate knowledge that Robinson does, his storytelling decisions are entirely different. Robinson doesn't use dialogue, relying entirely on his art to carry the story and especially its humor. He uses a style that's relatively realistic, at least to those familiar with fantasy art. Reklaw mixes an omniscient narrator with dialogue, and employs a loose, sketchy style to get across his action. His character designs are stripped-down and silly, but don't step into cheap parody. Reklaw has the narrator tell the story of heroic Bluefuzz as though we were already familiar with his most famous exploits, and instead opts to present a behind-the-scenes look at his story. Instead of a single flowing narrative, Reklaw chooses to chop up his story into smaller segments, each announcing a different episode of Bluefuzz's grand adventure. Bluefuzz himself has a blobby blue tone with a fuzzy head--the very opposite of a typical, muscular sword 'n sorcery hero.

There are two things in particular that I love about this mini. The first is the sardonic but matter-of-fact narration, as though it were told by a stoner. The second are intermittent, full-color splash pages that aren't part of the narrative, but rather are illustrative of a single scene--much like in a D&D Monster Manual. Bluefuzz himself is the sort of "brick" hero so prevalent in fantasy stories, a well-meaning oaf who can't be stopped. I noted earlier that Reklaw excels at subverting expectations. In each adventure, things don't turn out as the reader would expect: Bluefuzz is an oaf who only becomes a hero after being drubbed out of town, and the eventual conclusion to his adventures is a series of anticlimaxes. Even his heroics are a bit off-kilter: in a two-page spread where his most "famous" adventures take place, one of them has Bluefuzz playing an electric guitar attached to an amp.

It's a testament to Reklaw's talent that even this bit of fluffy fun is packed with great ideas, clever visuals and a lot of laughs. Though he's been around comics for awhile, it seems like he's really been taking his work to another level in the past couple of years. I hope to see him really bust out with a long-form work in the near future, because he certainly has the chops to pull it off.

Gazing Inward and Outward: The Voyeurs

While I greatly enjoyed Gabrielle Bell's fiction pieces in Mome and elsewhere, there's no question that her autobio work is uniquely discomfiting and hilarious. Carefully editing a couple of years' worth of autobio strips from her website and other places, The Voyeurs is a rich, dense and baldly honest account of Bell's attempts to connect with others. In his introduction, Aaron Cometbus (who first met Bell when she was eleven years old) notes her extremely antisocial upbringing, hinting at Bell as an almost feral human being in some regards. For her part, Bell revealing that she loved hiding behind bushes as a child and waiting for cars to come by is a touchstone for someone whose socialization was never quite complete. That is certainly to the benefit of her readers, because her keen intellect and powers of observation slice through polite and assumed interactions, as she asks questions that others might not. It's not surprising that most of her friends are cartoonists, artists and outsiders, but even in the company of those outside the societal mainstream, Bell reminds an outsider. Mainstream society is the club that she would never join if they'd have her for a member, to put it in Groucho Marxist terms.

Bell and publisher Tom Kaczynski (this is the first book from his Uncivlized Books publishing concern) organized the book chronologically, which is as good as any method to read the strips. The first chapter mostly concerns Bell's lack of presentness, disinterest in everything around her, and simultaneous hatred of and dependence upon the internet. These are short, punchy strips, setting up the structure of the rest of the book by focusing on the mundane and everyday but giving it a certain vivdness with her use of color. Speaking of which, the use of color and the paper chosen for the book are both top-notch, giving Bell's thin line an extra richness and depth while fueling the more fantasy-focused portions of the book. Chapter two leaps from Bell's mundane existence to detailing her relationship with director Michel Gondry. Whisked away to supervise and effectively co-direct his adaptation of her story "Cecil And Jordan In New York", Bell keeps the reader as off-center as she must have felt throughout the experience by not showing how she met him or the beginning of their relationship. "Michel and Me" starts off with the couple on the set, Bell struggling to come to terms with the absurd fantasy her life has become. Throw in the fact that the film was being filmed in the totally alien environment of Tokyo, and you have a perfect storm of stimuli that eventually drive Bell to hide out in her hotel room and argue with Gondry every day. The two money quotes in this section come from Gondry. The first, by way of translating his aunt: "Suzette says you're like a wild cat and I'll never be able to tame you", reflects Gondry's very real fear that this relationship is a tenuous one at best, even as he puts on a full court press to introduce Bell to his family and spend time with her in quieter locales. The second quote is from Gondry himself, after Bell gave him a drawing "I don't think I could tolerate you if you weren't so talented." In a narrative sense, Bell couldn't have a better foil than the garrulous Gondry, whose model of relationship relies on constant confrontation. Bell ends this section with a separate strip going back to her childhood, imagining herself running away to the woods but reemerging to great acclaim, eating a hamburger. It's a fitting cap to this chapter because it paints herself as having feral tendencies but tempering that with the desire to not just be accepted, but celebrated.

The third and fourth chapters are all about push and pull. As Bell gets into yoga, she starts to understand that the intensity of the physical activity (especially "hot" yoga) is the only thing that acts as a corrective against her mounting neuroses and her inability to stay present--that is, to simply be without being overwhelmed by random thoughts. It also acts as a corrective to her frequent irritability around others coupled with her fear of being alone. The fourth chapter chronicles a year of coastal travel during her long-distance relationship with cartoonist Ron Rege, Jr. A running theme of the book is Gabrielle doing things with an eye toward writing about it for her journal. Going on fish-out-of-water excursions to Los Angeles makes that exceedingly easy to do, and there's plenty of hilarious anecdotes about going to the beach, awkward hugs with Californians, and uneasy parties. The chapter closes with Bell creating her own yoga tent as a way of combating her depression and paranoia, making the connection between mind and body very sharp.

The standout chapter is the fifth, which is the "story" of Bell adapting Valerie Solanos' infamous S.C.U.M Manifesto for a comics anthology. When Bell starts to confabulate autobio stories with outrageous details, she's at her best. That's the case with this ludicrous account of word getting around to the press that she was doing this adaptation, adding all sorts of pressure. So much so, that she had to contact her mother in a hilariously convoluted fashion to get the scoop on Solanos and her past dealings with her. All of those shenanigans wind up with Bell speaking before a crowd and admitting that she chose Solanos in part because she could hide behind the author's outrageousness without having to cop to believing everything she said. Bell then confesses to the reader that it was all obviously made up, but brilliantly wraps up the the strip in a way that ties into some of Solanos' utopian ideals while tenderly paying tribute to her own mother. For a story that starts off as a lark, it's a remarkably moving and even revealing moment. Cometbus notes that despite Bell's willingness to talk about anything, this doesn't always mean that she's actually revealing herself to the reader. This chapter is one of the rare times when Bell reveals the clarity and depth of her self-knowledge and her upbringing and how it shaped her for the better.

The sixth chapter is her epic account of attending the San Diego Comicon as an invited guest. Having a comic turned into a movie will earn one that opportunity. I've read a ton of comicon-related comics, but this was by far the funniest. The tension between Bell's natural aversion to such an experience and her desire to return as a conquering hero leads her to go to crazy parties and lavish dinners in an effort to spend her considerable per diem. As always, it's the tiny details that make this comic so funny, like having to choose a genre for her room at the Hard Rock Cafe, or the uncomfortable party in her hotel room where Gondry and his new girlfriend come by, or the wrestling match Bell gets in with Ariel Schrag.

The last chapter and epilogue are a mix of inventory strips, gags, and reflections. For the first time, Bell starts musing about her age and identity along with how she fits in wither others. In the epilogue, her friend calls her out on her lack of presentness, noting that Bell is never "here", but rather always watching, learning, observing and filing things away for later. Bell is always working because Bell is always thinking, and the epilogue suggests that her inability to disengage in thinking is what leads to periods of solipsism and depression; the former to get away from people and the latter because of her need for interaction. This is a level of self-awareness that's startling to encounter as a reader and makes Bell something more than simply a great memoirist: she's become, in her own-self-deprecating and awkward manner, one of comics' great thinkers. And she gets precisely the kind of presentation that makes her art look best thanks to Kaczynski's loving treatment of her work in hardback form. This may well be my favorite comic of 2012.

Sequart Reprints: Fantasy Classics

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
****

I've reviewed a number of books in the Graphic Classics  line, and while the ambition shown in each has been impressive, adapting classic fiction hasn't always been successful. One problem has been that some of the stories that may have been innovative when published seem predictable and cliched to modern readers. Choosing the right illustrator for the right story is an endeavor in itself. Another difficulty is that not all of these stories seem like great fits to be adapted into comics form (a problem in the Lovecraft collection, for example). On the other hand, when editor and publisher Tom Pomplun finds the right formula, he really produces a winner, like in the recent reprint of the Mark Twain volume anchored by Rick Geary. The latest volume, Fantasy Classics, is perhaps the strongest volume to date that I've read from this series.

The key to its success is that its two anchor stories are classics in very different ways and both are translated quite successfully into the language of comics. The first such anchor is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story that is obviously familiar to anyone. That said, the original novel, revolutionary as it was, isn't all that widely read anymore. In the original narrative, Dr Frankenstein is frightened of the abomination that he created, but his monster is intelligent. As a result of his self-awareness, the monster is tortured by his appearance and driven to madness and murder. Confronting his creator, he demands a mate--but Dr Frankenstein reneges on his word, leading to more murder, mayhem and a showdown in the Arctic Circle. Skot Olsen was an interesting choice to illustrate this story, with his distorted and cartoony style. While he uses a washed-out approach appropriate for the gloomy nature of the story, his looser, more distorted figurework prevents the story from becoming too melodramatically oppressive in tone.

The other anchor, and one whose success lies mostly in the hands of artist Leong Wan Kok, is The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, by HP Lovecraft. This story was so successful because it didn't bother trying to set up the normal day-to-day life of protagonist Randolph Carter, then lead up to his own eventual madness/destruction (or both) like in so many Lovecraft stories. In this tale, Lovecraft (and adapter Ben Avery) gets straight to the weird and then keeps upping the ante. Carter has seen a magnificent city in his dreams called Kadath but discovers he can no longer access it--and learns that the various forces of the elder gods are trying to prevent him from finding it again. So he goes on a quest in his dreams to find the city, which finds him dealing with fierce fighting cats, ghouls, tiny creatures called Zoogs, being shanghaied to the moon by the forces of the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep, giant carnivorous worms called Dholes and a final showdown with the emissaries of the elder gods. Kok's fluid, vibrant and slightly rubbery art is a perfect match for the weirdness within this story, keeping up with Lovecraft's vivid imagination while maintaining clarity for the reader.


The other stories, "The Glass Dog" by L. Frank Baum and "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, are also quite clever. Lance Tooks handled the adaptation on the former, integrating large fields of text with his illustrations that occasionally slipped into comics form. That approach took a while to get used to, especially the overly ornate cursive script he used for dialogue. It was distracting to try and make out at times and got in the way of the story. Lettering is a tricky business, and it's one of those things that ideally should enhance what we read but never distract. Ideally, the reader should rarely consciously make note of lettering, so the way it jumped out here was a bit disconcerting. That said, once one got used to this approach, Tooks' visuals were quite beautiful and fit nicely with the story, about a scientist who raises his daughter to exude poison and the man who falls in love with her. "The Glass Dog" is a fun trifle about a wizard, a glass-blower and the awful woman the latter falls in love with. It all ends horribly, as Baum himself notes that he'd like to consult the wizard as to the moral of the story. One other note--it was nice to see Rachel Masilamani illustrate a poem here. I haven't seen much of her work since her self-published RPM COMICS. All told, I'm impressed that Pomplun is able to get such an unusual assortment of artists and writers to adapt these stories, and find ways to make them work well as comics.

Two New Minis From Rob Jackson

Let's check in with the latest from Rob Jackson, whose career has an uncanny resemblance to that of Lewis Trondheim's. Like Trondheim, Jackson likes doing fantasy and adventure strips that are thrilling in their own right but also gently mock their source material. He's also quite adept at autobio comics as well, and has his own little publishing empire. He was the first of the new wave of British cartoonists to send me their work when I started reviewing comics at sequart.com a number of years ago, and while his linework is still quite crude, his storytelling and sheer inventiveness are as sharp as ever.

Take California, for example. It's The Grapes of Wrath meets H.P. Lovecraft by way of the show Carnivale. It's the story of a poor farming family in Depression-era America that drives west in search of a better life in California. The only problem is that that their car wrecks in a mysterious small town, and they settle in with a farmer/repairman who fixes their car in exchange for help around the farm. Billy, the hero of the story, discovers his younger brother Jake wandering off and falling asleep in front of a mysterious old statue. It's not long before Jake takes on a malevolent air and starts performing "miracles", and he manipulates the family into heading west without Billy. Jackson then spins this into a sort of cult-like conspiracy, as Jake (now a revival-tent preacher) tries to create new converts by way of the water from the town's spring, ending the issue on a cliffhanger. Mashing up eras and genres with his distinctively dry and wacky sense of humor is Jackson's specialty, and the earnestness of Billy's homespun narrative mixed with the feeling of creeping dread is effective and funny.

Segway is a collection of shorter Jackson stories. "Professor McGregor's Fantabulous Time Travel Device" is the sort of silly sci-fi pastiche that Jackson does so well. The title character goes back into time with a couple of dupes to right some personal and petty wrongs, only to find his lab assistant (who punched out some people going back in time), wants to further his time travel experiences as "The Time Puncher". The story stacks silliness on top of time paradoxes as Jackson jams every page with detail (while still using a clean and clear sense of design). The rest of the comic consists mostly of even shorter stories, like the autobio piece "The Great Ice Cream Disaster of 2011", wherein Jackson admits to trying to get solace out of an annoying accident by knowing he'll be able to get a page out of it. "As Far Back As I Can Remember, I Always Wanted To Be A Ventriloquist" is exactly what it sounds like--a send-up of Goodfellas by way of a guy with his hand up a dummy. "The Interpretation of Dreams" is an especially funny story that leans on anthropology in providing a man first with a life of leisure and then rulership of his tribe thanks to his bizarre dreams. His eventual, grisly fate is based on an incredibly silly dream that's entirely within the logic of teh rest of the story. Jackson is really a master of coming up with an absurd premise, fleshing it out logically, and then capping it off with a killer gag. The final story is a slice-of-life fragment called "Marigold", about the adult daughter of a celebrity chef who doesn't quite know what to do with her life. I'm hoping Jackson returns to this character, as the premise (the chef essentially owns the small town she lives in lock, stock and barrel) is clever but more low-key than most of his fiction. Those curious about Jackson's comics would be well-advised to start here, given the wide variety of storytelling devices he uses here.

Sequart Reprints: Hotwire 2

This article was originally written for sequart.com in 2007.
******************
There's a lot to like in the new Hotwire, both by contributors new and old. The package is pretty similar to the last volume: lots of lurid, over-the-top and funny comics along with many pages of similarly-grotesque illustrations. Hotwire is editor Glenn Head's reaction to "literary comics" that he feels are pretentious an dull. While there's no editorial in this version announcing his manifesto of sorts, it's clear that Head both is continuing his own personal aesthetic vision while breaking his own rules when he sees fit. For example, there are even more non-story illustrations in this volume than the last, which contradicts Head's desire to present "comics with cool style and great stories". There's a lot here that isn't comics, but it does somehow fit into the anthology's underground, anything-goes, unruly sensibility.

I like the unapologetic, take-it-or-leave-it aesthetic that Hotwire carries. This isn't an anthology designed to win new converts to the world of comics, but rather it's a celebration of a style rooted in the tradition of the 60s underground artists and the 80s anthology Weirdo. As such, it's hard to imagine a reader being drawn to every artist in here, given such an extreme series of artistic choices. For example, Glenn Head's "Tongue Trouble" and Doug Allen's "Hillbillys 'R' Dumb" are the sort of over-the-top, stylized and id-soaked comics that are personally difficult to read. Johnny Ryan's "Sin Shitty" quasi-parody felt like a Ryan Mad Lib (insert your own scatological reference into line A, a taboo sexual act into line B, a vague comics reference into line C), especially since Frank Miller comics are the proverbial low-hanging fruit. Matti Hagelberg's "Zombie Justice" feels more like a Kramer's Ergot or Bete Noire piece than something for Hotwire, given the extreme stylization and scratchboard technique. Illustrations by David Paleo and Stephane Blanquet are the sort of page-jamming, highly-detailed orgies of visceral unpleasantness that my eye tends to gloss over.

On the other hand, the fact that this anthology provides such a fine spotlight for humorists, which is such a rarity in this era of graphic novels and prestige anthologies. It's exciting to see new work by Ivan Brunetti (in his stripped-down but still-vulgar style), Mark Newgarden (with his usual combination of old-style gag format with nihilistic punchlines), and R.Sikoryak (another literary smash-up, this time of Little Nemo in Slumberland with The Picture of Dorian Gray, done with his usual astonishing style mimicry), and Sam Henderson ("Lonely Robot Fuckling"--nuff said). Christian Northeast's "In The Trenches" was a hilarious, deadpan account of a self-serious but unaware small businessman's past. Onsmith contributes an autobiographical story detailing the odd behavior of a creepy neighbor. There's a lot to laugh at in Hotwire, and that alone makes me hope that we get a new edition every year.

Beyond pure humor strips, there's an amazing range of interesting material. The most welcome new presence in this volume is that of Mary Fleener, who contributes a new 10-page story and several of her distinctive illustrations. The latter are in her "Our Lady" series, using her fractal "cubismo" style, with subjects like "Our Lady of Apocalyptic Fixation" and "Uninterrupted Munitions". Her story, entitled "Niacin" will thrill any readers of her old Slutburger series in its depiction of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. This was a hilarious account of Mary winding up in a car with a creep who gave her pot laced with PCP, and her attempts at crawling out of that particular trip. Her thick, rubbery line is a perfect delivery system for the warped, drug-induced imagery that she saw in the story. Hotwire is a perfect home for Fleener's work, and I hope she continues to contribute to future volumes.

My favorite Hotwire discovery has been Tim Lane. His unfussy, naturalistic line is used to tell straight-up pulp stories. "Outing" plops us straight into a bizarre encounter in a bar that ends with a shooting and a car crash. My favorite conceit of the story is that it's narrated by a character who gives us all sorts of intimate information without revealing who he is or most of his backstory. "The Aries Cow" features a character named Muncie and weird stories told at a bar. "In My Dream" has Lane detailing the wacky details of a flying dream and his downfall in it. This sort of anthology is a great showcase for Lane, because his stories act as a sort of anchor for the work in here that are weirder, while still creating an unusual and unsettling tone.

Another remarkable achievement is Jonathan Rosen's "A Massive Stroke of Bad Luck", which is about an aunt who suffered a stroke and was kept alive but in a great deal of distress and pain for quite some time. The top half of each page is a single image that illustrates a few lines of text. The bottom half is a series of images from a sketchbook that "diagram" his aunt's sad state. The grey wash acts as a sort of numbing agent for the reader to the intensity of each page's drawings. The story's best quality is its lack of sentimentality while still getting across the affection Rosen had for his aunt and his concern for her condition.

Not every story here is in-your-face. Carol Swain's "Communicable Disease", is a quiet story about a man in an institution of some kind, where the very words of books fly off the page and his companion starts burying the books when they're empty. Colored pencil seems to be at work here in setting up the air of melancholy and despair. "Last Testament" is a clever, time-jumping story by Chris Estes and David Lasky about Clash guitarist Mick Jones.

Still, Hotwire's main punch comes from its stylization and concentration on the "all that is good is nasty" school of storytelling. Lorna Miller (another welcome presence) retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood that portrays her as a little skank who ends up being eaten--eaten out, that is, by the Big Bad Wolf. Glenn Head's "Oozing Dread" is a hilarious account of Wilhelm Reich's wackier theories regarding orgone energy, orgasms and how they're rooted in alien involvement, all centered around a particular neurotic patient. David Sandlin's "Slumburbia" is a typically sex-and-shame centered story, a sort of echo of Reich's prediction that sexual behavior and activity was doomed to take on a fetished, guilt-ridden quality. Mack White's "Trouble In Tacosa" takes on a western legend, splitting its depiction into the grimy truth on one side of the page and then how it would be portrayed in Hollywood. Craig Yoe's ode to Tijuana Bibles is a sort of day-glo meditation on the surreptitious, anonymous nature of these bits of pornography and the writers who created them. What I get out of it is that these artists weren't all that different in nature to other cartoonists in terms of pandering to an audience and doing it in a sweatshop setting. All told, while not every story in this anthology will appeal to every reader, there should be at least a story in here that will draw in the eye of any reader.

Sequart Reprints: Hotwire

This article was originally published in 2006 for sequart.com
*****************

With Mome, Fantagraphics tried to put together an anthology that would appeal to sophisticated readers who were open to reading comics but didn't necessarily know what to buy. A book for those who read Ghost World or American Splendor and wanted to know where to go next. Understandably, the focus of that anthology had to be on somewhat straightforward narratives. One doesn't find a lot of funny comics in there, even if some strips have a somewhat humorous bent (Tim Hensley is a notable exception). There also weren't a lot of comics in the id-fueled underground tradition, and what comics there were in that style were somewhat restrained. This is not a criticism, but rather a simple observation: Mome has its own aims and certainly can't be all things to all people. Hotwire steps in and picks up the threads missing from Mome, all in a delightfully lurid package.

Editor Glenn Head is quite clear about his goals for the anthology in his introduction. While acknowledging that it was all well and good that comics were now respectable, he missed comics that "felt unsafe, undomesticated, unhinged, even!" Hotwire is his expression of the feeling that "comics with great style and cool stories are already art, and no critic, museum or journal can change that..." Of course, Head breaks his own rules throughout the book. There are plenty of pages that aren't comics, like David Paleo's revolting pin-ups, Sam Henderson's sketches, Craig Yoe's centerfold or Judith McNicol's scribbles. While not stories per se, they contribute to the carny freakshow nature of the book. A book filled with nothing but this sort of thing would have been unreadable, but interspersed throughout they're a nice sideshow of sorts. Hotwire isn't a book likely to win new converts. Most of the artists within are take-it-or-leave-it in terms of their stories, and they don't apologize for it. It's a book meant for people who already love comics without reservation, in all of their cheap and occasionally debased glory.

As a result, there are a number of stories in Hotwire that aren't personally appealing. As a reader, I've never been drawn to a lot of the traditional underground artists. I can admire their nerve and the trails they blazed, but my eyes fall off the page of stories in the S.Clay Wilson tradition. The unleashed id and broken taboos are simply no longer as shocking or interesting in their own right. Thus, the stories by Head and Doug Allen didn't do much for me. My eye tends to fall off the page when reading these sorts of stories, and that was true here. The true highlights of this anthology are stories by the formidable array of humorists. Not all of them are personal favorites, but that just fits in with the rest of the book: there's something for every true fan of comics to either love or despise.

There are four comics in particular that stood out. Michael Kupperman's "The Scaredy Kids", Lauren Weinstein's "The Call", R.Sikoryak's "Mephistofield" and Mack White's "My Gun Is Long". The first is a tour-de-force of absurdity, as the title characters encounter The Bittern, Jungle Princess and other characters who introduce themselves by crashing through windows. Lines like "Nearby, an ant makes love to a paperclip" are thrown into the narrative as part of Kupperman's all-out assault on conventional storytelling. Every panel is packed with visual humor, wordplay, dada asides and/or over-the-top colors. Kupperman's sheer relentlessness is what makes his work stand out, and is perfect in this venue.
Weinstein's story would have fit nicely in her Inside Vineyland collection. It's a nightmarish tale of a young girl listening to a record of her favorite story, but the needle skips on an evil queen screaming. The scream takes on its own reality and draws the girl in, as she meets a sort of angelic figure who shows her the universe. She eventually returns back to her own world, but a later encounter with that same note leaves a permanent impression. Weinstein's loose, almost vibratory line adds to the story's hallucinatory quality.
Sikoryak is known as an astonishingly skilled style mimic, and his particular shtick is retelling works of classic literature by merging them with well-known comics characters. This time around, he combines Dr Faustus with Garfield to get "Mephistofield". He tells the story just like Jim Davis does a daily strip: three panels, with the third containing a punchline. The colors are appropriately flat and Sikoryak's perfect use of every Davis tic and style choice is a hilarious pairing with the grim cautionary tale of Dr Faustus. And of course, Garfield as the personification of evil is more than appropriate...

Mack White's "My Gun Is Long" is the amusing marriage of hard-boiled noir and conspiracy theory. It stars the real Lee Harvey Oswald, his double Alex Hidell, strippers, Jack Ruby, and a desperate attempt to dodge killers. The stark black & white imagery and unadorned figure work match the paranoia and claustrophobia in this story, but it's White's skill in channeling Phillip Marlowe that propels the story along.
There are plenty of other delights in here: a David Lasky-drawn biography of the Clash; a creepy Carol Swain story about a circus; a stripped-down Ivan Brunetti story; and Onsmith's demented tales of rural Oklahoma. This anthology didn't get a lot of notice when it was released, which is unfortunate because there's so much strong work in here. In particular, having a regular anthology that features humorists so prominently is something that the comics world has needed for quite some time. It'll be interesting to see if Head can produce future volumes that are as fresh and compelling as this.