Sequart Reprints: Life Sucks

I've been reading Jessica Abel's comics since the Xeric grant-funded Artbabe #5. Her greatest skill is her character work, especially in terms of the verisimilitude of her dialogue. In portraying little snippets of the lives of her 20-something characters, she managed to get at the core of their concerns and lives. There is a vividness in her character portrayals that made her stories linger long after reading them. With La Perdida, she once again created a vibrant set of characters, this time in a much more extensive narrative. Her running theme of characters feeling lost and trying to find their place in the world was put to dramatic effect, adding a frenetic element of action to her story. She made the bold choice of presenting us with a cast of characters who were mostly unsympathetic, especially the main character. By telling the story from her point of view but making it eminently clear that this character was deeply flawed, Abel made some telling points about identity and authenticity.

With Life Sucks, Abel is aiming a book at a different audience. The problem with this book is that its intent, flow and execution all seem to be at odds with each other at various points, which led to a comic that feels disjointed and overly labored. I'm not sure if this came about because she worked with another writer (Babe Soria) and another artist (Warren Pleece) to illustrate it, but the end result was largely unsatisfying. The book's high concept is very clever: a 20-something man is a vampire and is the servant of another vampire (the one who "made" him). As his servant, he's expected to work--in this case, the night shift of a convenience store. We meet his friends, the human goth girl he has a crush on, and his antagonist as the story unfolds. The effect we get is Vertigo comics meets Kevin Smith's Clerks.

The problem is that this comic is neither fish nor fowl. The rather predictable plot gets in the way of the kind of languid character set pieces that Abel excels at. We don't meet characters, we meet character types, and the main character is the flattest of them all. Dave is the familiar kind of sniveling, put-upon passive protagonist whose story arc is trying to screw up his courage to woo Latina goth girl Rosa. Dave is a "vegetarian" vampire, meaning he doesn't want to suck blood from humans and instead gets his nourishment from plasma. He's spurred into action by his irritant vampire friend Jerome (the bloodsucking Randal to Dave's Dante, to compare it to Clerks), his human roommate Carl but most especially by his rival Wes. Wes is a rich, spoiled vampire who has multiple slaves and furthers the whole "slobs vs snobs" plotline. He is determined to win Rosa, mostly as a way of annoying Dave.

After 90+ pages of this story, there's a shocking act of violence committed by Wes that reminds us that vampires are powerful and amoral. The violence is jarring and certainly changes the tone of the story momentarily, but we then return to the regular story with Dave. He then gets the girl when she realizes that Wes has several lovers, loses the girl when she realizes that Dave concealed his vampiric nature from her and refuses to turn her into one, and then has a big confrontation with Wes after she begs him to "make" her. This leads to a surprisingly downbeat ending where Dave makes a sort of sacrifice to win her her freedom from Wes.

There were aspects of this book that I found were done well. A leaner book with a tighter narrative built around its high concept could have been fun, especially if there had been a few more twists and turns in the plot. Alternately, a book that forgot about the plot and stayed with the high concept but concentrated solely on fleshing out the characters beyond the one or two notes that we saw in this book could have been a winner. Instead, we got to see way too much of Dave's vampiric sidekick Jerome, too much of the "old school" owner of the store Radu, and too much of the too-easy goth caricature Alistair.

The biggest problems, however, are the romantic leads. Dave is so put-upon and self-pitying that it's impossible to root for him. While this can be a bold decision (as noted above with La Perdida), it backfires in a familiar narrative like this that demands that the main character be at least somewhat sympathetic. Rosa is an even more frustrating character, with her falling for the trappings of the goth world as a means of rejecting her family; her eventual shallowness in choosing to become a vampire speaks to how underdeveloped she was. If those characters had had more than one dimension, or had been part of a tighter narrative, then Life Sucks would have been a much more engaging read. Warren Pleece's art walks a pleasant edge between realistic and cartoony, but does little to liven up the narrative. It's functional but unremarkable. I think it's quite possible that I'm not the target audience for this book, and that it may well be aimed at a teen demographic. That may be the case, but the rather graphic violence would seem to be at least slightly at odds with that goal in terms of marketing (though perhaps not appeal). I think if some of the more dramatic twists that were crammed into the end of the story had been employed throughout the story, or if the whole story was a more amiable (if oddball) slice-of-life story, I would have enjoyed either story more wholeheartedly. Life Sucks tries to be too many things at once, and while I admire the ambition of its creators, the execution of that vision simply didn't coalesce.

Latvian Excellence: S! #11

The Latvian anthology Kus! is so successful that there's a smaller spin-off anthology called S! The 11th issue has the theme of "Artventurous", one that's vague enough for the artists to either totally embrace or ignore. Editors David Schilter and Sanita Muizniece lean heavily on artists from eastern and western Europe, with a smattering of contributors from north and south America. Everything about the anthology is first rate, including the production values and the individual effort from each artist. For many of these artists, it's their first exposure to a wider English-speaking audience, and it's clear that they're doing their best work within the confines of the theme. Schilter & Muizniece have broad tastes, with no particular preference given to artistic styles or fiction vs autobio. The cover, by Latvian artist Leonards Laganovskis, is a beautiful, stunning work that is an intersection of human forms as both functional pieces of furniture and works of art, cascading nonchalantly across the page in a pleasing pastel color scheme.

Some artists, like Martins Zutis, took the theme and reworked epics like The Odyssey into comics form. Betty Liang went in a different mythological direction in her depiction of the Leda and the swan story, which has a very different and grisly outcome in her telling. There's a charming crudeness in the way she uses color, making the pages look constructed as much as they are drawn. Others, like KJ Martinet, ran with the concept and did a story about a distopian future where survivors scavenge and murder in order to "complete" works of art, like adding arms to the Venus de Milo. Nicolo Pelizzon uses a noir style to hint at the conspiracy behind a series of art thefts and forgeries, while Jen Rickert offers up a chilling story of a murderer getting out his madness on canvas. Roman Muradov's "Little Clouds" gets at something else: the idea of aesthetic perfection and aesthetic repulsion and how they can be embodied in the same person when in different environments. There's something appropriately beautiful and elegant about his heavy use of a cartoony clear-line style and the colors red, brown and black.

Aidan Koch unsurprisingly is a standout with her "After The Bath", which is a sequential series of single-page images depicting a form only using colors after a path. It's like looking at a series of paintings done in non-intuitive, bright color patterns, with the watercolors barely coalescing into recognizable forms. Renata Gasiorowska has one of the funniest stories in the book, about a child whose entire family is comprised of artists but has no talents or interest in the arts. Gasiorowska ties the strip back into theme when the child notes that only martial arts interest her, spawning a rant about the uselessness of art. Told at the dinner table, one guest notes how suited she is for performance art, given how "brave and rude" she is! Told in a scrawled line with anthropomorphic characters in black & white, this story stands out from many of the other, slicker entries in the anthology.

Olive Booger details an embarrassing anecdote from his art school days having to do with performance art. A cute girl who shared his studio encouraged him to go to a performance piece where everyone naturally wound up naked and he was tapped to serve as a human table. He (not surprisingly) freaked out over this, causing much humiliation and trauma that obviously continues to trouble him to this day. His garish, grotesque style perfectly captures the awkwardness and strangeness of that situation. Dilraj Mann's take-off on Rear Window has some cheesily exploitative art and a pat narrative, which was unfortunate because his skill at depicting forms and using shadow made the story interesting to look at. Daniel Werneck's "Shoulders of Giants" is a bit too on-the-nose in the way he depicts the constant inspiration of a variety of artists and writers on his work. Much better is Simon Moreton's "Working", a typically restrained story about a man who becomes so obsessed with the beauty of a landscape view that it consumes him until he's able to return at the end of his work week, paints and canvas at the ready as he intensely tries to capture both his feelings and the essence of the environment.

That's a sampling of the pieces that stood out for me, though there are many others that range from gag work to autobio to something close to science-fiction and fantasy. What's most impressive to me is how the editors are able to produce this anthology like clockwork, bringing in new artists for nearly every edition of either S! or Kus!. It's really become the international successor of Mome in terms of spotlighting new and emerging talent across a broad spectrum of styles and influences. It also points to the ways in which art comics are now a truly international phenomenon, with European artists influencing American artists and vice-versa. There are certainly still regional peculiarities and references in some of the stories, but they are all easily recognizable as the kind of art comics that are pushing barriers everywhere. Kus! and S! may not always make a point of spotlighting the most challenging work in every issue, but there's a delicate balance in giving time and attention to cutting edge, avant garde work and more conventional yet still interesting work. This issue is a perfect example of that tension on display, and the way that the stories are sequenced helps heighten that frisson in a manner that works to the benefit of every artist in the book.

Scenes From A Portland Bar: Adult Babysitting

Sometimes you read a comic and the high concept is so obvious, one wonders why it hasn't been done before. So it is with Adult Babysitting volumes one and two, Maryanna Hoggatt's illustrated account of being a bartender in Portland. These minis are a mix of drink recipes, bar vignettes, ruminations on being a bartender, gags and other assorted ephemera done in a smooth and highly attractive style that's a nice mix between naturalism and cartoony. These comics go down so smoothly that I immediately wanted to read the second issue after I read the first and then was disappointed when I was done with the second issue that there wasn't more. That's a tribute to Hoggatt's easy-going storytelling persona and her sense of humor. For example, the first issue leads off with a series of gags called "The Lessons of Bartending". The first, captioned "Never ask a girl why she's crying", features a stone-faced Hoggatt simply asking "Neat or on the rocks?" when a woman sobs out a drink order to her. Hoggatt is a great letterer, and that's key in the format she uses here, with lots of open space to take advantage of. It has a pleasant, decorative quality that morphs into more elaborate script to emphasize certain concepts (like "full moon") but mostly is just clear and attractive.

What I like most about these comics is the way Hoggatt captures the rhythms of her workplace and the occasional way a bar can become a true center of community, with favored regulars and a buzz of energy that sustains a bartender over a work shift. Her full-color section detailing the ways in which seasons change the atmosphere of the bar is simply beautiful cartooning, capturing the nature of her clientele as they vary their routines but include going to this favored pub. At the same time, Hoggatt draws humor out of the exceptional and memorable events surrounding the bar, like being present at a robbery at the bar across the street (and actually getting up to get her drink after being told to get on the floor!) Hoggatt's bartending tips are actually quite useful (like using the tip of a rubber glove so the acid from limes and lemons doesn't damage one's finger), as are the drink recipes and the best ways to hold glasses. Honestly, I could easily see her expanding these comics out to book length and selling them to a general audience. She's a skilled cartoonist, has an understated sense of humor and an eye for detail. I hope to see more of these soon.

Assorted Plugs and Kickstarters

First on my list of things to look at and possibly support is the new comics website of Noah Van Sciver and Joseph Remnant: The Expositor. These are two of the hardest-working, most rapidly improving cartoonists in comics today, and both are essentially serializing their next book online. Noah Van Sciver's story is "Saint Cole", which is about one of his typical loser characters on the edge. This one happens to have a girlfriend and young son, and the early chapters of the story show him on the verge of either an easier life or some bad decisions. Remnant's story is "Cartoon Clouds", which is a post-art school story about a painter with little sense of direction. Both see each cartoonist at the height of their powers as mature artists.

Another interesting web site is 4Panel, a project that has a killer lineup of cartoonists all doing just four panels at a time. Michael DeForge, Dunja Jankovic, Derik Badman and a couple of dozen other artists have all been contributing to the Carousel-magazine led venture edited by Mark Laliberte. Much of it is in full color, allowing artists a full toolbox to attack the four panel grid, with the idea being that formal and poetic innovation is encouraged as opposed to standard narrative strategies. The results to date are fascinating.

Let's look at some very worthy kickstarters:  first up is LOVF New York: Destination Crisis, which is being run by Robyn Chapman. Seeing as she's being the very successful kickstarter and subsequent publication of Ariel Bordeaux's The Complete Deep Girl, it's a no-brainer that this comic by Jesse Reklaw will be excellent.

Next up is Bingo Baby, an improvised story done by five CCS cartoonists, including Joe Lambert, Amelia Onorato, Denis St. John, Bill Bedard, and Donna Almendrala. The story was improvised, with each actor playing a particular role, their performance was recorded and turned into a script and then finally became a comic. It's a fascinating concept for a comic that's a very different spin on jam comics. Jason Lutes, a member of the CCS faculty, is running this kickstarter, which is about halfway to its goal of 7K.

Finally, there's the kickstarter for the Zan Christensen-edited anthology Anything That Loves. While it's already met its goal, a firmly-defined amount of money will go to the involved artists as certain new goals are exceeded. The concept for the anthology is intriguing: tales of people in-between: bisexuals or those whose sexuality defies easy description and labeling on the Kinsey scale. It's an admirable project, and from Christensen's perspective as a gay man, he correctly notes the ways in which the gay community has been outright hostile to bi-identified men and women. There's a great lineup for this anthology, including MariNaomi, Roberta Gregory, Bill Roundy, Ellen Forney, Erika Moen and many others.

Sequart Reprints: Graphic Classics

This review was originally published in 2007 at sequart.com
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Producing a viable and interesting adaptation from one form of art to another is one of the most difficult and thankless tasks for an artist. A novel is not a play is not a film is not a comic--each art form has its own unique strengths and limitations, and what gives one narrative a unique flavor in one art form can be lost in translation when it's adapted to another.

In comics, there has been a long tradition of adapting works of literature into comics. From the venerable   Classics Illustrated (soon to be resurrected) to EC printing Bible stories, the primary appeal for these adaptations was providing the general public an "easier" way of reading classic stories. The problem with such translations is that they be necessity must sacrifice the richness of the prose; the better the prose, the more the comics version can suffer. A remarkable illustration that replaces a particularly eloquent bit of prose can be a powerful experience on its own, but it's not the same experience as reading that prose. On a more practical level, there simply weren't enough pages available in a standard comic book to fit in everything from a novel, so huge chunks of story and characterization were often cut. The art in these adaptations often looked hacked out, which is not surprising considering that they were produced on a tight deadline.

The Graphics Classic line has tried to circumvent these difficulties by adapting well-known works of genre fiction that lend themselves well to a propulsive comics narrative. Series editor Tom Pomplun has also gone out of his way to use short stories rather than butcher novels. The line of comics includes HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and others--so the stories are generally plot-driven, with larger-than-life characters, and often a bit of action. Considering that many of these stories later inspired pulp novels, which in turn inspired early comics, one can see that Pomplun has made some shrewd choices in his choice of subject matter.

Given that Pomplun has carefully chosen the subject matter and has recruited a number of comics' best artistic talents to illustrate the stories, how do these volumes hold up as comics? Let's begin with the Lovecraft volume. While there are some truly excellent artists in this volume, including Matt Howarth, Richard Corben, and Rick Geary, I'd say this volume doesn't quite succeed as a comic. That has more to do with Lovecraft than it does with the artists. Lovecraft's characters tended to be ciphers whose purpose was simply to reveal a small glimpse of the horrific world that he dreamed up. That led to another problem with translating his work into comics: his stories are full of descriptions of things seen that defy description because they're too horrible to comprehend. These things are always just hinted at , just beyond our understanding. Viewing them on a page removes the mystery that gave Lovecraft's prose power and dread. In comics form, without the weight of doom that Lovecraft brings to bear, the stories are more predictable and the visual payoffs seem trite.

The other problem is that Lovecraft's stories are often short on dialogue, leading to a number of narrative-heavy captions. In the adaptation of "Herbert West: Re-Animator", the level of text used threatens to overwhelm the comics portion of the story. Indeed, it crosses the line between comic and illustrated story. The most successful story in the book as comics is probably the first, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". It works for three reasons: it's more character-oriented than the rest of the book, the slow transformation into horror is kept at an individual, human level rather than the apocalyptic levels implied in other Lovecraft stories, and the grotesque art by Simon Gane is a fitting match for this tale of a young man who slowly realizes his hideous destiny.

Much more successful in the transition from prose to comics is Adventure Classics. The sheer variety of material and artistic approaches actually improves the stories, some of which are so familiar that they cross over into cliche. For example, Mary Fleener's Cubismo technique is a nice match for the old Kipling poem "Gunga Din", and Hunt Emerson's exaggerated figures bring "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" to life. Emerson uses the verse as captions for each panel, but he packs the panels with so much detail and animation that they take on their own life. Along the same lines, Antonella Caputo & Nick Miller amusingly adapt Doyle's "The Crime of the Brigadier", which is part adventure story and part French-British humor. It's one of the few stories in the book that doesn't have a predictable ending. It's not really the fault of these stories that they're so formulaic; indeed, these authors created many of the formulae that are so familiar to the modern reader. Still, those stories that rely heavily on twist endings that most readers can see coming lose a lot of their impact.

The other standouts are Damon Runyon's "Two Men Named Collins" (adapted by Pomplun and drawn by Noel Tuazon) and Johnston McCulley's "The Stolen Story" (adapted by Pomplun and drawn by Chris Pelletiere). Both stories have a grimness to them that made them memorable and feature characters that linger in one's mind. The former is typical Runyon, about a hard-bitten soldier who lives a rough life, but winds up displaying surprising humanity. The latter (penned by the creator of Zorro), is about a man who so desperately wants to become a writer that he steals and rewrites the story of a drunken acquaintance of his. While the story is accepted and published, it unleashes a wild chain of events that result in the writer's doom. Both stories have a grittiness and ugliness to the art that perfectly matches the tone of the prose.

The third volume, Gothic Classics, has several stories that would go on to have a huge influence on the future of gothic fiction. "Carmilla", by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, would go on to inspire Dracula, though there's not much in here that's surprising for a modern audience. Lisa K Weber's cartoony grey-tones were an interesting match for this overheated bit of vampire fiction with lesbian overtones. Speaking of overheated, "The Mysteries of Udolpho" is sort of the world's first romance novel. Wildly popular at the time, its fainting heroines, mysterious castles, rugged heroes and sordid romantic details would become familiar to readers everywhere in story after story. Its adaptation here is perfunctory, getting across what a reader needs to know, but it's mostly of interest because of its historical importance and as a set-up for the best story in the book.

That would be Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey", adapted by Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons. That's a team that's worked together for quite some time, and it shows. "Northanger Abbey" is a parody of "Udolpho", and the main character actually references it in hopes that her own life would resemble that gothic tale. The delicacy of Timmons' pencils are perfect for this spoof of manners, and Robbins adeptly takes us through the story's twists and turns. It's Austen's wit that towers above all, and I was surprised at how well it translated into comics form.

The other story of note is "At The Gate" by Myra Jo Closser. It's most notable not for the very slight story about dogs waiting outside the gates of heaven, but rather for the welcome return of Shary Fleniken. I've long admired her work, and she does a nice job in making the dogs in this story expressive.
Tom Pomplun has taken on a unique project in comics, and while it's not always successful, it definitely is a worthy attempt. If nothing else, Pomplun is keeping alive stories whose influence is taken for granted today. His willingness to use a wide variety of graphic styles makes the comics worth looking at in addition to reading, though it would be nice to see ever more idiosyncratic approaches to the material. I'd be curious to read his attempts at adapting better authors, like Twain and Bierce, to see if the impact of those stories is sustained through their transformation into comics. At some point, I'd love to see him take on authors like Vonnegut, Chesterton and Asimov. While most of the stories he's adapted have been genre stories like mystery, horror, science-fiction, detective and the like, it would be interesting to see a volume built entirely around humorous short stories. That would be an excellent way of making use of another long tradition of cartooning.

Sequart Reprints:: Graphic Classics Mark Twain

This review was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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In my review of several entries from the Graphic Classics line of adaptations, I noted that some of the stories chosen seemed ill-suited for comics, and wondered what the Mark Twain collection might look like. Series editor Tom Pomplun was kind enough to send over a galley of their upcoming revised edition of Twain, and the results were impressive.

The reason why I think it worked so well was Twain's economy of style in his prose, the liveliness of the scenarios he concocted translated nicely to the language of comics, and the artists selected were astutely matched with the particular stories. Many of the stories contain some of Twain's most cynical, acidic works of satire. Even the adaptation of the little-read "Tom Sawyer Abroad", written from Huck Finn's simple-but-secretly-sophisticated point of view, contains a number of digs at religion, science, and imperialism. George Sellas' cartoony style is a nice match for what is also a rip-roaring adventure story, where Tom, Huck and Jim wind up on a mechanized hot-air balloon that sails over the Atlantic and winds up in Africa. Like any good comics story depicting action, there's a propulsive quality in both prose and art that leaves the reader breathless as they flip from page to page. The way that no-nonsense Huck acts as the foil for the slightly pompous Tom is what informs Twain's commentary and makes it crackle. The manner in which Twain is able to use Huck to get his points across while leaving him as one of the most vivid characters of all time speaks to his skill as a writer.

Twain certainly wasn't afraid to go over the top in scoring satiric points. "The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival Of Crime In Connecticut", adapted by Antonella Caputo & Nicholas Miller, features an exaggerated rubbery art style to match the ridiculousness of the scenario. It's about a man who happens to encounter his own conscience, in the form of a dwarf. His conscience literally tortures him, until he understands that the less he allows his conscience to affect his actions and feelings, the weaker it gets. He then throttles his conscience to death--and sets about committing crime after crime! This story humorously gets across the notion of what conscience is, why we act the way we do, and is more than a little ambiguous on which side Twain falls.

By far the darkest and best story in the collection is "The Mysterious Stranger", which is one of the nastiest, most cynical stories I've ever read. It's a story of a medieval village, and a stranger who appears to three boys. His name is Satan--an angel who is the nephew of Hell's Satan. An angel does not possess "the moral sense", that which enables us to tell good from evil. As the angel proceeds to demonstrate time after time throughout the story, "good" and "evil" often depends on who's judging it, who's meting out punishment for committing evil acts and one's own attempts at justifying one's comfort. In particular, Twain has sharp words for those who declare morality to be what separates us from the animals, since men commit acts of cruelty that animals never would.

The boys ask Satan to improve people's lives, but that often winds up as him killing them so as to avoid more years of suffering on earth. Toward the end, Twain attacks the twin notions of Christianity and civilization as unequivocally good things: "We saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through the ages, leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake...Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs who despise you--but whom you continue to fight and die for." Toward the end of the story, the boys asked Satan to make a friend of theirs, accused of thievery, happy. He responds by driving him insane. When confronted, Satan replies, "It was the truth. I said he would be happy, and he is now the one utterly happy person in this empire. No sane man can be happy. It seems to me that you are too hard to please." Twain then really unloads on religion at the very end, rejecting "a god who mouths mercy and invented hell", reducing the story and its surroundings to a dream.

Twain manages to do this while crafting an entertaining story full of twists and turns, made wickedly delightful thanks to the hand of Rick Geary, an artist who specializes in this sort of period piece. The light line and exaggerated character design are exactly what this darkly humorous story required. Even Twain's lighter-hearted stories contained a darker, cynical undercurrent as he took on hypocrisy and self-delusion. It only makes sense that a graphic adaptation of his work should also have a comic face that masks a darker heart. Every American satirist owes a debt to Twain, in terms of his boldness, clarity, wit, storytelling ability and the manner in which he managed to encapsulate both folk and sophisticated elements in his writing. Pomplun does a fine job here of finding ways to best fit his work into comics language. Given comics' long history of presenting illustrated satire, the fit only seems natural, but Pomplun clearly took pains in searching for the right artist to go with the right story. A volume solely devoted to great works of satire would probably be an enormous success in this series; I'd love to see an artist tackle Swift's "A Modest Proposal", Voltaire's Candide, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, various works by Aristophanes along with more modern satirists.

Around the World: Loge, Machado, Pereira, Astromanta/Hetamoe

I get comics from all over the world. Let's dip into a sampling of such work.

Lies Die Kind, by Lilli Loge. Loge notes that the title's meaning in German ("Read the child") applies as much to this portrayal of trauma and lost memory as does the English meaning, though neither meaning is entirely applicable. It's about lacunae, gaps in memory that feel like holes ripped out of one's brain in much the same way that Loge hand-ripped out a hole in each one of the covers of this comic. The comic isn't so much a narrative (it's about something lost, after all) as it is a series of representations of knowing that something horrible is missing from one's memory but that it's completely lost. Loge's linework goes from exquisite and detailed to cartoony and scratchy, depending on how she chooses to represent this phenomenon. She also uses a bunch of interesting formal tricks, like a post-it note on a blank page that features a rabbit saying "Got a mind like a sieve? Better take notes!" Loge also depicts the struggle as two young women portraying different parts of the brain, with one unable to communicate to another what has been forgotten; she has forgotten that she has even forgotten anything, and getting upset about it makes the situation even worse. It's a brief, powerful and striking attempt to get at an interesting idea. Loge is an extremely clever cartoonist who puts her formal inventiveness to good use.

Megafauna/Inner Math, by Joao Machado and Andre' Pereira. This mini is a flipbook, with each artist contributing one story that meets in the middle. Megafauna represents the distant past, while Inner Math tells of the far future. Both are about evolution and freedom, and the way that the struggle for both is literally a life-or-death affair. Megafauna shows the birth of the first sentient humanoid creature in a savage environment, and how its existence activates and angers the presence of the gods in the form of a many-headed elephantine creature. Inner Math is about a distopian future where a single human is bred to combat the decay of society, navigating its structures and bringing it back in touch with nature. Here, the state (or science, or religion) plays the same role as the gods in the first story, angry about humanity's attempts to evolve and better itself. The baby born in the first story is essentially another iteration of the human designed to run the gauntlet of the repressive future. Pereira's art in Megafauna is appropriately visceral and harsh, cutting up his pages into horizontal panels interspersed with EKG readouts indicating the brain activity of the new child. Machado's lettering in his story is a bit hard to parse at times, but I liked the way he used smudges, inserted diagramatic marks on his pages and mixed freehand drawings with what look like drafted structures. Both artists use greyscale to strong effect, modulating the lightness and darkness of individual images to create ghostly appearances. This is intriguing work.

Idle Odalisque, by Astromanta and Hetamoe.This odd and lovingly-made comic is crudely-drawn in manga style. The artists (writer and artist) tell the story of a young woman going about her day as she gets ready to go to work. It's just that her job is being a streetwalker. The comic is very much in the tradition of magical realism, as her world sparkles and she winds up going home with a talking bear who prefers to talk and play scrabble than have sex. There's a matter-of-factness about this story that I enjoyed. The crudeness of the line actually made it more attractive to my eyes, since I find typical shojo-style art to be painful to look at in its slick cuteness. I'm not entirely sure where the artists are going with this; it feels like a bit of a lark. Both this mini and the preceding mini came from Portugal, by the way; click on the link to see more work on a dedicated tumblr.