31 Days of Short Reviews #7: Nick Andors

Nick Andors' debut A Frozen World is a gritty howl of a comic, one that's perhaps too dependent on shock value and twists and not confident enough in its character-building. The story links together four different character narratives that take place in the distopian city of Irongates, which is partly a metaphor for urban life and partly a metaphor for prison, though for Andors the difference between the two can be considered negligible. The first story is short and mostly serves as set-up for the rest of the narratives, as it depicts what life is like in the city and how some people find ways to escape the mandatory "lock-up" at night and wander around the city. The second story follows a member of the "body patrol", a worker whose job it is to pick up the many corpses that litter the streets of the city. This particular patrolman has been mute to most partners for years after his pregnant wife was murdered in the streets on the day he got married. This story loads up on the pathos and doubles down on misery, though it does allow its protagonist a sweet ending of sorts.

Of course, that's all warm-up for the main narrative, a story about a deadly woman named Anneka. She's introduced to us at a low point, as a contract put out on her life is fulfilled by a group of thugs. Much of the story is a flashback to her childhood and the painful headaches and voice she hears in her head, assuaged only by the occasional ministrations of her neighbor Ivan. Her family life makes that of the character Precious in Push look like a birthday party. The father is overbearingly abusive, both physically and emotionally, while the mother is a crackhead who spends the entire day zoned out. When her father tries to kill her by slicing up his face, she transforms into a killer of killers by cutting off his head. Andors isn't afraid to get dirty, gritty and visceral in these scenes of violence. There's nothing pretty or exciting about them; they are simply horrific and graphic, like when she cuts off a rapist/killer's penis and shows it to him. There are a few twists here that aren't too hard to predict, including the weird twist of the misshapen Ivan never seeming to grow old, and the eventual reveal in the fourth part of the book as to who he actually is.

There is potential to be found in this first work by an artist who clearly poured everything he had into this book. Visually, the resemblance to Farel Dalrymple's realistic but occasionally grotesque and fantastic rendering style is pronounced. There's a heavy reliance on spotting blacks as a means of creating the book's relentlessly downbeat atmosphere. Andors' chops are not quite up to the task of maintaining steady character rendering on page after page, with some figures looking cruder than others. The shock value employed on a number of pages was less interesting than his actual attempts at character development, especially with regard to Anneka. She's an interesting character despite the cliches of her background, and the certain death she faces at the end (without revealing her actual fate) was a clever resolution of her storyline. This book might have had a great emotional impact if Andors had been a bit more restrained in his use of gore and violence, and it seems that in general as a cartoonist, restraint and greater simplicity would be useful watchwords for him.

31 Days of Short Reviews #6: Batton Lash

Batton Lash has been doing his legal/horror spoof Supernatural Law (formerly Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre) for thirty-five years now, going through virtually every form of comics publishing imaginable. What started as a comic strip in a local newspaper and then a law journal became a black-and-white comic book. When trade paperbacks became a popular way of keeping one's work in print, Lash started collecting his comics. When the market changed such that alternative comic books as such were no longer a viable model to make money on a consistent basis, Supernatural Law moved to the web. With crowdfunding services like Kickstarter on the rise, Lash conducted such a campaign to put together a complete graphic novel in color, The Werewolf of New York.

Lash's comics have always had an amiably amusing quality. His targets for satire have always tended to be easy ones, especially in the way he tends to portray them for the most effective comedic beat-downs. For example, the villains in this story are the People for the Rights, Interests and Concerns of Shapeshifters, or PRICS. This is a PETA stand-in that objects to court-ordered rehab for a werewolf that had been seen running around New York City. Lash couldn't quite stop at making the PRICS annoying because they valued a werewolf's freedom over the safety of the city; instead, he took the further step of making their methods far more nefarious. Gilding the lily in that fashion led to a plot twist that was pretty easy to see coming but that added little to the narrative itself, but it did help the comic end in a more pat fashion. One of the problems with the book is that this particular story didn't seem to merit lasting over a hundred pages. To be sure, there were nice character moments with Lash's well-established cast of characters, like their secretary Mavis. Dipping into the personal lives of the lawyers Wolff and Byrd has often been the most fun part of reading this comic, with the supernatural case law shtick feeling like more of a structural foundation instead of the real focus of the series. This book puts the plot front and center, and it's not interesting or varied enough to carry the book. The other problem with this volume is that printing it in color didn't do much for Lash's art. Indeed, I've always enjoyed the crispness of his black-and-white work, as it complemented his Dan DeCarlo-influenced character design without looking too bright. The use of color here overwhelmed Lash's thin line in some spots. Hopefully, future volumes will return to shorter vignettes with more character subplots running through them as well as a return to Lash's moody-but-cheerful black and white line.

31 Days of Short Reviews #5: Lilli Carre' and Thereza Rowe

The hardcover comics aimed at new readers from Toon Books have always uniformly done two things well. First, the design has always been impeccable, making each book its own little unique art object. They're simply beautiful to look at. Second, they are rock-solid in terms of comics storytelling fundamentals. The two most recent books from Francoise Mouly's publishing collaboration with Candlewick Press, Hearts and Tippy and the Night Parade, are no exception. Each book is visually distinctive in its own way. Hearts, which was created by Thereza Rowe, features characters put together with cut paper on the page. It's an elegant and beautiful approach that compensates for the slight stiffness of its figures with a propulsive, exciting story. Like a film beginning its narrative with credits rolling over it, so does Hearts set up its book-long chase sequence with protagonist Penelope the fox having her heart broken when her friend leaves on a rocketship. The book consists of her losing her broken heart and chasing a variety of characters who briefly wind up with it, including dolphins, birds, a paper airplane, and a king and queen. This is a Level 1 Toon Book, so it's aimed at emerging readers, and thus the dialogue is quite simple and limited. That makes Rowe's spectacular and varied use of color in particular a crucial part of the storytelling. Indeed, having Rowe do a book injects a bit of the NoBrow aesthetic into the Toon Books line: clear, bright and colorful.

Lilli Carre's background in animation was obviously of great help to her in creating her first book for children. If Hearts was a race, then Carre's Tippy and the Night Parade is a slow and gentle procession, one that keeps looping around on itself. Like Hearts, the narrative for Tippy begins on the inside front cover, when we seed an odd procession of animals strolling across the page, until we see a bird sleeping on someone's head. It turns out to be the titular Tippy, whose room is a mess and filled with an odd assortment of animals and plants. Tippy remembers nothing but going to sleep, and then kicks the narrative into gear by imagining what she might have done: take a walk on the dock, get lost in the mist, hop across lily pads, fall in a big hole, go through a cactus patch, etc. Along the way, a variety of creatures start following her, until we wind up back at her house and precisely the same situation that started the book. Carre's use of dark blues for night is one of her trademarks; few cartoonists create a night as evocative and mysterious as hers. In this book, night is a welcoming blanket of wonder, albeit one that Tippy doesn't experience consciously. The fact that she's doing something a bit "bad" but doesn't remember the hows or whys is undoubtedly appealing to children. Once again, the simplicity of the narrative, pushing readers along a straight line that is actually more of a curve, makes it easy for them to understand what's going on and connect words to images. Toon Books is building a truly impressive library of books, as the savvy Mouly cultivates her connections in the worlds of children's literature, illustration and alternative comics to find the best possible candidates to create memorable books.

31 Days of Short Reviews #4: David J Zelman

David J Zelman, writing under the nom-de-plume "Mohammed al-Muhammad & Youssef Fakish", sends up homophobia regarding gays in the military with the breezy and raunchy Al-Qaeda's Super Secret Weapon (Northwest Press). It lampoons a statement made by senator John McCain regarding the effect that having gays in the military might have on morale, discipline, etc. At just sixty pages, the premise is really better suited for a short story rather than a novella. Zelman stretches it out with a bunch of sex scenes in the same way that a sex comedy might pad its running time with extended sex scenes, drawing a fine line between "sex comedy" and "funny porn". Or perhaps more accurately, "porn with funny stuff in between sex scenes." Zelman's line is light and crisp, and publisher Zan Christensen's coloring adds a lot to the book's overall appeal. Still, it's the dryness of the narrative and Zelman's sense of comic timing that finds the book at its most successful. He has a way of heightening and then exploding stereotypes of all kinds in a hilarious fashion, and using the spy/terrorism setting to do so made it all the more effective.

The story is told from the point of view of Mahmoud, a sleeper agent sent to America in order to join its military and destabilize it as part of a wider operation where every agent would declare their gayness simultaneously to distract and confound the soldiers. Zelman sends up gay culture as much as he does military culture here, noting that after he meets a guy in a bar named Steve, he quickly moved in with him, "like a lesbian". As part of his training, he is tortured by an officer to drills him on the finer points of gay culture, like what drugs shouldn't be mixed with alcohol, pop music and what gay men and lesbians have in common. He learns about the perils of threesomes and broken hearts. Then the plan is put into motion in the funniest scene in the book, when revealing his gayness first causes a lot of discussion about who would be a top or a bottom if they were gay, then a wrestling match, and then a soldier despairing of all the gayness around him. With the military destabilized, Pakistan and India take the opportunity to nuke each other, and World War III in general breaks out. The book gets more ridiculous as it proceeds, and while the satire is as subtle as a sledgehammer, its general good nature and overall silliness makes it a fun read. That said, the satire was muted by the padding from the sex scenes, and the sex scenes muted by all the silliness. A shorter, more focused version of this book might have had a crisper comedic punch.

31 Days of Short Reviews #3: Margaret De Heer

Margaret De Heer's "Discovery" series moved on to a new subject in Science: A Discovery In Comics. In the vein of the "For Beginners" series (only with a looser, funnier and more cartoony approach) or Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe series, De Heer offers up a short, accurate and playful account of the history of science. De Heer is careful not to simply make this the Western history of science, as landmark discoveries from Muslim and Asian scientists are dutifully (if briefly) noted. Noting from the very beginning that science began as a holistic and interdependent field of study, De Heer structured the book roughly as a historical narrative but took plenty of side-trips to examine the details and history of specific scientific disciplines. She opens the book with a quick and witty philosophical exploration of what science is, exactly, with her own cartoon stand-in in constant dialogue with a figure who is supposed to be her partner. That cheerful interaction between the two pushes the book along at a pleasant pace, preventing it from bogging down into a simple information dump.

That's something De Heer is clearly sensitive to; she doesn't want the book to be dry or boring. At the same time, she wanted to make sure to talk about issues regarding gender bias, corruption and competition in the history of science. She correctly aligns the history of science with the history of philosophy, which makes me wish she had referenced thinkers like Thomas Kuhn in discussing not only what kinds of discoveries are made in science, but how scientists themselves think about their theories. Some of the equations and theorems she discusses are explained and glossed over perhaps a bit too quickly, leaving their meanings and significance on the blurry side. That's especially true when she gets into math and discusses the unusual numbers like Pi. Still, this is a mammoth undertaking, and I admired the way she took the book into contemporary issues like science vs religion, as well as the snaking timelines for certain key events and kinds of science. That concluded in the fantastic geological history of the earth, starting from 4.5 billion years ago up til today. Geology and quantum theory were good places to finish the book, as both have evolved and changed in what they can tell us and what implications they have for the nature of scientific inquiry itself. The images in this rather text-heavy book work because she makes an effort to provide a sort of panel-to-panel and page-to-page sense of motion and transition. They're also effective because she kept them loose, small, cartoony and clear. A heavier or denser line, combined with the text and surfeit of details, would have made this book unreadable. Instead, she lets some pages breathe with a minimum of text and a large image dominating the page and packs lots of information into other pages.  This book would be a fine supplement for high schoolers or general knowledge seekers, but is more useful as an informational supplement than a source of pure entertainment.

31 Days of Short Reviews #2: Renaud Dillies

Renaud Dillies' Betty Blues, like his previous Bubbles and Gondola, is a book about the difficulties of being an artist. Whereas the first book was about the crippling fear that can cause writer's block, Betty Blues is about the ways in which being an artist can disrupt one's personal life. At the same time, the book is about the ways in which being in a relationship with an artist can lead to long periods of being neglected, of being a widow to whatever calling obsesses one's lover. Of course, he does this in his trademark ultra-cute, anthropomorphic but densely-rendered style. Certainly, there are comic moments in the book and even a few pages of sight gags and kinetic physical humor, but the tone of the book is immediately downbeat and doesn't resolve in a cliched or expected fashion. To the English-language publisher NBM's credit, this book is published at close to the original album's size, giving the denseness of those pages some room to breathe.

Rice, the jazz trumpeter who's one of the book's protagonists, immediately quits playing when he realizes that his girlfriend, Betty, leaves him at the bar at which he's performing with a rich guy who bought her a case of champagne. The book begins with Betty at her breaking point, as Rice is at the peak of his playing powers and putting on a spectacular performance. For her, it's the culmination of hours of being ignored at the expense of practice and playing. When a smooth-talking man actually pays attention to the already-inebriated Betty, she leaves with him as much as a sign of protest than an actual desire to be with the guy. What follows are a series of adventures for each of them, where a down-and-out Rice drifts as far away from possible from Betty and music while she is seduced by living in luxury. Of course, both realize that neither of these roles suits them or is making them happy. Rice realizes that playing is as necessary to him as breathing (and I'm guessing that this is another autobiographical turn by Dillies) and Betty realizes that luxury is less important than respect and authenticity. The ending is left ambiguous, but the general message is precisely the same as Bubbles and Gondola: beauty hurts, but it's the only thing that matters. Dillies seems incapable of drawing anything less than the cutest of characters on every page; while this was unbearably twee in books he just illustrated (like Abelard), it actually works in this book. One feels for these charming, sad characters in a way that a more realistic depiction would have made impossible to stomach. The cuteness of the drawings dampens the book's more melodramatic and melancholic tendencies, while the downbeat story is lightened by the character work. It's an unstable kind of alchemy, but Dillies' key decision not to slap on a happy ending makes it work.The brevity of the story (just 78 pages, with several of them chapter-bridging illustrations) also goes a long way in letting the intense charm of Dillies' renderings remain pleasant rather than cloying.

31 Days of Short Reviews #1: Phil McAndrew

In an effort to get at my backlog of reviews, today will be the first of a month-long and daily short review feature.

First up is Phil McAndrew's Crying In Front Of Your Dog And Other Stories, published by Jordan Shiveley's Grimalkin Press. McAndrew's done work with MAD and the Cartoon Network, and you can see that style at work in many of these stories. The first, longer section of the book collects a number of minicomics done between 2008 and 2009, and the second section is shorter and more recent material. Overall, his shorter stories are punchier, funnier and weirder. The longer stories lean heavily on his exaggerated, heavily worked over and slightly blotchy style, wherein the funny drawings compensate for a lack of narrative meat and structure. There are exceptions, like the absurd and silly "Are You Man Enough?", which features a young man trying to impress his lover's father and winds up with him getting that man's magical mustache. Stories like "The Book" are really just a long, shaggy dog story that seems better suited for animation than comics, as there's not quite enough connective tissue there to make the long silences cohere into something entirely worth the reader's time. Indeed, the funny drawings in this story are entirely superfluous to the story itself; the joke is entirely text-based and could have been related in precisely the same way by having two dots talk to each other.

McAndrew's more recent material is no less silly, but keeping each story to two or three pages and choosing to go with more powerful and memorable imagery was a key to the success of these shorts. McAndrew's comics have tended to be one panel per page, a rhythm that's again more like animation than comics. In these shorter pieces, McAndrew cut done on the prose and made better use of funny images that actually contributed to the meat of the joke. For example, in "Delivery", he bolsters the silly notion of having to go out and hunt down pizza in the forest since delivery didn't exist with a photo of a manly man kneeling behind a wild pizza he had just killed with an arrow. "Internship" quickly introduces the reader to the prospect of being a wizard's intern, only the first thing he wanted you to do was teach him how to send an email with a photo attachment. It's a good joke that's reinforced by the final image of the wizard's photo being one of a beach vacation. McAndrew's jokes and approaches ranged from grotesque and heavily rendered to sparse and open, like a story about a discarded apple core leading to a tree growing in the middle of the ocean. Unsurprisingly, the book itself looks great; the design and layout are clear and unfussy in a package that is attractive and eye-catching. The book reveals a cartoonist's progress over a half-decade and shows how much McAndrew has improved, both as a draftsman and a storyteller.