Heavy Hitters Part 1: Rilly, Galloway

Pope Hats #4, by Ethan Rilly. In a format reminiscent of 80s alt-comics, Rilly continues to defy conventions by publishing his work in serial format. This issue is a collection of short stories published elsewhere, some of which are related. Indeed, the front cover features several key characters from the issue in one scene. Interestingly, none of the characters are looking at each other, which makes sense considering none of them interact within the context of the issue either. The back cover features mostly silent images from the stories, or rather images suggested by the stories that we didn't actually see. It's a clever idea that helps frame the entire issue.

"All In" connects to "The Nest", a story seen later in the issue. It's a small character moment: a young woman ignores going to bed for the siren call of playing poker on her phone. The steady march of panels in the 3x4 grid gives the story a deliberate, uneasy quality. "The Hollow", done in a yellow and blue wash, is about a disgruntled member of a colony on another planet. It's not just that he's disgruntled with the conditions, but that his mind has become wrapped up in conspiracy theories and paranoia, unable to see the point of view of any others. When he takes a drug that allows him to read the thoughts of others, it's too much to bear the actual thoughts and feelings of others. Rilly's takedown of an egocentric, Clowes-style misanthrope was extremely clever.

"Stained Glass" is a strip that really shows off Rilly's incredible understanding of how to convey gesture with just a minimum of lines. It's a story about the way vanity and ego, especially an artists's vanity, can have horrific real-life repercussions. Gesture is crucial to the story because the artist, who created stained glass windows for a church, noted a slightly unimpressed expression on the face of the sponsor, which drove him crazy. Rilly's simple and subtle use of gesture here was key to making the story work. "New Friend", which has a homey, brown wash, is all about trying to reconnect with one's past and the ways in which the choices of people we thought we knew can confound us. Once again, Rilly uses gesture and body language to tell the story even without dialogue.

"The Nest" is a multipart serial about the heartbreak of parenting and mental illness. Clement, a middle-aged dad drawn with a huge, bigfoot-style nose and a mustache (he looks like a slimmer version of Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace), discovers his grad student daughter sitting in her car behind his house when she should have been in school. Marie, his daughter, developed schizophrenia and no longer recognized her parents as such, thinking them impostors. This is the only story in this issue that features women as primary characters with their own agency, which I imagine is coincidence since women feature prominently in the usual Pope Hats narrative. Rilly navigates Marie's point of view, Clement's point of view, and the point of view of various other characters with a great deal of empathy, especially since Marie's mother is so obsessed with the idea of being judged for Marie's mental illness. The story ends with the father of two neighborhood vandals talking to him about how difficult it is for him, and without saying a word, it's clear that Clement does. The character design in this story is particularly clever, mixing a naturalistic setting with exaggerated facial characteristics. That combination creates a shorthand that allows for fluid panel-to-panel transitions, slightly rubbery movements and immediate clues as to the characters' emotional states.

"Bitter Drummer" is the most straightforward story in the book, as it talks about a famous but defunct band deciding to get back together, from the point of view of the drummer. He's the most grounded and domesticated member of the band, and his eventual fate (hinted at in the first couple of panels of the story) made sense because one got the sense that this was really no longer his life. There are few other gags in the issue that round it out that remind me of the sillier things Dan Clowes used to do in Eightball. Clowes and Adrian Tomine are Rilly's most obvious peers, but Rilly's line differs in important ways, as does the overall emotional tone of his comics. Certainly, there are sometimes desperate, obsessed people in his stories, but Rilly's take on them is to give them a fair shake rather than use them as either an emotional stand-in expressing frustration or as subjects of pure derision. While his comics are usually subtle and restrained, there's a remarkable sense of warmth to be found.

In The Sounds and Seas Volume 2, by Marnie Galloway. The second volume of three silent volumes about the creative journey is much more straightforward than the first, but no less filled with deeper meaning. The first chapter of this book is about the three creators we met in the first book working on building a ship for their journey. It opens with a crow flying into their workshop (in the middle of winter, no less) and perching at the top of the mast, becoming a sort of living good luck token. The woman with the longest hair is chosen for a special task: having all of the ship's ropes woven into her hair. Weaving is a repeating image in the comic, as there have been visual representations of weaving together songs and weaving in groups of three. While the task of being at the center of the ship's operations clearly wears on the woman, she accepts it without complaint. The fourth chapter describes the first part of their ship's passage. It's a joyful journey, full of fishing, diving, sketching, and bioluminescent squid. When the ship's crow is discovered dead, the crew reacts with horror, and a violent storm envelops the ship as the chapter ends. As always, Galloway's skill as a draftsman and cartoonist is impeccable. The density and precision of her hatching is a sight to behold. Her use of blacks adds perfect balance to every page. Her nature drawings are incredibly lifelike, indicative of her ability to reproduce patterns in a matter that's entirely organic. The fact that she's also an excellent cartoonist on top of a great illustrator is what makes this such an absorbing reading experience. Rather than one's eye falling off the page, the reader instead is sucked into each panel as the characters react to each other with fluid gestures and vivid expressions. All that said, this is still just a story fragment, and I eagerly await the finished product when it arrives.

Retrofit Extra: Kochalka and Alabaster/Forsyth

Today at tcj.com, I have a big feature on Retrofit Comics from the past few years. After I had finished that article, I got a couple of new entries from the publisher, so I thought I'd review those books here to supplement that article.

Elf Cat In Love, by James Kochalka. I've never been a fan of Kochalka's twee storytelling style, but I must that he's an underrated influence on contemporary cartooning and animation. This book is a mix of cute character design with dialogue that's very much in modern vernacular, which is the starting point for Adventure Time's formula. The book follows a typical fantasy quest as the titular character and his companion, a floating magic tennis ball, encounter a monstrous princess, a possessive and jealous dragon and a windy mountain. Elf Cat is cocky and conceited and denies the attraction between him and the tennis ball (who is female). The adventures are essentially a set-up for their relationship to spark, sputter and then blossom. While it's all a bit of fluff, there's no question that Kochalka's cartooning is top-notch if highly simplified. Considering that Kochalka was responsible for the infamous "Craft is the enemy" quote, his own craftsmanship is highly polished in its own way. He's very careful in the way he spots blacks, His use of negative space to divide his pages is crucial in getting his simple character designs to pop. His character designs are highly expressive and his panel-to-panel transitions are remarkably fluid. While I don't think cartoonists always take away the right lessons when drawing inspiration from his work, there's no question that his stripped-down style that emphasizes motion and emotion over everything else has considerable storytelling power.

Hellbound Lifestyle, by Kaeleigh Forsyth and Alabaster. With two dots for eyes, a tiny line for a mouth, and wavy blonde hair, artist Alabaster creates a memorable avatar for writer Forsyth's deadpan and hilarious commentary. In essence, this comic is an illustrated series of texts and notes made on a phone from Forsyth that get at a highly self-aware and self-effacing sense of ennui. As amusing as Forsyth is, Alabaster essentially one-ups the deadpan commentary with similarly understated but ridiculous drawings. In one section titled the "Self-Esteem Improvement Plan", one of the items denoted as "First find out: do I have an STD" is illustrated with Forsyth holding a hand mirror and putting one leg on the toilet. At other times, Alabaster is just there to provide a minimum of imagery, like in a series of attempts Forsyth made to learn other languages, translating sentences like "The tailor is my dealer" from German to English. It's rare that I see an artist/writer combo that works as well as this one, and that's not because Alabaster overwhelmed the text with her style. Indeed, her own comics are quite different in nature, though her raw sense of humor dovetailed perfectly with Forsyth's. The book was just under eighty pages, and I could have easily read another eighty pages of similar gags and observations and continued to enjoy it. That said, they were wise to keep the book relatively short and punchy, because the results were highly memorable.

Mini-Comics: Turbitt Power!

There's no cartoonist quite like Meghan Turbitt, as she balances self-effacing humor, frank talk about sexuality, trenchant social commentary and a furiously visceral drawing style that pummels the reader on every page. Let's take a look at her output over the last couple of years.

Imagine Caring About This. This is a succession of drawings based on inane facts about celebrities posted as tweets, ads and actual content, with each page featuring a single image. Turbitt has a photo of herself on the cover, and that juxtaposition is key, as she asks the reader why they should care about her or any bite-size bit of celebrity news. The cumulative effect is exhausting and frequently hilarious, like "Tori Spelling was hospitalized after falling onto a hibachi grill at Benihana", with Turbitt drawing her face down and skirt up.

Kim K is about a dumb guy asking Turbitt if she likes celebrity Kim Kardashian's ass, and Turbitt repeatedly says no (almost Green Eggs and Ham style) until she tears up Kardashian's photos, which magically makes her own ass grow in size (not unlike How The Grinch Stole Christmas). Turbitt's penchant for drawing the grotesque and the exaggerated makes her excess of lines a feature rather than a detriment. The distorted figures and scribbled lines all work, because her figure work is ultimately expressive and hilarious.

Conan is one of Turbitt's earlier comics, and it truly served as statement comic. She takes the suggestion that her face looks a bit like comedian Conan O'Brien and runs with it, as she imagines appearing on his show and then running through a series of highly graphic sexual positions with him, with a hilarious punchline. Only Turbitt would turn sex scenes into a sort of shaggy dog joke. Turbitt's line here is much sparer and thinner than in later years, and it lacks the visceral quality that marks her work now. It's still hilarious, and the eventual gag was well-served by her line by making it easier to parse than her more dense current style.

Teach Me How To Be A God, is another shaggy dog joke, this time involving rapper Kanye West. Visiting his "castle" the day after seeing him in concert, the comic has all the earmarks of Turbitt's current style: furious action on each page, a flurry of arms and legs in motion, exaggerated expressions, and unusual page design and a smart use of spotting blacks. The final gag, involving genitalia, is absolutely hilarious in its absurdity, but it's also a remarkably effective piece of composition. As Turbitt has matured, she manages to hide her solid fundamentals in the humorous shock value of her jokes, but it's her eye for composition and page design that make the jokes work.

Meghan Goes To McDonald's is a collaboration between Turbitt and her students. Many of these strips are hilarious, like one where a student imagines Turbitt throwing Ronald McDonald in a deep fryer, or another where McDonald is hitting on Turbitt, or another where Grimace is depicted as having huge, purple breasts. While most of the strips are crude (with the exception of one highly detailed drawing that's clearly done by someone who specializes in horror), they are bursting with the kind of unrestrained energy that marks Turbitt's own work. It's fitting that Turbitt chose a highly visible, commercial enterprise for her students to focus on, as it's precisely the kind of target she prefers to mock.

Untitled Gags 2 is as described, and there's a lot of tremendous work in here. My favorite story was "Free Samples", where Turbitt unintentionally said something that could be construed as racist to an Asian woman, and then Turbitt turns that awkward shame into a strip where the woman chops her up and turns her into dumplings. It's the details that make this strip work so well, like the drawings of the specific ingredients and methodology that went into making the dumplings. Most of the gags here are in the self-effacing mold, but Turbitt does the humor of awkwardness differently than most. A situation where a woman asked her if she was waiting for the men's or women's room ended with Turbitt sprouting a huge, erect penis that blasted through her cocktail dress. In "The Perfect Match", Turbitt eats an entire tub of chocolate frosting and weeps over her indulgence until she spots a guy on a park bench eating matches. It's a simple gag, but once again, it's Turbitt's over-the-top stylizations that make it funny: her legs contorting as she eats the frosting, her eyes bulging out after she finishes the frosting, and her exaggerated expression when she sees the match-eater. The strip where she screams at her students to be nice to each other feature those trademark zig-zag lines that indicate conflict or excitement.

RIP Meghan is another collection of gags and drawings. Here, it's evident that Turbitt was perhaps influenced by Lisa Hanawalt's early work, in that it's in turns absurd, deeply personal and frequently grotesque. The scene where Turbitt pulls out an absurdly huge breast and jumps on it to squirt milk into her coffee is a great example of that grotesque absurdity. The strip where she talks about dating someone much older than she was for eight years making her feel like an old person is remarkably self-revealing, and not just because she draws her old self with ridiculously drooping breasts. A strip where she's weeping on the floor, only to get relief when she gets a "like" on Instagram. My favorite strip came from a guy she was having sex with tell her that he read Conan and told her to call him that. In that moment astoundingly inappropriate moment, Turbitt depicts herself dying with hilarious facial contortions and coming back as a vengeful ghost. Most of these comics have short stories or story fragments, and I'd love to see a larger collection of the best of them as well as more recent work.

Mini-Comics, All New To Me: Deacon, Harmon, Lucas, Pallmall, Coyle

This group of minicomics is all interesting, and it's all by cartoonists whose work is new to me.

Coma Deep, by Brigid Deacon. Deacon's approach here is somewhere between Velvet Glove-era Dan Clowes and Charles Burns, maybe by way of Julie Doucet. Even on pages that utilize a great deal of negative space, Deacon's blacks are rich and bold, but they aren't slick in a way that makes one's eye fall off the page. Instead, there's a profoundly organic quality to her often horrific (but frequently just very strange) drawings that reminds me more of a Richard Sala. The characters are alive on the page, and that's what makes the bizarre images so affecting. The comic is about two young women trying out a bunch of strange cards and then spending the rest of the comic in and out of its bizarre vignettes. The narrative only implies this, mind you, as the reader and the girls in this story are sucked along without warning into a weird comic called She-Bitch Stinkpants, cuts open the moon with a switchblade, gets their faces rearranged by a balloon, get wrapped up in some body transformation sex, and on and on. The end reveals a reverie broken and a journey into one's subconscious ended--though it continues to loop around. Deacon's comic is an audacious one, using a larger than normal size for a mini and blasting out strange image after strange image while never losing her tether on the narrative properties of the comic. Indeed, playing with the formal properties of images and comics themselves is all part of the fun.

Peat and the Rabbits and Intergalactic Dance Party!, by Miranda Harmon. The former student at Tom Hart's Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) clearly picked up some solid storytelling skills, because this is a very fluid, exciting comic. Using a cute style and prepping the reader as to the cute premise of the comic (an adorable cyclops wizard named Peat works in a magic shop), things take a very dark turn when Peat meets a rabbit in the garden. Things go from spooky (the rabbit hypnotizes Peat into coming into their warren) to horrifying (a pile of bones reveals the rabbits' dark secret) in an entirely organic manner, as Harmon never deviates from her bright, sketchy style. The latter comic is about a satellite crashing on a planet, with the denizens of said planet recovering it, deducing its purpose and discovering that it's the Voyager, and they party listening to "Johnny B. Goode", which is one of the recordings on it. It's a clever premise that's skillfully executed. These comics feel like warm-up exercises for an artist who's ready to do more.

Colloquial, by Jesse Lucas. Starting off with "Cash and Bubs", an anthropomorphic animal story in a similar vein to the sort of thing that Simon Hanselman does, Lucas displays some very assured storytelling and a keen sense of humor. Indeed, even though this comic shares some of the stoner humor, questionable friendships and anthropomorphic character types, the tone here is different than in Hanselman's comics. First off, Lucas plays around with the form in a self-aware manner, as the bear Bubs informs his dog friend Cash that dogs don't wear pants as the latter frantically looks around for them. The big payoff for the strip comes when Cash gets so high that he and his friends start to look like humans, heightening the absurdity of the strip's building blocks. Lucas' muted use of color serves to flatten the strip further as he uses animal references for jokes (the "good sticky-icky" that Bubs the bear shares with Cash is a bottle of honey, while the police won't come out for "possum-related incidents" near a seedy park. Lucas has a strong grip on the mechanics of stoner/slacker humor and at the same time delights in sending it up. The other, shorter strips in the book have a quieter impact, including a girl turning invisible and spooking her younger brother, a horrific memory of a threatening father and a mom excitedly playing Call of Duty. Lucas' deadpan tone is his greatest asset as a humorist, driving every other aspect of his work. Playing so many aspects of his drawing in particular straight only serves to make everything else funny.

Sporgo No. 1, by Laura Pallmall. This pencil-heavy comic features two stories featuring tense, but quotidian stories. "Picaresque" is about different people finding themselves in places they didn't expect and regretting it. Pallmall's line is heavily-shaded, frequently adding a level of hatching that adds atmosphere and weight to a story that carries a great deal of emotional tension. A man is awakened in the middle of the afternoon by a friend after having a weird dream, and they discuss his current set-up. He's house-sitting for a couple he's friends with who have just gotten married--only they've opted to have a stay-home honeymoon. They chat for a while and go out for some food after the man burns his hand while cooking, and the story ends as he's awaiting a thunderstorm and giving advice to a man who's asking for help to get back to Panama. The key piece of information in the story is that the man is a musician whose band is about to go back on tour, and he's starting to doubt this way of life. That thunderstorm he's waiting for is an apt metaphor for a life waiting for something bad to happen, and the way he serves the newly-married (and now arguing) couple illustrates his desire to be around something he hopes has some solidity to it, even if its foundations are cracking.

The second story, "From Eden Hill", is about a young woman (possibly the artist herself?) who has a ghostly encounter when she believes a woman named Aidy Leem tapped her on the shoulder. When she looks her up on the internet, she learns that a woman of that name is dead and buried in the local cemetery. There are then several pages of what seem to be anticlimactic dead ends as they track down her grave. Then the protagonist realizes that her room is the only one visible from the gravesite, which leads to some mind games later on when it appears that a shadow in her room has an unnatural quality to it. Like the first story, the tone is consistently low-key and emphasizes small talk and character interaction, which makes the story's reveal all the more surprising. Pallmall's figurework is her biggest weakness at the moment, as her figures lack fluidity. Her naturalistic approach sometimes falls short as a result, with some panels looking overworked and others underdrawn (usually the figures). Still, her ability to create mood and depict malaise with an undercurrent of far more serious emotional concerns makes these stories unusual.

Western Democracy No. 1, by Noah Coyle. This is a political and sharply satirical comic that uses a variety of visual approaches in its attacks on the police state, anti-abortion exploitation and malaise. The first story takes place in an unidentified city (the only clue is that the signs are in French), as the police barge into a woman's apartment, demand to see her ID and weapon, then barge into her son's room and inanely interrogate him, asking if kids at school talk about "throwing rocks or spray-painting check-points". It's a story about the blunt, brutal and dehumanizing nature of police tactics as an extension of state terror--and it's dehumanizing for both police and citizenry, as one cop in the story had to be reminded to keep his barrel up when he went into a room. Coyle's line is naturalistic but shabby, depicting a world falling apart.

The ads in this comic are parodies of real ads from old porn mags and comics, like the old Count Dante ad being posited as whether he can "cure terrorism".The centerfold is printed on pink paper, and it's a drawing of a humiliated prisoner at Abu Ghraib, naked except for a sack tied over his head. "Abortion 2023" raises the chilling yet utterly plausible scenario where the state requires that ultrasounds of aborted fetuses be kept in perpetuity. That data was then purchased by an entrepreneur, who turned it into an online game similar to the Sims, where people could raise those aborted fetuses as virtual children. The game created its own currency, which became exchangeable for US currency, and eventually anti-abortion activists crashed that economy. The story's assumptions that unregulated greed and a lack of concern about the rights of women make this almost seem like a matter of when, not if as a potential future. The low-key final story about two gas-station attendants shooting the breeze then turns to a discussion about changing the gas-price signs and the stock market crashing in 2007--a micro approach to events on a larger scale. Coyle's line does the job, as its looseness doesn't completely fall apart, though there are times (especially when doing parodies) that he over-renders a bit too much. That said, it's clear that the rough edges that don't help his work will eventually get smoothed out as he continues to produce work, and it's both welcome and unusual for a cartoonist to do this kind of political work who isn't explicitly an editorial cartoonist or who doesn't do more didactic work.

Mini-Comics: Lautman, Whitaker, Boyce, Froh

Creation of Manson, The We Be Jammin' Tee and Grape-Nuts, by Sara Lautman (Ray Ray Books). Lautman's scribble comics can go from quotidian to grotesque on a moment's notice, often creating a jarring, unsettling reading experience. Grape-Nuts, for instance, follows three women cleaning out a garage, until a man comes out and makes mention of them eating cereal. As the trio mock him, he piles up lawn chairs and frames, sets them on fire, and walks right into them and then back out, horrifically burned. It felt like he was going to extreme lengths to prove a point or make an impact, and that final blocky, bulky figure is rendered with a great deal of detail that's unusual for Lautman. The We Be Jammin' Tee is a reflection of Lautman's absurd sense of humor, as a ratty t-shirt is rescued and given life by the T-Shirt Magic Fairy, becoming a headless and limbless torso. It's simultaneously sweet and deeply weird. Creation of Manson is along the lines of the prior comic, as it imagines Marilyn Manson's origin story in all its viscerally obscene and hilarious detail. The way Lautman varied her approach with regard to line thickness and overall rendering contributed to the story's mythological qualities. Lautman's sensibilities and approach are unlike virtually any cartoonist working today, with the possible exception of Josh Bayer--and even then, their styles seem like distant cousins.

The Weeknight Casserole Collection, by Kelly Froh. This is a collection of work done for a wide variety of anthologies, and Froh points out in an introduction that while anthologies are often uneven, they've provided her with structure and deadlines that have helped keep her productive. Froh's comics have always had a mix of the sweet and the slightly grotesque, both in terms of her drawing style and the subjects she covers. Her comics about her childhood often feature her in unflattering eyeglasses and hairstyles, and she plays those up for laughs, to be sure. At the same time, her stories about people often acting cruel have a remarkable amount of sympathy for all parties involved; the people in her stories are all human, and she has an acute understanding that everyone is capable of kindness and cruelty. "The Wrong Eric" is a good example of this, as it features Froh's disappointment that a boy she liked wasn't interested in her, but she showed a similar disinterest in a different boy further down the social food chain--which perhaps indirectly led to future bad behavior on his part. Froh is also great at drawing humor out of social awkwardness, like when she didn't realize a friend of hers was in a band that she was waiting to see, or the incredibly strange situation of her boyfriend's best friend possibly hitting on him in front of her. Froh also has a knack for writing open-ended stories that have disturbing components, like "The Rake", which is about the night terrors she has had since she was a child that involve feeling like someone is looking at her as she's asleep, someone dark and shadowy. The warm and inviting nature of Froh's narrative style and line results in a reading experience where one can see multiple sides of a story and where even unsettling experiences are depicted in a manner that's somehow less threatening--as though they were all ingredients in the same dish.

Bangs and Beard Diary, by Melinda Tracy Boyce and Aaron Whitaker. This is a sweet, clever idea: a flip-book comics diary, with a couple each doing their own separate diary of the same days. Boyce, the "Bangs" part of the couple, uses an open page format with no lines around her panels. While there is a clear differentiation between panels thanks to shading, it's her use of negative space that's key to making these comics works. When depicting time passing and panel-to-panel transitions that reflect that, she uses a lot of negative space. When each image is more discrete, there's a harder delineation between panels, with decorative markings or simple grey-scaling doing the job. Her drawing and writing style remains similar to that of Vanessa Davis, only Boyce employs a more cartoony style. Boyce shares the same overall cheeriness but is also willing to delve into troublesome emotions and situations, like her strips about body image. Whitaker's comics are denser and use a more traditional grid set-up. In part because some of the strips were done during shows where only Boyce was participating, Whitaker's strips are a bit more introspective, as he expounds on a variety of observations. The two cross over twice: once on a meaningful walk in Los Angeles and once in a tender moment spent alone at the end of a trip. The resulting collaboration of sorts paints a picture of two artists confident in their own skins who greatly benefit from the presence of the other.

Globes, by Aaron Whitaker. This comic is a sort of a second cousin to The Little Prince, as the story's protagonist starts the story atop a globe, in search of meaning and happiness in his life. The story diverges from Saint-Exupery in that the hero has his 3D printer create a son for him, one full of questions that the protagonist is not ready to answer. The story spins further as his son grows up, moves out (full of teenage energy and certainty) and then visits again with his own family. The tone of the comic ranges from absurd and cynical to sweet and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same page. Whitaker nonetheless manages to convey a real sense of what it's like to chase meaning and how one's mistakes as a parent carry over to a child begging for guidance. Whitaker heightens these conflicts, of course, and his cartoony character designs (not unlike Adventure Time creations) allow him to keep the stakes high while still keeping the overall mood of the comic light. What I liked best about this comic was Whitaker's willingness to strategically clutter every page with all sorts of detritus, charts, maps, etc. The way he pokes fun at his stand-in's quest for meaning and his overall pompousness doesn't detract from the emotional content of the comic, which is an impressive trick for Whitaker.

Mini-Comics: Pyle, Meuse, King/Vayda, Kerschbaum

Boatfire #1, by Kevin C. Pyle. When you read a comic by Pyle, one can be assured of two things: that it will be thoroughly and impeccably researched, and that it will have a powerfully argued point of view. This one is about death, and in particular its fetishization and cultural impact during certain critical periods during history. Pyle fixates on the idea of the momento mori in art, and how during the Black Plague era in Europe in the 16th century, this kind of imagery became highly prevalent. In essence, the images were reminders that in all aspects of life, death was lurking. Pyle then makes the connection between art created during the plague and how punk rose during an era in the late 70s and early 80s when nuclear annihilation was still considered a real possibility. He also connects punk to 1950s-era nuclear paranoia and how the cultural reaction in the 80s was in many ways a recapitulation of the 50s. By way of fascinating anecdote, he recounts living in Lawrence, KS, during the filming of the landmark TV movie The Day After, which depicts life after nuclear war. Pyle later posits that it was punk's very denial of death through nihilism that allowed him and many others to process the unthinkable and come out the other side. He then connects that to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, two works of art that look squarely into the void and acknowledge what it means. In an incredibly clever panel, he has a group of kids blasting out a loud song on a road trip, only it's the words to The Wasteland ("This is the way the world ends..."). By embracing the idea that the fragile structure of society might one day end, it reduces the anxiety of losing one's hold on that as the foundation of sanity. Pyle is a smart, clever cartoonist in terms of his visuals, depicting himself as an anthropomorphic vulture throughout the comic, because what better animal could there be in terms of circling around death.

Drawing Is Hard, by Adam Meuse. This talented artist from Cary is one I've always thought was deserving of wider recognition. His latest mini is the best distillation of Lynda Barry's "two questions" I've seen with regard to the creative process. The two questions are asked by the artist regarding their work: "Is this good? Does this suck?". In this mini, we see the artist in front of an empty sheet of paper as their brain pulls up a seat beside him. The design of the brain is both cute and grotesque, with eye stalks sticking out of its brain-body and tiny arms and legs. The brain used a subtle but powerfully manipulative and persuasive line of argument that would make Socrates proud, in which he tries to make the artist quit drawing. He even got the heart to come over and tell him he didn't "deserve to make anything good. You're not really a good person." Any doubt that the artist expresses as to what ideas to follow are seized upon by the brain as more reasons why he should quit. The mini ends with the brain going to bed and the heart furtively whispering encouragement. Meuse here gets at the essence of the struggle of the artist, because no one can argue themselves into being creative or feeling their art is worthwhile. While cognition is involved in making art, it's not a cognitive process per se. Instead, it's something more akin to a mystical or subconscious experience, just as experiencing art is. It requires a deliberate choice to make, but once the pen hits the paper and the tactile, visceral experience of drawing begins once again, that's when suspension of judgment (a purely cognitive process) ebbs. As Meuse hints at, the brain can manipulate emotions to trick the artist into not creating, often using the act of creation as a referendum on one's very worthiness as a human being. Meuse notes that this is only a trick, however, and when one can separate feelings from judgment, it's possible to pry oneself away from the two questions. For a simple, cute comic done with an open page format with four panels a page, there's a remarkable amount of complexity to be found here.

Next Week In New York City!, by John Kerschbaum. Kerschbaum is one of my favorite humorists, combining dense hatching with a goofy, cartoony approach to figure design. He uses satire, gross-out humor, wordplay and occasionally oblique imagery in telling his jokes, but it's fair to city that he loves jokes involving city life, and New York City in particular. This mini is a collection of four-panel strips that "predict" upcoming life in NYC, with most of the gags being specific and provincial. So there are jokes about local politicians (the Anthony Weiner joke is pretty clever), alternate side of the street parking and the cicada invasion that require some knowledge of the city, but there are also plenty of gags about social media, pollen and art--along with scatological jokes. Kerschbaum is not at his funniest when given these kinds of constrictions, but he still manages to craft some truly excellent pages, like the gag about sneakers hanging from electrical worries (a familiar image), then an umbrella hanging, then a plastic bag--and closes with a barefoot guy with an armful of groceries getting rained on. Most of the jokes in this mini aren't as good as that, though Kerschbaum compensates by hammering the reader with gags in every panel and even employing some running gags.

Left Empty Book One, by Alan King and Jamie Vayda. The King/Vayda team usually write stories about King's wild days and crazy anecdotes about sex, drugs, drinking and rock 'n roll. Vayda's dense and cartoony line combines heavy stylization (often verging on the grotesque and/or absurd) with thick hatching and cross-hatching that creates a moody but rubbery atmosphere. Usually, this is used to depict scenes of debauchery. In this comic, we follow a clearly upset man coming home and drinking til he blacks out and Th breaking down in tears. The first half of the story follows him dealing with loss and trying to self medicate, and the second half goes a bit further back in time when we learn it's the writer himself, and that his wife suddenly grew ill and died. The exaggerated and even trippy imagery that Vayda uses was put to use illustrating nightmares and emotional breakdowns, and it worked surprisingly well. Beyond a simple expression of loss, this series promises to be about the ways in which grief and even mourning are not one-time experiences, but rather are experienced over and over again--with the pain being fresh each time. Medical bills and old greeting cards are artifacts of that grief, transporting the mourning individual back to the original time and feeling of sadness that is so profound that it is somatic in nature--tremors, wracking sobs, etc.

Mini-Comics Week: Coin-Op

Peter and Maria Hoey are among the very best illustrators in comics. Using an ultra-precise, colorful style in the vein of Chris Ware, they love to use fractured panels to form visual gestalts along with the influence of an early 20th century aesthetic in much the same way that Kim Deitch does. At other points, they do a more straight-up kind of naturalistic illustration. Cities and music are two crucial touchstones in most of their work.

In addition to their anthology Coin-Op, they occasionally produce stand-alone works that have the same dimensions and are designed to look like 45 RPM records. Blacktop Mourning (They Died By Night) is a straight illustration job, bringing to life a number of musicians whose lives were ended by car crashes. They range from blues singer Bessie Smith to early rocker Eddie Cochran to Minutemen frontman D.Boon. The Hoeys include the particulars of the accident: who was driving, what the cars hit, what the weather was like, etc. in an effort to link each of the accidents and their senselessness. It's all drawn in a naturalistic, if somber and muted, style. You Don't Look Like (Anyone I Know) is a compelling narrative that transposes the flow of crowds in a city over the buildings themselves, creating an almost ghostly image as the people the unnamed narrator is following pop into view and then pop out as the narrator shifts from one direction to another. Following a final man up to the roof of a tall building, the title phrase is uttered by the man to his pursuer just as he was about to jump off the roof, implying perhaps that the pursuer was Death. The blue tones in the comic reflect that sense of melancholy. The final stand-alone, Boxed In, was written by Adam McGovern. It juxtaposes images of vacations and other activities with the reality of the stultifying nature of urban conformity, all with a fuzzy peach veneer. It's about how those that are privileged, even if it's the bland privilege of the bourgeoisie, are dissuaded from thinking of the misfortunes of the abjected.

In Coin-Op #5, the story "Au Privave" sees the Hoeys use a nine panel grid to break up the larger image on the page. Each of the panels has a blue wash, while the extended gutter space is a bright orange while featuring drawings that complete the main image. Each column of panels on the first page features a single character, and the top panels have a variety of thoughts streaming through each of their minds. On the second page, we see a character stretched out on a couch, and her dialogue spreads across the page. The story is about jazz musicians and the wife and daughter of one of them in particular thinking about their lives. The title is a play on the title of a famous Charlie Parker song as well as the fact that these are private, inner thoughts. This issue's "Saltz and Pepz" strip (a regular feature in the anthology that's a throwback to 1920s cartooning shenanigans) is done in the orange and blue that marks the rest of the book, with an overlay of zip-a-tone that adds texture and depth. That's important for the story, especially considering the silliness of its protagonists, two dog-looking creatures that walk upright and have a cartoony design.

"The Trials Of Orson Welles", written by Peter Hoey and C.P. Freund, is my favorite story in the issue. The Hoeys have always shown a fascination with classic cinema, and this story manages to blur and warp several of the great director Welles' best films. The bottom row of panels that run across each page are done in the style of an old newsreel, with a mixture of oblique commentary and explicit credits regarding which Wells character is being introduced in the story. It begins with Harry Lime and a nod to the sewer chase scene in The Third Man, who is found by the corrupt cop Hank Quindlan from Touch of Evil. They meet with the sailor Michael O'Hara from Lady From Shanghai, who takes them to the famous funhouse from that film's climax, where they are confronted by Charles Foster Kane (from Citizen Kane, of course). The final dialogue of the fortune teller quotes Touch of Evil, asking what one could say about Quindlan: "A man? They were some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?" That's a clever ending, given that the comic is an oblique commentary on Welles's use of imagery and his relationships, but in the end, it doesn't really matter what Hoey and Freund say about him.

"The Windy Parade" features a series of 4 x 3 grids, each panel of which makes up a larger image and also serves as not only a discrete image, but also serves as part of a distinctly different narrative. Panel one is about an editor dealing with his nephew's graphic novel, panel two features an arguing couple, and the middle panels feature a parade. Over the span of six pages, we get a satisfying little story from each set of panels, some of which spill over into other panels. It's whimsical but intricate storytelling at its best. I was less taken by "The Interoffice Memo", which uses the familiar trope of an office setting being transformed into something else. Here, it's an elevator leading to an island across an expanse of water and the systems admin office, and then back to the original desk. The mixture of mundane and surreal feels a bit forced.

In Coin-Op #6, "Inter-Office Memo" continues with an even more opaque approach to storytelling. Mixing together the image of the office being flooded and a worker surviving a boat on the river crashing into the shore, the clutter of the storytelling technique didn't justify the end result. On the other hand, I appreciated that this installment of Saltz and Pepz was a take on Waiting for Godot, as the two were pushing a handcar along a loop on a video cassette tape, never making progress and constantly commenting on their predicament. With canary yellow in the gutters adding a sort of muting process to the actual art, the overall flatness of the strip and its repetitive structure doubles down on its theme without wearing out its welcome.

"Une Lune Andalouse" may be the Hoey's greatest achievement: a mash-up of Luis Bunuel and Salvadore Dali's surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou and the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window. Co-written by C.P. Freund, the genius of this story is that it combines the suspense thriller elements of Rear Window and merges them with the transgressive elements of Un Chien Andalou in a manner that emphasizes the films' common element of voyeurism. Raymond Burr is replaced as the villain of the piece by Bunuel himself, as the story switches between black & white and color, depending on which film it's quoting at the time. Reprising the famous razor-to-the-eyeball scene from Un Chien Andalou and making it the central point of violence and terror for the James Stewart and Grace Kelly characters generated genuine tension, especially since surrealism at its heart aims to get at what is hidden in the subconscious and bring it to light through provocative imagery.

This issue also features an image-heavy piece that combines still images from film and shapes that are meant to represent a film projector rolling, which I thought was clever. There's also a longer piece about the director Nicholas Ray that's dense but entirely straightforward, mixing a first-person narrative from the director's point of view with all sorts of revealing anecdotes, along with snapshots and anecdotes from those that worked with him. That the panels form the shape of a film strip is yet another typically clever Hoey design choice. The issue also features what seem to be some illustration jobs, all of which get top-notch reproduction values here. What's impressive about the Hoeys' work in Coin-Op is not their obvious skill as illustrators, but rather the way they think through every piece so carefully.