The Complete Badly-Drawn Comics, by Martha Keavney

This collection of Martha Keavney's minicomics from 1988 through 2002 (eight issues in all) represents the work of a cartoonist who was part of the Xeric/DIY generation of artists, albeit one who wasn't especially prolific. What made her Badly-Drawn Comics series unusual was its relentless commitment to its mining humor out of its titular premise. Indeed, her comic probably had more in common with humorists of the 80s like Peter Bagge than the minicomics revolution that exploded in the 90s. What's clear is that in terms of pure, conceptual comedy, Keavney has few peers in comics. Her nearest cousins are probably Michael Kupperman and Sam Henderson. Kupperman's visual aesthetic is more important than Keavney's, as he's trying to draw on a particular kind of nostalgia for things that never quite existed. However, like Keavney, he excels at taking a familiar premise and absolutely flogging it to death, creating a tension between reader and the work that plays on that familiarity and warps it through that familiarity. Like Henderson, the deliberately crude quality of the drawing (especially when Keavney actually figured out a line she was comfortable with drawing) is a key element in the humor, providing a sort of easy-to-access visual that is easy to bend in any number of conceptual directions. Keavney's interest in (and self-mockery for) self-reflexive humor that often self-consciously explains the joke to the reader (creating even more tension) is a large part of her appeal. She sees the gears in hack comedy and loves to rearrange them for the reader.

The first few issues of Badly-Drawn Comics rely heavily on the "badly drawn" aspect of things, consistently bringing attention to this and creating conceptual humor out of it. Her original characters, Nick and Nicolette, often complain about not knowing what's going on because everything is so badly drawn, they have no idea what objects are around them. A "scratch 'n sniff" comic features items like a perfume called Eau de Paper. Keavney runs through these gags quickly before she creates her greatest character: Martha Keavney. She's introduced complaining about the many rip-offs of her famous comic and how bad they are, like Poorly-Penned Portrayals, which is a failure because it's drawn too well. Then there's the "reader participation" issue, which is told from the point of view of the reader hanging out with Keavney. After a pleasant conversation, the reader gets out of hand, angers Keavney (who starts throwing things through the panel like a 3D movie), has sex with Keavney and eventually learns that Keavney is the all-powerful god of her strip. In the next issue, she shows up in one of Nick and Nicolette's stories, who want to get back at her for heaping so much abuse on them.

Keavney also plays around with the formal aspects of comics for laughs (and making fun of Understanding Comics), explaining things like flashbacks, flash-forwards, etc in literal terms. When the caption said, "One Week Later", it was an actual week in Keavney time, as she was startled by the reader's presence. There's a blobby superhero named Letratone Girl who diffuses conflict thanks to her shades of grey. The sixth issue is where Keavney's style is firmly in place and she no longer makes gags about her comics being badly drawn. "One White Chick Sittin' Around Talkin'"explores her frustration with only being able to draw herself, then introduces multiple Marthas as extra characters, then rejects that as self-indulgent after a pun-filled fight between two of the Marthas. The story then morphs into a hilarious It's A Wonderful Life parody, where the assorted "what ifs?" twist and turn on themselves in the most convoluted possible ways.

Keavney doesn't often get into more personal humor, but her strip "The Incredible Adventures Of... Self-Absorbo!" featured her narrowly avoiding having the center of attention taken away from her from a friend who tearfully told her about her cancer. Using her secret power of super-tears, the friend apologized and told her how great Martha was. One of Keavney's great skills as a writer is adopting the cadence of whatever she's trying to lampoon, and she truly nailed super-hero speak here (and in the truly disgusting Hostess Twinkies parody later in the book). Probably her two best stories are "The Mix-Up" and "The Secret Life Of Martha Keavney". The former is a parody of every romance/comedy of manners/wrong time, wrong place trope imaginable, jammed into one story. Martha gets hired by someone who only takes on people in relationships (she was single), so she hires an actor who claimed he was gay (he was not, he lived in a building whose landlord only allowed gay people) to be her boyfriend for a dinner at her boss's house. The actor was told that Martha was a nun, leading to all sorts of hilarious contrivances. The best part of the story is that after setting up the premise, Keavney claimed that a few reels of the movie were missing, leaving only the ending. How everything wound up completely different and yet perfectly happy is completely omitted, making it that much funnier.

"The Secret Life..." is a masterpiece of building on a premise and one-upping it. Martha imagines herself as an Antarctic explorer, until she's shaken out of that reverie by her boss at her job that she hates. While imagining how great it was to be an explorer, she's woken out of that reverie by a fellow homeless person in a subway tunnel, and Martha thinks about how nice it would be to have a job and an apartment. That keeps escalating until we see Martha in hell, and that escalates to a hilariously banal punchline that nonetheless works perfectly in stopping the progression of events. Simply put, there are few cartoonists with the kind of comedic chops that Keavney displayed during her active publishing period, and hopefully the new strip she has in this collection (along with a funny introduction and index) means that she'll be more prolific in the future.

Miss Lasko-Gross and Kevin Colden's The Sweetness

I've been reviewing comics by Miss Lasko-Gross and Kevin Colden from the earliest days of High-Low. However, the Z2 comics series The Sweetness represents the first time that this married couple has collaborated on a major project. Their pairing on this gonzo sci-fi heist comic is as smooth as any I've seen in comics. Lasko-Gross's demented sense of humor is a perfect match for Colden's smooth line that still delights in gore and splatter. I have only read the first four issues (there is a fifth as well), but the series is filled with wit, interesting characters, plot twists and even surprising amounts of warmth.

The story is about two pilots hired to take a spaceship to a colony world. Also aboard is Nelly, an ex-con who is the liaison between the prisoners on board the ship in cryogenic sleep and those who are going to take them at their destination. That simple enough set-up is instantly complicated by one of the pilots nervously smuggling contraband as part of an apparently high-level deal. From there, the book becomes a kind of shell game as Nelly and Scout, a hilarious, bawdy pilot, try to outwit the other, smuggling pilot, a brutal customs process, an ambush on the colony planet they land on, aliens invading their ship and radical nudists.

The complicating subplot is the nature of the contraband: it's sugar. The aliens who tried to hijack them were after it, because for them it's an intoxicant of the highest order. That accounts for the outrageous covers, featuring an attractive, cute or harmless person with their eyes censored by a line and a close-up of their horrible, decaying teeth. It doesn't have anything to do with the plot other than as a visual metaphor for the rotten character of that particular future. Of course, the reality is that sugar truly is an addictive substance that's difficult to kick; it's just that supply and demand is very different than in this book. The aliens are so desperate to either consume sugar and/or obtain large quantities to get wealthy that they would attack any vessel that so much as had a packet of sugar. The series begins with aliens so desperate to score that they break a treaty between Earth and the aliens to do so. The punchline is they didn't want to harm anyone to get the sugar, but the authorities not only killed them but also the people around them, as a sort of sterilization measure.

This ultimately is a comic about negotiating hypocrisy as a means of survival. All Nelly wants is a cut of the action, because she knows it's going to happen no matter what. It's implied that as a black ex-con, she doesn't have many other options. The Earth officials are hypocrites and corrupt, the dealers she's working with are two-faced, and only Scout proves to be a real friend and ally. Nelly is tough, competent and no-nonsense, while Scout is wild, risk-taking and a free spirit. There's a scene where she is given a substance that's an extract of an alien's saliva, and it turns her into a monstrous, naked powerhouse that joyfully and viscerally tears apart a large group of people trying to kill her and Nelly. Lasko-Gross's sense of comic timing is superb here, as Nelly is trying to make a phone call to a drug dealer while Scout is killing enemies in the most disgusting ways possible. Colden picks up on that comic timing with a fine but detailed line that captures minute details for greatest shock and comedic value. I believe this series will be collected soon, and anyone interested in off-beat science-fiction that pulls no punches will find this to be a delightful read.

Fantagraphics: Bayer & Marra's Crime Destroyer #2

Josh Bayer's All-Time Comics line published by Fantagraphics has had its ups and downs. It's walked the narrow line between satire of hyper-violent, sexist comics and a celebration of same. Crime Destroyer #2 is mostly a Benjamin Marra production, with co-scripting by Bayer. It has the usual Marra beats, only some of the inherent ridiculousness of the character (like two Black Power fists acting as epaulets on his uniform) pulls away from Marra's usual deadpan delivery. It eventually answers the question: what if Ben Marra wrote Batman?

The issue begins with the titular character barging in on a villain named P.S.Y.C.H.O., a crazy nihilist type not unlike the Joker. The story explores the way vigilantism might actually play out, as he prevents the execution of judges by shooting the villain. They are outraged that he took the law into his own hands, before he reassured them that he used rubber bullets to stun him. When Crime Destroyer takes the villain to police headquarters, the by-the-book commissioner orders the villain to be freed and CD to be arrested, saying, "The law demands not justice--but order..." Marra hits on a sensitive political topic in a blunt manner, as the "Blue Lives Matter" mantra and the unwillingness of good cops to hold bad cops accountable for their actions is precisely about order over justice. It's also the polar opposite of what usually happens to super-heroes in these kinds of stories, as they become sort of unofficial members of the police department.

Marra and Bayer go straight for the throat again and again. The P.S.Y.C.H.O. kidnaps the commissioner's adult daughter after he's freed, prompting Crime Destroyer's only ally left to call him to help rescue her. He finds the villain, dispatches his muscle and then shoots him in the back with a real bullet as he runs away. CD then finishes the job by throwing him over a ledge--or does he? There's a villainous intervention by the Big Bad of the ATC line, Raingod, leading to an ending out of an old Steranko issue of Captain America. The comic's satirical elements are in many ways in conflict with its campier aspects, a frequent problem with superhero comics in general. Marra's stiff, 80s-emulating art really does make it look like a relic from another era, especially since veteran letterer Rick Parker contributed to this issue. The overall effect is somewhere betwixt and between. It doesn't work as light entertainment, but the characters are too thin to really work on a more sophisticated satirical level. There's a lot that's interesting about this comic, but its dissonant tone makes it disposable.

Minis: Mike Freiheit

Mike Freiheit's Go Fuck Myself! series of minis are mostly humorous autobio that focuses on mental illness, his relationship, and dealing with self-loathing. It opens on a note that I've seen a few times from autobio cartoonists: an army of duplicates converging on him and beating him to a pulp, leading him to decide to get up. After that, he dramatizes all the unpleasant things happening in a day (account balance insufficient, healthcare going up, worrying about doing an unfunny strip) as being kicked or punched in the groin...with him doing the honors in the final panel, uttering the titular phrase of the comic. That pretty much sums of the tenor of the strips: absurd and self loathing, with the author inviting the audience to laugh with and at him. The tone is lighter in other strips, like when his feet start yelling at him for exercising, then run away from his body when he takes off his shoes.

There are also uncomfortable strips where Freiheit catches himself staring at a pretty woman on a bus, then castigates himself for staring, then reminds himself that he's married. It's not quite at the level of horrifying self-revelation like in Ivan Brunetti's "I Like Girls", but it's in the same category. Later on, he helps his wife out when she's having a bad day at work, faxing the cat over in a bit of inspired silliness. There are funny callbacks, like Freiheit's alter ego (an apeman) and his dinosaur friend Craig encountering a benevolent alien (only to kill and eat it) and Freiheit wondering out loud to his wife that if he had a friend named Craig, could he call him "Craigasaurus Rex"? The best thing about that strip is that he felt he needed permission from his wife for this absurd thought.

The first issue ends with a substantial short story about dealing with anxiety and depression, personified as a round shadow creature that takes over his brain and prevents good thoughts. It's not an original idea, but his execution is crisp and affecting, using deep blacks to frame the rest of the action. He takes the metaphor to a funny place as things like therapy and medication are daggers used to stab depression and force it to ebb. What I liked best was turning that martial metaphor around as Freiheit hugged the manifestation of his fears and depression in a gesture of understanding that this is part of him. The issue closes with Freiheit's apeman self yelling at him in the mirror after Freiheit reaches out to him, saying that he's needed to keep him sharp as an artist.

The second issue (subtitled: "The Fuckening") is sharper in every way. Freiheit juggles five different narratives all relating to the same theme, taking place in different time periods. The first involves him as a farmer in a village, enduring going to the church of the Sky-Beast because his wife is still into it. The second features the return of his ape-man, trying to introduce the concept of dairy to his tribe and proposing that they merge with a nearby tribe instead of fighting with them all the time. The third takes place in the modern day, where he mulls over the idea of being a farmer and wondering if he could pick up the knack of killing animals for food. The fourth thread sees Freiheit in art school, enduring a horrible critique from a teacher. The last thread is in the future, where he and his wife are wearing body suits and wondering whether or not to buy a picture with or without clouds.

He neatly segues from period to period, with themes from each period echoing into the others. There's rejection in nearly every period: the apeman is ridiculed by his tribe (who worship the Sky-Beast) as well as the other tribe (who worship a kind of turtle creature); the art student not only endures a ridiculous critique, he's later forced to go to a museum where Hitler's beautiful tapestries are on display; the farmer skips out on tithing and is followed by the rest of the village to his home with torches; the couple are unhappy with their choices. Only modern day Mike, in the most banal of circumstances, seems to be happy, as his biggest decision revolves around what kind of sandwich to make. There's a final gag that ties it all together, but there's no question that this issue is a huge step up for the artist.

The strengths of the first issue are still all there: the doubts, the self-loathing, and the character of the apeman as a go-to protagonist. He folded everything else into the stories instead of them floating around as one-offs that were occasionally on the self-indulgent side. It's also more varied on a visual level, as Freiheit carefully builds his environments in such a way to both be distinctive and flow into each other in a natural way. He also doesn't linger too long on any particular story, and the transitions feel smooth and unforced. If the first issue was a lab where Freiheit worked on some very familiar concepts, the second issue was a solid finished project that touched on all of the important themes without hammering the reader over the head with them.

Koyama Press: Jessica Campbell's XTC69

In Jessica Campbell's first book, Hot or Not?, she took on sexism and the male gaze in the art world by judging artists by their looks and overall sex appeal. It was a blunt-force object of satire, taking its premise to its limits and beyond by actually making the satire funny and a willingness to stay in character the entire time. Her new book, XTC69, is a brutal take-down of the kind of science fiction novel that's sexist to the point of misogyny. The way she drew the cover (a woman in another woman's arms, a crew member fighting a zombie, a spaceship whooshing by) was meant to evoke those sort of books from the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Heinlein in particular is a target, both his simpler books like S Is For Space and his more "mature" work like Stranger In A Strange Land.

Those books tend to be power fantasies, with the handsome, brave space captain as a stand-in for the author, who inevitably has sex with whatever female character or characters whom might be introduced. Campbell does that one better: the protagonist of the story is Captain Jessica Campbell from another planet, and the female love interest also turns out to be Jessica Campbell, frozen in a cryo-chamber on earth for seven hundred years. Captain Campbell and her crew are looking for mates to help repopulate their all-female planet. Despite all the silliness in the book, Campbell plays fair and has her trio of alien women act very seriously, and the slow reveal of the plot also reflects a carefully assembled bit of scaffolding that surrounds the commentary.

After they take earth Jessica (whom they dub JC2, since the name "Jessica Campbell" was a title won through bloody combat on her planet) with them on their search, they find the last planet that can save them: Mxpx. Along the way, Campbell subtly sets up romance between the book's Jessicas, with a detour into a gag where the captain asks JC2 about the Hadron Collider and quantum physics (getting no results) and then asks about "Harry Potter, Boy Lizard", setting up a twelve hour lecture from JC2. That's a bit of silliness, along with the food available to eat and the aliens' preferred cuisine, "glug glug", which turns out to be pizza. When they find their destination, Campbell goes back to the blunt-force object approach, as the main continent on the planet of only men is shaped like a giant penis and there is some kind of football-like object at its north pole.

When after a period of trial and error that resembled an all-male version of the film Idiocracy, they meet President Chad, who helpfully tells the reader that women long ago abandoned the planet, "because those ingrate bitches wouldn't give us nice guys a chance." They get ordered around a bit, and JC2 gets bombarded with questions like "Why aren't females funny?", "Could you smile? You have resting bitch face" and simply "Blowjob?" The commander is so enraged that she orders the planet to be destroyed, seemingly dooming her planet until a deux ex machina of sorts pops up, albeit one that's totally consistent with the plot and its clues. The two Jessicas kiss in triumph at the very end, in the way the hero usually gets the girl but all the mushy stuff is left for the very end.

Perhaps the funniest part of the book came on the acknowledgements page, where she did a strip where someone asked her if the book was "misogynist against men" (in itself a hilarious turn of phrase). Campbell replied that "A man read it and said it was fine" and that "...some of my best friends are men." That was a rhetorical extra point after the touchdown that was the rest of the book, crushing the kind of arguments men have used for justifying sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. in their own work. Campbell's critique is pointed, even as she dresses it up with gags and sci-fi tropes. For example, she makes a sharp rebuke of transphobia when she has Captain Campbell relate that on her planet, people chose their genders based on their own personal revolution, and to force someone to be a man (because of course everyone would want to lean toward being a woman), to go against their own construction of gender, would be an act of cruelty.

Visually, Campbell keeps her pages simple, with a 2 x 3 grid and a thick, expressive line. Her self-caricature (in her trademark striped shirt and bushy hair) is one of my favorite in comics. Her character design is distinctive, with the page full of asshole guys questioning her containing hilarious and various "bro" types. Campbell's comedic timing is sharp, as she uses panel beats to heighten the awkwardness of a situation, like when Jessica first appears out of the cryogenic tube. The book is also breezily paced despite the occasional info-dump, especially such instances were usually incorporated with some bit of silliness. What Campbell has achieved in this book is a delightful balance of satire, absurdity and sharply-observed witticisms. That she achieved this with a plot that makes far more sense than most science fiction stories was just icing on the cake (or if you prefer, more cheese on the glug glug).

Minis: Matthew Kelly

Goulash 1-3, by Matthew Kelly. These comics are less drawn than scrawled, befitting a loosely-connected series of anecdotes that involve children and their perspectives. In the first issue, that’s especially true in a strip where a young boy is punished for saying a “bad word” by a teacher, and then given a lecture that his parents are unfit to raise him. The strip simply ends with the boy hanging his head and saying, “Sorry, sir”. It’s a brutal encapsulation of the ways in which authority figures misuse their power in a fit of self-righteousness, without understanding or caring about the ramifications of their actions. Later, there are a series of self-portraits of someone named “Didi”, with a crude attempt at realism producing a character all clad in black; then a rainbow stick figure; then a shadowy figure in panel full of scribbles and finally a pitch-black figure in a black panel. The stark simplicity and total disinterest in any further kind of explication gets across a lot of information in a series of anecdotes that are often about trauma but also about aspirations.

The second issue is about identity and impostor syndrome. In each of the stories, it's shown that lies and fears about being called out form the make-up of the relationship. In the first, it's about two people who meet on a hiking trail, where the narrator talks about meeting every question with a lie in order to disguise their "true" self, which is implied is repulsive and hurtful. The second story is about a kid who doesn't understand anything his older brothers say, but he pretends that he does anyway. The third story is about body dysmorphia, as the main character has their head replaced as a youngster because doctors said it wasn't right. Even after getting a head transplant later in life, the character questions not just their identity but the veracity of everything. There's a sense that in each story, the root cause of this self-loathing is a fundamental disconnect between children and their parents, with the latter abandoning or failing the children in some way. 

The third issue is a recapitulation of the first two issues, with a single narrative about a kid who portrays themself as Frankenstein's monster, swinging back and forth from feeling like a monster and feeling like a kid, even as their peers reverse course and say that they're just a little kid. In so many situations like this, once the precedent has been set to negatively identify someone in a particular way, that label sticks hard. Even after the label has been proven false or otherwise contradicted, internalizing shame and self-hatred comes easily once it's been implanted, and attempts to uproot it are met with suspicion. The second story is about the self: what is it to be oneself, or not oneself? What does it mean to try on different personas, and how real are these masks? Using scrawled text, sharp images and collage, Kelly gets at the impossibility of this question, just as most of the issues he broaches have no solutions. Kelly's rawness empowers the emotional quality of these comics; if anything, Kelly needs to learn how to simplify and pare things down even more in order to deliver his message. 

Uncivilized Books: Tim Sievert's The Clandestinauts

Uncivilized Books has never been afraid to publish unconventional genre comics, especially in the realm of fantasy. Tim Sievert’s book The Clandestinauts combines high fantasy with grit and guts; it’s like seeing how the sausage of a fantasy quest is made. The book’s promotional materials make a number of references to Dungeons and Dragons, and the narrative has the twists and turns of an especially sadistic game master and players expertly and accurately acting on the chaotic and evil natures of their characters. The reader is thrown into the narrative in media res, so the book starts with a battle rather than the boring stuff of how the party was hired, etc. Characterization is doled out in the middle of and after fights, which are exceptionally gory—on the level of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit series.

The reader is given a roster of characters and a brief description, and there’s the usual group of fighters, wizards, fighter-wizards, a humanoid slug-creature and even a fighting construct. In this world, becoming a warlock means forming a pact with a demon, entailing one’s eventual doom. The narrative itself is quite simple: the titular group is on a quest to steal a chalice from a powerful wizard and bring it back for a huge reward. Of course, nothing is ever quite that easy, as one member dies and is sent to hell right away. One of the members of the party is a bandaged warlock named Ganglion the Grim, and he’s the kind of wild card that has his own agenda.

What makes this book entertaining is the sheer unpredictability of its twists and turns, as well as a modern-day sensibility in terms of its humor. Indeed, the book reads like a gorier version of Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar’s Dungeon series, as there’s a level of self-awareness at play here in the way genre customs are being warped, but never so much that it breaks the fourth wall. Indeed, this world has its own unpleasant logic and rules, which the characters react to and defy as much as they can. Like Dungeon, the art is cartoony in terms of its character design but otherwise naturalistic, in order to truly capture the visceral quality of its violence and putrid environments. It also asks an important question: if a party has characters who are at each other’s throats, then why do they stay together? If they answer is “money”, then what happens when their reward shrivels up? Sievert plays that scenario fairly as the group falls apart at the end. Speaking of which, while there is a conclusion to this story, it feels like Sievert could easily write a number of sequels. There are any number of dangling plot threads that could be picked up again, and in this way it feels like it’s an adventure that’s part of a greater overall campaign. Readers looking for comics that are inspired by D&D’s nastier elements should seek this out, but this book isn’t aimed at a general audience.