Minis: Ruby Carter and Kayla E.

Ruby Carter is a young Chicago cartoonist who is primarily a humorist at this point in her career. For full disclosure, she will be doing a book for Fieldmouse Press in the near future. That future book is quite different from the full-color, psychedelic craziness of her minis Bogue and Oozemart. Bogue is a smaller mini billed as "the world's 1st fashion mag 4 bugs!", and that's precisely what it is. Carter has a great visual wit, and this Riso zine puts its colorful art to good use in depicting insects in fashionable gear. The funniest bit was "Who Wore It Best?" featuring comparisons of spiders and bees wearing pink ribbons, centipedes and dragonflies wearing pink heels, and snails and slugs wearing scarves. Oozemart is a sort of dystopian Riso zine done at larger scale (8.5 x 11), and Carter goes all-out with a colorful assault on the senses that mimics the visual assault of a big-box store. Of course, all of the food is comprised of a colorful ooze that melts away even as one is shopping. This is less a story than a concept brought to vivid (and lurid) life, as the pinks are especially nauseating. 

Ahead of the 2024 release of her book, Kayla E. continues to break brains with excerpts in the form of minicomics that are in themselves interesting objects to read and hold. Precious Rubbish: "Birds 'n Bees" (Vol 2, No. 2) is especially uncomfortable reading, as Kayla appropriates old kids' comics (here, Archie Comics and Sweetie Pie), redraws the art in her style while retaining the composition and action, and then grafts it to horrifying tales of sexual & physical abuse and incest. The bold simplicity of Kayla's line and adherence to gag format is almost unbearable to experience as a reader, as she forces the reader to engage these horrors through a structure that almost forces the reader to think of them as gags. Indeed, Kayla even labels many of these strips as "Surrogate Spouse Syndrome" gags, as both her father and brother walk around with her in a way that sexualizes her and leads others to think that she's their wife. Along the way, there are a number of fake ads that take their cue from Chris Ware's classically brutal ads in Acme Novelty Library #10, but she aims her vitriol at her abuser in things like "Hitman 4 Her." It's Kayla E's skill in making memoir that's a sort of subgenre, in that the homages use art meant for children and give it a warped new meaning that's meant to confront the reader. 

The Sickness: Uncivilized's dip into horror

The first issue of The Sickness, published by Uncivilized Books, looks and feels more like a 90s black & white Image comic than the kind of thing Uncivilized would normally do. At least at first. However, Tom Kaczynski's bunch has been slowly moving into serialized work for a while now, with Craig Thompson's Ginseng Roots, Noah Van Sciver's Maple Terrace, Tom K's own Cartoon Dialectics, and more. However, The Sickness most closely resembles a standard-size comic book, rather than a minicomic. Rather than the work of an auteur, it's done by the team of Jenna Cha, Lonnie Nadler, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Cha is the artist and co-writer, with Nadler. It feels and looks like a lot of other horror books published in that era and the early aughts; everything about it is a throwback, including having multiple covers for the first issue. Knowing Tom K, this isn't a choice made for collectors, but more of an aesthetic one. 

The Sickness follows a kid named Danny in 1945 Stillwater, MN, and then shifts a decade later to Lakewood, CO. In Stillwater, we're introduced to a teen named Danny, who's become increasingly alienated from the rest of his friends. He's seeing things, horrible things, and being around anyone just makes it worse. Cha teases us just a bit with a final panel reveal of a monstrous-looking woman and a mysterious man in the background. In Lakewood, there's a long reveal of a woman listening to records in a living room, talking to a cop, as it's slowly revealed that the woman's sister has murdered her husband, two children, and their dog. Her son survives the attack and is questioned by a psychiatrist, as he tells him that his mom kept seeing holes, said their faces had been warped, and there was someone else in the house. Going back to Danny in the future, he's seeing all of the things that were described by the killer, including a grotesquely warped version of his mother and a mysterious man in the background. 

The whole effect is quite clever, even if the extensive monologue by the psychiatrist and the dense dialogue in general suffocates the narrative a bit. The three part structure of show, don't show, then show again builds tension and slowly gives the reader a set of clues that are built upon without revealing the entire hand. Much of the horror is implied and teased, making the actual monstrous moments all the more effective. The idea of otherwise completely normal people snapping because of some pernicious outside influence is a terrifying idea, especially since the nature of this "sickness" is unclear. Given the slow pace of the issue, I'm guessing that this will go at least seven or eight issues, and that the psychiatrist will be a prominent character. The art is dense and naturalistic, with a lot of smartly-added greyscale shading to go along with hatching and crosshatching. That level of realistic detail makes the monstrous elements more effective, because it feels real to the reader. Limiting the number of those scenes is important precisely because its connection to what seems to be everyday reality is a big key to the comic's success so far. 

Short Reviews Of Short Minis: Desmond Reed, Fredo Noland, Stuart Stratu

Troubled Teen, by Desmond Reed. Reed is at his best when he gets to depict highly detailed, grotesque characters. This is a first-person narrative featuring the titular character, who is pock-marked with acne, has that distinct teen stubble, and comically exaggerated nose and ears. Reed establishes the visual stakes right away with dense hatching and cross-hatching, dragging the reader into a world that is already discomfiting. Immediately upon establishing the character, Reed takes things in a totally absurd direction, starting with "Like most folks, I was discovered in a trash can when I was a baby. I matured over a period of four weeks." It goes from there, as he spawns mini-clones through his acne that he keeps popping and then tortures his little brother, an egg-shaped head atop a torso with disturbing amounts of hair. The whole thing is disgusting in a Basil Wolverton sort of way; there's not much in the way of narrative. It's more a chance for Reed to briefly sketch an amusing, gross idea. 

Stratu's Diary Comix, August 2015, by Stuart Stratu. Stratu is an Australian artist who does crude, full-color, 12-panel diary comics. His self-caricature dominates nearly every panel, and his head dominates the rest of his body. With giant eyes, spiky bangs, a two-tooth smile and lots of exaggerated expressions, Stratu gives the reader something interesting to look at on every page, which is important when one considers the general dullness of daily anecdotes. The text-heavy panels are mostly carried by that memorable self-caricature, as Stratu does at least endeavor to deliver a gag of some kind every three panels. That keeps things moving at a fast clip, and his strong opinions about music and movies keeps things lively. A month's worth of these strips is just about the right amount; a longer collection would be difficult to read. 

Black Sheep #4 by Fred "Fredo" Noland. Fredo was one of my favorite late 90s/early aughts alternative cartoonists, and his mini sees him in fine form. Centering around a music scenester and critic named Ivan, Fredo delves into an incredibly detailed and dense slice-of-life story that sees him being harassed by a woman named Lattie in an ongoing game of "insult tag." Ivan hits the record store. He goes to a punk show, antagonizes people, has difficulty with his own Latino background, and later goes to a record party. Vinyl, of course. Every character is so well-observed and precise, the character design is absolutely top-notch, and the ending is a wonderfully surprising swerve. There's also something wonderfully and painfully familiar about all of these characters and settings; if I didn't know a lot of people like this, then I saw them from across the room. Like the best slice-of-life stories, it was a pleasure to simply hang out with these characters, and I was disappointed when the comic ended.

Minis: Alli Katz

I met Alli Katz at CAKE 2023, and she was kind enough to give me a few of her minis. Two of them focused on pregnancy and the frequently dubious joys of early motherhood. Very Funny Jokes And Some Comics That Make You Think Vol 1, as one might expect, is a grab-bag of random comics. It's hit and miss, which is not unusual for this kind of mini, but some of the hits are solid. "Live Action Carebears" has a realistically-drawn, angry bear with a Carebear symbol on its chest, and simply the concept behind this made me laugh. The execution helps the gag land. There's a good newspaper typo/awkward headline gag that works because Katz just keeps pouring on the weirdness. There's a New Yorker-style gag with the punchline of someone asking "Can you explain it in Harry Potter metaphors?" that I found hilarious considering there's a large segment of the population that seemed unable to do otherwise for quite some time. Most of the actual cartooning isn't especially memorable here, but Katz's skill and timing as a humorist are sharp. 

9 Months But Actually 10 Months But Actually Forever is about Katz's whole pregnancy odyssey, from imagining a sperm giving an egg a pick-up line to the actual birth. This comic is clearly what's in her wheelhouse as a creator: memoir told in short bursts with gag punchlines that still hew closely to the more serious aspects of the experience. Katz's self-caricature (huge glasses that hide her eyes behind blank circles) is especially effective. The comic is closest in spirit to Meghan Turbitt's comics about birth, which makes sense since Turbitt is primarily a humorist. The strips about things she's worried about reflect the way that so many birthing books exist primarily to terrify expecting mothers. There are also a lot of great strips about the way she relates to her partner, especially one strip where they talk about how they think their jokes are "really landing with the doctor." Katz doesn't veer too far away from expressing her emotions in this story in service of a gag; indeed, she leans into them as much as possible, which makes totally sincere pages like having her daughter in her arms all the more effective. 

"Just Pretend Your Boob Is A Hoagie" is all about the highs and lows of breastfeeding. This was the most interesting of the three minis, in part because it's a subject that's not always discussed much, even in the increasing number of mom comics that have been published in the last decade. Katz talks about the struggles of breastfeeding, the difficulties of pumping, the judgmental lectures from lactation consultations, and the feeling of somehow failing your child if you don't breastfeed them. Katz manages to inject a lot of humor into the proceedings, but this is a more serious attempt at coming to terms with the possibility of giving her daughter formula and the shame that this concept invites. In the end, Katz manages to mostly figure it out, and the comic ends on a wistful note when the transition comes in weaning her child. The expressiveness of her figure drawing is especially sharp here. This is promising work from a young cartoonist.

Short Reviews Of Short Minis: Storme Smith & Co; S.C.A.R.

I've recently become reunited with a bunch of minicomics meant for review that had been in storage. It's time to hit that backlog with short reviews of short minicomics. 

Nightmare And Sleepy, by Storme Smith and A. Shay Hahn. This is an ashcan/mini of a longer comic from Buño Books, which seems to be interested in doing public-domain superhero comics, among other things. The titular characters are typical Golden Age heroes that appeared in a blizzard of attempts at creating saleable new characters in the early 1940s. In this case, it's a pro wrestler (Nightmare) and his manager (Sleepy), who fight crime in between bouts in the squared circle. This story sees them fight a group of crooks who can turn into "were-armadillos." It's silly and amusing, but Hahn's art is stiff and amateurish. That somewhat mimics a lot of Golden Age comics, which were not always known as bastions of professionalism (given deadlines and the young ages of the creators), but this mini does little to intrigue.

The Heroic Few #0, by Storme Smith and Matt Lesniewski. (Colors & Letters by Dan Lee). This is a very odd comic. It is essentially the Silver Age Avengers (specifically, the "Cap's Kooky Quartet" team led by Captain America with former bad guys Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch) drawn like early 1990s Image comics. Smith really knows his way around these classic Silver Age stories, and he even makes some interesting changes and connections, like changing around the origin of the Hawkeye analog (Sharpshooter) and hooking it to a variation of the Marvel villains the Circus of Crime. Lesniewski is adept at channeling his inner Rob Liefeld in terms of the character design and the excessive number of lines on the characters. Say what you will about Liefeld's ineptness as a cartoonist, but his work had a genuinely weird energy that practically vibrated off the page, and what Lesniewski does here is pair that energy with the Jack Kirby energy of the originals. He also does a decent job of balancing Smith's extensive infodump of a script and allows the panels to breathe a bit. Smith is introducing a gaggle of new characters, and the plot device of a reporter is actually quite effective; it's just that it's a lot for a new reader to take in, even if they're in on the joke. This is a nice bit of a one-two nostalgia punch that is cleverly written.

The Fuglies, by Steve Carter and Antoinette Ryder, aka S.C.A.R. Published in 2014 by Australian outfit Pikitia Press, this is a whacked-out bit of post-apocalyptic eugenics, mutants, sex, and cannibalism. The artist-writer duo S.C.A.R. stars the proceedings with some gratuitous nudity from a young woman on the run from her best friend, but things aren't quite what they seem. While they have to deal with Fuglies,--carnivorous mutants who are the leftovers of regeneration experimentation--it's revealed that young and beautiful Rae & Gloria are also flesh-eating mutants. It's just that they look more human, are smarter, and craftier. This comic revels in its pulpy ridiculousness, as its gore and violence are depicted in a naturalistic and even heroic-looking manner. The plot takes a few surprising twists and turns that elevate it above your standard zombie/mutant storyline. The art is serviceable if a bit stiff at times; the action feels more like a poster than the fluid cartooning than it needed. 

The Beauty of Sloppiness: Julia Wertz's Museum Of Mistakes

In the original introduction that Peter Bagge wrote for the first Fart Party collection, he said of the webcomic proliferation of the early 2000's: "Some are professionally drawn, others cleverly written. Fart Party is neither...Yet both in spite of all that AND because of it, Fart Party is the best! It's very direct and funny and honest in a way that very, very few other comic strips ever are, and once you start reading Julia's strips, it's hard to stop."

As per usual, Bagge is right. Wertz breaks tons of rules with regard to what good cartooning is. The way characters relate to each other in space is awkward. The use of gesture is either underdeveloped or ham-fisted. There is frequently way too much text in a given panel. The thing is, none of that matters. This collection of Fart Party strips, unpublished strips, and assorted ephemera over the years is a document of how a young artist develops over time--not just with regard to drawing, but also their unique authorial voice. And no matter how sloppy her strips were, no matter how many typos there are (and there are many in this volume, including modern strips, and even on the title page!), none of that mattered. There is an enthusiasm and an immediacy in her drawings as Wertz shares her world with the reader, and the reader can't help but get swept along. Wertz world is an interesting place to be, and the hostess never runs out of stupid jokes, embarrassing anecdotes, hilarious stories, and glimpses of her pain. Her "definitive" Fart Party collection, Museum of Mistakes, includes the two original volumes and a great deal of additional material, including a note or two from 2020, updating her relationship and status as an expectant parent.

The one word I'd quibble with regarding Bagge's assessment of Wertz's comics is "honest." The concept of "honesty" in memoir is kind of a marketing device that allows for "authentic" voyeurism. It is meaningless. There is no such thing as "truth" in memoir, as the author's job is to tell a story, not recite every memory verbatim. And even if they did, it's only from one person's point of view. And Wertz herself noted that while all of the stories here are accurate, they are far from the complete picture of her life in her early 20s. She elides things like her lupus diagnosis, her older brother's addiction issues, her own alcoholism, and more that she hasn't been willing to share. Which is not to say that she should, but it should also be understood that memoir, like anything else, is a genre that demands something of a coherent story or well-threaded series of gags. In the parlance that Alex Hoffman coined, Wertz's autobio material is definitely "closed," meaning that Wertz only provides enough context to the reader to understand her jokes. 

Still, stuff bubbles up. Wertz writes about her tendency to isolate herself and her general social awkwardness that she masks with humor, attitude, and deflection. This give-no-fucks attitude is the essence of her humor, but it's also the core of a coping mechanism that went a few rounds too many. It's that need to keep others at arm's length that led to the extreme isolation that she touches on at the end of this book and details in Impossible People. The result was a whole lot of people who liked her, but few that she let in enough where she felt comfortable going to them. It reminds me a bit of reading John Porcellino's book The Hospital Suite, which reveals the true story behind his years of struggles with his physical and mental health that he just alluded to in the pages of King-Cat. When the artist is ready to share this different kind of story, it recontextualizes their entire body of work. For Wertz, it adds a weight to her silly comics that wasn't there initially but doesn't neutralize what people liked about them in the first place: a small, perpetually indignant malcontent who hilariously rails against the world, but one with an inherent sense of delight regarding so many things. 

While Wertz mostly lets things stand, warts and all, she does add context to a few things here and there. Mostly, she's content to let the book be what it is: funny, obnoxious, sloppy, and a portrait of a young person trying to figure things out in public. One can see not just her drawing and storytelling improve, but also her writing in general. In the chapter featuring strips for what might have been a third volume of Fart Party if Wertz hadn't chosen to do Drinking At The Movies, Wertz maintained her silliness and sense of enthusiasm, but there was clearly a different perspective as a humorist. "Perspective" is the keyword here. It's what made Drinking At The Movies and The Infinite Wait such excellent books, as Wertz had had a few years to consider the meaning of certain events in her life, unlike the immediacy of the Fart Party strips. I also think it's why it took so long for her to write (and finish) Impossible People; she needed time to process the events surrounding her initial rehab, struggles with sobriety, and the eventual lessons she learned about how reaching out to others is so crucial for one's mental health. 

In a sense, this is something she's done for a long time with the stories she's told in public, as they've clearly resonated with a number of readers. If immediacy was what made her early work stand out, it's her willingness to go all-in on providing context that makes her later (and current) comics so different from most memoirs. While there are any number of things that drive me crazy about Wertz's drawing (especially character design outside of her and a couple of other characters) and proofreading, her emphasis on storytelling and the complexity of her authorial voice make her a unique figure in the world of comics memoir. Museum Of Mistakes is a welcome document that allows the reader a chance to see how this voice gained its coherency and how talented she was as a storyteller even as she was still figuring out her style.

The Exception That Proves The Rule: Julia Wertz's Impossible People

There's a scene late in Impossible People, Julia Wertz's recovery memoir, where she meets New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. Chast reveals that she's a big fan of Wertz, because "it's not from the cartooning world. You don't follow any rules, which makes it unique and fun!" Wertz starts to follow this up about not really even knowing the rules before she's loudly interrupted by Chast's bird saying "Who cares?" This is pretty much Wertz in a nutshell. She does a lot of things as a cartoonist that I would hate from virtually anyone else, but her ability to draw you into her particular kind of storytelling is so all-consuming that I simply don't care as much. 

Impossible People is somehow both way too long and not long enough. It covers way too much ground sometimes, and the deleted scenes that Wertz has posted on her Instagram would have added the kind of rich detail found in her best book, The Infinite Wait And Other Stories. At the same time, Impossible People meanders, loses its way, picks up loose threads again, and is held together not by the fact that it's a recovery story, but rather that it gets at what is referred to as the "root" in recovery terms. Wertz bites off a lot more than she can chew in terms of the cartooning and character design, but her sheer determination and ambition to finally tell this big story somehow makes all of that less important. There are a lot of ways to think about the book, but let's start with the obvious. 

Wertz has a profound understanding that memoir is a genre like any other genre, one where the artist can manipulate any element they want to produce the story they want. "Truth" is irrelevant so long as a good story is told, yet "truth" has always proven to be an important marketing element for memoir. If something is true, it creates a voyeuristic thrill absent from fiction, and in many cases creates a window of misery porn for readers. Wertz absolutely rejects all of this, to her credit. The subtitle of the book is "A Completely Average Recovery Story," in part because every recovery narrative, no matter where rock bottom happens to be, tends to fall along certain patterns. The key to starting recovery that actually works is coming to terms with negative emotions and all the ways in which we seek to conceal them, usually by lying. Being honest is the first and hardest thing one must do in recovery, and it has to continue throughout--especially in not lying to yourself. 

Wertz uses a lot of recovery language in Impossible People and gives us glimpses of meetings, sponsorships, and accountability partners. A key character is her brother, a recovering drug addict who provides a lot of hard advice and compassion. The thing that makes Wertz a great writer--her ability to spin anything into comedy--is precisely the thing that made recovery difficult. By minimizing her own pain and attempting to laugh it off, she delayed getting to a lot of her root issues of exactly why she started drinking. Notably, Wertz doesn't go into much detail as to these events, but the truth is that it doesn't matter much what they were, so long as you're able to talk about them out loud to a therapist, sponsor, or peers. The Blue Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is mostly filled with recovery narratives. Recovery is a kind of belief system, beginning with giving yourself over to the infamous Higher Power, and so recovery narratives are really conversion narratives. 

One very smart thing that Wertz does in the book is explore the problematic aspects of recovery, beginning with the higher power, the religiosity of AA, the misogyny inherent in its origins and execution, and much more. She doesn't linger on it, as this book isn't a critique of AA in particular, but what her brother points out and what she learns is the most profound lesson of recovery: isolation is death. 

This is the heart of the book. Wertz has always painted herself as a misanthropic curmudgeon for comedic purposes, but the reality is that she's simply a shy but socially curious and empathetic person. However, worrying that your problems aren't "big" enough, feeling unworthy of love, friendship, success, etc, feeling like a burden to others and other ways we trick ourselves into isolating. For addicts, what happens is either lapsing into addiction, or worse, trying to white-knuckle sobriety. I would argue that this is uniquely exacerbated by the rugged individualist ethos of American culture. Seeking help is weakness. Buck up and stop complaining. No one wants to hear your problems. If you don't do it yourself, it's not of value. All of this is illusory, of course, whether or not people want to admit it or not. For an addict, it takes a lot of work to purge this social pressure, but the reality is that at a genetic level, humans are social animals. They need each other. They want to communicate with each other and always have--dating before even language. Our trauma is what tricks us into isolating ourselves and making ultimately ineffective choices for our coping mechanisms. Our culture encourages us to do this. Trauma isn't a contest as to who's had it worse; rather, it should be understood as something we all experience and need to reach out to others to cope with. 

As a result, Wertz presents an array of characters who are fully fleshed out in a way that she's never done in any other book. Sure, her friends and family have had supporting roles, but not to this extent and not to this degree of openness. Cartoonist friend Sarah Glidden and recovery friend Jennifer are prominently featured, with the latter particularly grounding Wertz and calling her on her shit. There's a boyfriend (Jeff) that Wertz becomes devoted to (to the detriment of her recovery), only to have him tell her he's cheating on her as he breaks up with her. The one problem with all of this is that Wertz's character design (beyond her own iconic avatar) has always felt perfunctory at best. Furthermore, Wertz's work has always had a static quality where body language, the relationships between bodies in space, gesture, and other key elements of cartooning have felt limited. It didn't matter as much when Wertz was just going for jokes, but it made things more awkward for the deeper, more interpersonal discussions that made up so much of Impossible People. The problem is that Wertz didn't seem to be able to create avatars as interesting or evocative as her own for anyone else, giving them mostly a vaguely generic cartoony naturalism that wound up not being enough of either. As drawings qua drawings, they were sometimes distracting. 

Fortunately, Wertz is well-suited to draw the other co-star of the book: the buildings of New York City. Her level of detail, care, and precision in rendering buildings stands in contrast to drawing people, but it nonetheless added so much flavor to the book. The other fortunate thing is that Wertz's talent as a writer is so prodigious that the cartooning issues melted away not just with her always-winning one-liners, but also her deeper, more interpersonal relationships. Her frank talks with her brother, her heart-to-hearts with her best friend Jen, her hard-won wisdom from her sponsor, and even the flirty banter she has are all totally absorbing and have such a strong rhythm that it holds the very loose plot together. It's less of a plot than episodic storytelling, albeit with a strong thematic throughline. That throughline and lesson of recovery is what gives Impossible People its very warm heart. The sarcastic Wertz is really someone who is quite sincere in how much she loves so many people in her life, and the lesson of the book, as it is for all of those in recovery, is learning how to practice gratitude for the loved ones in our lives. One may not feel like you deserve it, but practicing gratitude, reaching out, and being there for others just as they are there for you is the essence of all community and the key ingredient to fostering mental health. Julia Wertz explores the lessons of recovery and emphasizes that sobriety on its own is irrelevant with community, all while never deviating from everything that made her funny in the first place.