Trondheim & Sfar's Dungeon: The Early Years

Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's Dungeon (or Donjon, in the original French) is my favorite comics series of all time. It's a giant, sprawling epic that's both a love letter to and a send-up of fantasy spectacles. It spoofs overly convoluted world-building and plots while establishing its own deep lore. The essence of the story is this: there is a dungeon, run by its Keeper, that actively encourages adventurers to attempt to take its treasures. Of course, it's full of horrible monsters and traps designed to murder any party, which means the keeper takes all of their treasure as well. All of its characters are anthropomorphic animals, which makes sense since Trondheim drew most of the early series, and that is his style. 

The main title, nicknamed "Zenith," shows the dungeon at its height and introduces an idiot duck named Herbert trying to get a job in the dungeon. He befriends the Keeper's top man, a dragon named Marvin, and accidentally acquires a sword that demands he go on a quest. It's funny but also satisfying as a solid piece of genre fiction. The conceit is that Dungeon would run for a hundred volumes, but Zenith only had 10 volumes.

Trondheim & Sfar didn't want to do a conventional narrative. They wanted to play with the story in fun ways, asking the question, "Hey, how does it all wind up?" So they zoomed ahead to volume 101, starting a series of stories called "Twilight." Years later, we see what became of Herbert, Marvin, and many others, and it's a surprisingly grim story, still leavened by lots of slapstick. If that wasn't enough, they zoomed back in time to volume -99, called "The Early Years," which introduces us to the keeper in his youth. (There are also Antipodes + and -, which go way further into the future and past, but those haven't been translated into English yet.) 

NBM had originally published these in small digest format, which hurt the reproduction of the art, which was originally published in France in the oversized album format. NBM finally reprinted them again at the right size and published all of the Early Years stories. The six original French albums have been published in two editions: The Early Years Vol 1-2: The Night Shirt, and The Early Years Vol 3: Without A Sound. Overall, these volumes are a great improvement over the previous editions. There are still some quirks; there are lettering errors in the translation, for example. It's still exciting to see so many volumes of Dungeon translated into English, though NBM's recent shift to mostly doing biographies would seem to indicate there won't be any more forthcoming. 

There is a consistent character arc in the series that is reflected by the protagonist of each of the main series. The hero initially is highly naive and idealistic, but they are eventually worn down by their experiences and become corrupted and cynical. This happens to the Keeper, aka Hyacinth de Cavallere, and it happens to Herbert (and it's shocking when it does). Marvin the Red, the hero of "Twilight," is certainly naive at the beginning, but as the world literally falls apart, his narrative goes in the opposite direction: from a wannabe hard-boiled killer to a family man. 

"The Early Years" focuses on Hyacinth's journey from pampered son of a warlord to cold-blooded assassin. Both Early Years and Twilight depict an old order crumbling before the eyes of the protagonists, and the stories are that of adaptation and finding a new steady-state. In "The Early Years," the old world of knights, warlords, and chivalry came to an end, symbolized by the fall of the capital city Antipolis. It's the seat of all knowledge and law, but it's being undone by its own corruption, greed, and squalor. The first three volumes (-99, -98, and -97) detail Hyacinth becoming a sort of bumbling vigilante named "The Night Shirt," who fights for justice in the corrupt city. His undoing is falling in love with a snake-woman assassin named Alexandra. 

The narrative then jumps ahead to volumes -84, -83, and -82. Hyacinth is rich and powerful, and secretly the head of the assassin's guild, but he is in mourning because his lover Alexandra has murdered his sweet wife. His own greed helps settle the city's destruction, and he's forced to flee to his family castle. By the end of the last volume, he's assembled the crew that would make up the foundation of his dungeon, including a five-year-old Marvin the Dragon. Christophe Blain drew the first four volumes, and he was an outstanding choice as someone who has done so many action epics. Working within the Dungeon style, Christophe Gaultier brings a darker, grittier quality to the story than the others, but it's fitting for how nasty his chapter was. Stephane Oiry's chapter is brighter and clearer, which was also befitting a more optimistic story. Selecting the right artists for the job showed that Trondheim & Sfar were smart editors in addition to being great artists. "The Early Years" might be my favorite entries in the whole Dungeon saga, as they are satisfying in how they create the character narrative as well as having tons of fun lore-related easter eggs for fans of the rest of the series. 

Whit Taylor's Fizzle #4 & #5

There's only one more issue of Whit Taylor's series Fizzle to go after the fourth and fifth issues, and the fourth issue turns inward while the fifth issue has competing flashbacks and forward movement. The story revolves around Claire, an adrift twentysomething living in Los Angeles who's in an orbit of mutual aimlessness with her rich stoner boyfriend Andy. She works in a yuppie, high-end tea shop whose owner, Poppy, is obsessed with image and hyper-focused on her extremely niche interest. Claire develops an interest in creating gourmet popsicles with unusual fruit flavors, and the only person who really takes it seriously is Andy's grandfather Dick. Dick gives her a citrus taxonomy book to encourage her. 

What the reader doesn't know at this point is exactly how Claire wound up in this position. She had alluded to a shitty family and being estranged from her family, but that doesn't quite explain how she wound up in LA after being raised in New Jersey. It was also unclear what drew her to Andy in the first place. Taylor spends a lot of time answering both of these questions in these issues and fleshes out an unusual character narrative in Claire. What do you do with a character who has no motivations other than trying to figure out exactly what it is she wants? Taylor essentially presents Claire as a character whose motivations are defined by negative space. That is, Claire may not know what she wants, but she quickly realizes what situations she doesn't want.

The fourth issue goes into an extended flashback where her father forgets to pick her up from school, and young Claire has to walk to her mother's place. She takes comfort in television, and the sort of shows with romantic angles in particular. In the present day, she's increasingly frustrated with her slacker "musician" boyfriend, who sneers when Claire tells him that her mother is getting remarried. Claire is so angry that she takes up her work crush Jaime on his offer to hang out.

The fifth issue flashes between her first extended date with Andy and her platonic day out with Jaime. Here, Taylor reveals why she was drawn to Andy: he represented a total sense of freedom from responsibility that she had clearly craved. Living in a family marked by conflict and with a father who barely acknowledged her existence, pushed her to want to be with someone who wanted her exactly as she was. What the series suggests is that she had been drifting in a fantasy world, trapped in a warm cocoon where she wanted for nothing because of her rich boyfriend but was also not encouraged or acknowledged as having any meaningful sense of agency. Meeting Jaime, a witty and ambitious man who clearly valued her passions and found ways to encourage them, was clearly an unprecedented event that led her to start doubting everything about her life. Doubting, but not quite yet acting on these doubts. I'll be curious to see what happens in the final issue. 

Taylor sells everything with outstanding character work. Claire's facial expressions tell the story in ways her dialogue doesn't; the barely suppressed rage expressed as harsh facial angles, the brief moments of eyes-closed bliss, copious amounts of side-eye, and furrowed-brow anxiety. Andy's slovenly character design resembles someone whose own sense of inertia is highly cultivated; he's never known actual poverty or discomfort, and it shows. Poppy's hair and glasses instantly give the reader an instant sense of how self-serious she is, yet also totally contemptuous of anyone outside of her "influencer" sphere. The extra fun stuff is the fantasy segments where Claire imagines someone being on a dating show where the central woman is dating anthropomorphic versions of the planets. Taylor just cuts loose visually during those segments, as she plays to her strengths with regard to keeping things focused on characters but also displays a confident visual ambition that's a new element of her work. 

Jason's Death In Trieste

Jason's latest collection of short stories, Death In Trieste, once again finds the cartoonist doing deep-dive riffs into art history, pop culture, and pulp fiction. The result is something of a mixed bag. His work is always a pleasure to look at, as the smooth pen strokes and precise lettering, combined with his trademark, stripped-down, anthropomorphic character design, provide unwavering fun. As always, his sense of humor is deadpan mixed with slapstick, and he usually manages to mix in the essence of what he's riffing on into the jokes themselves.

For example, take the first story, "The Magritte Affair." The plot is an absurd detective farce as there's a surrealist crime wave of break-ins where men wearing bowler hats and masks install perfect duplicates of René Magritte paintings for some sinister purpose. They are opposed by the intrepid investigator duo of Mira Bell and Bob Delon, who look into a rash of mysteriously disappearing artists and more Miro-related crimes. Along the way, Jason does a deep dive into Miro's actual career as an artist, which includes a stint as a counterfeit painter. Like many Surrealists (of which Miro was a tangential member, at best), Miro's work was about the uncanny juxtaposition, designed to provoke a deeply emotional reaction. Surrealist work stems from and is aimed at the subconscious. Jason rolled with this concept as the mastermind behind the crimes used hypnosis and other techniques to brainwash his minions into obeying him by breaking them of their rational wills. It's a clever idea that sets up a conflict, like all action stories, that is settled with a fistfight (and a big fish). 

The titular story takes Jason's mash-up formula and gives it a tremendous sense of depth. It centers around the Dada movement in Berlin in the 1920s, but it also involves Rasputin (and his decapitated head, in particular), Nosferatu, David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, and a cameo from the seemingly immortal Athos, the Musketeer who has appeared in a number of Jason's books. Bowie gets mixed up with some Dada guys doing a routine with one of their members angrily "denouncing" the nonsense poetry of someone on stage, and getting into a fistfight. Bowie, in full Ziggy Stardust garb, is clearly a time-traveling secret agent of some kind, but he stays in Berlin for a bit and has a romance with Dietrich. Nosferatu's head is used in an arcane ceremony that predicts the Holocaust, and ghosts from the future haunt the man who invoked these images. There is a real sense of despair & joy, uncertainty & possibility, that is palpable on the page and emblematic of Berlin between the wars. There is enormous clarity in Jason's figure drawing here; they are still in his style, but also unmistakably capture the essence of the historical figures he evokes. It's a balance of assuming the reader knows something about these figures with just enough historical context to make it enormously satisfying. 

This is why the third story, "Sweet Dreams," doesn't work. The conceit is amusing--what if a bunch of 80s New Wave bands had super powers and were secretly government operatives?--but there's no resonance. Here, Jason had to actively identify that some of his characters were members of X-Ray Specs and the Eurhythmics, because it wasn't immediately clear. This felt more like a Grant Morrison comic than a typical Jason comic, in part because Jason doesn't go into any depth as to why any of these musicians were important or interesting. His anthropomorphic style worked against him as well; it took me awhile (and some context clues) to identify Boy George, for example. There's a fine line between a personal in-joke and a niche but inherently funny concept. Jason made this work the first two times in Death In Trieste, but returning to that well not only wasn't funny, it also made the apocalyptic ending fall flat. 

Casey Nowak's Duh! Ha-Ha!

So I recently found my copy of this perfect little minicomic, Duh! Ha-Ha!, that Casey Nowak did some years ago. This was back when Carta Monir was still running Diskette Press. It's a brief reminder that Nowak is one of the best working cartoonists in the world, even if their output has greatly slowed in recent years. (On my docket is their compilation of short work, Boy Chest; they're also working on a much longer project titled Bodyseed.) Duh! Ha-Ha! uses a clever idea: the narrative is from the point of view of an entirely reactive, clueless character. She busses tables at a restaurant, has the hots for the elderly owner of the place, and winds up as the girlfriend of his son. She looks like she's still a teenager, barely out of high school. 

As is often the case with one of Nowak's comments, the important parts are often what is implied, but not directly stated. This first-person narrative never even bothers to reveal the character's first name. The cover is exquisitely grotesque, as she's in a restaurant uniform, popping a pimple, and sports an impossibly round face. In a later scene, she's at a group dinner, presumably with other members of the restaurant (as the owner, Rick, is paying for it), and she starts talking to someone she doesn't know--a guy roughly her age. She starts chatting him up because Rick is perturbed seeing her talk to him, and she's playing out a fantasy in her mind where she likes the idea of making him jealos.

When it finally dawns on her that he looks like Rick, ("How come you have the same face?") he laughingly tells her that he's his dad ("Like--sorry, but duh! Ha-ha!"). Nowak is a master at contrasts--after this horny meet-cute, her own narrative clashes with the actual events. It's implied that she's in a fairly low state a lot of the time, but that his presence helps in ways she doesn't quite understand. She doesn't quite understand a lot about what's going on around her, but in her narrative, she tries to simplify things as much as possible in order to not dwell on the depths of her own depression. In the way she tells this story, it's a quick blur of events and people, and how exactly some of them are connected is unclear. Nowak crafts an emotional (not narrative) chronology for this character, and it's powerfully resonant, sad, and funny. 

Kayla E.'s Precious Rubbish

There's a lot to take in with Kayla E.'s stunning long-form debut, Precious Rubbish. When I interviewed her recently, she noted that the name and the logo were the first things she created when she decided to write about the horrific events of her childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, mother, and brother. The title alone reflects the use of contradictory images to convey a contextualization of her life. While the most common understanding of the word "rubbish" is simply garbage, the verb and adjective forms of the word connote "worthless." And yet, Kayla E., from the very beginning, declares that she is precious (valuable) even as she is told she is worthless. The verbal abuse and extreme objectification of her at every level was the foundation for not only every other form of abuse she endured, but the lifelong, desperate need for feeling love and acceptance from these figures--especially her mother. 

Kayla E. took a lateral approach in attempting to portray a monstrous level of trauma. Art Spiegelman mediated the monstrous, enormous scope of not only the Holocaust, but the difficulty of dealing with his father by using cat and mouse masks in Maus. Kayla E. goes a step further and mediates the entirety of her experience visually by using the layouts from children's comics like Archie, Little Lulu, and other comics from old publishers such as Harvey and Farrell. Her story required a level of extreme stylization in order to counter the extremity of her past. The sexual abuse at the hands of her brother, the neglect and sexualization (and implied sexual abuse) imposed on her by her father, and the parasitic manipulation of affection of her mother matched with her neglect and deprivation, was just too big to convey in a direct, chronological narrative. Not only that, but Kayla E. reports huge black-outs ending certain memories, which is almost certainly her toddler brain trying to protect her from some of the worst of the actual trauma.

There's also the consideration of the reader and exactly what kind of story she's trying to tell. Things are told episodically, partly through the structure of these older stories, but also by alluding to trauma at first without detailing it. Eventually, every incident she can remember, every feeling of horror and helplessness, is expounded upon. Kayla E. still often uses multiple textual storytelling tracks in these stories, with direct quotes from philosophy & psychology texts as well as Alcoholics Anonymous' Big Book. Even after specific details are revealed, Kayla E. goes back to masking them when referred to later. Part of this was the way she drew the book--in fragments, over time--but part of it was unveiling something monstrous and then throwing a sheet back over it. It's a process that's reiterated throughout the book. 

So what is this book, exactly? What is its function? What is its intent? One thing it's not is "trauma porn," the sort of naturalistic memoir that emphasizes the gory details from a marginalized person for a largely mainstream and privileged audience. The episodic quality of the book, with only the very last piece of the book feeling like it's a definitive statement, feels almost ritualistic in nature. Being raised in a Pentecostal church by her mother, complete with speaking in tongues, exorcisms (for both her and her mother), and other "gifts of the holy spirit," is a key component of the book. Speaking in tongues (aka glossolalia) is not an unusual "gift," but a less frequent one in the church is the gift of interpretation. This is where someone feels God or the Holy Spirit speaking through them, interpreting the glossolalia that they hear. 

Precious Rubbish is Kayla E. using a variation of this "gift" to create her own prayer or spell. The witch imagery throughout the book is positive (even if Charley the Witch and Petra the nun initially try to "help" her by pushing her toward becoming an alcoholic), and it's part of the fusion (with Christianity) that Kayla E. has mentioned making up her current belief system. This prayer/spell is one designed for healing, but it's also a way of trapping something horrible. There's a line in the book where Kayla is told that after her grandmother died, it was like some evil spirit descended on her mother, making her much worse. Similar to the way David Small had to face up to the fact that his mother never loved him in his comic Stitches, so too is the last story of Precious Rubbish a series of affirmations that Kayla E. is telling herself in order to rewire the emotionally manipulative programming she had been subject to her entire life. If you can rewire your brain, you can change your own reality. 

The irony of mediating your trauma through cartoonish images is that it is easier for readers to connect with this narrative and their own trauma than with a more naturalistic depiction. She does other things to mediate the experience in the form of pin-ups, fake ads, and recipes. This intersitial material draws its inspiration both from the pin-ups one might see in a Betty & Veronica comic and from Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Company #10, which is full of acidly written fake ads. The recipes are vegan and are a way of Kayla E. to connect to her Mexican heritage, from which she often feels estranged. More than anything, they are a space for relief: the joy of redefining how you want to look, the vituperative pleasure one feels in landing direct hits on those who wronged you, and reclaiming aspects of oneself that had been denied. It also gives the reader something else to look at, and it's another way of recontextualizing these comics stories that she found comforting as a kid that's not entirely trauma-oriented. Precious Rubbish is a curse lifted, pervasive evil excised and isolated, and an entire life recontextualized in order to create her own sense of order, purpose, and self-worth. As painful a read as it frequently is, it's also ultimately a gift to herself and her readers. 

Keiler Roberts' Preparing To Bite

Keiler Roberts' first book with Drawn & Quarterly was My Begging Chart. For a while, it seemed like it would be her last original book for them. She did a collection of her Koyama Press work called The Joy Of Quitting and a collaboration with her brother Lee Sensenbrenner called Creepy that bore little resemblance to her other work (which may well be why she did it). Then she quit comics, with part of her next book completed but with no desire to finish it. Until now, with her new book Preparing To Bite. 

She offers little in terms of explanation, except saying "I'm sick of feeling exposed" to her friend, the cartoonist Karl Stevens. Sometimes, an artist simply gets burned out, and that goes double for career memoirists. I'm pleased to report that her new work is just as good as her old work, maintaining the same sharp punchlines and gags disguised as quotidian memoir. Or when asked about the book, Roberts said "It's more of the same --vignettes of meaningless experiences." 

This is sort of true, but Roberts sneaks in a lot of genuinely powerful emotional moments into this book, frequently bolstered by her use of gesture and body language. Long-time readers of Roberts know that she is dealing with bipolar disorder and multiple sclerosis, both of which contribute to the fatigue, headaches, etc that she sometimes illustrates in her free-flowing vignettes. However, she has always resolutely resisted the kind of reductive narratives that focusing on either of these conditions would entail. Beyond Roberts' withering one-liners and bone-dry sense of humor, the beating heart of her work has always been her relationship with her kid. Indeed, Roberts' first mini-comics series was Powdered Milk, and it focused directly on being a new mother. As the series of comics progressed, Roberts' kid Finn became her foil, saying the sort of hilarious things that a toddler might utter. 

As Finn grew older, you could see Roberts subtly phasing them out of her comics, tightwalking that narrow divide as Finn grew older and needed to be accorded more privacy but was not old enough to advocate for their inclusion one way or another. Preparing To Bite restores Finn as Roberts' foil, but their roles are different. There was always the depiction of loving mutual aggravation, but Finn is now depicted as a full and formidable equal while the love between them is also depicted as deepening on a profound level. More than anything, there is a sense of being seen and understood.

In a previous book, there is an out-of-context image of Roberts sitting on her kitchen floor and crying. In Preparing To Bite, there's another out-of-context image of Roberts crying standing on the stairs, but this time Finn is holding and comforting her. Throughout the book, Finn offers up funny and sometimes pointed rejoinders to Roberts' own withering sarcasm. But if you look carefully at what Roberts is actually drawing, they are snuggling together, holding hands on walks, and otherwise displaying an unwavering closeness. Roberts as a character doesn't talk much about her fatigue and day-to-day struggles, but the way she depicts herself is a portrait of fatigue, even as she withdraws from teaching and other activities that slowly became too much to deal with. The subtlety of Roberts' work is on display throughout; a strip where her husband Scott asks "Am I going to bother you if I'm in here?" is met with "You bother me wherever you are." However, as Roberts is laying in bed, there's a huge grin on her face, as she can't quite keep a straight face with that wisecrack.

The lack of a specific narrative or direction in Roberts' work and its focus on humor on the surface has always added a layer of distance. However, an observant reader can see the increasing vulnerability in Roberts' cartooning over time. Perhaps this is why she had to withdraw for a bit. Regardless, there's a new equilibrium and steady-state in her work that hasn't abandoned what made her work so compelling. It's only deepened it.

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More than anything, there is a sense of being seen and understood.