High Silliness: Teen Boat!

When Dave Roman and John Green's first Teen Boat mini popped up at SPX a decade ago, it created a minor sensation, one that built a few years later when it won an Ignatz award for Best Debut. The reason why it became so popular is encapsulated in its ridiculous tagline: "The Angst of Being a Teen/The Thrill of Being a Boat!" That statement doesn't make any sense, which is fine since Roman and Green aren't concerned with making their narrative coherent or logical. Instead, each chapter sends up various aspects of culture aimed at teens with the central conceit of the book: that its titular protagonist can transform into a small yacht whenever he wants. The comics parody both Archie-style high school silliness along with John Hughes movie angst, as Teen Boat (yes, this is his actual name) has a female best friend who pines away for him while he's hot after the school sexpot, exchange student Nina Pinta Santa Maria.  Yep, the jokes are that direct and silly and Roman and Green are entirely unapologetic about the silliness.

The tone is actually akin go Nickelodeon cartoon: slightly edgy, aware of pop culture without delving too deeply into it, extremely silly and devoted to its own high concepts in a way that is over the top but internally consistent.  The Nickelodeon connection makes sense give that Roman was an editor at Nickelodeon Magazine and Green has worked for them. The first couple of stories find TB trying to fit in with the cool crowd by attending a party as a party boat for the school jock, only to find that they wanted him out over international waters so they could gamble.  Naturally, pirates show up, but TB's best friend may have saved the day thanks to her secret ability to transform into an iceberg. In another issues, he goes to Venice (with the school yachting club) and falls in love with a sentient gondola. He goes undercover to bust a boat-stealing ring.  He gets in a car accident and winds up having the ability to turn into a boat and its trailer, which still controlling a car. You get the idea; Roman and Green tackle each concept with gusto, throwing out wave after wave of jokes at the reader. 

The color makes this an attractive package, though I honestly thought the original minicomics were more effective than the book. The book feels a little overdone for such a slim premise, even if the book is careful not to let the colors dominate in a garish fashion. Considering the book's target audience (ages 12 and up), the use of color does make sense.  Not every joke lands, and some of the book's more obvious targets are groaners, but the concept of Teen Boat is so surprisingly sturdy and pleasant that it invites a lot of good will from its readers. It's best read in short chunks given the repetitive nature of the concept, but it will likely be a treasured book for a number of children who enjoys its mild satirization of teenage life and silly adventures.

Sequart Reprints:: The Three Paradoxes

This review was originally written in 2007 at sequart.com
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I don't want to say that The Three Paradoxes is the culmination of Paul Hornschemeier's career to date, because that implies an end to a process that's still ongoing. However, it does manage to combine a number of the visual, intellectual & emotional concerns that have always informed his work. Hornschemeier has always relentlessly pushed the formal edge in creating comics. A lot of his early work wasn't quite formal experimentation for its own sake, but it was obvious that he was as curious about how comics could look as he was about what they could express. I always liked his crazier experimental work, because it revealed a playfulness that was absent from his more straightforward narratives, which were relentlessly downbeat more often than not. What's most exciting is that he has clearly moved beyond his influences in this book; the lessons have been absorbed and the result is something new and startling.

Hornschemeier is often compared to Chris Ware for his inventive use of color, cartooning chops and choice of emotional tone for his narratives. Many of his stories have focused on lonely or alienated characters suffering through the banality of existence, or else emotionally crippled characters trying to come to terms with unspeakable tragedy. To combat maudlin tendencies from creeping into the proceedings, Hornschemeier's style was remarkably restrained in those stories and his work seemed even curiously drained of emotion.

Upon closer inspection, I've thought that the similarities to Ware were mostly on the surface and that his more profound influence was Dan Clowes. He did an interview with Clowes back when Hornschemeier's Sequential went through a one-issue broadsheet phase, and it was obvious that Hornschemeier drew inspiration from the way Clowes used flatness of affect as a device to create distance between the reader and the material. The Three Paradoxes seems to be influenced in terms of direction by Clowes' masterpiece Ice Haven in that it weaves interconnected narrative styles simultaneously, it uses color as a crucial tool to get across emotional tone & as a way to offer narrative clues; and that it also uses an intentionally dated and/or childlike style at times to offer narrative (as well as temporal) clues. Where Hornschemeier differs most from Clowes is that all of these devices are used to bolster both the story's emotional & philosophical concerns in a fairly direct, though subtle, manner.

In particular, Hornschemier is interested in a crucial ontological question: the idea of personal change. Can the self ever really change, or are we just trapped in a set of repeating loops that create the illusion of growth? The narrative clues that he uses are quite clever. The "Paul" character is drawing (in blue pencil) a strip about a boy afraid of the world and is constantly changing and revising the nature of the boy's apprehension. The struggle he has creating something as an artist is reflected in his blue-pencilled tot and his difficulties dealing with monsters. When Hornschemeier recalls an incident where he gets beaten up partially as a result of his own exaggerations (but also partially as a result of his father's reluctance to interfere), he uses a cartoony style with a 4-color palette along the lines of a standard "little kids" strip. That style also gets used for an extended daydream about a man he meets with a scar, and an account of Zeno's paradoxes. For "real life", Hornschemeier uses his standard muted palette, standing out in sharp relief compared to the more lurid colors of the stories that surround it.

The story is simple: he's visiting his parents in Ohio and walks with his father to his office in order to turn off his lights. Meanwhile, he's thinking about a woman from Germany that he's about to meet for the first time when he returns to Chicago. Throughout the story, Paul freezes up. The anxiety and excitement of this potential meeting and the possible changes it might bring cause him to freeze up at the drawing board and in front of the man with the scar. The narrative goes from stream of consciousness from Paul's perspective (when we see Paul's strip or he imagines his past in the form of a comic) to an outsider's view of what Paul is doing with his father. It's an extremely clever way of presenting an interior monologue while avoiding the tedium that often accompanies such a technique.

The climax of the story is Hornschemeier's comic-book version of Zeno's paradoxes. Essentially, Zeno postulates that movement is impossible because when we reach the halfway point of a destination, we have to continually go halfway over and over again in asymptotic fashion, never reaching our destination. He further notes that motion is illusory because we can't accurately describe a particular point in time as an arrow moves in its flight. The paradox is clever because it uses rationality's tools to hoist it by its own petard--concepts of divisions in time and measurement are man-made, but their ultimate conclusions are contradicted by the evidence of our senses.

Hornschemeier adds a beautifully tragic element to this story that's told with a huge dose of smartass (another element present in a lot of his short stories that didn't always make it to his long-form work) thanks to a young Socrates. That element is another philosopher telling Zeno that his theory is clever, but the real reason he postulated it is that he wanted to pretend that time didn't exist so that Zeno's much-older lover would cease to age...but they both knew that wasn't going to happen. Hornschemeier ends the story with a gag that's made all the funnier by the pall cast by this realization.

Of course, the natural response to this from Zeno's point of view is that ultimately, death is an illusion. The implications of this are that existence in general is an illusion, a paralyzing thought that was the basis of Descartes' exploration of the mind/body split. Zeno didn't reply in the comic, because we know that if he continued to defend the paradox, it would be a denial of his love. This causes the greatest paralysis of all: how to deal with human relationships.

At the book's core, the story is about relationships and their complexity. There's Hornschemeier's relationship between himself and his character, which is of course really the struggle between an artist and his medium. The fear of paralysis is obvious here; can there be real change and growth for an artist, or is there only the illusion of growth? The next key relationship is between Paul and his father. This was the element that I loved most about the book. There's that midwestern lack of affect that his father evinces, but it's clear that there's an enormous amount of affection between the two. At the same time, there are unresolved tensions that lurk between them as well, forever destined to be unspoken.

Then there's Paul's relationship with the man in the convenience store with a scar on his neck. That jarring detail pushed Paul out of a place where he could even attempt to interact with him and compelled him to compose a long story in his head about the man as a boy and how he got the scar. The story is ripe with detail and meaning, yet the fact that it remains entirely in Paul's head as he can't even talk to the man in real life is the best example of the kind of paralysis described by Zeno. The gulf between the two of them was short (both temporally and physically) yet was impossible to cross.

The relationship between Paul and his friends in the past is also important. The contrast in the cartoony, friendly style and the unpleasantness of the encounter was obviously a device that served to distance himself from the painfulness of the memory. That story addresses another gulf that seemed attainable, that of fitting in with a crowd. Finally, there's Paul relationship with the woman from Germany, with whom he's only communicated via letters. It's the one relationship that we don't actually see played out in the story, but it plays with the book's themes of distance and attainability. It is fitting that Paul is so excited about a relationship that has a built-in distance, and apprehensive that the physical distance is about to disappear. When talking to her on the phone, Paul draws himself as the blue-pencil boy--another sign that he's not quite ready to connect. The lingering question remains: will he be able to overcome the paralysis of the Zeno's paradoxes and bridge the gulf between all humans, or are all relationships doomed to be simultaneously near and far? Hornschemeier leaves this question to the reader to answer, but it's obvious that while there's no clear resolution, he's determined to keep trying to bridge the gap. Whether or not he succeeds (both in establishing relationships and growing as an artist) is less important than the effort, because paralysis is commensurate with death.

Graphic Medicine: Disrepute and DNR

The Welsh physician who uses the nom de plume of Thom Ferrier created the term "graphic medicine" to refer to comics about the practice of and participation in the field of medicine. The equivalent of a general practitioner in the US, his comics detail the daily life of a family doctor who has to see every kind of ailment imaginable, as well as his own mental state in performing these sorts of duties. The cartoonist "Mister V" is a former medical transporter (ie, a gurney and wheelchair pusher) at a hospital in Denver who's at the lowest end of the totem pole in patient care, yet his keen eye allowed him to document what it was like to live in a perpetual state of crisis in a health care setting. Both artists emphasize the raw, naked truth of stress on the job, dealing with difficult and flat-out insane patients, and living with life and death. Both artists create a narrative of sorts through a series of short vignettes. Neither artist is a remarkable draftsman, yet they both get their point across.  Let's take a closer look at Ferrier's book Disrepute first.

One of the most striking images in Disrepute is a photo of Ferrier with the phrase "I am a shit doctor" scrawled on top of it. It gets at the heart of Ferrier's overall project: humanizing the medical profession and getting the kind of mental illness that can haunt healthcare providers out in the open. Ferrier goes on to discuss his being a "sensitive" child who fainted at the sight of blood and how he overcame it as a surgeon. A recurring feature throughout the book are profiles of his "regular attenders": the patients who see him the most. He admits, for example, that he holds antipathy toward one patient because he reminds him of a man who stole one of his girlfriends, while at the same time admitting that patients who are extra nice to him certainly doesn't hurt in how he interacts with them. Another strip finds Ferrier about to give an apparently drug-seeking patient what for when he finds him on his schedule, when the patient just came by to give him a bottle of liquor as a thank-you for helping him feel better. Ferrier is candid and every bit as hard on himself as he is on others.

Ferrier also spends a lot of time talking about mental health. In a fictional story, his stand-in was obviously shattered to hear that one of his patients had committed suicide after the doctor disclosed his own battles with depression and finding life meaningless.  Ferrier was also saddened in real life when another patient never returned after Ferrier declined to talk about his own experiences with depression. A GP having to deal with mental illness on a regular basis must be astonishingly difficult, especially when there's often so little that they can do about it. In terms of the art, Ferrier is at his best when he's cartoony and lets his pages breathe a bit. His more realistic strips feel cluttered and choppy as he frantically tries to cram as many panels and as much information on the page as possible. On the other hand, his looser, scribbly and airier pieces have a much better flow as comics without losing any of their impact. Ferrier's work is important because so little has been written in comics from a provider's perspective, years after a wave of illness-specific comics done from the point of view of the patient. Ferrier is still getting his legs under him as a cartoonist, but both his draftsmanship and his storytelling chops have evolved as he's continued to write his stories.

From the opposite end of the medical world's pecking order comes "Mister V" and DNR. This is a funny, profane, gross and cynical look at the experience of being a patient transporter in a busy hospital. The job is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: taking patients via gurney or wheelchair from their hospital room or spot in the ER to someplace else (usually for a radiological study like a CT scan). Of course, this doesn't account for mentally unstable patients, patients who are too big to push easily or lift, puking patients, patients soiling themselves (sometimes intentionally), weird patients hitting on him, etc. Though the book is broken up into vignettes and jumps back and forth in time a bit, Mister V creates a narrative centered around the unrequited crush he has on a CT tech named Kim. Being around her is about the only thing he likes about his job and is one of the reasons he elects to keep it, even as it starts to interfere with college.

The potential romantic narrative is probably the least interesting thing about the book, even if it gives all of this craziness structure. That said, the bitterly unhappy ending to that story was interesting and certainly informed the tone of the rest of the book. Where Mister V does his best work is when he does an incendiary profile on one of his co-workers. The story of one CT tech he calls the "Enemaster" for her proclivity for giving unnecessary barium enemas was funny enough, but pairing her with her arch-enemy, an abusive nurse, was even funnier when the nurse was forced to get an emergency CT. Mister V's stories about his own nemesis, a fellow transporter named Rodney, were also some of the funniest stuff in the book, in part because Rodney's laziness always got the best of "Matt's" (his stand-in's name) conscientiousness. Mister V's art is all manic scrawl, with every character possessing huge, cartoony eyes. It's a perfect match for the subject matter even if it is a little wearying to look at for nearly 300 pages. What's interesting is that despite the cynicism of the author, it's clear that moments when his actions might have saved a patient's life or possibly contributed to the death of a patient clearly shook him up. It's the adrenaline rush of a life-or-death situation without the training or hands-on approach with which the adrenaline can dissipate; instead, there was just the body-shaking experience of being so close to a tough situation. The same thing went for patients in the hospital whom he struck up friendships with who either died or managed to bounce back. Mister V was in a very interesting experience because many patients strike up such friendships because transporters are the most approachable of all health care professionals, providing a service that goes far beyond their job description. I'll be curious to see the next two volumes of this series, as Mister V movies into other jobs at the hospital.

Funny Aminals Volume 3: Hush

Of the few CCS-related anthologies that have published more than one volume, Jeff Lok and Bryan Stone's Funny Aminals has been the most uneven in terms of production values and content. The third volume, subtitled Hush, is easily the tightest and best-looking edition to date. In part, I think that's because the editors chose from a wider pool of CCS-related artists, including a number of current and recent students. It's a substantial book at 64 pages yet doesn't outstay its welcome, with only a few pieces that might have been omitted. There was a sense that the contributors for the most part tried to bring their "A" material to the table, rather than hurriedly submit something, which is not an unusual occurrence for unpaid, self-published anthologies.

The book takes as inspiration funny animal comic books, a source that gives the artists a lot of latitude as to what kind of stories they chose to tell. Some tell stories in the original spirit of the comics that were once as commonplace as super-hero comics are today, while others take their cue from the underground comics that subverted these tropes. A good example of the latter is Matt Aucoin, whose "Floplins and Fuzzwumps", while silly and scatological, is superbly drawn and paced. This is probably the single best piece I've ever seen from him in terms of both storytelling and draftsmanship. G.P. Bonesteel similarly ups his game with his one-page strip "Chalk", which brings a silly premise to life with lively figure drawing of two lizard creatures. The anthology wisely leads off with Denis St. John's "The Devil's Magic", a hilarious and elegant story about a sinister-seeming anthropomorphic goat magician whose actual magic may be mundane, but still enormously impressive to his audience. It's a great-looking story with a strong undercurrent of humor throughout.

Other strong pieces included Andy Burkholder's "ZZZZZZZZ", a surreal piece filled with sharp and angular imagery; the joyfully loose "Bedtime for Boozy" by Colleen Frakes; Stone's delightful forest farce "One Year"; Jeremiah Piersol's ant vs anteater battle "Ant defEaters" (featuring his thick line deployed in a cartoony manner); Lok's bulbous figures and absurd horror in "Sal's" (the image of a sentient, bouncing pig's head is a hard one to shake); Donna Almendrala's silly Eastwood-as-chimp story "The Good, The Bad and the Chimpanzee" and the inimitable Dane Martin with "The Wise Old Bird's Paranoid Ballet". In his ratty, frantic, claustrophobic style, Martin once again tells a story of someone yearning desperately with the prospect of something wonderful at the end of his journey, only to find a bullet for his troubles. I'm excited that he's doing a series with Chuck Forsman's Oily Comics, because this is an artist whose work needs to be more widely seen. His presence is precisely the sort of change of pace that makes for a good anthology, and while many of the comics in Hush can be described as lightweight, there's a strong level of craft and care at work here that makes it worth a look.

Short Reviews: Cathy Hannah, Stan Yan, Graphic Classics, Sam Henderson, Kyle Baker, Sara Varon, Colleen Frakes

Ambrose Bierce was a friend of Mark Twain's, with whom he held a similar worldview. They were both satirists and cynics, continually pricking the overinflated balloon of modernist thinking. If anything, Bierce's work was much darker than Twain's and certainly more vicious. Unlike Twain, he's no longer very well known; he may be most famous for simply disappearing without a trace after he left the United States for Mexico. In adapting his work for comics in this second edition for the Graphic Classics line, editor Tom Pomplun used perhaps his most varied set of approaches. Much of Bierce's material is difficult to adapt, so Pomplun was careful not to stretch the boundaries of Bierce's work too far.

Instead, he let the prose speak for itself whenever possible, and then let the artists interpret Bierce's writing as they saw fit. This was certainly true of the most spectacular success in the book: the adaptation of twenty of "Bierce's Fables" by a dizzying array of artists including Shary Flenniken, Mark Dancey, P.S. Mueller, Roger Langridge (who was born to illustrate Bierce), and Johnny Ryan. Ryan's gross-out humor was a perfect match for a fable about a dog rueing his age and ablity to frighten others but taking some solace in the fact that he was still able to frighten others with his smell. Ryan cleverly turns the dog into a fetid version of Snoopy.

"The Devil's Dictionary", perhaps Bierce's most famous work, was mostly just excerpted without illustration. Steve Cerio's few bizarre illustrations suited the work well (sample: "Bait: A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty." His genre work feels a bit tame and predictable today, though it must have baffled audiences of the time. "The Damned Thing", about an invisible creature and the paranoia it inspired, presaged some of Lovecraft's work. "Moxon's Master", about a robotics experiment gone wrong, is one of the best-looking stories in the book. Stan Shaw's scribbly-yet-elegant line serves the darkness of this story well, but it's not difficult to predict what's coming.

On the other hand, Bierce's stories about the horror of everyday life are still quite effective. The nasty first-person story, "The Hypnotist", is well served by the grotesque illustrations of Michael Slack; however, it's not really a comics adaptation per se. "Oil of Dog" and "Curried Cow", illustrated by Annie Owens and Milton Knight, respectively, are true comics adaptations. The former is a delightfully warped story of a young boy who accidentally encourages his parents to become murderers in order to produce the best possible oil feels Swiftian in its inspiration.

The latter story is drawn in Knight's typically exaggerated style and well exemplifies Bierce's dark sense of humor. The story's longest adaptation is "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter", which Bierce himself adapted from other sources. It feels like Bierce all the way, given his cynicism toward religion and hatred of hypocrisy. Still, the way the story slowly twists around reader expectations is remarkable, with the grey-washed art of Carlo Vergera a nice match for Bierce's prose. There are a number of interesting creative flourishes, like the stained-glass fantasy of the monk

I think one reason why this collection works so well is that Bierce's prose, while vivid, had a spareness to it that lends itself to comics adaptation. Compare that to Lovecraft's prose, which overwhelms the reader with its weight and power. Translating that has proven to be a much trickier proposition. Given that Oscar Wilde is up as the next Graphic Classics volume, I'll be curious to see how the preciseness of his prose is translated.

*****

MAGIC WHISTLE #11, by Sam Henderson. Sam Henderson has few peers when it comes to conceptual humor. His ability to make jokes about boners, bathroom graffiti and eating cat food and turn them into a sort of metacommentary on humor itself never ceases to amaze me. He's somehow able to dissect the corpse of a joke, explain it to us in some skewed fashion, and then make the original joke ten times funnier. Henderson seems to simultaneously feel the urge to feed his audience non-stop gags while stopping to think about each one--the way they're constructed, how they affect an audience and how to stay original. The strip about Henderson drawing "X-Treme Jesus" for a Christmas card and the way his audience reacted to his cartoon is a perfect example of this sort of exercise.

Henderson is at his best with his longer stories. "The Groucho Duck" is a masterpiece of subverting expectations in panel after panel. When one character's attempt at pulling a gag is met with total obliviousness by his target, the way the first character breaks down and starts screaming "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" is funnier than the expected gags in the story. "Monroe Simmons' Blog of Revenge" is all about the humor of unexpected escalation by way of satirizing blog culture. There's a density to this strip that's made all the more satisfying by Henderson's deliberately simple line. Indeed, this 96-page comic feels absolutely jam-packed, requiring multiple readings to absorb every gag. Henderson remains in the top of rank of humorists working in comics today.

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HOW TO DRAW STUPID, by Kyle Baker. Baker is a mainstream artist in the broadest possible sense of the word, aiming books at every possible audience imaginable. He is first and foremost a humorist, and his early work relied most heavily on verbal, situational and character gags. The character interplay in WHY I HATE SATURN is deliciously acidic, while THE COWBOY WALLY SHOW is delightfully absurd (though raw in comparison to later works). After several years in animation and a number of advances in computer technology, Baker altered his style and went to a much more visual style of humor. In the relentless YOU ARE HERE, Baker promises either a chase scene, a fight or a pretty girl on every page--and he delivers, and offers up the laughs as well. His KING DAVID adaptation continued to employ his slicker animation style that was still stripped down to tell a classic story.

More recently, he's attacked on many fronts: an absurd war comic (SPECIAL FORCES), a moody history of the slave riot leader Nat Turner; illustrating the political satire BIRTH OF A NATION and pumping out several volumes of gag cartoons. The latter seems to have been the biggest hit, especially his autobiographical gag strips about his own family. Baker seems like the last artist in the world who would do something autobiographical, yet there's something remarkably general in the specific gags he throws out--particularly in the way he uses exaggerated character design.

His newest book, HOW TO DRAW STUPID is less an instructional manual than it is a manifesto. It's certainly not a text in the manner of DRAWING WORDS AND WRITING PICTURES. There's a smattering of practical advice that's filtered through his very particular philosophy on cartooning. This book is really an interesting companion piece of sorts to Linda Barry's WHAT IT IS. Both books dip heavily into the artist's own experiences, and both provide extremely simple but effective methods to get started. Both artists arrive at the same path by different means: just draw. Baker's book doesn't discuss aesthetics or the origins of creativity the way Barry's does. He just wants to tell you why he's successful, and just importantly, why and how he has fun as an artist.

The key thrust of the book is Baker conveying that intent is the key to success as an artist and that anyone can do it. Figure out what you want to do, use the visuals to tell the story first, simplify and exaggerate character design based on how you want the audience to react to them. Baker rejects preciousness about one's work and encourages artists to take feedback; after all, it's just a cartoon and you can make more. It's important to note that he emphasizes the audience over everything else, which is antithetical to what many cartoonists do and is even a bit crass at times. However, his emphasis on creating material that will appeal to a broad spectrum can lead to some important and useful work habits, and I can admire the way that Baker sublimates the need to be an "artist" into being an entertainer. HOW TO DRAW STUPID certainly never fails to entertain, as Baker can't help but crack wise on every single page as well as provide many examples of his own work that he then breaks down carefully. This book is a must for any Kyle Baker fan and recommended for artists starting out in humor work. It doesn't really have much to do with the literary wing of comics, more or less by design, but there are other books that address that. Someone's got to tell the people how to make 'em laugh.

**
WINTER BEARD, by Cathy Hannah. This odd little comic won a Xeric grant back in 2005. I first read it a couple of years ago and didn't know quite what to make of it. At first glance, this autobiographical work is pretty much a direct rip-off of the Jeffrey Brown style of episodic memoir. Like many of Brown's imitators (Liz Prince probably being the most prominent), it at first appears to be much more lightweight than Brown's work. Brown has the rare knack of injecting quotidian moments with enormous emotional weight. He is also constantly deflating himself as the protagonist but never makes the mistake of portraying himself as a martyr. In this vein, Hannah uses a similar episodic style (though it's roughly in chronological order) to tell a bunch of cute anecdotes relating to her and her best friend. On the surface, it's almost self-consciously and nauseatingly cute.

A deeper look reveals a level of meta-awareness that informs every page, and she finds it important to inform the reader of her own awareness. The book's hook is that she is in love with her best friend but isn't brave enough to tell him face-to-face, but rather would eventually do it by way of a comic. Hannah turns the notion of a passive diary comic on its head by making the recording of her thoughts part of the story itself. Even as she's creating the strip, she reveals (to her friends, never to an imagined reader in first person) her doubts. She's afraid people will think she's ripping off Brown. She becomes uncertain if this is a good idea. She becomes unsure of her feelings about him. She becomes unsure of her own feelings, period, and implies that this whole exercise was a passive-aggressive way of safely sabotaging herself. She wonders if she even wants a relationship; instead, it's clear that she's addicted to the feeling of falling in love. It's one-sided and almost narcissistic, yet she can't help herself. The project has taken on a life of its own.

The ending, where the depths of her own passive-aggressiveness become fully revealed, does not find her getting her man. Instead, he reads the book, is charmed by it, but notes that Hannah is moving away. In a sense, Hannah was exactly right in knowing that there never would have been a relationship, just this deep friendship with lurking possibilities. The idea of the relationship, coupled with the reality of their everyday friendship, was better than slogging through the messiness of such a relationship. Hannah would rather that random people think she's his girlfriend than actually make a move. A pleasant stasis is the order of the day for two people who are obviously very wounded in their own way, and it's suggested that ultimately this isn't such a bad thing. The end of the story, while not gleeful, certainly portrays a sort of bittersweet understanding.

If one is topare Hannah's comics to Brown, I'd say it's a "clean" version of his sort of story. Brown's relationships get messy, while the story of Hannah's crush is entirely "clean" and theoretical. That "clean" nature is matched perfectly by Hannah's artistic decisions. She employs a clear, simple style that maximizes simply-apprehended facial expressions and bodily gestures. For someone wearing their heart on their sleeve, it's a perfect style and Hannah is quite skilled in it. The thick blacks she uses in character outlines give each figure a bit of weight and gravity, pointing the reader's eye to what they really need to pay attention to.

**
THE WANG: THE BIG ONE, by Stan Yan. I reviewed the second volume of this series a couple of years back. THE BIG ONE was the first volume of the saga of the Goodman Beaver/Candide-esque Eugene Wang, and while the situations were slightly different, the humiliations were similar. THE BIG ONE lays out the territory that he would carve out more successfully later, especially in terms of his comic timing. Still, the series of gags relating to his mother and (soon to be ex-) girlfriend were cringe-inducing and direct hits.
Yan's work can best be described as "grotesque", in every sense of the word. His figures are exaggerated and elongated, composed of all sorts of jutting and deliberately ill-fitting angles. Hair sticks out at odd angles, giving his characters a vaguely crazed, asymmetrical appearance. His stories are also grotesque in terms of their settings, and one can tell Yan takes a special pleasure in brutally satirizing cold-call stockbroker culture. He saves extra venom for "Milestone", a letter-perfect satire of the sort of cultish "personal growth and transformation" groups that were especially common in the 90s. Having Wang as a sort of hapless, passive protagonist allows Yan to satirize these institutions without having to preach against them. Wang is bewildered by everything in his life and about the only thing he knows how to do well is run away.

Yan's art is at his best when he shows confidence in his character design and doesn't over-render, as when he introduces us to a panel of lunatics in the Milestone group. In earlier portions of the book, he sometimes uses too much black or makes his line too heavy, which chokes the life out of his gags and reduces the clarity of each page. One can see this becoming less of a problem for him in his later work, because clearer composition allows the reader to apprehend the gag quicker. Any time spent trying to interpret a panel or page kills the timing of jokes, and that's lethal for what Yan is trying to do. Yan's not an innovator, but he's a worthy artist to carry on a tradition of the grotesque in comics.
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DAD!, by Scott King. This "documentary graphic novel" is an interesting experiment that doesn't quite work but also has a lot going for it. The story documents the weeks King spent with his seriously ill father before he left to go to graduate school and the guilt he felt in making that decision. He filmed and photographed his family and himself, then changed the effects on the photos to create what looks like highly detailed line drawings. In essence, it's a variation on fumetti, only much warmer thanks to the way King processed and filtered the images.

What works best about the book is its rawness. King doesn't hide the stew of emotions he feels regarding his father and the rest of his family. He resents that his father wasn't really there for him in the way he was for other members of his family. He resents the way his father doesn't act in the best interests of his own health, as when he gorges himself on food only to quickly get sick. At the same time, King doesn't present himself in the most flattering of lights either. He makes himself out to be a martyr more often than not, he is often combative and also deliberately irritating to his sister. The rawness of those feelings combined with King deliberately clearing the reader's palate with descriptions of quotidian tasks like how to make coffee or cook an omelet are the most emotionally powerful moments in the book.

The main problem with the book is that it doesn't quite hold up as either a book-length documentary, or a nuanced examination of family relationships. The reason is that King tells us up front that this project isn't about his father or family per se, but rather as a way of dealing with his own feelings of guilt. That lack of ambiguity pervades every page, leading to a great deal of repetition of ideas and themes without really teasing them out further. The long text sections on the specifics of his father's history of illness are an especially tough slog and seem unnecessary for the purposes of the narrative

The book works best when it focuses on dialogue; the scene where King's father has an argument with his daughter, who won't let him bring his coffee into her car, spoke volumes about the dynamics of the family in a way that obviated King's own narrative. Indeed, King's long narrative text section almost seemed redundant; as a reader, we already know this is told from his point of view and his reconstruction of events. Despite the book's problems, this is, intermittently, a compelling read. This feels like an overambitious first project by a young creator, but I admire both King's ambition and the way he tackled such an intensely personal issue.

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Sara Varon's ROBOT DREAMS is a simple, wordless tale about starting and then betraying the bonds of friendship, but it's also about how those bonds tend to linger on, years later. I've been following Sara Varon's work for quite some time. She specializes in cute, anthropomorphic animals engaged in the minutiae of day to day life. Varon's thrust has always been that these moments are what makes life worthwhile. While her comics have always been cute and pleasant to read, there's never been quite enough "there" there (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker) for me. ROBOT DREAMS adds a bit more meat to what she typically does, while still staying squarely within her comfort zone.

The story is simple: a dog sends away for a build-it-yourself robot companion. With Dog's new best friend, they watch movies, eat popcorn and generally bring happiness to each other's lives. One day, they go to the beach and Robot gets in the water with Dog. When they lay out in the sun, Robot finds he can't move--and Dog, not knowing what to do, abandons him. Most of the rest of the book has Dog trying to find new friends to take the place of Robot, while dealing with his guilt over leaving his friend in the lurch. Robot is still quite alive on the beach, if immobile, and spends his time daydreaming about Dog rescuing him, then others rescuing him and being reunited with Dog, then being freed and seeing that Dog has a new robot friend, etc. These daydreams are the most affecting part of the book; they're funny and desperately sad at the same time.

For Dog's part, he attempts to help his friend after his first act of cowardice, but is thwarted: the beach is closed for the winter when he goes back there with repair equipment, and when he goes back again the next summer, someone had picked Robot up and sold him to a junkyard. Poor Robot gets his leg ripped off, snowed on and turned into spare parts. Meanwhile, Dog tries to connect with others, but suffers a fitting fate--his new friends (a family of ducks, a snowman) wind up leaving him. Eventually, Robot is salvaged and becomes a sort of walking radio companion for a raccoon, while Dog finally decides to get another robot. The ending is quite sweet--Robot sees Dog and his new friend out of his window. Instead of reacting with anger, he instead turns on a nice song on his radio, which Dog hears (not seeing Robot) and starts whistling as he walks down the street.

This book is charming, lovely to look at, whimsical and wistful. I'd also say that both its ambitions and its rewards are on a small scale. Despite the simplicity of the linework, there's almost a slickness to her use of color and design that makes this feel more like a typical children's book than a comic. These surface qualities made it difficult for me to fully engage this book on an emotional level; I could see what Varon was doing and the emotions she was portraying, but it all felt a few layers too removed for me to really feel for these characters. That said, I can easily see this becoming some ten-year-old's favorite book. As a children's book, the clearly outlined feelings and gags in this book work perfectly. At such a level, the languid pace allows the characters to amble on pleasantly, albeit with a sad, haunted undertone. As a reader, I think it just comes down to a sense of personal aesthetics. Varon's visual style doesn't draw me in, intellectually or emotionally, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating her skill, design sense and storytelling ability.

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Back in December, I did a review of the career-to-date output of several artists from the Center for Cartoon Studies. I found the work of Colleen Frakes to be quite intriguing, and I wanted to follow up that review with a quick look at the revised version of TRAGIC RELIEF #1. Frakes won a Xeric grant in 2007, and the revised edition was just recently released.

Frakes redrew and slightly altered this tale of a fisherman seemingly doomed to live a life of romances derailed by the (accidentally?) homicidal impulses of his mother. The original book ends rather ambiguously, as the fisherman is comforted by his new love after his mother died. This version is much more suggestive about the whys and hows of his mother's death, and the ending has been altered to something with a lot more punch. After the fisherman has found his romances with a mermaid, a genie and a harpy end in tragedy (though the deaths had a strong element of black humor), he finds that the woman he ends up with isn't precisely the happy ending he was hoping for. Indeed, he winds up with a woman very much like dear old mom, in the creepiest of ways.

The redrawn version of this comic has a much thicker, bolder line. This really helps the drawings pop off the page more dramatically. Frakes' sense of composition and design were already excellent, but this handsomely-packaged and printed version simply added clarity and polish to what was an already strong bit of storytelling. Working without the use of dialogue or any words at all, Frakes' ability to clearly get across the emotional narrative of this work is aided by the playfulness of her line. The darkness of the humor is complemented by the loose, joyful nature of her line, making the book's nasty punchlines all the more effective. This is a very strong first published work, and it was interesting to be able to compare her first crack at this story with the revised edition. Unlike some well-designed comics, the format here enhanced the format but didn't eclipse or overwhelm it. I hope that she's able to collect material for future editions.

Taking a Voyage with Rio Aubry Taylor

There's no question that Rio Aubry Taylor is the trippiest of the CCS cartoonists, and his most recent work certainly proves it. It's not so much that he's intentionally going for psychedelia in his art, but rather that comics for him serve as a sort of healing and creative ritual. The simple act of drawing serves as a magical and therapeutic act, and not only for himself but for others as well. That's the point of his brief mini Werefore Teach Comics?, which is a love letter to his teachers at CCS. In thanking comics enthusiasts like Alec Longstreth for his role in his education, he refers to him as a wizard who gave him a magic wand in the form of a pencil. For Taylor, this is only a metaphor in the thinnest of senses, because drawing for him boosts imagination, improves communication and provides an antidote to attention deficit-disorder. Taylor's total immersion in drawing not only as a vocation but as a total way of life reminds me a bit of Theo Ellsworth's approach, though Taylor doesn't have the same degree of control over his line at this point.

There's no question Taylor's dedication or productivity, however. His "abstract comics" zine, Tabe, was collected in an attractive package after ten issues. Each issue is brief--essentially two sheets of 8.5" x 11" paper--but is intriguing. Some issues are purely visual, drifting to Aztec imagery, shadowy beasts or shape-changing robots that also look a bit like Aztecs. A couple of issues are folded in such a way as to make the reader unfold and transform them into comics-delivery systems. Some issues rely more on text, like his thoughts on Carlos Castaneda and his influence on him or an "interview" wherein Taylor talks about wanting his comics to help others remain in the present (a goal of many cognitive behavioral therapy systems, interestingly enough). Other comics focus on the ways he thinks about the ways in which he perceives darkness within himself and how it impacts others, and how he hopes to deal with it. Other issues are invocations of love. Every issue is at least interesting to look at, as his imagination and line is totally unfettered without the standard structure of a comics page. Indeed, his art is much more fluid on these pages than in his more typical narratives, which are still a bit stiff.

Taylor combats that stiffness in the pages of his one-man anthology, Jetty, by writing stories that defy normal narrative conventions. In "King", for example, a child is taken from a car crash by giant bug-like aliens and winds up dominating them with the expected emotional maturity of a three-year-old. "Outer Space" and "Reincarnated Solvent Abuse" both use white on black images of squid-like creature in space. The wordless first story seems to be an imagination piece that posits that the connections we see between stars are in fact sentient creature. The latter story is a retelling of the story of Moses, except that instead of a burning bush, Yahweh happens to be a bug-eyed space creature. The second issue starts with a cyberpunk story with a character who looks not unlike Uncle Duke from Doonesbury trying to gain a piece of crucial knowledge by entering cyberspace, only to fall prey to a sentient virus and fall prey to the "dark internet". The latter story is about a Taylor stand-in who gets in a car accident with his sister, with both having their souls plucked by the Grim Reaper. Both of these stories are as over-the-top as they sound but both utterly heartfelt, with no happy ending in either case. The protagonists are laid low with no warning and no opportunity to even say goodbye. The first story is slickly illustrated while the latter is quite crude, with the stiffest character work in the batch. Taylor explains in the issue's notes that these stories were a way of purging something within him, another indication that art clearly acts as a kind of therapy for him. That's quite apparent in the last story of #1, "I Left You A Note", which sees the main character slowly disappear, reappear and then say "it's for good this time" before disappearing again. This is obviously about suicide, and is Taylor's way of exploring what it means to not exist. Taylor is very much the working definition of an artist who's in the process of discovering his own voice. These short works aren't false starts, but rather stepping stones for an artist who has the potential to do some very exciting work.

More From CCS: Jeremiah Piersol and Jeff Lok

One thing I've noticed about Jeremiah Piersol's work is that he likes to work big. I'm not sure if that's the influence of Gilbert Hernandez and the original format of Love & Rockets or something he stumbled on organically, but there's no question that he likes to have his figures fill up a big page. What's interesting is that the single work that seems to have had the biggest impact on Piersol is not Palomar or Poison River, but rather Love & Rockets X. Much like that tense story without a definitive resolution, Piersol explores issues related to race, class and gender and how tensions can develop along those lines. His new comics, Tableaux #1 & #2, aren't traditional narratives in the sense of following characters over time or using a panel grid. Instead, each page contains a single image that is meant to be juxtaposed to the image on the page facing it as well as all of the illustrations in the book.

Piersol stated that these drawings "contain cultural reflective snapshots of 'scenes' relating to disparity and the human condition". It's not always a polemic, but rather aims to have an unflinching take on the world. There are drawings of extreme wealth and extreme deprivation. There are also drawings of diverse families, confused children, angry protestors, steely taggers, elegant mothers, expectant and joyous mothers, along with scenes of desperate people trying to satisfy their most depraved desires. Piersol also weaves in "hybrid" drawings, in which a mash-up of several people is done to create a single jigsaw image. Despite how jarring these images are, there's something about them that allows the eye to rest, because these are still images that feel like looking at a sort of distorted stained glass in a church. Piersol's regular illustrations tend to range from the extremes of human existence (being present at a volcano erupting, surrounding a loved one as she's wheezing out her death rattle, seeing a nude stripper at work) to the most mundane of moments. The second issue ups the ante by going more extreme, depicting images of cadavers, concentration camps, murders and airplanes exploding while at the same time drawing cheerful babies, pop stars and actresses winning awards. It's as though Piersol is saying that aside from the ways in which people find themselves separating themselves from others, the only real juxtaposition to be made is alive or dead. It's an interesting project, made all the more tantalizing by only labeling the images with an index at the end of the book. I'll be curious to see how long he continues to do this, and how it will affect his work when he returns to more standard narratives.

Jeff Lok is developing his chops as a truly demented gag cartoonist. His desert island/baby cannibalism jokes in his comic Gag Rag were both disgusting and hilarious, downplaying the horrible nature of the subject matter by sticking closely to the structure of the gag. His new mini, Oh Babies!, moves his baby jokes into a bizarre Fight Club territory. Revealing what really happens in a maternity ward when the adults are away, his misshapen and slightly grotesque newborns get into fistfights and death matches, complete with chairs thrown and knives drawn. The comic takes a turn when a comically oversized baby with a nasty temperament appears in the incubator, leading to a bizarre series of events involving the babies using welding equipment to make a specialized shiv to jam in the huge baby's vulnerable fontanelle, the big baby damaging himself by accident, and a surgery scene where the babies-as-doctors need the supplies that make up a baby. While I love Lok's character work, there are some odd bits of white space in a lot of his panels that throw his images off-kilter. Some of those are intentional, but there are others that feel a bit odd in terms of composition and broke me out of a reading rhythm. I think that's the price paid for the delightful spontaneity of his character design, the looseness of which is integral to establishing the humor of the comic. I hope Lok continues to keep himself open to his strangest ideas even as he tightens things up in terms of format.