Sequart Reprints: Ed Piskor Interview

This interview was originally conducted in 2006 for sequart.com. It was my first full-length interview.
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Even the most casual of comics fans is probably familiar with Harvey Pekar, thanks to the film success of American Splendor. Pekar is one of the trailblazers of autobiographical comics, focusing on the insights that can be gained from the mundane details of everyday life. HIs legendarily pessimistic and curmudgeonly aspects were played up in the film, and while these are certainly qualities familiar to every reader of American Splendor, the film glossed over other aspects of Harv's work. In particular, Pekar has always been a working-class, self-made intellectual. Some of his most absorbing comics have dealt with his thoughts on literature, music, politics and history. In addition, Pekar has become as much a biographer as autobiographer later in his writing career. He's written about a war veteran, someone suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, and most recently a forceful personality named Michael Malice. Harv writes the stories, but they're all a form of oral history.

That brings us to his latest project, Macedonia. It's about a student at Cal-Berkeley named Heather Roberson. She spent some time in Macedonia, one of the Balkan states. Unlike nearby Kosovo in the 1990's, Macedonia did not descend into civil war, despite many of the same conditions that led to ethnic cleansing in other Balkan states. For her thesis, she wanted to find out why this was. Before she went over, she met Harvey Pekar, who urged her to take extensive notes so he could do a graphic novel of her experience.

The results are fascinating. It's partly a travelogue of Roberson's experiences, but they are from the perspective of a student, someone trying to stay objective while gathering as much information as possible. Unlike a journalist, she's not quite there to tell someone else's story, but rather to synthesize all of the stories she's heard into an overarching theory. Pekar himself invokes Joe Sacco's classic Safe Area Gorazde, which takes a hard look at near-genocide in eastern Bosnia, which only makes sense. Anyone doing a comic about the Balkans inevitably is going to be compared to Sacco. But Pekar adds a couple of layers of distance here. It's not his experience there, and he's not drawing it. Furthermore, Roberson's aims and methods were completely different from Sacco's. Most importantly, Macedonia is about what went right, even if there are still enormous problems and conflicts. A conflict in a country untouched by war is better than trying to deal with the aftermath of the brutality in Bosnia.

Pekar famously does stick-figure layouts for his comics before handing them off to the illustrator he selects for each story. Robert Crumb has been his most famous collaborator, but there have been dozens of others (including Alan Moore!). His choice of artist often varies according to the kind of story he's telling. He'll choose a more realistic artist for more straight-ahead narratives, and a more abstract artist for more emotional stories.

The man for the job on Macedonia is 23-year-old Ed Piskor. At the age of 9, he saw a documentary that had Pekar reading one of his stories, and he was instantly fascinated. Piskor's knowledge of comics' underground period is matched only by his fierce desire to improve. His work ethic is what helped him get his early gigs with Harvey. After turning around a 4-page assignment in days, Piskor avoided sleep while helping Harv beat a deadline with a 24-page story in the Our Movie Year graphic novel. If that wasn't enough, underground legend Jay Lynch tapped Piskor to collaborate with him on his strips about other underground artists. That's heady company for such a neophyte, but Piskor has met every challenge and continues to improve rapidly.

After a childhood of comics obsession, Piskor went on to the Joe Kubert comics school for a year, an experience which both helped and hindered his development. His panel composition is excellent, his faces expressive and his attention to detail meticulous. Like many young artists, he's still learning to loosen up his figures a bit. One can already see his development from this early comic to these preview pages from Macedonia. This is in just the span of a couple of years, and it's clear that he's still developing his style as an artist, but is doing it rapidly. Working with Pekar is a huge challenge, because it's up to the artist to establish the story's rhythms in a milieu that isn't exactly replete with slam-bam action and dynamism. It's clear that Piskor is improving with every assignment, and it will be fascinating to follow his career as he writes his own stories, particuarly because of his rather dark sense of humor. Piskor is obsessed with making good comics and his astonishing work ethic along with his willingness to learn & adapt make him one to watch.
Below is a page from Macedonia, exclusive to this site. Following the image, I talk to Ed Piskor about his training at the Kubert School, his influences, his collaborations with Harvey Pekar and Jay Lynch, and how Macedonia was created.

LIFE AT THE KUBERT SCHOOL AND OTHER INFLUENCES

SEQUART: You attended the Kubert school for a year. Was this a positive experience overall? What do you feel like you learned? How did you relate to the other students; did any of them share your interests in alternative comics?

PISKOR: When I think about my tenure there, I realize that I did learn a lot there in a relatively short amount of time, which was great. That being said, the rest of the experience was about as lame as can be. They teach you to be a hack at the school, meaning that you should take every possible job that comes your way and just crap out everything that interests you the least. . .I really don't agree with this position and I even contribute this idea for the degradation of quality in comics. They had a real racket running with what they chose to teach. The first year they were teaching us how to paste up and make color separations...all kinds of stuff that has been obsolete in print media for a decade already at that point.

We lived in the famous "Mansion", which contained a mix between squirrelly-socially retarded cartoonists, old wanna-be cartoonists who could pay their tuition with cash, and pseudo-jock testosterone seething alpha male cartoonists. The teachers in that first year were mostly former students that need the extra cash from the teaching gig because Archie comics doesn't pay that much. And when it comes to the other students and me relating to any of the regarding underground and alternative cartoonists, believe me when I tell you there wasn't one person that was into it. I still bump into these guys and I have to explain who Dan Clowes and Chris Ware are, which is unbelievable.

The main reason I went to this school was to network with like-minded individuals and I remember Tim Truman's account of meeting [Steve] Bissette, [Tom] Yeates, [John] Totleben, and [Rick] Veitch and how they rallied around all the old EC comics and undergrounds and I honestly was looking for a group of cartoonists who knew what I was talking about. I guess that's an impossibility when you're going to a school that is advertised in Spider-Man comic books. I just mythologized that place for years as a kid and those first batches of students are sort of heroes of mine. The school didn't live up to a fraction of what I expected. I'll do a comic about it someday.

SEQUART: You've mentioned in another interview that your art gets mistaken for being that of a 1960's underground artist, and that's a pretty clear influence on your style. But what I find interesting is that I don't see the specific imprint of any one particular artist more than any others. You mentioned being influenced as a youngster by seeing Harvey Pekar in the documentary Comic Book Confidential. Who were some of the other artists in that documentary that influenced you so heavily? Who are your main influences now?

PISKOR: I'm extremely influenced by Robert Crumb. That guy is tops to me, but every artist in that documentary is someone who I look very closely at for different things. I love Jaime Hernandez's body language, Charles Burns' inking, Gilbert Shelton's whimsy, Art Spiegelman, Kurtzman, and Will Eisner's insight on storytelling, Frank Miller's bravado, the old EC artists' craft at illustration. The only person in that flick that can go fly a kite is Stan Lee...that guy annoys the hell out of me. Nowadays my tastes are leading more and more to old comic strips, so I'm inspired by Harold Gray, Winsor McCay, Bud Fisher, Milt Caniff, and Chester Gould to name just a few. There are also plenty of cartoonists working today who are doing fantastic stuff that makes me excited about the future of the comic book medium.

SEQUART: You mention Crumb as a major influence. Is this in terms of his visual approach, the kind of stories he tells, or his general uninhibited unleashing of his id in his stories, no matter what? Or some combination thereof? What was the Crumb story or stories that really blew your mind? (Your noting that you put in some silent panels to help the story breathe on your own seemed a very Crumb-like move, particularly with regard to his American Splendor stories)

PISKOR: I really can appreciate the obsessive quality in Crumb's work. The level of craft is ridiculously high when it comes to the look and feel of his illustrations. I'm influenced by his complete body of work and the growth he's had as an artist is unparalleled when you think about his first wobbly Fritz the Cat comics that were done in composition notebooks all the way through the years to his HUP comics and beyond. Thanks to Fantagraphics' Complete Crumb Comics, anybody can take a look at that work and watch like 40 years of artistic upward mobility in a single day. I think it's necessary to absorb all of his work to get a true appreciation for his stuff. The guy lived most of his life on paper and for better or worse such a body of work is a goal of mine even if it requires me to be poor, alone, and I can think of worse things than to spend the majority of my life at the drawing board too. He's done dozens of strips that I really love and are blown away by...let me think of a few. I think "That's Life" is up [there as] one of my favorites. That's the one with the blues singer who runs away from his wife, records some music, gets killed and the old stuffy white guys find the recording. His autobio comics are great. I can seriously go on for hours talking about this guy's influence on me.

SEQUART: You mention that there are a lot of cartoonists working today who are doing fantastic stuff. Anyone in particular come to mind that really impresses you?

PISKOR: I'm fortunate enough to have some great cartoonists locally here in Pittsburgh that I meet with on a regular basis and these guys blow my mind. They are Tom Scioli who draws Godland for image, Jim Rugg of Street Angel fame, and Pat Lewis who happens to be one of the best guys working on minicomics today. Some other guys who make me want to chop off their drawing hands out of jealousy are the St. Louis Catastrophe crew (Kevin Huizenga, and Dan Zettwoch mostly) Farel Dalrymple, there's this guy Phonzie Davis who can hypnotize you with his work, Sammy Harkham, Anders Nilsen, John Porcellino, Vanessa Davis, Lauren Weinstein, [and] Matt Bors who does a weekly strip called Idiot Box. I equally love and am viciously jealous of each of these cartoonists along with plenty of others who I can't think [of] at the moment.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR AND OTHER COLLABORATIONS

SEQUART: How long did it take for you to track down issues of American Splendor? What was it about Harvey reading an excerpt (do you remember what story it was?) that inspired a 9-year-old? His tales of mundane life aren't exactly typical kid stuff.

PISKOR: The story Harv read in the documentary was the one where he steals some records from the college radio station and instead of just pocketing them, he creates an elaborate process to heist the wax and ends up accidentally locking them in the bathroom. That story was drawn by Crumb and it was frigging amazing to me. This was around when his first collection through Doubleday came out and the book was easy enough to find at the local mall. I wasn't looking for it, but I immediately recognized the book and was completely confused by the whole thing. I was a mainstream comics fan as a kid but I really enjoyed the parts with Peter Parker and his hard times when the other kids liked the parts with Spider-Man fighting Green Goblin. This led me to think "American Splendor" was Harvey's superhero name, and while reading his stuff, I was constantly waiting for him to disappear into a phone booth and appear in costume but those moments never happened; and I found myself fascinated and I didn't even care that there wasn't a battle in which the buildings in Cleveland were compromised. They also had a sort of horror quality because it gave me insight as to what I could expect as I grew into an adult.

SEQUART: You've done a lot of collaborative work in your brief career. Has this been a conscious choice, or were you just given opportunities you couldn't turn down? Would you prefer to do more of this in the future, or do you have your own big project simmering in the back of your mind?

PISKOR: In a lot of ways I'm just letting things happen as they may. I'm excited and lucky to have worked with Harvey as well as Jay Lynch (another prominent underground cartoonist). These projects have sort of fallen into my lap but were definitely too cool to pass up. I want to do plenty of my own comics as well but I really need to focus on the writing portion more because I'm missing some vital skills required to tell great stories on my own. Slowly though, I think I'm starting to figure it out and it's possible that I may pick up some great habits from the people that I work with.

SEQUART: The earliest work on your website seems to be a lot more heavily rendered than your work with Pekar. Was this the influence of the Kubert school coming into play? Are you consciously working towards a different style, and do you see a particular evolution of that style?

PISKOR: This is all just a constant learning process for me. I have no clue what I'm doing, and I'm basically just progressing on an intuitive path as opposed to creating a specific style. I'm sort of blindly hoping that it will emerge eventually as I continue to absorb more great works of others and I think that simple life experience plays a part in the evolution of artwork. The older stuff definitely had a lot of Kubert school programming in there and I confess that I still need to shake a lot of the conformist practices that were beat into my head while I was at "Superhero University".

SEQUART: Going back to collaborations, I was really impressed by the pieces that you did with Jay Lynch. Along with Justin Green, I always considered him to be the most underrated of the underground artists of that era. How did this collaboration come about? What's the division of labor here--does Lynch just write them, or does he do layouts? Did you consciously alter your style for these strips? They seem a lot more polished and self-assured than some of your other material, and I was wondering if that's just your style maturing, having the time to do them right or a conscious decision to do something different.

PISKOR: When I was sending out packages of strips to all of the small press companies, anthologies and other publishing venues I also sent out dozens of packages to my favorite cartoonists who I though may have some insight as to what I was doing wrong because I was steadily being rejected by these companies. Jay Lynch called me days before Pekar called me and explained this idea for a comic book that he had but he said he didn't have the confidence to draw the stuff on his own and couldn't sacrifice the time because he needed to keep a roof over his head. He provided these things for each story that he called roughs, but I have to tell you that these things are print quality. Beautiful pages. But he wanted me to draw them closer to my style, which puzzled me but I was more than happy to oblige. The look of those final strips were a mixture of working off of his great compositions and just a little more experienced construction on my part. The pages were pretty dense too, just because I had a terrible overcompensation complex with Jay to try and make him happy with the outcome of the strips. I think after a while cartoonists become confident enough to leave extraneous detail out of their work, I'll get there someday.

SEQUART: I've read and enjoyed your Isolation Chamber minicomics, particularly your rather dark view of the world and a sense of humor to match. But I also am fond of the human touches you threw in there, like playing with your younger sister. You've said that these minicomics are a way of working out your inner anger for a limited audience, but do you see yourself trying to cultivate a larger audience as a writer in the future, and if so, what kind of story do you think you'd want to write for such an audience? Is it odd to draw stories for others that don't have the same kind of anger you work through in your own comics?

PISKOR: It would be great to have a substantial audience who like my stuff. I don't see a lot of people enjoying those particular comics nor do I even want to many of those in the wrong hands. It was very important that I controlled the distribution on the Isolation Chamber minicomics. I have some stories that I'm working on that I think may appeal to a decent number of people and I'm also pretty certain that most other cartoonists aren't qualified to handle the particular subjects I want to deal with, which is the only reason to devote a year or more on a book in my opinion. My collaborations are a completely separate thing. Those are stories that I would never be able to tell on my own, which is the only reason to collaborate in my opinion. It's fun to work with Pekar because the guy is not a taskmaster at all with me and I don't think of our working together as odd by any means. I'm young, I'm going to have plenty of time to do my own comics. I don't plan on quitting anytime soon.

SEQUART: What subjects are those that you think you're particularly qualified to handle or are specially interested in?

PISKOR: I don't want to go into much detail but I will say that I guarantee you I know more about computer/telephone hacking than any decent cartoonist working today, and this is going to play a major part in the next big project that I'm currently writing and can't wait to produce after the Macedonia book.

WORKING WITH HARVEY PEKAR ON MACEDONIA

SEQUART: How did you get the gig for Macedonia? I know you turned a couple of stories around very quickly for Harv for Our Movie Year, but what else do you think Harvey saw in your style? What made him pick you in the first place, and what do you think made him pick you for Macedonia? As you know, Harv selects his artists based on the kind of story he writes; what do you think it was about your style that made him think you'd be a good fit.

PISKOR: I think the main reason was that Harv was just impressed with my speed in which I produced the Our Movie Year strips. He likes my artwork and he sees the improvement that is happening to the quality because of the steady workload. I think the evolution of style before his eyes may be interesting to him because it is a topic of conversation between us every now and again. I'm not sure what he saw in me initially to make him want to work with me. I did send him a few autobio strips heavily inspired by him so maybe that was helpful. Even then he was constantly aware of the increasing skill and craft that was visible with each strip I'd send him. I hope I'm not coming across as being too egotistical or something on this particular question. I'm just grasping at straws. I have no clue why the guy likes me or anything.

SEQUART: What sort of reaction did you expect to get from Harv when you sent him your story? What were some of the helpful things people said to you when you sent them your early comics, and who were some of the artists who helped you?

PISKOR: I wasn't even sure I was sending the comics to his actual address. I just saw this address on the front cover of a Dark Horse comic and I couldn't conceptualize why he would have the balls to put a real address on the front cover. It just became part of my routine when I'd send submissions and it was fantastic to actually hear back from the guy. I don't know what I expected, but I can sure tell you I never thought in a million years that I'd be in charge of drawing a whole graphic novel for the guy.

Some of the most helpful people probably don't even remember how encouraging they were to me but it sure meant a lot. I recieved great feedback from Peter Bagge, Bill Griffith, Denis Kitchen, Adrian Tomine, Rick Altergott, Steve Bissette, and a slew of other guys. Not many people were in positions to put my work in print but just by responding to me in constructively critical ways they created some incentive to keep me working on new stuff. There are some really popular guys that give me first dibs on jobs that they have no time to do which is really cool.

SEQUART: Let's get into the process of making Macedonia. What is the nature of the collaboration? Did he do stick-figure layouts of what he wanted first? How much influence did you have on the story and the way pages and panels are composed? Has there been a lot of give-and-take in the creative process? Is Harv very particular about the way things look, or does he give you the story and let you go?

PISKOR: Harvey asked Heather to keep some detailed notes on her trip to the Balkans. She complied with him by providing hundreds of pages for us to create the comic. From her notes Harvey put together his famous stick figure scripts which I received and completely deviated from. Each panel he wrote was so dense there was no room for the characters to breathe and it was very important for me to help pace the story in hopes of making the experience less cumbersome to the reader. There were also spots where I thought some silent panels that were pure storytelling would help the mood of the story. He's given me total carte blanche to tell this story in an interesting way, and so long as it comes across perfectly clear to the reader he is happy. He hasn't asked me to change a thing, which is a huge relief. He's the only experienced guy in comics who would trust a newbie punk like me with such a task.

SEQUART: Did you have any contact with Heather Roberson throughout the process? How did Harvey write the script of the whole experience? Did he use notes, photos, tape recordings, etc? How long did the whole process take, from when he first contacted her, then wrote the script, then gave it to you? How long has it taken to draw, ink & letter it? Did you receive part of the advance for the book deal?

PISKOR: I did provide Heather with pencils of the pages for a while and we'd go back and forth. I wanted her approval on the progress until I was comfortable, and she was very happy to criticize. Heather did provide Harvey with plenty of notes and dialogue suggestions for the story. It was a breeze for him to write. She also provided me with a bunch of photos of all important buildings from the book. He wrote the story as I drew it. I can tell you that around MOCCA 2005 I had penciled about 20 pages and as of this interview it's around (or shortly after) MOCCA 2006 and we pretty much have the thing wrapped up in a bun so my conservative guess is that it took us a year and a half from the time her notes were taken. I'm not sure exactly when Harvey first met Heather though. I actually was fortunate to receive a page rate on this book, which I'm very lucky for since this is a rare thing to come by in alt comics. Harv is taking great care of me on this book, and I won't soon forget it. I'm gonna have the funds to draw my own comics and live without having to shovel crap at some 9-to-5 gig for a while.

SEQUART: It seems the biggest challenge you must have had in drawing the book was taking a relatively static story and try to make it interesting. The first 20 or so pages are a whole lot of medicine for an audience to swallow, as Heather basically delivers a lecture on Macedonian history to her boyfriend. Yet you try to break this up by seeing them go through their day: driving, cooking, eating etc. Were you trying to give the reader something to look at, and was this your idea or Harv's?

PISKOR: It was my idea to try and keep the characters moving. The Harv script is very undetailed when it comes to setting, character direction or situation a lot of the times and this batch of pages was a perfect example. Thanks for bringing it up. In the wrong hands this part of the story could have just ended up being 20 pages of talking heads filibustering to one another. This part of the story was a tough one to set, because it does boil down to a 20 page conversation. At least the words are interesting or else we'd have trouble.

SEQUART: What was it like for you as a huge Pekar fan to work with him? What was he like to work with?

PISKOR: It stokes me out. I really never expected the guy to get back in touch with me after I sent those initial strips. I thought that he was probably deluged with slimy jerks pursuing him for work and thought my work would be in that shuffle. Whenever he calls me up, it flat out makes my day because the guy is an important creator to me. It's a blast working with him.

SEQUART: Last question of my interrogation. Early in the book, Harvey points out the elephant in the room when he talks about Joe Sacco. How much of an influence was Sacco on how you did the book, and how do you think the overall experience of Macedonia compares to Sacco's work? I find it very interesting that someone as pessimistic as Harv would think to focus on the mirror image of what Sacco does (go to some of the worst sites of conflict on the planet and figure out what's going on)--it's very hopeful in its own way. And it fits in with the guarded optimism at the end of Our Cancer Year, with the various youths from war-torn parts of the world coming together. What does working on Macedonia mean to you as an artist?

PISKOR: I love Sacco's work, but I consciously didn't look at his stuff since Harv first mentioned this project. I think if our book is compared to Sacco, there is now way for ours to hold water to that guy, because the stories he does are much more intimate to him. I'm a suburban kid from Pittsburgh, who's never been out of the eastern time zone, working from photographs and a script. It's possible our story would be much richer if I would have made the pilgrimage to the Balkans, but I'm sure the publisher wouldn't fit the bill on that. I also do think our story is very different in more ways than it is similar. One example is the overall journalistic approach that Sacco is known for, our story is pure Harvey Pekar in that the conversations that Heather has with people carry the story. The book doesn't have any spiritual value to me but it is the culmination of a lot of hard work and gives me a decent sense of accomplishment. Hopefully this is the beginning of a long, fruitful career.

Promotion and Self-Promotion: Abadzis, Sezen, Comics Reporter

Last fall, I wrote a piece on international small press comics, I reviewed a comic called Zakkum, by Turkish cartoonist Beldan Sezen. With a chunky drawing style mixed with digital collage, her story about a murder-mystery in Turkey drew in pieces of her actual life along with noir elements. Most interesting was the way she drew in elements of queer identity as a key part of the story. Sezen is now doing an indiegogo campaign to fund her new book, Snapshots of a Girl, which is more explicitly about growing up and figuring out one's sexual and personal identity in the Muslim/Christian world. The book will be published by a small concern in Italy, and she's looking to find funding to help support herself until she's done. Sezen is an artist whose work bears watching, and I hope you will consider funding her. Nick Abadzis asked me to pass note along, and it's based on his good character that I'm passing this along. He's noted that The Phoenix, a comics anthology for children published in the UK, is now available as an Ipad application. Abadzis is one of the contributors and is among a group of quality cartoonists who also submit work to it. Please consider checking it out, especially if you have kids. Finally, I wanted to point readers in the direction of my interview with Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter, as part of his annual Holiday Interview series. I was honored to take part in a feature I look forward to reading on a yearly basis, acting as his critical sounding board for the year's alternative comics releases.

Comics Journalism: Cartoon Picayune, The Illustrated Press Chicago

At the moment, comics journalism is still a movement that's in its infancy. Joe Sacco is its progenitor and exemplar, but not all journalism involves international hot spots and war crimes. Josh Kramer is an interesting case to me because, like Dan Archer before him, he came to the Center for Cartoon Studies in an attempt to sharpen his skills as a cartoonist and storyteller in the service of his already keenly-developed skills as a journalist. As Darryl Holliday astutely observed in The Illustrated Press: Chicago, print may be dying off, but journalism existed before print and will continue to exist in new formats. Observing the world around you, telling the stories of others whose voices might not otherwise be heard and generally trying to connect reader to place and time in a direct fashion while offering new perspectives can and is being done in any number of ways. Comics journalism frequently lacks the immediacy of other kinds of journalism, but this can work to its advantage when comics seeks to provide reflection and thought. Let's look at a few different but allied examples of this in action.

The Cartoon Picayune #3 and #4, edited by Josh Kramer. Kramer's modest but steadily evolving minicomic is the nexus of small-press journalism at the moment. Both Holliday and Warner printed stories in this tightly-edited, heavily sourced anthology. Kramer isn't against printing personal or less politically charge pieces, so long as they are up to the standards of the publication. The third issue (Spring 2012) features "The Man Who Built Beirut" by Andy Warner (which I reviewed here ) and Holliday/Rodriguez (see below for my comments on their comics). It also has a vignette that's essentially a series of interviews regarding DC charging extra for plastic or paper bags as a "clean-up" tax. Kramer is very limited as a draftsman but certainly knows how to put together a comics page, and this two-pager provided a variety of viewpoints before zeroing in on why it was important. Ethan Lener's "Julia Vericella: The Girl Who Plays Solitaire" is an interview told in first person from teh point of view of the interviewee, and it's a quick glimpse into the mind of someone who is restless and creative.  Both of these pieces were a nice contrast to the longer, splashier work in this issue.

#4 (Fall 2012) continues the mix of personal interest stories, more focused news stories, stories with a political and even activist slant and even a human interest story. "Rattled!" is a humorous, first-person account of the writer's participation in a rattlesnake race in Texas. Matt Diffee is a sharp and funny illustrator who makes some wider satirical points about Texas but mostly uses the strip for self-deprecatory purposes. Holliday & Rodriguez return for another story printed to better effect in their book. Colin Tedford's "The Story of Jake Tuesday" is fascinating for the way it celebrates a bit of local culture and history, and how the titular character who inspired the yearly celebration found that the holiday transcended his own particular tale of life and death. "Bethesda, Maryland" is Jess Ruliffson's straightforward interview with a Marine in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. It seeks to do nothing other than let a soldier tell his story, both of how he was injured and how he is recovering, in an effort to make this bit of hidden information visible to the public. Kramer's slowly growing more and more ambitious as he is even starting to pay his correspondents; he's accepting limited advertising in order to do so.

The Illustrated Press: Chicago, by Darryl Holliday and E.N. Rodriguez. This sixty-page comic is a sort of self-determined PhD project in comics journalism by Holliday (the writer) and Rodriguez (the artist). It should be noted that this duo gets more in synch as the comic proceeds; breaking up the writing and drawing tasks put them behind the curve a bit in terms of producing something that reflected both of their sensibilities in equal measure. The book is essentially a love letter to their city of Chicago, though in many instances it's tough love. Arranging the book in a seasonal manner and taking it upon themselves to cover many different neighborhoods in a city that's clannish and gentrified, Holliday & Rodriguez tell their stories in a restrained, humane and dignified fashion. Even when writing more in an activist tone, Holliday is always even-handed and avoids hyperbole, relying on Rodriguez to fill in the blanks in terms of tone. Rodriguez never abuses that trust by going over-the-top in how he depicts events. Both writer and artist covered all of their events together and in person, making it a true collaboration.

It should be noted that the production values for this book are top-notch, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. The colors look great on the nice, thick paper. Holliday provides perspective on each story. The opener, "Wedlock", takes on a fascinating event: people getting married to inmates one day a year at the Cook County jail. It's a highly charged concept, but Holliday typically plays it low-key, letting the anecdotes speak for themselves. Neither artist nor writer had found their feet as of yet; the story is too wordy and the lettering is shaky at best. Rodriguez was also clearly an illustrator without much experience in drawing comics at the time of this story. His actual draftsmanship was fine, but the way he drew figures relating to each other in space was awkward. "Chess Records" takes an entirely different approach, with limited text and full-page illustrations in its depiction of chess players on Michigan Avenue. It's a simply-told account of the ways in which people in different walks of life come to play and why.

"Inside The Crawford Coal Plant" plant reminds me more of Dan Zettwoch's strips about outdated technology than a standard piece of comics journalism. It's beautifully colored and gives the reader just a quick glimpse of a piece of technological history that's about to be put out to pasture."Night Watch" sees Rodriguez step up his game considerably in this account of nuns drawing attention to immigrants being deported. It portrays their protests very matter-of-factly without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing with it, letting the images once again speak for themselves. The composition, the rendering and the character design were all sharp and bold, aiding the piece's overall impact greatly. "Home In One Place" is perhaps the best story in the whole book. This interview with Holliday's uncle is a survey of the city's history in a single neighborhood, documenting its rise and fall. What makes the story work as a comic was Rodriguez telling the story as we follow the uncle as he walks his dog, from left to right in each panel. This gives the reader something to grab onto and propels what is otherwise a static interview forward nicely. The use of color is muted but not to an extreme degree, as swashes of blue and green brighten up brown buildings. "The Clash On Wabash" details the ways in which a crowd and the police clashed at a NATO protest, using one or two images per page to get the story across. "Degrees of Literacy" is another static interview, this time hamstrung a bit by being set at a cafe. Rodriguez tries some tricky angles and foreshortening to liven up the visuals, but this proves to be a bit distracting. Overall, Holliday & Rodriguez are an ambitious, conscientious and thoughtful pair of journalists who are evolving into solid storytellers. Not everything worked well in this book, but it was clear that the two were well aware of their shortcomings and strove constantly to improve and try new approaches that gave their source material the respect they felt it deserved.

Sequart Reprints: Yet More MoCCA minis

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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There's always been a strong relationship between minicomics culture and zine culture. Indeed, one could make the argument that minicomics are one of the most vibrant subtypes of zines these days. Beyond the fact that they're relatively cheap and easy to make, minis also allow cartoonists to turn comics into art objects if they so desire. Another connection is that many personal zines tend to be autobiographical musings of the author, and that tradition is certainly prevalent in the minicomics scene. This article will examine a number of minis that are either autobiographical or deal with slice-of-life narratives. I'm going to try to resist giving detailed plot descriptions and instead focus on character and characterization, along with the specific look of the comic and what kind of impact it makes on characterization.

CROSS-COUNTRY, by MK Reed. MK Reed's newest feels like a screenplay, but she puts in enough comics-only flourishes to give the comic weight and substance. This one's about a cross-country road trip with a young guy who's part of a family of Wal-Mart-like stores, and an employee. Greg, the boss, is a boorish frat boy type whom Ben, the employee, despises. Greg is a vacant sleazeball and Ben is conflicted about being there--it's a summer job and he needs the money. Greg loves to sleep with young girls, and this first issue ends with Ben being forced to drive home a waitress that Greg slept with--to school, because she's only 15 years old.

Greg is actually the more interesting of the two lead characters, because he's so unrepentently awful and banal. Ben clearly hates himself in more ways than one, and is stewing over an old girlfriend. He obviously thinks he's morally superior to Greg, but the fact that he's enabling his boss' bad behavior makes him worse in some ways. I like this ambiguity in Reed's characters here, as well as the unusual page and panel composition she uses. That includes panels at odd angles like diagonals, eschewing a grid on certain pages, using diary-style narration in print outside the panels, and going to unusual close-ups. Reed's figure-work is crude but she continues to play to her strengths, focusing on gesture, body language and facial expressions. Reed's definitely one of my favorite mini-comics artists who specializes in the lives of young people; I'm glad that she's moved on to a slightly older age demographic after mostly writing about teenagers.

MATCHING JACKETS and SOURPUSS 1 by Robyn Chapman. Chapman is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design whose work I've been following for many years. She's one of the co-editors of the fascinating TRUE PORN anthologies as well as the driving force behind the enormously entertaining HEY, FOUR-EYES! zine. This pair of minis are obviously very personal and intimate; one is explicitly autobiographical and the other inspired by autobiographical events.

MATCHING JACKETS is a compilation of stories about old boyfriends. "Something's Wrong" is from TRUE PORN, and is a devastatingly personal account of her problems with sex with one particular boyfriend, and how this turned into an irreparable barrier. What I liked most about this story was the disconnect between "Robyn's" emotions and her physical reactions as a sexual being. When she reveals that it may be related to her evolving sexuality (being attracted to women), it's a painful moment, one where all further communication is impossible. A cheerier story is "Comfortable", a John Porcellino-style story where Chapman merges text and image in a free-flowing manner, abandoning panel gridlines altogether. This one retells a clearly-doomed but still-pleasant relationship from college, and is told in Chapman's sparer, cleaner line from her recent works. The nature of the narrative will feel familiar to anyone who recalls their first love from college, but it's her compositon that makes this the best story in the book. There's one page where she describes the first time she and her boyfriend told each other that they loved each other. The way she makes the eye follow her boyfriend laying in the grass, to the narrative, to an overhead view of a park, to Chapman in the bottom right hand corner, is a perfect example of assured and creative storytelling, neatly solving several visual problems.

SOURPUSS is the first chapter of a high school story, and it takes place in Chapman's native rural Alaska. There's a Chapman stand-in in Doris, an artist who hangs around with some nerd friends and can't relate to anyone else around in her redneck town. This comic is a well done but quite familiar account of teen alienation. In the first chapter, the dynamic between Doris and her friends is fairly predictable, down to her jealousy over one of them getting a girlfriend. Chapman's character design is the main attraction of this mini, along with her understanding of expression. I'll be curious to see where the story winds up going.

JAM IN THE BAND and PARTY @ HORROR BEACH, by Robin Enrico. Enrico's specialty is conjuring up atmospheres of particular youth scenes, and he creates that verisimilitude thanks to witty dialogue. JAM IN THE BAND is a short preview of a much longer work, and it had echoes of Brian Lee O'Malley's SCOTT PILGRIM and Jaime Hernandez' LOVE AND ROCKETS. It's about a music writer in New York who's about to see a well-known, all-female indy rock band--one that he knew quite well in the small college town they came out of. It's got that same indy rock vibe as SCOTT PILGRIM but uses the time-jumping techniques in those Locas stories. Despite those influences, Enrico has his own voice. His cartooning is simple, iconic and stylized, with a number of decorative flourishes. He's careful to keep his panels uncluttered, even when he's trying to get across a lot of information through visual cues. The small taste we get of the characters in this issue wasn't quite enough to get lost in their stories quite yet, but it does lay out the tensions nicely. I look forward to the larger work that's yet to come.

PARTY @ HORROR BEACH has several semi-auto-bio stories, some of which read like inside jokes. "Trapped In The Closet", however, put together a string of ridiculous situations and sustained them nicely as one coherent, funny narrative. It's about a Halloween party that Enrico's stand-in character attends, where he comes as a "Big Stupid Box" on a dare. There's a funny aside where two women note that since it's Halloween, they're required to dress in something Sexy--so one chooses to be Sexy Abe Lincoln and the other comes as Sexy John Wilkes Booth. He winds up fooling around with a woman (with a boyfriend) whom he had slept with before (at a drunken party) in a closet. When he's told that the woman is now engaged, and that her fiance was at this very party, he finds himself stuck in a closet for the night, hiding out. Enrico manages to play a sordid encounter for laughs, mostly at his own expense. What I like about this is the extreme short-sightedness of every character; the woman he sleeps with has no problem cheating on her fiance, until he gets wise and takes away their engagement ring, while Robin knows it isn't a good idea but does it anyway. Enrico's skill at humor is what distinguishes this autobio mini from others of its kind, along with that amusingly cartoony art (which greatly aides in evoking laughs).

DISCO MAXX by Katie Skelly  This brief mini has a mylar cover with a different design on every copy. While this is an autobiographical story, it's not really a narrative or even an anecodote, really. Instead, it's a series of memories as images, flowing together on a night when Skelly and a friend DJ'd a party at Syracuse. Skelly's style is spare and simplistic, emphasizing expression over form. It's a sweet, unambiguous account of a night where everything went magically right. It was the sort of night where one could sense great things happening as they unfolded, and the result is a series of memories that burned themselves into one's mind's eye quite vividly. Skelly's panel composition can be slightly cluttered; if anything, I'd like to see her simplify things even further. Still, I enjoy the way she presents memories and encounters on a page, especially how she constructs dialogue. Though this story was very sweet, she actually has a tart and witty voice, and I'd like to continue to see that fleshed out in longer narratives.

MY BRAIN HURTS #6, by Liz Baillie  Enrico and Skelly distance the reader from the emotional content of the material, either through humor (Enrico), narrative ambiguity (Skelly) or a cartoony drawing style. Liz Baillie, whose work I've reviewed here previously, goes in a different direction. She plunges us head-first into her characters' tumultuous emotional lives, and does so with dense, detail-packed panels. Her actual line is fairly thin, which lessens the punch of each particular panel (different from Robyn Chapman, who uses fairly thick blacks for her lines), but she adds mood to her panels with the heavy use of shadow, cross-hatching, blacks in a panel, etc.

All of this is in service to her story, and this particular issue deals with some unusual difficulties regarding young love for a teenaged lesbian. Baillie perfectly captures the awkwardness of an attempted sexual encounter, especially when her girlfriend paradoxically clings to her Catholic upbringing. Baillie gets this across in a page where the panels sit at odd angles to each other, overlapping and zooming in and out of intimate close-ups. It's a great page, one of several in the book where the page design has a direct influence on the book's emotional content. By the end of the issue, we have a real sense of the main character feeling as though she's hit rock bottom, with nowhere to belong. Baillie's become more adventurous as an artist as the series has proceeded, and the interesting choices she's made have deepened the book's emotional impact.

NO IN-BETWEEN #1-6, by Marion Vitus  I remember buying the first issue of this series at SPX several years ago, and was struck at how ambitious it seemed for a young artist to undertake a sprawling travelogue as their first work. It's obvious that this story, described as "fiction with autobiographical inspiration" (what Dean Haspiel calls "semi-auto-bio"), was a life-changing and enormously meaningful event for Vitus. The plot can be described simply: an aspiring artist is stuck in a dead-end job, awaiting a backpacking trip to Europe with her long-distance boyfriend as the catalyst needed to get her out of a rut. When he unexpectedly dumps her, she decides to go anyway--by herself. I like that Vitus took a sharp turn away from standard 20-something romance drama and went in a very different direction. It's clear that this isn't just a series of observations on travel, but rather an attempt at using travel as a means of finding out what she really wants in life, and how to get it.

The fact that it took Vitus nearly four years to produce six 8-page minis just points to how much of a struggle it can be for a working artist to find the time to concentrate on their personal projects. Among other things, this mini is obviously Vitus' laboratory in attempting to grow as an artist. She changed her rendering style twice before settling on a look that seems to be a good fit. The first issue was a pretty clear-line affair; there weren't many blacks used, and she kept her figures fairly simple. I also noticed that Vitus loves to play with gesture, posture and expression as emotional cues; there's a squirminess to her stand-in character that reflects her own discomfort with the world, and at times, herself.

The second issue, which takes place in Italy, was much more heavily rendered than the first. At times, it was over-rendered. That killed a lot of the spontaneity on the page and made her figures look stiff. By the end of the third issue, she loosened up a bit, especially on a page where she gets goosed on a subway. In the sixth issue, Vitus does a nice job of keeping that spontaneity going while still getting across the beauty of the surrounding countryside. It's fitting that in a story about transformation, growth and becoming comfortable with oneself, Vitus the artist continues to grow and struggle with the lessons she learned as Vitus the character. The difference is that the story crystalized that moment into a series of epiphanies. The struggle to hold onto those feelings of self-discovery and relay it on paper continues to inform the way Vitus is slowly unfolding the story.

THE ROSIE STORIES, by Diana Tamblyn  As a storyteller, Tamblyn is clear, restrained, matter-of-fact and has an assured, bold line. After reading a number of stories involving teens or young adults, it was an interesting change of pace to read stories about becoming a mother. Tamblyn's tone is gushingly emotional and joyful; there's no attempt or thought of an attempt to put any distance between her plain feelings and the reader. She ameliorates that bluntness by using a couple of different techniques in these stories about her daughter. Tamblyn either tenderly narrates her stories in a realistic style, or else simplifies her line for stories told from her daughter's point of view. It's a more cartoony, John Stanley-esque style that's very appealing. Throughout the comic, there's a genuine warmth that comes across on each page. At times, it's a bit overwhelming for a reader.

While I can certainly appreciate how much a new mother loves her child, there's not much going on in the first story other than an expression of that love, along with trying to capture perfect moments. It felt more like something you'd send out to your relatives than work for the general public. The Rosie-as-narrator stories work a bit better, especially when Tamblyn introduces some light elements of conflict. The last story, where Tamblyn relates her paranoia regarding her child's safety and her own desire to become a better person, is the most interesting by far. There's a lot of skill and sincerity in this comic, but one senses that Tamblyn isn't sufficiently distanced from the initial event to write a compelling narrative about her experiences. I'd like to see her take cues from the last story in the mini and add a bit of perspective to what is obviously an amazing, life-changing odyssey.

DUMB JERSEY WHITE BOY #3, by Mark McMurray McMurray is a very strong storyteller, using a variety of approaches to give a powerful sense of time and place. His stories usually mix comic and horrific real-life events, and this issue is no exception. It's a collection of short stories about his father from various points in his life. The most accomplished is a short story he submitted to the SPX anthology some years back, and it's a beautifully-illustrated memory of his childhood. Young Mark is obsessed with the new Fantastic Four cartoon, which his father interrupts by talking about his failing marriage. While he weeps and holds his son, young Mark can only think that Jack Kirby was definitely involved in the cartoon! The stage is set for the other stories in the book, where McMurray displays a combination of ambivalence and bemused affection for his father. The latter stories were originally done as correspondence, and have the vibrancy that a quick sketchbook drawing possesses. McMurray has a very assured line and an excellent eye, and augments these skills with a keen sense of when to exaggerate and when to reel things in. As a writer, McMurray keeps a layer of humorous distance up when discussing his father--he talks about what his father has done or said, but never spells out his own feelings. He prefers to let the anecdotes speak for themselves, a tactic that works to his advantage.

PHASE 7 #11, by Alec Longstreth. This is a follow-up to PHASE 7 #10, wherein Longstreth starts to lay out his entire history of comics involvement. This issue picks up with Longstreth deciding to make creating comic books his life. The last issue was all about how he became immersed in comics and came to start drawing them, but this one focuses on how he developed his working method, the ways in which he started interacting (and drawing strength from) fellow cartoonists, and how he came to terms with his own publishing schedule. Longstreth uses a cute framing device to explain why he published issues out of order, giving a long and very specific autobiographical story some structure. What I find interesting about Longstreth is that while he acknowledges the huge debt he owes to those cartoonists who inspired him over the years, he doesn't seem to be quite aware yet of his own role in inspiring his peers. Simply put, it's rare to see an artist this completely devoted to his art, who thinks about it in terms of the years that are ahead of him, and who provides such a steadfast example of hard work being its own reward. The fact that he has such an enormous appetite for different kinds of storytelling and doesn't seem to favor one over another is also interesting; he's very much an "in-between" sort of artist. He lists BONE as his favorite comic ever, but is also a big fan of Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. Likewise, his comics go from gags to autobio to adventure, and his art ranges from stick-figure (inspired by Matt Feazell) to intensely cross-hatched and detailed; he refuses to impose limits on what he can do.

Even though he's already published quite a few comics, I get the sense that he's still working through his influences. As solid a craftsman and storyteller as he is, Longstreth is not yet an innovator or visionary as an artist. He's an artist that I think will plow through a series of "steady-states", wherein he will master a storytelling or artistic technique, and then face either a new problem to solve or influence to absorb and then adapt that into his routine. Eventually, these years of internalizing these adaptations through sheer hard work will coalesce into something we've never seen before. Until that time, his audience will have a great many unusual, enjoyable comics to read.

ANTELOPE EATER, by Juliacks. This is an intensely stylized, painful story of a young boy struggling with his mother's illness and her resentment towards him. What's most striking about this is the sophistication of the page design, coupled with raw, primitive art. The way Juliacks combines text and image on a page, such that the text should be seen both as part of the image and as a separate message, makes for an intimate, almost suffocating experience as a reader. The images are not pleasant, because the experience of watching one's mother die as she wishes you had never been born is certainly not pleasant. The boy retreats into fantasy, becoming a superhero who can save her. The images switch from purely grotesque to fanciful, though the tiny text reminds us of the painfulness of the experience. The last page, with a number of small panels that intersperse her vitals with images of a heart (acting as both literal and metaphorical agent), is shattering--especially, once again, with the way she integrates text into the image. Juliacks has a powerful voice, and the multitude of influences on her art (see her website) point to someone who can do some very interesting things in the world of comics.

THE OTHERS, by Matt Madden. Madden is well-known for his formalist experiments, devising whole stories around clever storytelling constructions. He seems endlessly interested in taking the basic format of comics--panel, page, images, letters, panel-to-panel transitions, point of view--and scrambling them so as to force the audience to see what's happening "backstage", so to speak. At the same time, he's able to imbue this interest with enough humanity to make these more than mere technical exercises. THE OTHERS is a brief, circular exercise in switching points-of-view. It reminds me a bit of the Richard Linklater film SLACKER in that we are privy to a character's narrative for a few moments, and then we sail off into another character's narrative when their paths cross. The difference is that as a comics audience, Madden gives us access to their interior, running monologue. Each character happens to be studying the next character, wondering about their histories and motivations. Starting with one young man in a cafe, we zip from character to character until we arrive back at the original character--and an attempt to make contact. "Other" here refers to our essential isolation as human beings, and how difficult (and often startling) it can be to try to genuinely break through that layer of alienation. Madden's line is as loose and sketchy as ever; I sense that he prefers that his work should look a bit fuzzy so as to provide less of a shock to the reader when he starts shuffling his formalist deck. Madden really found his voice doing these sorts of comics, and they're always satisfying to read--though they'll never have the emotional impact of more personal work.

THE OTHER SIDE and DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES, by JP Coovert and Hope Larson. These comics have modest ambitions, but the ambiguity in both made them linger a bit. THE OTHER SIDE is a seemingly simple look at a sleepover with two boys who are best friends. They scamper around their neighborhood at night in a carefree manner, peeking into the windows of various people. Until one of them spies a couple having sex--one of the boys is fixated, and the other gets nervous and wants to leave. This leads to an argument, accusations of being gay, and then an attempt to pretend the whole thing didn't happen. While never apologizing, I liked the way Coovert found ways for the characters to nonetheless reconnect without language--especially through the use of physical contact.

DOUBLE-YELLOW LINES is a beautifully-designed mini (black cover, black-embossed lettering, and 2 yellow lines to represent the highway) where Coovert and Hope Larson collaborated. Both stories reflect on each other, as they're both about the briefness of life and the painful awareness that it can be taken away at any time. Larson's story has her coming upon a rabbit that had been struck by a car . As she tried to comfort it, she noticed that the rabbit's mate saw them near the edge of the highway. The rabbit she held died, but the other was shooed away to safety, despite the obvious urge to search for his mate. Not for long, however--the rabbit returned, only to meet his own death on the highway, joining his mate. "Driving In The Rain" is about Coovert wondering where his better half is and getting a phone call from her that she'd been in a wreck. He raced to get her, worst-case scenarios burning through his thoughts, until he found her OK--and presented him with a touching romantic gesture. The sentiment of the story is a nice balance to the downbeat ending of Larson's half of the mini. It's the nature of mortality, that we're all essentially living on borrowed time, and this mini eloquently gets at that truth in just ten pages. Visually, Larson punctuates her bold black line with all sorts of decorative touches that act as narrative clues, while Coovert keeps things clear and simple. His art is all about economy of line and advancing the emotional narrative of his story with a minimum of fuss.

NEW CONSTRUCTION #1, by Kevin Huizenga Huizenga is a fast-rising star in the world of comics, with an Ignatz book (GANGES) from Fantagraphics and his own series (OR ELSE) and a collection (CURSES) from Drawn & Quarterly. However, he got his start with his minicomics series SUPERMONSTER, and he continues to make minis to work out ideas, provide anecdotes, and show off some interesting work from his sketchbook. There's a sense that this is autobiographical, because it's displaying ephemera and sketches straight from the cartoonists' pen, and a number of the pages are about his working methods.

A number of the strips here were "deleted scenes" from GANGES #1. I have no idea if he actually meant to include these scenes but didn't have room, drew them but decided they didn't fit, or did them after the fact as a lark, but they're all a hoot. That issue depicts the life of a couple at home, focusing on minutiae and moment-to-moment beats & rhythms. Both of the scenes depicted here were a lot more light-hearted than what we saw in the actual comic, and I can see why they weren't included. Still, it was fun to see Wendy Ganges tell Glenn to stop thinking sexualized thoughts about her, or see her fall on the floor laughing because of a trick Glenn was pulling with snacks. I also rather enjoyed the very odd "The Hundred Most People In America", a riff on celebrity and other such lists featuring a number of oddball characters and descriptions. Any fan of Huizenga should track down a copy.

ECLIPSE and THE ANATOMY OF US, by Karla Krupala. Krupala has serious chops as an artist. ANATOMY OF US is less a story than a self-described "work in progress", where she "sketched various relationships in states of disorder". The results are very interesting in this mini, but they've obviously not resulted in a coherent whole as of yet. Krupala likes static images and using them in unexpected ways. On one page, we see the back of a skeleton as a means of conveying a conveying a dialogue, doubling as an anatomical chart. On another page, we see a woman's legs, and her shadow is formed out of the word "take" repeated multiple times. Krupala seems to be emphasizing our essential aloneness and the near-impossibility of communication. In particular, words not only fail in trying to connect people together, they inevitably serve as weapons. ECLIPSE is a story set in outer space, but the themes are similar: loneliness, the possibility of connection, and the nature of that connection. I felt tantalized by these two minis, wanting to see more by the artist. I especially wanted to see her themes fleshed out a bit more in longer stories. Her development as an artist over the span of a year was remarkable, especially in terms of her figures. They became more assured and bolder in ANATOMY, though her composition in both comics was striking.

ALICE IN NEW YORK #4, by Henry Chamberlain. I reviewed the first two issues of this series in entry #10 of this column, and was happy to see this issue pop up in my mailbox. I missed #3, but it was easy to catch up with what happened. This is the conclusion of Chamberlain's love letter to New York and Lewis Carroll, and it's interesting to see how his art has matured. He uses a thick line but is nice and loose with his figures. There's a pleasing, sketchy quality to them that meshes well for the slightly dreamy quality he embues in his story. The theme of the story is allowing oneself to become open to an awakening of imagination and the possibilities therein. The Henry character is guarded and uncertain, but clearly wants to find ways to break out. This issue is essentially one long battle of wits with the object of his affection, a woman who challenges him to break free of his self-imposed, over-intellectualized restraints and assumptions. This issue is very talk-heavy, but Chamberlain counters that with big panels that are well-composed. The central conceit of the series, that characters from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND are secretly aiding Henry in opening himself up to a new world, is kept mostly to the edges of the story, allowing the issue's central dialogue to take precedence. It's a smart decision, because there was definitely a danger in those fantasy elements overwhelming the emotional thrust of the story. Instead, Chamberlain was able to present the story of a character who overthinks things a little too much, who was able to find a way to lose himself to the immediacy of experience.

THE HOOKAH GIRL VOLUME 1, by Marguerite Dabaie. The subtitle of this comic is "Growing Up Christian Palestinian In America", and Dabaie wastes little time in addressing some very sticky points about this subject. She cleverly begins this collection of brief stories and anecdotes with "Should/Am", which is a series of paper-doll cutouts. Dabaie goes from stereotype to stereotype, boldly drawing humor out of a cut-out of "Martyr" ("NOT in Israel To Sight-See!"), alongside "Muslim", "Seductress" (a harem girl costume), "Revolutionary" and finally "Hungry Artist". It's a direct shot across the bow to start a collection, and Dabaie makes her bluntness work by using dark humor and the convention of a child's activity.

The rest of the stories in the book range from light-hearted memories as a child to pointed observations on today's political climate. A story about her family stealing grape leaves from wine orchards (prefaced by the technique on how to roll a grape-leaf) was funny, as was a story about the ways in which Palestinian-Americans go to extremes in connecting with their culture. It's clear that Dabaie is conflicted on a number of matters relating to the Palestinian cause. In a story about hijacker Leila Khaled, it's obvious that Dabaie is drawn to her because she was a woman who acted boldly in the Arab world, and not just because she drew media attention to the Palestinian cause. There's another story called "The BestEST Joke" where someone tells her a Palestinian joke (not knowing that she was half-Palestinian), and she doesn't know how to react.
My favorite story in the collection was "NOW", an acidic critique of Americans using the kaffiyeh, a traditional piece of cloth, as a fashion statement. ("Go against 'the man' Now. In style!") I think Dabaie is currently most skilled as a satirist; she has an elegant thin-line in those drawings that really brings out the cutting humor in her concepts. I also admire her simplified, stripped-down style that she used in "The BestEST Joke" and the grape leaf story. The stories using thicker blacks are somewhat less successful visually, feeling slightly over-rendered and drawn with a less confident hand. Still, Dabaie was bold in trying so many different styles for her first collection of work, and she has a strong storytelling voice. Her point of view and experiences are also obviously unusual in the world of comics, but it's not just that point of view that makes her distinctive as an artist. Her brains, sense of humor, and graphic design sense are the engine that manages to link her memories and opinions in such a bold presentation. I'm eager to see how she grows as an artist.

STABBED! and BERNIE, by Cheryl Gladstone. These autobiographical comics score major points for being really funny. Gladstone uses her background to generate laughs out of family drama, thanks mostly to the outsized personality that is her mom, Bernie. She's a "Jewlipino", a rare person who is both Jewish and Filipino. In BERNIE, Gladstone does a series of one-page gag strips with Bernie's point of view on all sorts of things. My favorite is Bernie telling young Cheryl that she was adopted, even though she wasn't. Another strip, "Motherly Advice" has Bernie offering dating advice to Cheryl's sister: "No blowjobs!" STABBED! relates another crazy anecodte: Cheryl's brother and mother both threaten to kill themselves as a means of trying to one-up each other. Her brother finally tops her by impulsively stabbing himself in the leg, which is a cold dose of reality for everyone. That bit of insanity leads everyone to cope the best they can: Bernie starts organizing her shoe closet, Cheryl starts writing in her livejournal, and her sister goes shopping. BERNIE is the later mini, and it shows. Gladstone's line is both bolder and simpler. It's much more assured, with better panel composition. STABBED! loses some of its comedic impact simply because the figures are shakier, and Gladstone tries to compensate by overrendering the backgrounds. BERNIE is more successful on a visual level simply because Gladstone makes sure to emphasize her characters above all else. She has a strong comedic voice and manages to evoke humor from a situation without relying on distancing herself from the reader. Reading these two comics made me want to see more from her.

KING-CAT #66, by John Porcellino. To say that John Porcellino is a revered figure in minicomics circles is an understatement. He long ago mastered an economy of line that strips away everything but what is essential, especially in terms of emotional content. His stories range from standard narratives to wisps of memory to story poems, all grasping at getting across the sublime on paper. "Football Weather" is a lighthearted story about playing football with the neighborhood kids, with more funny moments than the usual Porcellino story. I especially liked the revulsion he felt at the possibility of having to play on a team called "The Packers", given his status as a life-long Bears fan. I love the way this story looks--the stripped-down lines still depicting action and motion so well, various emotions shown with just a line or squiggle, and the way he creates a rainy fall atmosphere. It's beautiful and evocative. This issue is like a Porcellino primer, because he goes from a straight-ahead story like "Football Weather" to an illustrated poem in "Blue Light" to an almost wordless meditation on scenery in "Freeman Kame". Porcellino writes many of his stories on a small scale--a memory here, an anecdote or observation there. It's that very scale that creates an intimacy and warmth for a reader, that slowly lets us understand Porcellino's point of view instead of him jamming it into our faces. The urge to create autobiographical work is often a narcissistic one, wherein the creator is the most important "character" in their story. Porcellino manages to side-step that tendency by neither overselling nor underselling himself, but rather by revealing himself to be a small but not insignificant part of the world--just like everyone and everything else.

Minicomics: Morgan Pielli, Andy Warner, Sean Collins/Colleen Frakes

This minicomics round-up focuses on the end of the world, paranoia and dread.

The Creeping Things, by Andy Warner. Warner is a talented young cartoonist who's especially adept at drawing children and their concerns. This story is about two young brothers after they've moved to a new town. The older brother is consumed by his own fantasy life in the face of being unable to cope with the world shoves his way. The younger brother is far more happy-go-lucky but worships his brother, which means that he's swept up in that fantasy world as well. This comic is heavy on atmosphere and the older brother's constant (and frequently justified) feeling of dread; he channels events such as being beaten up on the playground into a monster tracking him and his brother, with only a "fortress" they have built protecting them. That fortress, a pile of rocks they build out in the forest near their house, proves to be crucial in the story's climax. The older brother constantly tells his younger brother to "be brave", despite (or because of, really) his own cowardice. That cowardice leads to the tragic events at the end of the book, which finally lead the older brother to cry for help. Whether or not help actually comes is beside the point of the story, because this is about the danger of using others to mediate your own fears.

Indestructible Universe Quarterly #9, by Morgan Pielli. This is another compelling issue of Pielli's one-man horror anthology, one that was recently collected in a volume that reprints the first nine issues of the series. Pielli has a strong sense of design and an understanding of how those choices affect mood. "Benson, Arizona" is a multi-media project of sorts, taking the lyrics of a song and expanding them into a story about an astronaut allowed only one visit with his earthbound lover, now old and gray after he first left on his trip. While the actual lyrics are on the mawkish side, Pielli counters that with sober, striking images (like his lover's picture on a pack of cigarettes) and blunt character design (like thick, rectangular eyebrows and a bushy beard). "City of Crowns" is fascinating in its mythology regarding royalty and the redistribution of wealth, though it suffers a bit from cramped imagery. I would have liked to have seen the simple design of the first story or else a bigger format. "Quantum" and "Dreams of Suicide" are thematically related and raw stories. The latter may be a personal anecdote where someone wakes up relieved that their mother's suicide was real, that she hadn't faked her death and put him in a position where he'd have to deal with her death all over again. It's a brutal, grim and absolutely honest expression of feeling. The former story is about a provocateur who murders quantum versions of himself but nudging them toward suicide, a sick pastime that comes with the nagging feeling that his "superior" will one day order him to do the same. Pielli still has some rough edges to take off his visual approach, but there's no question that he's a compelling storyteller.

Here At The End Of All Things, by Sean T Collins and Colleen Frakes. This is a collaboration between one of my fellow critics at tcj.com and a favorite CCS cartoonist in Frakes. As a writer, Collins likes to stretch out genre concerns with regard to horror and examine particular angles. This story is about the apocalypse in the form of deadly vegetation that's creeping all around the world, told through the eyes of a man just trying to get home to his love. The tone is reminiscent of a Zak Sally comic, with single panel images narrated by big block text at the bottom (sort of like some stories from Sally's Recidivist). Frakes' brush is all about big, bold strokes and thick black lines with cartoony figures, and it was interesting to see her work in such a directly visceral style. There's usually more restraint in her stories, but Collins needed her to work more broadly and it worked. Collins offers the reader a sliver of hope at the end, but it's implied that it's only a sliver. I'd be interested in seeing this duo work together again.

Sequart Reprints: 10 Great Minis From MoCCA 2005

This article was originally published in 2005 at sequart.com. It was my first-ever column on minicomics.
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Readers only vaguely familiar with the concept of mini-comics will be relieved to know that it's nearly impossible to pin down what is and isn't a mini-comic. Generally, they are small (but not always), usually relatively brief (anywhere between 8 and 80 pages), hand-made, frequently self-published, and often with personal touches like silk-screened covers, hand-stitched bindings, etc. Often, they serve as a sort of proving ground for young and/or inexperienced artists, though there are several accomplished artists who publish nothing but minicomics. The line between minicomics and zines is often blurred, but they often share similar content, a similar aesthetic, and the same sort of autobiographical self-expression.

The ten mini-comics I picked for this list were chosen based on how substantial they were (I skipped over some worthy 8-12 page minis simply because there wasn't enough "there" there), notable aesthetic or narrative qualities (preferably both), and formal elements unique to the world of minicomics. The artists range from absolute newcomers to those who have books from major publishers.

1. VAGABONDS #1.5: OF TWO MINDS, by Josh Neufeld (http://www.JoshComix.com). $2, 16 pages. Neufeld recently won a Xeric grant for A FEW PERFECT HOURS, distributed by Alternative. It's a collection of travel comics he had done over the years in his two-man anthology, KEYHOLE, and various other places. But Neufeld is also well known for doing a number of collaborative works (AMERICAN SPLENDOR the highest profile), and this mini is an exceptional collection of such stories. Neufeld adapts the poetry of several authors to comics, the most notable being "Time of Arrival". This is a single page with a 4x6 panel grid arrangement. The entire grid taken as a whole is an airplane, and Neufeld chops up the words of the poem into individual panels that comprise the plane. It's a clever formal trick and an effective means of getting across the poem's intent. Neufeld also did a story drawn with his non-dominant hand, imagining that such a person existed in his mirror and setting the story from the point of view of that character, and also draws a page using dialogue from an issue of Superman and completely recontextualizes its meaning with his new art. The mini is attractively packaged and extensively notated.

2. SATISFACTORY COMICS #6, by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe (isaac.cates@aya.yale.edu). $3, 28 pages plus extras. Full disclosure: Mike Wenthe is a long-time friend of mine. However, the work that he and his partner have produced speaks for itself. The duo has long thrived on experimentation with the form for their attractive minis, with other participants drawing panels for inclusion, providing built-in story constraints or throwing in random elements for the Cates-Wenthe team to work into their stories. As one might expect, jam comics are frequently better in theory than in practice, and some of their stories suffer from a lack of narrative cohesion. However, their output in the last year or so has shown considerable and sustained growth. Their latest effort is so jam-packed with different kinds of stories, ideas and clever geegaws that the result is a sort of miniature version of the comics issue of McSweeney's that Chris Ware edited. This issue features two comics based on a map created by a group of creators; an autobiographical story about online game addiction; a detective story wherein each page must mirror the form of a stanza of a sestina; an adaptation of Job 41, and a minicomic tucked into the front cover and a random shuffle comic paperclipped into the back.

3. NO PUNCHBACKS, by Kelly Denato & Christine Nimocks (http://www.nopunchbacks.com). $5, 28 pages. Amazingly, this is the debut comic for this duo, although initially No Punchbacks Press contained more contributors. Denato is an animator by trade, and it shows in her story, "Nanni-Nanni Boo-Boo". It's a wordless tale about a man who buys a bird and a fish from a pet shop whom are already friends, and how the fish is taken away. Her style resembles CHUNKY RICE-era Craig Thompson and Sara Varon, with a clean, assured line creating a cartoony world. Nimocks is a fine artist whose style and content is radically different than Denato's. She employs a scribbly line and deals with more autobiographical subjects, including internet dating. This is a remarkably accomplished first comic, with attractive packaging and smart storytelling. Interestingly, the duo was inspired by past visits to MoCCA to create their own comic.

4. SEE SAW, by Sara Edward-Corbett (http://www.greenfog.com, http://www.partykausa.com). $8, 35 pages plus extras. The artist is the most impressive member of the Partyka collective, and her strips here are reprinted from the New York Press. She uses a thin, precise line but balances this with heavy blacks and cross-hatching, giving these tales of schoolchildren an extra weight. The strips are about brother & sister Georgie & Olga, psychopathic Chucky and lovesick Meals. Georgie is an ultra-intelligent little nebbish, while his sister is constantly paranoid. Her dreams of being killed by a gangster octopus (complete with mask) are vivid, and while we feel her fear, the whole set-up is still hilarious. The comic is hand-stitched, with a "cootie-catcher" enclosed in the back.

5. APOLLO ASTRO #9: JOURNEY OF GEORGE, by Jack Turnbull. (http://www.jackturnbull.com). $5, 30 pages. Turnbull abandons his anthology-style for his mini and devotes an issue to his Walking George Potato character. The simplicity of the George and Veggie characters are balanced by Turnbull's lavish backgrounds and the Dreaded Bellpepper Storm Toucan, not to mention a gorgeous silkscreened cover It's a simple story, well-told, that owes as much to Dr Seuss as it does to Chris Ware. Turnbull's biggest strength is his ability to draw out every ounce of expression from his characters using just a few lines. He took a chance using characters that had mostly inhabited one-off strips and plugged them into a larger narrative, and it worked well. This issue is part one of a larger story.

6. COUCH TAG #2, by Jesse Reklaw. (http://www.hobocomics.com). $2, 20 pages. Reklaw is the artist of the syndicated dream strip, SLOW WAVE. This mini has a simple premise: it's about the thirteen different cats Reklaw had during his childhood. What makes this such a great read is that this is really an autobiographical account of his family, but telling it through the device of when certain pets were around and making that the focus of the narrative makes the side details all the more intriguing. Little touches like designing different logos for each cat's introduction and skipping long periods of time between pets make this a great read.

7. THESE THINGS THESE THINGS, by Jeffrey Brown. (http://www.theholyconsumption.com). $4, 36 pages. Brown's scratchy art style and his focus on his love life in his major works for Top Shelf have made him a love him or leave him sort of artist. Personally, I can't get enough of his comics and their lack of adornment when dealing with major drama. Beyond his graphic novels, his minis are often just as compelling for very different reasons. Brown lets his sense of humor show more in his minis, and tells different kinds of stories. This mini deals with some of the events in ANY EASY INTIMACY, providing a sort of closure as Brown deals with yet another broken relationship, the quest to find the artist who performed a particular song, and a book tour with some fellow artists.

8. SUMMA CUM LAUDE, by Eve Englezos & Josh Moutray. (http://www.icecreamlandia.com). 10 pages. The comics that this duo creates are unlike anything else out there today. This latest work, a little bridge between issues of the sublimely strange Icecreamlandia, is designed to look like a minature diploma case. As you open it up, the pages fold out accordian-style, revealing a bizarre science fair. For some reason, the adults are all in 18th century aristocratic dress (complete with powdered wigs and corsets). The dialogue follows from this absurd set-up ("Why, yes, it seems pretty obvious to me now that the dinosaurs were in 3-D.") As always, the realistic, clear-line art belies the insanity of the set-up.

9. A CASE IN TOKYO, by Damien Jay. $10, 22 pages. This comic wins the "most beautiful mini" award, hands-down. Printed on a heavy cardstock and hand-assembled, the coloring process used to illustrate this creepy little story makes the whole thing feel like a children's book gone horribly wrong. The story describes a mental patient who in fact may be possessed, and the momentary clarity she displayed in this state. Her clarity was so incisive that everyone couldn't stand to be around her, until the spell faded and "she became a stupid person once again." While a very quick read, the visuals alone make this a worthwhile purchase. Jay gets the most out of the minicomic format, using every hand-crafted trick in the book.

10. ISOLATION CHAMBER #2, by Ed Piskor (wimpyrutherford@hotmail.com). $1.50, 16 pages. Of the comics on this list, this is the only diary strip. Diary strips (much like personal zines or blogs) can get boring quickly if the author simply devotes it to standard quotidian concerns. It's important to establish some sort of angle early on to differentiate it from other kinds of autobiography. Piskor does this through establishing his voice loud and clear in the early going: he's a curmudgeon who knows a lot of strange people, and isn't afraid to dish. He manages to inject sincerity into his description of his relationship with his baby sister without seeming overly sentimental. He struggles with what to put in his journal and what to censor, some interesting interactions with his parents, and a local group of comics creators. There are weird stories about his interactions with junkies, talks with Harvey Pekar and his feelings about becoming semi-famous. At the end, Piskor announces that the cartoon journal took up all of his time and discontinued it--an interesting statement in itself. Piskor is a real talent and has an interesting voice; it'll be interesting to see what he does after he finishes up his work with Harvey Pekar.