Life and Death: Keiler Roberts and Jason Walz

Powdered Milk, by Keiler Roberts. The thing that sets apart Keiler Roberts' autobio comics from others is the resonance of her authorial voice. She's got this direct, firm, dry but funny and slightly detached way of looking at the world and herself. The early strips in this collection of minicomics are a bit more free-flowing regarding her family history, journeys through time to meet her younger self, etc, but things really get cooking when she announces that she's pregnant. Roberts eventually reveals in a fairly nonchalant manner that she had previously had a miscarriage, an event that induces a lot of anxiety that carries through her pregnancy and into her first year of motherhood. Indeed, this comic is a fascinating account of managing post-partum depression along with a curious kind of neurological disconnection, like her peripheral vision creating weird illusions and forgetting the names of everyday objects. Through it all, Roberts maintains a wicked and even occasionally abrasive sense of humor, like in a strip that's supposedly about her being wrong but is later revealed to be partially fictitious on her part (the fictitious part being that she was sorry!).

Seeing someone as witty and vital as she is absolutely fall apart is jarring, like when her mother asks her why she's crying and she says "I have no idea. It's what I do." Her anxiety prevents her from sleeping, which only ramps up anxiety and depression even more. What's interesting is the dispassionate way she records all of this information, almost as if it was happening to someone else. Eventually, partly through the intervention of therapy & medicine and partly through the passage of time, she snaps out of it. While the book never got heavy or maudlin while she was discussing her illness (Roberts has the instincts of a gagsmith and kept that up throughout), there's a noticeable lightness in her work after her daughter turned one and eventually started to talk. Kids are an endless font of random, funny nonsense and Roberts adapted only the best material for this section. I admire Roberts' low-fi, simple pencil drawings. Everything about her work eschews fussiness and frills, leaving only the meat of her sharp observations about herself and others, observations that spare no one while still softening a little of the impact with affection and humor.

Homesick, by Jason Walz. On paper, Homesick should have been the sort of book I dislike. Cancer comics in general can be a cheap way to create drama on the page while deifying flawed human beings who happen to suffer from a disease. While there have been some excellent comics that dealt with cancer (like Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner), most tend to gloss over the very real emotional and personal collateral damage that the disease can create. Thankfully, Walz goes in a different direction here, using three separate devices to tell his story. First, there's the dream/metaphor of a cosmonaut dying in space, trying to get in contact with someone back on earth. That thought is put into Walz' head by one of his students, who told them about some mysterious signals in space that some thought might have been a failed Soviet manned space mission. Second is the straightforward account of his mother's latest bout with cancer coming at a time when Walz should have been at his happiest, thanks to getting engaged. Her eventual deterioration and the way the family came together were all pretty standard fare for this kind of story, but understandably necessary. The details of her struggle were actually underplayed with due restraint, if anything.

The third storytelling arm was the most interesting to me. Walz reveals his sickly childhood, having suffered from epileptic seizures that especially manifested if he came into any rough contact to his head. His mother protected him in such a manner that left him not only forever grateful and close to her, but in some ways left him very much a child. I found this to be a refreshingly honest and open take on why we are sometimes so reluctant to let loved ones go: because we need them and don't know what we'd do without them. The cosmonaut metaphor was Walz's way of mediating this intense fear and disconnect, allowing him to find a way to let go and thus become an adult. The story of his mother and the story of the cosmonaut are both narratives about an inevitable fate and how it can be navigated. Walz doesn't make his mother out to be a hero, saint or noble figure because of her disease; she's simply a very good mother who never stopped being a good mother, even when he didn't need her in the same way. Walz's book acknowledges this and his cosmonaut device allows him to acknowledge his own fears without seeming maudlin or selfish. His art is very self-assured, with pull-quote contributor Jeff Lemire an obvious influence. Walz's uses of slightly cartoony and distorted figures, along with blank eyes, gives his work an extra layer of distance from the intensity and desperation of the emotions felt, which worked perfectly for this story. On the other side of things, Walz connects with the reader by showing them how he became engaged to his future wife in a wordless sequence and what life is like as someone who teaches kids on the autism spectrum. Both sequences serve the narrative in specific ways, but the way he drew them out also gave us a sense of who he is now as a person, in contrast to his childhood flashbacks. In terms of narrative structure, thematic structure and emotional structure, this is a strong, effective and touching book and a solid debut.

Sequart Reprints: The Ignatz Line: Sally, Igort, Giandelli, Sala

I've stated more than once that the Ignatz line of comics are undervalued and underdiscussed. The all-star lineup of artists (matched with an exquisite format, nice paper and top-notch production values) delivers issue after issue of superb reading. It's a particular treat to be exposed to so many non-American artists, especially the Italian artists whose work is particularly flattered by this format. I'm guessing the price point scares off some readers ($8 for 30 or 40 pages), as does the fact that these are serialized comics, not "graphic novels". These books, in my view, have single-handed revitalized the relevance of comics as periodicals, even if their overall impact has been muted.

Let's start with Delphine #3, the latest issue in Richard Sala's demented take on the Snow White fairy tale, told from the perspective of the male lead. The way that Sala obliquely refers to Snow White (a poisonous apple, deranged dwarves, a menacing forest) while reframing the story as a Sala-style tale of horror is truly inspired. As much as this book is a dark reworking of a fairy tale, it's also very much touches on horror-movie tropes. The protagonist experiences multiple dream fake-outs (twice dreaming he was reunited with his lost love Delphine, and twice waking to horror), unexplained danger (he'e never given the slightest clue as to what's happening or why), and an array of grotesque but familiar creatures who dog his every step. Sala's scratchy, wobbly line is a perfect fit for this kind of fractured fairy tale, both cartoony and grotesque. The brown color tone contributes to the dirty, grungy feel of this story.

The main weakness of this issue is that it felt much less like a complete story (which Sala had managed in the first two issues) and very much like a whiplash ride that leads to a cliffhanger. The hero met the one figure from Snow White we hadn't yet seen in the story (the wicked Queen), and it'll be interesting to see how Sala wraps up the story. Sala's protagonists are always very active and propulsive, but their actions don't necessarily always lead up to solutions. Given the relentless darkness of the series to date, it'll be interesting to see if the hero manages to actually find Delphine, and if so, what the nature of their reunion will be like.

Baobab #3, by series editor Igort, is another pitch-perfect, achingly beautiful comic. Igort's sense of composition alone is worth the price of admission; BAOBAB is the most strikingly attractive of the Ignatz books, where every page is worthy of simply being stared at. This is a deliberately-paced story involving multiple threads and locations and will take a while, I'm sensing to fully coalesce. Most of the action has centered on cartoonist Celestino of the fictional South American island nation of Parador. Thus far, Igort has thrown the kitchen sink at the reader in terms of themes, motifs and storytelling concerns.

The storyline involving Celestino is about the power of comics (including many pages of Celestino's own comics), the struggle to create art, the way art survives under an oppressive government, the nature of friendship and family, the relationship between science and spirituality, and the ways in which the unconscious guides everything. There's a sequence in which a mesmerist accidentally coaxes Celestino into confessing his love for his longtime friend Tecla that fits perfectly with Igort's exploration of spiritualist practices of the early 20th century and his obvious affection for his characters. On top of everything else, Igort's use of negative space is ingenious. In one panel where Celestino describes bad news as though he "had been kicked in the face by a willful mule", Igort draws an image of a man being kicked (with a starburst impact) by a donkey, the men rendered only in terms of shadow and light. He returned twice more to that particular visual motif, going from violence to understanding to cooperation.

We also get another glimpse of the young Japanese boy Hiroshi, who learns that his grandmother is dying. These pages incorporate some traditions of Japanese art, like the emphasis on landscape vs figure drawing, where the background becomes an important character in its own right. It's a bit frustrating as a reader to be given so little forward momentum regarding this part of the story, but the key to engaging BAOBAB is simply to enjoy the ride as best as possible without worrying too much about where things are headed.

In the last pages of Interiorae #3, the languidly-paced bit of mythology by Gabriella Giandelli, we finally start to get an explanation of why there was an anthropomorphic rabbit feeding dreams to a creature living in an apartment building's basement. This is a comic with a number of sharp contrasts that don't fully emerge until after it's been read. It's the story of the lives of the people in the building: quotidian dramas that seem like life and death to them, but seem rather quiet and muted when compared to this mysterious, ominous mythological narrative. The creature that feeds on dreams is a kind of godlike being, and the rabbit is his go-between. The implication is that he's performing some kind of service, and the fact that some people are able to detect him is a bad sign. The figures are simply but expressively, but the intensity of the hatching and shading on each page adds a sort of neurotic underpinning to everyone's lives. What seemed like the most rambling and episodic book in the Ignatz line may well end up having one of its most conventional narratives; the next issue will conclude the series.

Zak Sally's comics have always had a powerfully visceral quality to them, especially with regard to pain and confusion. I'm not talking about emotional pain, but rather the feel of splitting headaches, bones splintering, waves of nausea and the like. What's more is that he's able to play these sensations off for dark laughs, like in his gloriously rambling Sammy The Mouse #2. The opening sequence, where poor Sammy is in a field and gets poked in the head by the finger of god, was a hilarious one--especially when he's jolted out of a fitful sleep and awakes with a deadly hangover. Sally structurally takes us back to the first issue, where an unwelcome visitor demands that Sammy leave his house, and a voice from above tells him he must do so.

Like in the previous issue, the person rousting him from sleep is a lunatic. This time, it's a woman that Sammy has never met who insists that she knows him and must drag him off to a picnic. Sally's line is gloriously ragged and expressive, once again evoking a world suggestive of classic comic strips, only much grimier and more frightening. Sammy is constantly being propelled forward against his will, but finds ways to bend back against that influence. The woman (who oddly wears a fake mustache to look more "exotic") is an especially frustrating influence: she claims to know him, demands his time, never listens and never stops shouting enthusiastically. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of weirdness going on in the background: a short man with sharp teeth emerging from the ocean (who in the last issue mysteriously fired a gun), the disappearance of Sammy's friend Puppy-Boy, and some kind of oceanic prison. Above all else, it's frequently gruesomely funny. The scene where a rabbit buries a nail into the forehead of a drunken duck who was taunting him made me both flinch and laugh, which roughly sums up the experience of reading this book so far. I'm not sure where the narrative is going, but Sally's stories, no matter how odd they may seem, tend to eventually cohere.

New Scales: Transposes

Artist Dylan Edwards has broken new and important ground in his Northwest Press-published book, Transposes.In documenting the lives of seven queer female to male transgender individuals (QFTM), Edwards explodes the myth of binary sexuality and opens up the need to see sexuality, sexual identity, sexual preference, etc as something that is fluid and unique to each individual. Sexual preference and sexual identity are frequently not the same thing, as its repeatedly discussed in this book. The book is full of people born as women who identify as men, but just because they identify as men doesn't mean that they're attracted to women. The book also touches on other sexuality scales, like monogamy vs polyamory as well as kinky vs non-fetishistic sex, but the real focus is on identity and desire.

The book gets off to a rough start thanks to an awkward, borderline embarrassing comedy strip that sees Edwards as an announcer, talking about the book. I get that he wanted to start with a laugh for anyone uncomfortable with the content of the book, but it fell totally flat. It sounded a discordant note because the strip was so painfully dire, and I was worried about how he was going to go about crafting the true stories of the seven people he interviewed for the book. Fortunately, Edwards quickly recovers once we get into each story, and he cleverly arranges each narrative in a manner that reflects the subject. For example, for "Henry", a genderfluid individual who is attracted to both men and women, Edwards crafts a museum of exhibits devoted solely to Henry as a framing device. It fits Henry's OCD nature like a glove, and the result is a hilarious story that demonstrates that labels are arbitrary and sometimes dangerous.

"Cal's' story leads off the book, and it's the most straightforward: a QFTM recalls an encounter with a gay man who wanted to be topped by a pre-op trans man. So a few jokes about buying new equipment later, Cal felt good about being able to satisfy his partner and fulfill such a masculine role. "Adam's" story is all too familiar in trans circles: a woman who initially identified as straight because she was attracted to men comes out as a lesbian later on. Her girlfriend starts to understand that Adam has unresolved gender issues, and when he comes to terms with his real identity as a QFTM, it's time to break up. "Blake's" story is also all too familiar, as a new QFTM fools around with a hot guy and contracts an STD for his trouble. "Avery's" story is more complex, as he's poly in part because his "primary partner" is his dissertation, and he drew inspiration from a gay uncle and scorn from a highly homophobic father. The best-constructed piece in the book belongs to Aaron and James. We follow the timeline of the former at the top of the page and the latter at the bottom until they eventually converge when they become a monogamous couple enjoying marital and domestic bliss. Both took very long routes to their current lives (Aaron had a son when he was a woman), pointing out once again that attempts to put sexuality in a box are fraught with danger. Edwards' line is serviceable; the key to making the book work is that he's quite good at being able to draw many different kinds of faces. The figures are a bit stiff at times and there's an occasional lack of fluidity going from panel to panel and page to page, but he makes up for it with his clever page design. More importantly, he did a fine job of turning interviews into stories that read well as stories, as opposed to polemics or simple dry biography.

Delving In: Eric Kostiuk Williams and Mardou

Hungry Bottom Comics: 2Fags 2Furious, by Eric Kostiuk Williams.  First of all, this is clearly the title of the year. Williams is a fantastic young talent whose debut mini was remarkable. There were a number of clever takes on autobio in that comic, which doubled as a soul-searching session. This issue tilts even more in that direction, as the Eric who floated through the gay hookup scene in Toronto found himself increasingly uncomfortable with what he was doing and his own identity. The issue starts with a hilarious take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, with "bears" being used in its alternate meaning in a manner that was both funny and endearing. The problem with the story is that it was fictional in every sense; Williams doesn't have that kind of relationship right now, and in fact took a step back into celibacy.

That celibacy was less a deprivation than it was a kick-start to start exploring different aspects of himself and his community. In "Christeene", Williams discusses his first time doing full drag, with assistance from a close friend not yet comfortable with "dressing out". Williams' fractured panel placement, exquisite decorative touches and rock-solid rendering mesh perfectly on page after page, creating a tumultuous but exciting world of discovery. The account of the concert by trans performer Christeene is hilarious and outrageous: glam rock at its most transgressive. In each of the following chapters, Williams picks up a new persona, all armed with a long knot of hair: Goldilocks, her Britney-esque drag persona, her celibate nun persona, and a masked X-Man, defending him against a world that hates and fears him. That's the persona that responds to gay-bashing and homophobia he encountered on the streets of "tolerant" Toronto, thanks in part to the fluidity of his own gender identity. He points out that the oppressiveness of some aspects of gay culture made him almost as uncomfortable as the heteronormative culture he so dearly wanted to escape. In the end, he notes that there has to be something in-between celibacy and the hook-up culture, and it's obvious that he still has work to do on himself in order to be comfortable and confident with all of these identities while presenting them in public. I loved the way how Williams once again used comics to take a good long look at himself, merging his fantasies and his fears while articulating both in an entertaining, fluid and honest manner. There's no question that he's already become one of the most exciting autobio artists out there.

Sky In Stereo #2, by Mardou.Mardou's coming-of-age story is so true-to-life that it hurts. After a first issue tracking Iris, a young woman in college who works at a fast-food joint for extra money and has an unrequited crush, this issue follows her on an acid trip. I've read many a comic depicting the experience, but Mardou's take is impeccably accurate in so many ways. She captures that sense of being the only person in the world who's awake at 4am, the way that the rapidly approaching light of a sunrise can be a visually stunning experience,and most especially the way that a first acid trip can be a game-changer in terms of how one looks at the world. She also captures how the return to "consensus reality" can be rocky and unpleasant and how long it can take to truly adjust to the filters and guards we put up to defend ourselves from the world. Of course, the simple act of taking a drug doesn't really change anything but one's point of view, and the feeling of just how Important one's thoughts and feelings are on the experience are always exaggerated and often seem silly in the cold light of day.

The other aspect of the comic that was devastatingly effective was the reaction of Iris' mother when she failed to show up for work. The desperation and gratitude in her eyes when Iris told her the truth was heartbreaking, and Mardou captured it perfectly in the way she drew the mother's slightly bulging eyes. The thought that Iris had at that moment, that she wished her mother had covered herself up better, was hilariously and perfectly apt. Throwing her mom's obtuse and abusive boyfriend into the mix (who says charming things like "Right now, I don't care if you live or die") gets at the heart of Iris' central feelings of self-hatred and an overall lack of self-worth. Mardou's always had a knack for getting at real and unpleasant human interactions, but she's truly outdone herself in this series and this issue in particular. This issue was published by Rina Ayuyang's increasingly ambitious Yam Books, which has been releasing an interesting mix of full-length books and minicomics.

Sequart Reprints: More MOCCA minicomics (2005)

As I've noted before, it's always a bit awkward reviewing and analyzing comics whose main purpose is being funny. They either make you laugh or they don't, but examining exactly why this is like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. That said, let's take a look at some recent humor minicomics and the different approaches they used.

Summer Fun With Elroy P Dinner is a mini that's an excerpt from an upcoming issue of Sam Henderson's Magic Whistle. Henderson is probably the preeminent gagmaster in this generation of cartoonists. In particular, he's a master at subverting situational humor, either by upending expectations, taking situations to their logical extremes, or by stacking so many absurd elements on top of each other that he destroys any semblance of logic or structure. This mini is his technique in microcosm. It's about a bearded restaurant critic who only gives good reviews to restaurants where everyone involved is wearing a beard. The restaurant owner panders to him by forcing everyone (including customers) to wear fake beards, then has to pander to a pirate food critic and a cowboy yodeling food critic. He then throws in the fact that the restaurant is famous for cat food sandwiches and takes us to the cat food factory (owned by a talking cat, of course). This insanity is made all the more effective by Henderson's crude but expressive characters, all of whom just look inherently funny to my eyes. Henderson flogs a premise until it starts to lose all meaning, and this commitment to a joke while finding a thousand different ways to warp it is what makes him a master. Check out http://magicwhistle.com for more.

Matt Wiegle of the Partyka group checks in with Your Karate Vacation. Wiegle's sense of humor is usually a bit dry, but he goes for all-out silliness in this comic. This is an 8-page mini that combines martial arts cliches with travelogue banalities, and the result is very funny. The cover image shows a karate warrior with his leg up, ready to strike--but with a martini balanced on it and standing on a beach. Every page is its own gag, and they're all funny. The best might be one captioned "Some tips on the use of public transportation:" for a diagram that shows our karate master leaping from the street to on top of a passing bus. Wiegle doesn't go for the kitchen sink like Henderson does, instead, he juxtaposes two unlike things and wrings every bit of humor out of them.

As Eavesdropped, Vol 2 by Suzanne Baumann depicts out-of-context scenes and overheard conversations. This works well because of Baumann's timing and rubbery style that gives the eye something to latch onto. The best story is about a movie theatre cashier who receives a compliment from an elderly woman about her politeness, only to get savagely critiqued when she reveals that she's 26, not a teenager: "Why on earth are you working HERE?" This mini is short and sweet, with a great premise.

Speaking of great premises, Teen Boat  #7 continues to follow the ridiculous adventures of the boy who can turn into a boat. John Green and Dave Roman take every 80's-movie cliche and pack them into one comic: the whiny hero who gets great advice from his female best friend who has an unrequited crush on him, the jock who gets all the girls he has a crush on, etc. The fact that he can turn into a boat (and is obsessed with nautical terms) is what makes this comic irresistible. The best thing about this issue, where Teen Boat tries to learn how to drive a car to impress a girl (with predictably disastrous results), is that "TB" is self-centered, obnoxious and a narcissist. This only makes him much funnier, as the audience actually enjoys him getting his comeuppance. I can't wait til this series gets collected, because it's going to be a dynamite "gateway comic" for a lot of readers. Check out http://www.myspace.com/teenboat for more.

Tom Gauld takes a completely different tact in Guardians of the Kingdom. He's deadpan and dry, but gets all sorts of laughs out of this story of two guards defending a wall from invaders that never come. They build snowmen, throw rocks, brew tea, piss off the wall--anything to alleviate boredom and their simultaneous need for each other's company and resentment of same. Gauld is known for his spare lines, but there's a lushness to this comic, thanks to the manic work he did crosshatching and shading so many of the pages. This comic is beautiful and wistful, but I found myself chuckling on every page as well. I picked up my copy from Buenaventura Press.

Most of the folks in this article are polished veterans. That's why reading Alexander Rocine's Binge of the Space Pig was just an unusual pleasure, because this comic obviously just flowed from the pen of a young artist who just wanted to draw something that made him laugh. The effect is sort of like a cross between Rory Hayes and Monty Python, as a group of pirate teddy bears sail the ocean, the author visits the YMACA (Young Man's Anti-Christian Association, an old Python joke) and winds up hanging out with Satan as he gets a tour of hell from a penguin demon. These comics are crudely-drawn but have an enormous amount of energy and imagination. As Rocine cycles through his influences, refines his style and firmly establishes his own voice, he could become quite a cartoonist. He's already a great stylist and has a no-holds-barred approach to storytelling, not to mention a considerable amount of enthusiasm. His sense of humor combines the absurd and the demented, and a willingness to try anything on the page. Seek out http://www.myspace.com/maskedcreature for more.

Last on this list is the one and only Matt Feazell, the Rembrandt of stick-figure mini-comics. I've been reading his work for close to 20 years, and he only keeps getting better. His stick figures are more expressive than most humorists' regular figures, and it's no accident--I've seen some of his test sheets where he perfects his methods. The result is pure storytelling, with no extraneous elements. Anything extra he packs into a panel is either devoted directly to the story, character, or gag--even if it's just a decorative element. The comics I got at MOCCA were The Amazing Cynicalman #15-18. These are collections of his weekly strip, featuring characters he's been writing for years, like Cynicalman, Cute Girl, Stupid Boy, etc. Feazell is pretty conventional when it comes to most of his punchlines, but the clarity of his storytelling is so powerful, that one's eye just can't get enough of what he's doing. On one page, he had a strip that ran for 15 tiny panels to get to its punchline, yet his sense of rhythm and timing is so impeccable that the eye just zipped across the page. Feazell veers from absurd gags (like an elevator to Alpha Centauri), to goofy puns, to clever observations ("Wonders of Domesticaton" traces the evolution of fierce beasts into pets, and ends with the hunter being turned into a sales manager), to sociopolitical commentary, to some jokes with nasty punchlines. Like many of my favorite artists, Feazell's features could only work as comics, and there's something about seeing them in standard 8-page mini form that's very comforting.

New Comics from Noah Van Sciver and Joseph Remnant

Cartoon Clouds Part 1, by Joseph Remnant. I talked about the web version of this story by the talented Remnant, but he's releasing it in minicomics form. I'm not sure this makes any sense, but the story simply reads better on paper than on the web; it really feels like Remnant is most comfortable with this format. I'm not sure where Remnant is taking this story of a self-pitying recent art school grad named Seth, his fellow students that he mostly despises, and his female best friend on whom he has an obvious crush. From the cloud following Seth around on the cover to his generally miserable demeanor throughout the comic, Remnant makes it clear that Seth is the architect of his own fate in all sorts of ways, even if he is surrounded by an array of hilariously annoying people. Remnant is the master of the awkward social exchange at parties, as Seth has to make it through a gauntlet of privileged assholes going on trust fund-bankrolled European trips to the cutting-edge atheist who bases his entire career on that bit of iconoclastic behavior. Again, I'm not sure where he's going with all this, but he's off to an amusing start.

Blammo #8, by Noah Van Sciver. In this issue of Blammo, Noah Van Sciver returns to a lot of his very old ideas, like his Chicken Strips saga and his Punks vs Lizards feature. What's interesting is that he's become such a confident and skilled artist that these older ideas have taken on a new level of proficiency; they're simply being executed better. Even though these ideas are silly in the extreme, Van Sciver treats them with utter seriousness and really throws himself into them. The results are more tightly-plotted stories, better gags and better overall storytelling. They act as an apertif of sorts for an issue that's otherwise fairly downbeat and contemplative. "Expectations" is yet another excellent relationship comic by Van Sciver, who seems to hit on new emotional angles every time he tackles a new story like this. This one is about a guy who fell apart when his longtime girlfriend suggested "a break" and who completely disappeared from her life and the lives of their friends. The storytelling device of the park that was a pauper's cemetery is incredibly clever, since the whole story is about the past, and in particular, the ways in which we poorly handle our pasts and the people in them. Like Remnant, he has a real knack for getting across the awkwardness but also the potential for magical connections that can be found at a party.

Van Sciver's facility as a draftsman is on display in his adaptation of the Brothers Grimm's "The Wolf and the Fox", which is about a wolf and his hostage fox companion. Van Sciver expertly hits all of the key beats in this depiction of an abusive relationship that is escaped both through cleverness and a keen understanding of the weaknesses of one's abuser. The decorative aspects of the story are also beautiful and do a fine job in framing each page, especially the pages with acts of violence. Shorter stories, like the bizarre and funny "She's Losing It" and the "Dog on Wheels" short strips, displaying Van Sciver's continuing affection for the weirder side of his underground comics influences. The former story turns from a creepy and inexplicable relationship between a man and a little person into something that's far more weirdly poignant than one would have expected. The "Dog on Wheels" strips remind me a bit of what Evan Dorkin does in Dork!: mining comedy in the darkest of places with the most benign of set-ups. Throw in a great letters column, a guest strip from Matthew Thurber and other ephemera, and you have a genuinely exciting comic book done by an artist who's really coming into his own.

Sequart Reprints: Will Dinski

Being only vaguely familiar with his name but not much else, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the minicomics I received from Will Dinski. They are by turns elegant, quirky, funny and enigmatic. He reminds me a bit of a young Bill Griffith, more in the "Griffith Observatory" days rather than Zippy. As an aside, make sure to visit his website, which is laid out as a photo page for the 1953 "Fraternity of Graphic Narrative". Make sure to click on each of the highlighted names to get a sort of bonus story. It's the sort of story that delights me in webcomics, something that's not quite possible with a printed comic, that formally demands a different sort of interaction between reader and artist.

Back to more old-fashioned media: I read issues 2 and 3 of his mini-series, Habitual Entertainment. Before I get to that, let's look at "The Midwestern Artist", an 8 page folding comic. It starts with a brief meditation on the notion that midwestern artists tend to be celebrated in the area only when they leave to become famous elsewhere. After reciting an anecdote about F.Scott Fitzgerald holing up in a particular Saint Paul address to write his first successful novel, Dinski does the same and emerges raving about his success as though he were Fitzgerald, causing an accident. It's the sort of dry, offbeat humor that he seems to be best at. It's not a gag, exactly, but it's an unusual and even absurd situation that doesn't have a ready resolution.

Habitual Entertainment #3 ("Bury The Hatchet And The Cross You Bear") is his most recent effort. The layout and presentation is interesting: it's on red paper, with a 5 x 5 grid. Each panel is very small, cramming a lot of information on the page. When he needs to, he expands important images to take up more of the page. He solves his space problem by placing dialogue in entire panels next to images. In order to create breaks in the story, he puts in blank panels to represent pages with a crease in them. The story is about a farmer in the future, having to deal with a son he didn't want because his wife died giving birth to him. The focus of the story seems to be on the relationship between the farmer and his son, then takes a wild left turn as the quasi-sentient machines tilling the soil do something unexpected. Despite that ending, the theme of the story (relationship between father and son, dealing with death) remained intact. There's no pat resolution here, as the anger we see in both father and son and the nature of their conflict remain on the page.

The best of the comics in this set was Habitual Entertainment #2 ("Fool's Gold"). It's a very clever and amusing story of an unemployed actor who gets a call to be a secret shopper as a quickie job. He looks it as an opportunity to act again. Along the way, he invites his ex-fiance and an old rival to his "performance", which he has advertised all over town. Coincidentally, the new boyfriend of his ex happens to work at the very coffee shop that he was to appear at for his secret shopper job. The narrator of the story is a man in an audience of some kind, recounting the events. The ending gives us a double-take and then a triple-take, as Dinski pulls the rug out from the audience.

What makes this such an effective story is the way Dinski manages to create interesting characters that have their own individual quirks, and then puts them through unusual situations. The little character tangents that he makes often wind up tying directly into the resolution of the story, along with his overall themes, even if it seems like extraneous detail at first. There are lots of side-jokes peppered throughout the story, heightening the sense of absurdity that winds up being the comic's overall theme.

As an artist, Dinski knows how to skillfully compose a page. His figures are somewhat stiff, but he compensates for this lack of fluidity by exaggerating facial features, especially absurdly long and pointed noses. That exaggeration also compensates for the sketchiness of his line. The quality of his line is workmanlike; it gets the job done and communicates things clearly and even with some subtlety. One senses that as he continues to gain experience, his draftsmanship will also smooth out a bit; at times, he looks as though he's working hard to make it look simple. One could see his improvement just judging from the transition from HE #2 to #3. His skill as a humorist is obvious, but he's a thinking man's humorist, and that's what makes him someone to watch.