Sequart Reprints: Tranny and 40 Hour Man

Steve Lafler, artist of the BUGHOUSE series of graphic novels that are among my favorite comics, just self-published an intriguing collection. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I published an excerpt of one of the stories ("Cat Suit") in Other magazine, for which I am the comics editor. Of course, I wouldn't have published it if I didn't think it was a hilarious, bizarre story--just what one would expect from Lafler. Lafler's new collection, TRANNY examines, celebrates and explores the world of cross-dressing from a very personal point of view.

Indeed, Lafler's cross-dressing alter-ego is named "Fiona Mallratte". In the first story, "Drunken Lady", Lafler details the origins of his interest of dressing in women's clothing from the time he was child, then fast-forwards into some excerpts from his "The $99 Drag Makeover", a hilarious yet practical guide for cheap cross-dressers who still want to look fab. This story was the first time he talked about the connection between being a transvestite and having a secret identity like a superhero. The effect is literally transformative, where having this different persona becomes an entirely different way of looking at the world. The superhero conceit is then carried to its obvious conclusion in "Stupergal's Slave, Jimmie Ogler", a parody where Jimmie is as interested in Stupergal's outfits as he is in her. The bit where he's angry that she doesn't have a pair of "spike heel booties" is particularly amusing. "Halloween Mashup" is pretty much more of the same, this time substituting Halloween and monstrous transformations for the cross-dressing urge.

"Cat Suit" is the collection's best story, and one of my favorite-ever Lafler stories. It's a mash-up of Lafler's various interests, as we follow the cat-suited Manx around town. He's a bored, rich guy who puts on a cat suit as a way to alleviate his boredom and help him figure out what he wants to do with himself. Lafler then takes a left turn into his metaphysical ideas, as Manx realizes what he wants to do is publish a book about his theories about time, that all moments are the same moment. The story is classic Lafler, going back to his old Dog Boy stories. The story rambles on pleasantly, as Manx meets a sexy woman at a club, smokes dope, joins a homeless man in a street band, grapples with an amorous but vicious psychotherapist, shoots a waiter in the head with a Drano-tipped dart, and smokes dope. The whole story is a play on the fetishistic power of transformation and otherness that wearing the suit brings, as Lafler makes a connection between cross-dressing and the appeal of superheroes.

It's all done very playfully, as is the entire book. Lafler's purpose isn't a heavy-handed treatise on cross-dressing or being trans, but rather a light-hearted look at a way of life that's obviously been enormously beneficial and liberating for him. Lafler has always had a very elastic view on reality, and this looseness plays out on his comics pages. As he's matured as an artist, he's tightened up his imagination on the page a bit into something with more narrative coherence, but he still retains his essential free-flowing spontaneity in what he draws. There's a sense of great joy in Lafler's line, one that draws in the reader's eye and follows it wherever it may go.

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How do you measure someone's worth? In a society where one's career is supposed to define one's self, what does this mean for the millions who work minimum-wage, soul-crushing jobs? Even for those who work to support whatever it is they really want to be doing (not uncommon in the comics industry), how does one come to terms with those 40+ hours where we don't get to do what we want? Stephen Beaupre and Steve Lafler's answer is to laugh to keep from going insane in 40 HOUR MAN.
Back in 1990, writer/poet Beaupre and writer/artist Lafler began an anthology called BUZZARD, which more or less took up a role not unlike the classic anthology WEIRDO. That anthology was created by Robert Crumb and later edited by Peter Bagge and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Its title said it all: Crumb liked publishing the unusual, often outsider art, continuing in the vein of the underground movement that he helped to create. Beaupre & Lafler were clearly working in the same continuum, though they also weren't afraid to get overtly political. Their anthology was completely unpredictable, publishing the likes of Gerald Jablonski, Joe Sacco, Mary Fleener, Julie Doucet, Phoebe Gloeckner, JR Williams, Mario Hernandez, Lloyd Dangle Tom Tomorrow and many more. The editorial duo also published a number of their own stories. Lafler's BUGHOUSE graphic novels started here, and the duo collaborated on an early serial called "Duck and Cover".

In BUZZARD #7, they teamed up for "Almost Chinese". There were four panels a page, but instead of a standard comics panel featuring dialogue, there was a text box running above it. Some of the panels had dialogue that was directly illustrative of the narration. It was somewhere between a comic and illustrated text.

With BUZZARD #8, Beaupre and Lafler repeated the formula by beginning "40 Hour Man". The hook is simple and powerful: Beaupre recounts every single one of his jobs, starting from his teenage years in the 70's up until the end of the dot-com bust. Beaupre's slangy prose is perfect for pointing out the absurdity of each job he happens to wind up in. He's both blessed and cursed by having a brain: he understands the tediousness of each job and hates it, but at the same time can't quite play the corporate game either. In every job, he found as many ways as possible to goof off, get drunk or high on the job and otherwise have fun inbetween the drudgework. Despite these diversions, one can sense a certain desperation slipping through the cracks of his humorous narrative. "40 Hour Man" ran until the series ended with #20 in 1998, but the story itself wasn't quite done.

The authors finished the story and are publishing the compiled result through Lafler's own Manx Media. The images were blown up a bit, with one panel per page. The result is a page-turning experiences that compels the reader to race through it. Beaupre starts with teenage jobs like stockboy (fired for "basic incompetence"), dishwasher, maintenance man, etc. Then things get weird, with trying to maintain a putt-putt golf course run by a poodle-obsessed woman and her hard-drinking husband. Part of the job involved driving around the beach town he was in and trying to drum up business by shouting into a loudspeaker. Growing quickly bored of his script, he instead started ranting about whatever came to mind. This becomes a constant theme: Beaupre is quite willing to pretend to be a diligent employee to get a job, but simply doesn't care enough about the job to stop him from amusing himself by whatever means are at hand. The threat of the axe, especially as a younger man, was simply not a deterrent.

There's a panel later in the book when Beaupre is working as a cook in a nursing home where he has a smoke and tries to "imagine what it would be like to have a job that I actually liked." But he can "only imagine the same paper hat and milk crate". After being told to learn to work slower after he finished his chores, he quit. Later, he gets a job as a security job, and finds that "doing nothing might be more work than doing something". Bits of his life outside of work slip in, as he recounts when one mysterious phrase he espies at a job inspires a song for his band; or when he mentions meeting a woman after losing a job inspired by his aspirations as a poet. His time as a late-shift security guard found him musing about the daily life of those who worked in cubicles.

First and foremost, though, this book is funny. After getting hired at a steakhouse when he lost the stockboy job, he notes "Somehow I had managed to take my burgeoning flair for incompetence and move it two hundred yards to the left". Describing the poodle-obsessed wife of the putt-putt owner and their house, he observed "Chez Whoopie looked perfectly normal from the outside. But inside it was pure David Lynch deleted scene." While living in his run-down college dorm, he "awoke to a commotion outside my room. When I opened the door, I witnessed my fellow residents, armed with hockey sticks, chasing rats down the hall. This was the extent of Graham's sports program." Going through the types of employees at one of his job, he described one job that needed attention to detail. "But that was hard to come by. So instead they settled for chain-smoking, hard drinkin' women in their late fifties with silver hair."

Probably the funniest section of the book is the "Rock Star Petting Zoo" chapter, detailing his days working in a record store. The best bit is when his store is tapped to host an in-store appearance by none other than the Village People, at the height of their popularity. They turn out to be jerks, even whining about the pens they were using. In general, Beaupre loved the job until he was somehow promoted to assistant manager. Another subtheme throughout the book was the hindsight that whenever he happened to be happy in a job, it was doomed to end sooner rather than later.
Eventually, he wound up in "cube land", where not only could he no longer say what was on his mind (he once said "Fuck you" to one of his direct supervisors when she made absurd demands on him), everyone around him was deliberately using management-pleasing buzzwords in a desperate attempt to move up the corporate ladder. Eventually, the company starts hemorraging cash and he's downsized. He then winds up working for a dot-com, during the height of that insane era. That ends predictably, but it still gets to him as "over three decades of employment leading up to this one solitary impossibly-dumb moment. Is that all there is?"

Beaupre doesn't pretend that there's some greater overarching meaning to his work life. He tried to have as much fun as he could and his breezy writing style captured those extreme moments that fueled his story. Bad jobs, moronic bosses, mind-deadening tasks, insane coworkers all wound up as raw material for his narrative. The secret ingredients that prevent this from devolving into Dilbert are Beaupre's take on autobiography and the rubbery art of Lafler. Beaupre credits Harvey Pekar, the master of mining gold out of life's little moments. Pekar wrote a number of stories revolving around his workplace at the VA hospital in Cleveland, and Beaupre similarly found plenty of inspiration from the oddballs he met over the years. The main difference is that Beaupre was actively trying to play it for laughs, and that's where Lafler helped him. Lafler credited the genius of Harvey Kurtzman as his wellspring, with the creator of MAD's skewed and irreverent way of looking at the world. In particular, he was inspired by Kurtzman's constant assault on society's institutions. While this book has an undercurrent of personal desperation, it's also a polemic against the culture of capitalism and the American dream. But like with Kurtzman's MAD, it's a polemic that goes down smoothly, bending minds and bringing laughs.

Comics From the UK and Ireland: Robbins, Short, Moreton, Pomery

Between The Billboards, by O.D. Pomery. These modestly-packaged, short minicomics come in drab cardboard covers that barely hint at the melancholy of the characters within. This comic is about a dramatic and vivid way of withdrawing from society, as a man named James Ebner lives in a small room he crafted between two advertising billboards in a city. The series is essentially several setpieces that get at the heart of why he withdrew, the potential for him to come back to society full time, and how living in total isolation and at a great height influences his thoughts regarding oblivion.  The first issue sets all of this up as a kind of man between the margins, unnoticed by most. The second issue sees an old friend try to talk him out of his solitude, to no avail. The third issue sees James wandering the streets, reminiscing about a particular girl left behind and trading barbed quips with a friend who works at an all-night bowling alley. The fourth sees him confronting death and loneliness after a friend dies, flashing back a bit more to that woman who was so uninhibited where he was so unsure of himself. Pomery's drawings are crisp and precise, making great use of both negative space and geometric patterns, especially when trying to create a vertiginous effect as the reader looks down a sharp drop. This is a somber, reflective comic drawn with skill and intelligence, and I'm curious to see how Ebner's story turns out.

Grand Gestures, by Simon Moreton. Published by Box Brown's Retrofit, this new book by Moreton is absolutely lovely to look at, first and foremost. His evolving style of removing as many lines as possible is similar to what John Porcellino does, but the effect is much different. With John P, there's a sort of simple but firm structure that underlies all of his figures, landscapes and other drawings. They are stripped down to a kind of essence. With Moreton, he goes beyond that essence at times into the realm of figurative abstraction, recognizable only by dint of context. It's a kind of filter that goes beyond removing all but the essentials and into erasing some of them, creating a sense of stirring beauty on page after page. The story, which is told without words, follows a middle-aged man through walks around town and in a sales conference. There's some ambiguity here as to what the reader sees. Are we seeing what the man sees, what he wishes he could see or do, or some ghostly form of the man who is finally free (perhaps after killing himself)? When his body turns into a circle with a couple of loops trailing after it, it's almost as though he's a spirit floating around, but that could be him imagining himself floating freely on the breeze, freed of the dullness of his daily life. It's telling that we don't see the man in the final chapter after he seems to fly off with a flock of geese, and instead we only see busy city streets and people walking before Moreton pans back to an image of a single bird in the sky. Once again, Moreton offers no explanatory details, making the images all the more haunting and yet uplifting, because those images of freedom are peaceful ones, especially for a man who seems to be living a life of "quiet desperation".

Klaus, by Richard Short.The Charles Schulz influence is obvious in these strips, from the introspective nature of many of the characters to its overriding sense of melancholy. With the little rat creatures who otherwise look like humans and the strip's generally earthy and occasionally vulgar sensibility, there's also a bit of the sensibility of Jon Lewis' True Swamp. Finally, the frequent lack of punchlines and drifting nature of the character interactions reminds me of Glenn Dakin's comics. While Short's influences are clear, he quickly transcends them to create beautiful, funny and thoughtful comics about topics like music, dreams, loving and nature. Short's figures are simple, crisp and cartoony, which sets them off nicely from his lovely and more detailed drawings of nature. Indeed, the pastoral quality of these strips adds to that sense of contemplative longing that pervades it. At times, the strip is also wickedly funny, like when a favorite strip is sold, the scandalous nature of insects is eschewed as an example of virtuous living, or when a smoking squirrel flat-out admits that he doesn't like jazz. Even an attempt at suicide has a funny punchline. This is really excellent work and is highly recommended for readers who like their humor mixed with poetry.

Curtains, by John Robbins. Robbins has really refined his pitch-black sense of humor and interest in the ways in which people think about and deal with death. The title story is about a sort of OCD man obsessed with his dead mother's obsession with telling him to close the curtains before turning on the light. The story deals with the way the narratives and voices of others seep into our consciousnesses  Far crazier and his most ambitious story to date is "The Heart Bowed Down By Weight Of Woe". It's drawn in a clear and even cartoony style, which makes it a nice counterpoint to the darkness of the humor within. The story has two narratives: the death of the ailing father of a family and how reluctant his wife is to do anything about it, and the relationship between his son and an odd woman obsessed with a missing child. The mother character flatly states what a relief it is that he's dead, considering his nature as a tyrant, hilariously imagining that his obituary would focus on how long-suffering she was. The increasingly uncomfortable joke in this story is that she keeps making up excuses not to call an ambulance or deal with his dead body in any way.

Of course, his son Tom is a misanthrope who can't be bothered either. As we learn about what a socially inept misfit he really is, the reader can't help but wonder how he managed to get a girlfriend, especially one as sweet-seeming and caring as Wendy, who scours the countryside in an effort to find a missing child named Mary. As the story proceeds and Wendy becomes creepier and creepier, Tom is mostly oblivious to her behavior until being confronted with it in a funny and unsettling scene with a neighbor who tells Tom about Wendy's dark past while trying to get him to agree that pedophilia is something everyone is interested in. The cheerfulness with which Robbins depicts all this is both dissonant and a big source of the humor. Robbins has always been fond of dramatic, horrific twists in his stories, but now he's balancing them with restraint, humor and a real sense of humanity, twisted as it may be.

A Fundraiser Recommendation and a Link

Readers who remember my review of the Real Cost of Prisons project will be interested in seeing this link that writer Aldo Baker sent along, regarding the rise of the elderly in our prison population.

I'd also like to throw my whole-hearted support for the new project of the artist Juliacks.  It's both a film and a comic called Architecture Of An Atom. The fundraiser is for both, which promises to be the most ambitious of Juliacks' very interesting career.  Please consider lending your financial support to the project.

Minicomics: Taylor, Jordan/Smith, Cass, Keeper Steinke

Tabe #11, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Labeled "an abstract comic about community", Taylor's latest is a fascinating series of drawings that packs a surprising emotional punch. There are varying types of abstract shapes: squiggles, straight line patterns, hair-like tangles of lines, blotches, grey shapes that look like torn pieces of paper glued to the page, and things that operate as captions that contain "text" that looks like an alien language. There are moments where the page explodes like a supernova against a night sky, and then it fades back into what looks like a drawing of the circulatory system. There are pages where the drawings seem to be in harmony and others where the drawings look to be in opposition. What makes the comic work so well is Taylor's sense of rhythm and balance on the page, creating a sense of independent intelligence in each drawing while never creating anything that's directly figurative.

History In Ruins #1-2, by Rusty Jordan and Andrew Smith.Both of these comics are just twelve pages long, but they pack a truly bizarre punch in each installment.The main character, Duane Fields, is the sort of greasy loser that is not unfamiliar to alt-comics fans, a Clowesian character who works part time at a drug store and shoplifts on the way out. I'm not sure what the division of labor is here in terms of story and art, but the figure work has a sweaty, rubbery quality to it. There's an almost clownish, Skip Williamson quality to these odd-looking characters that makes this feel like it could have been published forty years ago in an issue of Arcade. That's especially true because the second issue takes us away from the more alt-comics narrative of the deluded loser and brings us to far weirder territory. Living in the basement of his mother's house with a near-sentient mouse and assorted "experiments", he spies upon his mother (wearing inappropriately sexy clothes around her son, though she still treats him like he's a toddler) being threatened by a gang of thugs. When she is later kidnapped, the story is transformed into a wacky revenge narrative. I have no idea where things are headed next (I get the sense that much of this comic is improvised), but each page is a visual treat and full of surprises.

Mr Wolf #2, by Aron Nels Steinke. In Steinke's autobio series, Big Plans, his Mr Wolf character is usually an expression of his range. It's interesting that he's chosen to rework it as an uncertain authority figure to reflect his status as a first and second grade teacher, transforming all of the characters into anthropomorphic animals. These fictionalized strips obviously draw heavily from his real life experiences and encounters, and I'd imagine that many of the characters are composites rather than outright fictions. These strips are the best comics of Steinke's career in my opinion, because it balances his need to constantly scrutinize and microanalyze his decision-making and emotions with actually having to deal with the emotions and minds of dozens of children. His observations about the kids are warm and knowing without descending into saccharine sweetness or sentimentality. Indeed, there's something raw and real about his observations and how in many ways he's more like one of them than he is like many of the adults, even if he is an authority figure whom many of the children respect and admire. It also helps that this strip is very funny, with Steinke no doubt curating the funniest things he's experienced or heard other teachers relate to him. His drawing is simple, cute and powerfully expressive, getting across the emotions and mental states of the kids with greater facility than if he had used a more realistic approach. Comics about teaching are still fairly rare, and I hope Steinke continues to develop his observations and witty, humane approach to discussing the children under his tutelage.

The Drowning Ring and Uh Oh Dojo, by Mike Keeper. I couldn't find any website info for these idiosyncratic zine/comics fusions. The Drowning Ring is a small booklet that is absolutely jam-packed with trivia, comics, ephemera and a narrative about being a lifeguard in a particular beach community. There's something remarkably knowing about the gags, the language and the weirdness of being part of lifeguard culture that Keeper brings to life. His actual comics have a surprising level of careful detail when he chooses to illustrate something in a naturalistic style, but he mostly prefers quicker, cruder renderings and iconic drawings. I have no idea how many of the details he throws at the reader are actually true, and I prefer to keep it that way. It's like reading a Leon Beyond comic, where one knows that Leon is mostly feeding you lies, but they are so enjoyable that one wants more and more. The whole thing is a very appealing mess, as the layout is frequently sloppy and slapped together, but it's an obvious labor of love. Uh Oh Dojo is a short and magazine-sized comic that's just eight pages long, but packed with comics and repurposed photos. It's about Keeper hearing about the death of his former karate sensei (teacher) and the likelihood that he had killed himself. It spurs Keeper to think about suicide in general, while circling back to the history of karate, to his own life and the things he learned in karate. It's a comic with no pat answers or lessons, just many questions solemnly asked in an unusual package. It's Keeper's attention to fine details while making sure to get across the essential emotions of a situation that make these comics worth reading.

The Index #4, by Caitlin Cass. Cass's deeply introspective series about insignificance, meaning and knowledge has now taken a firm turn into the realm of fantasy. After raising the specter of indexer Paul Otlet and zipping everyone to a fairly intact library of Alexandria, Diogenes wanders into the proceedings of this issue. He's the antithesis of Otlet, who spends his time with words and writings; Diogenes viewed anything less than a total lifestyle commitment to one's ideas as a kind of inauthentic living. As the cast of this comic has expanded, Cass has juggled a new character into every issue to likewise expand the nature of the ideas at work. One of the leads, Susan, kept blank cards because their potentiality and nothingness comforted her equally, balancing her own sense of nothingness.  When the other lead, John, started writing ideas on them willy-nilly it was as a way of rejecting his former career as a graduate student trying to get words to do his bidding. Otlet's index of ideas was the impossible task of trying to categorize all universal knowledge using a finite and clumsy set-up. Cass is careful to keep the non-apparitions in the story close to their somatic roots, giving them hunger and restlessness as they drift away from the performative spaces of the ghosts. This was a fascinating issue that betrays no particular allegiance to any of these points of view, which is what makes it so interesting. Her drawings are functional if unremarkable, sloppily but accurately getting across her points of view quickly and directly.

Sequart Reprints: Meathaus #8 (Head Games)

I've been following the comics from the Meathaus collective for quite some time and have been impressed by the group's evolution and commitment to innovation. The group began as a way for some graduates of SVA (The School For Visual Arts in New York) to stay in touch and continue to hone their cartooning chops. Most of the original artists came from either illustration or animation backgrounds, so while the early issues were stylish, the writing often ranged from thin to incoherent. Around the fourth issue or so, things started to click and each subsequent issue became more ambitious and innovative. There was a sense that the artists understood that people were actually reading and paying attention to these comics, and this was matched by a greater commitment and seriousness by the artists.

It's interesting that the Meathaus group evolved in parallel to the Kramer's Ergot anthology, which similarly started from humble beginnings. I'm not sure if Meathaus was influenced by Jordan Crane's Non anthology, but there are similarities in terms of the anthologies being cohesive and statements of purpose. These aren't just random groupings of artists, they're a testament of a certain kind of commitment to storytelling.

As the anthology has progressed and expanded, many of the Meathaus members have gone on to success. Tomer Hanuka is an accomplished illustrator and just had a collection of his comics, The Placebo Man, published by Alternative. Farel Dalrymple has done quite a bit of work for Dark Horse and is doing the art for Jonathan Lethem's Omega The Unknown revival for Marvel. Becky Cloonan has illustrated series like Demo and American Virgin along with her own graphic novel for Tokyopop. James Jean is an in-demand cover artist, while Jim Campbell, Dash Shaw, Tom Herpich and Brandon Graham have all gone on to success with their comics.

The success of so many of these artists was perhaps a contributing factor to why Head Games was such a disappointment. One thing that Meathaus has always lacked is a strong editorial hand, the kind that drives Kramer's and drove Non. While this allowed for a lot of freedom and resulted in quite a bit of interesting work, in this book it felt like a lot of creators were distracted and not fully committed to the anthology. Look at Hanuka's contribution: it's simply two pages of what seems to be an illustration assignment. Many other of the stories are fragments at best--bits of a sketchbook, or perhaps much older work. The fact that the last edition of the anthology came out in 2003 is a clear signal that there was a sense that everyone involved just wanted to get this one published. In addition, it seemed that not everyone either had the time to devote to it or the commitment to the anthology that others had. That this was the first edition of the anthology to be released by a publisher (Alternative) and thus get wider distribution is all the more unfortunate.

All of that said, there are certainly highlights to be found in this edition. Brandom Graham's stylish synthesis of American comics, urban folk art and manga takes us through skewed perspectives and strange character designs for a bit of unusual slice-of-life. Tom Herpich contributed just two pages, but as always his quirky composition and enigmatic text made for a fascinating combination. He also did a full-cover inside back cover strip which was enormously clever. Jay Sacher's art is deliberately cruder than the others in the book, but the stiffness of his figures is a perfect counterpoint to the odd and uncomfortable circumstances his characters get into. The sci-fi story by Matthew Manning & Robert Donnelly is perhaps the highlight of Head Games, a beautifully weird, futuristic murder mystery that's also a clever comment on consumer culture. Phonzie Davis' densely penciled story was a bit of a throwback, a wordless story about a Christian puppet show gone awry. While I was mostly unimpressed by the contributions of the new artists here (especially Jim Mahfood, Scott Morse and Jim Rugg, none of whom fit in with the rest of the book), Jonique Williams' strip about her mother was expressive, tender and evocative.

What was most disappointing about the book was not that it was a fiasco, but that it could have been so much more. With the wave of beautiful and carefully assembled & edited anthologies that have been published in recent years, Head Games simply doesn't measure up. This isn't because the core group of artists isn't capable, because they are. It may well be for the reasons I've mentioned--distraction, a lack of time, a sense that the anthology wasn't as important to all of the contributors as it once was. It's obvious that this anthology shouldn't exist unless the members are truly devoted to it, and willing to push themselves as storytellers. To that end, I understand that the next edition will be out much sooner, will have a number of stories in color, and will be a response to the deluge of handsome and ambitious anthologies that have been released in the past few years. I look forward to the possibilities that their next volume will bring us a coherent statement of purpose from a group whose sense of style is its calling card and whose ambition to push the edges of their skills and the art form has always informed their work.

Jason Kieffer's Toronto

The Rabble of Downtown Toronto and Zanta The Living Legend are two fascinating accounts of the forgotten underculture of a major metropolitan city. In the former book, artist Jason Kieffer simply draws a series of two-page features on a number of what can be called street characters in his city. One page is a close-up of the person and the name Kieffer uses for them, as well as a map of where they can be found in downtown Toronto. The second page is a portrait of each person, complete with arrows pointing to key visual characteristics as well as notes on their behavior and activities. Some of the profiles are funny and light-hearted, but after awhile, they start to get depressing and uncomfortable. Pointing out piss and shit stains on the homeless is not exactly a charitable observation, but it also becomes clear that Kieffer is actually interacting with these people. At first, it seems like it's from a position of condescension and smug superiority, but then it becomes something else all together. The level of detail here is a little too refined, making the reader wonder just who recorded all of these tics and how long it took. Kieffer himself lets the cat out of the bag with the final member of his "rabble": "The Artist", whose hair is usually unwashed and his jacket missing buttons.  In other words, the Rabble are his people.

Deep down, there is compassion for everyone he meets, though only up to a point. It's easy to feel sorry for someone strung out on drugs or past the point of help with regard to a serious mental illness, right up until they threaten you. Kieffer gets at that feeling as he describes crack whores, criminals and those who simply slipped through the cracks of urban civilization.Kieffer favors an exaggerated style of drawing, with big swooping, thick lines for his characters. It's a snug fit with the kinds of people he draws, because there's nothing subtle about them in the least. While it can be argued that Kieffer is occasionally cruel in his depictions of these street characters, I'd say that the level of detail he provides is a way of concretizing these people. They are not simply ghosts that we can look away from, but rather real people who somewhere along the way found they simply stopped fitting in and stopped caring about it. In the case of some, they lost to ability to conform to consensus reality because of their illness. Kieffer also wants the reader to stop and think about whether these people are crazy or if the city itself is crazy.

That point is expanded upon in Zanta, which is a long profile/interview the artist conducted with the famous Toronto street character. Shirtless, and clad only in shorts, shoes and a Santa hat, the muscled man performs his own brand of street theater as he did knuckle push-ups on the street while yelling all sorts of strange things. Zanta began his career as a street performer after he recovered from a devastating injury that left him on permanent disability. The concept of being a character who never stopped being in character intrigued him even as it was obvious that he was very clearly unbalanced in a number of ways. Kieffer captures the way he fascinated many, some laughing at him but many laughing with him. He also captures the way in which Zanta is oblivious to those he scares with his in-your-face approach, as though he was entirely incapable of reading the emotional reactions of others.

That said, the oppressive reaction made by the city of Toronto's police was entirely over-the-top, as far more offensive personalities were ignored on the streets while Zanta practiced his sometimes annoying but mostly harmless antics in public. The fact that Zanta never asked for money alone makes the "nuisance" aspect of his shouts and push-ups a bit harder to swallow. In the end, Zanta wanted to bend reality to his own way of seeing the world, and reality fought back -- hard. Even in a diverse city like Toronto, there's a certain amount of order and routine that the ebb and flow of urban life requires, and Zanta was a dissonant note that was summarily and harshly rooted out. Kieffer gave a voice to Zanta, even if that voice was occasionally hyperbolic, incoherent and lacking in self awareness. As the narrative of the book moves forward in time, it grows increasingly sad, as the one thing that gave this man any real joy in life was systematically taken away from him. Zanta may not have been a hero, but he was certainly no villain. Yet this is how he was treated: as a threat to society, and Kieffer convincingly makes this case while making no claims as to Zanta's sanity nor by denying that some people found him obnoxious or frightening.

Sequart Reprints: Peter Conrad, Superior Showcase

I happen to love comics anthologies, in all their beautiful sloppiness. I love panning for gold in them, hoping to get at least one great story even in an anthology that's otherwise a waste of time. I enjoy seeing authors stretched to put something together for a themed anthology, to be put out of their comfort zone either by the length of the story or its theme. In the history of comics, there have been so many significant talents that were discovered in anthologies, so much important history made. I especially enjoy reading minicomics anthologies, as so many artists get their first significant exposure (such as it is) in these venues.

One advantage of self-published, self-constructed minicomics is that the formal and design possibilities are almost limitless. They can become as much art object as a vehicle for delivering narratives. Peter Conrad has done a lot of exploring with both form and design for his comics. His best known was a comic he affixed to a Rubik's Cube, where every twist and turn created different stories. It wasn't just an ingenious idea, it actually made for some good comics, because he took the time to break down every panel and how it might connect to every other panel.

Along these lines, Conrad conceived of an anthology where every artist had to draw their story using their non-dominant hand. I was intrigued by such a severe formal constraint, and it was Conrad's aim to get each artist out of their comfort zone. What was interesting is that a number of similar themes popped up from story to story, including twins, mirrors, and other states of not quite being oneself. Conrad's formal constraint wound up producing a set of stories that fit well together, but was not burdened by the sort of repetitiveness that a thematic constraint often brings.

Highlights from On The Other Hand include Josh Neufeld's "Josh And I", Diana Tamblyn's "Cat Scratch Fever", John Hankiewicz's "Left Side/Right Lung", K. Thor Jensen's "Business Plans", Luciano Cruzado's "Secrets" and most especially Renee French's "Tooth Fairy". Neufeld's story is told from the perspective of his mirror twin, wondering about the odd person he sees in the mirror every day. Using his other hand loosened up his normally fine line considerably, adding a nervous energy that seemed to suit the personality of his mirror self. Tamblyn wrote about a cat whose "bad" paw caused it to get into all sorts of mischief. It seemed a sly way of talking about how difficult it was to work with her "bad" hand. The subject matter of Hankiewicz's story fit right into the rest of his typically cryptic tales, but still meshed nicely with the overall theme. There's his typical sense of foreboding here, about a man who can't sleep on his left side without his right lung causing him agony. Hankiewicz is another artist who normally employs a tight and spare line, which belies the tension beneath. Here, the nervousness and claustrophobia is all on the surface with an almost rubbery quality.

Jensen's story is a bit of autobiography: an embarrassing, drunken night. It's funny and the crudeness of his drawing looks perfect in this context. Cruzado's entry is perhaps the most beautiful-looking piece, suggesting that he may be ambidextrous. Regardless, it's a creepy yet touching account of a young boy finding a roomful of secrets and dreams, where he learns the most important secret of his young life. Finally, there's the insanity that is Renee French. Blessed with some of the best chops in the business, her disturbing-yet-charming style remains intact with her off hand. The story tells us what the Tooth Fairy really looks like, and it's not pretty.

Many of On The Other Hand's stories stayed with me for awhile, which is unusual for an anthology. I think part of that was due to the strength of the writing. While most of the stories clearly showed how much the author struggled to even get them on the page, it was ultimately their themes and execution that made this a memorable experience.

Turning to a thematic constraint, Superior Showcase #1 ($3.95, AdHouse Books) spun out of Chris Pitzer's beautiful Project: Superior anthology. That one was pretty simple: artists told stories about superheroes they way they wanted to. Whether it was superheroes as romance, straight-ahead stories, slice-of-life or humor, the results were at worst amusing and at best quite charming. Showcase is a "regular" comic book that continues the theme, and the three artists featured turn in very different pieces. The ultra-versatile Nick Bertozzi gives us "Super-Mart". In TOP TEN, Alan Moore gave us a city where everyone has superpowers and wears a costume, so that those two things no longer serve to differentiate members of the populace. "Super-Mart" works on a similar level, only with the more mundane setting of a convenience store. Mike Dawson shows us the fate of "Ace-Face", a retired superhero turned college professor. When he decides to stop a brutal vigilante, the real world catches up to him. Finally, Dean Trippe (with John Campbell) brings us a tale of "Butterfly", the son of a Superman-like character. He meets up with a disaffected Robin-like sidekick named Birdie, and they encounter Hipster Ghosts on Halloween.

The stories vary in tone, with Dawson's becoming unexpectedly grim. Trippe's is sweet and frothy, while Bertozzi's is absurd with a healthy helping of smart-ass. The book is aided by a gorgeous Hope Larson cover and publisher Chris Pitzer's impeccable design sense. I like superheroes and enjoy seeing artists put them to uses beyond simple action. What I've enjoyed about Pitzer's vehicles is their sense of fun. Superhero comics are really not very good at dealing with "serious" subjects; the inherent ridiculousness of the genre tends to make attempts at seriousness collapse. This is not to say that one can't do character work in a superhero setting, just that the artist has to have a grasp on the absurdity of that sort of world.

Finally comes, a miniscomics version of Conrad's webstrip Paper Dummy, which Conrad describes as a cross between a blog and a comic strip. What this winds up meaning is that formally, every entry is a comic strip. It's just that Conrad doesn't feel constrained to stick to a particular genre. Some days, it's gags. Other days, it's slice-of-life stories. And on other days, it's just little observations: things he's noticed in nature, or odd things that he's heard. The punchline here is that I'm reviewing a minicomics version of an online comic strip, which of course provides certain constraints of its own: the size of the paper, the order in which I am to read the strips, etc. While there are some web cartoonists who are uninterested in being published in "real" books, there are plenty who happily view the web as a great place to get the kind of daily / weekly / monthly exposure they might get from more traditional (but hard to obtain) means of serialization. After reaching a certain critical mass, they can simply use a service like lulu.com to whip up print-on-demand collections. For artists with more clout, they can cut a deal with either an established comics publisher or even a "real" book publisher; there seem to be more and more of these kinds of deals every day.

Of course, that's a whole 'nother story. Conrad's own contribution has lots of great gags. I especially liked the story about his parents moving to California and him getting them a TiVo and subscription to Wired so as to fit in; staying awake on the road by watching movies in other cars; and a dog reading a book called "Where The Ball Went" in bed. My favorite gag was "That Tingle Means It's Working", depicting a man with his hair on fire. The strips definitely have that sketchbook feel, looking quickly drawn. That aids in their immediacy, but their visual component is not all that compelling. I like a loose style that contains a certain energy, but I also appreciate the craft that goes into honing a line to perfection. The beauty of the online sketchbook is that an artist can do both: draw something every day to keep their skills in practice and get the instant gratification of having the world as an audience; and working on that long-range, slow project that can take years to finish.