mini-Kus! Of The Week #8: Moisseinen, Franz, Kallio, Sailamaa

mini-Kus! #40: 1944, by Hanneriina Moisseinen. Using dense but delicate pencils, Moisseinen elegantly uses a background setting of war to illustrate the ways in which nature is abused and exploited by man and the ways in which the feminine is ignored and cast aside. The story starts with bombers flying overhead and a woman doing her morning chores on the farm, and when she's told that she and her family have exactly two minutes to evacuate, she replies that she has to assist a cow that's about to give birth. After a successful birth, the men take the calf away from its mother and kill it, saying that it would starve and never survive the journey away from the farm. As they leave the now-bombed farm, there's a sort of thousand-yard stare shared by the woman and the cow. There's a sensitivity and restraint on the part of Moisseinen in this comic, as there's no need to exaggerate events that undoubtedly happened repeatedly and continue to happen now. In that sense, this comic serves as an object of mourning and honoring the dead, the innocent, those left behind and that which is destroyed in the wake of senseless violence.

mini-Kus! #41: EYEZ, by Aisha Franz. This is a bright, almost garishly-colored story about surveillance. Franz's line and use of color reminded me a lot of Gilbert Hernandez in this story, especially in the way Hernandez uses nudity as both an expression of personal freedom as well as a potentially dangerous way of exposing vulnerability. Franz's use of near-future technology is also a bit like Hernandez in the way that technology causes as many problems as it solves. In this particular story, which opens with a young man sunbathing nude on his roof, we see a camera drone fly up and violate his privacy. As he goes into his apartment/bunker (every aspect of the apartment is meant to mimic a panic room or a fortress meant to keep the outside world from intruding, instead of a warm and functional home), he angrily closes the blinds to all of his windows when he sees the drone hovering outside, only to reveal a gender-switch: she was wearing a fake male suit the entire time. Her privacy (spent desperately drinking water while being serviced by some kind of electronic pleasure couch) was disturbed by the prying, needy eyes of her cat. That sparked her to go to yet another secret chamber (layers within layers of camouflage and secrecy) and hook herself up to a sort of virtual reality/sensory deprivation device that turned her into what looked like pure energy. It's interesting that the progression of the comic goes from seeing the person sunbathing out in nature, then at least experiencing physical pleasure in her house, to finally becoming non-corporeal when she was sure no eyes were on her. To be viewed, in the context of this comic, is to be objectified and commodified, which is why the gender disguise was such a powerful image. Franz takes it a step further as the simple act of being needed in the material world becomes an invasion of privacy and an interruption of the intimacy of solitude, which is a horrifying side effect of that objectification. The end result of objectification, Franz seems to suggest, is people escaping their physical forms altogether in order to avoid it.

mini-Kus! #44: PF-E/FRAF, by Ville Kallio. This is an exploration and extrapolation of how global capitalism, fueled by right-wing responses to Islamic terrorism, fuels a permanent state of emergency and inextricably fuses the work force with the military. Sponsored by Saab and Volvo, unwitting soldiers are sent to pursue suspected terrorists. There's a grim, cartoony beauty in Kallio's drawings and a remarkably lively quality in his cartooning, as there's a sense of camaraderie even in these doomed, exploited soldiers that's mixed with social media interactions and viruses. Indeed, the endgame of the strip, where the resistance makes itself known in an unexpected way that gave the soldiers a chance to save themselves, reveals how the opposition to fascism often tries to use its tools against it in innovative ways. While the soldiers on the ground use conventional weaponry, Kallio suggests that the real weapons are information and a willingness to engage in personal transformation. This comic was clearly drawn on a computer, but Kallio shifts between making that artifice obvious (as though the soldiers, and by proxy, the reader, were in a terrifying video game) and disguising it in a manner that makes even the most garish of colors feel surprisingly naturalistic. Kallio redefines what is real in a world of nanotechnology, noting at the end that in a cancerous world dominated by our cancerous minds, we have to learn to accept that toxicity and adapt. This is an example of the mini-Kus! format and the short length of these comics being perfectly suited to an aesthetic approach and concept.

mini-Kus! #46: Everyone Is Hungry, by Anna Sailamaa. This beautiful comic, done in colored pencil, focuses on the simple, day-to-day existence of a girl and explores the passage of time in a moment-by-moment series of sensory impressions that focus on each of the five senses in different ways. The sheer delight of a girl looking out a window, touching the window, tasting and smelling her food and hearing the song of the sparrows gives the comic an intimate but visceral quality that reflects the power and immediacy of each moment. There's a broader metaphor expressed in the comic as well, as the day is not just a day, but an entire lifetime. As the sun sets and the flowers bloom and wilt, the fruit is eaten and rots, and the birds come and go, the reader sees the lights of the house extinguished at the end of the story after the sun sets. It's the end of a day consisting of moments, the whole of which seems impossibly greater than the sum of each moment, because moments are measured outside of time, in the full embrace of the power of aesthetic experience. The naturalistic approach here is softened by the use of colors, so the images on each page come alive as that particular moment is being experienced and savored.

Rokudenashiko's What Is Obscenity?

Rokudenashiko's What Is Obscenity? is jam-packed with great ideas and horrifying but hilarious stories. Its only real flaw is that it's incredibly fragmented, a reflection of much of its original serialized nature. There's a lot in here that's also not comics: interviews, photos, newspaper clippings, etc. All of this makes for a choppy and occasionally repetitive reading experience, as we're told several times about how she started to make her unique style of art as well as the circumstances surrounding that arrest. So as a cohesive work of art, What Is Obscenity? is kind of a mess. However, taken in pieces, it's an astounding account of sexism, fascism, hypocrisy and one artist's joyfully laughing response to all three.

Rokudenashiko's (a pen name that means "good-for-nothing girl" in Japanese) story is basically told in two different sections. What the reader sees first is the story behind her arrest for obscenity in her native Japan. She was a strugglcng cartoonist who hit on the whimsical idea to have a mold made of her genitalia and then decorate the results. The resulting "manko" (pussy) art, which she dubbed "Deco-Man", was upbeat, silly and clever. She made the molds into decorated manko cell phone covers. She turned them into dioramas of things like golf courses and gardens. She ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to buy a 3D printer, which enabled her to build a cover for the first manko kayak, which she took out for a spin in a public event. It was an amusing, affirming and above all else, cute, way to reclaim and demystify the ways in which pussy had been either completely sexually objectified by men or else decreed gross and unfit for public consumption (also by men). Cuteness, as she discussed later, was a crucial aspect of what she was doing. When she was doing this in a more serious manner, it got little attention. When she saw a particular pop singer get a huge amount of attention because of her cuteness, she understood that using those kinds of surface trappings would allow her to get attention from the public while getting her point across at the same time. Moreover, she could make that point in an indirect way, allowing the ideas to penetrate in a non-didactic fashion.

Rokudenashiko was arrested for digitally distributing "obscene" files to crowdfunding supporters who donated a certain amount of money. Before any American reader snickers at outdated and hypocritical morals and mores of Japan, one should consider a couple of different cases: Mike Diana and 2 Live Crew. In the latter case, a power-hungry, politically ambitious sheriff in south Florida declared the rap group's very lyrics to be obscene, causing their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be to be banned in Florida and many other places. Of course, 2 Live Crew was famous and made a lot of money, so no real harm came to them. Diana's case is another story. It was another example of a power-hungry lawman looking to climb the political ladder who ordered Diana's violent comic, Boiled Angel. To be sure, Diana's comic was crude, violent and disturbing, which he attributed to simply being a reflection of the things he would see on the news all the time. In a case in the mid-90s where the prosecution built their case on the idea that all comics were for children, he was the only artist in US history to be convicted of obscenity in a backwater Florida court. Among other things, his sentence forbade him from coming within 100 feet of children as well as drawing anything, ever. He was subject to random, unannounced searches of his home to make sure he wasn't drawing.

Obscenity charges are distractions that inflame ignorance and hypocritically moralistic & self-serving agendas, and such was the case for poor Rokudenashiko. Of course, the Japanese government made a mistake in picking her as an opponent, because of her relentless optimism and fighting spirit. From the moment she was arrested, she thought of what a great manga it would make. She spent a harrowing week in lock-up after she was arrested, unable to contact her family and only getting a brief visit from a court-appointed lawyer. Japanese jails are incredibly rigid in terms of one's activities. The police didn't read her her rights, lied about any number of things and were trying to force a confession out of her. They had up to twenty days of locking her up to force a confession, and they cops tried to wear her down. Instead, she unnerved the cops by making them say "pussy" over and over--something that visibly unnerved them. It was clear to Rokudenashiko that in Japanese society in particular, there was a huge double standard regarding male and female genitalia. There were giant penises being celebrated in town festivals, but the mere mention of female genitalia was considered something far too awful for public consumption.

The good news for her was that she was receiving a great deal of public support for her release after the press initially denounced her as a "so-called" artist. She got a great deal of free legal help and was actually freed after her first appeal. There's a hilarious scene where she's getting out of jail and is trying to throw away the pair of panties she had worn when she went to jail that were taken from her. The guards refused to let her do it, and actually chased her down when she just tossed them aside to give them to her. It's a level of sheer spite and meanness on the part of authority when faced with opposition.

The second half of the book traces how and why she became a manko artist. She started in manga, but it was tough for her to really break through in a brutally competitive market. She got the idea to get laser surgery to trim her labia a bit and did a comic about it, and then had the idea to make a mold of her pussy and create art with it, sharing it with others. After some initial success, there was a powerful sequence where she revealed that she was struggling after she divorced her husband (whom she had cheated on repeatedly because of her general unhappiness) and her art was getting roadblocked. Even the manga she made about her surgery was downbeat and dour, as the editor told her to make up an angle about her hating her own body. She felt suicidal until one woman came up to her after an event and told her how much it meant to her, which gave her renewed strength to go on.

In many respects, this book feels provisional, as the trial has not yet occurred and a lot has happened to Rokudenashiko, like getting married and becoming pregnant. A reworked and more cohesive version of both of the stories in the book (her arrest and her origins as an artist) after the trial is over would likely be a far more powerful and effective book. Still, there's a lot to enjoy here, and everyone involved was careful to provide context to American artists regarding a number of her references. Rokudenashiko's line is playful, confident and loose. It added a tremendous amount of humor to her story, was always clear, and was remarkably expressive. At her heart, she is a humorist, and the sharpness and ferocity of her wit came through on every page.

mini-Kus! Of The Week #7: Tara Booth, Ingrida Picukane, Tommi Mosturi

Picking up my ongoing mini-Kus! reviews...

mini-Kus! #37: Snake In The Nose, by Tommi Mosturi. Subtle, this comic isn't. Using a thick line and lurid color, the first page introduces to a woman sunbathing outside. Eventually, we see she's being splashed by a yellow liquid. The next page, a huge splash page, sees a man pissing on her from above as we're given a close-up of his penis. The comic is essentially one, long misanthropic, self-flagellating yowl. After a close-up of the man's anus, he goes to a happy place and winds up singing "Like A Virgin" to himself as he pisses all over his fantasyland. That scene was mildly amusing, but it takes a special talent to get away with this kind of self-negating nihilism (like Ivan Brunetti), and this comic felt like a deliberate poke in the eye to the reader. I imagine that was the entire point, to provoke and punish, but the final product was simply self-indulgent and tedious.

mini-Kus! #38: Three Sisters, by Ingrida Picukane. This story of the titular sisters encountering a strange, nude man in the forest is in French and Russian, with no subtitles or translation into English. Considering that the entire Kus! series has been translated or subtitled, this is clearly a deliberate move on the part of the artist, that the dialogue should be unintelligible for the English reader. Having both French and Russian indicates that Picukane was trying to create dissonance and confusion not just for the reader, but for the characters as well. Drawn in colored pencil, the visuals in the comic are immersive and beautiful, as Picukane uses an open layout that draws in the eye in an interesting way, as she uses the resulting negative space to push the reader along the page in the same direction they're walking. The color, the ultra-feminine dresses, the make-up and the flowers they put in each other's hair all wind up being a bit of misdirection, as the ultimate acts of the sisters upon finding the unconscious man in trying to "calm" him are both horrible and yet utterly in character. For them, Picukane, life seems to be a series of dreamlike vignettes without any meaningful consequences. The fact that the man speaks a different language seems to indicate that they viewed him in much the same way as they did the flowers and a bear: as curiosities meant to be curated, pondered and collected, but not as fellow living beings on their own level. That's also reflected in the man's totally pale appearance in comparison to the sisters, who are adorned in flowers, only the way they added color to him wound up being deadly. This is a well-paced, sharp comic that gets across its main twist quickly and effectively through the use of visuals.

mini-Kus! #39: Unwell, by Tara Booth. I found this silent bit of quotidian minutia to be beautifully crude in its use of watercolors, character design and subject matter. Booth gets across the titular idea that the woman that we follow in the story is not exactly living a healthy lifestyle, but she is at least living it on her own terms. What makes the comic such a consistent delight is Booth's use of sight gags that are not exactly jokes, but rather absurd, shocking and/or disgusting. In the opening scene, she crawls out of the bed of the guy she just slept with but pauses, naked, in the living room to read some comics before she lurches to the bathroom to vomit. That absurdity turns to pure joy when she gets outside, breathes the air, feels the sun on her skin and the sensation of riding on her bike. There's a brief moment when she remembers the things she did with the guy (riding him like a horse, strapping her underwear on his face) and one gets the sense that she's wondering why the hell she did it. Again, Booth takes the reader through moment by moment as she showers, lays on the shower floor and goes through a number of outfits before she picks one to paint with. After she paints a simple frowny face, she pours paint out on a cloth on a floor, sits on it and paints with her ass. One gets the idea: this is a woman ruled entirely by her whims, which sometimes result in funny outcomes and sometimes results in her downing an entire bottle of vodka on the street. Booth makes no judgments and leaves that up to the reader, resulting in a series of events that are both hilarious and vaguely unsettling.

Minis: E.Davis, L.Nichols, K.Froh, A.Shrestha, S.Lautman

Libby's Dad, by Eleanor Davis. This Retrofit release is further proof of Davis' versatility. Her issue of Frontier ("BDSM") showed off her black & white chops, while this comic looks like it was done entirely in colored pencils. Davis' comics are usually pointed in terms of her themes and the emotions she wants to explore, but she deflects away from hammering that point home through a series of interesting strategies. This comic is about the complexities surrounding emotional spousal abuse and how its fallout affects children. Davis' strategy was to tell this story entirely through the daughter of that estranged couple (Libby) and her friends during the course of a sleepover. The essential conflict of the story is that one of the members of the group was forbidden to come over to over by her mother because Libby's father had threatened to shoot Libby's mom. The rest of the story (told from the perspective of Libby's friend Alex) is essentially a debate as to whether or not that could possibly be true.

The genius of the book is Davis' unfailingly accurate depiction of children and the way they interact, with all the innocence and casual cruelty that implies. Davis' character design and her use of colored pencil gives the book the feel of a children's book, with exaggerated facial expressions, cheery colors and uncannily precise body language that gets across the energy that kids generate when they're in this kind of environment--especially since Libby's dad bought a house with a swimming pool and bought them all lunch. A running theme in Davis' comics is the way that adults try to keep secrets from children and fail to trust their ability to understand difficult situations. What the adults fail to understand is that children hear and understand far more than they might realize, only without context that knowledge can be warped. That's certainly the case here, as Libby's friends debate whether or not Libby's dad was nice or a monster and whether Libby's mom was a potential victim or a liar (there was no middle ground). The comic comes to a head when night falls and the colors turn from friendly greens, yellows and light blues to dark and oppressive midnight blue. There's another color whose presence is a constant in the book: blood red. It becomes especially prominent in the slumber party scene, especially when a spilled bottle of nail polish splatters the carpet like blood. Suddenly, jokes about Libby's dad and his gun turn into pure fear, as the white image of a gun against the dark blue background is a clear indicator of their mutual panic.

An exasperated Libby, who has been mostly silent up until this point, gets up and tells her weeping friends to shut up, and declares that her dad's not scary. There's a chilling two-page spread where her friends are in the bottom left corner of one page and Libby goes out the foreboding door in the upper-right hand corner of the next page, indicating a gulf between them as well as a sense of things not ever being the same when she returns from her dangerous quest. Their fears peak as the next two pages are devoid of backgrounds as they imagine her dead shooting all of them, shrouded in shadows. Davis comes back from that image with Libby's dad cheerfully cleaning up the mess in a room with the light on, bathed in a comforting yellow. That act is "proof" to Alex that "Libby's mom is crazy and a liar", and the girls are now free to have a carefree good time. Of course, what Davis is getting at is how women are made to feel crazy for responding to abuse, for people assuming they are lying or exaggerating and in general doubting the stories of survivors. There's also a larger question of complexity: Libby's dad may treat her well, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't abusive toward his mom, even if that threat was an empty one. The way the girls react can be explained in part because they are just children, but Davis' larger point is that it wasn't just them who reacted that way, as the parents of the other children had no problem with them spending time at Libby's dad's house. This is a story about abuse and the ways in which so many people prefer to believe that it doesn't happen, and Davis' use of color masterfully takes us through every element of the narrative, modulating emotion along the way.

Senior Time, by Kelly Froh. If one of Davis' special skills as a cartoonists is portraying children, then one of Froh's is portraying the elderly. This mini is about failing upwards, beginning with Froh fervently hoping she was going to get laid off because her desk job was debilitating her, both mentally and physically. Coming to terms with the idea as someone over forty that they weren't ever going to make a lot of money is difficult in a society driven by financial success as a measure of overall success. Froh struggles with that idea but counters it by embracing her role in the arts as well as time spent helping the elderly and teaching comics. Each page features a single image, some typeset text and Froh's own cursive script. The latter was especially important in establishing an intimate line of communication with the reader, but it also represented the kinds of relationships she was having with her clients.

Froh balances the tremendous respect she has for her elderly clients with her cartoony and slightly grotesque character design, and the gentle humor she records in this comic is modulated by her thoughtful and gentle voice as a narrator. Above all else, she listens, and she responds with respect but also humor. The variety of mental and emotional states among those living in retirement homes dictates some of Froh's work here, as one woman who kept asking "Then what?" whenever Froh would tell her what came next led to Froh expounding on what was really her own life goal: a full life, meaningful relationships, love and happiness. When the reply to that was "Then what?", what else could Froh say but, "Then, you die". I'm not sure if that last conversation happened verbatim, but that's not really important; what was important was the way Froh was encouraging and optimistic but also realistic and accepting of our ultimate fate. This comic is about process, and for Froh, it's processing the richness she feels in her current role, even as she is just barely able to piece things together.

Macrogroan #7, by Sara Lautman. Lautman has slightly refined her scratchy, sloppy scribbly line just enough to make her comics more easily intelligible but not so much as to lose their spontaneity and pure beauty. Simply as a personal aesthetic preference, I love artists who have mastered the ability to create characters using expressive scribbles because that spontaneity is key to making the characters come alive. They have a wobbly, vibratory quality to them that creates a sense of motion and energy on the page, even when the images themselves depict a silent character sitting on a stoop. Like Jules Feiffer, both Lautman's line and her handwritten lettering are beautifully sloppy in an inspiring way. It also helps that she has a sharp sense of humor, ranging from self-deprecation to crafting a shaggy dog story for the sake of a pun. The way she draws herself as frequently slumped over, with a pointy nose and messy hair, only adds to the sheer pleasure I get from looking at her drawings. When she uses grayscale, she often just uses her pencil to gray-out some backgrounds so as to give her drawings some more weight. There's also a great deal of charm in her strips, like one in which she enthuses about a "classic date spot" in New York (The Cloisters), which turns out to be from a banned lesbian young adult novel from the early 80s--which her friend calls her on. Lautman's autobio reminds me a bit of Sophie Yanow's, only less angular and less political. Lautman's comics explore comic and quotidian aspects of city life with occasional forays into surrealism. She's become a much better storyteller, especially in terms of panel-to-panel transitions. It's pretty clear that she could do something long form or collect strips thematically, much like Gabrielle Bell does. She's certainly hit on a winning formula.

Genus, by Anuj Shrestha. This batch of one to two page stories and illustrations is separate from the body horror/conspiracy series of the same name, but the aesthetic is very much the same. In this zine, that aesthetic of people slowly having their faces completely subsumed by a wriggling, plant-like growth is entirely ignored, especially in terms of the narratives that Shrestha spins. The first story is about a young girl's experiences in school as an avid participant--almost too avid. In this and other strips, the growths seem to be a visual metaphor for a kind of inner ugliness made external, except that everyone experienced it the same way. It's a stripping away of innocence and a reflection of the parasitic or codependent nature of our relationships. The more materially and financially accomplished a person became, as in the story "Company Dinner", the more disfigured and inhuman each person became, until their heads stopped being recognizable as human. The illustrations are all of fashionable, hip looking people whose faces have become entirely transformed into that mass of writhing tentacles/stalks. The final strip, "Genus Company Policy" reveals that the system is rigged from the start. Shrestha's line drawings are exquisite as always, as they add a level of chilly distance to the everyday activities they depict.

Flocks, Chapter Five, by L.Nichols. Nichols' incredibly empathetic and humane autobio series about the various groups that have had an impact on their life reaches an almost unbearable point of agony and then resolves in an unexpected but remarkably hopeful way. Growing up in rural Louisiana as a queer kid led to all sorts of feelings of self-hatred, even as the local church community often provided her tremendous support and encouragement. Nichols rejects all binary arguments and instead embraces the contradictions that surround us. It was possible for people in their church and their family to support them in some ways but make them inadvertently feel like a sinner in others. They were often a shield for them and encouraged their budding academic talents in the face of bullying from the other kids at school. Their parents were another set of contradictions, simultaneously encouraging Nichols and making them feel worthless. This volume follows up on hints laid down in earlier volumes, as Nichols' father asks for a divorce, leading Nichols' mom to leave the house with all the prescription drugs. Nichols details the ways in which their parents put them in the middle, each attacking the other.

Nichols depicts themself as a rag doll in their autobio comics buffeted by the inexorable forces of physics. This is an especially apt metaphor given the way Nichols felt pushed and pulled, reducing them to a pile of stuffing. Nichols details the ways in which their church helped them and their mother out, no questions asked: food, clothes, shelter, etc. Even with the weight of being queer bearing down on them as a young teen, Nichols' faith was still a comfort in the face of extreme anxiety. Nichols finally gets relief when they're accepted into the state Science, Math & The Arts high school. Here, Nichols meets a new flock. No longer an outsider due to their intellect and interests, Nichols finds unconditional support for the first time in their life. There's a remarkable scene when one of Nichols' friends basically tells them to come out, that everyone knew they were interested in girls--and it was OK. The pressure arrows bearing down on Nichols disappeared as the one thing they thought they'd never get and didn't deserve--true acceptance--was freely given. After extending empathy, compassion, understanding and the benefit of the doubt to everyone else, Nichols finally gave it to themself. The joy and radiance in Nichols' line at this point fairly bursts off the page as they were able to extend and receive the trust that had been broken with their parents.

Michel Rabagliati's Paul Up North

The final volume (for now) in Michel Rabagliati's Paul series features many familiar delights, but it's ultimately the most lightweight. Rabagliati has gone on record saying that he decided to quit the semi-autobiographical series that jumped back and forth in time after he and his wife got divorced, noting that it was now just too painful to delve into the past. To be sure, Paul Up North's virtues are simple, and it has the least amount of depth of any of the books in the series that has spanned nearly 20 years. It more-or-less picks up right after the end of the last book, Paul Joins The Scouts. The running theme in every Rabagliati book is that of transition and the difficulty of accepting change. It's also about people trying to find their place in life, be it Paul, his family or his friends, there's always a tension between the instant nostalgia of the moment and the desire for things to never change and the need for growth at different stages in one's life.

This book follows Paul's family moving to a new town when he was sixteen and his adolescent tendency to pull away from his parents. Along the way, he makes the kind of close friends that are so valuable to a teenager, has some wild adventures with his new best friend and has something close to his first mature relationship--and first real heartache. Rabagliati is superb at relating the small details in friendships that give his stories a real sense of authenticity, especially with his slightly bigfoot, cartoony style of character design. Every character is distinctive in their own way, but it's clear that his friendship with fellow smart-ass Marco was the most important. The key sequence in the book was their hitch-hiking adventure that nearly got them killed when a powerful snowstorm rolled into northern Quebec. Marco represented that friend who was a little cooler than you are who introduced you to all sorts of music and culture while pushing one beyond their comfort zone in an effort to get them to try new things. The snowstorm sequence saw Rabagliati in peak form as a cartoonist, using swirling whites and grays to surround his clueless protagonists with increasing (if denied) levels of danger. The color dream sequence that followed was also an unexpected delight, especially after the reader was subjected to such an intense and harrowing series of panels.

That said, Paul in this book was especially whiny and immature. Rabagliati wasn't necessarily trying to make Paul look good, to be sure, but rather to normalize him. In other words, "here's a teenage asshole boy, just like all the other ones". Doing so was an effort to neither let Paul off the hook nor judge him too harshly, especially given his naivete. However, the inexplicable and tedious attitude he gave his parents did not make for great storytelling, even when Rabagliati went over the top in ham-handed metaphors at the end when Paul burned his old childhood playhouse and helped his father on the project he had been requested to work on from the start. While Rabagliati mercifully made this a silent sequence, that's all that saved it from cliche'. There are other problematic elements in the book: there's a deep undercurrent of sexism that pervades it, especially with regard to how men treat women as objects. From his uncle taking him to a strip club and sexually harassing women (played for laughs) to the way he and his friends treated and talked about girls, there's a tacit acceptance, a sort of boys-will-be-boys understanding of their actions. There's a homophobic sequence regarding a guy picking up the boys as well as a sequence that was simultaneously fat-shaming and slut-shaming of a girl who wanted to fool around with several of the boys. I found that tacit homophobia to be especially surprising given Rabagliati's sensitive handling of the subject in Paul Joins The Scouts. While one can appreciate Rabagliati's honesty in telling it like it was with regard to how a teenage boy might approach things (freaking out about a guy coming on to him and freaking out about sexual contact with someone he was not attracted to), there was little to indicate in the text that Rabagliati found any of these behaviors regrettable now.

While Rabagliati made it clear that Paul in this book was to be considered an unreliable and immature narrator, there was enough of a sense of nostalgia running through the book to blur the line between reporting on things as they were without celebrating them (like the sexism) and cheerfully recalling the good ol' days. There are other problems with the book as well: a subplot regarding his mother getting a face-lift goes nowhere, as does a subplot involving her sister dating a possible criminal. Every storyline, including Montreal hosting the summer Olympics in 1976, is inevitably sucked into the teenage Paul vortex, which concludes with the hilariously over-the-top sequence of him listening to the same sad song for over two weeks in a row as he lay in his underwear in his bedroom. To be sure, Rabagliati is in no way trying to glorify himself when his girlfriend broke up with him, even if she tried to avoid him instead of telling him. Rabagliati does suggest that finally facing up to his heartbreak was what enabled him to make the transition from adolescence to early adulthood and an acceptance of his responsibilities. It's unfortunate that Rabagliati concluded a series filled with emotionally powerful moments earned through his storytelling prowess with what amounted to the melodrama he usually managed to avoid. That's especially true given how wonderfully deft his cartooning has become, as it carried many an underwritten sequence in the book.

Top Thirty Long-Form Comics of 2016

Here's my list of 2016's best long-form comics or short-form collections that I read. I have an entirely separate short-form list that will be published on the Comics Journal website, tcj.com. There's a ridiculously long list of books I haven't had a chance to get to yet, but I will, in part because I'm an Eisner judge this year and will be reading every significant release from 2016. A partial list of books I haven't read includes: Perfect Hair, by Tommi Parrish, a couple of different books from Simon Moreton, Virus Tropical by Powerpaola, Band For Life by Anya Davidson, Kramer's Ergot #9 (edited by Sammy Harkham), Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden, After Nothing Comes by Aidan Koch, Gorgeous by Cathy G. Johnson, Big Kids by Michael DeForge (everything by DeForge, basically), Sick by Gabby Schulz, Laid Waste by Julia Gfroerer, a couple of books by Kevin Budnik, Trying Not To Notice by Will Dinski, Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier, Founding Fathers Funnies by Peter Bagge, and Palace of Champions, by Henriette Valium. I expect the vast majority of these books will make my future list, so I'll be updating it in April, where the list will likely expand to a top fifty. Consider this to be a snapshot at the end of 2016 of the good to great books that I've managed to read.

1. Rosalie Lightning, by Tom Hart. Alternative Comics.
2. Someone Please Have Sex With Me, by Gina Wynbrandt. 2dcloud.
3. Sir Alfred #3, by Tim Hensley. Note: I realize this could have gone in the short form category (it's 40 pages), but the sheer density of this thing led me to put in long form. Your mileage may vary.) Pigeon Press, distributed by Fantagraphics.
4. Exits, by Daryl Seitchik. Koyama Press.
5. She's Not That Into Poetry, by Tom Hart. Alternative Comics.
6. Time Clock, by Leslie Stein. Fantagraphics.
7. Demon, by Jason Shiga. First Second.
8. Beverly, by Nick Drnaso. Drawn & Quarterly.
9. Turning Japanese, by MariNaomi. 2dcloud.
10. Hot Or Not: 20th Century Male Artists, by Jessica Campbell. Koyama Press..

11. Looking For America's Dog, by Steven Weissman. Fantagraphics.
12. Megg And Mogg In Amsterdam, by Simon Hanselmann. Fantagraphics.
13. Tetris, by Box Brown. First Second.
14. In The Sounds And Seas, by Marnie Galloway. One Peace Books.
15. Hilda And The Stone Forest, by Luke Pearson. NoBrow.
16. Hot Dog Taste Test, by Lisa Hanawalt. Drawn & Quarterly.
17. Gulag Casual, by Austin English. 2dcloud.
18. More Heroes Of The Comics, by Drew Friedman. Fantagraphics.
19. Mox Nox, by Joan Cornella. Fantagraphics.
20. We All Wish For Deadly Force, by Leela Corman. (Here's another short-form/long-form toss-up. It felt too dense to be considered short-form in my eyes.) Retrofit.

21. A City Inside, by Tillie Walden. Avery Hill.
22. How To Survive In The North, by Luke Healy. NoBrow.
23. Hip-Hop Family Tree Volume 4, by Ed Piskor. Fantagraphics.
24. Rules For Dating My Daughter, by Mike Dawson. Uncivilized Books.
25. Patience, by Daniel Clowes. Fantagraphics.
26. Disquiet, by Noah Van Sciver. Fantagraphics.
27. Talk Dirty To Me, by Luke Howard. AdHouse Books.
28. A Brief History of Everyday Objects, by Andy Warner. Picador.
29. The Creepy Case Files Of Margo Maloo, by Drew Weing. First Second.
30. Friends Is Friends, by Greg Cook. First Second.

There were also a number of great reissues in 2016. The best of those that I read include Soft City by Hariton Pushwagner, The Greatest! Of Marlys by Lynda Barry, Nicolas by Pascal Girard, and Neat Stuff By Peter Bagge, There are many more to go.

31 Days of CCS: The Index

Here's the index for the 2016 iteration of my feature on the artists of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

1. April Malig
2. Jarad Greene
3. Joyana McDiarmid
4. Reilly Hadden
5. Sophie Goldstein, Laurel Lynn Leake
6. Alex Karr
7. G.P. Bonesteel
8. Beth Hetland, Josh Lees
9. J.P. Coovert
10. Colleen Frakes
11. J.D. Lunt
12. Alexis Frederick-Frost
13. Robyn Smith
14. Mathew New
15. Anna Sellheim, Tillie Walden
16. Amelia Onorato
17. Steve Thueson and Jacob Bussiere
18. Laura Terry
19. Andy Warner
20. Romey Petite
21. Chuck Forsman
22. Dakota McFadzean, Ian Richardson
23. Melissa Mendes
24. Penina Gal, Betsey Swardlick, Bailey Sharp
25. Luke Howard
26. Casey Bohn & Aaron Cockle
27. Rebecca Roher
28. The Other Side, co-edited by Melanie Gillman, with a story by Amelia Onorato
29. John Carvajal
30. Rio Aubry Taylor, Kevin Uehlein, and DW
31. Luke Healy