Simon Moreton of the Week #1: Plans We Made

Simon Moreton is one of my favorite artists to emerge in the last five or so years. His style, which has evolved past influences like John Porcellino and Warren Craghead, is elegantly stripped down, meditative but active and fascinated by the past but not weighed down by nostalgia. I have a number of books and minis by him to examine, so I thought I'd do a bit at a time, starting with Plans We Made, a 2015 volume published by Uncivilized Books.

The book is a look back at time spent in the suburbs growing up and into his teen years. The dominant theme here is one of inhabiting that sense of special, sublime time spent as a youth, where moments in real time simultaneously become beloved memories. Moreton's bold but spare line is perfect in providing just enough detail to inhabit those memories along with Moreton, to get a sense of the emotional narrative of running around his neighborhood as a boy, playing in the forest, claiming a chunk of land as theirs. At the same time, Moreton starts to build a competing emotional narrative as he grows older and his circle of friends expands: a sense of needing to escape, to move on to something bigger. Those two strong impulses circled each other, as Moreton's mastery of his territory started to feel like treading the same ground over and over. At the same time, the pull of his friends is beautifully depicted in small anecdotes like watching a building catch fire from their vantage point in the forest and being struck by the strangeness of it all. It's an experience marked in their memories as something atypical in their daily patterns, their daily interactions that were driven to creak a spark. That spark is the sublime quality of feeding off of and feeding others in conversation, in love, in closeness and in treasuring simple, small moments. It's an evasive feeling frequently blunted by the mundane aspects of everyday life, but Plans We Made reads like a narrative not so much of events but of exceptions to the daily grind.

Each story was an exception, forging a group memory. Moreton uses very little text in telling his stories, and the spareness of that text is often simple but poetic in nature. More often than not, he prefers to let his line do the talking in terms of capturing and explaining an experience. The trees, the lines of houses, the heat of the sun, the blare of the radio, body language at parties: even as things become more complex emotionally, they retain that same simplicity in form in terms of the drawing, as well as in scale. There's a brutal scene where it's implied that Moreton breaks up with a girlfriend and she urges him to go, and we see him on that brutal, solitary walk home. He's alone with his thoughts and the familiar surroundings are not comforting to him. The last section of the book, where he's alone in his house for a month as his parents are away, happen to coincide with 9/11. It was a final moment of not quite understanding himself, or the world, in that moment. It recorded perhaps the last time he felt at home in some sense. Sitting outside the house with his friend, trying to make sense of it all, trying to connect all the dots of his life, nothing quite fit.

It wasn't a part of his life that had a definitive conclusion; rather, he was there until he left, and all that remained were the memories that had changed from pure, innocent joy to an aching impatience mixed with a profound sense of connection. Moreton does it with a slow pace, with single panels or images taking up one page (and not even all of it, much of the time), as he wanted to portray a sense of looking at the page reliving the memory in the same amount of time. At the same time, detail mattered less than impressions, and so the hints at trees and houses and neighborhoods got sketchier in some segments, and slightly more detailed in others. The way in which Moreton takes his time and in so doing makes the reader take their time as well, is the key to emotionally inhabiting each scene and letting the reader in on these feelings. It's an honest, gentle, and bittersweet account of the feeling of having close friends, a first love and a place to explore.

Comics As Poetry #1: Inaction Comics

This is the first entry in what will be a months-long series on comics-as-poetry. It's a branch of comics that's exploded in recent years, with the results being remarkably varied. A cousin to abstract comics, comics-as-poetry stretches the limits of narrative in comics and explores the different ways words & images can interact in a manner similar to poetry's ability to use words in an intuitive manner to get across a hint of the sublime.

This week's book is Inaction Comics #1: Productivity, edited by Kimball Anderson. It's more than just a clever title; indeed, its premise is a challenge to a fundamental aspect of comics: that it is sequential art, featuring movement and action between panels and pages. The grids and the rhythms of storytelling are all designed to create a fluidity of action that carries the reader along. Anderson goes in a different direction, and the other artists in the book follow along; create a single narrative from a number of different artists that focuses on stillness, inactivity, and quiet. The book is separated into three sections: floating, weighted and balance. One of the running themes of the book is how frenzied and uncontrolled activity is in itself a kind of sickness, or at least an inability to stop and be still. There's virtue in having goals and working hard, but this book examines what happens when work consumes us. At the same time, in one running narrative spearheaded by Anderson, one of the characters is clearly medically disabled, and they have trouble reconciling what they see as a lack of usefulness with their partner's activity.

The Weighted section is the book's most intense, as there's a frenzy of activity but also a period of having to wait before being active, and it's portrayed as agonizing for a certain set of people. For them, as LB Lee shows us, activity is simply an antidote to a fear of being still, of being alone with one's thoughts, as well as being part of bipolar. That's followed up on in the Floating section, where the mania of needing to be in constant motion eases and equilibrium is achieved. In the course of works that vary between stream of consciousness narrative, snapshots of relationships, case studies, and traditional narratives, the very concept of "productivity" is examined and flipped around. There's a strip by L. Nichols that examines the anxiety surrounding "work" and "getting work done", highlighting the fact that being anxious about work interrupts the actual flow of being able to first relax, then focus and finally follow-through. In their strip, as they sit at a drawing table, they finally are persuaded to go on a walk with their dog. In the middle of the walk, they realize the irony that sometimes the act of moving one's body creates a stillness of mind that's impossible to achieve simply by trying to will it into being. Anderson goes even further to suggest that such activity creates erasure of self and meaning.

The book also hints, in the Floating section, that the very concept of productivity in a capitalist society is toxic. It values frenzied activity over thoughtful contemplation, rushing instead of moving, and busyness as a form of self-worth. Susie Oh's strip about the silkworm is a perfect encapsulation of the book's ethos, as the silkworm creates beautiful silk in its own time, at its own pace, in its own way. Frenzied activity is almost incapable of the act of creation. Laurel Lynn Leake's strip is the visceral opposite of this, as the "shame of inaction" is turned inward, until one devours oneself. In this strip, it's a literal self-destruction, a metaphor for the ways in which guilt and self-loathing drive self-destruction. It's an interesting strip because the visual approach of each artist is radically different. Anderson's use of line is spare, as color shapes create the emotional narrative. Nichols uses a single spot color and line, concentrating on close-ups but never showing their face in total. Lee's work is standard pencil and ink, hewing closely to naturalism in a way that's jarring when compared to the rest of the book. Andrew White often works directly with words and shapes, representing the way in which one's vision becomes strained and one's ability to concentrate dims. Leake's art is visceral and terrifying. The overall result is a beautiful, restrained and remarkably cohesive work, despite slipping from the work of one artist to another. The overall effect is as though the reader has been given the rare privilege of seeing how someone else sees the world, feeling what they feel, and understanding their fears and desires. At just over a hundred pages, it moves at a remarkably brisk pace, as the artists found a way of locking in together in an intuitive way. It's poetic and direct, but also offers so many sublime moments of simply being, of inhabiting each strip and understanding, even if only for a moment.

Koyama: Nathan Jurevicius' Birthmark

Nathan Jurevicius' book Birthmark is part fairy tale and part hero's journey, as it follows a nameless and bulbous creature from abject poverty to world-shaking influence. Told in first-person captions, what's memorable about this book is Jurevicius' dense, grotesque and often scribbly use of color. The hues and scribbles give one the sense that the entire world shown here is badly bruised and battered. The story begins in the city, where the hero is separated from his mother after his father (a painter) had displeased the Grand Inquisitor (the defacto ruler of the city). The juxtaposition of pink, purple and dark green creates that "bruise" effect, as the hero lives the life of a scavenger and later a menial factory worker.

One of the central themes of the book is that compassion and caring, even in a brutal and uncaring world, can be enormous strengths. The hero takes pity on a grub that would otherwise have been farmed for food or entertainment, and she becomes his best friend. They leave the city together and simply go about trying to do the right thing and be helpful, which leads to a series of adventures that eventually become horrible. Death is everywhere, and it comes for Edith the grub, transforming the hero into someone who turns his grief and love into a weapon of vengeance. At the same time, he knows that he has to take care of Edith's children, to whom she gave birth right as she died. Again, protecting and nurturing life in this book ultimately leads to a special and powerful destiny. By the end of the book, the hero waltzes back into the city and rescues his mother, and threatens changes. Those changes are only hinted at as the book ends (I suspect there will be another volume), but what matters is the way in which the hero became hardened enough to kill his enemies but retained enough compassion to think of his mother and the inhabitants of the city first.

Jurevicius worked big on every page. Most every page had one or two panels at most, in an effort to emphasize the massiveness of the struggle, the sheer size of the city, the ferocity of the threats encountered, etc. As such, each page is worth of studying on an individual basis in terms of the color balance and composition. It's not what I would call a beautiful book, but its aesthetic is powerful and unapologetic in the way it portrays the grotesque quality of its characters and backgrounds. When Jurevicicius switches from the base colors to bright blue or canary yellow, it opens up the book's world to the reader as well as its hero. The matter-of-factness of the hero is another interesting quality of the book, as he reacts in a level-headed manner to the horrible things that happen as well as the major changes that occur in his life. Gaining new knowledge and purpose does not fundamentally change him as an individual; instead, it only reinforces his strongly-held values. I'll be curious to see if there's another book that will come out of this series, because it has room for greater complexity with regard to the overall narrative.

Uncivilized/Odod: Musnet, volumes 1 & 2

The artist known as Kickliy (their identity a closely-held secret for some reason) has crafted a remarkable series about a mouse who comes to be named Musnet and his love of painting. Indeed, the entire series is a love letter to the art and craft of painting and the possibilities of self-expression, particularly in the way that Impressionism was such a startling change from previous styles of art. This is a sweeping epic that is nonetheless made up of numerous quiet moments, as Kickliy is clearly content to take their time in telling this story. The colors are lush without being distracting or garish, giving the reader something to enjoy looking at as the narrative unfolds. The character designs are simple, straightforward and cute without being cloying. The story of the would-be painter mouse is one where the garden and the house are full of fun & adventure, but death also lurks around every corner. It's charming without being sanitized.

The first volume of Musnet, The Mouse of Monet, focuses on the young mouse coming to be the apprentice of a cranky old squirrel painter, in the shadow of the house of Monet. It slowly establishes his friendship with the girl mouse he meets at the beginning of the book (Mya) and how he is able to talk the old painter (Remi) into being his mentor. It's also a long look at the craft of painting, from how to stretch a canvas, how to mix paint and how to hold a brush. It's marvelously modest, low-key and charming, even when we are introduced to the grieving Monet himself. Kickliy slowly establishes the series' status quo, as Musnet works with Remi and moves into the big house with Mya's family. The mixture of wit, ambition and melancholy makes for an interesting tone for the series. All at once, the reader is being shown something old that's dying out (Remi's style of painting), the future of art in Musnet, the anguish of Monet and the longing for a sense of being part of something greater than himself in Musnet.

With the premise established, Kickliy complicates things in volume 2, Impressions Of The Master. As opposed to the uncertainty that opened the first book, this volume opens with a picnic, symbolic of Musnet's becoming friends with Mya (who is a writer) but also symbolic of his relentless work ethic in trying to please his mentor. Kickliy then turns that bit of reverie and character-building into a life-or-death chase as Musnet manages to outwit a snake and an owl who are looking to turn him into a meal. There's a funny sequence where the mouse enters a maze (a lovely bit of visual storytelling/problem-solving), the introduction of a major new character (a spider named Chiby), threats from landlords, and other concerns. There's another major action sequence where Musnet and his friends rescue Mya's father from the owl.

Its end is gentle,as Musnet has struck out on his own and relishes the company of his friends. Though each volume is just 54 pages, the sheer density of each page and the album size of the book make this a highly satisfying read. The books consistently avoid cliche' and predictability. There are some gentle lessons taught about friendship and being part of something, but it's far from didactic. The books focus on the importance of balancing hard work with spending time with friends, of being honest about feelings and having the courage of one's convictions. Kickliy balances gags & silliness, character moments and exciting action scenes with aplomb, never allowing the book to fall into a pattern. Add to that the simple and expressive beauty of each page as a separate art to appreciate with the fluidity of the storytelling, and you have a book that's both easy to love and admire.

Exploring The World of Cartozia Tales

I've read a lot of young adult fiction in going through books for the Eisner awards, and a fair number of them have been fantasy/action-adventure oriented. None have the level of ambition, playfulness, formal daring and fun of the Isaac Cates-edited Cartozia Tales series, which is an issue away from finishing up its initial run of ten. Cates and his artistic partner Mike Wenthe (a long-time friend from before his comics days, in the interest of disclosure) basically made Cartozia Tales a far more aggressive experiment than their work on their old series, Satisfactory Tales. Their interests in comics have always revolved around collaboration, formal experimentation, an almost whimsical sense of play (including plays on words and visual puns), and creating problems to solve. They seemed to really find a groove when they worked on an ambitious fantasy comic together, which perhaps provided the impetus for this series. The central thrust of the series is this: in a set of adjoining land masses dubbed Cartozia (the first of many, many place name puns in the series), the reader would follow all sorts of serialized adventures. Cates divided the map into a nine-panel grid. In each issue, one of the seven permanent creative teams would be assigned a sector and create a story. Each issue would feature two guest artists. In the next issue, the creators would move over one sector, so now they had the option of picking up from the previous artist (in a sort of narrative exquisite corpse game), creating a new character, or some combination thereof.

This approach has led to a crazy level of complexity, especially since some characters were created by one artist but not actually used by them; instead, they were given to another creator to use. And unlike the random approach of a true exquisite corpse, there was careful attention paid to continuity (both narrative and character), especially as each issue drew the overarching narratives of the series tighter and tighter, like a sort of fantasy Raymond Chandler novel. That's how it was supposed to go in theory; in practice, things got a little choppy at times. While the covers for each issue and the overall design have been excellent, it's been obvious (especially in some of the middle issues) that some cartoonists were rushing their entries. There have been a couple of fundraisers for the series, as Cates is paying everyone. Not every guest star has been a perfect match, nor has every narrative maintained a sense of fluidity. Frankly, unless the series is read at once, it can be difficult to remember exactly what was going on with nine different storylines. That said, it's remarkable to see how coherent the book is given the incredibly complicated logistics involved.

It was always obvious that when Cates & Wenthe worked together, they went all-out for the series. With a relatively smooth line and the ability to trade off with each other, that duo turned in some of the denser stories in the anthology, though that density often circled around how many puns and funny visual references they could throw in. Still, their works felt like going back to home base when reading this comic. The two most dependable cartoonists on the roster were Lucy Bellwood and Lupi McGinty. Bellwood works using a slightly thicker line and a looser overall style than McGinty's ligne claire approach, but they both possess a smoothly welcoming style that worked for every character in the series. The series' secret weapon has been Tom Motley, whose scratchy and inky style felt dissonant at first, but whose relentless commitment to formal experimentation (along with a few changes here and there to make his line clearer) makes him a great place in the book to get one's eyes challenged. He also shares the Wenthe/Cates proclivity for whimsy and wordplay, a nice contrast to the more straightforward styles of the other artists. His greatest achievement in the series was his homage to Gustave Verbeek's The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a classic comic strip that could be read one way, then turned upside down to continue the story using the same images. Motley's ability to precisely and flawlessly emulate that style within the context of the story itself was astonishing.

The early MVP of the series was Shawn Cheng, whose ultra-thin line and clean storytelling was simply beautiful to behold, but obviously work-intensive. He simplified his style later on, which was still perfectly functional but not quite the same in terms of impact. The other regulars (Jen Vaughn and Sarah Becan (often with Beckie Gautreua)) certainly had their moments. Vaughn created my favorite character/narrative in the series, the "Vagabond" narrative, and was clearly working hard in the early going. She had to skip an issue and some of her later work looks rushed, perhaps because she has a lot of other commitments on her plate. Of the two guest stars per issue, some were remarkably great, like Dylan Horrocks (oh, if he had been in every issue) and sublime work from Luke Pearson, whose young girl scientist Gret was a perfectly-designed character. Jon Lewis was a natural and another great artist to start out the series with, while Carol Lay was an interesting choice for a one-page story. Jon Chad and Chris Wright were fantastic gets in the same issue whose styles contrasted in a visually exciting way (Chad's detailed clear line vs Wright's scratchy and darkly eccentric style). The team of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Ming Doyle was interesting because it resolved a key plot point and did it in a naturalistic style--which was highly unusual for the series. Tom Hart's dreamy, poetic comic also addressed a key narrative concern and Nick Abadzis' strip was formally charming in a series full of formally intriguing comics.

The good news about what will emerge as 400+ pages of interconnected anthology storytelling involving over thirty different artists is that actually really started to tie up loose ends, put characters together and gain some real momentum as it went further. I look forward to the final issue and how it finishes drawing together the various storylines, both grim and silly, enigmatic and simple, and pleasantly ambling and urgent. While the series had its ragged moments, I'm staggered at how much traffic Cates had to direct while still contributing to virtually every issue himself. And while the series had its misfires (the James Kochalka piece felt like it came from another series entirely and changed what had been a promising narrative thread into something that became sillier and sillier), I admired Cates' try-anything style of editing that still had a degree of narrative rigor. I should add that the all-ages character of the book was a key to its success, especially as Cates threw every kind of extra he could think of at younger readers: paper dolls, word searches, mazes, drawing exercises and more. It was clear that Cates was making the kind of comic he would have wanted to read as a child, or perhaps creating one for his own family. That level of sincerity, effort and creativity is a remarkable tonic to the level of cynical, money-making tropes that I see in so much YA fiction.

High-Low and the Top 75 Comics Blogs

A nice person named Anuj Agarwal wrote in and said that High-Low had been named one of the top 75 comics blogs on the web. This was a very nice and unexpected honor, as the site clocked in at #67. I don't know what metrics led to this determination by the Feedspot people, but it's nice nonetheless, especially since I have that .gif of the honor on the site now in medal form. Thanks to my readers.

:01: Jason Shiga's Demon, Volumes 1 & 2

I say it with every review I do of a Jason Shiga comic, because it bears repeating: Shiga's background is in pure mathematics, and so his comics often read as a series of locked-room puzzles, coding problems or other sorts of math-related conflicts, all punctuated by a jet-black sense of humor. Most of his other comics have had at least one twist involving a shocking act of violence, or multiple acts of violence over the span of the book, but Demon is sort of Shiga's version of Stephen King's It: a book that has every violent and disgusting action setpiece Shiga could conceive, each more over-the-top than the next, but each working in a rigidly-applied set of principles based on the book's initial premise. It's like It in the sense that King considered that to be a novel that had every scary thing he could think of in there.

The premise is this: the long-suffering Jimmy Yee (a protagonist of the same name appears in many other Shiga books, and it's not too much of a stretch to paint him as a simple Shiga stand-in) tries to kill himself by hanging himself in a hotel room for unknown reasons. Next thing he knows, he wakes up in what seems to be the same hotel room, alive (to his great consternation). In the beginning, Shiga really takes his time in establishing the presence in as brutal a fashion as possible. We see Jimmy try to shoot himself, bleed out in a tub and jump in front of a truck, but he keeps coming back. Volume one, which features the first five chapters of the story, features Jimmy trying to work out what happen and introduces Hunter, the man who will become his nemesis. What Jimmy realized is that he was a "demon": when the body he was in died, he simply possessed the nearest person, until they were killed, and so on. That sets Jimmy down a gruesome, amoral path where he experiments with the limits of his abilities by ruthlessly killing random people.

At the end of volume one, he is pursued by government operative Hunter in order to offer Jimmy a job as an agent, which Jimmy has no interest in. Hunter insists that Jimmy's going to work for him whether he likes it or not, leading to the first of many incredibly strange cat-and-mouse games between the two. This one involves a bleeding-out Jimmy being put in a jail cell next to a death-row inmate. Hunter thinks he has Jimmy pinned, since he took away anything that the inmate could kill himself with...except a square of toilet paper. This is the most hilarious and disgusting segment in the book, as Jimmy tries to reason his way out of the situation until he finally determines that he could turn the the toilet paper into a shiv if he dipped it in enough semen enough times. The situation inspires the immortal line, "Looks like he slit his throat with a cum knife, sir."

The second volume features chapters six through twelve, and adds a needed complication to the plot (otherwise Jimmy would have just disappeared at the end of volume one). That complication was the existence of his daughter, who not only is alive (Jimmy thought she was dead), she's a demon like her dad. That leads to a book-long series of conflicts between Jimmy and Hunter. When it looks like Hunter finally has the upper hand, Jimmy uses calculus and a photographic memory to turn the tables, seemingly once and for all. The second volume ends almost a hundred years after the story began, but this would in fact just reset the chess board between Jimmy and Hunter.

This is one of the rare instances where I've decided to skimp on story details, because in true blockbuster fashion, it's the details in how Jimmy and Hunter engage in their battle of wits that makes the story so much fun. This is a book about strategy and lateral thinking as much as it is about anything else. It's about trying to limit your opponent's moves as much as possible and forcing them into a single move, and then deviating from the expected with a devastating or surprising move that catches your opponent off guard. It's about turning your opponent's strengths into weaknesses. It's about finding out what your opponent holds dear and exploiting it. It's about ethics, and in particular, the circumstances under which murder is acceptable from a utilitarian point of view. Hunter wants to use Jimmy to wipe out all of America's enemies and create utopia. Jimmy isn't interested in being anyone's slave and kills out of what he views is necessity. The reality is that both of them are nihilists of the worst kind, unable to appreciate the value of a single life because of their willingness to discard it for their needs. They are the same person who are simply in opposition to each other, with Jimmy's weakness being his daughter and Hunter's weakness a simple-minded utopianism.

Shiga has refined his line in a manner similar to John Porcellino and Matt Feazell in that it's deceptively simple and beautiful. There's an effortlessness on each page where his drawings are lively but in total service to the story; his lumpy character design that often features odd facial characteristics is almost 8-bit video game blank at times, but his understanding of things like gesture and body language give the characters a sense of presence. In terms of storytelling, Shiga has few peers. His panel design is all part of his method in slowly unfolding an action set piece, switching from a tight grid to a page full of jumbled panels as things seem to spin out of control, and then back to order. Shiga flips the page around for aerial views--not to make the scene more spectacular, but as an illustration to fully understand the stakes involved. There's an almost mechanistic quality in reading these books, in the sense that once you start, it's much harder to stop reading than it is to continue. That's a testament to Shiga's total control over the page, including the use of rose and pink spot color and the extensive but unobtrusive use of grey scale. The design of the books is on the boring side, especially compared to the original minicomics. I also though splitting it into four volumes was questionable, but it actually proved to read relatively well in that format. Hopefully, there will be some kind of deluxe format available in the future.