Minis: Kenan Rubenstein, Drew Beckmeyer

Everything Unseen, Parts 6 & 7, by Drew Beckmeyer. Beckmeyer's story about an apocalypse brought on by a proliferation of doppelgangers enters into the beginning of the end here in this deranged, loopy epic. Printed straight from Beckmeyer's pencils, there's a frenetic quality to his art and lettering, as though his life depended on doing this story as quickly as possible. This installment is part road trip/buddy story and part existential journey into self-discovery. In Beckmeyer's world where multiple copies of one's self exist as doppelgangers as part of a caste system, those two stories are really one and the same. Though much of the story is absolutely crazy-sounding when describing it (there's an extended section on how bouillon cubes are manufactured to be a delicacy with sweets), there's an ironclad internal logic at work here and a seriousness of purpose that makes the comic relief all the more effective.

In the first part of the story, the lead doppelganger ("Charles Grodin") encounters the highest-caste version of himself after escaping his role as a war god for a group of tribal savages. The Angel of Death (who had been guiding him toward rebellion all along) sacrifices himself to save Charles, leaving his mask to him. Charles has to deal with a new and far less friendly Angel who wants the mask and wants to kill him, attempting to sow doubt in his mind any way he can. The second part of the book sees Charles, Jim and Jim (the higher and lower caste doppelgangers) on a raft (shades of Huck Finn, no doubt) so that Charles can find Level 1. Upon descending, he finds out where babies are created and judged ahead of time as to what caste they will belong to by a triumvirate. Charles learns that there's a "Level 0" that is self-determining and that all other levels are just "practice". This infuriates him into committing a shocking act of violence that ends the issue, as Beckmeyer really gets at the heart of matters here: are we creatures of free will or predestination? If man is simply a machine perfected over time as part of a process, how can free will defeat that mechanistic process? Does action and agency overcome the inherent flaws of being an inferior being? I can't wait to see how Beckmeyer resolves these questions in this funny, thoughtful, and surprisingly violent saga.

Last Train to Old Town, Chapter 1, by Kenan Rubenstein. The story aside, the design and execution of this mini is beautiful. Landscaped cardboard stock with an image of a train glued on, and then page after page of two-tone color. The color is used quite deliberately: as we meet our protagonist "Two-Shoes", your prototypical, borderline Asperger's nerd. The swarm of students around him is done in light green and uninked, whereas he's inked and seen in a darker green. The effect is repeated throughout the comic and makes the characters pop off the page, emphasizing the actions of the main characters while still keeping them in the larger context of the school. The figures themselves are simple and sketchy, with enough information to clearly and quickly differentiate them. Two-Shoes is harassed by a weird assortment of kids: a goth guy (Stone), a metalhead and a punk rock girl. All give him grief about reading for fun and having no life, but there are a few things that are a bit odd in their school. Two-Shoes doesn't associate with the D&D nerds, scoffing at how anachronistic their scenario is. When Stone and his pals conspire to get Two-Shoes out of school and out to the train station, the reader expects the worst. Is this a high school bullying story? What do these kids (whose identities seem fragile in some respects) want with him? When Stone tells him that they're not going to the city but to Old Town, Two-Shoes says it's dangerous there. At the very end, Rubenstein pulls off an audacious twist as he starts to show us just what kind of people are going to Old Town and then a final page reveal of just how old Old Town actually is. It's an incredibly clever maneuver that flips around the entire nature of the comic. I'm eager to see future chapters.

Lost and Found: After School Special

Dave Kiersh's recent book, After School Special, feels like a distillation of his themes with a conclusion that's far more hopeful and perhaps personal than much of his work.This story about two high school kids named Jed and Lisa is still packed with his typical themes: pain, longing, desperation, and alienation, but it allows for a kind of connection that's unusual in Kiersh's comics. Indeed, it almost feels like lonely characters from two separate short stories crossed over into each other's narratives, radically improving the course of events for both of them. As per usual, what makes Kiersh's work interesting is the way he's interested in exploring a particular set of melodramatic, adolescent emotions through the lens of the culture he was weaned on and the blandness of the suburban environment he grew up in. Indeed, the very title of the book refers to the frequently didactic, moralizing TV series aimed at teens, depicting them in trouble with drugs, sex, rebellion, etc. This comic, and much of Kiersh's oeuvre, is a sort of response to that kind of cultural saturation by providing a response from the teen's point of view while dealing with the litany of stressful, alienating circumstances typical of the genre.

In this book, Jed expresses his detachment from  the baby boomer generation, noting the contradiction of the "Leave It To Beaver" blandness they were raised on, their "free love" phase and how they returned to such 50s cliches when it was time to have children of their own. He's living with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend, who is constantly telling him to turn down his music until he throws his stereo out the window. Lisa is new in town after having had an abortion, thanks to getting impregnated by a jock. Her "reputation" follows her to her new school, where she randomly meets Jed and they hit it off. At first, they represent a means of escape and/or rebellion, an outlet for frustration. There's a hilarious scene where Lisa's watching the cult classic Slumber Party Massacre 2 (complete with stills!) and Jed calls her up, playing at being the obscene phone caller. As the book proceeds and each segment of the book is introduced by a journal written alternating between the two characters, their relationship deepens and becomes more lyrical.

As with all of Kiersh's comics, there's a sense of the protagonists wanting to freeze their small moments of happiness in time. That sense of not wanting to grow up is another theme in Kiersh's work; like Peter Pan, his characters want to keep flying and "Never land/Neverland". While that's true here as well, as Lisa tells Jed that she's not ready to have sex yet and he replies that he's in "no rush to become an adult", there's also the sense that this couple will find a way to remain in each other's lives. That's unusual for a Kiersh comic, as is the way he portrays both characters as fully sympathetic. Kiersh often portrays what he refers to as "dirtbags": losers with no sense of direction. Jed and Lisa may well have been precisely that kind of character in this book if it wasn't for each other. Both characters start to flourish because each believes in the other and don't judge. The book starts off in Kiersh's simplified line with full color, as Jed melodramatically despairs over his life, but then switches to the dense, smudgy line that Kiersh is best known for now. The simple figures and backgrounds are given weight and power by the thickness of the line that he employs, which allows them to stand out against the shadowy hatching and smudges. The effect is like watching a show on a small black & white television; something that's alien to people over a certain age but possibly quite familiar to Kiersh, who grew up in the 80s. The connections to TV are quite deliberate; the cover looks like an old test pattern and the panels are rounded like an old TV tube. Kiersh's comics have been marinating in the melodrama of outsized teenage emotions for nearly fifteen years, and I feel like this book is the bridge to a new area of exploration, and it's an elegant, frequently poetic bridge at that.

Self-Promotion: Big Feminist But, Studygroup Magazine

I'd like to indulge in a bit of self-promotion for some other recent projects of mine. I was a consulting editor for The Big Feminist But, an anthology edited by Shannon O'Leary and Joan Reilly. The only thing I really did was suggest a sequence for the stories in a manner that I thought made sense. While I wasn't thrilled with every story in here, there's some excellent work as well. Gabrielle Bell's "Manifestation" (her story about adapting Valerie Solanos' SCUM Manifesto) is one of my favorite stories of her career. Lauren Weinstein's heartfelt "If This Is All You Get" is a wonderful account of motherhood. Ulli Lust's autobio story about polyamory with her partner Kai Pfieffer is excellent; a mix of outrageous and strangely sensible. There are also strong pieces like the collaborations between real-life partners Vanessa Davis & Trevor Alixopulos, Josh Neufeld & Sari Wilson and former partners Jesse Reklaw & Andrice Arp. Other highlights include stories by Corinne Mucha, Virginia Paine, Justin Hall, Ron Rege', Jeffrey Brown, Emily Flake and Jen Wang. The book also contains one of Dylan Williams' last comics, and it's one of the best in the entire book. It's a fine group of artists examining a topic worthy of discussion, whether it relates to personal identity, sexual identity, marriage or child-rearing. Please consider buying a copy.

I'm also pleased to note that I have a piece in the new issue of Study Group Magazine (#2). Titled "Punk As Fuck: The Comics of Josh Bayer", this article takes a close look at a number of comics by the emerging cartoonist whose Raw Power was one of the best comics of the year. I'm not exaggerating when I feel like both the first and second issues of this magazine felt like they were being published just for me. Zack Soto is the designer and comics editor of the magazine, and his bright & powerful aesthetic can be felt in both issues. The list of artists he put together to contribute number many of my recent favorites: Aidan Koch, David King, Malachi Ward, Trevor Alixopulos, and Michael DeForge (in issue #1) and Lilli Carre', DeForge, Onsmith, Julia Gfrorer, Dan Zettwoch, Alixopulos, Sam Alden and Koch (in issue #2). None of these artists are turning in half-assed material, either; it's a-list stuff. The other great thing about SGM is that its features editor is former Comics Journal editor Milo George. George presided over one of the greatest runs in TCJ history, and seeing him with his hand back in the comics game is exciting. He was a supportive and hands-on editor whose input helped shape my article on Bayer into a piece I'm truly proud of. His process interview with Craig Thompson in #1 was fascinating. I also enjoyed his interview with Angie Wang, as well as Zack Soto's talks with Eleanor Davis and Mare' Odomo. I'd also like to single out J.T. Dockery's excellent piece on visiting John Byrne's house (!) and the way in general SGM manages to address some mainstream comics with a discerning and critical eye. This is strong and frequently cutting-edge stuff that's designed and packaged beautifully. Strongly recommended.

Battling Demons: Look Straight Ahead

Elaine M. Will's depiction of a teen's descent into psychosis in Look Straight Ahead reminds me a great deal of Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole. There are significant differences, however; Powell's story actually dips into magical realism and does not have a happy ending. With Will, the delusions experienced by lead character Jeremy are powerful and life-altering, but they are never treated as "real". That said, she spends a lot of time depicting Jeremy and his state of mind as something that is poorly understood and treated by his family and his very small circle of friends. Indeed, Will draws a direct line between Jeremy's already-shaky state of being and the outside forces that eventually force it to shatter, which included bullying. It doesn't help that Jeremy is brittle and withdrawn, living in a fantasy world that eventually mutates into a demented realm of psychosis. Throw in a demanding father who doesn't begin to understand his son or what he's going through, and Will lays on Jeremy's gauntlet pretty thick with an array of faceless, brutal bullies and friends who don't quite understand him.

Will uses a mostly naturalistic style with faces that are slightly on the cartoony side of things. That tension makes the fantasy/psychosis segments of the book very effective, as it's not especially jarring when Jeremy meets the demons he's created. Indeed, the parallel fantasy story that Will writes for him is a compelling one, as he's compelled by god to stop "the Quietus" which will bring about the end of the world. This causes him to act in bizarre ways, like collecting certain candy bar wrappers and other actions that have a significant place in the logic of psychosis. Those were the strongest scenes in the book, especially when he wanders down into a cave where he encounters some demons who have his drawing hand and are gambling, gabbing about other people they've driven to madness and eventually death. At its heart, the logic of psychosis relating to depression (something that is far more common than most people understand) is that of a voice telling you that you are worthless and don't deserve to live. In Jeremy's case, the voice took the form of a fantasy character he had created in his sketchbook, which is likely why the only way out he saw was in the form of a heroic quest that only made sense to him. These are powerful, disturbing scenes that Will is up to the task in depicting; her rare use of color comes when Jeremy's sense of reality is at its most warped.

I found it unfortunate that her plotting went a bit by-the-numbers in the final third of the book. He's institutionalized and quickly relapses as he received little support. He meets a rebellious guy in the hospital who becomes his role model; when he urges Jeremy to escape and to stop taking his medication, the results are a bit on the melodramatic side. Indeed, Will plays up the drama surrounding virtually every event and character in Jeremy's life, making it seem inevitable that he's going to snap and further descend. The sole exception is his therapist in the hospital, who treats him with respect and doesn't deny his delusions. I honestly would have preferred a story that didn't feel the need to overdramatize what is already a horrifying experience for both the sufferer and his friends and family, although once Will started stacking the deck early in the book, I suppose the eventual outcome was inevitable. Still, much of the book cleverly avoids cliche and is innovative in the way it depicts depressive psychosis; it's unfortunate that this wasn't the case down the stretch. That said, it was refreshing to see both medication and mental health professionals portrayed in a positive light; while far from perfect, Will depicts them as caring individuals who are trying to help those who are far gone in many respects. In one of the final books to receive a Xeric grant, Will clearly had a powerful story that she wanted to tell. There's no question that she's a skilled artist who is quite proficient at using a number of different storytelling techniques and formal tricks to create her narrative. She's certainly talented enough to perhaps use a bit more restraint and subtlety in future projects, allowing her considerable talent to show more and tell less.

Sequart Reprints: So Super Duper, Superior Showcase #3

The sort of super-hero comics that I tend to discuss are off-beat in some way. The genre is usually at its best when it depicts motion, drama and action. Super-hero comics should have a propulsive quality to them and should be easily understood without even looking at the dialogue. Gesture and a body's relation to space and other bodies is crucial for such stories. The inherent fantasy limitations of super-hero comics limits its abilities to address certain ideas. Famous super-hero comics that deal with racism and other ills of the day almost always have a laughable quality to them, because the author's good intentions take the reader out of a believable sphere. That said, it's quite possible for super-hero comics to portray human interactions and dynamics in an interesting way, as long as the artist keeps everything within the rules of the world that we've been made familiar with.

Chris Pitzer's AdHouse published a fine anthology featuring indy/alternative artists doing their take on superheroes called PROJECT: SUPERIOR. Like all the books he releases, it was beautifully-designed and had a number of stories that successfully told off-beat tales that succeeded because they stayed within the parameters of the rules the artists created. So many of the artists had such a good time doing it that Pitzer occasionally releases a new issue of a periodical called SUPERIOR SHOWCASE, featuring three stories in this vein.

Issue #3 featured a Street Angel story by Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca, a tale of superpowered siblings by Laura Park and an extended superpowered fart joke by Dustin Harbin. The latter story is drawn in a lively, playful fashion. It really is one long series of fart jokes invoked by a superpowered kid on the teacher he has a crush on and a school bully. The story dragged a bit as the same set-up was repeated with different variations and eventually became quite tedious. Still, there's no question that Harbin has great chops. The Street Angel story perfectly encapsulates the idea of creating a world and staying consistent within its rules, no matter how absurd. For Street Angel, the young skateboarder/martial artist/orphan, it wasn't odd for her to wind up in a hospital where all of the other patients were ninjas. It also wasn't too strange for her to face a monstrous opponent who was straight out of The Ring, something that was alluded to from the very beginning of the story. Rugg & Maruca tell a satisfying, very funny story that is told in an entirely deadpan fashion, while still being able to depict a lot of action.

Laura Park's entry is a quiet, wistful story that just alludes to superpowers without showing us much of them. It's really about the relationship between two latch-key siblings and how they react to the way their peers treat them as freaks. The older sister is quite sanguine about it, thinking only of the welfare of her brother. The younger brother gets into fights when people insult his sister but is unable to fully articulate his rage. A loving gesture by his sister helps him start to deal with his feelings. This story is lovely because of the details Park includes: the way his sister goes about the rituals of cooking, cleaning, washing and sewing for him. It's unspoken, but in many respects she acts as surrogate mother, thinking of nothing but him and how to make him happy and well-adjusted. Those details, evoked by Park's use of shadow, cross-hatching and lively character design, make this tender story a true highlight.

Brian Andersen's SO SUPER DUPER is similarly consistent in tone. That tone is one of constant, over-the-top enthusiasm as the story's hero, Psyche, deals with being an underpowered hero on a JLA-style team and his own repressed homosexuality. Psyche's the sort of gay man who is closeted pretty much only to himself, as virtually everyone else in the world knows he's gay. The funny thing about this comic is that it's incredibly sweet, goofy and good-natured. Andersen's art is crude and highly stylized, which somehow fits in perfectly with the ridiculousness of the scenarios he creates. Having Psyche get off witty, bitchy one-liners to the fairly square-jawed heroes surrounding him, stumbling around his own desires (very chastely depicted), and generally behave like the most hyper gay kid you've ever met is a delight. The effect is like reading a child's superhero comic, retaining a certain purity of design without a sense of self-consciousness or guile. One can feel Andersen's personality busting through on the page as he combines what is an obvious love of superheroes with a style of art and pacing that is pretty much the opposite of what one would expect from such comics. The comic works because Andersen takes this ridiculousness seriously, with detailed subplots surrounding the longer character bits much like a standard superhero comic. This comic couldn't be any more different from the ham-handed, tedious superhero comics that have appeared in recent years trying to deal with gay issues.

Minicomics Round-Up: White, Drawdoer, Gamboa, Enrico, Cass, Wiedeman

We Will Remain, by Andrew White.The theme of this comic is the journey. Some of these journeys were to a particular geographical location, some to states of being, and others concern journeys through time around a single object. A graduate of the Frank Santoro course, White uses the grid to interesting effect in several different ways. In "The Deep End", a story of a young boy watching an older woman swim at a public swimming pool, he uses a strict nine-panel grid. Every center grid is an action panel--usually the woman swimming, or leaving a wake, or emerging from water. On page three of the story, White deviates from this with a four panel grid on the second tier of the page: the middle of the page summarizes the action of the story as noted in the captions on either side of these silent images: "She swims. He watches." Those two center images set up the dynamic for the rest of the story, a relationship whose motives are deliberately vague. The final page is a kind of metaphor for the boy's thoughts and fantasies mirroring hers: a crossover into adulthood. White uses a sort of smudged pencil effect in this story that's meant to simulate the murkiness of being underwater.

"Travel" is a narrative about an astronaut dematerializing across space, except that we only see what is being seen on the journey: stars, Kirby effects, etc. The actual character drops away, other than his narrative captions. Some of the images are close to abstractions, but they are given context by the reader's understanding of the story. "As Leaves Change Color" superimposes loosely-rendered but inked figures over smudgy penciled backgrounds, an effect that places our eye on the characters as they are both part of but removed from their environments. This effect is useful, as the story is about a woman feeling displaced after an accident who discovers a hidden garden. The story flips back and forth in time, as we discover that there's someone in the woman's life steering her toward recovery (including magically creating the garden) who is also trying to repair the woman's relationship with her brother. The title story returns to that nine-panel grid and the technique of superimposed inked figures over a lighter background. This time, however, the background image takes up the entire page, with the figures operating through time and space in the grid. It's a clever technique that tells the story of a single, unusual space through thousands of years. When a statue is built out of the area's rock, it has the effect of inspiring devotion, awe and eventually madness. Without explaining the hows and whys of the statue, White gets across the message that something about the area inspires a connection to this concept of an eternal thing that one may as well call god. Every one of these journeys that White depicts is a mysterious one, though one that each adventurer feels inexplicably and inexorably drawn to. In this Retrofit comic, White neatly ties together a number of complex ideas while leaving the essentially meaning of each story up to the reader, though he is careful to leave many clues.

Miss Lonely Hearts 2, by Gabrielle Gamboa . This second issue of Gamboa's adaptation of the 1931 novel by Nathanael West doesn't dip into the same kind of cartoony well as the first issue did. Instead, this issue features two stories dealing with the main character's existential despair as it relates to his belief in Christ. As the story begins, the Miss Lonelyhearts writer is despondent from reading letters from the desperate all day long and retires to a speakeasy after work, where he is accosted by a dandy friend of his who won't stop talking about all sorts of nonsense, which is clearly what Miss Lonelyhearts craved. A bizarre tableau follows, as the dandy engages his girlfriend and Miss Lonelyhearts in some hilarious babble about religion (a constant running throughline in the series), carnal concerns and how one man was using an adding machine as a means of prayer for a man condemned to be executed. The second story involves MLH in bed, praying to his crucifix and chanting "Jesus Christ", having a dream about a drunken collegiate romp with a pair of Humpty-Dumpties that leads to sacrificing a lamb. With all of its crazy events, the second chapter was far more interesting to look at than the first, despite Gamboa's best efforts to use a number of different shading effects to draw in the reader's eye. In both chapters, it starts to become clear that MLH has an uneasy relationship with the rest of humanity. He wants to be able to love all people but finds them just too much to bear. He wishes to be carefree and hedonistic but is weighed down by his own sense of guilt and propriety. Even in his own dreams, a day of drunken fun turns into a gruesome animal sacrifice, as MLH is forced to batter the lamb's head in with a rock: MLH feels so guilty about his desires that he imagines that he's killing Jesus' stand-in himself. Gamboa's figures are a little stiff at times and her panel-to-panel narrative flow can be a little creaky, but she's a solid storyteller overall who's taking a piece that's obviously difficult to translate into comics and bringing a lot of her own personal style to the task, which I hope she's able to complete.

Jam In The Band 3, #3, by Robin Enrico. Enrico is starting to veer toward the conclusion of this series and finally gives the reader a bit of hope with regard to Bianca, the former lead singer of the band Pitch Girl, whose adventures comprised the first two volumes of this series.What this comic is really about and what the series has really become is a story about writer's block and the dark places that paralysis can lead to, as well as growing older and growing up (which aren't necessarily the same thing). If the second volume of the book was about the things that distract from the pure joy of creating and the camaraderie that creates, the third volume is about rediscovering the joy of simply making music with your friends as a fun thing to do, as opposed to be rich and famous. The parallels with making comics are so obvious that I don't think I need to draw them out. The other former Pitch Girl bandmates Tiara and Corbin were able to rediscover that simple sense of joy together in their new projects, something that Bianca was able to rediscover in this issue, even as her friends were getting married and having children. Enrico wisely depicts each of these decisions as trade-offs in terms of how one's freedom becomes limited by marriage and children but how much can be gained in the process. Enrico's greatest character, hedonist musician/philosopher Becky Vice, spells all of this out pretty clearly as she accepts Bianca because they've shared the same kind of despair and the same disinterest in family. I'll be curious to see where Bianca ends up in the final issue.

The Lettuce Girl #3, by Sophia Wiedeman. Wiedeman reminds me a bit of Julia Gfrorer in the way she reimagines fairy tales in a wider cultural context. The third issue of this new take on the story of Rapunzel (grown in a lettuce patch by a witch) adds in another element: the story of Hansel and Gretel. The girl in question finally escapes from her tower, only to find the warnings of her "mother' to be surprisingly accurate: the world is a cold, dark and dangerous place. Each issue of the series is slowly paced, as Wiedeman is interested in establishing place and mood in great detail. Wiedeman's rendering has become quite good; her characters remain slightly blank and cartoony in the best sense, while her backgrounds have become lush and dense, with lots of crosshatching acting as a counter-balance to the simplicity of her character's line. There's a certain grimness to this story about the darker side of motherhood that makes one wonder about the ultimate fate of these characters. The witch literally creates her children for sinister ends, yet raises and nurtures them up to a point. Is she evil, selfish or merely controlling? Wiedeman adds further complexity to this question by introducing the carnivorous witch who treats the girl sweetly and feeds her sweets in order to fatten her up for her oven. It's hard to tell just where Wiedeman is going to ultimately take this story, but the richness of her storytelling and unsettling imagery make this a consistently intriguing read.

The Index #3, The Text, The Salon, by Caitlin Cass. The Text expands upon Cass's life-long obsession with and fear of texts. In this mini, she explores the history of language and her uneasy relationship with its dogmatic control over meaning. What something "really" means and what it meant to be an informed person were questions that vexed her so fiercely that she went to St. John's College, where the "Great Books" of the Western World are taught in their original form. It's interesting that her drawings (and even her spelling, something else she rails against as a dogmatic concept) are so fuzzy and tossed-off; it's like comics became her escape hatch from this curse of needing to conform to the reality of the text as she understood it. Comics are a kind of way of communicating at a more basic, intuitive and even poetic level (at times), though Cass' own comics's writing style tends to be more direct rather than poetic.

Despite her discomfort with the text, she is fascinated by ideas and thinkers in particular. The Salon is a spread of famous thinkers and writers all trying to come to terms with what they have created and achieve immortality in the own ways and with varying degrees of success. Each thinker is in their own (literal) frame on this oversized, cardstock  For example, Adam Smith is despondent looking upon his works, because he realized "that no one ever read past the first chapter of his book", and he sees capitalism run amok. Isaac Newton used only "ink and geometry" to "create a ladder to infinity". Cass cleverly draws the thinkers as men dealing with ink, books, words and the detritus of ideas; it's one of her best pieces.

I have mixed feelings regarding the third issue of The Index.I love this series as a crazy mix of ideas, with the text-phobic nature of Susan clashing with the need to order and index everything that John possesses. I enjoyed the side trips the series takes and how it introduced the index writer Otlet into the cast of characters, summoning him from a fire as they all mused about the library at Alexandria. Cass notes how the library became more useless the more information that was stuffed into it, as there was little regard as to the quality of that information. The problem I had with this issue in particular is that Cass overstuffed it with ideas, characters, and information; there's hardly any room for the reader to breathe. There's also the problem of the drawing itself; while Cass is undeniably improving as a draftsman, she's over-rendering too many of her pages when a more simple approach might have been more appropriate. Her lettering and word balloon placement also drive me crazy at times, as words are squeezed into balloons and sometimes spill out. It doesn't seem to be a deliberate effect (if it is, it's distracting). The real issue I had is that after three issues, I'm starting to lose track of the characters qua characters, as opposed to mouthpieces for certain states of mind. These is the first story of hers that I've read with original and fictional characters, and it seems like she's still trying to find the right balance between concept and character. That said, she continues to take the ideas of the series in fascinating directions.


.

Be The Love, Be The Comics, Buck, and Drawdoer's Best American Comics 2013, by Jon Drawdoer. This large array of comics are mostly of the gag variety. Be The Comics is a series of gag strips headlined by the title story, which is a tongue-in-cheek exploration of why one should become a cartoonist. It should be said up front that Drawdoer is not a great draftsman and few of his jokes land because of his visual sense. However, he can draw well enough to tell a story and shape his jokes, which makes lines like "Not many people know this, but every so often, when they reach a certain age, Los Bros [Hernandez] hold open auditions for a new brother" really stand out. Drawdoer likes drawing distinctions between high and low, like making a joke about pubic hair with regard to Downton Abbey. Buck is a different look at the 1980s TV version of Buck Rogers interpolated with The Shining; there are some decent gags here, but the crudity of the work distracts from the references he's trying to get the audience to understand. Be The Love #1 saw Drawdoer start to refine his line a bit, trying different line weights and textures in different stories. He also continues a story begun in Be The Comics about "Chubby Meltdowns": the phenomenon wherein children have a meltdown when children have Chubby Checker's music taken away from them. There's also a hilarious strip about being on the wrong side of history throughout history. The Chubby Checker saga is continued in Best American Comics, as Drawdoer also makes an extended pun on the awful movie B.A.P.S., with B.A.P.S.tist churches proliferating and sermons ending with statements like "We must all serve the plot!". This issue really starts to get impressively self-reflexive and complex, as the cultural references start warping into something other than simple and cheap gags. He's starting to get at something here, but his ambition is still outstripping his ability in terms of what he wants to depict on the page. That said, he's come a long way in a short period of time, especially since he seems to be publishing a minicomic a month.

Press Gang Presents: Soto, Vigneault, Dalrymple

The Press Gang collective in Portland is directly connected to the excellent Studygroup website that features over a dozen interesting webcomics.Masterminded by Zack Soto, they've long created comics that have a heavy and unapologetic genre slant to them. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and adventure are common plot referents, though each author puts their own stamp on genre and frequently blends it with any number of other concerns. It's not quite the same thing that Michael DeForge and Josh Bayer are doing in the way they're putting genre in a blender, because each of these comics can be read as a perfectly straight-ahead genre story, albeit with an aesthetic viewpoint that is unique to each artist, rather than being part of a mass-market formula.

For example, Titan #1, by Francois Vigneault, is a straight-ahead science-fiction story, though it has more in common with sociopolitical fiction than it does any other genre. It's about a corporate mining colony on Jupiter's moon Titan and a new manager who's come to deliver some very bad news to them. The problem is that the bulk of the workers are mutated humans now known as Titanians, who are about ten feet tall and massive. Printed in a single orange tone (fitting for its Jovian setting), Vigneault captures the tension of the labor-management conflict while setting up secrets to be revealed by both sides, unbeknownst to the new manager. Vigneault also adds an interesting racial component to the proceedings when a potential romance starts to germinate between the new manager and a Titanian counterpart. Vigneault's really cleaned up a lot of the rough edges in his art (I credit that in part to those excellent bird minicomics he likes to draw) and has added a layer of style that makes this a smooth but still highly personal read. The format, design and every aspect of production make this a beautiful comic to look at. Fans of "hard" sci-fi will enjoy the way that certain details regarding life on Titan play out sociologically and in terms of technology, especially in the way that technology has the potential to completely erase a way of life.

The Secret Voice V2 #1, by Zack Soto. For most of his career, Soto has done variations on bizarre superhero/fantasy comics, many of them featuring his bandaged hero Dr Galapagos. Soto has abandoned and returned to this project a few times, and each time he's brought to it a higher level of craft. His character design is an uncanny marriage of Fort Thunder-style aesthetics and superhero-style anatomy: muscular figures, heroic poses, lots of characters in motion. That aesthetic mix is not in the least ironic; instead, Soto has taken what's inspired him to create something new. The story here is very simple: Dr Galapagos has entered the bowels of the Troll Kingdom to seek their aid in a war against the Smog Emperor. For reasons beyond his control, he accidentally kills the king and his shaman and is forced to fight for his life in order to escape. What sells this comic is the way Soto creates atmosphere, thanks to the way this comic was printed (Risograph?). The dark purples, yellows and oranges create the oppressiveness of this atmosphere, highlighting and strengthening his solid drawing ability. He manages to combine the heroic romanticism present in Jack Kirby comics with a more cartoony but monstrous quality present in Fort Thunder, which is less a stylistic jolt than a reminder to the reader of how much the two really have in common. Both are about motion and movement above all else, with any stillness creating a sort of heroic pose. They're both about conflicts, grand gestures, and an explosive quality that makes every image matter. Fort Thunder tended to make the character designs themselves simpler and more abstract (like Mat Brinkman or Brian Ralph), while Soto moves that design line closer to Kirby while still setting the story in that Ralph/Brinkman sort of world. As Soto has finally seemed to settle on a visual style that suits him, I hope the story itself continues to pick up its threads and weave something dense and complex; as it is, the reader is only getting hints of a massive, epic storyline.

It Will All Hurt, by Farel Dalrymple. Dalrymple is one of the finest draftsmen in the world of comics and has been for a long time. What we haven't seen from him is much extensive personal work since early in his career. This new series is going a long way to correct that, as it appears like it will be a long, sprawling career-defining work. This first issue mostly introduces the huge cast of characters, as the reader gets to see them do their thing in a series of unconnected vignettes. Dalrymple's line is a little looser and less precise than in some of his older work, but his use of watercolors brings every page to vivid life, thanks to a slightly muted but imaginative palette.  This is a kitchen sink of a comic that feels like Dalrymple simply dumped every single character idea that interested him into a single narrative that has elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic distopia. Dalrymple is great at drawing children doing unusual things as well as monsters, and both are featured prominently in this story that sets up an invincible enemy and a small but growing set of allies that oppose him. Dalrymple plays around with action, with fluid panel-to-panel transitions and with the occasional dramatic pose for effect. This one is simply a visual feast, going above and beyond the already-high standards of Press Gang. This will undoubtedly wind up being one of my favorite minis of 2013.