Galactikrap 2

Brian Chippendale, writer/artist

self-published, October 2007

72 pages

$8

Buy it at PictureBox Inc.

This is what those “fun” superhero comics that nobody but predominantly superhero-comics bloggers reads would look like in an alternate universe where Gary Panter took over as Marvel house artist instead of John Romita Sr. and Los Bros Buscema following the departures of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. The major difference, of course, is where in those books the action-humor blend is the primary selling point, here it’s simply the tool Chippendale uses to set up the action beats and environments that are the meat of his cartooning. The yuks and fights are the means to an end, not an end in themselves, but they also happen to be really really crackerjack, which is more than you can say about this book’s Big Two brethren.

Plotwise, this is a follow-up to Chippendale’s earlier Battlestack Galacti-crap, a story of two tribes (cue Frankie Goes to Hollywood) of costumed weirdoes battling it out over the right to sell cupcakes in a particular area of their sci-fi city. It’s exactly as nonsensical as it sounds, which is totally fine because the point is the drawing, and man, it’s a pip. This issue kicks off with a brief silkscreend color section that evokes the full-color openings of manga volumes, a comparison subverted here by the supreme ridiculous of the subject matter (one of our warring tribes, Teamy Weamy, is debating whether to change their name to Team Tomb or Team Tummy). The rest of the comic comprises three separate, vaguely interlocking vignettes, each defined by the way they use sequences of panels to pace action. In the first (back at the cupcake stand from the first issue) a bug-laden “bugcake” is lobbed past a stunned onlooker at the head of a disgruntled customer; Chippendale draws the action out over several panels to call attention to its kinetic silliness. This is in contrast to the next big bit, in which panel after panel is left silent while two characters are placed on hold as they call a credit card company to find out why one of their cards has been denied–here the drawn-out sequencing conveys boredom rather than action. Things kick into high gear in the second section, which involves a pair of super-types infiltrating an underground lair and battling robot-type dudes. Chippendale’s chunky, crunchy line is a surprisingly effective canvas for action choreography, making the space in which the action takes place feel solidly constructed and lived-in while lending a certain palpable oomph to various ninja stealth antics, laser dodges, and one really memorable blast at a bad guy. the third and final sequence is mainly an excuse to create a convenience store shaped like Godzilla called Snackzilla, I guess, but it too has a laugh-out loud depiction of slapstick involving a bunch of characters getting bonked on the head with a baseball bat and sent tumbling down a hole in the floor by a secret member of a rival gang. After a funny, deadpan two-page bonus comic by Ben Jones about a dog who will become the Chosen One but at this point mostly stands around with his tongue lolling out, the comic ends with another two-page color section; as with the first issue, this finale displays Chippendale’s knack for drawing figures in freefall, but this time uses it to set up a funny gag about one falling character remembering he can fly mid-plummet.

The character designs are all funny and easy to parse–I sort of want to see these folks cross over with the gang from Powr Mastrs; the environments, particularly in a trio of stand-alone pages toward the end of the book, are immersive and mysterious; and since Chippendale is working with basically one or two large panels per page it’s probably a lot easier than Ninja or Maggots for your average civilian to follow. This is the kind of minicomic you’ll read from cover to cover each time you come across it wherever you keep your minicomics. If you spot this at a con you should buy it.

Forlorn Funnies #5: My Love Is Dead/Long Live My Love

Paul Hornschemeier, writer/artist

Absence of Ink, 2004

80 pages

$10.95

Buy it from Copacetic Comics still, maybe

Originally written on July 8th, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal

The fifth installment of Paul Hornschemeier’s personal anthology series is a transitional work of sorts, a midway point between the publication of the author’s formidable graphic novel Mother, Come Home (the serialized installments of which completely took over Forlorn Funnies‘ previous three issues) and his upcoming entrée into the art-comix big time when Fantagraphics begins publishing the series. (This is the alternative comics equivalent of a WB starlet getting that phone call from Playboy–you’ve made it, baby!) Perhaps Hornschemeier himself sensed the in medias res nature of this project. It’s his most direct effort to date in forging a middle way between his satirical and melancholy modes. Granted, separating the two physically may seem an odd way of linking them, but the link isn’t any less clear for that.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, My Love Is Dead/Long Live My Love is indeed divided into two sections, one “funny,” one “forlorn,” each printed at a 180-degree rotation from the other. Each section has its own “front cover” featuring the appropriate half of the subtitle and a mood-specific image and color scheme (as well as, cleverly, the book’s bar code and ISBN information–this way there’s now way to guess which half Hornschemeier considers “the back of the book”). At the spread at the center of the book, where the two sections meet, we find two pages’ worth of rival “About the Author” material, one of which solemnly enumerates Hornschemeier’s C.V. and the other of which features a lengthy explanation for its use of the phrase “butt smear.” (You’re all bright people, so I’ll leave it up to you to guess which is which.)

Baroque conceits such as this are nothing new for Hornschemeier–you may recall that the entirety of Mother, Come Home is supposed to be the introduction to a novel of which we only see the first chapter’s title page. It’s fun to watch Hornschemeier at play in the fields of the formal, but what excites one most about FF5 are the cartoonist’s visual and storytelling skills, which continue to expand at an alarmingly brisk rate.

Perhaps the best example of this is the emergence, fully formed, of a vocabulary of the monstrous a la Woodring or Brinkman. These strange creatures and the psychedelia-by-way-of-graphic-design wilderness in which they live are used to great effect on both sides of the forlorn/funny equation. In the former case (“Underneath”), a furry, Yeti-like behemoth responds to his growling stomach by diving under the sea, assaulting one of the creatures he finds there, and devouring one of the creature’s young as its sibling and parent look on. The attacker arrives back on dry land only for its stomach to rumble yet again; he glances at the sea, and in the subsequent panel is nowhere to be found. The sequence is wordless, the creatures expressionless, but the horror inherent in the sea-creatures inability to protect itself or its children is palpable and chilling. As it trundles over to comfort its surviving offspring when the land-creature swims away, we wonder what it can possibly say to provide solace or safety; moreover, when we realize the land-creature has gone back underwater, we know that neither is in the offing. The humiliating powerlessness of parents in the face of overwhelming violence is usually the subject of only the finest literature (on TV, only The Sopranos goes there; in comics, you’re hard pressed to find explorations of the topic outside historical efforts like Maus and Safe Area Gorazde); it’s both jarring and inspiring to see this painful aspect of human existence broached in a monster comic.

On the funny side of things (“Ditty and the Pillow Plane”), the monsters are used (not surprisingly, as we’ll soon see) to explore similar themes. While the two title characters float along in a manner reminiscent of Mother‘s opening sequence, strange creatures bite each other, ride each other, attempt to devour each other, and run past the frame while on fire. Ditty (whose eyes are x’s) and the Pillow Plane (who has no eyes to speak of) grab a snack amidst the chaos, and the sequence concludes with this exchange: “Is civilization a cancer?” “Of the liver, Ditty.” This seems as accurate an assessment as any, given the absurd pandemonium going on around them.

The notion that something’s just sort of wrong with civilization and that we’ll never set it right is the funny side’s major preoccupation. This sentiment is frequently expressed in the broadest of terms–phrases like “Has it all been that senseless?” “Is it pointless to laugh?” “Fuck it all anyway!” and (especially) “Whatever, dude” echo one another from strip to strip. A trio of overt political cartoons help make this case as well. “Everyone Felt It” (its title emblazoned on a striking, stark black background) skewers the vague everybody-hurts semi-soul-searching the U.S. occasionally indulges in in times of tragedy. The star of “America, Your Boyfriend” is a MODOK-esque lunkhead who kicks the crap out of anyone who dares look askance at his SUV-driving, beer-swilling lifestyle. Personally, I believe that our country’s most devoted enemies, in their drive to quite literally revive the Middle Ages, have problems unrelated to our own nation’s admittedly troubling obsession with luxury vehicles, but the point is made clearly and, perhaps more importantly, hilariously. “The World Will Never Be the Same” depicts various people behaving like racist, sexist, xenophobic, elitist, patronizing assholes both “THEN” and “NOW,” 9/11 being the unspoken line of demarcation between the two. The strip is similar in effect to an oft-reproduced sequence from Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and if the simplicity of the message of both is a little disconcerting (gee, America still isn’t perfect? Bush lied!), Hornschemeier’s iteration is more effective both for the vicious specificity of its targets and his willingness to implicate himself with his send-up of patronizing artsy-fartsy types. (“Oh, absolutely, his work is really making a difference,” says one such gallery-attending schmuck as a presumably homeless man walks by.)

The excess of the artiste is another prime target. “Stupid Art Comics Are Stupid” is a gratifyingly reductive assault (at times, a physical one) on the pretensions of the modern artist, depicted alternately as a sex-obsessed phony or an empty-headed dilettante. Its follow up, an essay entitled “Stupid Art Comics May Be Stupid, But ‘Stupid Art Comics Are Stupid’ Is a Complete Waste of Time,” is written from the point of view of a critic enraged both by the earlier piece’s unsurprising “surprise” insights into the human condition and its creators insistence on designing it so that it can only be read if held upside-down in front of a mirror. A multi-page sequence entitled “Artist’s Catalogue” deploys a slew of anti-art gags, including several pages that are simply blank and a reprint of the meticulous, highly intellectual plans and sketches for what turns out to be an “I went down on your mother” joke. (Fans of a certain Mozart/Bach-inspired Spinal Tap song ought to be pleased.)

With Long Live My Love so fixated on depicting a world going to hell in a handbasket as society’s supposed coalmine canaries, the artists, jerk themselves off, it’s up to My Love Is Dead to make more personal, though equally universal, points. A strange, untitled sequence involving a man, his grandmother, and a blood orange is difficult to unravel–I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on, or more specifically what is about to go on–but the man’s sweat, tears, and self-contradictory statements speak volumes about the power and terror of family love. “We Were Not Made For This World,” a sci-fi parable about a robot seeking the source of its creation even as the desert through which he marches slowly erodes the automaton’s ability to continue, is reminiscent of any number of similar SF meditations on loneliness, from Martin Cendreda’s memorable minicomic Zurik Robot to Stephen King’s eerie short story “The Beach.” Hornschemeier’s skill with both art (depicting with mathematical precision the granules of sand that are inexorably eroding the robot from within) and words (“He focuses on the horizon and tries to think it is beautiful”), however, give the story its own tragic grandeur. Most impressively of all, in “These Trespassing Vehicles,” Hornschemeier uses a moment of random, catastrophic violence to center a story that encompasses the entire lives of its characters with daunting, heartbreaking totality. There’s even room for a thoughtful twist ending, itself emerging from a life’s irreversible turns. The story itself neatly mirrors the strength of Hornschemeier’s work in general. Some moments may overshoot, others may undershoot, but the ambition is always grand, and thanks to the keenness of the author/artists’s eye for detail amidst his expansive vision, so too is the execution.

Tales of Woodsman Pete

Lilli Carré, writer/artist

Top Shelf, May 2006

80 pages

$7

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

Was this a webcomic first? A series of microminis? I ask because the skill Lilli Carré shows in this anthology is so considerable in terms of its ability to build to a punchline that also doubles as an indictment of the specific brand of thoughtless waste she’s gunning for that it feels like you’re reading a best-of collection rather than a debut.

Tales consists of strips of varying length chronicling the comical misadventures of both the titular woodsman and the legendary tall-tale hero Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece–Carré occasionally gives into the temptation of a too easy joke, as in the first strip, where Woodsman Pete remarks upon the beauty of a pair of birds’ song and then kills them anyway; meanwhile many of her strips on Pete dealing with aging strike me as being a young person’s view of what old age is like; a lengthy section involving a future globally-warmed world where dried-up oceans leave great salt deposits behind never clicks as well as its length demands.

What I am saying is that it’s a remarkably assured book, one where even its weak spots (which strike me as less important the more I think about the collection) feel like deliberate choices rather than missteps. Carré’s thin, clear line, attractively presented in blue throughout, enables her to simultaneously cram many panels onto the book’s small pages–resulting in a bit-by-bit inch-by-inch dialogue pace that perfectly fits the stories’ shaggy-dog-tale rambliness–and give her characters an expressiveness that belies their knowingly crude design. I could sit and stare at Paul Bunyan’s hair and beard for minutes, while at certain points the shading on Pete’s hat and beard is almost tactile. The comparative realism of the animal heads mounted on Pete’s wall lends weight to what struck this particular vegetarian as a message of conservation buried beneath the black humor.

Meanwhile, the gags frequently arrive from unexpected directions. Along with his wall-mounted hunting trophies, Pete keeps row upon row of beard trimmings to mark the decades. A stuffed deer head presented as a flourish on the top of one strip is revealed to have a stuffed butt attached to it when we turn the page. When Pete calls one of his trophies his favorite, another one silently cries. In a strip called “Saturday Night,” Pete strips butt naked, dances around, then stops and falls asleep, and that’s the whole strip. It’s bracingly dry and cleverly delivered stuff.

The most impressive aspect of the collection is the unforeseen interlocking of the Pete and Paul Bunyan material. The giant lumberjack and his bovine friend don’t show up until about a third of the way through the book; when we realize what’s going on and that the images that kick off his arrival seem tied directly to the events of the preceding Pete strip, it’s a rewarding little epiphany. However, Carré fudges the details of the strips so that it’s never quite clear whether or not Pete and Paul are actually anywhere near each other temporally or spatially, which besides being a fairly complex narrative conceit for a gag-strip collection speaks directly to the larger point she’s making about the unreliable nature of memory and storytelling and the dubious prospect that these mental phenomena can actually enable true and lasting connections between different people. All this for seven bucks? Sold.

Mattie & Dodi

Eleanor Davis, writer/artist

self-published, 2006

40 pages

$5

Buy it from Little House when its shop re-opens in June

This one didn’t quite do it for me. Partially I think it’s because Davis’s relatively realist story this time around, about a working-class woman who’s forced to take care of her elderly, bed-ridden grandfather and her very young and withdrawn little sister, lacks a certain level of mystery compared to the fables and fantasies I’m more familiar with from her. The problem is that Davis tries to apply some of the same storytelling techniques here that she uses in her fantasy stories–mysteriously silent characters, long wordless stretches, a touch of the monstrous (in the form of the moaning grandfather), matter-of-fact nudity–and they end up overwhelming any sense that this is real life carefully observed. (She isn’t helped by the hard-to-swallow obliviousness with which she imbues her main character.) Her cartooning is as strong as ever, with dynamic figures and an at times stunning selection of body language for her characters, but an overuse of zip-a-tone, strangely inorganic lettering and slightly over-animated facial expressions push it just a bit into slickness. It’s funny, I remember reading in Gary Groth’s interview with Davis in Mome that this was the comic that really made him sit up and take notice, but for me it feels like a detour from the more fruitful avenues of expression she’s pursued before and since.

Wet Moon Book 1: Feeble Wanderings

Ross Campbell, writer/artist

Oni Press, December 2004

172 pages

$14.95

Buy it from Oni

Buy it from Amazon.com

I’d imagine your tolerance for this book will vary proportionately to your tolerance for goth culture, because it’s definitely about goths. There are a lot of piercings and unusual hairstyles and ripped stockings and purses with little batwings sewn on them. But this strange, slow story about a group of kids at either the Savannah College of Art and Design or a fictional facsimile thereof isn’t your usual po-faced every-day-is-Halloween goth artifact. There’s a sadness and a weakness and a feebleness to everyone’s presentation of themselves as Goths, a recognition that this identity is the result of chipping away at certain surface characteristics until the desired result is achieved but that there can still be any number of chinks in the armor. Cleo and her friends/enemies more or less live in squalor, with pizza boxes and bags of chips and cockroaches strewn hither and yon. They make much of their bodily functions. They always look kind of tired and sickly. None of this is in the glamorous way that goths are supposed to work, either. Indeed the only character who truly appears to have perfected a seamless goth look and lifestyle is treated almost like an alien. And humor deflates the pretension on several occasions (what’s up, punch to the boobs?).

What is glamorous about the book is its recreation of that sense of languid, sexy ennui-bordering-on-mania that afflicts certain types of people in college. Laziness so profound it becomes almost sensual, a constant unspoken sizing-up of your fellow young people as sexual objects, a feeling that, despite being surrounded by like-minded individuals in a setting expressly designed to stimulate the exchange of ideas, you’re alone with your thoughts. This is essentially the storyline, but it’s best expressed through Campbell’s art itself. His women are extremely sexy in the way his lush line sort of idealizes their imperfections, and his dudes ain’t so shabby either, but they all have this slightly slackjawed, tired-eyed look of being dazed. Campbell frequently frames them awkwardly within their panels, using the surrounding space to suggest that they’re always a little lost, which is sort of the point.

Jessica Farm Vol. 1

Josh Simmons, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, April 2008

100 pages

$14.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

It’s a truism to say that comics have an unlimited special effects budget, thus casting their unfettered nature with regards to other narrative arts like film and television as primarily rooted in spectacle. But that sky’s-the-limit difference can be a formal one as well. With few if any physical or logistical constraints on an ongoing creator-owned comic’s length–particularly during this Internet Age–the ways in which stories are told may be similarly stretched. Any artist with a preexisting propensity for rambling, discursive narratives will find this limitlessness to be right in their wheelhouse.

No one seems to be stepping up to this plate with more determination than Josh Simmons, the underground-informed cartoonist behind many gleefully vulgar minis and anthology contributions who really exploded into comics-cognoscenti consciousness with his relentlessly bleak, wordless survival-horror graphic novel House last year. Jessica Farm Vol. 1 is the initial fruition of a project he’s apparently had simmering for eight years, a projected 600-page graphic novel drawn one page per month and released in 96-page installments every eight years until its completion in the year 2050. With Jessica Farm, Simmons has created a comics-reading experience where getting there isn’t half the fun–it is, by definition and at least for the next half-century or so, all the fun.

Is it fun? The answer is a qualified yes. For starters, Simmons tackles the erotic far more directly than any other cartoonists of his generation that I can think of, excepting Hans Rickheit I suppose–certainly more directly than anyone else with his Fantagraphics-granted level of exposure. The parts of this volume I’ll remember most vividly involve the titular teen (?) grabbing other male characters by the cock on more than one occasion, an earthy and erotically matter-of-fact gesture. While character design does not strike me as Simmons’s strong suit, he does give Jessica a winsome jolie-laide beauty, with wide eyes and sensually ropy tresses. And he really tapdances along the line that separates sexy from smutty from potty-humor in his depiction of his characters’ bodies. When we catch a glimpse of Jessica’s pudenda sticking out slightly from between her legs as we see her shower from behind, or when the mute, naked Mr. Sugarcock seasons her soup by dipping his balls in it Louie-from-The-State-style, or when Sugarcock’s full-tilt sprinting is indicated by his namesake member flopping like a windsock in the opposite direction, the sight is intimate, titillating and discomfiting all at once.

Indeed Simmons excels as an artist of human physicality. Fans of his memorably gruesome Batman pastiche will no doubt be delighted to find that comic’s thoughtful illustration of the body at work echoed throughout Jessica Farm, from watching tiny little people clamber up stairs that are each twice their height to the many shots of Jessica diving or pole-sliding through the many floors of her seemingly enchanted home. Depicting the cavernous and claustrophic contours of that home and other environments by moving his characters through them is another great strength of Simmons’s cartooning, and the scenes in which Jessica and her alternately adorable and threatening companions wend their way through the house’s darkened corridors no doubt contain within them the seeds of House, the artist’s full-length exploration of exploring.

The problem with this experiment, I suppose, is one of its methodology. The attention-getting publishing schedule is no doubt what made you aware of the book in the first place, and in terms of sounding completely awesome, hey, mission accomplished. But once you hit page 96 and realize that it’ll be another eight years before a subsequent volume provides you with a continuation–and more importantly, a context for–what you’ve just read, the bloom fades off that rose in a hurry. As I was getting at before, the format lends itself perfectly to a peripatetic story in which Jessica, Alice- (or Odysseus)-like, has a variety of surreal encounters. But as Alan Moore once astutely pointed out, myths need a Ragnarok, and without the hard defining line of an ending (at least until the grandchildren of the Bushes and Clintons are running for office), there’s no real way to judge whether Jessica’s rambling, discursive adventures are more or less than the sum of their dream-logic parts. So for every powerful image, like the Paperhouse-esque silhouette/villain/father or the little French band that plays in Jessica’s shower, there’s something that seems a bit on the nose without further explanation or exploration, like the cute li’l monkey getting stabbed to death or a room full of giant fetus-babies with their eyes gouged out and tongues pulled out. Without the constant an ending would provide, the equation is unsolvable. Of course, we wouldn’t even be discussing these challenging topics if the comic were not an experiment to begin with.