1-800-MICE
Matthew Thurber, writer/artist
PictureBox, 2011
176 pages, hardcover
$22.95
Buy it from PictureBox
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For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

Sock
Chris Day, Conor Stechschulte, Mr. Freibert, Matthew Thurber, Neal Reinalda, Molly O’Connell, Emily Johnson, C.F., Zach Hazard Vaupen, Sam Gaskin, Ben Stiegler, Erin Womack, writers/artists
Conor Stechschulte, editor
Crepuscular Archives, May 2011
40 pages
$6
Buy it from Closed Caption Comics

In which the Closed Caption Comics crew and selected associates get freaky. Billed on the cover as a collection of “ADULT STORIES AND IMAGERY,” Sock proceeds in the mighty CCC manner, albeit a pornographic variant thereof. Editor Conor Stechschulte and Noel Freibert go in their customary horror direction, with Stechschulte employing a less dense than usual style for an Evil Dead referencing story of a woman sliding down a hill while being taken advantage of by the flora, and Freibert using his customary in-your-face explicit dialogue (“I’m just experimenting with the corpses, running tests”) and gutterless panel layouts for a “straight forward sex-death comic” that relies equally on puns (holes, bones, and boxes figure prominently) and dream logic to conflate the two impulses. The flipside to their ugliness is elegance, and here’ it’s provided by Chris Day’s almost rebus-like typography and decontextualized presentation of sexual imagery (a whip, a boot, a big black circle, the legs and crotch of a woman in black underwear and garters); one of C.F.’s always convincingly delivered portraits of women in bondage, all thin lines, bound breasts, tile floors, and lovingly delineated spit; and a wordless, benday-day dotted strip from Erin Womack, which convincingly uses corn cobs and ropes and fountains in tandem with drawings of figures in embrace and ecstasy as stand-ins for the more explicit stuff found elsewhere in the anthology. Zach Hazard Vaupen even gets a good gag strip out of the idea of anal sex, which you’d think would be impossible in our assfucking-fatigued society. None of this is a turn-on per se — erotica it may be, but pornography, then, not so much. However, its most effective contributions earn that honor by coming across as genuine transmissions from artists about what they consider sexy, from Day and Womack and C.F.’s poetically understated images to a simple, funny pin-up from Neal Reinalda that simply puts a photo of Nicki Minaj and her cartoonish physique back(side)-to-back with a drawing of Jessica Rabbit. A wise woman once asked, “What do you consider fun?”; when it works, Sock answers.

Mould Map #1
Jason Traeger, Daniel Brereton, Aidan Koch, Massimiliano Bomba, Stéphane Prigent, Kitty Clark, Matthew Lock, Lando, CF, Jonathan Chandler, Matthew Thurber, Brenna Murphy, Drew Beckmeyer, Colin Henderson, Leon Salder, writers/artists
Hugh Frost, Leon Sadler, editors
Landfill Editions, December 2010
16 large pages
$12
Buy it from Landfill
Buy it from PictureBox
Learn more at MouldMap.com

Ingenious idea, meet ingenious execution. In this gorgeously printed, oversized anthology, a posse of prominent and obscure artcomickers create evocative one-page science-fiction strips/images/whatever — not so much to tell a complete story as to convey a mood, an environment, a series of story possibilities that emerge into the past and future of the events depicted on the page. Aidan Koch’s bold all-caps lettering meshes perfectly with her story of a nude, distraught wanderer of the highways who knows that something terrible is growing inside of him. Lando’s similarly perambulatory protagonist is confronted in the final panel by a reptilian counterpart, the ominous of the sudden meeting conveyed by superimposing a massive image of the creature’s head over the panel itself. CF’s contribution features a warrior in freefall and ends with the phrase “ENTERING ENEMY AIRSPACE” — it stops where the story starts, basically. Jonathan Chandler’s soldiers marvel after one of their fellows — “He really did it. He went out alone after the lights.” — whose journey to a cryptic series of what look like cardboard cutouts of robots or aliens remains unexplained. Many more pages are simply wordless images or wordless series of images featuring vaguely science-fictional figures doing vaguely science-fictional things. The tight space constraints offer the participants a welcome opportunity to step away from the typical worldbuilding concerns of alt/artcomix-genre hybrids and instead focus on world-evoking, a sense of what it would be like to be there, even when you don’t know what or how or why “there” is. The comic is printed in a flourescent orange and blue palette, like Cold Heat‘s pink and blue gone radioactive — a post-apocalypse run by a New York Mets memorabilia cargo cult. It’s a fine package and a delightful combination of form and function.