Reviews of Lots of Little Comics
REVIEWS! REVIEWS! REVIEWS!
So, I’ve been so busy that I’ve hardly had any time to read all the comics and mini comics I bought at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland at the end of last September.
But I am finally getting started. I thought I would review all the comics I read on here, but I think I will just review the ones I like.
“Lightbulb” < - no actual title
by Linda Medley
mini-comic from One Percent Press
This comic is visually charming. It’s an experimental representation of a young artist wrestling with an idea until he is ready to work with it. The pages are dark (literally, not metaphorically), until the artist finally settles on what he wants to do with his idea, then he gets to it. Charming.
“Driving South”
by JP Coovert
One Percent Press
I really enjoyed this comic. It’s very cartoony drawings of normal looking people (stripped down to the simplest lines). It’s the story of a boy who goes home for his grandfather’s funeral. I don’t want to say what happens at the end, but let’s say this: he’s very busy through the whole funeral process.
We buried my grandfather not so long ago, and I saw a lot of truth in this story. It’s elegantly done and the drawing is really solid throughout. It once again demonstrates for me that the best artists leave out more than they put in. Not always true, but there’s a lot to say for economy.
“Onion Jack”
by Joel Priddy
from Ad House Books
This was really just the cover story for Ad House Books’s Free Comic Book Day offering, Issue Zero!!! Superior Showcase. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, here, but for all of Coovert’s economy above, he’s a morass of crosshatching compared to Priddy’s beautiful bio of the inestimable superhero, Onion Head Jack. Priddy reduces heroes and villains down to their most iconic with remarkable effectiveness. Many fools will look at these drawings and say, “anyone could draw that.”
Yeah?
Try it, then. Try to draw a readable story with drawings as simple as this. Hell, try to even come up with one character that looks at all unique using the same economy he uses.
You’ll be surprised. I know some other artists out there that can do it, but simplicity is deceptive. I’ve always said that in almost all things it is much harder to be easy to understand than it is to be mysterious.
Plus, the Onion Head Jack story is a great one – if you love heroes – and ends fantastically, surprisingly and satisfyingly. Find it. Love it. I have to check out more of this guy’s work.
“Monday” part 1
mini-comic by Andy Hartzel
This is the story of Adam and Eve after the first week of creation have ended. Many liberties are taken with the story. Hartzell has a lot of talent and his drawings are pretty. His representation of God is adorable and his Eve has a very cute butt. I hope I see Part 2 at some point.
“Keeping Two” part 1
by Jordan Crane
Jordan Crane is the youngest old-hand out there. I picked this up because Jordan Crane is famous, the cover price was low and the screen printed cover was very pretty. Also because he was standing next to Brian Ralph. This helped Jordan’s sales a lot, I’m sure, as Ralph is the closest thing the comics world has to a pop star (sorry, James K., but I thought of you when I wrote that… you are still a SUPERSTAR!).
At first I thought this story would bore the shit out of me. It’s very much a slice of life story, but it turns out to include high drama. A woman encourages her husband to go on a trip. Because he goes, he misses the birth of their child.
It gets worse. You feel for them.
Crane’s story is told with enough little details to make it feel true and you develop a definite sympathy for the stars of this show in only a few pages.
Another thing I appreciate about Crane is his willingness to show you around the world his characters find themselves in, to take some time with the story and give you the wide view. This is rare in American comics, but Crane does it. It makes the book feel different, in a great way.
Again, I hope I find the second part when it comes out.
“The Intruder”
by Mark Burrier
The art in this story bridges the gap between all the work above and the last one I will write about today, below. The lines in this book are clean, but not quite so clean. He has a lot more edge in his drawings. A lot more motion lines and more more shading. Some very splattery shadowing at parts.
This is all done for a purpose and intentionally. Burrier keeps his lines under control, unless he doesn’t want to. And that’s good. This is a story about completely unnecessary anger and completely unnecessary machismo. It’s about the way men with their women can just be dicks sometimes.
It’s a simple story, about a young boy who finds people making out in the back of his office who don’t work there, aren’t customers and who he’s never seen before. All he asks is that they leave and they won’t. It’s bizarre, but you can see it happening. Some men really would pull that shit with their blood up in the wrong spot/part.
The only crticism I would make of this book is that Burrier probably turns to the panel’less page a little more often than I’d like. Stripping panel borders away from pages can be the right thing to do, but I like it to happen in a way that makes so much sense that I don’t even really notice it. I was very, very conscious of the pages that didn’t have panel borders, and didn’t really see what point there was in leaving them off.
Still, art is about emotion and this one was emotionally evocative in a wonderfully effective way. More importantly, I think Burrier evokes a combination of emotions – uncertain power, anger and righteousness – that we don’t often see in comics. It’s always nice to see an artist try to break into new emotional ground with their work, and I think the field of comics is richer for it. Comic artists tend to rely on a certain limited pallette of emotions too often. Maybe someday when I have more philosophical time I will try to delineate what those are. Anyway, Burrier definitely isn’t in the comic book cliche category with this one, and bravo for it.
“Sea-Man Lamprey”
mini-comic by Mollie Goldstrom
All the rest of the comics I have reviewed so far had nice, clean lines with a strong consciousness of the figure and how it interacts with other figures and objects. Very little shading and unneccessary line work appear in the pages of the comics previously listed (maybe “Monday” is a little busy).
Throw everything I said about how great economy is OUT when you get ready to read Goldstrom’s 4″ x 4″ offering. This one is a mess. A very rich mess. A delicious mess. I like that I have this review in the mix because it shows there is more than one way to do things in the land of art and comics. In fact, Mollie’s work is a lot of fun even though she completely stands in contrast to all the compliments I gave the other artists above.
From the very first page (you really just have to see it), Goldstrom achieves something in drawing what I think must be the most nonsensical sea monster in the history of visual depictions of sea monsters. I mean, if the creature had a larger place in the story, you could entitle the work “Intestines from the Deep.” Go, Mollie!
This is the story of Erasmus Lamprey, mythical seafarer, wanderer. Erasmus has strange friends, strange abilities and strange adventures (all in about 16 pages). Goldstrom’s book definitely falls into the camp of Jennifer Daydreamer in that she tells stories that have the logic of dreams. That is, very little logic at all – but you understand anyway.
Erasmus, as a character, is pretty flat. That doesn’t matter. You’re here to see the world of Goldstrom’s imagination, and you do it by following Erasmus around. The point is Goldstrom’s drawings and trying to figure out how her mind works.
Goldstrom is part of a vein of comics that I think make the comics world one of the richest art scenes you’ll find (if you aren’t a closed minded fuck who dismisses comics out of hand). She has a lot of limitations, technically, as a draughtsman. You can see in reading these pages that she has tested the limits of her limitations and learned to work around them, even with them, creating environments and images that are within her power, technically, and, artistically, up there with any artist of her age and experience out there (and quite a few who’ve been at it longer and ought to be able to accomplish more by now).
I know this sounds like backhanded praise, but I don’t want it to. This is a hard point for me to get across, but let me try to restate it: most art forms put too much stock in technical ability. If art is, in the end, about self-expression, then there might be some people who learn to express themselves extremely well despite the fact that their fundamentals are weak.
Think, for example, of the illiterate storyteller. There have doubtless been countless storytellers and bards over the centuries who couln’t read, spoke only in vernacular and had embarassing grammar. Yet, if they got on a stump and started telling stories you’d be hypnotized. This is the perfect example of the less technically proficient artist performing brilliantly.
I mean, people dismiss punk rock, but it changed music forever and for the better. When punk started, half those guys couldn’t even really play their instruments – yet they changed music forever. I can’t overemphasize this enough. Technical ability is not all that, and I’ve certainly seen some people who draw really well – and everything they draw bores the living hell out of me. Seriously. I’m like: spare me, mofo.
Goldstrom will never be able to, I don’t think, draw a world with both the exquisite realism and cartoony simplicity of, say, a Jason Lutes. It doesn’t matter. Read “Sea Man Lamprey” and you’ll feel like you know something about Goldstrom’s mind, and you’ll want to meet her. Much as a lot of people feel about Lutes’s work.
So there, that’s my point. The comics scene makes more space and opens its arms more widely to the artistically gifted but technically limited among us. I definitely fall into this category, and I appreciate the fact that I feel comfortable making and sending out comics, because I know people into this medium understand that looks aren’t everything.
Lots more comics in my satchel o’ fun. I’ll let you know the next time I read through a stack. In the meantime, be a dear and visit some of these websites and buy some of these comics. Make a young artist’s day!
“Future Me”
by Jesse Moynihan
Mini-comic – $3.00
This mini-comic is beautiful. Fellow Philadelphian, Jesse Moynihan, really has a handle on the whole simple yet beautiful line style thing. You aren’t going to look at thise pages and say, “Wow! What detail!” This is actual art, so you’ll just say “wow.” With no exclamation point. Partly because you aren’t quite sure what’s so captivating.
But it is, baby. It is. One of my favorite elements is his use of patterned materials to fill up spaces. The pages look more intimate than if he had left off that detail, but since it’s a pattern it sort of disappears in a way, like white space does. Making it a sort of alternative-negative-space, that I like to see a good amount of on a page. At least for this sort of meditative story. Meditative it is.
On the other hand, it doesn’t entirely make sense. You’ve got to have the same patience with this book that you bring to a museum when you look at paintings that are really impressive but you don’t quite understand. In fact, Jesse’s work is easier to understand than a lot of really great paintings I’ve seen, but it’s also narrative so you sort of expect to understand everything or nearly-everything. That’s not going to be the case with “Future Me.”
That said, I’ve communicated with Jesse about this and he says that the more of his work you read the more it all makes sense. So that’s promising. “Future Me” definitely made me want to see more.
“_______ Are Always Fun to Draw”
by a lot of people (mostly in New York, I think)
This book is not really a comic. It’s a collection of drawings that a bunch of friends made after compiling a list of a billion things that are “always fun to draw.” They had a master list of like 30 things that EVERYONE had to draw and another much longer list that everyone had to pick ten more things from. The only rule, I think, was to get all of the things onto one page.
So everyone did it and then they printed it up. The result is a great little book with great pictures in wildly diverse drawing styles. Some of them are really inspired.
The list of fun stuff to draw includes earthworms, explosions, ducks, cats, fish, space aliens, etc. It’s pretty wide open. My favorite was, arguably, Isaac Cates’s alphabet (incidentally, he organized the project). A lot of them are really good, though. Karen Sneider uses an interesting device in her page. If she doesn’t think the thing she has to draw is fun, it’s being killed or destroyed in her drawing. She pointed this out to me herself at SPX when I was looking at the book. I was amazed to see that she doesn’t like to draw robots.
Who doesn’t like to draw robots?
I wish I could tell you how to get your hands on it, but I can’t. You might try contacting Karen Sneider directly, because her bio says she’s working on a sequel. Which implies she might know something about the original.
Midnight Creep
by Frederick Noland
Mini-comic, Post-Apocalyptic Funhouse
I think this might be a comic version of a southern fable. Anyway, it’s the story of a poor black working man in the South who’s telling a stranger in a boxcar about murders he committed as a result of his wife’s infidelity. He’s been on the run ever since.
He gets his come-uppance. Boy howdy.
The design and draughtsmanship falls somewhere in between realistic and cartoony – and nicely so. The pages are laid out well and the overall design shows a real eye for the importance of a well planned page.
The sequence that reveals the true identity of the narrator’s companion in the boxcar can be described as controlled, steady cinema.
Check this shit out, brother.
RHYTHM
Anthology by Turk Street Projects
This is a nice anthology that I have no memory of buying, who I got it from or how you can get your hands on it. I can say this: it introduced me to Joe Sayers who has a t-shirt (the gold one) on his website that I am definitely going to have to buy.
This anthology is different stories about rhythm. The stand out is probably the story about murdering Jimi Hendrix is probably the stand out, by Geoff Vasile. The one pagers at the beginning and the end are pretty great, too.
Out of Water
by Matthew Bernier
tinglyelectriceelunderpants@hotmail.com
This is probably the best drawn book, over all, in today’s collection of reviews. Very, very Craig Thompson’ish. In fact, he’s probably technically a little more powerful than Thompson, though we’ll see if he has the emotional range of Thompson. This work is too short to really weight it against Goodbye, Chunky Rice.
He seems to be a little fixated on gonads, I gotta say. And anatomy. Not external anatomy. For some reason he periodially shows cut-aways of his characters so that you can see their guts.
It’s funny, just yesterday I was thinking about how much I love my skeleton and yet I hope never, ever to lay my eyes on even one fraction of one inch of any of my bones. Ever. Funny, that.
Not so sure I want to see the guts of my comic book characters either. It reminds me of the Paul Pope comic where no one is interested in seeing strippers naked anymore… they have machines that allow you to see their guts bobbing around as they dance.
I cannot imagine this ever actually being a turn-on, but I could be wrong.
“Out of Water” is a sweet story about an awkward boy that develops a great friendship with a dolphin. This is, of course, in some ways a dangerous friend to have. Dolphins do not play in an environment that’s wholly convenable to boys, but the environment of boys is not at all hospitable to dolphins. This point is one that Bernier does an excellent job, in ways both overt, subtle and so subtle that you will realize it later, of conveying.
The story, in the end, is about solving the problem of environments. You should definitely email him and order a copy. One of these days I’ll get around to ordering some of his other work.
I also have one other much longer review of a longer book, “Top Secret Summer,” here