Two artists from Seattle and three from Portland give the following suite of reviews a soggy, Pacific Northwest feel. The first assemblage in what one hopes is a series attempting to establish some semblance of control over the teetering Comics Journal mini-comics pile, the other distinguishing characteristic for the work featured in this initial round-up is their relative age. Many of these comics were obtained directly from artists in attendance at Small Press Expo 2000 in Bethesda, Maryland, by now a distant speck in the rearview mirror of comics culture. Some of the artists with books examined here, like Johnny Ryan and Kevin Huizenga, have produced more recent work -- in Ryan's case, a newly-launched and high-profile regular comic series.

Still, a few months or so should do nothing to diminish the impact of these objects as objects. Speaking to The Comics Journal as he just began to worm his way into alternative comics consciousness, James Kochalka extolled the virtues of mini-comics as a delivery form superior to those available to established comics publishers, particularly in terms of the immediacy and vitality with which work could be made and distributed. The same way publishers like Highwater and Fantagraphics have explored mini-comics' aesthetics of art direction and presentation of work, several cartooning talents have kept their hands in mini-comics as an artistic choice rather than solely as the result of the medium's economic contraction. While a combination of leftover Harvey Kurtzman-influenced craft blinders and unfortunate artistic choices may keep many readers from experiencing these comics as intended, the fact remains that many mini-comics are working through highly-developed, idiosyncratic worldviews that in another time and place might be wholly absorbed into traditional publishing outlets. So while mini-comics have become the format of choice for dimly considered sub-movements, extended artistic experimentation and even willful crudity, the artists below remind us they also exist as individual art objects on the periphery of a pre-marginalized form. Mini-comics are the subject of hand-to-hand exchanges, the secondary expressions of established cartoonists and industry figures and a form of complicated social interaction: the bootleg tapes of the comic-book world, paper MP3s. As much as mini-comics beg to be analyzed, they ask even more strongly to be traded, made, and listened to.

Johnny Ryan
Angry Youth Comix #11

Where have all the funnybooks gone? The current alternative comics scene isn't particularly flush with old-fashioned joke-based comics. It's not that these comics have gone out of fashion as much as the creators who huddled around this particular section of the store are occupying more of their time elsewhere. Peter Bagge is enjoying the fruits of his sustained 1990s artistic success with more high-profile print and online magazine gigs than comic books, Evan Dorkin has enjoyed a similar writing-gig expansion, Rick Altergott, Ivan Brunetti and Pat Moriarity have settled into irregular publishing patterns, and some other name humor cartoonists from a decade ago have seemingly withdrawn from the art form altogether. As for artists who have launched comics in the last five years, Pete Sickman-Garner continues to improve and impress but his work wouldn't yet demand a place in a relaunched Weirdo, while Dean Haspiel has settled into the heroic romanticism with which he is obviously most comfortable. Alternative newspaper strips from Tony Millionaire, P. Revess, Sam Henderson, and the artist working as Smell of Steve have far outstripped the comic book for dependable, humorous content.

Johnny Ryan is the most fully realized of a number of crude-humor talents (and currently the best-known) who have recently bubbled up from mini-comics and seem fully fixated on comic books as their format of choice. Angry Youth Comix #11 is a strong precursor to Ryan's recent Fantagraphics funnybook launch. Even better, AYC #11 serves up a mixture of single-joke one-pagers and broad character-driven multi-pagers that make it that rarest of all mini-comics finds: the dense, satisfying read.

Ryan rips into everyone, and discerning his likes and dislikes is to read the nuanced tissue damage around hamstring scars. For instance, he pulverizes the notion of rebellious stances to the point he devotes an entire strip to one of his characters performing fellatio on a donkey and slitting his own throat, and it's still clear by comic's end that he prefers that sort of person to loutish, beer-swilling, establishment jocks. Ryan's work is remarkably cohesive. Each component -- the throwaway characters' names, the way the figures look, the vomiting and character reaffirmation that ends most stories -- are funny in and of themselves, but also stress the larger, nastier worldview. In other words, Ryan isn't using elements of the comics form to present crudely-realized ideas, he's exploring an idiosyncratic point of view through a grasp of the medium's strengths, a working foundation on which it may be possible to build a long career.

Craig Thompson
Doot Doot Garden

Doot Doot Garden purports to be from something called the "small batch series" -- a great idea made even greater in my mind by the fact that at the time of this review I couldn't find any information on it. The Top Shelf website advertised on this comic's back cover didn't have the book listed under any of the appropriate sub-designations, and the copy I received lacked a price. But from the looks of this work, the "small batch series" seems designed to feature mini-comics format books from Top Shelf regulars, collecting previously published work and other oddities. The reduced expectations of the mini-comics format make this a savvy publishing choice, if that is indeed what's intended.

Doot Doot Garden reprints the Goodbye, Chunky Rice cartoonist's 24-hour comic, the best of his two major mini-comics, and a couple of magazine assignments. It's interesting, given his recent alternative comics notice, to re-examine the work that kicked off the Chunky Rice pre-buzz. Although this 1999 graphic novel was by far the most visually accomplished debut of that year, the connoisseur's appetite for new blood combined with a really sub-par year for sustained work across the art form, to result in more than a few disproportional claims on the book's behalf -- and I say that as a fan of Thompson's Chunky Rice. The mini-backlash that followed was a rarity in alternative comics circles in that it seemed based less on jealousy and kicking the new guy in the teeth than on a specific critical oversight: how the overwhelming romanticism of Thompson's writing bordered on preciousness, which given the extremely stylized nature of the art, made it hard for the reader to find emotional entry into the situations presented.

All of this is important to our understanding of Doot Doot Garden, because I think that those who lost themselves in the first-rate visuals and back-of-the-station-wagon, end-of-summer-vacation romanticism of Chunky Rice will find Doot Doot Garden horribly disappointing, even ugly -- even though the art is thoroughly accomplished. Personally, I don't miss the Jay Stephens-style self-awareness as much as the underlying sense of rudeness and horror (animals chopped in half, giddy explorations of man's undying appetite for self-inflicted loneliness) that might help provide emotional ballast for Thompson's more frothy and poetic flights of fancy.

Greg Cook
Hear Say

An extremely pleasant little book by the cartoonist behind a half-dozen similarly admirable efforts, Greg Cook, Hear Say offers a double experiment in the formal connections drawn between how comics readers experience sound on the page. The story follows a nearly deaf gentleman through a seemingly average day, complete with friendly interaction over a gaming table and a restaurant meal. When he ends up on the shore, and pulls out a horn to use as a crude hearing aid, the reader not only gets to delight in the added sound elements, but the meaning of the empty word balloons becomes explicit, and their silence in retrospect becomes deafening. It's such a nice trick that readers may not even notice how Cook plays with white space and incomplete drawing, a subliminal reference to the incomplete worlds from which we all draw inferences to create a whole.

More than any other cartoonist, Cook serves as an exemplar for the Highwater line of books, his graceful drawings creating a fragile, idiosyncratic language of childhood clumsiness and potential adult violence. As such, he may serve as a barometer of the line far more clearly than any of the higher-profile artists with whom publisher Tom Devlin works.

Anina Bennett and Paul Guinan
Heartbreakers Minidigest 2000

This was a freebie giveaway handed out by intermittent comics creators from their booth at last year's Comic-Con International: A sixteen-page foldover with a single-color cover (shades of red, naturally), it is the kind of thing one receives rarely that nonetheless seems perfectly suited for promotion. Taking home the mini-digest, I have a much better idea as to scope and breadth of a series I do not read. With its mazes, puzzles and penny table games, the Heartbreakers Minidigest 2000 also takes advantage of the disposable nature of mini-comics, allowing for the kind of writing on the comics page that most may be loathe to indulge within a full-sized comic.

But despite educating the reader, Heartbreakers does a less-than-successful job selling the larger story. Both Guinan's art and Bennett's writing look serviceable, but the stand-alone story (art by "xtine") provided in the digest underscores the difficulty of doing lighter-than-average science-fiction soap-opera: the clash of genres may work against one another, the dialogue and character interaction existing in a space that floats above the details that readers accumulate in order to better relate to the actors within it. Those familiar with the genre neighborhood may be able to buy in anyway, and from the evidence provided, Heartbreakers seems like the sort of series that holds onto a rabid core of savvy comics fans, the kind that may occasionally throw up their hands and stamp their feet for the lack of its wider success.

Various Artists
Monster 2000

Monster 2000 is the house anthology from Fort Thunder, the cabal of cartoonists and artists whose uncompromising approach to art for art's sake provided a disproportionate share of the great moments in mini-comics in the 1990s. Although one news article about the Fort Thunder enclave calls Monster a "monthly," my understanding is that it's not only irregularly published but creatively numbered, a suitable approach for a magazine that doesn't so much change editors as only ever has one when the impulse to edit strikes a likely candidate.

According to Brian Ralph in his on-line interview with Megan Kelso, the Monster issue on-hand at last year's Small Press Expo was produced under the editorial guidance of Leif Goldberg. It is a beautiful, messy, and near-glorious object that reminds one of a pile of construction paper art projects stored at the bottom of a drawer used by a second grade class of world-beating geniuses. The usual suspects provide good work: particularly good are Keith McCulloch's tree gag (reminiscent of Feiffer) and non-sequitur spouting animals; Brian Chippendale's terminal, insect-like inscrutability; and Jordan Crane's narrative dead-ends so slickly drawn they almost seem out of place amidst the majority of the contributions. Surprises include Erhin Roozendalal and the editor's 3-D strip, complete with the clumsy insertion of glasses. Many contributions are less than satisfactory on their own, but contribute to the anthology's messy vibe. Taped together, drawn over, and scribbled on, Monster 2000 enthralls even as it frustrates and disgusts.

Steve Lieber
My Naked, Naked Friends

Steve Lieber's photocopied foldover makes a handy convention giveaway for this Warren Oates of the convention season artist's alley: 12 studies from his sketchbooks, all nudes. The artist behind Oni's Whiteout series and various reasonably high-profile gigs at DC Comics, Lieber's mini serves as a reminder that he can draw, that he works at his drawing, and his artistic career will hopefully be measured in the fruits of the growth that comes from that sort of hard work. It makes a great business card.

Barring some sort of prurient interest in drawn nudes, the pleasure one receives out of the mini comes from comparing the work here to the published comics work. The figures share the same solid, believable sense of mass and weight displayed by characters in the artist's published work. And while the nature of the exercise may be what leads him there, the figures in My Naked, Naked Friends lack the kind of expressiveness in face and form that reminds one of many traditional American adventure comics.

Johnny Ryan
Shouldn't You Be Working? #3

This is one of those concept-over-content winners, even though the content is fine, too. Like many artists, Ryan works day jobs to make ends meet. Like many cartoonists, Ryan draws at work a lot. These quarter-page books are collected from Ryan's workplace sketches, complete with a description of the type of job worked ("I was working at Greatfood.com for a couple of weeks, then at the Catholic Arch-Diocese for a while, then a urological clinic.")

Based on the drawings -- and there's no way to tell how many fail to make it into a volume -- Ryan is a prolific and funny sketch artist. Shouldn't You Be Working? is full of gag humor: stupid characters ("Grosso, Grossest of the Sickies," and "The Old Baby"), one-liners about obtuse concepts ("monkey money," a "jelly suit"), and old-fashioned humorous drawing (a portrait of Buh-Buh Ray Dudley and more than a few of Ryan's girlfriend). For the complete throwaway nature of what Ryan probably intended, it's a more amusing read than the practiced mini-comics from other emerging talents, and while it makes a far better supplement than introduction to Ryan's work, it is nonetheless recommended.

Eric Reynolds
Surfin'

A burgeoning pen-and-ink illustration career and a full-time job as the George Stephanopolus of the Gary Groth/Kim Thompson administration leaves Eric Reynolds little time for comics. It should therefore be noted when one of his minis works its way up and through the skin for public display. Reynolds has always been a solid inker and a fair conceptual designer; working with Peter Bagge's pencils in Hate and on Suck.com has helped his linework to become less ragged, more elastic. Surfin' puts Reynolds' development on display, working through its slight visual narrative by breaking down each graphic idea onto a beach-ready design face. The ideas are linked less by iconography or narrative than by energy -- until its final triumphant image, Surfin' builds towards several false climaxes before each time stepping back (or off to the side). Like the disposable act on which it reports, Reynolds has produced a treasured little throwaway.

Daniel Langsdale
Geeks in Disguise #10

After a dozen pages of stately-paced exposition and what seems like endless talking between various characters, cartoonist Daniel Langsdale gives the readers of Geeks in Disguise #10 the issue's most interesting scene. Seated around a table, with the air of mock-importance that high school students invest in meaningless organizational activities, Langsdale's characters play out a mini-drama of sexual sublimation. The more socially active of two female student friends pounces on a boy of vague to non-existent interest to her slightly less comfortable pal. Langsdale nails the element of betrayal that the character claims comes not so much from the flirting but the fact that the aggressive girl was only barely interested in helping with the dance in the first place, an amusing and too-true portrayal of how some teen-agers conflate dissimilar social obligations.

While it becomes obvious that the characters and some of their relationships are derived from real-life observation, Geeks in Disguise also features some sort of overriding superhero motif, an almost impenetrable plot sheath of hinted-at laboratories and terse, vaguely-worded agreements between the affected students. Conveniently for plot purposes, the powers also hold Great Thematic Truths, such as a largely ignored boy who seems to have the power to disappear and the slightly more interesting, but similarly played out, notion of flying around as a personality quirk to be mastered or mitigated in the process of growing up. These genre elements add little to the best parts of the story, although Langsdale may be close enough to the age of his characters that self-expression through genre motifs may simply feel right in a way that an older reader would fail to appreciate or understand. And although an occasional interesting idea may bubble its way to the surface, Langsdale currently lacks powers of observation (and the artistic chops -- rooms change size, and sparse to non-existent backgrounds are common) to give the reader a compelling, realistic setting in which to tell his stories.

Sean Bieri
Jumbo Jape

One of the better-known names among mini-comics practitioners, and a transitional figure between the small press comix of the Jeff Nicholson era and the slicker, more realized stories from Fort Thunder and various John Porcellino-influenced artists, Sean Bieri works as a Detroit-area art director and has written insightful analysis of alternative comics for a mainstream, arts-savvy audience via local southern Michigan media. The equivalent of a basketball playground legend, Bieri has long been a favorite of artists and writers who take to his very mainstream humor cartooning approach to mini-comics, many of whom have encountered Bieri at Midwestern regional or small-press-friendly national comics shows. Some raves for his work focus on its professional, accessible, and all-together not-what-you'd-expect-from-minis nature; the kind of compliments that hilariously and unintentionally damn everyone else with faint praise.

Jumbo Jape is a compendium of work drawn from popular convention buys of past years, "Fix," "Jape" and "5 O'Clock Shadow." Based on the material inside, it's clear why Bieri's a favorite of both mini-comics skeptics and enthusiasts. At its most refined, Bieri's art recalls Terry LaBan's more meticulous work, although Bieri lacks LaBan's virtuosity of depiction within that style -- his worlds are just as appealing, just less fulsome. In addition, Bieri's writing crackles with Lampoon-alumni slickness. Among its peers, Jumbo Jape stands tall as a model of execution.

The works collected in Jumbo Jape fall into three broad categories: broad, aggressive social satires; observational humor with a hint of cartoon exaggeration, and comics parodies. Many of the social satires fall flat. The longest, "Hard-Boiled Hygienist" seems more of an excuse for Bieri to work with Toth-style figures than a story, while many of the shorter ones make unremarkable, even obvious points or telegraph their endings. Bieri's comics parodies have the opposite problem: they just end. But mixing Conan the Barbarian with Peanuts and Thimble Theatre with the Christ story makes for some great gags along the way, many of which depend on those exquisite choices, which one would guess were made for the potential of humor to be found in their contrasting themes.

Finally, like most cartoonists, Bieri's observational comic stories work according to the strength of his observations. The stories that take the time to draw the reader into a short narrative, "Vive Le Difference" and a two-pager featuring a pair of girls watching a movie on TV, fare much better than those which immediately leapfrog their way to one of Bieri's aggressive laugh lines. That in fact, becomes the recurring theme in reading Jumbo Jape: that more of his work in general, and more space developing each story when they appear, would allow his natural facility as an artist to better work in his favor. Sean Bieri's comics don't demand recognition as much as encourage it, but at what point is it unfair to use the context in which an artist has been presented as an avenue of criticism? Fortunately, Jumbo Jape is an impressive highlight reel worth watching on its own.

Garret Izumi
Love is Like the Sun and Memories are Made of This

Straddling a line of the artist's own making between obscure mini-comics and accessible art objects, the works of Garret Izumi have in the last half-decade become more refined and, in the context of the small press world, easier to understand. Izumi's love of iconography seems less daunting after the recent flurry of renewed interest in the woodcut artists and their long narratives. Izumi's comics work best when the eloquent simplicity of his pictures engage broad subject matter, such as in Love is Like the Sun, a hand-assembled and nicely-produced book of short stories. Even the fully-dialogued story featuring Izumi's disappointingly imagined human stand-ins seems less arch and more graceful than previous efforts by the artist in the basics of verbal-visual blend. Those wishing to understand Izumi's approach to objects might also look into obtaining a copy of Memories are Made of This, a photo study in mini-comics form notable for the humor of the captions, and Izumi's special attention to both shape and the reader's private projections of meaning.

Vincent Stall
Passenger Side and Ishkabibble

A slim portrait of a life lived in quiet desperation, Passenger Side offers attractive art and capable writing that in the end give the reader much less than the cartoonist's facility initially indicates. The lack of ambition displayed in the mini-comic's choice of theme seems to justify the format in some strange and probably unhealthy manner and adds a layer of ironic commentary to the mini's choice of subject. A day in the life of a sweaty, fish-eyed office drone, Passenger Side makes a nice point in passing about the nature of emblematic guilt. Beyond that, it offers little more insight than one might mentally scribble on a synaptic napkin watching some poor soul climb on board your downtown elevator.

Still, the writing is solid, and the art is lovely at times, particularly in the single-color, silk-screened cover. Despite the outrageous design of the lead character, Stall's narrative instincts are strong and the composition of the panels, particularly in the way the blacks frame and hound the lead, adds a great deal to the reader's perception of the protagonist's ugly, sweaty, miserable life. Passenger Side should whet the appetite for longer, more sustained work from the cartoonist.

Those so inclined should also seek out Ishkabibble, with art slightly less accomplished than the newer work but still distinctive, and a story that reads like a fan letter to Ben Katchor. We see a few moments in the business day of a shlumpy, middle-aged businessman. As he walks home to his apartment, he addresses the readers with a monologue about his life perceptions of same, Stall's art seems barely accomplished enough, at least at this point, to convey the ambitious blending of man and landscape which the story seems to demand. But that ambition is noteworthy, as is Stall's restraint in making the mini's feature character more depressingly ordinary than romantic.

Ken Wheaton
"Please Don't Sue Me!" Comics

Who can resist a classic quarter-page mini-comic featuring pun-filled superhero jokes, a not-much-better-than-lukewarm recommendation emblazoned on the back cover like God's own handwriting (Tony Isabella's "I smiled at every cartoon and chuckled out loud at several of them."), and a company logo that says simply "FBI." Sporting the company's initials, it's easy to imagine this mini as some sort of bizarre mirror universe version of a Fantagraphics comic, put to press in a world where Dennis Fujitake still drew men in tights for this magazine's letters section and the editors never stopped asking "What's Wrong with the X-Men?"

Unfortunately, this mini-comic probably wouldn't have made the cut at that company, either. Wheaton's art is cursory, gag-cartoonist fodder and most of his jokes depend on recontextualizing superhero likes, dislikes, and catchphrases into situations where they take on humorous meanings (for example, the Marvel super-team The Avengers "assembling" at a puzzle convention). At times, Wheaton's willingness to bend even the fragile super-reality surrounding such characters for the sake of the joke takes on brave, Ernie Bushmiller-like proportions. But let's not get ridiculous: these are gag jokes for superhero fanboys. The mini-comic that houses them is included here as evidence that the old-time collector's ethic, that fond, adoring look at men in tights and newspaper gag strips from the safe and comforting Sunday afternoon of same-day nostalgia, will never really abdicate its place in American comics culture. Third printing.

John Kerschbaum
Randy and the Christmas Pimple

Kerschbaum lends his facile, luridly inked art to this somewhat pedestrian tale of Christmas-time cruelty. The comic's protagonist, Randy, is a sniveling idiot-child who develops a gigantic, festering zit at the end of his nose the day of the Christmas dance. Grandma doesn't care, Grandma's new boyfriend exists almost solely as a vague physical threat, and even Santa whips on Randy's ass when he and his zit are invited to join the reindeer team in order to provide some Rudolph-style leadership. Like some of the great Mad artists, Kerschbaum's angular style expresses horror so appealingly it's hard to take seriously the nasty worldview on display. The great joys in this mini are found in the capriciousness with which that ugliness is put on display, and the slightly disjointed narrative with which Kerschbaum allows the story to unfold. The plot leaps forward without warning, Randy is punched in the face by a dog off-panel, and Santa is given the strange last word. Randy deserves to have it piled on for his stupid-looking duck shirt alone, but savaging a moron almost always sounds funnier than it reads.

Kevin Huizenga
Supermonster #12

Comics should be the perfect medium for rich explorations of the stifling hideousness of modern suburbia and its slightly more hip cousin, the cloistered urban neighborhood. But try as some cartoonists might, the subject slips through even extremely capable hands. Some of the best post-alternative comics make a case for suburbia as a place of simple comforts (John Porcellino) or inane consumerism (Tom Hart), but choose to explore its more insidious side as a symptom of individual behavior rather than setting. Others seem to stress the pains of insularity that result from living within an active non-environment, but feature protagonists who never seem to engage their surroundings as anything more than a vehicle for the leviathan of mass culture: autobiographical protagonists like Joe Chiappetta in his pre-evangelical phase never seem to live in specific suburban villages but in McDonald's-like franchises of generic American values. That's a fine observation, but relatively weak ground on which to build work of lasting interest; the most compelling portraits of time and place are almost always built on specific detail.

The longest story in Kevin Huizenga's Supermonster #12, "The Wild Kingdom, Starring Glenn Ganges," uses an obtuse narrative strategy that works as a dissection of life lived simultaneously on different levels. Its narrator participates in the mind-numbing banalities of errand-running and household chores, but keeps a specific eye on the pigeons, cats, and cockroaches that cross his path. By letting his story unfold naturally, over dozens of pages and without words, one sees both the daily routine and the discoveries of hidden wildlife as activities that help sustain the narrator. In lesser hands, the natural law that asserts itself by story's end might be seen as an emotional capstone or even a betrayal of the live-and-let-live ethic expressed throughout. But for Huizenga, the ending seems to indicate another layer of meaning in the interrelationships to which the narrator seeks to become accustomed -- a stronger, more resonant point.

The other stories in Supermonster #12 are a mixed bag, although all are interesting to the point that call for a more detailed examination of his work. Huizenga's explorations in comics form read better than his illustrated text pieces, although both showcase insightful set pieces: a sideways shift from videotape watching to a Border's book store as signifier of the unreality of visiting home from college, extra garbage along the curb as a measure of a life slowly slipping from the neighborhood. The only sour note is an overdependency on generic facial characteristics, which jar to the point that they risk distancing the reader from the characters due to their unrealistic look. Given the skill with which the backgrounds and setting are evoked, leaning on cartoon exaggeration where it's needed least seems curious. But this is definitely a book and talent worth seeking out.