| ||||
| ||||
 |
|
Thrown to the Wolves
Minicomics Round-Up II
DORK BOY #4.1 and #5.1 by Damian Willcox I've never understood why so many cartoonists make "funny" supercomix. Wasn't THE TICK the end-all be-all when it comes to superduper satire? In #4.1, the Asian issue [so named because Willcox was living in China while making it], Dorkboy battles the Evil Mashed Potato Man in a ritzy restaurant -- it has to be, because the waiter, like, says stuff like "My word," and calls our protagonist "Monsieur Dorkboy" -- almost foils a burglary, and clashes with the Four-Fingered Boy [everyone else has three in Dorkworld]. "Hilarity ensues," especially if one still finds Fat Elvis, Star Wars, and Spam jokes funny. The art is as clumsy as the writing, the perspective work is atrocious, and nearly every square inch is filled with noodly technical pen hatching -- "scribble scribble scribble" instead of "line line line" -- that never reproduces well. I was surprised by a few clever design touches: the last page of the restaurant sequence features a snazzy tromp l'oeil of a dinner plate that frames the last panel. Unfortunately, the weak draftsmanship shown in the plate panel makes the facade of the swanky restaurant Dorkboy was in look like a bowling alley. Willcox has a steady grasp on basic storytelling, and as evidenced by #5.1, he's learning that less is more. #5.1 is better written, though the story is still a bit stupid -- Dorkboy battles Mental Morcoccino, the evil coffee shop owner, and her java zombies -- and it, like #4.1, frequently tries to pass off pop culture references as punchlines. The artwork is exponentially better, displaying an improved sense of line variance, perspective, black spotting, and when & where to add hatching. The character design and overall feel of the book reminds me of most Slave Labor comics not done by Evan Dorkin [though Willcox's "Non-Dairy Creamer Man" has to be a Milk & Cheese homage/ripoff] and the deadpan pacing reeks of Shannon Wheeler.
SPACE DOG Book One, chapters one & two, by Daniel Sergent There's a strong Star Wars influence on display in SPACE DOG -- a good example being the first page, half of which is a lengthy caption that apes SW's chapter opening crawl -- but it's the kind that comes without any of SW's archetypitecture. In other words, I don't think Sergent read much Joseph Campbell before writing this mini. The book has buckets of plot but no real story worth following, lots of characters but none of them are interesting enough to hold our attention. Ubu the scimitar-wielding, muscle-bound title character has to, uh, do something. I can't follow the book page-to-page well enough to figure out what. The art is lightweight and sketchy, the dialogue is as stiff as the figure drawing and is frequently cringe-inducingly expositional:
SPACE DOG: [Eating his dinner] "I know your game, Blackstaff. You may or may not have eaten tonight, but you're certainly not going to remove that mask in front of me -- Or anyone else, for that matter. Gotta keep up the mystery and all that."Aside from Star Wars, SPACE DOG reminds me of those anthropomorphic critter comics Clay Geedres published nearly twenty years ago, especially the ones Eastman and Laird did before TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, except not as good.
AIR GUITAR #4 by Mike Gorman Reprinting 20 six-panel strips from Gorman's weekly "You do the Math" series, AIR GUITAR is ideal for people who wish Dan Clowes stopped evolving as a cartoonist sometime around 1993. The "Math" strips remind me a lot of Clowes' CRACKED artwork -- choppy, boldly inked grotesques populating iconic urban areas -- with a touch of Kurtzman cartooniness. The jokes never quite fly; the strip's protagonist, Super Douche -- "Math" is yet another superduper satire -- is a substance-abusing crossdressing loser who is abused by virtually everyone he knows. Nothing in AIR GUITAR #4 persuades me to believe that the "Superduper as complete loser" vein of funnybook humor was not completely tapped by 1986. The text that fills the rest of each page with is standard zine stuff -- drinking stories; goofy reports from the local police blotter; weird headlines, classifieds, stories and marriage announcements from the local newspaper -- but there are moments in Gorman's drinking stories, and just the idea that there's a newly married woman somewhere in this world who changed her last name to "Hufanagle-Funkenhouser," are far funnier than a month of "You do the Math."
BART SCHOOFS' BESLOTEN DOSSIER and BRAAF VARKEN #1 by Bart Schoofs Speaking of strong Dan Clowes influences, here are two comics from Leuven-based STRIPBURGER and COMIX 2000 alumnus Bart Schoofs. The typeface-looking hand lettering, the smart smartass humor [from what I can tell], the handwritten letters page, and stories that appear to be about disaffected youth, all of it reads like a collection of EIGHTBALL outtakes. Except that DOSSIER and VARKEN are in, uh, Belgian, so I can't really judge how good they are. Still, both books are marvelously well-packaged and designed.
PRETTY SURE #1 by David Porter, with design/layout by John Poyser PRETTY SURE reminds me a lot of Matt Groening and Matt Feazell's comics, except without the meticulous attention to craft of both, the legibility of the former and the elegant linework of the latter. It is the first minicomic I've ever encountered that is actually more sloppily put together than Mike McPadden's HAPPYLAND; in addition to scads of blank pages -- the book opens up to two blank pages, with page two actually starting on page four -- the photocopies were misregistered on the sheets, resulting in a lopsided book with the post-staple pages sticking out an inch past the first half's pages. Oy. David Porter draws like a preschooler but tells stories like a professional; the artwork is atrociously crude, but that ceases to matter much once his funny slice of life stories kick in. Drawn on what must be a preprinted panel grid page -- some stories end mid page with the remaining panels blank -- he uses stick figures and icons [the star of David, a cross, a San Francisco Police Badge, A traffic light, etc.] to tell the terribly funny and charmingly neurotic stories of vacationing with his annoying parents, his fears that he's really gay, his dating troubles, stealing a ride on public transition with an ex-girlfriend, working a summer job in his parents' PR office and having an embarrassing accident while masturbating in the handicapped stall of the office men's room, and a fantasy of what it would be like to be a superstar cartoonist. Porter has a good ear for dialogue -- "Beating off at work was great. I always had something to look forward to ..... I swore I wouldn't do it while I was working for my dad. He was playing me way more than my old boss, which made it seem unethical." -- and strong knack for pacing that gets a hold of the reader's attention and keeps it for the duration of the story. I'm not sure if an improvement in the artwork would really improve the work overall; aside from a few sight gags, the figures could be erased entirely and the stories would still work with just the panel lines providing a rhythm for the text.
SPY-FI by Tatiana Gill & Craig McKenney When I received this one, I thought someone back at the TCJ bunker had reshuffled the pages on me -- the book isn't stapled and the pages are unnumbered -- since it makes no sense. Having reshuffled it into every way possible, it still makes no sense; a girl goes swimming, an old lady collapses, a girl goes clubbing and a guy looks at her breasts, a guy and girl fuck, the guy stabs someone, the old lady recovers, blurb for the next chapter, curtain. This is one of those comics where you get the feeling the creators spent more time coming up with snazzy-sounding taglines -- "They're the best spies in the world... Too bad they're the worst people!" -- than making a comic worthy of a snazzy tagline. It would make for a good candidate for a game of Five Card Nancy if people want to play with an inane, amateurishly drawn minicomic, though.
THE MYTH OF 8-OPUS #1 by Thomas Scioli
"If someone asked me how to do a comic the Jack Kirby way, I would tell him to make up his own characters and tell a story no one has ever heard before."Supercomix Homage Sucks. If KINGDOM COME, "The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man," and most of THE NEW SPIRIT ADVENTURES have taught us anything, it is that such expression of admiration is inevitably insipid, nauseatingly sentimental, and makes for truly lousy comics. I can only hope that someday cartoonists will learn that homage is best expressed by sacrificing a virgin or a farm animal to their funnybook idol. Seeing the cover of THE MYTH OF 8-OPUS for the first time, I so hoped it was just another straightforward rip-off of -- not a homage to -- Jack Kirby. My hope was dashed when I read the 8-OPUS press release. Then I thought it must be a subtle parody of late period Kirby, when everything got a little too big, too cosmic. But I can't shake the sense that 8-OPUS is done with a straight face; I get the really bad feeling Scioli is completely sincere here. This is one of the worst comics Jack Kirby never drew. The art is stiff, illegible in spots, and clumsy, though it makes a nice encyclopedia of nearly every pose a Kirby character struck from 1967 to 1972. There's a fairly mediocre imitation of nearly every one of Kirby's late 60s to early 70s surface tics -- the blocky figures, the energy dots [I refuse to call it "Kirby Krackle"], uniquely Kirby-looking machinery and gadgets, the stylized stilted dialogue, the two page splash [though he does Kirby six better by waiting to do the double splash on pages 8 & 9 instead of the second and third pages] -- though Scioli displays none of the deeper thinking and motivation Kirby showed in his prime work. It doesn't matter how many times its characters refer to events occurring elsewhere, 8-OPUS comes off as a vapid adventure story no deeper than the paper it's printed on. A kinder, gentler Orion is looking for his comrade Daedalus [our Lightray stand-in] -- whose help he needs for "a great task" -- and winds up in a village nestled in a living planet's skeleton. He saves the villagers from a bunch of bad guys, and then leads a few of the villagers in an old fishing boat up what I believe would have been the shrouded endocrine system [I'm unfamiliar with living planet anatomy] to the planet's skull. Daedalus is already in the skull and has followed a flying lady to an upside-down city when 8-Opus and company arrive. Hopefully, they find an idea for a story worth telling in the skull for the next issue. Scioli also takes Kirby's odd habit of adding redundant captions/dialogue when what's happening is already clear in the panel -- a habit Kirby probably developed from years of penciling in story comments to Stan Lee or whoever to script from -- to ridiculous extremes; panel of our protagonist being hit with an arrow from behind. Panel balloon: "AAARRGH! An Arrow From Behind!" I guess imitating that bad habit was for the best, considering how unclear Scioli's artwork is in spots, its artificiality be damned. One of things that set Jack Kirby apart from his peers was that there was something bigger going on in the story than just what was on the page; issues of prime Kirby feel like vignettes taken from a larger mural. And, even while drawing with the meter running, Kirby could generate more palpable energy in his artwork than anyone else and still created his own organically idiosyncratic motifs and images as needed. It's a rather depressing thought that someone could sincerely choose to follow Kirby's lead yet make a book that goes in the opposite direction Kirby would have gone had he not been born to be The Jack Kirby.
|
||
|
About | Subscribe | Back Issues | Writers | Advertising
Newswatch | Interviews | Reviews | Essays | Online Features
All site contents are © 2002
|
||||
